Search Engine Optimization
What is search engine optimization? Or SEO as many people have shortened this term to? According to Wikipedia and other sources, search engine optimization is a process used to improve the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and on down the list. SEO consultants often measure the quality of visitor traffic by how often a visitor takes a desire conversion action, such as making a purchase, downloading a certain page or file, signing up for a newsletter, or some other specific action. This process of increasing the quality and frequency of visitor traffic through the use of search engines is called search engine optimization.
After understanding what search engine optimization is we can, as programmers and website developers, engage in our own search engine optimization for our own websites and the websites of our clients or employers by learning these various methods are used for optimization. Creating webpages with SEO in mind doesn't always mean that the content you provide on your webpages needs to be more favorable to search engine algorithms and search engine spiders as some might expect. There are other efforts you can involve yourself in when optimizing your websites such as coding, presentation, and structure. Using a clear hierarchical structure can assist search engine indexing programs when they are spidering your website. This is a broad description for where to begin your optimization research. Let's move on to some more of the details.
In the mid-1990s, webmasters and content providers began optimizing their websites for search engines because of the value recognized by having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results. Initially, search engines were supplied with information about pages by the webmasters themselves using meta-tags to guide each page's content. This method was found to be less than reliable as webmasters abused these tags by including irrelevant keywords to artificially increase hits to their websites. Because inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent meta data caused pages to rank higher for irrelevant searches, search engines had to respond by developing more complex ranking algorithms. Additional factors were taken into account such as:
- » Text within the title element
- » domain name
- » URL directories and file names
- » HTML tags - headings, emphasized (< em >) and strongly emphasized (< strong >) text
- » Term frequency, both in the document and globally, often misunderstood and mistakenly referred to as Keyword density
- » On page keyword proximity
- » On page keyword adjacency
- » On page keyword sequence
- » Alt attributes for images
- » Text with NOFRAMES tags
- » Web content development
- » Sitemaps
This increased activity by search engines to develop more complex indexing algorithms has caused webmasters and content developers to change the way they optimize their websites. You can no longer spam keywords throughout your webpages in order to achieve a higher ranked webpage. Now there is more importance given to relevant content when indexing webpages in search engines.
Another method used to index webpages is a PageRank system that uses hyperlink activity to rank webpages. Based upon the quantity and quality of incoming links, Google PageRank weighs a page's importance and then ranks that page based on those results. To keep this article short I will hold off on describing the details of Google's PageRank system. Maybe a future article will contain this well-documented information. To view those details now view Google's PageRank information at their website.
Search engine optimization is a very important aspect of web development. The most important reason for using search engine optimization is to increase the quality and frequency of visitors your website receives from search engines. Previously webmasters and content developers had been able to spam search engines with keywords and content to achieve high rankings in their search engine results. Today this is not possible as search engines have become more intelligent and use more complex algorithms to rank webpages. Aspects of a webpage that influence it's page ranking include:
- » Keywords in the title tag.
- » Keywords in links pointing to the page.
- » Keywords appearing in visible text.
- » Link popularity.
- » PageRank of the page (for Google).
- » Keywords in the Heading Tag H1, H2, and H3 Tags in webpage.
- » Linking from one page to inner pages.
- » Placing punch line at the top of the page.
Hopefully you will find this information useful when optimizing your websites. For more information about this topic you can visit Wikipedia, Google, and other search engines to find out how they rank webpages in their search engine results pages.
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