Search engine optimization is the process of making sure that your website content and information helps you to achieve high ranking on search engines such that you will get traffic directed to your website through these search engines.
1. The very first and important step in search engine optimization (SEO) is to know all your niche keywords and phrases, and this begins with a good knowledge of your niche. If you want to attract some potential customers to your website, you should know the relevant keywords and phrases to use. When people are looking for information online, they type different keywords and phrases on search engines, and you will need to know these keywords and phrases. By having these keywords in your website content, your website will show up on search engines when people look for information that relates to these keywords.
2. Make maximum use of your keywords and key phrases. In order to make sure that your website is found by search engines, you will need to have your keywords in your web content and on your blog. Make sure that your web content is keyword-rich. Use your keywords in all the articles that you write.
3. Build your website such that your keywords and phrases are included in the content of your website, including the headlines on your website.
4. Expand one way and two way links to your website. Link building is one of the most effective ways to increase the visibility of your website on search engines. Build one way links by submitting articles with your website URL in the resources box, and participate in relevant forums and have your URL in your signature. Write product reviews and post them at other related websites and include your website URL. You can also exchange two way links with other web masters for related web sites. The more websites you have linking back to your website, the better your web site ranking will be on search engines.
5. Submit your website to website directories. This will help to improve your page ranking on search engines and will also drive traffic to your website.
SEO is very important for the success of your website. Follow the steps outlined above and make your website visible on search engines. If your website ranking is high on search engines, it means that you can be easily found and a lot of traffic will be driven to your website.
How search engines work
Web search engines work by storing information about a large number of web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a web crawler (also known as a spider) — an automated web browser which follows every link it sees, exclusions can be made by the use of robots.txt. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed. Data about web pages is stored in an index database for use in later queries.
Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas some store every word of every page it finds, such as AltaVista.
This cached page always holds the actual search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it. This problem might be considered to be a mild form of linkrot, and Google’s handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations that the search terms will be on the returned web page.
This satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects the search terms to be on the returned pages. Increased search relevance makes these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data that may no longer be available elsewhere.
When a user comes to the search engine and makes a query, typically by giving keywords, the engine looks up the index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document’s title and sometimes parts of the text. Most search engines support the use of the boolean terms AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. An advanced feature is proximity search, which allows you to define the distance between keywords.
The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the results it gives back. While there may be millions of Web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the “best” results first.
How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve.
Most web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue and, as a result, some employ the controversial practice of allowing advertisers to pay money to have their listings ranked higher in search results.
The vast majority of search engines are run by private companies using proprietary algorithms and closed databases, the most popular currently being Google, BING, Yandex, DuckDuck Go, MSN Search, and Yahoo! Search. However, Open source search engine technology does exist, such as ht://Dig, Nutch, Senas, Egothor, OpenFTS, DataparkSearch and many other.