SEO | Search Engine Positioning

Posts Tagged ‘publicity’

Search engine optimization has evolved over years. In good old days, tweaking on-page parameters like meta tags, headlines, alt tags, keyword shoving and anchor texts used to fetch good results. This is less likely these days since the techniques are simple to implement. As a result there is no dearth of optimized websites.

Be that as it may, for new websites it is always a good idea to start doing all that before exploring other avenues. In this article I will look at why search engine optimization is necessary, proceeding to unravel basic issues in this game before touching on aging factor which I believe is the cornerstone of success on the web.

Why search engine optimization?

When you are looking for information on a topic on the web, you usually query your favorite search engine for search terms relevant to your topic. The search engine on its part displays a list of web-pages which it thinks are closely related to your search term. The web-pages that appear at top are considered more important than the ones that appear successively below. Question arises as to how search engines must know which pages are more important for the search query.

This is where you step into the realm of search engine optimization. For all your painstaking effort, if your webpage is not considered important by search engines, you will remain undiscovered forever. Remember, search engines are not humans. They are machines. Which is why you need to let your webpage talk to them to achieve top ranking.

The mental block – do I need it?

If search engine optimization is important, why is it that many website owners still do not feel any need for it? One may say they are naïve, so they are. I have come across many of them who strongly feel that after a website is launched, nothing more needs to be done. There is a perception that once a website is there in world-wide-web, it is bound to be ‘known’ soon. Known to whom? ‘Why, Google will know me’ is a common refrain. It is only much later that one discovers that nobody, not even Google knows his site.

To be true, Google’s knowing your website is not a big deal. Just have an already-indexed website point a link to your main page. Google will shortly find out your main page and from there your other pages as well. This is exactly the way Google is indexing billions of new webpages everyday.

On the flip side, suppose your webpage has nice description of trekking in Himalayas. You have provided good information and pictures on the subject in the page. Yet if I am to search for the term ‘trekking in Himalayas’ in Google, will I get to see your webpage in the first 20 or 30 results? Perhaps not. Because, even though your website is indexed by Google, it still does not know that your webpage on ‘trekking in Himalayas’ is important enough to be listed high for the term.

On to optimizing web content

If indeed optimizing your web content is necessary, how do you proceed? As mentioned in the beginning, search engine optimization is an exercise of dressing up your webpage based on a chosen set of keyword phrases. This is to be done in such a way that the content appeals to human visitors as much as it does to search engine robots.

In a previous article [http://www.prioriti.in/blogs/?p=48], I have dealt on how to include keyword phrases to write an optimized content. To be sure, other than optimization you will need quality incoming links as well. But that is a different story.

The basic issues

If we have understood the inevitability of search engine optimization, let us briefly touch upon some basic issues.

1 Search engines list a webpage, not a website. This means one has to optimize individual web-pages (except those that are public disclosures) while maintaining overall aim and balance of the website.

2 Optimization of a webpage, in its primitive, centers around strategically locating one or more keyword phrases in that webpage. Number of keyword phrases to be used and frequency of each will depend on total number of content-words in that page.

3 Optimization for search engines is not an one-off exercise. Rather it has to be an ongoing effort to create web-pages. Websites that are veterans of many years have thousands of web-pages in their database.

4 Search engine optimization usually does not fetch immediate result. For new websites, specially in case of Google, it can be a long wait, sometimes several months.

5 If your website generates lot of traffic by itself, it has a fair chance to rank high in SERPs’ (search engine result pages), even if you have not done much of an optimization (for example, xe.com’s real-time currency conversion service). This means that your product or service is so unique that simple word-of-mouth publicity is enough to bring in torrents of visitors, while also ensuring prominent rank in search results.

6 Search engine optimization is not merely an exercise of shuffling keyword phrases. The content has to make sense to readers. In other words, ensure that your content passes usability test.

7 Apart from keyword-enriched content, there are more factors responsible for achieving top rank, specially building quality links that point to your website. To search engines, incoming links are like ‘votes’ in favor of your website. A good quality link carries considerable weight in the eyes of search engines.

8 Finally, lest one forgets, optimizing for search engines is only one part of the game. The other equally important necessity is to retain and satisfy your visitors.

Summing up – the aging factor

In Bengali, my mother tongue, there is a saying, which when roughly translated, means ‘seasoned paddy-grains make more rice’. In SEO parlance, nothing beats if you are at it for years. Search engines love the aging factor. Create good content. Allow it to settle. Revisit it to update occasionally. Repeat the cycle.

In other words, search engine optimization is all about letting it known that your website is a treasure-hub of great relevant content that only gets better as time passes.

Well, this is not enough to have an attractive website to show company products/services on internet to get business nationally or internationally. If company products or services are not advertised then definitely there will be no awareness of its existence in the market. Same is the case with online websites. There are many ways to advertise a website for its awareness in the market. One of the most common ways, which is increasing rapidly, is the Search Engine Optimization as a part of Search Engine Marketing. When we need to get information of foreign universities, national or international job opportunities, worldwide news, latest technology products, customers from all over the world and many more; we turn towards Search Engines like Google.com or Yahoo.com etc. Search Engine is a tool for searching information on the internet by giving topic as keyword(s) which returns the relevant websites.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the amount and quality of traffic to a website by making its contents Search Engine friendly. In Search Engine Optimization a website is prepared and altered to make it as compatible as possible with Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN and it also focuses the contents to the keywords and key phrases desired by the customers. It is preferred to get optimization of a website during its construction because structure of the website is to be designed according to the rules and regulations of search engines but it can also be optimized after publishing a website on internet. Many website designing and development companies in Pakistan are offering Search Engine Optimization service during construction of website and even after designing and publishing of a website. These companies can be easily found through Search Engines by putting any keyword like “Search Engine Optimization in Pakistan” or “SEO experts in Pakistan”.

Many small and large entrepreneurs are focusing on online services like online shopping, fashion boutiques, hotels & accommodation, event management, real estate, travel agencies, outsourcing and different unique services. Entrepreneurs get developed their company website but forget to invest on its Search Engine Optimization. They either don’t know about it or they are unaware of its importance. From now on, job of SEO experts starts to follow rules and regulations of famous Search Engines to make available optimized website against keywords by the visitors in a search engine. Although there may be thousands of competitors of a particular website with its products or services but only those websites will be seen in Search Engines’ top results which will be properly optimized. Many Search Engines maintain database of new & old websites automatically and many store information manually but it depends on the algorithm of the Search Engine that how do they operate.

Search Engines work by following this specific order i.e. Web crawling, Indexing and Searching. Web crawling is the process in which a crawler (also known as Spider- a program that browses websites automatically) visits all available links of a website to store information of its webpages. Search Engines’ crawlers continuously crawl websites after specific time to get its up-to-date information to make it available on the keywords by the search engine users. Normally Google takes 20 days and Yahoo takes 30 days to revisit a website for its latest information. Indexing collects and stores data of websites for its fast and accurate information retrieval. Search Engines usually extract information of the website from its title, description, heading, special fields (meta-data) and file names. When a keyword or keyphrase is entered in a search engine to search information then the keyword is checked against the search engine’s index of all the web pages it has analyzed. The best URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) are then returned as hits and ranked in order with the best results at the top as process of Searching.

While optimizing a website, two important aspects of Search Engines should never be forgotten: Robots.txt and Sitemap. Robot.txt is being used to prevent access of web spiders to different parts of the website for its publicity. So spiders will leave those webpages which will be mentioned in the Robots.txt at the root directory of uploaded website on the internet. Sitemap is used to inform Search Engines about available webpages on a website for its crawling. Sitemap also facilitates to mention webpage’s importance and date of last modification so that Search Engines can crawl it easily to get latest information available on the website.

Many of SEO Experts play tricks with Search Engine to come into top ranking which is known as Black-hat or Spamdexing but famous Search Engines do not follow one algorithm to rank websites. People should avoid such tricks because if a website is found doing such activities then it is very difficult to get good ranking in famous Search Engines and more importantly a website can loose the trust of visitors if they are not able to find their required information on the website.

Search Engine Optimization plays a vital role to increase traffic of relevant visits to the company website that in turn, increases the visits of potential customers as well. This helps to attain major objective of the website i.e., online business. If you are planning to build a new website, you must optimize your website according to SEO rules and regulations during its construction. If your company already has a website then it must be optimized to get good ranking in Search Engines and more customers from all over the world.

[Article by M. Munir Bhatti]