What Is Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is a process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that this ranks your site highly in search engines so that when someone searches for specific phrases it returns your site on tops.
It basically involves fine tuning the content of your site
along with the HTML and
Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually.
Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine. New sites need not be "submitted" to search engines to be listed.
A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.
If you are unable to research and choose keywords and work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to work with you on these issues.
Search engine marketing and promotion companies, will look at the plan for your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic.
If you wish, they will also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make recommendations for editing and improvements to keep your site traffic flow and your search engine ranking high. Normally your search engine optimization experts work with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are considered at the same time.
Submitting Your Website to Search Engines
If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine.
No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.
Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are but only false promises. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.
Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right key words, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content.
Don’t submit websites that are incomplete. While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.
Mere submission to search engine companies does not guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite sometime before they take up your site for review by human editors.
One important factor to remember while submitting site is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines like ‘http://www.google.com’ hardly considers submissions without sitemaps.
There are many online companies that accept search engine submission services. You can choose to do it yourself with a software package and service like this one:
Or if you want professional help try the following sites:
http://www.addpro.com/professional_submission
http://www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.html
Don’t use the automatic submission services.
Here is a list of the most popular Search Engines and directory companies:
Search
Engines
Go.com/InfoSeek
AltaVista
Google,
HotBot
Excite/Webcrawler
Directories
AOL
Search Inktomi
Lycos
Open Directory
MSN,
Yahoo!
LookSmart Snap
Apart from the above there are thousands of search engines and directory companies, where you can submit your website to as many companies as possible. The following links gives info on other search engines and directories:
http://websearch.about.com/library/searchengine/blsearchenginesatoz.htm
http://websearch.about.com/library/tableofcontents/blsearchenginetableofcontents.htm
How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers
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
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.
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