WHAT IS ADVANCED SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ?

SEO

Search  engine optimization also known as SEO, is the art & since of making web pages attractive to the search Engine.

The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines- Yahoo, MSN, Google & AskJeeves (although AOL gets nearly 10% of searches, their engine is powered by Google results). If your site cannot be found by search engines or your content cannot be put into their databases, you miss out on the incredible opportunities available to websites provided via search – people who want you have visiting your site. Whether your site provides content, services, products or information, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all internet users.

Search queries, the words that users type into the search box which contain terms and phrases best suited to your site carry extraordinary value. Experience has shown that search engine traffic can make (or break) an organization success. Targeted visitors to a website can provide publicity, revenue and exposure like no other. Investing in SEO, whether through time or finances, can have an exceptional rate of return.

How Search Engines Operate:

Search engines have a short list of critical operations that allows them to provide relevant web results when searchers use their system to find information.

1.     Crawling the web:

      Search engines run automated programs called “bots” or “spiders” that use the hyperlink  structure of the web to “crawl” the pages and documents that make up the World Wide Web. Estimates are that of the approximately 20 billion existing pages, search engines have crawled between 8 & 10 billion.

2.     Index Documents:

Once a page has been crawled, its contents can be “indexed” – stored in a giant database of documents that make up a search engine’s “index”.

3.     Process Queries:

When a request for information comes into the search engines (hundred of millions do each day), the engine retrieves from its index all the document that match the query. A match is determined if the terms or phrase is found on the page in the manner specified by the user.

4.     Ranking Results:

Once the search engine has determined which results are a match for the query, the engine’s algorithm (a mathematical equation commonly used for sorting) runs calculations on each of the results to determine which is most relevant to the given query.

How to Conduct Keyword Research:

Keyword research is critical to the process of SEO. Without this component your efforts to rank well in the major search engines may be mis-directed to the wrong terms and phrases, resulting in rankings that no one will ever see. The process of keyword research involved several phases:

1.     Brainstorming:

Thinking of what your customers/potential visitors would be likely to type into search engines in an attempt to find the information/services your site offers (including alternate spellings, wordings, synonyms etc).

2.     Surveying Customers:

Surveying past or potential customers is a great way to expand your keyword list to include as many terms and phrases as possible.

3.     Applying Data from KW Research Tools:

Several tools online (including word tracker & Overture-both described below) offer information about the number of times users perform specific searches. Using these tools can offer concrete data about trends in KW selection.

4.     Performance Testing and Analysis:

After keyword selection and implementation of targeting, analytics programs (like Indextools and ClickTracks) that measures web traffic, activity and conversions can be used to further refine keyword selection.

Accessibility:

An accessible site is one that ensures delivery of its content successfully as often as possible. The functionality of pages, validity of HTML, elements, uptime of the site’s server and working status of site coding and components all figure into site accessibility. If these features are ignored or faulty, both search engines and users will select other sites to visit. The biggest problem in accessibility that most sites encounter fit into the following categories.

Broken Links:

If an HTML link is broken , the contents of the linked to page may never be found. In addition, some surmise that search engines negatively degraded rankings on sites & pages with many broken links.

 Valid  HTML & CSS – Although arguments exists about the necessity for full validation of HTML and CSS in accordance with W3C guidelines.

Functionality of Forms and Applications – If form submissions, select boxes, javascript or other input-required elements block content from being reached via direct hyperlinks, search engines may never find them. Keep data that you want accessible to search engines on pages that can be accessed via link.

File Size – With the exception of a select few documents that search engine consider to be of exceptional importance, web pages greater than 150K in size are typically not fully cached. This is done to reduce index size, bandwidth and load on the servers, and is important to anyone building pages with exceptionally large amounts of content.