Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Increase the amount of visitors to a website

  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is all about optimizing a website for search engines. SEO is a technique for:

·        designing and developing a website to rank well in search engine results.

·        improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines.

·        marketing by understanding how search algorithms work, and what human visitors might search.

SEO is a subset of search engine marketing. SEO is also referred as SEO copyrighting, because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines, deal with text.

If you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work.

How Search Engine Works?

Search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results.

·        Crawling - Process of fetching all the web pages linked to a website. This task is performed by a software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, in case of Google).

·        Indexing - Process of creating index for all the fetched web pages and keeping them into a giant database from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords.

·        Processing - When a search request comes, the search engine processes it, i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database.

·       Calculating Relevancy - It is likely that more than one page contains the search string, so the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search string.

·     Retrieving Results - The last step in search engine activities is retrieving the best matched results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser.

Here are a few guidelines that you should keep in mind while designing a web page.

·      You should have more text content than HTML elements.

·      No frames. They are the enemies of search engines, and search engines are enemies of frames.

·       No ads if possible. Because most of the ads use Java-Script which is not advised to be used.

·    No JavaScript. If you need JavaScript, call it from an external file rather than dumping the code in the HTML file. JavaScript drop-down menus prevent spiders from crawling beyond your homepage. If you use them, be sure to include text links at the bottom of the page.

·        Do not put anything in the page topic that does not fit perfectly.

·        No unnecessary directories. Keep your files as close to the root as possible.

·        No fancy stuff (Flash, Splash, Animated Gifs, Rollovers, etc.) unless absolutely necessary.

Here are some considerations while designing the title of a webpage:

·        The title shouldn't consist of more than about 9 words or 60 characters.

·        Use keywords at the very beginning of the title.

·     Do not include your company name in the title unless your company name is very well known.

Why HTML/XHTML Verification is Required?

There are various reasons to verify your website before hosting it over the internet.

·        Any webpage quality depends on how well you have written your webpage.It should be syntactically correct and should pass all the Quality Gates.

·        When any search engine does indexing for your web page content, it might get confused if the HTML tags are not written properly, and much of the web page content might not be indexed properly.

·        There might be many HTML tags, which you are using in your webpage but then have been depreciated and many of the search engines do not support them.

·        Consistency, HTML Code Beauty, Process Compliance are always appreciated by good webmasters.