Introduction – Precisely What Is SEO

Whenever you enter a question in an exceedingly search engine and hit ‘enter’ you get a listing of net results that contain that question term. Users normally tend to go to websites that are at the highest of this list as they understand those to be additional relevant to the question. If you’ve got ever puzzled why a number of these netsites rank higher than the others then you need to apprehend that it’s attributable to a robust web promoting technique known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO may be a technique that helps search engines realize and rank your web site over the ample different sites in response to a probe question. SEO therefore helps you get traffic from search engines.
This SEO tutorial covers all the mandatory data you wish to grasp concerning Search Engine Optimization – what’s it, how will it work and variations within the ranking criteria of major search engines.

1. How Search Engines Work

The first basic truth you wish to grasp to be told SEO is that search engines don’t seem to be humans. whereas this could be obvious for everyone, the variations between how humans and search engines read sites are not. in contrast to humans, search engines are text-driven. though technology advances rapidly, search engines are off from intelligent creatures that may feel the wonder of a cool style or fancy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the online, gazing specific website things (mainly text) to urge an inspiration what a site is concerning. This transient clarification isn’t the foremost precise as a result of as we’ll see next, search engines perform many activities so as to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.
First, search engines crawl the online to envision what’s there. This task is performed by a bit of software, known as a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is that the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to a different and index everything they realize on their approach. Having in mind the quantity of pages on the online (over twenty billion), it’s not possible for a spider to go to a web site daily simply to envision if a brand new page has appeared or if an existing page has been changed, typically crawlers might not find yourself visiting your web site for a month or 2.
What you’ll be able to do is to see what a crawler sees from your web site. As already mentioned, crawlers don’t seem to be humans and that they don’t see pictures, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, thus if you’ve got heaps of these on your web site, you’d higher run the Spider Simulator below to envision if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they’re not viewable, they’re going to not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. – in an exceedingly word they’re going to be non-existent for search engines.
After a page is crawled, following step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in an exceedingly big database, from where it will later be retrieved. primarily, the method of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to specific keywords. For an individual’s it’ll not be potential to method such amounts of data however typically search engines deal simply fine with this task. typically they could not get the that means of a page right however if you facilitate them by optimizing it, it’ll be easier for them to classify your pages properly and for you – to urge higher rankings.
When a probe request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string within the search request with the indexed pages within the database. Since it’s seemingly that quite one page (practically it’s ample pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of every of the pages in its index with the search string.
There are varied algorithms to calculate relevancy. every of those algorithms has completely different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. that’s why completely different search engines provide different search results pages for an equivalent search string. what’s additional, it’s a known incontrovertible fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc. periodically modification their algorithms and if you wish to stay at the highest, you furthermore mght got to adapt your pages to the newest changes. this is often one reason (the different is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you need to be at the highest.
The last step in search engines’ activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it’s nothing quite merely displaying them within the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the foremost relevant to the smallest amount relevant sites.

2. Variations Between the main Search Engines

Although the fundamental principle of operation of all search engines is that the same, the minor variations between them result in major changes in results relevancy. for various search engines various factors are vital. there have been times, when SEO specialists joked that the algorithms of Bing are intentionally created simply the alternative of these of Google. whereas this might need a grain of truth, it’s a matter a incontrovertible fact that the main search engines like completely different stuff and if you propose to beat quite one in every of them, you wish to optimize rigorously.
There are several samples of the variations between search engines. for example, for Yahoo! and Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, whereas for Google links are terribly, important. Also, for Google sites are like wine – the older, the better, whereas Yahoo! typically has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). therefore you would possibly would like longer until your web site gets mature to be admitted to the highest in Google, than in Yahoo!.

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