The essence of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) shows major search engines that your website is better quality than that of other competing websites. When webmasters apply SEO to their websites, they need to be aware that the ranking and evaluation of their website is not done by people, but by specialized software machines that constantly scan the internet, re-evaluating existing sites, finding new ones, and ranking your website accordingly to other relevant websites.
People use search engine all the time for one simple purpose, the search for information. If your website has it, then it’ll be noticed without a doubt. But what if you have the information but your website is still goes by unnoticed? Well, it’s probably because you don’t have quality content. Or your content is in a format on the web that is unreadable to those major search engines that you hope to get noticed on.
There are two approaches to SEO, white hat SEO, and black hat SEO. White hat SEO is basically acknowledging the quality criteria that a search engine sets and delivering your content and structure accordingly, while on the other hand black hat SEO depends on technological approaches only, neglecting the key factor of peoples desire, information.
To mention a few good practices that one can do to help in getting you noticed quickly (and not to mention ever lasting results, rather than those spikes of traffic that flat lines again after a week.)
• Content: ensure that its readable by software, i.e. not in binary form (flash) or articles scanned and added to your site as a picture; search engines can’t read those (at least not yet). Ensure that your pages are COMPLETELY free from grammatical and spelling mistakes. Use a thesaurus, if for example; you’re a real estate company and in your text you are talking about “properties in Cairo”, it would also be a good practice to include in there somewhere else down the line “real estate in Cairo”, as people know that properties and real estate are the same thing, but search engine robots don’t.
• Links: if many websites tend to link to your website, this will indicate to the search engine that the Internet community is actually voting for that your website is a good resource in what it contains of information.
• Meta-tags: ensure that you have as many of these as possible, insert quality keywords and description to each page here and ensure that its correct and constant.
• Size: larger websites are usually ranked higher than smaller ones, the logic behind that is, a website with a thousand pages can be considered a reference in its category of sites (e.g.: a university website that has all scholastic studies and thesis’ online compared to one scientist who’s researches and findings are limited to his own capacity).
• Clean code: always clean up your pages from hidden or commented text that can include completely irrelevant keywords to what is actually on the page at the moment. Also write alternative text for all those images that have meaning, either an image that contains a title you don’t to remove, or a picture that has some meaning that adds to the content around it.
Theses are of course just a few of the hundreds of different criteria that you can find available at any search engine terms of service (TOS) agreement, a good knowledge of these criteria is always the best way to obtain good rankings in those various search engines.
