Category Archives: Issue 2011 May

  Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and/or quality of traffic to a web site pages from search engines via "natural" or "algorithmic" search results.  In other words, SEO is the art and science of making your site accessible to your target market through search engines like Google.  The objective of SEO is to increase traffic to your website by ranking high in the results of the search engines query.

  As seen here, on this result page:  Since most people now use search engines to search the internet you need to position yourself so that people will find your site amongst the sea of information, thus resulting in increased site/brand awareness and revenue opportunities.

  Search Engine Optimization is a very important part of your Internet presence and overall Marketing Campaign, since it has the ability to reach the most people amount of people via free search engine listings.   SEO helps your target market, find you.

  How Search Engines Work  Search engines are almost entirely text driven. These Search Engines view web pages very differently than you and I do.   Search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.

  First, search engines “crawl” the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by proprietary software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web, it is impossible for a spider to visit a site everyday just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified. Sometimes crawlers will not visit your site for a month or two, so during this time your SEO efforts will not be rewarded.

  What you can do is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you'd better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. – in other words   they will be non-exist for search engines.

  After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings.

  When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one pages contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search string.

  There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo, Google, MSN etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you'd like to be at the top.

  The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser –the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.

  How a Search is executed:
  1-The User identifies Keywords into a Query – for example: “Soccer news” are entered in the Search Engine Website
  2- The Query “Soccer news” is sent to the Search Engines Web Server. The Web Server Identifies the Keywordss and sends that information to the Index Servers. This action is similar to you and me looking a word up in the Index, at the back of a book. The Index Servers tell us where the information is stored.
  3. The query “Soccer news” then travels to the Doc Servers, which actually retrieves the stored documents that the previous step help provide. Snippets of information are generated to describe each search result.   
  4. The search results are then returned to the user in a fraction of a second. Now we can see snippets of information about “Soccer news”. This happens in less than one second.