What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization ? It can be put across as the best way of building up a brand and reputation management for any website, especially when competitors are standing close by to grab customers. It is one of the most effective marketing strategies for increasing the website relevance for the targeted customers.

Let?s look at the background of ?How Search Engines Work??

Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and AOL are few of the prominently used search engines. Google shares the major portion of the internet search engines, followed by Yahoo and MSN. The figure below gives you an idea of how much portion is being occupied by Google.

All the search engines work largely with keywords as the key matrix for giving their search results. Search Engines identify the article in the webpage by the keywords that appear on the content of the webpage, title of the webpage, meta tags and the description of the page and serve results. They have their algorithms which send the bots to web approximately every 15 to 90 days. These bots crawl a website (www.yoursite.com) or a webpage, which are submitted to www.searchengine.com/AddURL.html, or by passing through a website (www.example.com) which is freshly crawled and your site link appears on the website www.example.com before the bot crawling. Then your site is stored in the database of the search engine and whenever a keyword is entered in the text box of a search engine, depending on the criteria of keyword relevance, link popularity, site architecture, quality of content and site updating the chances of your site getting listed in the top 10 results are greater.

The best practices in SEO can be classified into four different categories:

• Subject matter Expertise
• Information Architecture
• Technical Implementation
• Marketing

Let?s have a look at each of the above one by one:

Subject matter Expertise:

In the search engine optimization industry we often come across a saying ?Content is the King?. The content for a website has major role to play for producing good results in SEO. We cannot build a large site unless we have good content. It requires expertise to build content that is unique. Content should never be duplicated or copied. We often find copied content not being listed in the search results page -- or they appear as supplemental results.

Here are a few ideas to show expertise with your content:

• Write articles on the area of your expertise. Don?t stuff the article with the goal of selling it. Make sure that the purpose of your writing an article is served.
• Create a theme-based site which has expertise in one area.
• Create a community around your website for the theme in which your website content exists.
• News and Updates make up a major source of expertise for a theme-based site.

The content-rich site wins more trust with the customers. And trust is something that lasts with a website for a long time.

Information Architecture

Information Architecture is a process or a practice of structuring information. This is an essential part of building a website.

First, let?s understand what the user needs and what is he searching for.

• Here, keyword mapping plays a significant role. Identify keywords using the word tracker, keyword discovery or Google keyword suggestion tool. Find out what the search count is for the keyword you?re looking to optimize. If you see there are more appropriate keywords highly relevant to your subject matter, use the keywords which are likely to draw good traffic.
• Have well defined site navigation so that the bot as well as the user can easily access whatever content they wish. A tree structure is always recommended, unlike site architecture.
• Ensure smooth accessibility for the user to go any page he wants from whichever page he?s in.

a. Technical Aspect

As discussed above, search engines have some basic requirements to fulfill for listing a website on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP?s). Here are few key points that can be considered in order to have a search engine friendly web site.

• See that the web page navigation is done properly and that the search engine bots can easily crawl your website when ever they come to your site.
• Internal linking architecture should be easily accessible from the home page of the website. The good articles or articles which are regularly updated should be accessible within 2 to 4 pages from the home page.
• Have Meta tags and Title of every page according to the article of the respective keyword.

Marketing

Word of mouth marketing is what works in search engine optimization. That can be achieved through links to your site from other good sites. The best way to get more traffic from SEO is to have theme-based link exchange. When you have good content on your site, there are many other external sites that will link your website or webpage to theirs, which gives weight to your site. You can even build page rank for your site through link exchange from other sites. It flows from one site to another. The page rank in the Google tool bar shows how good your site is with regard to reputation. It?s ranked on a scale of 1 to 10.

Here are the points to be noted:

• Have Alt text for all the links that are from or in your site (i.e., inbound or outbound links).
• Don?t blindly swap the links. Consider the weight that your site gets from linking to another site.
• Have links from traffic-oriented websites which are ranking high in search engines.

Summary

SEO is one of the most effective methods to build a good reputation for your company or website. There are many ways of marketing a website and many other practices that are followed in optimizing a website. These are only few of them. Hope to come up with some others in the next article!