Search engine optimisation is the art and science of making web pages attractive to the search engines. The more a website appeals to a search engine the higher it will be ranked.
In the middle of the 1990s, webmasters and search engine content providers started optimising websites for the search engines. At the time, all the webmasters had to do was provide a URL to a search engine and a web crawler would be sent from the search engine. The web crawler would extract links from the web page and use the information to index the page by down-loading the page and then storing it on the search engine’s server. Once it was on the search engine’s server a second program, called an indexer, extracted additional information from the web page, and determined the weight of specific words. When this was complete the page was ranked.
It didn’t take very long for people to understand the importance of being highly ranked.
In the beginning, search engines used search algorithms that the webmasters themselves provided about their own web pages! No surprise that it didn’t take webmasters very long to start abusing the system. This led to search engines having to develop their own, more sophisticated, form of algorithms for ranking the popularity of websites.
Google developed a new concept of evaluating internet web pages called PageRank. PageRank weighs a web page’s quality based on the page’s incoming links. This method of evaluating a web page’s popularity was quickly recognised as being vastly superior to anything that had gone before.
To help discourage abuse by webmasters, most search engines will not disclose the precise algorithms they use when ranking web pages. Techniques used today in optimising web pages for search engines, typically involve the use of keywords in the title, link popularity, keywords in links pointing to the page, PageRank (Google), and keywords that appear in the visible text.
One of the first things a crawler-based search engine looks for is keywords. In simple terms, the more frequently a website uses a certain keyword the higher the website will rank. Search engines believe that the more frequently a word appears, the more relevant the website (but see below re keyword “abuse”).
The location of the keywords is as important as the frequency. The first place a search engine looks for keywords is in the title. Web designers should include a keyword in their HTML title tag and also make sure that keywords are included near the top of the page. Search engines operate under the assumption that any information that is important to the website it is on, will be obvious right away.
Spamdexing is a term used to describe a web page that uses a certain word hundreds of times in an attempt to propel that web page to the top of search engine rankings. Most search engines use a variety of methods, including customer complaints, to penalise websites that use spamming methods. Very few internet search engines rely solely on keywords to determine website ranking. Many also use something called “off the page” ranking criteria. Off the page ranking criteria cannot be easily influenced by webmasters. Two such criteria are “link analysis” and “click through measurement”.
For the most part, registering a website on a search engine is a simple task. Forget about formally applying to be included on a search engine. All Google requires is a link from a site already indexed and the web crawlers will visit the site and begin to spider its contents. (This is where your posting a comment on a blog such as this can help you. Always include your website address when leaving a comment). Normally a few days after a new site is identified by a search engine, the main search engine spiders will begin to index the website itself.
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