SEO in nutshell

Search Engine Optimization is one of the leading technical means that websites could use to ensure that their site appears on the top portion of search results. It acts as a great tool to help websites reach the most portion of the targeted audience that most they intend to reach out to. Search Engine Optimization also known as SEO learns how a search engine operates when ranking websites based on the search query and uses this to maximize the chance that the website gets selected and placed on the top few searches during an enquiry from an Internet User.

The five types of search engine technologies and systems are

1. Crawler Based Search Engines
2. Non-Spidered Indexes
3. Human Powered Directories
4. Pay-Per-click Systems
5. Hybrid Search Sites.

The most predominant one would be the crawler based search engine. Search engines of this sort have a spider or crawler software that visits all the websites, take a note of them and revisit them from time to time and make note of changes.  The Indexing feature then creates a large catalogue with a reference to every page that has been visited by the spider. These pages then are made available to users accessing a search engine when they get indexed into this catalogue. These spiders then follow links found on the website to other web pages. It also uses ranking software that organizes and ranks the results based on the search query made in the search engine.

One must remember that search engines are not human and cannot ask more questions to narrow down the search results and provide the user with the information they are seeking. Thus, they rely heavily on the keywords and phrases that are entered while submitting a query. The search bots then searches and collects the list of sites where they detect a high frequency of these keywords. More preference is also given to sites where these keywords are found in the domain name, titles, and tags and on the top half of the page.

They also use some off the page ranking factors such as link popularity, page importance, page reputation and click through measurement to determine the validity and relevance of the website for the search engine user. These measures are added in so that website developers could not control these factors to cheat the search engine to situate their site on the top portion of the search results, when they in reality do not deserve a top position in search engines.

Some key factors to design search engine friendly pages are to create pages rich with the keywords and key phrases. These keywords must also be located appropriately such as on the top of the webpage, as anchor tags for links, in titles, headings and the domain name.

A very important factor to remember is that images and graphics cannot be indexed by search engine spiders. Search bots are only trained to detect text and text-based links. Therefore, while the use of graphics and images may make the website more appealing to human visitors, they must be accompanied with some text and text based links to be accessible by search engine spiders and to make the website optimized for search engines.

At present, some of the most used and well known search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo and MSN. It would certainly benefit to learn more on how these search engines operate and create optimized websites that could come on top of search results provided by these search engines. The higher the search ranking, the more popular the website gets.