Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a powerful web marketing process to improve website ranking in order to increase the number of visitors the site receives from search engine. In other words it is a way of optimizing website for various search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Bing. SEO involves writing content and building links.
The purpose of the Search Engines is to help people to find out what they are looking for Search Engine is also known as Information Retrieval System. The architecture of search engine includes spider, crawler, indexer, databases, results engine and web server. Spider is the program that downloads web pages. Then crawler follows each hyperlinks on the web page and gather information for its database. Once the crawler has gathered all the information then indexer analyses elements of the web page such as text, headers, special HTML tags etc. This information is stored in databases. The result engine will then rank the web pages using ranking algorithms for the web pages.
Internet Marketing
Internet Marketing is the process of promotion and distribution of ideas, products and services through online activities. Other terms used for internet marketing are web marketing, online marketing, web advertising, or e-marketing. The importance of Internet marketing strategies has grown with the growth and importance of the Internet as it has the power to connect millions of people from around the world. To maximize potential, every business should have online presence. It includes both direct and indirect marketing response and uses various technologies to help connect businesses to their customers. Internet Marketing is relatively inexpensive way to generate a new business. Goals of internet marketing are:
- Customer retention
- Driving attention to a website, thereby to increase number of visitors
- Brand awareness
Types of Internet Marketing
includes e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing, search engine marketing, social marketing etc.
Display Marketing
This refers to graphical advertisements displayed on other websites or blogs to boost traffic for their own content. It uses eye-catching visuals to grab the attention of website visitors. Examples are web banners, pop-ups, text ads, video ads etc.
Email Marketing
E-mail marketing is the cheapest and most effective way for retailers to Advertise. It is the process of promoting products and services via electronic mail. The purpose of email marketing is to develop relationships with potential customers and/or clients. It can target groups of customer or even an individual in a short period of time.
Affiliate marketing
Many companies pay a commission if a customer coming from your site buys something from theirs. This is known as an affiliate program, because you are serving as an affiliate of the Web site to which you are linking. In other words it is a marketing practice wherein a business pays an online retailer for each visitor or sales that these websites make for their brand. The ways to earn money through affiliate marketing are pay per click, pay per sale and pay per lead.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
It is a process of promoting websites through social media networks such as twitter, facebook, linkedIn, you tube etc. It relies on passing messages along from person to person. The message needs to be cool, outrageous or provide exceptional value to attract attention.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
This type of marketing is the process of promoting a website through paid advertisements that appears on the search engines such as Google, Yahoo. This technique involves paid placements, pay per click advertising, context advertising and paid inclusion or search engine optimization. Paid Placements is the method of buying advertisements and these are listed along the one side of a search engine. Contextual advertising allows your advertising to appear in a pop-up.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is a form of e-marketing, is the process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.
Benefits of Internet Marketing
- Cost-effective
- Fastest
- Target large audience
- Measureable
Importance of Keywords
Keywords are the phrases that web surfer’s type in search engine to get desired websites. Search Engine Optimization relies heavily on use of proper keywords that describes the site’s content. Always choose popular and theme-related keywords to increase website’s visibility in major search engines. Keyword Tool helps in keyword research that involves identifying group of keywords phrases that will be used in optimization. This step is critical and requires considerable amount of time to find a good set of phrases.
Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO is defined as techniques or methods that are performed against the search engine rules for placing website at higher rank. It also known as unethical SEO because it uses wrong or illegal ways of increasing traffic in your website. These methods provide short-term gains in terms of rankings and result in your website being banned from a search engine. For this reason, black hat SEO should not be used, especially if other effective SEO methods out there.
Some Black Hat SEO techniques are keyword stuffing, doorway pages, invisible text, and link farms.
Doorway Pages
These are HTML pages that are visible to only specific search engines and their spiders. These pages contain useless links and keywords. When user clicks on a link he/she is redirected to other web page which is not a site that he is intended to visit. Other names for doorway pages are jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and bridge pages.
Keyword Stuffing
It is a technique of loading long list of commonly searched keywords in Meta tags of a web page. This is done to maximize traffic to the site by raising the site’s ranking in search results, in the hopes of increasing site income. This will lead your site to be penalized by search engines. For example repeating phrases or words which are irrelevant to the content of page.
Invisible Text
This technique involves the text or keywords which visitors cannot see but they are readable by the search engines as these words being created in the same color of the background of the web pages of a website. The purpose of this technique is to attract the attention and interest of the search engines.
Link Farms
A link farm is a collection of web pages that are interlinked to one another. Some webmaster buys unrelated links from other sites to boost a page’s rank. This sort of artificial link building is very transparent, and the search engine crawlers will pick up on it immediately and penalize these web sites.
Types of SEO
On Page SEO
On page SEOrefers to any activities you undertake on the actual page of your web site. This includes optimization of a website’s content, text, Meta tag, heading tags, anchor tags, link title, alt tags, dropdown box, domain name, page name, image name and title name. On-page factors are controlled by coding on website pages.
Domain Names
Before picking up the domain name you should know your target audience. Always use keyword as a part of domain name.
Content
The content of web page should be unique and well written that will focus on primary keywords.
Meta title
This is an important tag for optimizing ranking and must contain keywords. Title should be attractive and easy to understand. It can contain maximum of 60 to 80 characters including spacebar (only for Google) and Yahoo and MSN use 100 to 120 Characters with space.
Description Meta tag
Description tag includes page description. It must be written in dynamic and promotional language. It can contain from 120 – 150 characters with spacebar.
Keyword Meta tag
It is used to specify important keywords. These keywords should best describe what surfers are searching for. You can specify maximum of 20 keywords.
Alt tags
Alt tags are alternative names for images. Most of the sites contain images and it is advisable to include alt tags for all these images to make site search engine friendly.
H1 and H2 Heading Tags
Including headings with h1 and h2 tags in your source code will enhance your ranking and it makes our site more readable and easy to navigate.
Off Page SEO
Off Page SEO refers to outside of your own web pages to increase their rankings in the search engines. It is all about getting traffic to the site by way of article submission, directory submission, backlinks, forums posting, blog posting, blog commenting, press release, social networking. It requires a lot of work on daily basis.
Directory Submission
It is the process of submitting details of your website to internet directories or web directories. Use important keywords as titles for your directory submission. Manual directory submission is the best way to submit to directories as in this your website is submitted to every directory manually. Always try to avoid automated submissions.
Article Submission
It refers to writing article for websites or for your online business to get backlinks and visitors. It is important that the content of the article should be original, relevant to your website and written with proper keywords. The user can submit their articles to the article directories. A good article must include title, summary (short description), and keywords, about author.
Social Bookmarking
Any time you tag a website or save it for later use, you are participating in social bookmarking. For this instead of saving the link in your browser, you are saving it on the web where it can be shared with others. Social bookmarking and social news allow you to specifically target what you want to see.
Forum Posting
Forum is a place of discussion where people can post their queries and share their views with other members. It is a wonderful way to interact as well as receive information and also not to forget, it helps in building a relationship. If you promote your link too much and contribute little you may be at a risk to getting banned from forum. If forum posting is done the right way then it can drive targeted traffic to a website.
Guest Posting
Guest posting is a type of content posting that’s done on another blog or website. It is considered as one of the best way to build your brand and site popularity. It also helps in grow relationships with other blog readers, and increase traffic for their own blogs.
Press Releas
It is a way of delivering news of events that are taking place within a company. These press releases can get published on hundreds of different websites. It provides your website with important backlinks that will help boost its position in the search engine rankings.
Conclusion
SEO is an online marketing process and most cost effective way to target your visitors. SEO improves brand awareness and dominate your competition, broaden market share. Black Hat SEO techniques should never be used as these will result in your website being banned from a search engine. As long as there are websites, need for SEO exists.
A Presentation on slideshare
Indexing and working process of search engine
Indexing and working process of search engine from ADMEC Multimedia Institute
