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A quick guide to search engine optimisation

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important online marketing tool as search engines are one of the primary ways that Internet users find web sites. Unfortunately, many web sites appear poorly in search engine rankings because they fail to consider how search engines work. Submitting your site to search engines is one part of the challenge of getting a good search engine ranking, it's also important however to prepare a web site through ´search engine optimization° ensuring that your web pages are accessible to search engines and focused in ways that help improve the chances they will be found.

What is a search engine?
How search engines rank web pages
Design issues and search engine optimisation
Common search engine optimisation techniques


What is a search engine?

The term ´search engine° is often used generically to describe both crawler-based search engines and human-powered directories. These two types of ´search engines° gather their listings in radically different ways.

Search Engines
Search engines compile their indexes by running computer programs (spiders) that ´crawl° the Web and index individual Web pages. An example of a prominent search engine is Google.

Directories
Directories use human editors to find sites and place them in appropriate categories. An example of a prominent directory is Yahoo.

Search Engine/Directory Hybrids
Because each type of site has its own specific advantages, search sites have begun evolving into hybrids, delivering results that combine the characteristics of both search engines and directories. The hybrid sites provide searchers with both high quality directory results and the depth of a large search engine database. Yahoo is an example of a hybrid directory/search engine. The first set of results that appear are from Yahoo's directory, backup results are provided by Google's search engine.


How search engines rank pages.

´Ranking° is a measure of how high a Web site's pages appear in the lists of results that search engines and directories return for queries run on specified search terms. Each time that someone types in a search term and requests results, that search engine applies its own unique algorithm to calculate the relevance of each page in its index to that particular search. It then returns a list of results sorted in order of relevance.

Although search engine ranking algorithms differ, they generally use a combination of the following factors, placing varying weights on the importance of each of them:

Keyword in title tag
The contents of a page's HTML title tag have an especially important influence on many search engines' assessments of relevance. For a page to rank as highly relevant for a given key term, that term should appear at the start of the page's title tag.

Keyword in meta data
Many people who have heard of search engine optimization believe that it primarily involves manipulating keywords in meta tags. Today however search engines place very little weight on meta tags. Some engines, such as Google, ignore meta tags altogether. It certainly is still beneficial to include meta tags on all pages that are submitted to search engines. Sometimes search engines will use the description information from these tags as the description in their listings. Having the keyword in the meta description and meta keywords may also provide a bit of a rankings boost in some of the major search engines.

Keyword density and placement in body text
In order for a page to rank highly for a given term, it is essential that the key terms appear in the page's plain HTML text. Search engines read the actual text of the page and look for keywords in order to understand the page's content.

Link popularity
Another major factor in most major search engine ranking algorithms is link popularity. Link popularity relies on the democratic nature of the Web by using the Web's vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. A link from page A to page B is counted a vote for page B by page A. Additionally, search engines look beyond the mere number of links a site receives to the importance of the sites that provide those links. For example, the more important the sites are that link to a Web page, the higher that page will rank in search engine listings. Link popularity is a particularly important factor in Google°s algorithm.

Page popularity
A page's popularity is a function both of the number of people who click on the page's listing in search results and of how long those people remain at that site before returning to the search results page.

How directories rank listings
In contrast to search engines' ranking algorithms, which sort search results according the ranked pages' actual content, the ranking algorithms used by directories look only at the information provided during the submission process and approved by the directory's editors.


Design issues and search engine optimisation.

Although there are many aspects to good Web design, certain design decisions can have a significant effect on Web pages' rankings in search engines. The basic concepts are simple - plain text, unhindered text based navigation and permanent URLs are all good.

The most common design obstacles to search site ranking include:


Common search engine optimisation techniques.

Search Engines and Directories have guidelines, which defines what design factors are considered good and bad from the search engines' point of view. Below is a list of the common search engine optimisation techniques to achieve a higher ranking on most search engines.

Content Optimisation
Your web site's content is the search engine's content, so search engines want sites with high quality content above all else. Web pages with text that accurately reflects the products, and services offered by the website.

Meta tag optimisation
Meta tags are used to describe the content of a Web page. Current search engine algorithms do not place much weight on metadata; in fact, some major engines simply ignore meta tags altogether. Nevertheless, there does remain some benefit to giving pages meta tags that concisely, accurately, and consistently convey the central focus of the page on which the tags appear.

Title tag optimisation
The title tag also provides the title for the page's listing in search results at some major search sites. Because the contents of a title tag often are an important factor in the algorithms that search sites use to determine which pages appear first in search results, choosing title words carefully and ordering them strategically can be an important part of optimizing a web page.

Navigation optimisation
Search engines use the links within websites to crawl and index the pages those links point to. It's very important that you have text links on your website that contain your target keywords. Many common web site navigation design features can inhibit or even prevent search engine spiders from indexing those pages. Examples include a heavy use of Flash or JavaScript, the embedding of text within graphics, and some common uses of frames. Removing such technical obstacles can help search engine spiders find the site content to index.

Site Map
This is a textual representation of your site's structure. It includes every single page on your site, usually categorized for easier navigation. Site maps provide a great way to make sure that search engines, which follow links, index every page.

Keyword density adjustment
One of the criteria that search engine algorithms have often used to rank search results is the density of the sought keyword in the body text. Attempts to adjust the keyword density to hit the magical intermediate value is largely a matter of guesswork, and what works well one day may work poorly the next, as ranking algorithms change.

Linking campaigns
Link popularity is an increasingly important part of search engines' ranking algorithms, a common search engine optimisation technique is to try to increase the number of sites that link to the your site. The actual ´link popularity° is mostly based on the quality of the links, not the quantity of them that point to a given site.

Pay-for-ranking
A few search sites - most notably Overture.com - allow sites to bid for position in search listings for relevant keywords. These search engines typically charge sites on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis, therefore high rankings depends entirely on the amount bid.


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