Search Engines Optimization Basics
Sunday, July 26th, 2009 Blog, SEO by adminSearch Engine Optimization Basics
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technique of increasing the traffic to a website through search engines. A website that is properly optimized will have a higher search engine ranking and attract heavy traffic. People find websites through search engines. If your website is poorly optimized, then its presence will not be felt since people will never come to know about the website. This article provides some vital information about SEO.
There are two techniques to optimize websites and they are White Hat SEO and Black hat SEO. White Hat technique refers to a method of improving the traffic (volume or quality) to a website by strictly adhering to the guidelines of search engines. It has to be noted that these guidelines are not provided as commandments or rules. The users see the same content that is indexed by the search engine. This method ensures that the content is created for internet users, rather than search engines and lasts a long time. Even though the content is created for users, search engine spiders can easily index the content.
On the other hand, black hat tries to increase the traffic too soon by cheating the search engines by providing improper content or stuffing. The search engines disapprove this method of improving the ranking and the offending sites may be banned temporarily or permanently from the search results. In this technique, separate content is provided to the users and search engine. This is achieved by hiding the text by various methods or by masking (cloaking) the links. These sites will be warned, blacklisted or removed from the search engine’s database. The Algorithm takes care of it automatically or it is done manually. BMW Germany, Ricoh Germany and PPC Agency BigMouthMedia were removed from Google database in 2006, since these websites utilized black hat techniques to trick Google.
Most of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing etc use crawlers to display their search results. A Crawler is a program written specifically to browse the data from the World Wide Web in a systematic manner. These are also called as ants, bots, worms, spiders, robots etc. Search engines use crawlers to fetch up to date data and this process is known as spidering or web crawling. Page indexed by one search engine is automatically available to the other search engines. Some search engine offers paid submission schemes in which the site belonging to the subscriber is added into the database but good ranking is not guaranteed.
SEO also stands for search engine optimizers, professionals who provide SEO solutions. You can find many companies that specialize in SEO solutions and Sarasota web Design Company in Florida is one among them that provides excellent SEO solutions along with website design and development.
General guidelines for good SEO
- The most important thing required to have a good positioning in the search engine’s result is content. Your content should be keyword rich. The spiders pick up these keywords or keyword phrases and your site rank depends on them.
- Design should be simple and without too much bandwidth consuming graphics.
- Well written Meta-tags and description can boost the traffic to your site.
- Every page should have a static links through which the webpage can be reached.
- Use text only to highlight important content. Do not use text embedded in images since the crawler cannot recognize them.
- Keep the number of links less than 100.
- Create an information rich site.