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!
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