Search Engine optimization is commonly called SEO. This process involves having your website rank good on natural search results. This is also known as organic search results. It simply makes the website friendly to the search engines. The main goal of SEO is that your website is on the first page in the top position of the natural search results. Search Engine Optimization requires specific tasks that you need to complete to get the rankings you desire to get your web pages to return results from the search engines.
If you are new to this process, you probably have many questions about why your website should be optimized for search engines. Let’s start by explaining Search Engines, and give you the knowledge that you need to succeed.
Search Engines: What Are They?
The type of search engines that we are explaining in this situation, are web search engines. These search engines are used for looking up information on the World Wide Web. We type in terms or sentences that explain what we are searching for into the engine and it will give a bunch of results to choose from. These results are information that is related to what we had searched for. The results will include web
pages, files, video, and even images.
There are certain things that need to occur before these results can be brought up. The search engines need to already have this information in their database. The information that is put together is done by programs that browse web pages on the World Wide Web automatically. The programs mentioned above are named spiders, bots, or web crawlers. These programs analyze web page content by using algorithms. The data that is received is then stored in the index database of the search engine When we conduct a web search, the search engine looks into its index database for information that best match what we are looking for, and displays them on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
3 Major Search Engines Today:
The three most commonly used are Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Google is the most common. It has by far the biggest market share and around 91% was shown in the end of the year 2010. That stat was concluded by the Stat Counter global Stats. The search engine named Google is owned by the company Google Inc. Google was founded Sergey Brin and Larry Page in the year 1998. It then became a corporation that was publically known in the year 2004.
Yahoo had a 4 % market share near the ending of 2010. It is the second commonly used search engine on the web today. It was founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang in 1994 and is owned by Yahoo Inc. It was incorporated in the year 1995. In the middle of the year 2009, Yahoo and Microsoft told the world that Bing will start to power Yahoo Search. The change to Bing has been seen in Canada and also the USA.
Bing, that was known in the past as Windows Live Search, MSN Search, and Live Search is Microsoft owned. This search engine was launched in the year 2009 and had around a 3 % market share in the end of the year 2010. This was also noted by Stat Counter Global Stats. The move of Yahoo Search to Bing is known to be completed by the year 2012; which means it will be worldwide.
Search Engine Optimization: The Beginning
The beginning of SEO started around the middle of the 1900’s. This occurred when webmasters discovered the potential value of having web pages show up on results that were being search for. They started sending URLs to the engines, which made their pages be able to be indexed. The name itself, Search Engine Optimization was first heard of and put to use in 1997. It was on the Multimedia Marketing Group website.
The early search engines relied on keyword density and keyword meta tags, and thus it was easy to manipulate rankings. You simply had to put the targeted keywords into the meta tags and insert those keywords lots of times into the content of webpages. This was great optimization
for the search engines.. This process was not good for user experience, and that is why measures were taken to keep this type of manipulation from occurring on search engines.
In the year 2004, there were many undisclosed factors put into ranking algorithms to help decrease manipulation. Google, Yahoo, and Bing; being the top search engines do not like to disclose the factors used in the algorithms that they use to help rank web pages. Google, says that they rank their web pages by the use of over 200 various factors.
SEO: Why Do It?
Webmasters learned that when they had their web pages show up on the top of the search results. The higher that the results were; the better. You may be wondering what the value is that they saw; well let me explain.
The more visible and higher ranked that web pages are; the more traffic that they get. The more traffic that a page gets also means more chances to make sales of, affiliate sites, advertisement, and many other things.
Factors of SEO:
Two types of factors that impact Search Engine Optimization. They are named On-Page SEO Factors, and Off-Page SEO factors.
On-Page SEO factors are mostly defined by keyword density, headings, links, and Meta tags that are on a webpage. They also look for site structure. SEO was typically about getting targeted keywords onto a page and place your keywords in for good rankings.
Off-Page SEO factors are external links and are currently more vital than the On-Page SEO factors. The links that come from other sites are crucial when ranking good on the search engine results pages. The quality and quantity of the links that are going towards a site and what they contain is what the algorithms look for when they are ranking web pages. It is important to get high quality sites to link to your sites.
The algorithms have grown up since then and realized that keyword density does not have as much value. The content on a web page must be high quality and well written. The keyword that is targeted should be in the content but not overdone without keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is now a thing of the past and will be reported as spam on the web.