Tuesday, April 20, 2010
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a technique used by webmasters to boost their search engine rankings. By just creating a website doesn't mean it will appear in the search engine result page (SERP) straight away. You need to do a little SEO for this to happen.
Of course, why stop at that? You will want to improve your ranking to increase your organic traffic (traffic from search engines). This topic is rather large and changes will always be made to the search engines ranking algorithms (formulas to calculate your ranking).
The 3 major search engines are Google (approx. 49%), Yahoo and MSN (both for approx. 47%). The rest are smaller search engines. Generally, if you can do well for these three and you will do well for the rest of the smaller search engines.
There are 2 ways of optimizing your website, onpage and offpage, both of which should be practised for maximum effect. When doing SEO, make sure that your website is not one of the following type, or else work will be extremely hard or near impossible.
- Full Flash or Flash Navigation
- JavaScript generated content
- Graphical, with little or no text
- Frames or iFrames
- Dynamic URL (database driven with ?example=123)
- Password protected
If you have read the Top 10 Mistakes in Building Websites, you should have avoided most of these. If your website is password protected, decide if you want access for everyone or only for members. If it is to be restricted to members, use robots.txt to prevent search engines to cache your restricted webpages.
For the other types of websites, you will have to use cloaking to change your dynamic URLs to static URLs. Read .htaccess for more information.
SEO only deals with such websites as that is what search engines are looking for. The crawlers simply can't read graphical text, JavaScript or Flash. They cannot cache dynamic URL webpages too as these are temporary ones generated by the database.
Once you make sure your website is search engine friendly (conforms to what search engines want as said above), you are ready to start SEO.
In the Internet, abbreviations and lingos are bound to be everywhere. SEO is no different. Before you start on this topic, I will now brief you on all the SEO terms so that you will not irritate others on webmaster forums by asking silly questions.
- SEO - Search Engine Optimization
Techniques used to increase organic traffic by optimizating webpages to give search engines the impression that the webpages are highly relevant and important.
- Organic Traffic
Website traffic that comes from search engines.
- SERP - Search Engine Results Page
The results page of a search engine for a search term.
- SEF - Search Engine Friendly
A website that is properly designed for Search Engines to read, cache, crawl and index.
- Crawlers/Spiders
Web bots of search engines that 'crawls' your webpage, creating a cache of it for their database. It will also index it (include your website in their database) if it haven't done so.
Optimizing by controlling ranking factors on your webpages.
Optimizing by improving ranking factors outside of your website.
This is a link on another webpage that links to yours. There are 2 types: one way backlink and reciprocal backlink. One way means they link to you, but you did not link to them. Reciprocal means both parties link to each other.
- Internal Links
Links that point to another webpage of the same website.
- Keywords
The word or phrase that your webpage is about. You optimize your webpage for these keywords so that when users search for them, they can find your website from search engines.
This is an indicator of how 'important' your webpage is through the number and quality of backlinks. 0 is lowest, 10 is highest.
- Alexa Rank
Shows the traffic of a website compared to others. Highest rank is 1 and means that your site has the highest traffic among all the websites! 1,000,000 means the 1 millionth highest traffic website.
- Compete Rank
Ranks a website based on the number of visitors per month. Not so important right now, currently a new ranking system of not much attention to it.
There are of course more terms to go, but these are the more general ones. As you read on, I will introduce more in-depth terms and explanations.
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