Search Engine Optimization:
Most of the visitors prefer to start its surfing with help of a search engine, as it is one of the most convenient way to find web sites. Google, Yahoo, MSN have been the major search engines along with others, through which 80 percent of total users search web sites. So search engines can be referred as the gate way to the internet world.
Search Engine Optimization is an integrated and ethical process which helps in increasing the position of sites on search engine result page (SERP is where users get the information about sites after putting their queries to search engines). So SEO is a systematic and on going process to bring the sites on the top of the SERP.
As Yahoo and dmoz are human based directories, sites are visited and checked manually before inclusion to those directories. As a result it will take some time to get listed because of large nos. of submissions. Even the paid subscription cann't guarantee a listing.
Google crawls through web site and add content of that site to its database if it finds some uniqueness in it. It’s not mandatory to submit sites to Google because it gets information about newly launched sites over web and then it keeps visiting to those sites on regular basis. Once the search engine recognizes the home page, it finds other pages of the site to crawl through. The sitemap page guides search engines to find path to the other pages of a site. Sitemap is a collection of links that point to other pages of a site. So there must be a sitemap page for each site and a link to that sitemap page from the home page.
Keywords play a major role in achieving a better position in search engine result page. It’s very important to select keywords which are relevant to the site. While designing content care should be taken to avoid the use of more generic words as well as placing those keywords properly through out the whole content of a page. Density of keywords in the content of the web pages should be between 5 to 15 percent.
High rank in search engines can also be achieved by placing links to the subjected site from other sites. Those sites should be similar to the theme and content of linked site. Otherwise it would have a negative effect in search engine ranking. This process is known as link campaign. Generally web masters go for one-way and reciprocal link building process to achieve high ranks. Reciprocal link building is a wholesome process where two sites of same theme exchange links in between them and in the case of one-way link building, subjected site gets link from other sites with out providing links to those sites from its pages. As link out doesn’t occur in one-way link building, this process is more effective than two-way or reciprocal link building method. A site can get more one-way links from other sites if it is considered as more resourceful for the visitors of those sites.
For a site the title, heading and Meta data are as important as its content. The text within title and heading tags tells the summary of the whole page. Users look at it immediately as they get the page on browser. So the text inside these tags should be precise and meaningful. This is suggestible to put only 3-4 words (It may be keywords) within the title tag and the text should be in title case. Hyphen and commas are allowed but these characters should follow the keywords, if the title is required to be expanded a little bit i.e. ‘Web Promotion – SEO, SEM and other online marketing approaches’. The heading of the page tells the summary of the content. A page should have a single h1 tag and needed to be content relevant. In most cases, users only look at the heading and 2-3 lines of page content. So it’s advisable to place the key words for the pages within heading and beginning of the page content in attractive manner. A page should have content specific Meta description as search engine gives more importance to Meta data.
There are so many other ways to increase search engine ranking. Article submission, forum and blog posting are more effective methods which can help a lot in improving the traffic to a site. So an integrated and collective approach can ensure a better performance of a web site.
