Search Engine Optimization Explained

During the last few months I was involved in the process of Search Engine Optimization for our company. During this period I learned a lot about search engine optimization specially for google. I am writing this article to share my knowledge with anyone who is going to do the same thing.

How Google Search engine works

Before going into the Search Engine Optimization you should first know how the search engine works and then try to optimize your site for that.

No one knows exactly how google works. The brain behind their search engine is the major Intellectual property and competitive advantage of google. Also they are regularly change and optimize their algorithm to pick up abusers. What everyone can do is just guess.

I try to explain overall algorithm briefly without going too much in details. Then I will give you some hints about how you should tackle your Search Engine Optimization campaign.

When you search for something on google, google put two different factors together to return the result:

• Page Rank
• Page Relevancy

What is google Page Rank

Google is ranking pages on the Internet. If you download the Google Toolbar you will be able to see the google page rank in your browser. Page Rank is an indication of your page reputation in the virtual world regardless of the search phrase.
Page Rank is identified by number of pages referring to your page. More pages linking to your site, higher the page ranking will be. I don't want to go into deep mathematical formula but the rule of thumb is more link you have to your pages, higher ranking you will get.

Link from a page with high ranking will have more effect on lifting your page ranking. It has exponential effect for example a link from a page with ranking 7/10 may worth equal to thousand links from pages with ranking 4 or 3. The logic behind this is that a link from a page with high reputation (Page Rank) more likely to point to a useful information. .

How to organize your SEO campaign for higher page rank

Before going into more details I have some suggestions for your SEO project:

• Play fair: There are many people out there who are try to deceive search engines in many different ways and search engine providers try to pick them up in automatic and manual ways. I think this war will continue for a long period of time. I don't suggest anyone to go into this path. Theses techniques are not fair and very likely to be picked up. If google pick you up, they will drop you from their search engine for a long long time.

• Be patient:Creating reputation and high ranking in search engines is like creating a new brand. It takes time to create reputation and high ranking for your site. So don't expect a one night change it may take you years to come to the first page of search result in google.

• Nothing worth than Valuable information: What search engines are doing (and of course doing it well) is finding valuable relevant information. So the best way to create a high ranked website is providing valuable information which you are regularly maintained and updated. SEO is just gives you the boost and increase the efficiency. So the first think that you should think of is what can we provide in our website that mean to someone.

If you want to get high page ranking I suggest you to provide lots of useful information on your site and let the community and search engines do their job. If your information is useful, then people will start to give link to your website and then search engines will pick that up and it will lift your web site ranking. My suggestions are:

• One of the other parameters that google use for website ranking is the age or your domain. So register your domain as soon as possible.

• Ask your partners, friends and customers to put a link to you website in their website.

• Try to write an article for an online journal to get link from them.

• Number of pages in your website is an important factor so try to split your long pages into more smaller pages.

• Ask your staff to put link to your website when they are writing in online discussion forums.

• Try to provide support for the online community related to your field of expertise. You will get huge amount of links from them in a long-term.

Page Relevancy

The other important factor for google is the page relevancy of your page to the search phrase. The relevancy of the page is determined from different factors:

• Is the search phrase appeared in the page: For example if you search for Search Engine Optimization on google, the relevancy of pages that have “Search Engine Optimization” phrase will get higher relevancy than pages that have these words but not as a phrase.

• Location of the phrase in the text: If the phrase appeared in header, title,url or in bold format, it will more likely to be related to the search than a text that appear in the document.

• How many times the phrase appeared in the text: more time the text appear in the text, more likely that text be relevant to the search. For example if you search this document for “Search Engine Optimization” you will find it appears many times in the document. It has not happened by accident;)

• The Name of the links from other websites to your website: This is a very important factor to determining the relevancy of your site to specific search phrase. For example if your site have a link with the text SEO, this will increase the relevancy of your website to SEO.

How to increase your website relevancy for specific phrase

• Pick the phrases that you want to get high ranking for: this is the first and most important factor. You should find keywords that more likely to be searched for and then try to optimize your website for those keyword. There are some softwares on the market to help you to view the search engines statistics about keywords.

• Optimize your website for the selected keywords: For example if your selected keyword is Search Engine Optimization, this world should be part of your page title and header. Also it should be repeated in the text frequently. Of course don't overuse your keyword google will pick that up and penalize your for that.

• Make sure that link names to your website comply with your selected keywords: you can find the links to your website on google with search phrase: link:<yourwebsite> then you can find the links to your website. Remember that links inside the text are more important than isolated texts. Update your profile on your partners website to comply with that. For example if we have a SEO company the following profile:

My Company: My company is specialized in providing Search Engine optimization for small company.

Should be changed to:

My Company: In My Company we are providing specialized Search Engine Optimization for small companies.

Conclusion

What search engines are doing (and of course doing it well) is finding valuable relevant information. So the best way to create a high ranked website is providing valuable information which you are regularly maintained and updated. In this article I described some techniques to boost your ranking in the web site. But never overlook the fact that you should provide useful information in your website and then expect to get high ranking.