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How to get Your Web Site to Rank Higher
in Search Engine Listings
Some Do's and Don'ts of SEO ... read more.
Personal, Friendly Service and Advice to Small Business
INTRODUCTION to SEO for Beginners
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation, SEO for short, is a process that anyone can apply to the pages of a web site in order to increase its visibility on search engine listings. It can be a single process applied once with sometimes dramatic results, but at best it is an on-going procedure of constant re-evaluation and improvement.
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and others, are continually evolving and changing the way they work, ie., their algorithms. Therefore if you want your website to achieve and maintain a high position on search listings, you may have to do a certain amount of work to keep up.
First of all it is useful to know a little about how search engines work.
What is an Algorithm?
An algorithm, in this case, is a complex computer program consisting of a series of tests applied to the HTML and content of each and every page of every web site that the search engine's spider software has crawled.
The software analyses certain elements of (a) the hidden HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the code which determines the format of the web page when it is displayed, and (b) the actual text content.
What is meant by - Spidering? Crawling?
These are slight misnomers. What the software actually does is work through, at incredible speed, its own enormous list of web page links. It visits each link in turn and determines that the page still exists. If not it may delete the link from the list.
It checks the visited page for new links, either to pages within the same site or externally to other web sites. New links are added to the list for future "spidering". At the same time a check is made to see if any material changes have been made to the sites content since the last visit. Stale content which has not been updated for some time affects the ranking applied to the site.
Finally the text content is analysed for keywords, excluding words like 'the', 'and', 'it', 'for', etc., and an assessment made of what the page is about based on the frequency with which words and phrases appear. A 'snapshot' is taken of the page at the time of the visit and stored in a massive relational database along with all the relevant keywords.
So what happens when I do a search on Google, Yahoo, etc?
The word or phrase you enter in the search box is applied to the engine's database to find relevant matches. Most searches bring up results numbering millions and yet some web pages invariably appear in the first twenty or thirty sites listed. Why is this? Because those pages have been OPTIMISED! And why is your site so far down the listings? The answer is simple! Your site needs SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION!
Some Do's and Don'ts of SEO ... read more.
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