 | | eCommerce: Website Design, Software, Web |
Simply put, search engines use computer programs, commonly referred to as “spiders” or webcrawlers that literally “crawl” throughout the complex circuit of web... |
How Search Engines Work Simply put, search engines use computer programs, commonly referred to as “spiders” or webcrawlers that literally “crawl” throughout the complex circuit of web pages across the entire Internet, logging the content on each page and following the links associated with those pages.
Searches on Your Hard Drive If you have ever utilized a search feature on your computer or word processing software, you know the process is fairly simple; you enter a word or phrase at the prompt and the software looks throughout the hard drive or the document for the word or phrase you entered.
Searches on a Search Engine Using a search engine such as All the Web, Alta Vista, Google, or Yahoo, among others, you can get similar search results as you did searching documents on your own computer, but the results that contain your search criteria are for web pages on the Internet.
Search Engines Defined Essentially, a search engine is a set of programs used by search engine companies to generate an index or database of websites that likely match the search criteria entered.
How Search Engines Work Simply put, search engines use computer programs, commonly referred to as “spiders” or webcrawlers that literally “crawl” throughout the complex circuit of web pages across the entire Internet, logging the content on each page and following the links associated with those pages.
The information is then placed into databases. When queried on the search engine, they will generate a list or “library” of relevant websites, based on the search term and the search engine company’s algorithms. The algorithms created by the individual search engine companies rate each web page’s importance by its content and relevance. The value they place on the various words and phrases contained on a page determine where that page will show up in the ranked results.
What are Links? A hypertext link is a link on a website which identifies a website address and enables a direct connection from that webpage to another. In most cases, the link’s address is highlighted or underlined, so website visitors will know to click or follow the link to another page on that site, or another site altogether. Photos oftentimes have links associated with them.
Link Relevance With the advent of the Internet, computers branched out and linked to related computers in the network. The original concept of the World Wide Web was that web pages connected via hyperlinks to one another would be related in some way. For example, on a website about ‘speech writing’, there could be links leading to relevant websites containing books on writing or public speaking, or the site might provide links to various speaking schools, associations, or a speakers bureau, etc.
One important factor in determining relevance is the number and quality of related web sites that link to a particular web site. Over time, many websites created “link farms” whereby anyone could post a series of unrelated links to a website, hoping to cross-link their sites en mass to add perceived value in search engine rankings. This resulted in corruption of the library of information that the search engine spiders had gleaned. Most of the search engines have incorporated complex subroutines into their algorithms that look for link farms, non-relevant links, duplicate content, hidden text, hidden links, and many other factors, which detract from the quality of their search results.
After link farms came ‘familiar link listings’ for all of a website owner’s friends, family, et al. Businesses did favors for business associates, linking to their associates’ unrelated business sites from their own business sites. The links to other sites then became less relevant in search engine rankings.
Following came abusers, who basically generated websites that would fare well in search criteria only because of repetitive keyword usage throughout the pages. Visitors to those types of sites saw only relevant keywords sprinkled throughout the page, but no relevant content, further corrupting the relevance of the search queries. In the end, links to other sites then became less relevant in search engine rankings.
Consequently, search engines must constantly adjust their algorithms in order to rank the websites by algorithm-perceived relevance and hopefully, weed out the sites that do not contain relevant information based on the search criteria.
As a result, search engine optimization is a constantly changing and rapidly evolving area. About a year ago, there was really only one search engine worth worrying about. Google provided in excess of 80% of all search engine traffic and their methodology was fairly easy to understand. Now there are at least three main competitors and they are constantly changing their algorithms.
SEO = Search Engine Optimization Simply defined, SEO is the process of determining relevant keywords and phrases as they relate to a website, crafting the visible content of a web page to highlight those words and phrases in search engine friendly ways, and adding those specific words and phrases to the title, keywords and descriptions in a website’s metatags which the search engines read and in turn, add to their databases.
What is Internet Marketing? Internet marketing firms promote websites in a variety of ways including advertising, link building and registering the website on various search engines. Their ultimate goal is to ensure that the website places well in the search results for related keywords and phrases for that website, just like an SEO firm does.
What to Look for in an SEO or Internet Marketing Firm There is a growing niche of consultants and firms who specialize in search engine optimization but not all SEO’s have the same level of expertise, specialties or standards of service.
If a company offers to “Submit your site to 8000 search engines for $xxx.xx” be sure to run as fast as you can. If they discuss their expertise at “fooling” the search engines, creating doorway pages, cloaking, etc., you should quickly lose their phone number. If they guarantee you the number one spot on the search engines, be sure to find out which obscure four-word phrase they will guarantee that placement for and whether anyone actually ever searches for that phrase.
Some SEO companies will simply market client websites to a variety of search engines, charging the website owner a monthly fee to ensure that the website is found in search engine databases. Most of the ‘work’ by these SEO firms simply consists of utilizing an automated mass marketing software tool to repeatedly register a site to a number of search engines. Use of the program ensures the SEO’s ‘marketing efforts’ will produce evidence of placement on search engines for a limited search term and for an extremely limited time. They then report proof of search engine placement to the client who then justifies the expense based on that ‘factual’ report of the SEO’s marketing efforts. The SEO in essence does not provide optimization services to the client and lets the computer do all the ‘work.’ This type of SEO does not serve the client’s best interest and will seldom produce favorable results
Be aware that search engine spiders will eventually find every website on the Internet, even poorly designed, non-optimized and those lacking in relevant keywords compared to their site content. The key to effective SEO does not lie entirely on search engine listings, to the surprise of many. If mass-marketing tools were all that was needed to effectively market a website, SEO’s would be out of business in a heartbeat. Fortunately for the successful SEO and Internet Marketing companies, there is more to SEO than meets the eye and their jobs will be secure long into the future.
Remember this: A non-optimized website that shows up “somewhere” in search results may never be found due to its unfavorable ranking. In that case, ranking ‘somewhere” may as well equate to ranking nowhere.
On Google, for instance, the search term ‘speech writing’ yields 3,850,000 results as of this writing. The list of web page results displays ten related sites per page.
If a site is poorly optimized for the phrase speech writing, it may actually show up in the results ‘somewhere’, but could be buried among those 3.85 million results and could even be listed last! The likelihood of anyone weeding through 385 thousand pages of 10 sites per page to find a relevant site is nil.
Most search engine users will find precisely what they are looking for on the first page, even though there may be extremely relevant pages on the first three to five pages or 50 listings.
Reputable SEO’s will research the client’s industry, analyze their competitors and keyword relevance, create a shopping list of relevant, highly targeted key words, phrases and descriptions to focus on, make recommendations for revisions to meta tags and page content, and may advise on a site redesign for ease of navigation by the search engines and site visitors. Additionally, they will make recommendations for advertising as necessary, and provide ongoing analysis and reports to the client.
SEO experts should have extensive technical experience as well as project management, system design, and systems integration experience. (Some say that SEO is not rocket science but several of AZhttp’s staff members have related experience just in case!)
There are many criteria which should be taken into careful consideration in choosing an SEO for Internet marketing and planning efforts. Consulting with an expert or specialist SEO consultant might be the best search engine investment you will ever make.
Internet Marketing Services and SEO Overview
Define Objectives
Define Goals
Identify the Current State of Site or Sites
Identify the Target Audience for each Site
Identify and Select Strategies
Research
Site design recommendations
Search engine placement campaigns
SEO Monitoring and Reporting
Choose an expert to ensure a successful SEO campaign to improve your online sales and Internet marketing efforts and to aggressively promote your products and brands.
Oftentimes, a commercial site has an extreme number of competitors. All sites cannot be listed first, therefore an SEO might focus on other products to increase his client’s results, or focus advertising on a specific product or target a region or city. Search engine results are ever changing, so analysis should be ongoing. Lastly, the SEO should be heavily involved in monitoring the client’s advertising campaigns or they could put a company out of business by mismanagement.
AZhttp has seen a multitude of poorly rated, badly designed client websites with extensive sloppy or careless use of html coding, many that do not even have a title, description or keywords! Additionally, we’ve seen code that actually sends search engines away from the site rather than code that encourages the search engines to visit and follow links.
Following is one example of how the source code below the header of a properly constructed page should appear. To view the source code of your site, visit the site, place your cursor in the body of the site (where there is content), right click and select ‘view source’ from the menu:
THIS CODE TELLS SEARCH ENGINE WEBCRAWLERS TO INCLUDE THE PAGE IN THEIR DATABASE AND TO FOLLOW THE LINKS ON THE PAGE! You can reprint this article (if not stated otherwise above) on your website or publication with notice and a link to http://www.zongoo.com
"Reprinted from Zongoo.com Daily Press & Consumer Information"
Please copy and paste the following HTML Code to your page:
"Reprinted from <a href="http://www.zongoo.com" target="_blank">Zongoo.com Daily Press & Consumer Information</a></b>"
NOTE:
If you find our site usefull, have used our articles, or submitted any article, please take a moment to add a link to our site by copy and paste the following html code at your web site:
<a href="http://www.zongoo.com" target="_blank">Zongoo Daily Press & Consumer Information</a>
| 
