SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine
How Web Search Engines Work???
Search engines are the key to finding specific information on the vast expanse of the World Wide Web. Without sophisticated search engines, it would be virtually impossible to locate anything on the Web without knowing a specific URL. But do we know how search engines work? And do we know what makes some search engines more effective than others?
When we use the term search engine in relation to the Web, we are usually referring to the actual search forms that searches through databases of HTML documents, initially gathered by a robot.
There are basically three types of search engines: Those that are powered by robots (called crawlers; ants or spiders) and those that are powered by human submissions; and those that are a hybrid of the two.
Crawler-based search engines are those that use automated software agents (called crawlers) that visit a Web site, read the information on the actual site, read the site's meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects to performing indexing on all linked Web sites as well. The crawler returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. The crawler will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the administrators of the search engine.
Human-powered search engines rely on humans to submit information that is subsequently indexed and catalogued. Only information that is submitted is put into the index
In both cases, when we query a search engine to locate information, we're actually searching through the index that the search engine has created — we are not actually searching the Web. These indices are huge databases of information that is collected and stored and subsequently searched. This explains why sometimes a search on a commercial search engine, such as Yahoo! or Google, will return results that are, in fact, dead links. Since the search results are based on the index, if the index hasn't been updated since a Web page became invalid the search engine treats the page as still an active link even though it no longer is. It will remain that way until the index is updated.
Now question is that then why will the same keywords search on different search engines produce different results? Part of the answer to that question is because not all indices are going to be exactly the same. It depends on what the spiders find or what the humans submitted. But more important, not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices. The algorithm is what the search engines use to determine the relevance of the information in the index to what the user is searching for.
One of the elements that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a Web page. Those with higher frequency are typically considered more relevant. But search engine technology is becoming sophisticated in its attempt to discourage what is known as keyword stuffing.
Another common element that algorithms analyze is the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By analyzing how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about (if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page) and whether that page is considered "important" and deserving of a boost in ranking. Just as the technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated to ignore keyword stuffing, it is also becoming more sense to Web masters who build artificial links into their sites in order to build an artificial ranking.
My Review of Google’s Search Engine
We will start working with Google, now question arise Why Google? Why not other….
Answer is simple….
The Google search engine (www.google.com) launched in September 1999 is now the largest and most popular search engine by far on the internet. This is largely due to the top quality of Google's Page Rank Technology which is based on link analysis (link popularity and link quality) and content analysis. Google crawls the web and maintains a huge index of cached pages (the largest among the search engines), that is updated often (approximately every 2 days) to show the freshness of its results.
Google was founded with a clear vision in mind : To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. And so the world’s leading search engine was born. It did not take long to realize that to fulfill our mission we must help organize not only publicly available information, but also the valuable information residing behind corporate firewalls.
At Google, we think that all our business information should be searchable from one interface –just like on the web, while maintaining the security of the enterprise.
The Google Search Appliance indexes over 220 different document formats –HTML, PDF, Microsoft Office suite and hundreds of others that most of us have never used!
The Google Search Appliance can directly access content in IBM DB2, Microsoft SQLServer, MySQL, Oracle and Sybase relational database systems.
Google consistently returns search results across many billions of web pages and documents in fractions of a second.
Google is our top search engine but we also use other key players like Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista, khoj etc, as each search engine adds its own spice. We can rely on Google to give us the best resultant links with the content that we are looking for. This is due to Googlers who aggressively stick to their Quality value - There is no paid inclusion into the main results which is absolutely free and depends on the quality of our site - and to the Freshness of their main results.
Submit our Site to Google for Free
Submitting our site to Google is very easy and absolutely free. All we need to do is submit our home page URL to Google and our whole site will be indexed. Click to Submit our site to Google (Please note that for a new site Google can take upto 3-6 months to improve our ranking after it initially indexes it, so instead of worrying about why our ranking is low, we can use this time to optimize and promote our website).
"The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want"
Larry Page
Google co-founder
Guideline for Webmasters based on Google’s Search Pattern
Webmaster Guidelines
Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank our site. Even if we choose not to implement any of these suggestions, I strongly encourage all of you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.
So, pls. take more attention on point given to all you by me here …
Design and Content Guidelines :
Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Offer a site map to our end users with links that point to the important parts of our site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, we may want to break the site map into separate pages.
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe our content.
Think about the words users would type to find our pages, and make sure that our site actually includes those words within it.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
Make sure that our TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
Check for broken links and correct HTML.
If we decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Technical Guidelines :
Before upload site to web server, Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine our site, because most search engine spiders see our site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep us from seeing our entire site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling our site.
Allow search bots to crawl our sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of our site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
Make sure our web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows our web server to tell Google whether our content has changed since we last crawled our site. Supporting this feature saves our bandwidth and overhead.
Make use of the robots.txt file on our web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for our site so that we don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site.
If our company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export our content so that search engine spiders can crawl our site.
Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in our URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.
When our site is ready :
Have other relevant sites link to ours.
Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
Submit a sitemap as part of our Google Sitemaps (Beta https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login?source=gsm&subID=us-et-gdlnsbeta ) project. Google Sitemaps uses our sitemap to learn about the structure of our site and to increase our coverage of the WebPages.
Make sure all the sites that should know about our pages are aware our site is online.
Submit our site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.
Adding our URL to Google Optimisation and submission tips and advice.
Optimization techniques to add our website to the Google Search Engine.
Getting Google to index our website.
Method 1. Add our URL to Google. This is a free and easy method, but if we don't have other sites linking to ours then we still may not be indexed immediately.
Method 2. The second method of getting our site in Google is to let it find us on its own. This works by getting other sites that are already listed in Google to link to us. When Google revisits these sites, it will find our link and go to our site and index it. We will want to "announce" our site to others, and try to get other relevant web sites to link to us. Google "works" by following links, and finding who is linked to who.
If our site gets other "Good Sites" (websites that have a reasonable Google page rank) to link to ours then we will never have to worry about having to submit, or ever having to resubmit, or being "lost" from the index. This works by getting other sites that are already listed in Google to link back to us.
Method 3. One of the most effective methods for getting our website in the Google Index, is to have dozens, if not hundreds of one way links all pointing back to our website, all with link descriptions that contain our primary keywords.
Let me explain were I m coming from. Lets say our website is about "Web Hosting" and lets also say that we are some what of an expert on "Web Hosting". And let's also say that we can put some words together about "Web Hosting". Write an article, no longer than 500 words on any topic about Web Hosting and send it out to as many websites as possible, which starve for information like ours. Chances are an article written on "Web Hosting" will be added to a dozen new websites, each article containing a link back to our site, with a link containing our primary keywords.
But before start work as Web Designer / Web Developer / Web Master, you all have to follow the W3C Validator.
Now Question is what is W3C and their Validator?
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C's mission is:
To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.
W3C primarily pursues its mission through the creation of Web standards and guidelines. Since 1994, W3C has published more than ninety such standards, few of them we have to follow these days.
Tim Berners-Lee and others created W3C as an industry consortium dedicated to building consensus around Web technologies. Mr. Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 as HTML.
Validators :
Most Web documents are written using markup languages, such as HTML or XHTML. These languages are defined by technical specifications, which usually include a machine-readable formal grammar (and vocabulary). The act of checking a document against these constraints is called validation, and this is what the Markup Validator does.
Validating Web documents is an important step which can dramatically help improving and ensuring their quality and it can save a lot of time and money. Validation is, however, neither a full quality check, nor is it strictly equivalent to checking for conformance to the specification.
This Validator can process documents written in most markup languages. And online we can use W3C Markup Validation Service, a free service that checks Web documents in formats like HTML, CSS stylesheets and broken links.
http://validator.w3.org/
Now question with us is that how we can develop a site, so reached more and more nearer to W3C Validation.
Answer is that no any predefined rules that we have to follow, we know that most pages on the World Wide Web are written in computer languages (such as combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript) that allow Web authors to structure text, add multimedia content, and specify what appearance, or style, the result should have.
As for every language, these have their own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and every document written with these computer languages are supposed to follow these rules.
However, Just as texts in a natural language can include spelling or grammar errors, documents using Markup languages. The process of verifying whether a document actually follows the rules for the language(s) it uses is called validation, and the tool used for that is a validator. A document that passes this process with success is called valid.
With these concepts in mind, we can define "W3C validation" as the process of checking a Web document against the grammar it claims to be using.
Pls. also note that Validity is one of the quality criteria for a Web page, but there are many others. In other words, a valid Web page is not necessarily a good web page, but an invalid Web page has little chance of being a good web page.
FAQ’s that we should know based on our discussion …
1. What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
The definition of Search Engine Optimization is to make your website search engine friendly. Search engine enables the internet user to find the sites of their interest when a keyword is entered by the user. A search engine runs the spiders, collects and stores the data from all over the world.
2. What is Internet Marketing?
Internet Marketing is the methods of using the Internet to promote products and services includes Search Engine optimization, Email Marketing and pay-per-click, Search Engine Marketing.
3. What is SEM?
SEM means Search engine Marketing. SEM refers to using paid listings, paid inclusion and PPC (Pay Per Click) to promote websites using search engines.
4. Why do I need Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine marketing for my website?
After spending lots of money in making an appealing website and in advertisement, you might find that very less people are visiting your site. People surfing through internet do not have the patience to look through millions of pages shown in the search engine result. It has been noted that the net users visit only the top ten results. If your website is not in top search results, you lose your customer to your competitors.
By optimizing your website, you will get more business as more people will visit your website. You will get more leads as your website is in top ranking.
5. How much time does it take to list new website in Google search engine?
It takes at least 6 months to list a new website in Google search engine result pages. You will have to be patient and wait for the page to appear in top ranking. Sometimes your new website appears on the top rank and suddenly falls down. There are many theories regarding this sudden change in the website ranking. One of the theory is Google Aging Delay.
Google Ageing: Google has incorporated the ageing delay to stop the inflation of artificial linking strategy. The artificial reciprocal linking will show high link popularity and PageRank. Many of the websites appearing in top position in Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines may not appear on top position because of Google Ageing.
Be patient! It is advisable to plan ahead, register your domain name and configure the hosting. Temporary pages with enough content and all the requirements for listing in a directory must be put on the server.
6. What is the difference between search engine and directory?
Search engines: It is programmed software which collects the data from the web sites all over the world, stores them, and later retrieves the related data when a user enters the keyword in the search engine.
Directories: As the name suggests, directories are like white pages or yellow pages which catalogs businesses according the field they serve. These web-based directories are organized by human editors. Yahoo is first directory categorizing different businesses. With increase in number of website all over the world, it became impossible to catalog all the businesses manually.
Difference: Search engines are programmed software, whereas the directories are cataloged manually.
7. Is there a guarantee my site will be listed in top ranking in Google?
Be cautious of the SEO companies that guarantee you top listing of your website in search engines. Google has very clearly explained that no one can guarantee No.1 position, not even Google.
You will get further information in the Google site.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/seo.html
8. My website is in top position in search engine, still I don’t get customers for my
website...
You need to have targeted traffic flow to your website. It is not just enough for a website in top position in search engines. It is essential to be in top result while typing for keywords that relates with your products and services.
If you are getting enough traffic flow with keywords that are not relevant to your business, you will not get customers simply because they are not interested in your products. Rather, your website must attract the customers who are interested in buying your products. The traffic flow of potential customers must be in focus by adding few keywords related to your site instead of stuffing it with irrelevant keywords.
9. My site has suddenly disappeared from the top position of the search engine. I was on
the top position with the keywords relevant to my products.
The search engine runs the spider repeatedly and makes updates in its data. So if your site is on top position, it may not remain on the top the next time the spider crawls through the web pages. You will need to retain your position of high rank in search engines. This needs constant updating of the website and submitting the websites to the search engines.
10. What is Tag?
Tags are surrounded by brackets (<>) to distinguish them from text. ‘Tags’ is also used to describe the code indicating index entries in embedded indexing. Tags are very important and essential for Search Engine Optimization. In HTML, a 'Tag' is used for marking-up text in various ways so that it is formatted in a Web document.
Tags used in HTML are as follows:
Meta Tag: "Meta" means "about this subject". Meta tag is an HTML tag which provides important information of webpage. The most familiar Meta tags used in websites are KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION. The KEYWORDS tag allows the author to emphasis the importance of certain words and phrases used related to webpage content.
The Meta tag contains information such as author; date of page created or last updated description of the page, keyword and phrases that indicate the subject matter. Meta tags are very important for search engine optimization. Meta tags supply information about a page but do not affect its appearance.
H1 Tag: H1 tag is known as Top level heading tag and its position is very important in search engine technology. It shows top level heading of web page. It’s like page title of news paper. It helps to create a well-formed document.
The H1 "top-level heading" tag is used to mark the most important title on a page. The text marked within the H1 tag shown by the browser as a large heading. H1 simply indicates that the text is an important heading. H1 tag is also important for search engine optimization.
It begins with the
"tag" and ends with the
"tag".For example
PAGE TITLE
ALT Tag: ALT tag is an HTML tag that provides alternative text when non-textual elements such as images cannot be displayed.
Some important uses of ALT tags are as follows
ALT tags can provide details for an image, destination of a hyperlinked image.
ALT tags are very useful for the surfer who surf the web with text-only browser. It also provides information for people who surf the web with graphics turned off.
ALT tag are also important when page is loading slowly, it display information of image written in alt tag before it loaded completely.
Title Tag: Title tag defines the title of the page. This title will be used wherever a web browser or sometimes a search engine needs to display a title for a page.
Mostly all search engine use title tag to collect information about website. This title appears in the clickable link on the result page of search engine. The content in the title tag is the key factor in which search queries you will rank highly with in the major search engines. It is equally as important as visible text copy and the links pointing in pages.
Titles appear in the browser's title bar. If you bookmarked the example page, the bookmark would also be labeled with information from the title tag.
Title is written between starting and ending tag.
11. What is Spiders?
Spiders also known as “bots” and “agents” is the programs search engines use to collect information on the Internet for their databases. The results are retrieved from this database when a search is performed. Spider Friendly website is a goal of Search Engine Optimization.
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