Wednesday 28 September 2011

What is Search Engine Optimization


Search engine optimization, SEO, simply means optimizing a website to search engines criteria. It is a process of manipulating aspects of a website or choosing targeted keyword phrases to improve ranking of the website on the search engines.

Optimization is mainly done to make the pages of the websites readable to search engines and potential internet visitors. Search engines use ‘spiders’ and ‘crawlers’, normally termed as search engine robots, to visit various websites and index the information on those pages. This indexing further helps in ranking the website on the basis of targeted keywords, its popularity and the quality of the content. The ranking also depends on the page design, page structure, length of the article and even the codes that are used to build the pages.

Apart from finding the relevant keywords for the articles, it is also important to maintain a word count of minimum 200 words and a maximum length of 100 kb for easy optimization. Too short articles are usually penalized by the search engines robots and too long articles are given up because they require much longer time to download. Search engines usually prefer CSS layouts, so it is always beneficial to have CSS based websites. Titles of the pages also play a major role in ranking and the robots offer higher ranks to pages with meaningful titles that adequately describe the content of those pages. Most of the search engines also give importance to headings, sub headings and a descriptive text link to some meaningful website or page.

Every website owner dreams to have a higher search engine ranking and if done correctly nothing can stop a website from competing and reaching the peak.