03 November 2012

Optimizing Your Web Site

By Roger Frost


As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users.

Finding out where your site ranks in Google can be tricky. There are many websites that claim that they can tell you where your page shows up in Google search results for your keyword phrase, but most of these sites are unreliable and produce questionable results.

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to each page's content. Using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable, however, because the webmaster's choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site's actual content. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelevant searches

Google Panda refers to the changes introduced in 2011 to the search algorithm used by Google to improve Internet search results. The change aims to lower the rank of "low-quality sites" in search results and return high-quality sites to Google's users. CNET reported a surge in the rankings of news websites and social Networking sites, and a drop in rankings for advertising sites. This change reportedly affected the rankings of almost 12 percent of all search results.

Google Panda was built through an algorithm update that used artificial intelligence in a more sophisticated and scalable way than previously possible. Human quality testers rated thousands of websites based on measures of quality, including design, trustworthiness, speed and whether or not they would return to the website.




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