What is Search Engine Optimisation?
Posted by Administrator (boyd) on Jul 22 2008 at 12:00 AM
Website design and development blog >> Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation is the process of modifying your website to push it as close as possible to the top of the results pages of one or more search engines.

This e-book is written for the small business owner, but will be useful for any one looking for a simple explanation of Search Engine Optimisation, how a Search Engine Works, and how to get your website listed and moving up the Search Engine rankings. The information in the following article deals only with the “Natural Search Results” often referred to as “Organic Search Results”. It has no relevance for Pay Per Click or Sponsored listings.

What does a Search Engine do?

A search engine finds the most relevant results from its data base, in response to a user's search.

Here is a simple breakdown of what search engines do all day.

1. Spidering. This is the term used to describe the research phase of a search engine's cycle. It visits your website and reads some or all of the pages. Based on the information it gathers, your website will be grouped with similar sites in its data base. So if your website is about gardens, it will be stored with all the other websites about gardens.

2. Calculating Page Rank. When the search engine has your website indexed, (in the data base) it assigns level of importance to the pages within the site and the site as a whole. Google calls this Page Rank. Other search engines have different names for this measurement. The more reputable the search engine deems your website, the higher the Page Rank.

3. Search Results. When a user starts a search in the engine, it will consult its data base to find the best result. It looks at relevance of the words on your pages, and the Page Rank to find the best matched results from the most reputable web sites.

These results appear in the “natural” results in the search engines results page. (As opposed to the Sponsored results.)

More on relevance and Page Rank

Relevance is essentially a factor of how closely the text in a given web page matches the search term entered by the user. For example, imagine that a user searches the term: “Rose Garden”. If you have web pages about caring for your garden, pruning trees, planting bulbs, etc etc... your website will probably appear in the results somewhere.

However, if you have a page that is specifically optimised for the term “Rose Garden” and perhaps has an article that specifically deals with “Caring for a rose garden”, your web page will appear much closer to the top of the results.

Page Rank is a popularity or reputation score. It is mainly calculated by counting the number of incoming links to a particular page. If a page has 100 incoming links, it will have a higher Page Rank than a page with 10
incoming links.

The equation is made more complicated by the fact that the Page Rank of each incoming link is also taken into account, so a link from website “A” might be worth 100 times that of a link from website “B”.

Other factors that contribute to your Page Rank include,

• Size (number of web pages)
• Amount of content
• Type of content
• Link structure
• Outbound links.

to be continued...

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