Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Basics of SEO Techniques

There are lots of things in the world of computing that people tend to find mysterious and touching look like black magic. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of those things that takes up there on the scale of mystery and black magic. Today, the term has been extended to Search Engine Marketing, which includes paid advertising and other online marketing activities, but for our purposes we'll stick with SEO.

SEO is the practice of promoting a website by increasing its position in search results on major search engines. The Google search engines comprise mainly, but also include Yahoo, Bing, and others. The idea is to make the site appear higher in the list of search results from similar sites. This is known as "organic" SEO which means that the range was the result of the Plain of the old search results instead of having to pay for placement search engine.

There is much value in doing the right thing in terms of SEO goes. First up is free and the second Internet searches are becoming the primary means of finding information. The main search engine is Google and according to some market research, Google sent an incredible 81.22% of the worldwide market share in June 2009. Google's success is punctuated by the fact that the word "Google" has found its way into the dictionary.

The main goal of search engines is to bring relevant search results to its users. When a user enters a search phrase, a search engine is successful when it delivers the information the user is looking. If a search engine can not deliver relevant information that simply does not spend much time in the digital scene.

The execution of this feat is the result of a very sophisticated mix of programs, servers incredibly powerful, and maybe some eye of newt and toe of frog thrown in for good measure.

Seriously, however, complete mechanics of how search engines rank web pages are kept strictly confidential. He just has to be that way or the bad boys of world knowledge is used to artificially inflate their own rankings.

There are some basic truths in SEO and it is fair to say that today's search engines consider the following ranking of a given web page:

* The content of the page - what it is, what words are used prominently.
* What words are used in the title of the page?
* What words are used in the URL of the page?
* What words are highlighted on the page?
* What internal links (links from other pages in the same place) suggest that?
* How many external links to it and more importantly, if these pages are relevant to the subject of the page?
* The text used to form the internal and external links.
* Although the age of the domain name has a role in your ranking!

There is much more involved, of course, and that list could have gone for a while. Factors such as keywords, the use of images and Flash animations, and design of the site itself also play a role in the ranking of a page.

Good SEO lists can be found on the web, but probably the most important thing to think about search engines does not mean at all. That is the quality of content.

The ultimate goal of a search engine is to return relevant information to your visitors. As such, search engines have become very sophisticated to find out if the content is relevant to the search term and, in fact, if a human looks interesting.

SEO is a fascinating subject and search engines are examples of incredibly complex computer programming. They are so good in the fact that the best advice I can give someone looking to increase their placement is - write your content for people and search engines. You will be rewarded for it.