Search Engine Optimization Uncovered
Filed under Search Engine Optimization
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the act of optimizing a website for natural listing in search engine’s listings. To rank well naturally, a website owner can reap the benefits of free traffic search engines have to offer.
Spiders and robots crawl a websites pages. These are automated programs that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN use to crawl website pages that are copied and added to a search engines large database. As a result, billions of pages are indexed, waiting for a search engine request to be made. Search engine algorithms then determine the relevancy of the near-endless pages in it’s database files.
Search engines do the following functions:
- Crawling – Indexing – Processing – Relevancy – Retrieve
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 mystery. Otherwise, savvy individuals could manipulate search listings in their favor. There are presently more than 200 factors what contribute to the ranking of an organic search. On personal searches, you may notice similar search results with different search engines. Each search engine has its own guidelines 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
The term used to describe the altering of factors on a website is On-Page Optimization. Factors include keyword density, keywords used in Title, Meta, Alt tags, and the type of support pages and number of links used throughout the site. The search engine algorithm also takes into consideration the strength of a key term based on it’s prominence on the web page. The first two hundred words will usually hold more weight than the words following.
Other contributing factors to on-page optimization is the use of similar words to key terms targeted, video usage, blogs, and the way top-level sections are structured. The type of servers being used, a domain names public status, time spent on site stats, and bounce rates are some of the other factors that contribute. With on-page optimization being important to a well optimized site, it only contributes about 30% of a full SEO strategy. The other 70% is accomplished with off-page factors.
Off-Page Factors
Factors that can not be controlled by a website owner or webmaster is considered off-page optimization. These factors include the type of links pointing back to a site. To search engines, this is considered a vote and the site providing the link is basically vouching for the site they are pointing to. The type of links coming into a site will have different weighing factors. It’s not uncommon to have most of the inbound links providing absolutely no link value to a website. So, when acquiring links, it’s important that a site receives quality links as opposed to quantity of links.
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 influx of traffic and potential inbound links.
SEO is very important to any online business. It provides free traffic with great branding exposure and plays an important role in increasing a company’s bottom line. With SEO being so rewarding, it’s also the hardest strategy to execute of all online SEM disciplines. 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 site and listing well in organic search engines, the wait is worth it.
