Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be termed as the process of receiving quality traffic from search engines. Sounds simple, but it is not a cake walk.

The Internet has almost become a deity where we ask for virtually everything under the sun from real estate to clothes to home appliances. It is just the matter of how better you offer your prayers (search) to gain the expected results. Your business is likely to lose your clients if your website lacks the quality of information they seek.

Obviously, a great website is just an initial step. What really matters is that finally your website should be in search engine results so that every one sees it, browses through it, and your business gets a steady client.

Optimization of a website with a series of techniques ensures your site to be searched and ultimately you will be approached.

To make things work for your website, it needs to be current and active and should contain keywords that accurately reflect what people are looking for. A person searching for strawberries will not be interested in how they get transported or who transports them, but might be interested in their variety, quality and prices.

The ultimate goal is to get a sale at the end of the day, whether it is a product sale or an information sale.

As our lives revolve round positives and negatives, the SEO also cater to two contrasting techniques.

Black hat and White hat SEO

1. Black hat SEO

Black Hat search engine optimization can be defined as methods that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually:

* violates search engine rules and regulations
* creates a poor user experience

* presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

Black hat SEO basically is a short-cut solution to a long-term problem.

Some Black Hat Techniques are:

1 Keyword stuffing: Stuffing keywords everywhere on a page

2 Invisible text: Hiding text from the visitor. This can be done by making the text and the background color same

3 Doorway Pages: Doorway pages are web pages that are created by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending visitors to a different page.

2. White hat SEO

White hat SEO techniques maintains the integrity of your website, the search engine results and include using keywords and keyword analysis, backlinking, link building to improve link popularity, and writing content for human readers.

Some White Hat SEO Techniques are:

1 Internal Linking

2 Content Creation

3 Site Optimization

Importance of website design on SEO

Website in order to attract heavy targeted traffic needs to be user friendly and have a gimmicking look and on one hand and search engine friendly on other.

It reveals that good design alone doesn’t ensure the success instead it works well in combination with good code.

Link structure of website

Links can be both internal and external. Internal links can have a big impact on your overall SEO.

First you have to ensure that you use the proper anchor text.

The second way to use your internal links is to make sure they are html links and not dynamic links.

The best way to improve your SEO with internal links is to make sure that your navigational bar is HTML-based.

Every “important” page on your site should link to every “important” page on your site.

Internal link

An internal link is a hyperlink that is a reference or navigation element in a document to another section of the same document or to another document that may be on or part of the same domain of the internet.

External linking

External linking is important, because it puts you into a specific “neighborhood” of sites and associate your site with the subject those neighbors are about.

Page hierarchy

The best way to design your hierarchy is to think of it as a family tree. A web page is considered a Parent page if it has pages under it in the hierarchy. These “sub-pages” are the Child pages.

Searching Engines

Search engines are specialized software based online that provide results to enquiries made.

Top Search engines

Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Live Search, AOL Search, Ask, AltaVista

Crawlers and Spiders

A web crawler is a program or automated script that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. This process is called web crawling or spidering.

Jenny Austin
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/search-engine-optimization-677837.html