The Internet Marketing Boom has brought with it numerous changes in the business context. It is a well-known fact today that if your business does not have a presence on the web, its life span will be significantly reduced as a result of your market space being eaten away by your net-savvy competitors. Without a website and proper search engine recognition, your company has little or no chance of targeting potential clients and customers. Hence, it becomes necessary for your website to gain more visibility on the Internet which can eventually benefit your business by leaps and bounds. So if you have a website of your own or are planning to get one, it is time for you to educate yourself about Search Engine Optimization or SEO and the various aspects of this relatively new technology.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization essentially refers to the process by which you can increase the volume and quality of traffic to your website from search engines with the help of the search results generated by them for certain targeted keywords. This means that your website can be designed and optimized in such a way that it allows popular search engines like Google, Yahoo! etc. to skim through and understand its contents thoroughly, making it more “SEO-friendly”. This in return would make the search engine display your website’s URL to the users who are searching for similar content as available in your website.

Another aspect of this kind of optimization is the rank of your webpage on the search engine. It is obvious that the higher the ranking of your website, better the visibility it will enjoy among the search results and hence more users will be attracted to clicking on its link. But for businesses the quality of the user traffic frequently becomes more important than the traffic’s volume. A positive “conversion action” is required which means that a profitable number of your website’s visitors indicate interest in the products or services that your company offers through different means of interaction like making purchases, downloading offerings and requesting for information through queries. This might lead you to wrongly conclude that SEO is just a form of advertising because all it is doing is bringing in more traffic to your site. You may also consider getting enlisted in paid search results for a given search terms. But you must remember that the basic idea behind SEO is to get top search engine rankings based on your website’s relevancy to a certain keyword, and not because you are paying for the same.

The use of SEO as a marketing strategy involves an understanding of how search engine algorithms work along with a good knowledge of the terms commonly searched for by Internet users. It also requires some technical know-how – basic HTML skills are a must. Hence, we can consider SEO as the technical counterpart of Internet marketing.

How does SEO work?

SEO works on the tenet of satisfying the algorithms of search engines. Search engines use advanced mathematical equations and theorems to analyze, sort and rank websites. The websites which get the top spots in the search results are the ones which conform to the algorithms with the highest relevancy. Although many search engine optimizers have tried to demystify the inner workings of the search engines and decode their algorithms, no one has discovered a magic tool to figure out the exact formula of how an SEO works. But to make things simpler, we can abbreviate the sequence of activities performed by a search engine to deliver results, as “CIPRR”. The explanation is given below:

1. Crawling: The most important thing to remember is that search engines are “text-driven”, that is, they crawl the Web, with the help of a tool called a spider or a crawler, to make note of items (mainly text) to get an idea of what a particular site is all about. These spiders follow the links from one page to another, indexing all the information they find on the way. Because of the enormous number of web pages on the Net, it is obvious that a spider cannot scan your website everyday to check for any new links or modifications. This means that there is nothing you can do with your SEO efforts during the time period when the spider does not visit your site. But you can optimize your website during this time too by checking for the items on your site that are viewable by the spider, with the help of a tool called Spider Simulator, and remove the redundant items according to the results displayed by it.
2. Indexing: After crawling a webpage, its contents are indexed and store in a colossal database from where it can be later retrieved for use. Indexing is essentially a process which involves the identification of key terms that provide the best description of the page, which then helps in the assignment of particular keywords to the same page. You can help your page get better rankings by helping the search engine in optimizing the process by enhancing and correcting the keywords and information on your site.
3. Processing: When a user enters a search request, the search engine processes it by comparing the search string with the pages of its database. Usually more than one page contains the particular search string.
4. Calculating Relevancy: The next step involves the search engine deciding the relevancy of each page in accordance with the user’s request. This is done with the help of numerous algorithms. Since every algorithm gives different relative weight age to some common factors, like metatags, keyword density and links, you may notice tHat the same search string can give dissimilar results in different search engines. Also, commonly used search engines like Google and MSN, have been known to modify their algorithms periodically. This should be a good enough reason for you to permanently devote your time and efforts to SEO, if you want to retain your top spot.
5. Retrieving: Finally, the search engine displays the long list of search results in your browser, which have been sorted and indexed neatly in the decreasing order of relevancy.

Although, we know roughly how search engines work, as I mentioned before different search engines work on varied principles. It might be useful for you to know these differences, like Google gives a lot of importance to links, while Yahoo! and MSN gives weightage to keywords. If your domain is older in comparison to others, Google will show its preference to you unlike Yahoo, which does not believe in this kind of discrimination.

A Few Useful Tips Here are a few tips to optimize your search engine to rise above the ranks in search engine results:

• Optimize your website for the right keywords. Conduct a keyword research to know the keywords which will reserve your spot at the top. You can do this by using like SEO Book, Keyword Discovery etc. Also, you can use the Website Keyword Suggestions Tool which can help you figure out how websites determine the theme of the website and the related keywords which fit into the same. Make your site keyword rich and use keywords in special places.
• Look for good websites to backlink to you. You may also consider link-bartering and buying links but be careful about the quality of the sites that you link to.
• Use Meta keywords in the heading of a document, but limit it to 10-20 words. This is a useful practice, although all search engines do not give importance to this. Also, include keywords in your Meta Description tag because it will appear in the search engine’s results.
• Pay attention to your website’s content. Search engines look for websites with fresh and original content which is updated regularly. The content should be useful and have practical value to the visitors of your website. You can also include news sections and RSS feeds on your site.
• Use headings and bold and italic text effectively to make the useful information stand out from the rest. Put <b> and <i> tags around some keywords on every page, but do not overdo this.
• Keep your web pages “short and sweet”, that is, their size should ideally not exceed 50 kb, so that the users do not have to keep waiting for your pages to load. Also, avoid using Flash, images, frames and JavaScript as it is against SEO guidelines and spiders find it taxing to crawl.
• Assure that your website is free of any syntax errors, declare the type of your document in the beginning and validate your CSS and HTML because search engines are quite biased against pages with errors.

Unethical SEO: White Hat vs. Black Hat

SEO techniques can be broadly divided into two categories. If a technique conforms to the standards and guidelines of a search engine and involves no unethical practices, it is considered a White Hat. White Hat also ensures the consistency of the content indexed and ranked by search engines. Reversely, Black Hat SEO techniques attempt to achieve higher search rankings in a deceptive manner. Black Hat SEO not only breaks the rules of search engines, it also creates a poor experience for the user on the web. Some of these techniques include creating hidden or invisible text, text that is colored similar to the background or positioned off-centered, stuffing in long-lists of unnecessary keywords and packing in “doorway pages” or pages that the user will never see but will be crawled on by spiders.

These tricks can seem tempting and may work temporarily, but your site may get penalized, receive lower rankings or even be banned by search engines. A notorious example of this was the removal of BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany by Google in 2006 for their deceptive Black Hat practices. So the lesson here is, use White Hat SEO for higher rankings and stay away from any technique that even remotely resembles a Black Hat SEO technique.