Search Engine Optimization

Overview

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of developing and optimizing a website to increase traffic by improving page rankings. This optimization process is done by adding keywords, optimized URLs, and images.

SEO involves two processes: onsite optimization and offsite optimization. Onsite optimization includes techniques such as optimizing title tags, content, and linking structures within your site. With offsite optimization, links are created to your site from other sites. This type of optimization is done by publishing blogs and press releases, and by posting updates and comments on social media sites.

Search engine architecture contains components known as spiders, crawlers, indexers, databases, results engines, and web servers. These components regularly monitor your website to see if any new content has been added. Major search engines include Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

Benefits

The biggest advantage of optimizing your website is that your website becomes more visible on search engine results. It also helps you drive more traffic towards your website and increase the page ranking. With increased visibility and traffic, visits and sales also increase, which result in increased profits. SEO is more effective than other forms of advertising as it has a wider reach. Maintaining regular search rankings reports help you monitor the progress in your business.

How It Works

A website must have HTML tags, meta keywords, and description tags that are specific to your business. Keywords refer to words or phrases that your prospective customers are likely to use when searching for web content. Use these key words in the content, meta descriptions, and title of the page to optimize your webpage for that keyword.

The other methods of SEO include using keywords as links, creating text navigation, adding footers for every page, embedding internal links, and building a site map. You can also submit your website to major directories.

Search engines run programs called spiders that "crawl" the web to find new documents and web pages by following hyperlinks from websites already in the database. Once a page has been crawled, the search engine indexes the content in the document and adds it to huge databases that periodically update. Since, spiders look for fresh content, regular up gradation of content has to be done to make your websites search engine friendly.