Monday, January 26, 2009

Search Engine Optimization?

By Alex Plana

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the act of optimizing a website for free listing in search engine's listings. To rank well organically, a site owner can reap the benefits of free traffic search engines have to offer.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN utilize automated programs known as spiders and robots, which crawl website pages. This precedes the crawling of a page, which is later added to a search engines large index. Literally, billions of pages are indexed. When a search request is made, the search engine compares the string to the data stored on the billions of pages in the database. The search engine algorithm calculates the relevancy of the pages in the large index to the search string that is requested.

Activities performed by search engines:

1. Determine Relevancy 2. Information Processing 3. Information Retrieval 4. Robot Spidering 5. Site Indexing

An algorithm is a set of rules that determines the relevancy of a requested search. All search engines keep the knowledge of how their engines actually work a secret. Otherwise, savvy individuals could alter search listings in their favor. There are presently more than 200 factors what contribute to the ranking of an natural search. On personal searches, you may realized similar search listings with different search engines. Each search engine has its own rules for how it searches and retrieves information, but for the most part, every major search engine will follow similar guidelines in determining search relevancy.

On Page Factors

There are many factors which can be changed on a site by its owner, and this is called on-page optimization. The process takes into consideration the density of the keywords used on a page, the keywords used in the Title, Meta, Alt tags, support pages, and the incoming and outgoing links throughout the site. Search engine algorithms also determine the strength of a keyword by its prominence on a web page. This is why the experts suggest that the first two hundred words are always the most important.

On-page optimization should also target similar words to the key term, use of videos, blogs, and attention to the way top-level sections are structured on a web page. The type of server being used, the public status of a domain name, and website analytics (such as bounce rate) are also key factors that determine the effectiveness of on-page optimization. As important as it is, on-page optimization only contributes 30% of a full and robust SEO strategy. The other 70% of the SEO process is accomplished by Off-Page Optimization.

Off-Page Optimization

Off-Page Optimization refers to factors that cannot be altered by the site owner or Webmaster. Such factors include the type and number of links that point back to the website. If the site has a robust number of quality inbound links, it is considered a vote of confidence by search engines. On the other hand, it is possible for a site to have a large number of incoming links that add absolutely no value to a website. The first order of business is quality over quantity.

Social media plays an important role in off-page optimization. Utilizing social media is a very popular strategy of creating attention and building up a following. Attention grabbing viral campaigns can create a large source of traffic and potential inbound links.

Search Engine Optimization is very important to any online business. It provides free traffic with great branding exposure and plays an important role in improving a company's bottom line. With SEO being so rewarding, it's also the hardest strategy to execute of all online SEM strategies. One of the major reasons is that SEO can be very time consuming and you may not see results from SEO efforts for several months to year. But, once you have a well optimized website and ranking well in organic search engines, the wait is worth it.

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