Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of scrutinizing the content, designing and html coding of your website in order to make it easy for search engines to read, understand and index it appropriately. This is done to improve the volume and quality of traffic to a website. According to webopedia;
a search engine works by sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible. Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query.
Why Search Engines and Online Directories?
When you build or open and office or shop or any establishment you will build it where people can find it. Or if it is difficult to find, you make attempts to advertise it so that people can know about it and find it. The internet works in a similar manner. There is no point of creating a website if people cannot find it. The easiest and cheapest way of doing this is making sure that your website is indexed by the major search engines and online directories such as Google, yahoo, Ask, MSN and so forth.
Google and Yahoo are the main search engines and the most of the other search engines are based on those two. Getting your website indexed by search engine ensures that your products or services are visible on the internet.
How Search Engine Optimization Works
If a website is optimized properly, it means that it will feature high up the list on the search results pages of major search engines when people search for information using search terms similar to the ones found on your website pages. Part of the SEO process is to think and analyze how people would try to find a particular website or webpage. This would have a profound influence on the relevancy of the content and HTML coding of the webpages on the website that is being search engine optimized.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the neo-online marketing strategies. Many people may be surprised when they type in their company or organization name in a search engine and the search results only show other websites and not their website. SEO is important because search engines are the single most important way of finding information on the web (internet).
This search engine optimization process should be part of the website design and development process. In existing website, a review and identification of areas that require optimization is crucial. Things like duplicated content, flash, dynamic content and session IDs are problematic for search engine indexation.
Things to do
- Use appropriate keywords that relate to your website content.
- Create content (rich with the keywords) that is relevant and appeals to your website audience and ensure that it is well optimized.
- create or modify title tags, meta tags, alt image tags, internal links and sitemaps appropriately.
- create one-way plus reciprocal links from appropriate directories and other related sites.
- Enter your website to renowned online directory. However, one should be aware that there are millions of online directories and reciprocal link exchange programs that promise to help generate traffic to your website. Most of these are spam programs that will get your website blacklisted!
- Submit the search engine optimized website to all the major search engines and directories; Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN. This is a major step because if your website is not submitted to search engines or online directories, it will not be found by people that do not remember your domain name.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) costs E300/page