Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of optimizing a web page or a web site so that it ranks high in the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. This article is the first in a series of short articles that will give you the information you need to make the adjustments to your site to help improve your search rankings and benefit bring an increase in search traffic. SEO is simply the act of adjusting the content on your web pages of your website to make them easy for the search engine spiders to examine the context and index them for the subject they deal with.

A search engine spider is a software robot that search engines use to check millions of web pages very quickly and sort them by relevance. A page is indexed when it is spidered and deemed appropriate content to be placed in the search engines results for people to click on.

SEO is both an art and a science because, although there are rules (the science part), it also requires some more subjective imagination is more of an art than a science. It requires understanding how search engines identify pages that are relevant to a query made by a visitor.

In these articles we will be learning to design a marketing strategy based on the principles used by the search engines. Search engines offer the most cost effective way to acquire “real” and “live” business leads. SEO brings better ROI (return on investment) than other forms such as online advertisements, e-mail marketing and newsletters, affiliate and pay per click advertising, and digital campaigns and promotions.

Each search engine has formula called an algorithm that it uses to evaluate web pages and determine their relevance and value when crawling them for possible inclusion in their search engine. A crawler is another name for a software robot that browses all of these pages for the search engine.

Google has a comprehensive and highly developed technology, a straightforward interface and a wide-ranging array of search tools which enable the users to easily access a variety of information online.

Google is Nr. 1

Google is the top search engine and its users can browse the web and find information in various languages, retrieve maps, stock quotes and read news, search for a long lost friend using the phonebook listings available on Google for all of US cities and basically surf the 3 billion odd web pages. It boasts of having world’s largest archive of Usenet messages, going all the way back to 1981. Its technology can be accessed from any conventional desktop PC as well as from various wireless platforms such as WAP and i-mode phones, handheld devices and other such Internet equipped gadgets.

Page rank determines which sites come up first

Page rank is based on the popularity of the web page. When you do a Google search (or any other search engine for that matter) the algorithm will determine which site is the most popular for the given search phrase (call a keyword or keyword phrase). The web pages will be listed in the order of “popularity.”

The formula used by the search engines varies from engine to engine. In addition they are constantly changing so it is nearly impossible to know what the rules are at any given time. There are some things we can do to increase our popularity.

Content is king

The most important part of SEO is having good content. By this I mean having content that is relevant to the subject of the web page. To do so you must content that talks about the subject that is being searched for. This means that it must include the key phrases that people are searching for. To find out what people are searching for you can use tools like Word Tracker. There is both a free version and a paid version.

Back links are votes for popularity

Google calculates the importance of a page by the number of links back to it. It is not only necessary to have other sites with links back to your site, they must also be relevant sites. Google’s robots assume that if other sites relevant to the subject think your site is worthy of giving their readers a link to it that it must be relevant to the subject at hand.

How does a Google search work?

Google has a three step procedure for handling a search query:

1.When the query is submitted the web server sends the query to the index servers. An index server is exactly what its name suggests. It consists of an index much like the index of a book which displays where is the particular page containing the search term is located in the book.

2.After this, the query proceeds to the document servers. These servers actually retrieve the stored documents. Page descriptions or “snippets” are then generated to suitably describe each search result.
3.These results are then returned to the user in less than a one second! (Normally.)

Google updates their index about once a month by recalculating the Page Ranks of each of the web pages that they have crawled. The period during the update is known as the Google dance which we will look at in my next post.

Popularity: 8% [?]

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