SEO Basics:

Search Engine Optimization Basics:
- Bhaskar Thakur

Search engines are the doorway to the Internet. They are perceived as ‘independent rating authority’ by most web suffers. Good ranking on search engine drives ‘free, qualified’ traffic to websites.

Search engine optimization ensures accessibility of website to search engines for the desired search terms.

But what are search engines?

Consider Search engines to be the ‘smart’ Yellow pages of the Internet. They collate information about the resources on the Internet and serve them based on the user search. There are three basic types of Search engines:

1. Spider based search engines
2. Human – managed/edited directories
3. Fusion Search engines

Spider based search engines like Google are “algorithms” or “software programs” written to Spider, Index and process results.

Spidering involves traversing the websites with the help of links and recording the content. Indexing result means storing the “data” captured by the spider in a huge database. This data is then ‘organized’ by the Search engine’s logic software. This helps in grading, categorizing and ranking the result based on search engines proprietary algorithm.

Human managed/ edited directories like the Open Directory Project (Dmoz) are managed and edited by human editors. Editors decide the category and the snippet in such directories.

Fusion Search engines use the best of both worlds. They rely partly on the spiders and partly on human editors to build their database.

How do search engines rank websites?

Search engine spiders create giant database with information about the websites on the World Wide Web. Every spider based search engine has a unique algorithm to analyze its database and categorize results. These search engine algorithms consider various on page and off page factors to rank the websites. Rank in simple terms is relative ‘importance’ of a web page in context of the search term. Some of these factors are:

On Page factors:

1. Meta Content
2. Web page theme
3. Keyword density and spread

Off page factors:

1. Back links and link balance
2. Click thru measure

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