What is search engine
optimization and the Internet
marketing industry?.
Here you can find almost
everything from technical SEO
minutia to broad-based
marketing and advertising
theory.
SEO and Web Marketing provides
our readership with the latest
and greatest in
industry-related thought and
opinion. Since search engine
optimization is not an exact
science, there is much room
for thought, discussion,
observation, anecdotal
evidence and of course opinion
in this field.
How can one define SEO/Web
marketing ?
SEO (search engine
optimization) defines as
"Designing a Web site so that
search engines easily find the
pages and index them. The main
goal is to have your page to
be in the top 10 results of a
search. Optimization includes
the choice of words used in
the search box and the
placement of those words on
the page…" This may be very
true, but SEO professionals
know there is so very much
more to this subject. Search
Engine Optimization (SEO) is
often considered as more
technical part of Web
marketing. This is quite true
because SEO does help in the
promotion/Grading of websites
and at the same time it
requires some technical
knowledge – at least
familiarity with basic HTML.
It oftens called SEO
copyrighting because most of
the techniques that are used
to promote sites in search
engines deal with
text/keywords. Generally, SEO
can be defined as the activity
of optimizing Web pages or
whole sites in order to make
them more search
engine-friendly, thus getting
higher positions in search
results.
In Google, for instance,
inbound links are king, so
simply optimizing what is on
your webpage will not go far
in Google. The better news,
however, is that MSN and Yahoo
do pay more attention to what
is on the page and rank
webpages more on the merits of
on-page optimization that upon
inbound links.
How Search Engines Work for
retrieving results?
The first and the most
acceptable truth you need to
learn about SEO is that search
engines are not humans. While
this might be obvious for
everybody, the differences
between how humans and search
engines view web pages aren't.
Unlike humans, search engines
are text-driven. As technology
advances rapidly, search
engines are far from
intelligent machines that can
feel the beauty of a
impressive design or enjoy the
sounds and movement in movies.
Instead, search engines crawl
the Web, looking at particular
site items (mainly text) to
get an idea what a site is
about. This brief explanation
is not the most precise
because as we will see next,
search engines perform several
activities in order to deliver
search results – crawling,
indexing, processing,
calculating relevancy, and
retrieving.
First, search engines surf the
Web to see what is there. This
task is performed by e piece
of software, called a crawler
or a spider (or Googlebot, as
is the case with Google).
Spiders follow links from one
page to another and index
everything they find on their
way. Having in mind the number
of pages on the Web (over 20
billion), it is impossible for
a spider to visit a site daily
just to see if a new page has
appeared or if an existing
page has been modified.
Sometimes crawlers will not
visit your site for a month or
two, so during this time your
SEO efforts will not be
rewarded. But there is nothing
you can do about it, except to
keep quiet.
What you can do is to check
what a crawler sees from your
site. As already mentioned,
crawlers are not humans and
they do not see images,
JavaScript, Flash movies,
frames, password-protected
pages and directories, so if
you have tons of these on your
site, you'd better run the
Spider Simulator to see if
these goodies are viewable by
the spider. If they are not
viewable, they will not be
spidered, not indexed, not
processed, etc. - in a phrase
"They will be non-existent for
search engines".
After a page is crawled,
further is to index its
content. The indexed page is
stored in a huge database,
from where it can later be
retrieved. Essentially, the
process of indexing is
identifying the words that
best describe the page and
assigning the page to
particular keywords. For a
human it will not be possible
to process such amounts of
information but generally
search engines are quite fine
at this task. Sometimes they
might not get the meaning of a
page right but if you help
them by optimizing it, it will
be easier for them to classify
your pages correctly and to
get higher rankings.
When a search request is
entered, the search engine
processes it by comparing the
search string in the search
request with the indexed pages
in the database. Since it is
likely that millions of pages
contains the search string,
the search engine starts
calculating the relevancy of
each of the pages in its index
to the keyword in the search
box.
There are various methods to
calculate relevancy. Each of
these methods has different
relative weights for common
factors like keyword
density,metatags or links.
That is why different search
engines give different search
results pages for the same
search. What is more, it is a
known fact that all major
search engines, like Yahoo!,
MSN, Google, etc. periodically
change their algorithms and if
you want to stay at the top,
you also need to adapt your
pages to the latest changes.
This is one reason to devote
permanent efforts to SEO, if
you'd like to be at the top.
The last activity of search
engines'is retrieving the
results. Basically, it is
nothing more than simply
displaying them in the browser
– i.e. the endless pages of
search results that are sorted
from the most relevant to the
least relevant sites.
