Basics of SEO
A common question among business owners is how to be the first listing in search engine results.
There is not a one and done, quick and easy fix to put websites in the top search result, if there were, everyone would do it.
There are, however, ways we can help get your website ranked higher in the search engines. For instance, we can optimize the HTML code on your webpage to fine-tune it to use stronger keywords and to eliminate barriers to search engine indexing activities.
Furthermore, we can help optimize your title tags and meta tags, and we can give directions on how to get other websites to create external links to yours.
Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is the processes to make your website noticeable in unpaid, organic search engine results.
SEO can also target vertical search engines, which are designed with a specific industry in mind.
Even searches for images or video can be targeted through SEO.
Remember, there are many forms of search engine marketing, or SEM, i.e. paid listings, the higher up and more often your webpage is listed above the organic search results, the more people are likely to see it. We are not downplaying the need for SEM.
Search Engine Bots Differ
SEO must take the capabilities of a search engine into account, and know what individuals look for to be useful internet marketing.
Optimization can involve code and content editing, or publicizing your website to increase the amount inbound links to your page. Let us run your
How to Be Indexed in Search Engines
Bing, Yahoo!, Google, and other popular search engines strengthen their algorithms for search results using crawlers. They also changed and updated their algorithms in order to counteract SEO’s that were aiming to game the system, but that’s for another article.
SEO Keys to successful indexing: If an indexed page, however, has an inbound link to your page then your site is found automatically, and several search engines, such as Yahoo!, (once upon a time) allowed users to pay for guaranteed crawling.
The fee varied, sometimes they charged per click, and other times only a set payment was required. My times have changed from the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project requiring manual user submission.
Now we have Google Webmaster Tools where you can make and submit an XML Sitemap feed for no charge to guarantee that potential customers will see your website, particularly websites that cannot be found by following links.
Google eventually indexes everything, submitted XML sitemaps is a sure way to get it crawled sooner, and indexed more thoroughly.
Same applies to the Bing webmaster tools sitemap submission form.
When crawlers collect data from a webpage, they examine many diverse factors.
Search engines, however, do not necessarily index every webpage. Another factor which determines what webpages are crawled is how far away the webpage is from a website’s root directory.
How to Stop Crawlers
Website managers can direct spiders to circumvent files or directories via the robots exclusion protocol in a domain’s root directory to keep undesirable content out of the search indexes.
Moreover, certain robot-specific meta tags can keep webpages off of a search engine database.
When crawling a website, the first file crawled is the robots exclusion protocol.
Next, the file is parsed, and instructions are provided so the crawlers know whether or not to crawl a webpage. Notably, crawlers sometimes cache copies of the robots exclusion protocol.
As such, there is a possibility that they will crawl a webpage that a website manager does not want crawled. Login specific pages, which contain elements like user-specific content or shopping carts, are usually not crawled.
In the past, Google has stated that website managers should not allow internal search results to be indexed as pages containing those are counted as search spam.
Ways to Increase Organic Website Traffic
There are several ways to go about increasing a website’s prominence in the search results.
If your website contains links to other pages on your site, it will increase its prominence.
Keyword laden content, too, makes your website relevant to many searches, and helps promote your visibility.
Your websites receive more traffic, too, if you include keywords in the title tags and other meta data. Furthermore, use of “canonical” meta tags can increase traffic by ensuring different iterations of the URL still strengthen the page’s popularity.
Conclusion
Search “SEO” in Google or Bing to see how some of the top websites have optimized their content.
While there is no magic bullet to SEO, you can see how others have done it, and made it to the top.
“Guaranteed rankings” is a popular buzzword of less ethical SEO companies, who only will provide a temporary increase in popularity by tricking the various search engines. The issue with this method, though, is that algorithms can be updated to keep spam such as this off the listings, effectively meaning that you misused your hard-earned money.
Our company, however, take the ethical methods of SEO listed above to make your website visible to traffic. We will strengthen your keywords, both in content and titles, and advise how to get other websites to link to yours.
After we work with you, you will see how pouring some time and love into your website, can help raise it up higher in search results than it ever was before.