Last time around, when I was writing about website promotions, I promised that I would write in detail on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A lot has been said and written about SEO. There are megabytes of information on the net available on this topic. I am here to add some more on the sameJ.
It is the dream of every website owner to see their site displayed on the first page of any search engine. Also, it is a known fact that an Internet user, looking for information on the web, would first go to one of the popular search engine portal and type the keywords, for which he seeks information. And the chances are that he will NOT browse more than 2-3 pages of the search results. Hence it is important that our site is displayed in the initial 20 results. SEO today has become one of the key online marketing efforts of every website owner to achieve success on the net.
Search Engines: An Introduction
Archie, Gopher, Veronica and Jughead are three standard "finding" tools on the Internet. The Archie database is made up of the file directories from hundreds of systems. When you search this database on the basis of a file's name, Archie can tell you which directory paths on which systems hold a copy of the file you want.
To use Archie, you must Telnet to an Archie server. You can do that by keying in a command such as telnet://archie.internic.net to get to the Archie server at that address and log on by keying in archie when prompted to do so. Once you do your Archie search, you must then go get the file using FTP, the Internet File Transfer Protocol.
A Gopher is a menu system that simplifies locating and using Internet resources. Each Gopher menu at each Gopher site is unique. Gopher menus usually include the other familiar features of the Internet. You can use a Gopher to Telnet to a location or to FTP a file or to do just about anything else--as long as that option is listed on the Gopher menu.
Gopher software makes it possible for the system administrator at any Internet site to prepare a customized menu of files, features and Internet resources. When you use the Gopher, all you have to do is select the item you want from the menu.
The Veronica database is a collection of menus from most Gopher sites. When you do a Veronica search, you are searching menu items. In the course of the search, Veronica builds an on-the-spot menu consisting of just those items that match your request. When the search is finished, Veronica will present you with a customized Gopher menu.
Veronica will not only present you with a list of Gopher menu items, it will also act like a Gopher. The Veronica database of all Gopher menu items is called Gopherspace. Thus, if you used Veronica to search Gopherspace for the word supreme, you would most likely come up with a Gopher-style menu listing the places to get U.S. Supreme Court decisions. At this point, you could simply choose an item, and Veronica would automatically take you there.
Jughead is available at some Gopher sites and uses the menu items on a single Gopher menu as its database.
(Thank you netlingo.com)
Search Engines are “portals” for Internet users, seeking information, or guiding users to their target destinations on the web.
Search engines uses programs called ‘spiders’, ‘crawlers’ or ‘bots’. They seek out information containing in the webpages.
The programs then ‘read’ the text content in the page and they are indexed in the SE database. When a query is put on the search engine server, in form of ‘keyword/s’ the search the indexed database and throw up the results… wherein the keyword-listed sites are shown.
How the SE works:
To make the complicated process simple:
Harvesting – Indexing - Searching
special ‘programs’ read the content of pages on the web
2.the programs ‘visit’ in random millions of page every hour and read the content
3.the content are organized and indexed in huge database.
4.each SE has a particular algorithm to check the relevancy of the text read and the page
Page Ranking:
Page ranking can be termed as the position at which your site is displayed when searched/ queried on specific keywords. So the lower the page ranking the higher is its visibility and chances of someone clicking through to your site from the Search Engine portal.
There are a number of factors that affect the page rankings. These depend upon the program that runs the SE and the relevancy your site has vis-à-vis that particular program. Some of the regular factors most SE looks into are:
ü the frequency of the keyword in the page
ü number of links to that page from other sites/ pages on the net
ü % usage of the word compared to other words in the page
üplacement of the keyword – such as in headings, titles, hyperlinks, etc
HTML Tags:
Many web evangelists claim these to be the magic words for increasing the chances of improving your page rankings. META TAGS, inserted in the html codes, with the keywords, squeezed in between them, are said to increase the chances of visibility.
The META TAGS are mainly divided into META KEYWORD and META DESCRIPTION tags. Now-a-days most of the search engines ignore the KEYWORD tag, as these are easily manipulated.
DESCRIPTION tags are taken into consideration as they give a description about the web page. But, it is said that in the recent past, the search engine programs are relating the content in the description tags to the actual site content… and if they find anything amiss they are blocking the display of the site in the results page. The META DESCRIPTION is the content that will be displayed on the search engine results page.
Indexing:
Indexing of the pages are a continous process. There are millions of pages on the web that are not indexed.. and millions of new pages added on to the net everyday (like this one). Hence it is a bigggg task for the search engines to keep indexing each and every page on the web. Getting listed on the seach engines can take days sometimes months.
Broadly speaking the process for SEO will include
1.using the proper keywords – the best way of finding the important keywords are writing all the words that identifies with your site, and choosing the 10-15 best of the words
2.the site needs to be content rich. Yes, content is the king.
3. the keywords needs to be incorporated in the page frequently, also they need to be there in headings, page titles, and linked to other pages/sites
4.personal submission of the words to search engines… though this is time consuming, it is worth the efforts
5.try and link the site from various other internet pages…
6.keeping track of the improvements/ non-improvement in page rankings, and finding out the reasons…
Some important search engines
