Search
Engine Optimization by XSEO
There
are essentially two types of search engine: those driven by automatic "spiders",
and those operated by human editors. In practice many of the listing companies
use a combination of the two techniques.
Automatic
engines- spiders have a limited amount of intelligence which allows them to
judge the relevance of a page for a particular search criterion. They're also
able to recognise - and delist - certain of the more obvious tricks. This helps
the search engine companies to avoid sending hits to sites that are trying to
gain traffic that isn't relevant to the search word. Human operators visit hundreds
of sites daily, making judgments in a few seconds of what the site's about.
Directories- Yahoo is the best known of this type of directory; like
most systems of this type, Yahoo also receives input from spiders. Web site optimisation
is the process of making a site easily understood by the spider or the editor.
A carefully judged weighting is given to certain keywords to achieve a listing
under relevant searches.
People
often get confused with the different types of search engines. When it comes to
optimisation the only benefit is to those engines that use spiders to interpret
a sites content and standing.
Setting
up your site to attract listings in the search engines for keywords that no-one
actually uses as a search term is a singularly pointless exercise. But there's
no point trying to grab hits that aren't relevant to your site content either.
In fact the search engines are looking to identify such practices. Everyone wants
to be at the top of the search engines, the Internet and search engines appear
to be a quick and easy way of expand your "widget bunching" business,
but unless your site is identified as being "authoritative" for widget
bunching (according to the search engines) the chances of being anywhere in the
top listing for something meaningful are remote. In fact the same applies to the
visitors, it is widely accepted that if your web site cannot deliver its relevance
to the search with in 8 seconds the next hit the visitor will make will be the
Back button.
Judging
by the number of unsolicited e-mails promising extra traffic, the process of search
engine optimisation must be easy. The fact is that optimisation is very straight
forward. The difficulty is that as web technology evolves the search engines are
behind the times, meaning that they often struggle to penetrate a site fully and
read all its content.
As
stated earlier optimisation for the engines as about being "authoritative"
on a given subject. Long gone are the days when you could influence a sites listing
solely by putting in extra text, or playing with meta code. We estimate that Google
uses something between 150 and 200 different elements to assess a sites relevancy.
So for the best chance of optimising for the top terms you have to identify "right
boxes to tick" and tick them.
Page
Rank- at one time Page Rank was seen to be the definitive signature of an authoritative
site. Whilst having a page rank of less than 3 would make a page score only for
low competition terms, a page rank of 8 or 9 does not guarantee a top listing;
see page
rank explained
However
low competition terms are quite often very easy to get with little optimisation,
just good practice web design. Playing
with site content is only half the battle when it comes to optimisation
for hi competition terms. In fact this is where the whole process of optimisation
moves into a new area. For example you'd have thought that to be at the top of
a search engine if you have optimised for it with all the right keyphrases, in
all the right places you'd stand a chance on a high competition term. Yes and
no. No because how is it site can appear top in the search engines without having
the search term in it?
Example;
the search term"exit" Google
has listed 38million sites that fulfill the search. But why does Yahoo, Disney,
Crayola and Google come top when none of them has optimised for the word "exit",
have no interest in being found for the word "exit and do not have the word
"exit" in them?
This
shows that there are other elements that influence a sites standing in the search
engines, and that optimisation of the text on a page doesn't necessarily "tick
all the boxes" and get top placement in search engines for highly used terms.
There
are optimisation programs that appear to do it all for you. There are companies
that will quote a standard price, there are even companies that guarantee search
engine listings. The bottom line is that there are too many variables in the optimisation
process for these to work effectively.
Keyword
density- So
do you tweak your pages every time there's a change in search engine practice?
If you like, but bear in mind that you won't see the results of your optimisation
for four to six weeks, so how do you tell if you were successful? SEO does work,
and it will bring more traffic to your site. But there's no substitute for knowledge
and the capacity for hard work.
Keyphrase
competition- Every market sector every search term has a unique level of competition.
Some keyphases may have a lot of competition and the players in the market may
be optimising
their sites for top results
very aggressively .
Web
site structures- are very different, some sites by the way they are built
are not search engine friendly. Typically search engines still struggle to penetrate
dynamic sites. As a result the site will appear to be a single page, in this case
it doesn't matter how much page optimisation you do how can a perceived single
page site be "authoritative"?
It
has got so that many of the search engines look for dubious optimisation techniques.
It wasn't until a recent visit to Microsoft, Seattle as one of the MSN Search
Champs that we realised just how passionate search engines feel about the "dirty
tricks" played by poor SEOs. Google and Yahoo are no doubt the same, they
have whole departments dedicated to anti-optimisation known as SPAM. Spam departments
are continually trying to identify the tricks that result in sites being awarded
top listings and develop filters that negate the use of cloaking, hidden text,
gateways, redirects and even more recently reciprocal links and even linking to
the wrong sort of "neighbours" can be detrimental to your site.
All
this is coming round to the fact that every web site presents its own problems
when it comes to the process of optimisation. Therefore the amount of work required
to attain a top search engine position is also unique. At this point you may start
to think that this all sounds a little complicated and time consuming. The bad
news is that it is. Many of the "too good to be true" programs, or SEOs
offering to attain high search engine listings cheaply without developing a unique
strategy, generally are exactly that.
There are few tricks involved, other than being
"on the case" and ready to innovate and put in the commitment to delivering the
result.
When a page has been optimised, it's submitted to the search engines for
evaluation and - hopefully - a high level listing. This last part of the process
is a question of finely judged timing - The XSEO approach to all this is offer
the search engines what they're looking for: clearly understandable pages that
can be easily classified by humans or spiders. Inevitably, there are a few tricks
of the trade that we use, but they're designed to help the search engine, not
fool it.
find
out more about search engine optimisation...
