Friday, December 11, 2009

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization

By Steven Smith

SEO, (Search Engine Optimization) is used to improve the position of a given website in the organic or natural results on a search engine. People use search engines to find a certain item. Listings then show up as a result of the terms they type in are how websites are discovered. The search results are determined by the search engine and are in order of the most relevant listings to the least relevant listings, with only a limited relation to the query, last. The biggest reason to improve organic search results would be to increase relevant traffic volume and quality to the website of future customers.

Search engines find these results based on their algorithms. The algorithms are designed to produce the most relevant websites for which targeted words being searched. These words, are used by actual people looking for a specific item or service, these are referred to as Key Words. Search engines use the algorithm mathematical formula to determine which websites are most relevant to the terms in the target search. The sooner a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it ranks, the more searchers will visit that site. That means that if a certain business or topic website is not found in the first or second page, that website is not going to get much traffic or business.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a website ranking or relevance, or Search Engine Optimizers consider how search engine algorithms work and how the target audience will search for a particular good or service. , (Search Engine Optimizing) efforts will involve a websites coding, presentation, content and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully indexing the site. An SEO will often include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more user friendly.

SEO has to be able to determine which keywords are best and going to be used by potential customers when they are searching for what the site has to offer. It is of little value to target a key word or phrase that has little to no relation to what the site has to offer since it will just frustrate the people searching and will not result in quality traffic to the site.

SEO became necessary because of the History of Search on the internet. When the World Wide Web first went public, search technology was very basic. Similar to a self governed library where the search directories relied heavily on the input of individual webmasters to accurately enter information regarding their websites. As business became aware of the power of internet marketing, competition for high ranking on search results led to attempting to falsely manipulate search results. This manipulation of Search Results was actually the beginning of SEO. Not very glorious, but as search ranking became so competitive, even a legitimate business website had to struggle to be found in the relevant results.

Search Engines had to become better at seeing the false manipulations to regain control and insure that every person doing a search got only the most relevant results. At one time, Yahoo was the most used Search Engine on the planet. But as the information Yahoo presented became more polluted with garbage (websites that truly were not relevant to the search) people began going elsewhere for more relevant results. Because of that, we now have Google as the dominate Search Engine giant.

Although Google is king, it knows that it can only be king as long as it presents good results. Billions of dollars are spent by search engines every year to continue to fine tune and adjust the algorithm to take out the unwanted information. SEO works to make the client website rank high enough within those search results to promote the needed traffic.

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