What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is the art and science of making web pages attractive to the search engines.

Why Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site.

So search engine optimization focuses on techniques such as making sure that each web page has appropriate title tags and meta tags, and that the keyword or key phrases for the page are distributed throughout the content in a way that the particular search engine will like.
Benefits of Search Engine Optimization

Search engines generate nearly 90% of Internet traffic and are responsible for 55% of e-commerce transactions. Search Engine Promotion has shown to deliver the highest ROI, compared to any other type of marketing, both online and offline. Search engines bring motivated buyers to you and hence contribute to increased sales conversions.

Search Engine Optimization offers an affordable entry point for marketing your website and an effective way to promote your business online. SEO makes for a long-term solution, is your access to sustained free traffic and a source of building brand name and company reputation.
5. Basic Rules of Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is crucial for anyone who wants people to visit his or her Web site. You can place as many ads as you like, but most people are still going to find your site because of its listings in search engines or directories.

It's a fact that most people who use search engines only look at the first one or two page of search listings. The goal of effective search engine optimization is to get your pages listed on those critical first pages for particular key terms.

1) Remember that each page of your site is a separate entity.

You need to apply the basics of effective search engine optimization to each individual page.

2) Choose appropriate key words or phrases for each page.

Phrasing matters. Many more people search for the term “effective search engine optimization” than for “effectively optimizing for search engines”. To find out which key words or phrases are more popular than others, you can use a tool such as Overture's and Word tracker’s Search Term Suggestion Tool

3) Give each page an appropriate title that includes the key word or phrase at least once.

We often see sites that use the name of their business as the title of all their pages. Is every page of their site about their business? Probably. But chances are really low that people will be searching for their business’ name!

4) Put the key words or phrase that you've chosen in the page's title tag, meta keywords, and meta description.

Make sure that the meta description is as appealing as possible, because some search engines actually use this description in the search engine results pages that people will be reading.

5) Be sure your chosen key words or phrase is repeated judiciously throughout the content of the page.

You don't want to overdo it, or your page may be rejected as spam, but you need to repeat it enough times that the search engine's software will consider the phrase relevant.

Following are the main areas of web page that search engines give more importance in their ranking algorithms:

Title tag, The main body text, Meta tags, Link popularity, Domain name, Heading tags, Proximity of Keywords, Bold or Italic texts, Folder or file names, Image alt tags, Title attribute and keyword in the beginning of the sentence.

Based on the importance, we can rank those areas as below:

Title

2.0

Link popularity

2.0

The main body text

1.5

Domain name

1.0

Keyword prominence

1.0

Heading tags

0.5

Proximity of keywords

0.5

Bold or Italic

0.4

Folder or file name

0.3

Meta description

0.3

Alt tag

0.2

Title attribute

0.2

Meta keywords

0.1

Total Score

10

What is Search Engine?

Internet search engines (e.g. Google, AltaVista) help users find web pages on a given subject. The search engines maintain databases of web sit

es and use programs (often referred to as “spiders” or “robots”) to collect information, which is then indexed by the search engine. Similar services are provided by “directories”, which maintain ordered lists of websites e.g. Yahoo!

How Internet Search Engines Work

The good news about the Internet and its most visible component, the World Wide Web, is that there are hundreds of millions of pages available, waiting to present information on an amazing variety of topics.

When you need to know about a particular subject, ho

w do you know which pages to read? If you're like most people, you visit an Internet search engine.

Internet search engines are special sites on the Web that are designed to help people find information stored on other sites. There are differences in

the ways various search engines work, but they all perform three basic tasks:

• They search the Internet -- or select pieces of the Internet -- based on important words.
• They keep an index of the words they find, and w here they find them.
• They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index.

Early search engines held an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand inquiries each day. Today, a top search engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of milli

ons of queries per day.

Before a search engine can tell you where a file or document is, it must be found. To find information on the hundreds of millions of Web pages that exist, a search engine employs special software robots, called spiders, to build lists of the words found on Web sites. When a spider is building its lists, the process is called Web crawling. (The

re are some disadvantages to calling part of the Internet the World Wide Web -- a large set of arachnid-centric names for tools is one of them.) In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, a search engine's spiders have to look at a lot of pages.

How does any spider start its travels over the Web? The usual starting points are lists of heavily used servers and very popular pages. The spider will begin with a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within the site. In this way, the spidering system quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the mo

st widely used portions of the Web.

Types of Search Engines

The term “search engine” is often used generically to describe both crawler-based search engines and human-powered directories. These two types of search engines gather their listings in radically different ways.

Crawler-Based Search Engines

Crawler-based search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. They “crawl” or “spider” the web, then people search through what they have found.

If you change your web pages, crawler-based search engines eventually find these changes, and that can affect how you are listed. Page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role.

Human-Powered Directories

A human-powered directory, such as the Open Directory, depends on humans for its listings. You submit a short description to the directory for your entire site, or editors write one for sites they review. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted.

Changing your web pages has no effect on your listing. Things that are useful for improving a listing with a search engine have nothing to do with improving a listing in a directory. The only exception is that a good site, with good content, might be more likely to get reviewed for free than a poor site.

“Hybrid Search Engines” Or Mixed Results

In the web's early days, it used to be that a search engine either presented crawler-based results or human-powered listings. Today, it extremely common for both types of results to be presented. Usually, a hybrid search engine will favor one type of listings over another. For example, MSN Search is more likely to present human-powered listings from LookSmart. However, it does also present crawler-based results (as provided by Inktomi), especially for more obscure queries.