Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a potent web marketing tool that improves the ranking of your website within a search engine. Once you understand the basics, SEO is fairly straightforward. Each time you enter a search query on Google or Yahoo, you are presented with a list of results from the Web. These directories can be hundreds to millions of pages long, but most people will only visit the sites at the top of the list. Search Engine Optimization is the reason some websites rank higher than others. This is because the search engine software identifies those sites deemed to be most relevant to the search query.
Search engines are text-driven and contain ‘crawlers’ or ‘spiders’ crawl the Web and scan the text of each webpage to get an idea of what each website is about. This data is stored in a giant database according to keywords and phrases that offer the best descriptions of a page.
When you type a query into a search engine, the search string is compared against the database’s index. Typically millions of pages share the same search string and so the search engine calculates the relevancy of each page relative to keywords in the search request. The search engine then retrieves these results by displaying them in a ranked order. Sites that are ranked the highest are deemed the most pertinent to the search query.
As with buying property, the most important factor in Search Engine Optimization is location, location, location. Websites that contain the keyword within the HTML tag are deemed more relevant than sites with the keyword appearing elsewhere. Search engines also scan webpages for keywords that appear near the top, such as in a heading or within the first couple of sentences. Naturally most websites about a particular topic will mention that topic within the first few lines.
Also central to SEO is the frequency of keywords. Spiders will scan pages and calculate how many times a key word appears in comparison to other words. Of course, pages with multiple keywords are ranked higher than those with only a few.