Having been in
search marketing industry for a couple of years, it still strikes me when I meet website owners that have just recently become aware of this “phenomenon”.The newbies introduction.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in a nutshell is helping a website to achieve higher positioning on search engines and thus to be found by users typing in a specific query related to website contents.
The first thing most searchers do when looking for anything on web, is turn to their favourite search engine, for example: Google, Yahoo! and MSN to name top three, type in their query (what they are looking for), press submit, and results magically appear approximately 3 seconds later.
For most searchers whatever is displayed on that very first page is deemed most relevant of hundreds and sometimes thousands of websites on search engine’s index.
It has been proven that most people do not browse further than first two result pages at most; therefore it is safe to assume that if your site is not listed on first 10 – 20 results it will likely not be found.
Gaining position.
SEO uses various techniques to help prepare and boost a website into these sought after positions.
Some of techniques used are, but not limited to: 1.Site architecture 2.Optimized content 3.Optimized html 4.Link building campaigns
To briefly explain these four points: 1.Site architecture – directory & page structure, page names, domain name and language (asp, php, jsp, html etc. ) 2.Optimized content – Key-phrases are chosen based on target market. (Key-phrases are phrases that people will type into their browser when they are looking for something on web.) Each page of a website is optimized for a particular term. The page copy, image names, hyperlinks etc are all carefully optimized in strategically chosen areas to reflect this particular term to spider. 3.Optimized html – One area is page title and meta description. This is what most search engines use to display in their results pages. This is area that sets your site apart from other nine results that are displayed on page and encourages user to choose your site. 4.Link building campaigns – Google developed their PageRank algorithm to determine relevancy of sites as seen from a hub or group perspective. In a nutshell it ranks sites out of 10 based on how many other sites are linked to it. The theory goes that if many sites are interested in that site, then that site is surely important to users and therefore it should be important in index. To kick-start a site Link builders are assigned to research sites that are in similar industries to their own projects, email relevant webmaster and exchange links. In so doing, building up site’s relevance within hub. Once relevance is built up, Link building will occur on a more natural basis and link building requests should no longer be necessary.
