Monday, January 26, 2009

SEO Basics

By Alex Plana

Search Engine Optimization or also referred as SEO is the method in which a website is optimized to gain free ranking in a search engines result pages. If the site ranks well, a web owner can reap the benefits that of the organic traffic that search engines provide.

Spiders and robots crawl a websites pages. These are automated programs that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN use to scan website pages that are copied and added to a search engines massive database. As a result, billions of pages are indexed, waiting for a search engine request to be made. Search engine algorithms then calculate the relevancy of the near-endless pages in it's database files.

Search engines do the following functions:

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

Search engines use a set of rules, called an "algorithm" to calculate relevancy of requested search queries. The algorithm are kept in secret by search engines from the public to avoid altering of their search listings. To date, there are over 200 plus factors that contribute to organic search rankings. As you've searched on major search engines, you may have noticed similar but not duplicate results with the different search engines. Search engines have there own algorithm with slight differences with listing rules but for the most part, all major search engines follow similar rules when it comes to 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 page. The first two hundred words will usually hold more weight than the words following.

Other factors that contribute to a pages optimization are the use of synonyms, videos used, blogs, and the way that top-level sections are structured. The server used, a sites domain name status, site analytics of site bounce rate are other factors that can contribute to how highly or low a page is listed. However, how well a page is optimized only contributes to roughly 30% of an overall SEO plan. Off-page factors contribute the other 70%.

Off-Page Optimization

Factors that can not be controlled by a site owner or webmaster is considered off-page optimization. These factors include the type of links pointing back to a website. To search engines, this is considered a vote and the site providing the link is basically vouching for the website 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 site. So, when acquiring links, it's important that a site receives quality links as opposed to quantity of links.

Social media is another off-page strategy that can improve search engine listings. Social media is one of the most popular methods being used today. However, there are so many social media sites online that an individual can become overwhelmed. Building a following through strong viral campaigns can lead to online success via a large increase of traffic and a potentially high number of inbound links.

SEO is also the hardest strategy to execute of all the online SEM disciplines. Results take time, and in some cases it may take up to a full year to see the kind of results hope for. However, the wait is well worth it. - 16928

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