Search Engines Are specialized programs that facilitates information retrieval from large segments of the Internet. Search engines attempt to help a user locate desired information or resources by seeking matches to user-specified keywords. The usual method for finding and isolating this information is to compile and maintain an index of Web resources that can be queried for the keywords or concepts entered by the user. The indexes are often built from specific resource lists, and may also be created from the output of Web crawlers, wanderers, robots or spiders.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines.
As a strategy for increasing a site's relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure , as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users.
Search Engine Optimization Techniques
White hat and Black hat
White hat SEO techniques conforms to the search engine's guidelines and involves no deception. It is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks the same content a user will see.
Black hat SEO or spamdexing, uses methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indexes.
Search Engine Optimization Basic Components
Content- is what drives search engines rankings, content is what brings users to the site, and content, when sprinkled appropriately with keyword phrases, will feed search engine spiders.
Site Design- sites that are successful in the search engine results have this in common-they are all simply designed, with a minimum of bandwidth hogging graphics, slowly loading animations or other such frippery, and are easy to navigate. Simple clean designs are what search engine spiders and search engine user like, because it enables them to get to what they are looking for.
Well-written Meta tags-meta tags-keyword, description, and title are important, they need to be written in compelling, keyword phrase-heavy content that will make the user click through from the search results page.
On Page Optimization
Keywords are words and phrases that web surfers put into search engines when they are looking for websites that cover particular topics or sell certain products. Optimizing a website so that it turns up near the top of the search engine result pages for keywords can help build its business.
Meta Content
Page Title: Include 1-2 of your most important keyword phrases here. Ideally, around 8 to 10 words or around 70 to 90 characters including spaces.
Meta Description Tag: Is reflective of the content on the page. It should ideally be between 20 to 25 words or 250 characters including spaces. Include the main keywords at the beginning of this tag.
Meta Keywords Tag: Contains the keyword phrases that are also used in the copy of the page, Title tag, Meta description, and other tags. It is advisable to add plurals and common misspelling.
Web page theme
H1, H2, H3 header text: Defines the Size of fonts. For SEO the order of importance is descending starting from 1.
Bold Text/ Emphasis/ Strong/ Capitalized: These tags are used highlight portions of text which are more important.
Alt Tags: Keyword relevant Alt tags give name to the images. These tags are displayed if the browser cannot display images and also explain the image to the search engines.
<img src=”Hello.jpg” alt=”Hello”>
Title Tags for Tables: This serves similar purpose for the table as title tag does for the page.
Internal Link Structure: Content relevant and evenly spread internal links help in optimization and ranking.
External Link Structure: Be careful with the external links. Link only to relevant websites. You do not want to send the spider away from your website unless it has seen enough.
Keyword density and spread
First text on Page: Having keyword as the first word on the page helps. If the first word cannot be the keyword, have it in the first sentence or the first paragraph.
Keyword Density: Maintain keyword density of 2-4% on a web page. Keyword density affects ranking on almost all major search engines.
Keyword Spread: One should take care to have keywords throughout the web page. While some search engines give importance to the first and last paragraphs others read through the entire page.
Points to Analyze in Optimizing
Nature of Business
Product/Services Categories
Site overview
Home Page
Page Design
Site Dimensions, number of pages
Keyword Density
Page Rank and Number of indexed page
Link Popularity
Positioning with respect to search engines
Site map/Navigation Tracking
Analyzing inter links, broken links etc.
Things to avoid in search engine optimization
Black hat
Dupe/Duplicate content
Grey hat
Keyword Stuffing
Link Farm
Mirror Site
Over Optimization Penalty
Spam
Website Structure
Just as information is filed in folders in a file cabinet drawers for ease storage and access, information is stored within a website file directory structure for the same purpose. The public component of a website is really a repository for information files which are delivered to the client on demand. The better organized the information is, the easier the site will be to build, manage and maintain. The key to good organization is a good system for filling information.
Folders
Folders in a folder setup are seen by search engines as part of one site, so the more folders you have, the more content your site appears to have. And it's no surprise how search engines adore a site rich in content. Folders allow you to build your site's content every new folder you add.
Aside from search engine concerns, a folder setup is easier to maintain – it's easier to create a new folder that it is to create a completely new sub domain each time you want to add a new area of content to the site
Sub domains
Any links between sub domains will hold higher perceived weight because they will be seen as external rather then internal links within the site.
A benefit that sub domains have is that some link directories allow for topic submission.
If you go with a folder setup, be sure to build up a good deal of content and have helpful and important inbound links back to your site. If you have loads of content and good branding reasons for treating each section as a separate identity, then subs are probably the best way to go. But be warned! There is a bit more work involved when adding sub domains it’s not as easy and fast as adding a new folder.
Site Maps
A site map is a graphical representation of the architecture of a website. It can be either in a document in any form used as a planning tool for a web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engines bots find pages on the site.
Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. Most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if a site is very large, the site map may be required so that search engines and visitors can access all content on the site.
robots.txt
The robots exclusion standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web spider and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to categorize and archive web sites, or by web masters to proofread source code. The standard complements site maps, a robot inclusion standard for websites.
A robots.txt file on a website will function as a request that specified robots ignore specified files or directories in their search. This might be, for example, out of a preference for privacy from search engine results, or the belief that the content of the selected directories might be misleading or irrelevant to the categorization of the site as a whole, or out of a desire that an application only operate on certain data.
For websites with multiple sub-domains, each sub-domain must have its own robots.txt file. If example.com had a robots.txt file but a.example.com did not, the rules that would apply for example.com will not apply to a.example.com.
.htaccess
.htaccess(hypertext access) is the default name of Apache's directory-level configuration file. It is placed in a particular directory, and the directives in the .htaccess file apply to that directory, and all subdirectories thereof. It provides the ability to customize configuration for requests to the particular directory.
Usage
Authorization/authentication
Error responses
Redirects
Rewriting URLs
mod_rewrite
This module uses a rule-based rewriting engine to modify URLs before fetching the requested item, for variety purposes. Some benefits derived from a rewrite engine are:
Making website URLs more user and search engine friendly
Preventing undesired in line linking or hot linking
Not exposing the inner workings of a website to users
