Basics behind search engine optimization (SEO)

History behind the SEO:

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, as well as any and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the earliest known use of the phrase search engine optimization was a spam message posted on Usenet on July 26, 1997.

By 2007, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals. The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Live Search, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs.SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.

Basic of SEO:

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

1)Getting indexed

The leading search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Some search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click.^[22] Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results. Yahoo's paid inclusion program has drawn criticism from advertisers and competitors. Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both require manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that aren't discoverable by automatically following links.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.

2)Preventing indexing:

To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots. When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed, and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish crawled. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam.

Just remember few tips and do not listen to the myths:

1) I read about a SEO myths lately that "Submitting your site on web directories is not good" Says who? It is true tho that web directories had a rough time with Google not long ago but having your website listed in a web directory will certainly not harm your site in the SERPs.


2) Google will NOT penalize you for duplicate content in exception if the original author will not send a copyright infrigement notice to Google Inc. in that case the URL where the copyrighted content is located will be removed from Google’s index.


3) Repeat your keywords to rank higher is a myth. Over repeating or also known as keyword stuffing will actually get you in trouble and possibly your site will be penalized.You need to keep a proper density of using the keyword.

4) Advertising through AdWords will not help in your rankings.

However since PageRank is Google’s tool to determine the popularity of a site (where the popularity is calculated by the number of the backlinks a site receives from other popular/trustworthy sites) then it is closely connected with the fact how your site performs in the search engines (but not for specific keywords, as search engine rankings depends on the anchor that is used on those backlinks).

Just maintain the same keyword density, give value to those keywords for which you are ranking and of course, never stop to build backlinks to your site. Especially stopping to build quality backlinks, will give more space and time to your competitor to beat you on the SERPs.

That's all for now.See you later folks.