Search Engine Optimization and Tips

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site as linked from search engines. Need to improve your search engine standings? First of all, recognize that there are many search indexing schemes used in the various search sites on the Web. The search indexing rules change over time, and you cannot be guaranteed to have a page that will place on the first page of any of the good search sites. However, there are some things to do to optimize your chances, and here are a few ideas to get you started.

A search engine is only a very fast computer with massive drive space managing databases filled with information about your Web site. The intelligence behind the search engine is a program (known as a spider or bot or crawler) written specifically to read all or part of your content (or information that you have submitted) and extract what it thinks is relevant information in order to determine what your Web page is about. The search engine then inserts this extracted information into the database index which is queried when a user submits a search.

What does all this really mean?

1. The search engine may not have accurately summarized your Web site's principle subject matter.
2. The search engine may have emphasized the wrong ideas.
3. The search engine may not have found anything of significant value to index.
4. All search engines are different and may change their criteria for relevance ranking. Consequently, you cannot satisfy all search engines equally.
5. The search engine programs may inadvertently or intentionally delete your Web site from the database, (i.e., do not try to trick them).
6. It can take many weeks to discover your site among the millions of others.
7. It's up to you to code your Web site using techniques that are easily indexed by the search engine.