Search
Engine Optimization
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and describes a
process which ensures that your Website is accessible to
search engines, improving the chances of your Website being
found.
Why is SEO important?
If your
Website ranks high in the search engine results, the
number of visitors to your Website will likely increase as
well. Search engines are the key to finding information on
the Internet. Without search engines, it would be nearly
impossible to locate anything without knowing a specific
Website address. The higher a Website ranks in the results
of a search, the greater the chance that the site will be
visited by a user. Users are most likely to view the first
few pages returned by a search result instead of the
hundreds or thousands of pages thereafter As a result, you
will want your Website listed on one of those first few
pages, which is where SEO enters the picture.
How does a search engine work?
There are three types of search engines that will index your
Website: Those that are powered by crawlers, or spiders;
those powered by human submissions and a combination of the
two.
In a nutshell, crawler-based engines send crawlers or
spiders to visit Websites and return the information back to
a central depository to be indexed. On the other hand,
human-powered search engines actually rely on humans to
submit the information, and then it is indexed and
catalogued.
In both situations, when you search the Internet, you are
actually searching the index in which the search engine has
created. It's like a giant database!
How do the search engines decide where to place my page?
Search engines use algorithms (a formula or set of rules) to
determine what is relevant information in relation to what
the user is searching for. Additionally, not all search
engines use the same algorithm.
What type of algorithms do the search engines use?
One important element that a search engine algorithm scans
for, which most of us are aware of, is the frequency and
location of keywords. Another common algorithm is the way in
which pages link to other pages on the Web. By analyzing how
pages link to each other, and the number of pages linking to
a Website, the search engine can decide what the pages are
about and if they are important. If so, they may get a
boost!
Which search engines are the most popular?
The largest and most often used at this time are Google and
Yahoo.
