SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization
. SEO is all about optimizing a website for
search engines. SEO is a technique for: designing and developing a website to rank well in search engine results.
improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines.
marketing by understanding how search algorithms work, and what human visitors
might search.
SEO is a subset of search engine marketing. SEO is also referred as SEO copyrighting,
because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines, deal
with text.
If you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines
work.
How does a Search Engine Work?
Search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results. Crawling - Process of fetching all the web pages linked to a website. This task is
performed by a software called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, in case of
Google).
Indexing - Process of creating index for all the fetched web pages and keeping
them into a giant database from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the
process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the
page and assigning the page to particular keywords.
Processing - When a search request comes, the search engine processes it, i.e.,
it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the
database.
Calculating Relevancy - It is likely that more than one page contains the search
string, so the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages
in its index to the search string.
Retrieving Results - The last step in search engine activities is retrieving the best
matched results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the
browser.
Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! often update their relevancy algorithm dozens
of times per month. When you see changes in your rankings, it is due to an algorithmic
shift or something else beyond your control.
Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor
differences between their relevancy algorithms lead to major changes in the relevancy of
What is On-Page and Off-Page SEO?
Conceptually, there are two ways of optimization:
On-Page SEO
– It includes providing good content, good keywords selection,putting keywords on correct places, giving appropriate title to every page, etc.
Off-Page SEO
- It includes link building, increasing link popularity by submittingopen directories, search engines, link exchange, etc.
SEO techniques are classified into two broad categories:
White Hat SEO
– Techniques that search engines recommend as part of a gooddesign.
Black Hat SEO
– Techniques that search engines do not approve and attempt tominimize the effect of. These techniques are also known as spamdexing.
