Introduction to SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Refer SEO series (list of articles) here

One of the best things of writing a blog is that one constantly learns and upgrades his knowledge.
Knowledge also grows, when people share their experiences.

Today's article is an introduction to SEO (Search engine optimization). It will be the first of the many articles I intend to write on this topic as I learn more on SEO.

Also, I intend to use all of the best practices that I learn in this article (and obviously in the future).

So, what is SEO (search engine optimization)?
At its most basic, "SEO" means trying to get your site as high up as possible on search result pages.
This generally means more traffic to your site.
One can define it as a process of trying to make a website appear in a high position when users conduct a search with keywords.

In upcoming articles, I may go into more details, but to explain in basic terms:
Search engines have two major functions:

• Crawling and indexing documents, articles, images etc
• Return search results with max relevancy and importance (popular)

SEO techniques provide ways that search engines can crawl the site and the site comes up in the search results.

So, how do we go about it? As mentioned, this is an introductory article and we shall have more detailed articles in the future.

Keywords
One should be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of his/her site:

• Titles
• Content
• URLs
• Images

Users search based on keywords, and hence keywords, if indexed by search engines, will help to increase a site's relevancy and popularity.
The title tag and page header are the two most important spots to put keywords.
Description meta tag gives the search engine a summary of what the page is all about.
Ensure title tag text also appears in the body of the page.

Note: Be judicious in your usage of keywords. If you overdo the number of keywords, you risk your site to be labelled as SPAM by the crawlers/spiders.
Will briefly touch more about this topic when we discuss on SPAM.

Internal Links:
Linking related pages within your site is an easy way to boost traffic to individual pages.
Links also make it easier for the crawlers to crawl through your page.
Make the anchor text search-engine-friendly -- keywords linking pages will add to the index and show up in users search results.

Sitemap:
Create a sitemap (a page listing and linking to all the other major pages on your site).
It makes it easier for spiders to search your site.

Learn more about sitemaps here

Avoid Flash
Avoid using Flash. Avoid Frames and AJAX.
However, if you do use, place text and links around it.

Images and the ALT tag
Crawlers/Spiders crawl though text data. They do not crawl within images (jpg, png etc).
Thus, one needs to ensure that if images are used, the ALT text has a keywords in the description.
This is something that I need to start doing and I will report back on the improvements.

Content
It will help if the content is updated frequently.

Role of Social media
Social media plays an important role in SEO. If there are popular websites which have links to your sites, there is an increased probability for users to click and get redirected to your site.

Kindly note that I am not suggesting that one should SPAM other sites and put in their website links. There is a mutual understanding to help each other and have links to popular sites (as well as have links to your site within the popular sites).

I have pages that I don't want to be crawled.
If you have a specific requirement to avoid crawling of specific pages (typically some internal only pages), one can instruct crawlers/spiders to NOT crawl those URLs (via robots.txt).

• When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled.
• The robots.txt file is then parsed, and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled.
• This file may be cached, and hence you sometime may see some pages crawled that you did not want to be crawled.
• Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots.

SEO Techniques:We will try to give a brief introduction to SPAMming via SEO.
Note that the below is just an introduction and we will have follow up articles on the same soon.

SEO techniques can broadly be classified into two types:

• White hat
• Black hat

An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception.
The techniques mentioned above are part of white hat technique.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception like:

• Hidden text (either as text colored similar to the background or invisible div tag)
• Providing different page for user based searches and machine based searches (Cloaking)
• SPAMdexing

Cloaking:

• Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser.
• This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page.
• When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page
• The purpose of cloaking is sometimes to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed
• They try to trick search engines into giving the relevant site a higher ranking.

SPAMdexing

• SPAMdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. Some phrases or keywords are repeated deliberately to manipulate the relevance of the page.
• SPAMdexing techiniques are broadly classified into

• Content SPAM

• Keyword stuffing involves the calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count and make a page appear to be relevant for a web crawler.
• Doorway pages are low-quality web pages created with very little content, but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. They are designed to rank highly within the search results.

• Link SPAM

• Link spam takes advantage of link-based ranking algorithms, which gives websites higher rankings
• A spammer may create multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other, such as fake blogs (known as spam blogs).

Refer SEO series (list of articles) here