Achieving strong search engine rank takes effort, time and
patience. Search Engine Optimization, or
“SEO,” of a website is what helps search engines correctly interpret and index
the pages. SEO consists primarily
improving each page of the website to help achieve a higher score by the search
engines, as well as creating links TO your site from other sources.
Search engines need to determine which of billions of pages
is relevant to a small number of specific words. In order to do this, the
search engine needs to know your site relates to those words. That’s where SEO comes in. Here are some important points:
- Websites
should be designed with both humans and spiders in mind. Spiders read text from left to right,
line-by-line starting from the top left corner of your page. Search
engines look at the URL, the page title, description meta tag, headings,
and whether you have key words in your text that are relevant to your
business or topic.
- It’s
important to have good content and to keep it fresh. Search engines give higher scores to
websites that are updated regularly.
- The
more outside sites that link to your site, the more the search engines
will like you (especially if those outside links are relevant to your
industry)
- Search
engines can only read text. They
cannot read graphic representation of text. So, it’s important to add text to
graphics and photos via the ALT tags.
- Use relevant
keyword phrases in anchor text. It
helps solidify the search engine's perception of the relationship between
pages and the words used in the link.
- Spiders
appreciate a text-based site map and an easy-to-follow navigation menu
they can follow throughout your site.
- Keep content
simple and thematically focused.
And, use the strongest key words early in the copy.
- However
… do not overuse key words. Search
engines may interpret it as spamming and penalize your ranking.
Important Note: Be wary of companies who advertise they'll submit your URL to hundreds of search engines and promise to get you ranked quickly in a top 10 spot. It is most likely a scam.
SEO
is a constantly evolving field. Because
of competition and the potential for spamming by disreputable designers, search engine companies adhere
to strict secrecy and regularly change their algorithms and criteria by which they
judge web pages. A professional SEO
company cannot guarantee a high ranking right after a website has been
optimized, nor can they be held accountable if your website rank changes, while
or after optimizing your site to your specifications. To be effective, SEO should be an ongoing strategic
effort.
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HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK
Simply put, search engines collect data
from the Web and organize it into very large databases.
Electronic spiders (or “bots”) crawl
the web in search of data, which is then copied and stored by the search engine
to later be used in response to a user’s search request. When a bot finds a link from one page to
another, it sends out another bot to record the content on the linked pages,
thus eventually cataloging your entire website. If a link to a site exists, a spider will eventually
find that site.
There are many components that go into getting a particular web page ranked more highly than others. Search engines use complex algorithms and criteria by which they judge each page. That's why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important.component of effective website design.
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