Introduction To Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is the process of fine-tuning your website so that the search engines are able to access and understand it more easily. Search engines have “bots” which crawl around the word wide web, following links in what would appear to be a never ending journey. As these bots crawl through pages, they need to try and work out what each page is about, and report the information back to the headquarters where it’s stored in a huge database. From this database comes your search results when you search for anything on Google, Yahoo and MSN for example.
The process of optimizing pages involves tasks such as using special HTML tags that provide information to the search engines on what the “keywords” of the page are. By strategically combining the usage of these HTML tags, you can define the theme of the page.
Other common optimization tasks involve having relevant content, having clean source code, well structured URL’s and linking.
The most important optimization task relates to linking. Google in particular is very keen on favoring websites that have other good quality sites linking to them. This is not to say the reverse is also true, that Google will not favor websites with bad quality sites linking to them since you don’t have any control over who links to your site. If this were the case it would be too easy for me to set up 100 poor quality websites and link them all to my competitor’s site. The basic idea is that it is much harder to receive a link from a good quality site since those sites obviously don’t want to damage their reputation by linking to poor quality sites.
Search Engine Optimization is split into two categories. One is on page optimization which are all the tasks that are actioned on the pages on your website. The other is off page optimization which refers to tasks such as obtaining links from external sites to your sites, and all other actions which improve your website but are actioned externally.
It’s important to lay a good foundation to build your Search Engine Optimization strategy on. This means that all the boring on page optimization must be done first and correctly before embarking on the off page optimization which can be equally as boring but also give you an opportunity to think outside the box. There really are no big secrets or different methods of on page optimization that the top websites use. Typically the difference between the best and the rest is determined by their off page optimization strategy and additional thinking outside the box.
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August 20th, 2007 at 2:23 amVery informative post, but would appreciate it if you could list some examples of, how you call it, “fine-tuning your website”.
Thanks,
August 20th, 2007 at 2:29 pmCGI Joe
This is only the start
I will be adding a lot more content over time, going over each SEO technique in detail (well, the ones I am prepared to give away anyway!).
August 20th, 2007 at 11:45 pm