Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization

In simple terms SEO is the set of processes by which a website can be put into the top search results of any search engine. If a site comes in one of the top search results, the probability is that, higher number of users will enter into the site to find relevant information. This is quite understandable, You search for something in Google, say, “the costliest pen on earth”. Google will show you

”Results 1 – 10 of about 13,900 for the costliest pen on earth”

and you will find a number of site links discussing the same (or similar) topic. You will scroll at most though the Google 1^st two pages of search results and will click on the link which you think will share the best information. Would you really bother what the 3000^th search result or even the 50^th ?? maybe not. Here lies the utmost importance to optimize a site for the search result, because more than 70% traffic is diverted to different websites via the search engine’s search results.

Bottom line is whatever content you put into your website, if it does not come in one of the top search results; then your site is nothing but a failure. Nobody will ever find it.

The Keyword Concept

The text that you type in the search bar of any search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing is your keyword. You may type a single word like “soccer”, a phrase like “latest song download” or a sentence like “List of Red Cross office locations in Iraq”. A search engine will match your typed text with different websites which are already indexed with relevant content. Indexing is nothing but the listing of keywords available in a website,found and accessed by a search engine crawler.

How does a search engine work?

First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. A piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google) does this. Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. It is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, please remember that there are more than 20 billion web pages. Sometimes crawlers will not visit your site for a month or two. Another thing you must remember that the crawler will not read images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories in your website.

After a page is crawled, indexing of the content happens next. It is basically the listing of visible keywords using search engine specific algorithm. The indexed page is then stored in a large database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the word s and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. When a search request comes, since it is likely that more than one pages (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search string by several logics and algorithms to calculate relevancy. All major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes.

The last step is the display of the search result which is simply putting your website’s link in the search result list, So that people finds it easily.

SEO service companies do exactly these things for you by using some necessary SEO tools and techniques. They optimize your site on the basis of some specific keywords so that your site comes in one of the top results when a user searches with the keyword. At the end of the day SEO helps to ensure that your site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine and naturally will generate more traffic or help you reaching your target customers.

SEO techniques, what SEO service providers exactly do?

Now, if you want to optimize your site in a search engine and hire a SEO service provider company for doing the same; what exactly it will do?

Briefly, they will first analyse your site content for relevancy, they will suggest what keywords you should have and to have those keyword optimized what modifications you need to do in your site. Next they will use some particular methods like

• SEO strategy building
• Site Analysis
• SEO copywriting
• Metatag copywriting
• Directory posting
• Article submission
• Social book marking
• Create anchor text links
• Forum posting
• Link building and exchange
• Keyword ranking and Auditing

And many more…

In my next post, I would certainly take up these activities individually and discuss in detail.