Currently, SEO web design is the most promoted product for the online businesses to achieve their sales targets. Yes, fetching a good traffic from Google or other search leading engines is being possible with SEO campaigns. On-page optimization, off-page optimization, and technical factors are the three prime elements of bringing SEO success for a website. So, the need of SEO friendly programming language can be fulfilled with PHP. For a better search engine visibility of the web pages, the web developers should follow the following tips while developing a SE friendly website.
• Clean URL structure:
Dynamic URLs and season IDs in URL are not good so the developer need to use a unique PHPSESSID variable. If the season IDs will be included in URLs so, the search engines will treat a single page with different season IDs as different pages. It leads to duplicate content which is punishable by search engines.
Use keyword rich permalinks with url_rewriter tags, which makes the URLs friendly for both search engines and visitors. Also decrease the use of special characters other than the hyphen (-) symbol.
• Avoid canonical errors:
Search engines treat www and non-www sites differently if also they contain the same content. Duplicate content issue may arise, so use 301 redirection. In this concern the PHP developers need to spend more time on the homepage as the site.com/index.php will be treated as different to site.com.
• Putting right heading and bold tags:
Optimizing the website for search engines in the development period carries a lot of responsibilities and adds more tasks for the web developers. Creating a dynamic header (header.php) and using unique values for Meta of singular web pages is a must do act for designing an SEO website. So, at the time of coding, using of page-specific PHP variables get’s the work done. $pageTitle, $pageDescription, $pageCanonical, $pageKeywords, $pageRobots, etc are the significant SEO stuffs for On-page optimization of a PHP website. Also, using H1, H2, H3 and <strong> attributes in a webpage improves it’s indexing possibility.
• Cross browser issues:
In this mobile web age, we can’t rely upon the desktop users only as the growth rate of internet on mobile browsers created a milestone in the last few years. SEO is now promoting user experience and the cross browser compatibility will surely impress both visitors and the search engines. Coding a responsive or mobile friendly website using PHP language is not a hard task for the experienced web developers.
• Navigation and links:
Both of these are vital in bringing SEO success for a website. It is proved that the Google and others like easy to navigate websites. So, use texts based navigation as well as try to have breadcrumbs which provide more flexibility for a user for browsing the site effortlessly. Links, both inbound and outbound, carry the scores of getting good link juice. Using diverse and relevant anchor texts for hyperlinks and declaring rel=nofollow/dofollow attributes is advised.
Advantages of PHP (compared to ASP):
- The accessories or software required for a functional web server for PHP websites, i.e. Linux OS, Apache server, MySQL server, and PHP can be installed or upgraded at free of cost with no restriction. But the MS Windows Server and MS SQL Server (used for ASP) licenses need to be purchased which proves PHP is cost effective.
- ASP.net holds about double time for coding or deployment than PHP so, choosing PHP is wise for the busy web developers concerning time.
- Talking about support, as an open source platform, PHP (with LAMP - (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) has a lot of resources and support options.
- According to most of the research data sources, the communication between PHP and MySQL is a little bit faster than ASP.net and MSSQL. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc like some high traffic websites are using MySQL so there is no doubt about the performance of PHP’s preferred database management system i.e. MySQL (by Oracle).
- The ext4 file system of Linux OS (supports PHP) has a better performance record than MS Windows OS’s NTFS (used for ASP) during Input/output (IO) process.
- The Linux web servers with LAMP platform use comparatively fewer server resources, i.e. CPU and Memory.
- The PHP developers got the flexibility choose their own editor, but this feature is not associated with ASP. Using VI and VIM editors, the PHP developers get access to use and integrate other important platforms like Ajax, JavaScript, JQuery, etc due to developing on an open source platform.
- PHP is supported on any OS platforms like Linux, Mac (Mac OS X), UNIX and Windows also. But ASP is limited to only with MS Windows OS.
How to survive a Google Algorithm Change or Update
Each time a new Google update is rolled out, the moans and groans from webmasters, bloggers, and internet writers whose traffic seemingly fell off a cliff can be heard across internet forums.
Survivors chime in too, tentatively claiming victory, although accompanied with the uneasy feeling that maybe they only dodged the Google bullet this time.
Yet, these "unlucky" and "lucky" internet content providers often have this in common: they have no understanding of why the most recent Google update caused their site's search engine traffic to either sink or survive.
But ranking well in Google SERPs does not have to be a mystery.
In reality, Google SEO is as simple as black and white.
Google Panda and Penguin
Website owners dependent on traffic via Google understand that a sudden loss in traffic may mean a sudden drop in income. During 2011 and 2012 this was the case as Google changed their search algorithm with the Panda and Penguin updates.
The over-arching goal of Google's search algorithm updates is to return higher quality sites to users. Yet, it seems as though Panda and Penguin have been unfairly blamed for the traffic loss that many websites have experienced.
Remember the old saying about blame: when pointing a finger, three are pointing back. Sure Google is setting its "rules" for who gets to play in its top-search-results playground, but the only thing that website publishers, bloggers, and writers can do is examine and change their own body of internet work.
Black Hat SEO vs. White Hat SEO
Perhaps the names of the most recent Google updates, Panda and Penguin, provide insight into Google's expectations for pages to rank high in its search engine results.
Think about it:
- Question - What do a panda and a penguin have in common?
- Answer - They are both black and white.
To those in-the-know about all things SEO, black and white are very meaningful terms, as in black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Whether or not Google is attempting to humorously pass this subliminal black and white message along through their update names really does not matter. What is important is understanding that each can have a major impact on search engine rank. Simply put, Google penalizes sites employing black hat techniques and rewards those using white hat SEO.
What is black hat SEO?
Black hat SEO involves exploiting a weakness in search engine algorithms in order to gain rank. Keyword-stuffing, web-spamming, link schemes, cloaking and doorway pages are just a few black hat techniques. According to Wendy Brown, web search guide for About.com, in Black Hat Search Engine Optimization, black hat SEO characteristically:
- Breaks search engine rules
- Creates a poor user experience
- Unethically presents information differently to search engine spiders and users
What is white hat SEO?
On the other hand, white hat SEO enhances the user's experience. According to Webopedia, the term white hat SEO refers to...
"...the usage of SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus on a human audience [as] opposed to search engines and completely follows search engine rules and policies."
Google Webmaster Guidelines
The good news is that the key to achieving good Google search engine rank is not a secret. In fact, Google publicizes it for anyone to read. Google Webmaster Guidelines is a must-read, providing a list of, and explanations for:
- Design and content guidelines
- Technical guidelines
- Quality guidelines
Google is very clear about their expectations, strongly stating that,
"Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit."
User is King
The goal of the Google Panda and Penguin algorithm changes is to return higher quality sites to users - sites that provide a great user experience and meet their information needs.
It's often been said that "content is king" but perhaps the new mantra should be "user is king." Certainly creating essential, high-quality, and unique content is almost mandatory to achieve good rank and must not be overlooked; after all the user's information needs must be fulfilled.
But spend time reading Google Webmaster Guidelines and the official Google Webmaster Central Blog, and very quickly it becomes apparent that the user's experience is the heart and soul of Google's focus. Over and over the user's experience and usability of a site are touted.
Journalism students are often taught to know their audience. Likewise, web content providers should consider their audience, and determine what type of experience their audience expects; what would make their page far more compelling than the next one about the same subject?
Google engineer, Matt Cutts explains in his April 2012 post Another Step to Reward High-quality Sites on the Webmaster Central blog that,
"Good search engine optimization ... mean[s] ... thinking about creative ways to make a site more compelling, which can help with search engines as well as social media."
How to create compelling, creative sites with the user in mind
The best writers are the ones that can put themselves in their intended audience's shoes and provide the best web content and experience for that particular audience. But it is important to realize that content goes beyond the written word. Make no mistake about it, words can be compelling, especially when it is clear the author has first-hand knowledge, but the internet is not an old black and white static newspaper.
Be creative! Compelling content has to do with engaging your audience, keeping them on the page longer, maybe even causing them to share.
Example 2: Or suppose you turn to the internet to find a recipe for chocolate cake. Do you find the recipe that has a photo of the ingredients needed to bake the cake or the recipe that showcases the author's photo of a slice of the moist chocolate cake more engaging?
Example 1: Suppose you are a first-time mom who just can't figure out how to get her crying baby to burp. What would be more compelling... an article on how to burp a baby maybe with a stock photo of a baby and mom included, or an article on how to burp a baby with a video showing the technique? Perhaps you might even share the video with your mom's group.
Example 4: You are searching for fun birthday party ideas; you come across a website that is very slow to load and when it finally finishes is full of ads and clutter. You next visit a page with ten fun birthday party ideas, listed 1-10 with a pleasing amount of white space, photos, and a rapid load time. Which are you more likely to read and perhaps share?
Example 3: Perhaps you are trying to find a healthy way to make delicious homemade french fries. Is the recipe you find on the internet that is simply text, ingredients and instructions, more engaging, or the recipe that provides step-by-step photos, perhaps a video, nutrition facts, user ratings and comments?
Google SEO is all about the human audience
When the human audience is the focus of search engine optimization, both the website content provider and the user win. Content providers will be pleased to no longer have to try to stay on top of the latest black hat SEO trends, but rather focus their expertise into great content.
Users will be pleased to find authoritative, unique and compelling content that meets their information needs, highly-ranked and easy to find in Google results. Additionally, users will often find that the content is creative and engaging, and worth sharing. It's as simple as black and white.
Do you want to write about what you know or what interests you?
Join HubPages now. It's free, simple to use & you can publish within minutes.
The use of metadata by search engines, including meta keywords, has changed extensively throughout the years.
While many of the rules regarding metadata remain the same, it is now an area of lesser importance when it comes to SEO. That said, meta tag optimization is still an important aspect of search engine optimization, so it is important to employ many of these so-called "deprecated" techniques to ensure high SERP rankings
Following these rules pertaining to metadata can help ensure a site's high ranking in search results. While Google does not use metadata for site rankings, there still are search engines that do. A variety of websites and syndication services also rely on metadata. Furthermore, Google even pulls your site's description from your metadata for use in the SERPs.
While meta tag optimization is still useful, it's important to note that there is no reason to stress out over metadata. This article is meant to serve as an informational piece on how metadata is used today as well as noting its much greater historical importance. Feel free to comment, however, on your thoughts and feelings (particularly on the modern usage of meta tags and meta data in SEO.)
What is Metadata? What are Meta Tags?
Metadata provides information about a site. This information gives search engines clues regarding what a site is about. Since metadata is hidden away in a site's markup, visitors can't see it, but search engines can. There are several types of metadata, but we're going to talk about the three most important parts that make up meta tag optimization: meta keywords, meta descriptions, and the robot tag.
Meta descriptions are actually one of the few things that visitors will see, but they won't see it on your site. Here is an example:
Bob has a site about sports cars and in his meta description, he has written, "The ultimate guide to European and American sports cars."
When someone searches on Google for the term "sports cars," Bob's site may show up in the results. If it does, the listing will show his meta description. In short, meta descriptions tell people what a site is about before they even visit it.
What Do Meta Keywords Do?
Meta keywords work very similar to meta descriptions, but instead of telling Internet users what a site is about, it tells the search engine. Here is an example:
Lisa's site is about Georgia peaches. In her meta keywords, she has written, "Georgia peaches, peaches from Georgia, peach orchards" By writing these keywords, Lisa is telling search engines that her site is about Georgia peaches, peaches from Georgia, and peach orchards. Annette searches in a search engine for the term "peaches from Georgia." Since Lisa's site has this phrase in its meta keywords, the search engine may show Lisa's website to Annette in the search listings.
Why You Need Meta Data
Meta information is very important to a site's well being when it comes to SEO. The part of SEO that deals with metadata is known as meta tag optimization. Many people say that you don't need meta keywords because "Google doesn't use metadata in their algorithm and since Google is the most popular search engine, there's no need to use them." That is a myth. While there is no argument that Google is the most popular search engine in the world, Google also reportedly does not use metadata as a way to weigh sites. Still, it's a bad idea to ignore meta tag optimization.
Here's why:
- Other search engines use meta keywords in their algorithms and although they won't make up the larger portion of a site's traffic, it is traffic the site may not be getting if it didn't have meta keywords.
- Google doesn't care about meta keywords at all, so no sites will be penalized by Google for having meta keywords.
- Meta tags are easy to add. It's as simple as adding a tiny bit of HTML right after your <head> tag. Many content management systems even do all the work for you. Those using something like Wordpress are blessed with the number of plug-ins available that help out with metadata.
- Google uses meta descriptions to give searchers more information about your site. Without a meta description, Google will hand-pick something from the site it feels is relevant to what the searcher is looking for. While this can be helpful, having a clean and well-written meta description can really entice searchers that YOUR site is the one they are looking for. While it has no impact on a site's ranking, it can help click-through rates.
How to Add Metadata
Each site has a main page or an index page. In the file for this page, a web developer or site admin, should is to look for the open head tag: <head>. Right after this tag, the site admin should enter their metadata. The following example shows what metadata should look like:
Metadata Mistakes
There are a few easily fixable problems that people run into when they are optimizing their metadata. For example, sometimes metadata is set up to disallow search engines from indexing a site. There are a few reasons webmasters set their sites up to block search engine, but those creating websites for SEO purposes should make sure search engines are NOT blocked.
If a website isn't being indexed in the search engines, generally the first thing a webmaster will do is make sure their robots tag is not blocking search engines. By default, if a site does NOT have a robot tag, search engines will index it. Many webmasters write a robot tag that essentially says "allow search engines to index this", but this is unnecessary as search engines will only avoid indexing a site if there is a robot tag that disallows them from doing so. (Or if it's been blacklisted, but that's a whole different issue.)
Another problem that people run into is giving search engines too much information. Sites are allowed a max of 10 keywords in their metadata. Here's an example:
Lisa's site has three meta keywords which are "Georgia peaches, peaches from Georgia, peach orchards." Gina, who is Lisa's competition has 12 keywords which are "peaches from Georgia, Georgia peaches, peach orchards, peach orchard, peaches, Georgia, Georgia peaches, Gina's peach stand, juicy peaches, peaches from the south, ripe peaches, fresh peaches"
Because Gina has more than 10 keywords and Lisa has only 3, Lisa stands a better chance of doing well in the search engine. The same rule applies to meta descriptions, except web developers are allowed a max of 150 characters for meta descriptions. Remember that it's 150 characters and not 150 words. While this isn't one of the biggest SEO mistakes a web developer can make, it still can negatively affect search engine rankings.
There is always a hype surrounding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and websites will do almost anything including selling there mother to have a good SEO Ranking with Google. SEO has become a big business now on the internet has people have actually become experts in the art of good Search Engine Optimization. There are many jobs now available through SEO alone. That's right, people will hire full time SEO experts who dedicate their expertise solely on making sure that a website SEO score is high and remains that way. While some companies may hire a SEO in house expert, others will simply outsource the task whenever they see it fit. This is where the SEO Agencies come in. SEO Agencies are companies with a group of experts who are hired to ensure that a website is ranked well in Google. With that said, lets look at some of the benefits of using SEO Agency.
SEO Agency Website Analysis
Good SEO Agencies will do a complete website analysis and then engage you in their findings and recommendations. The strip down of your website by the agency will include but not limited to:
Website Design or Redesign
Website design has its small share in how well your site is ranked by Google. Google crawlers expect to find a website which is user friendly. This means that the user experience on the website must me of good to excellent quality. How to get a high user experience will be determined by:
How well categorized is your website
Is your web pages headings properly placed and categorized properly? Does a user click on the Home button and it navigates to a sister site instead of actually going back to the sites home page.? Are buttons and links on the site well placed and information easy to find? Is the site color easy on the eyes of the user? Is the website in any type of order? Do clicking on links actually bring up the information under the link title? Is your website mobile ready? Is your website slower than a dial up modem? When designing your site to meet top SEO standards, you will definitely have to look at all these questions to ensure that you cover all the basics. The SEO Agency will have the expertise and manpower to strip down your site design to see what can be improved.
Authoritative Link Building
Relevant and authoritative link building are both essential for your website ranking with Google. A good SEO Agency will ensure that useful and authoritative links are created back to your site.The Agency will normally conduct a link audit on your website and and evaluate your link portfolio. Smart SEO Agencies do not only look at your website link building alone, but will also look at your competitors site and compare your link portfolio with theirs to see the type of link building strategies your website would most benefit from.
The reason why any Good SEO Agency would run a link building analysis on your competitor website is to determine how well your site measures up. It gives you an insight as to where you are on the authoritative table with Google. It gives the agency insight on the kind of links to be built and how much manpower needed to build the authoritative links.
Strong Social Media Presence
SEO Firms can provide you with the right social media marketing strategy. The agency will help your website to establish business objectives and core functions tied into your social media campaign. The agency should be able to:
- Identify Target Audience
This is important because it helps to create relevant and integrated customers and followers of your business. One of the best and most profitable aspect of any business is to have continuous returning customers.
- Share Worthy and Useful Content
Remember the content you present to your clients speaks to what you are about. Your content should be very engaging and worthy for re-shares.
Everyone who has a profitable website knows the power of good social media marketing. It gives you the opportunity share relevant information which will lead to brand awareness. So how do SEO agencies know that they have stunted a good social media campaign? Well the shares and retweets, likes views and comments are good marking tools. Some of the most popular social media platform to focus on campaigning are; Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+.
Keyword Research and Placement Strategies
Keywords are very much relevant to how well you website will rank for a particular term or word. The content on your website should not only be useful and relevant, but should have a focus keyword placed in relevant areas within the article. SEO agencies will research and determine best target keywords to drive website traffic and will advice on the best placement area. Proper keyword placement can increase your search engine ranking and intern give your business a better SEO Score. Some of the best places to place keywords are within the body of your article, The title of your article and within the meta data. If this is done correctly, chances are that your organic traffic will also increase.
Content Creation and Content Marketing
Not all people with a good web site business plan are capable of churning out good content for their clients. This is another area where a Good SEO Agency or Firm can help significantly. You do not want to have a highly developed site with crappy content. This can be a turnoff for clients. The agency can determine the right content to be produced on your website, do the keyword research on that particular content and have their content creating experts develop these content for you. This is good as it give you time to focus and simply advertising and driving business to your website.
Content Marketing builds communities, inspires engagement and increases rankings via creation and sharing of high quality, problem-solving relevant information, aiming to satisfy business objectives. It helps influence consumer behavior, with the end goal of boosting sales and increasing interaction between the brand and customer.
Content Marketing is an effective way to encourage conversions and its main objective is to build a content strategy to meets the needs of your target audience. It helps you stand out from the competition, provides a great resource to your customers and is highly shareable. Content Marketing is meant to improve your brand profile and online reputation.
Effective Mobile Marketing
If your website is not being optimized for the mobile market then you undoubtedly are in trouble as it relates to website ranking and potential sales. This is a heads up, Smartphone users are growing everyday and outnumber PC users. Smartphone users are also always connected to the internet than PC users as mobile data plans are becoming cheaper and cheaper everyday. More marketing apps are available to smartphone users than anything else. The potential to create a strong following and effective branding is endless with mobile marketing. You can reach targeted groups anytime and anywhere.
An effective SEO agency will be able to stare your mobile marketing campaign. They will be able to effectively create a strong online presence, and effective audience profiling. This profiling will allow you to understand the interest of various mobile users by age, gender, location and browsing style.
Conclusion
You website or online business success depends on your online presence and ranking in Search Engine results. It can mean you are either successful on line or you have failed to make your mark. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is quite detrimental in order to have that effective online presence. It is geared towards ranking your site better in search results, thus increase your organic views, increase website traffic and intern boost web sales.
"Currently, SEO web design is the most promoted product for the online businesses to achieve their sales targets. Yes, fetching a good traffic from Google or other search leading engines is being possible with SEO campaigns. On-page optimization, off-page optimization, and technical factors are the three prime elements of bringing SEO success for a website. So, the need of SEO friendly programming language can be fulfilled with PHP. For a better search engine visibility of the web pages, the web developers should follow the following tips while developing a SE friendly website.
• Clean URL structure:
Dynamic URLs and season IDs in URL are not good so the developer need to use a unique PHPSESSID variable. If the season IDs will be included in URLs so, the search engines will treat a single page with different season IDs as different pages. It leads to duplicate content which is punishable by search engines.
Use keyword rich permalinks with url_rewriter tags, which makes the URLs friendly for both search engines and visitors. Also decrease the use of special characters other than the hyphen (-) symbol.
• Avoid canonical errors:
Search engines treat www and non-www sites differently if also they contain the same content. Duplicate content issue may arise, so use 301 redirection. In this concern the PHP developers need to spend more time on the homepage as the site.com/index.php will be treated as different to site.com.
• Putting right heading and bold tags:
Optimizing the website for search engines in the development period carries a lot of responsibilities and adds more tasks for the web developers. Creating a dynamic header (header.php) and using unique values for Meta of singular web pages is a must do act for designing an SEO website. So, at the time of coding, using of page-specific PHP variables get’s the work done. $pageTitle, $pageDescription, $pageCanonical, $pageKeywords, $pageRobots, etc are the significant SEO stuffs for On-page optimization of a PHP website. Also, using H1, H2, H3 and <strong> attributes in a webpage improves it’s indexing possibility.
• Cross browser issues:
In this mobile web age, we can’t rely upon the desktop users only as the growth rate of internet on mobile browsers created a milestone in the last few years. SEO is now promoting user experience and the cross browser compatibility will surely impress both visitors and the search engines. Coding a responsive or mobile friendly website using PHP language is not a hard task for the experienced web developers.
• Navigation and links:
Both of these are vital in bringing SEO success for a website. It is proved that the Google and others like easy to navigate websites. So, use texts based navigation as well as try to have breadcrumbs which provide more flexibility for a user for browsing the site effortlessly. Links, both inbound and outbound, carry the scores of getting good link juice. Using diverse and relevant anchor texts for hyperlinks and declaring rel=nofollow/dofollow attributes is advised.
Advantages of PHP (compared to ASP):
- The accessories or software required for a functional web server for PHP websites, i.e. Linux OS, Apache server, MySQL server, and PHP can be installed or upgraded at free of cost with no restriction. But the MS Windows Server and MS SQL Server (used for ASP) licenses need to be purchased which proves PHP is cost effective.
- ASP.net holds about double time for coding or deployment than PHP so, choosing PHP is wise for the busy web developers concerning time.
- Talking about support, as an open source platform, PHP (with LAMP - (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) has a lot of resources and support options.
- According to most of the research data sources, the communication between PHP and MySQL is a little bit faster than ASP.net and MSSQL. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc like some high traffic websites are using MySQL so there is no doubt about the performance of PHP’s preferred database management system i.e. MySQL (by Oracle).
- The ext4 file system of Linux OS (supports PHP) has a better performance record than MS Windows OS’s NTFS (used for ASP) during Input/output (IO) process.
- The Linux web servers with LAMP platform use comparatively fewer server resources, i.e. CPU and Memory.
- The PHP developers got the flexibility choose their own editor, but this feature is not associated with ASP. Using VI and VIM editors, the PHP developers get access to use and integrate other important platforms like Ajax, JavaScript, JQuery, etc due to developing on an open source platform.
- PHP is supported on any OS platforms like Linux, Mac (Mac OS X), UNIX and Windows also. But ASP is limited to only with MS Windows OS.
Search Engine Optimization is Also Known As SEO
This is the first part of a three part series on search engine optimization or SEO.
In this section, we'll discuss how search engines work and why search engine optimization is important.
In the second section, we'll discuss basic techniques and important factors in SEO and search rankings.
And, in the final section of this guide we'll discuss how to maintain and continually improve SEO long term.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is optimizing your content to drive search engine traffic to your work.
It involves gaining a thorough understanding of how search engines work and then reflecting that knowledge in your writing and webpage design to maximize traffic to and user experience on your page.
SEO is important because search engines like Google, YAHOO!, and Bing drive the majority of web traffic. Shares on social media can cause short term spikes in stats, but real, long term success comes from maximizing search engines ability to drive traffic to your page.
Not only will good SEO improve search rankings and increase traffic for the author, but it helps people interested in your topic find your page and improves the viewer's experience as well.
SEO involves strategically using appropriate keywords, building links to your work and making your pages search engine friendly. Although it is important to understand what SEO is, it is also important to understand what SEO isn't. While SEO can make a big difference in stats, it cannot fix bad writing or poor content. SEO can make good writing into a great, high performing webpage, but it cannot turn poor content into good writing.
How Search Engines Work
Search Engines use "spiders" or "crawlers" to build an index of the webpages available, the words on each page, and where on the page those words were located.These program robots begin on popular webpages and add important words found on the page to the search engine's index. From there, they follow every link on the page and index the corresponding pages before using the links on those pages to go to the next set of pages, and so on and so forth. This process is known as crawling.
Once this information is gathered by the spiders, it is encoded and stored for indexing. In order to even out the difference between the time needed to search a term beginning with a popular letter like 't' and a search term beginning with a less popular letter like 'q,' a numerical value is applied to each word. This process is known as hashing. Not only does hashing even out problems related to letter frequency, but it condenses the index. Only the numerical value and a link to the actual information is stored in the index. This increases index and search speed, especially with more complicated searches that involve multiple words.
When a user performs a search, he or she types a query into the search box. Boolean operators can be used to define specific relationships between the terms in a query. Some of the most common operators are:
- AND-requires that both terms are on the page
- OR-requires that one term or the other is on the page
- NOT-excludes pages that include the following term
- NEAR-requires that two terms be near each other on the page
- "quotation marks"-requires the query be treated as a phrase, instead of each significant word in the query being considered an individual keyword
- FOLLOWED BY-requires that one term be followed by another
These searches are defined as literal searches. Research is currently underway on concept based searching which uses statistics statistical analysis of webpages containing your query to recommend pages you might be interested in, as well as natural language searching which allows users to type a question into the search box using the simple language they would use to ask a friend their question instead of using Boolean operators.
There's More than One Search Engine
Each search engine uses different rules for determining which words are indexed and which words aren't. Some search engines index every word on the page. Others focus on the most common words, the words in titles and subtitles, meta tags and the first few lines of text.
If you've ever tried searching the same phrase on different search engines, you probably noticed that you got different results. This is because each engine uses different algorithms to weight and index keywords and determine search result rankings. Search engine ranking algorithms use website popularity, meta tags, number of back links (links to the page), keyword frequency and location and a wide variety of other factors to rank webpages and how well they correlate to viewer searches.
In addition to relevance, website popularity is taken into account in determining search rankings. As more interested users are directed to your page by your SEO techniques, not only will the techniques increase your relevancy scores, but the popularity component of the ranking algorithms will increase as well.
(For more concrete information on specific ranking factors and their relative weight please see this website.)
Your Audience is Important in SEO
Now that you know how search engines function, we need to consider how users interact with search engines. To conduct a search, the user types a few keywords into the search box and clicks enter, browses the results and selects a page to visit. If the user is unsatisfied, he or she will return to the search and select another result or modify their query for a new result list.
People perform searches because they a) want to go somewhere specific on the web b) want to do something specific or c) learn a piece of information. In order to create a high performing webpage, you need to think like your user.
Ask yourself how many of your audience's needs can be met on your page. Add additional, relevant content that meets these needs to attract more viewers and happier views. Then ask yourself if your audience can find your page. What queries might your target audience put into the search engine? Are those keywords found in your titles, subtitles, alt text, summary and first few sentences?
Remember, building content for your users will lead to better results than trying to build pages for search engines.
More on SEO
For more on specific SEO techniques see Part 2 of this guide.
For more on maintaining SEO rankings long term see Part 3 of this guide.
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