Search engines are the ones that help you to find what you want on internet in a high accurate manner. They display the results as a list in a particular order that shows most favorable once at the top of the list. In order to do that they use automated web crawling engines generally called as Spiders or Bots. They crawl through the sites all over the internet and keep a index of their markup in their data structure. Once a user submit a search query with a specific set of keywords, search engine give a result containing links to related pages according to priority defined by their algorithm. The Web developers have to pay attention on making the site they design in the top of rankings. That’s where those Search Engine Optimization techniques come to the picture. It can be dividing in to main two categories which are on page optimizing and off page optimizing.
On-Page Optimizing
What Are Keywords?
Keywords are queries you type in when you search on any search engine. In general, people call a collection of words also as “keyword” instead of telling ‘keywords’. When doing the on page keyword optimization, the developers have to consider mainly on 3 factors. They are:
Keyword Density: Too much keyword usage in your site make the search engine feels you as a spammer. The less amount of usage let the search engine ignore your site. So it is recommended to use at least three times and not more than 5 percent of the content text on your page.
Keyword Variation: The developer can use several variations of the keywords such as plurals, misspellings or changing the order of the available keywords. Misspellings may make the page look not that professional. But it works as an optimization technique.
Keyword Similarity: Providing similar keywords such like ‘single’ for ‘one’ is a good optimization technique that can catch search engine’s eye on your site.
Domain
There is no doubt that keyword rich domain names perform much better in the search engine rankings than the domains without keywords in the domain. The difference cannot be seen that much as each site has its own way of doing optimizing. If you compare one site having keyword in its domain and other not having keyword in domain, you will definitely find a difference after a few months you have host the site.
URL
Having a URL that includes the keyword alone does not help, but it helps when other sites link to another. A lot of people link to others by their URL, thus the anchor text will use the keyword.
Title Tags
Many developers use their site name as the title of the page. It is true that it displays that in the title bar of the browser. But, it is a very easy and efficient way to present keywords rather than displaying site name. Optimized title tags give several advantages on applying SEO to the sites.
- The phrase you were looking for and the title tag both are same. So search results will be highlighted.
- Increase rankings on search engines.
- Helps engines distinguish between pages that might look similar.
Meta Tags
Using Meta-tags are very common thing that developers use. For example;
Header Tags
The header tags only do not catch the user’s attention on the page. It is a great way to let the search engines know what is the subject of your page is. If there is a need to control the size of those tags, you can easily use CSS for that. It is a bad practice that some developers use CSS to control font size other than using the header tags. Any webpage should include single H1 tag and the hierarchy of H2 and H3 tags.
Bold, Italic And Oblique Tags
The same scenario which I described earlier applies to the Bold, Italic and Oblique tags also as they let the search engine have much more attention on them. If the keywords of the websites are shown in using those tags, it will be a great way to do the optimization.
Remove Duplicate Content
In some cases, the duplicate content may cause pages to be filtered at the time of serving of results by search engines. It cannot be guaranteed that this page will be shown and this page will not. Sometimes the content will be removed from the index also.
Off-Page Optimizing
As it says in the name, Off-Page SEO techniques are not applied inside the particular website. Developers can apply them in some other websites. Some of the most popular techniques are listed as follows.
Create Back Links
There are a number of ways to get create back links.Submiting articles to article directories (such as ezinearticles), and adding the site’s URL to web directories, pay per click and social sites will be effective.
Social Bookmarking
This is much inexpensive than having advertisements, because most of the Social sites provide free service of letting people to have links. Even they charge, the fare is reasonable. Search engines travel around the websites through the links available. Google Robot is the link traveler of the Google search engine. When providing the links to the sites even in advertisements or some other publications, it is good to look to use keywords as the available anchor text.
What Is Google Page Rank
The Page Rank is patented process of Google. This is a good method that overcame the early days search engine ranking that were based only on the content and the Meta tags of the page. Google gives every page a numerical value between 1- 10. This numerical value is called the Google Page Rank of that site and that is updated once in a 3 months. After seeing the accuracy of Google, other search engines also added a page ranking mechanism to their search algorithm.
How To Get Page Ranking In To The website?
The best and easiest way to get the page ranking to a website is to get a link from a highly ranked page. For example getting a link from a page with the rank of 5 can make your site rank as 4 if the site is trusted and if it has less amounts of links like that. It is not that worth getting links from low ranking pages. A page can be ranked 0 if it is punished by Google.
Nofollow Flags
In some of the pages like Facebook and MySpace they have added nofollow flags. After adding a nofollow flag, those back link won’t add any page rank for the target page, in other words it’s not a ‘vote’.
Search Engine Optimization Tools
There are several SEO tools that can be used to optimize the web site easily. There are categorized on each task as follows.
Keyword Discovery
There are several keyword discovery tools that tell us on what topic do people mostly search on the web. You can find them mostly free.
- Google Adwords.
- Trellian Keyword Discovery
- AdCenter keyword Group Detection
Keyword Volume
It shows how many people monthly search for that keyword.
- Google Adwords External Tool
- SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
Backlink Tracker
They help to find how many links available for the site from the other sites and how many links available in your site.
- Site Explorer
- Digitalpoint’s Keyword Ranking
Benefits
There are number of benefits of applying SEO to the websites. It can be commercial or social. Most important thing is that designers do not need to pay continuously.
- Perspective
- Targeted Traffic
- Increase Visibility
- High ROI
- Long Term Positioning
- Cost-Effective
Summary
Search engine techniques do not remain same for months. They changes. Some of the very basic techniques of optimizing are listed below. Mostly the Search Engine Optimizers’ task is to build the traffic and give a higher rank to the web site. Sometimes what they do is not acceptable as good by the search engines. Then the search engines make changes in their algorithms or their techniques. Therefore this is like a battle between search engines and the Optimizers. So the most important thing is to be updated.
References
- Google Optimization. (n.d.). Retrieved 04 03, 2010, from SEO Chat: http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/
- SEO for beginers. (n.d.). Retrieved from TIZAG: http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/
- SEO Questions and Answers. (n.d.). Retrieved 05 03, 2010, from SEO Forums: http://seoforums.org/seo-questions-answers/
- Edgware SEO Company | MiddleSex SEO Company. (2009, December). Retrieved May 2010, from seoarena.wordpress.com: http://seoarena.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/search-engine-optimization.jpg
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