Search Engine Optimization

SEO-Introduction

Internet has become a powerful marketing source for the benefit of mankind. Many websites are available in the internet, fulfilling various purposes. These websites need to be in the top rankings in the search engines to maintain its popularity and to increase the volume of traffic to the site. Search Engine optimization (SEO) serves the above purpose. If the pages of the website are optimized with high targeted key words, the rank of the site increases. Higher the rank, higher is the amount of visitors to the site.

Maintenance of Ranks:
Search engine Optimization involves a number of techniques to increase the ranking and sales of the website through search engines. Some of the points to be noted for Search engine optimization are,

Keywords: The web pages should be rich in content, communicative and item-specific. The web pages should contain the highly specific keywords which are frequently searched by the users. This helps to increase the position of the website in the search engine. For optimization purpose, the pages should be checked with keyword density analyzers.

Link Popularity: The links in the website is marked factor which decides the ranking of the website. The number of incoming links which conjoin to various files, directories, keywords and also to other sites is called as link popularity.

Good Content: The content of the website should be periodically updated so that it becomes alive and effective. The website should contain good content for the visitors to use it efficiently. Also, the content’s flow throughout the page should be relevant. Thus clarity and relevancy are the key points to be noted for search engine optimization.

Pay Per Click: Another method of increasing the website’s popularity is pay per click advertisements. According to this method, the website owner maintains an agreement with the search engine on a specific keyword. Every time when a user clicks the keyword, the owner is supposed to pay a specific amount mentioned in the agreement. Thus the ranking of the site is increased followed by good volume of traffic.

Accordant Title Tags: Relevant title tags and meta tags should be given to the web page for user convenience. The title tags should be shorter in length with 6-8 words and should not be too critical to analyze. The description tag is also required to describe briefly the content of the web page. Readability will also increase the number of visitors to the site.

Web Design Factors:
The factors involving web site design also affects the ranking of the website. Some of them are;

Frames: Certain search engines are not compatible using frames. For the website which uses frames, they should also use NOFRAMES section in each page to avoid the above said backward compatibility of certain search engines.

Better Indexing: Avoiding graphics in the web pages containing keywords will help in better indexing of the search engines. If the html code is less, then the search engine can access it faster and easier. Search engines are not comfortable with the pages which are more than 100 Kbps.

Things to be Avoided: Flash should be avoided in a web page since it takes more time to explain a single concept and also to load. PDF s should be avoided since there is no summary of the concept in the HTML. This reduces the ranking of the website. Frames also should be avoided.

It is better to create the website with the following guidelines rather than to alter it depending upon the consequences. Thus, care should be taken to during creation and maintenance of the website to place it in the higher position of the search engine.