Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
December 26, 2013There are nearly 3 billion people using the internet. People use search engines like Google, YAHOO! And Bing to find out more about a certain thing, find out information or for a variety of other reasons. When a person queries a search engine with a word or a phrase, the search results are generally presented in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a specialist in web pages, images, information and other types of files.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO as its more commonly called is quite simple to understand. SEO helps a website or a page of a website to rank higher than its current rank on search engine result pages. As a rule of thumb, the higher a page is ranked on a results page, the more visitors it will receive from the users of that particular search engine. SEO is an important domain of internet marketing. Taking into account the working of a search engine, the most common keywords for which users query, and also which search engine is used more by users, SEO can be quite an influential tool in the internet marketing and e-commerce domain.
SEO may involve making changes to a website’s content, HTML and associate coding to increase relevance to the target keywords and phrases. These changes can be small and when seen individually, may not represent a lot at first glance. However, the sum of all these changes when brought together can have a hugely positive effect on the rankings of the website and on your site's user experience and performance in organic search results.
The workings of SEO
Indexing:
Search engines use crawlers to see what content is present on a page. . Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that are not discoverable by automatically following links. Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines.
Preventing Indexing of Certain Pages:
There are pages on a website which the owners or the webmasters can instruct a search engine not to crawl. They can instruct search engine spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots. When a spider visits a website, the robots.txt is the first file crawled. This file is then parsed and will provide instructions to the crawler as to which pages to not crawl.
Important aspects to know:
Since the initial stages of SEO, various techniques have been used to increase the rankings of web pages. Linking pages of the website to provide more links to the more important pages may improve its visibility. Fresh original content that contains widely used keyword phrases can also result in growth in traffic. Content when updated leads to engines crawling back to give additional weight to the page and this can push the rankings up. One of the most important things is to add relevant and useful keywords to the page’s meta data which includes meta description and title tag. Pages which can be accesses using multiple URL’s can be normalized using the canonical tag or 301 redirect.
Posted by SMG Convonix. Posted In : Search Engine Optimization
SMG Convonix - We are India's first Internet Marketing firm specializing in Search Engine Optimization, Pay per Click Management Services, Online Reputation Management and a Website Usability Design