Basically SEO is a process of choosing the most appropriate and targeted keyword phrases related to your website and working to get them to rank your site in the search engines so that when someone searches for the keywords or phrases it returns your site on the top of the search engine results page. Basic SEO involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags. It also involves a good link building process.
The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves.
Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to prevent spam pages from clogging the 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 one search engine could rank #200 in another. New sites don’t necessarily have to 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
visit and index the new site.
Now let’s talk about how the search engines actually work. They use spiders to crawled your website pages and index them. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. The spider visits a web site, reads the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects to. 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.
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 that contains a huge 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.
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 results and rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to get the job done.
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. 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.
I know this may sound a bit confusing if you’re new to SEO but don’t worry once you take the time to learn the basics you find that it’s not as complicated as you may think.
Now, if you don’t want to research and choose keywords and work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to do the work for you.
There are many marketing and promotion companies available that will to all of the work for you or simply look at your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. 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 SEO 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.
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Teresa
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