Search Engine Optimization 4 Non-Geeks

Keep this in mind

noreply@blogger.com (Goran Erhartic) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 18:34:00 +0000

It is important to understand that for a successful webpage is equally important to be user friendly and search optimized because users will have hard time finding your webpage if it is not optimized for search, but than again they will not visit that webpage if it is too complicated to navigate through. It is of the most importance to find a balance between these two factors if a webmaster wishes to increase the traffic on his/her website.

Tips on how to easily optimize your site

noreply@blogger.com (Goran Erhartic) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:05:00 +0000

There are numerous techniques of optimizing the site so that it would be more visible to search engines, but the most important are to have the desired keyword(s), which you think best describe your website, in the title, and as high up as possible on the page so the crawler will first see it and mark it as a very relevant word. It is recommended to have unique title names for each page so the search could be more precise. Important thing to watch out for is when inserting Java scripts and Flash animations to a web page. Not only because crawlers can not read its content and will not be recognized, but it will push down the desired keywords in the page, making them less relevant for search result. Also, web master or a designer has to be careful when using tables in a web page design because crawler will automatically scan for the words inside the columns starting from the left column to the right column. Another thing a web master/designer should do if a web page has many images is to add descriptive “alt attributes” for all image files if, for some reason, web browser can not open them so a viewer can know what that image is about, and also for the image to be more search friendly. This technique is called “image search optimization”. To ensure your web page will be visited by a crawler it is wise to submit it manually to various search engines via submission form that can be found on almost every major search engine page.

How search engines work? part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Goran Erhartic) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:08:00 +0000

This is because a webpage is made up by “heading tags” which are used to present its structure and there are six different sizes of these tags which represent the importance of the text. Beginning with "< h1 >" the most important heading tag, usually the name of the site, and ending with "< h6 >" the least important. By using complex mathematical algorithms, a crawler determines the relevance of the webpage and its keywords and categorizes it in its index for faster search results. End result of these algorithmic equations will determine the position of a webpage when search results come up. These algorithms which are used to rank pages are secret for each individual search engine, and because of this, there are no identical search engines on the internet. It is very important to update the criteria used in algorithms so that “reverse engineers” could not crack it and use their newfound knowledge to improve their ranking.

How search engines work? part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Goran Erhartic) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:51:00 +0000

New generation of search engines such as Yahoo! and Google use so called “Crawlers” or “Spiders” to investigate all of the websites that are currently online, to check their contents, make a copy of them, save them and finally index them so the search engine could later categorize them for faster search results. Web crawlers are automated “bots” which start from so called “seeds” or list of URLs, from which it recognizes and follows hyperlinks to other URLs that are linked with the seed, and by doing so not only do the crawlers collect and update information from visited sites, it automatically calculates the relevance of visited sites by the number of links that are directing to it, how many times the searched word occurs in the sites content and its position in text, words that are in the title and subtitle of the site and in meta tags, etc... In other words, when crawler visits a site it looks for two things: words that can be found in the text of the webpage; and its position (the higher the word is in the text, the more relevant it is).

Search engine history

noreply@blogger.com (Goran Erhartic) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:47:00 +0000

Because of its huge growth in the past decade, many companies began using internet as a way of promoting their products and services, which led to first search engines so customers could easily find what they were looking for. Competition became more and more fierce between competitors, and so they begun to optimize their sites for searches so they would be one step ahead of their rivals. As it is in life, few companies started exploiting flaws of the way search engines worked and used methods such as “spamdexing” (creating multiple links to a site), “keyword stuffing” (writing keywords over and over on a site), “hidden text” (hiding keywords in a site), etc… They have used these methods so the search engine would recognize their site as the most relevant of all and to mislead searchers to their websites. Luckily new generations of search engines have solved this problem, and now they exclude sites in search results which use these techniques to get a higher ranking. These methods of search engine manipulation are called “Black hat” methods.

Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Goran Erhartic) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:43:00 +0000

Acronym SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” which is a way of improving the rank of a webpage in search results on various search engines by maximizing the chance that the searched keywords will point to his/her website. The higher the site is ranked, the better it is optimized for search engines to find it. It must be pointed out that search engine optimization is not the same as search engine marketing, because SEO is based on knowing how a search engine works and customizing the website according to the algorithms that search engines use to find and rank sites, and SEM is a paid way of getting higher rankings in the search results. It is important for every site to be ranked as high as possible so it would come up at least in top 10 sites for searched keywords, because it is these sites which get most visitors. The reason for this is simple: when someone searches for a specific topic, most relevant search results will come up first and these sites will get the viewers attention and most traffic.