Tuesday, 27 October 2015
It is the search engines that finally bring
your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to
know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to
the customer initiating a search.
There are basically two types of search
engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.
Search
Engines use
spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search
engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider
will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by
the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the
actual site, the site's Meta tags and also
follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that
information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will
visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some
spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create
a site with 500 pages!
The
spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that
has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the
moderators of the search engine.
A
spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the
actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds
during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.
Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.
When
you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through
the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different
search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses
the same algorithm to search through the indices.
One
of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and
location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword
stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that
pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other,
an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the
linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.
Thursday, 11 December 2014
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the act of altering or optimizing your website and it’s content in order that search engines deem it to be relevant and useful to certain topics. You are able to select the most appropriate topics through the use of certain keywords in your website.
When surfers conduct searches on search engines they are presented with a list of results for that search term. These results are called Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and generally speaking, the websites that appear at the top of the SERPs will receive plenty of traffic to their websites from searchers.
In order to determine your position on the SERPs, search engines use their own algorithms. While nobody knows for absolute certain what these algorithms are it is widely accepted that your website needs to be easy to navigate, popular and relevant.
Easy navigation means that your site should have text links to each of its pages. If you use a flash menu system then you should include a sitemap in order that search engines and visitors can quickly and easily find their way around the whole of your website.
In order to make your website appear popular you need to get links to your site. While search engines would rather these links were generated because visitors to your site genuinely found your content useful, it is commonplace to undertake a reciprocal link campaign or generate inbound links. Reciprocal links mean a website links to you in exchange for a link to their own site.
Relevance is judged by your content. By including the keywords you place in the metatags of your site throughout the body of your content and in certain places within your site you are indicating to the search engines that your website contains relevant information.
By combining these factors you can effectively convince search engines that you deserve to be near the top of their SERPs. However, this can take time and a lot of effort if you don’t fully understand what you are doing.
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