Monday, January 26, 2009

SEO?

By Alex Plana

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the act of optimizing a website for free listing in search engine's listings. To rank well naturally, a web 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 scan website pages that are copied and added to a search engines enormous 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.

Functions performed by search engines:

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

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 secret. Otherwise, savvy individuals could alter search listings in their favor. There are presently more than 200 factors what contribute to the ranking of an natural search. On personal searches, you may notice similar search listings 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 website. 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 ranked. 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 Factors

There are other factors that cannot be controlled by a webmaster or site owner, and these factors are referred to as Off- Page Optimization. The type and amount of links pointing back to a site is voucher that the site being linked to is important. However, it is not uncommon to have a fair amount of inbound links that provide no link value to a website. It is important that a website attract quality links as opposed to a quantity of links.

Social media plays an important role in off-page optimization. Utilizing social media is a very popular method of creating attention and building up a following. Attention grabbing viral campaigns can create a large increase of traffic and potential inbound links.

SEO, while being rewarding, is a difficult strategy to execute of all SEM disciplines. SEO can be time consuming, and the results may not be realized for several months. However, once a site is well optimized and is positioned well in organic search engine traffic, it will have all been worthwhile. - 15478

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