Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making your website search engine friendly. In other words, through SEO, you can help search engine spiders understand the offerings of your website better and thereby ensure better indexing of your website and higher rankings in search results.
What is shown in search results:
- Paid Advertisements: These appear on the top and right side of the search results page. To get your website listed here, you need to participate in the pay-per-click programs of each search engine. Many search marketing firms offer to manage your PPC campaigns.
- Organic listings: The rest of the search results are organic listings (or natural listings). You do not have to pay the search engines anything to be present in these listings. However, rankings and visibility in these listings is dependent on how the search engine spiders rate your website. SEO is a technique through which websites can be optimized to ensure that search engine spiders understand your website’s offerings towards ensuring higher rankings in the search results.
What does SEO include:
To understand SEO, it is important to understand how the algorithms of search engines work. It is also important to understand what people are searching for and how your competitors have optimized their website.
SEO efforts involve making changes and refinements to the site’s programming, design, content, presentation, structure, and can include fixing of problems that could prevent search engine spiders from fully indexing and ranking your site.
Depending on the content of a site (and its relevance), SEO efforts can include adding unique and search engine friendly content to your site.
Search engines also give importance to the popularity of a site. This is a calculated as a combination of factors like:
Traffic: If more people are visiting your site, it is likely to be popular.
Links to your site: If websites relevant to your site’s content are linking to your website, it is an indicator of your website’s popularity and status.
Among other things that also have an impact on search engine ranks are:
Age of your website: An older website is considered to have more authority, stability and reliability than a new one. Many times, a new website has to undergo a probation period (can be a few months) before search engines start listing it in search results.
The site’s file structure and naming: Many sites have URLs that look like http://www.mywebsite.com/product123/page934671.html. A URL like that is meaningless to a search spider and tells it nothing about the website's content.
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