What Is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
is
often considered the more technical part of web marketing. This is
true because SEO does help
in the promotion of sites
and at the same time it
requires some technical
knowledge.
SEO is
sometimes also called “SEO
Copyrighting” because most
of the techniques that are
used to promote sites in
search engines deal with
text. Generally,
SEO can be defined as the
activity of
optimizing Web pages
or whole sites in order to
make them more search
engine-friendly, thus
getting higher positions in
search results.
One of the basic truths in
SEO is that even if you do
all the things that are
necessary to do, this does
not automatically guarantee
you top ratings but if you
neglect basic rules, this
certainly will not go
unnoticed.
Also, if you
set realistic goals -
i.e to get into the top 30
results in Google for a
particular keyword, rather
than be the number one for
10 keywords in 5 search
engines, you will feel
happier and more satisfied
with your results.
Although SEO helps to
increase the traffic to
one's site, SEO is not
advertising. Of course, you
can be included in paid
search results for given
keywords, but basically the
idea behind the SEO
techniques is to
get top placement because your site is relevant to a particular search
term, not because you pay.
SEO can be a 30-minute job
or a permanent activity.
Sometimes it is enough to do
some generic SEO in order to
get high in search engines -
for instance, if you are a
leader for rare keywords,
then you do not have a lot
to do in order to get decent
placement. But in most
cases,
if you really want to be at
the top, you need to pay
special attention to SEO and
devote significant amounts
of time and effort to it.
Even if you plan to do some
basic SEO, it is essential
that you understand how
search engines work and
which items are most
important in SEO.
Search Engines: How do They
Work?
The first basic truth to
discover about SEO is that
search engines are not
people. While this might be
obvious for everybody, the
differences between how
people and how search
engines view web pages is
vastly unique.
Unlike people, search
engines are text-driven.
Although technology advances
rapidly,
search engines are far from
intelligent creatures that
can feel the beauty of a
cool design or enjoy the
sounds and movement in
movies. Instead, search
engines crawl the Web,
looking at particular site
items (mainly text) to get
an idea what a site is
about. This brief
explanation is not the most
precise because as we will
see next, search engines
perform several activities
in order to deliver search
results - crawling,
indexing, processing,
calculating relevancy, and
retrieving.
First, search engines crawl
the Web to see what is
there. This task is
performed by a piece of
software, called a crawler
or a spider
(or
“Googlebot”, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from
one page to another and
index everything they find
on their way.
With the number of pages on
the internet being somewhere
over 20 billion,
it is impossible for a
spider to visit a site daily
just to see if a new page
has appeared or if an
existing page has been
modified. Sometimes
crawlers will not visit your
site for a month or two, so
during this time your SEO
efforts will not be
rewarded. And, there is
nothing you can do about it…
After a page is crawled, the
next step is to index its
content.
The indexed page is stored
in a giant database, where
it will be retrieved later.
Essentially, the process of
indexing is identifying the
words and expressions that
best describe the page and
assigning the page to
particular keywords.
It would be impossible for
any person to process such
huge amounts of information,
but generally search engines
deal just fine with this
task. Sometimes they might
not get the correct meaning
of a page, but if you help
them by optimizing it, it
will be easier for them to
classify your pages
correctly and for you - to
get higher rankings.
