|
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
is considered the more technical part of Web marketing. This is because SEO
helps in the promotion of sites and also requires technical knowledge – at
least familiarity with HTML. SEO is sometimes also called SEO copyrighting
because most techniques used to promote sites in search engines deal with
text. SEO is the activity of optimizing Web pages or entire sites to make
them search engine-friendly, thus getting higher positions in search
results.
You can be included in paid search results for given keywords but basically
the idea behind the SEO techniques is to get top placement because your site
is relevant to a particular search term, not because you pay.
If you are a leader for rare
keywords, then you do not have a lot to do in order to get decent placement.
But in most cases you need to pay special attention to SEO and devote time
and effort to it. Even if you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential
that you understand how search engines work and which items are most
important in SEO.
How Search Engines Work
Unlike humans, search engines are
text-driven. Search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items
(mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. Search engines perform
several activities
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Processing
- Calculating
- Relevancy
- Retrieving.
First, search engines crawl the Web
to see what is there. This task is performed by e piece of software, called
a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders
follow links from one page to another and index everything they find. 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. Sometimes crawlers will
not visit your site for a month or two, so during this time your SEO efforts
will not be rewarded. But there is nothing you can do about it, so just keep
quiet.
Crawlers do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames,
password-protected pages and directories. These will not be spidered, not
indexed, not processed, etc. - they will be non-existent for search
engines.
After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed
page is stored in a giant database. Essentially, the process of indexing is
identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and
assigning the page to particular keywords. Sometimes they might not get the
meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be
easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher
rankings.
When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it
compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in
the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (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.
There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these
algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword
density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give
different search results pages for the same search string.
Major search engines periodically
change algorithms. If you want to keep at the top, adapt your pages to the
latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote
permanent efforts to SEO. .
The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results.
Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser –
i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most
relevant to the least relevant sites.
Differences Between the Major Search Engines
There are many examples of the
differences between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and MSN,
on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links
are very, very important. Also, for Google sites are like wine – the older,
the better, while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites
and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time
till your site gets mature to be admitted to the top in Google, than in
Yahoo!. |