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SEO is not as complex as it sounds. The rule of the
thumb is to keep your site very user friendly. Search engines are
bound to reward such a site. Text links, a clear mention of what
you are selling, a descriptive title for the page & good content
is the recipe for success.
What is a ‘spider’?
Search engines use a software called 'spider'. The spider crawls
the web using links to go from one site to another. Take an example.
Google's spider is named Googlebot. Googlebot can easily get to
bigger sites because their references are everywhere on the net.
Suppose it reaches a site like D&B (http://www.dnb.com/).
D&B maintains a list of companies & has links to their websites
which it will follow. D&B has a link to webizus.com. That's
how Google (& other search engines) find websites.
What if I have a new website?
If you have a new website, obviously it is not listed anywhere
& spiders wont find you. In such a case, you will have to go
to the spider. For example, to tell googlebot about my new website,
I will have to submit my website to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html
(Note: Submitted sites may rank lower in search results)
How much time does it take for a new website to reflect in
search results?
Depending on the search engine, it may take anything between instant
reflection to upwards of eight weeks. Depending on how the spider
ranks your website in the search results, the site has to be tweaked
to get the perfect results.
How does my site get ranked in search results?
You decide the products/service that you would like to promote
using SEO. SEO is a two step process, internal & external. Internal
SEO involves the HTML & content of the site. One of the criteria
based on which sites are ranked is their keyword density. Meta tags
are not important as most search engines do not read them. Optimization
of the HTML code (alt tags, text links, sequence of text, naming
conventions in files, writing ‘pure HTML’ &
so on). External SEO involves arranging for other sites with similar
but not conflicting interests to link to your site, submitting the
site URL to various directory & industry specific portals.
Search engines look for relevant content, the number of times the
word (which has been searched for) is repeated in a page & the
whole website (known as theme of the website), the number of websites
linking to your website and a host of other factors which are comparatively
less important.
How do I know what people search for?
You might have optimized your website for a particular keyword
but no one on the Internet may be using that word to search. Various
keyword trackers & search engine themselves provide search statistics
& reports or maintain online databases. You should know exactly
what your potential customers are searching for & optimize your
site for the right keywords. You should also know an approximate
number of searches made for a particular keyword on the Internet.
Undertake SEO for only those keywords that provide a positive ROI.
How do I find out which search engine is sending visitors to
my site & what pages do they visit?
Most servers provide logs. These provide referring URLs (sites
which send users to your site). These also tell us what the user
searched for (see the URL in the browser when you are in the search
results page of Google). Log file analysis needs a lot of expertise.
With more & more information coming out of log files (you can
even identify the city the user comes from), an experienced log
file analyst can provide a valuable tip that can suddenly double
the volume of your online business! If your server does not provide
log files, you can capture some of the information through third
party tools.
What is ethical SEO & why is it important?
Search engines try to keep their customers happy. They will not
tolerate irrelevant search results. Since search engines look for
the number of times a keyword is repeated, you could create a homepage
that has text in the same color as the background (A very common
trick done on ‘doorway pages’ long time back. A few
sites on the Internet still have it). Your keyword can be in white
on a white webpage, repeated hundreds of time. In 30-45 days your
site will be no.1 for the keywords you need. There are various other
tricks which give you an unfair edge over other sites. Quality search
engines like Google keep on checking for such sites. Users can go
to http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html &
report such a site. Your site will then be removed from the search
engine database. It is better to take an ethical & long term
approach to SEO.
Should you target as many search engines as possible to attract
maximum traffic?
There are thousands of search engines on the Internet. You must
have seen advertisements which say they will submit to thousands
of websites free or for a small fee. For the 950 search engines
at the bottom, there will not be much harm done as you will only
receive spam mails from them (and their large network of partners) regularly.
They also submit your site to genuine search engines like Google,
which could lower your ranking. The top search engines are
interconnected. If you are feature in one search engine, you will
automatically be included in other search engines. Concentrating
on just the top two or three search engines could provide you the
best ROI.
What after SEO?
If SEO is paying back well, it is advisable to continue the efforts.
Search algorithms keep on changing & your site may start dropping
down the list after a few months. If SEO is not paying off, find
out if the hits to the site have increased. The problem then lies
with the navigation, content or site structure. Business analysts
& usability experts may need to come in to make sure that successful
SEO results into positive ROI for your site.
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