Evolution of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Evolution of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Searches on Your Hard Drive
If you have ever utilized a search feature on your computer or word processing software, you know the process is fairly simple; you enter a word or phrase at the prompt and the software looks throughout the hard drive or the document for the word or phrase you entered.

Searches on a Search Engine
Using a search engine such as All the Web, Alta Vista, Google, or Yahoo, among others, you can get similar search results as you did searching documents on your own computer, but the results that contain your search criteria are for web pages on the Internet.

Search Engines Defined
Essentially, a search engine is a set of computer programs used by search engine companies to generate an index or database of websites that likely match the search criteria entered.

How Search Engines Work
Simply put, search engines use computer programs, commonly referred to as ?spiders? or web crawlers that literally ?crawl? throughout the complex circuit of web pages across the entire Internet, logging the content on each page and following the links associated with those pages.

The information is then placed into databases. When queried on the search engine, they will generate a list, index or ?library? of relevant websites, based on the search term and the search engine company?s algorithms. The algorithms created by the individual search engine companies rate each web page?s importance by its content and relevance. The value they place on the various words and phrases contained on a page determine where that page will show up in the ranked results.

What are Links?
A hypertext link is a link on a website which identifies a website address and enables a direct connection from that webpage to another. In most cases, the link?s address is highlighted or underlined, so website visitors will know to click or follow the link to another page on that site, or another site altogether. Photos oftentimes have links associated with them.

Link Relevance
With the advent of the Internet, computers branched out and linked to related computers in the network. The original concept of the World Wide Web was that web pages connected via hyperlinks to one another would be related in some way. For example, on a website about ?speech writing?, there could be links leading to relevant websites containing books on writing or public speaking, or the site might provide links to various speaking schools, associations, or a speakers bureau, etc.

One important factor in determining relevance is the number and quality of related web sites that link to a particular web site. Over time, many unscrupulous websites created ?link farms? whereby anyone could post a series of unrelated links to a website, hoping to cross-link their sites en mass to add perceived value in search engine rankings. This resulted in corruption of the library of information that the search engine spiders had gleaned.

After link farms came ?familiar link listings? for all of a website owner?s friends, family, et al. Businesses did favors for business associates, linking to their associates? unrelated business sites from their own business sites. The links to other sites then became less relevant in search engine rankings.

Following came abusers, who basically generated websites that would fare well in search results only because of repetitive keyword usage throughout the pages. Visitors to those types of sites saw only keywords sprinkled unnecessarily throughout the page, but no relevant content, further corrupting the relevance of the search queries. In the end, links to other sites then became less relevant in search engine rankings.

To provide better quality search results, most of the search engines have incorporated complex subroutines or filters into their algorithms that filter out sites with link farms, non-relevant links, duplicate content, hidden text, hidden links, gateway or doorway pages and use many other factors, which detract from the quality of their search results.

Search engines must constantly adjust their algorithms in order to rank websites by perceived authority, relevance and validity to weed out the sites that do not contain relevant information based on the search criteria. As a result, search engine optimization is a constantly changing and rapidly evolving area.

SEO = Search Engine Optimization
Simply defined, SEO is the process of determining relevant keywords and phrases as they relate to a website, crafting the visible content of a web page to highlight those words and phrases in search engine friendly ways, and adding those specific words and phrases to the title, keywords and descriptions in a website?s metatags which the search engines read and in turn, add to their databases.

What is Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing firms promote websites in a variety of ways including advertising, link building, press releases, registering the website in various directories or in second and third tier search engines. Their ultimate goal is to ensure that the website places well in the search results for related keywords and phrases for that website, just like an SEO firm does.

What to Look for in an SEO or Internet Marketing Firm
There is a growing niche of consultants and firms who specialize in search engine optimization but not all SEO?s have the same level of expertise, specialties or standards of service.

If a company offers to “submit your site to 8000 search engines for $xxx.xx” be sure to run in the opposite direction as fast as you can. If they discuss their expertise at ?fooling? the search engines, creating doorway pages, cloaking, etc., you should quickly lose their phone number. If they guarantee you any position in the search engines, it is likely that plan on using an obscure four-word phrase that no one searches for. The major search engines advise that no company can guarantee placement. If they do, they are not providing acceptable services.

Some SEO companies will simply market client websites to a variety of search engines, charging the website owner a monthly fee to ensure that the website is found in search engine databases. Most of the ?work? by these SEO firms simply consists of utilizing an automated mass marketing software tool to repeatedly register a site to a number of search engines. Use of the program ensures the SEO?s ?marketing efforts? will produce evidence of placement on search engines for a limited search term and for an extremely limited time. They then report proof of search engine placement to the client who then justifies the expense based on that ?factual? report of the SEO?s marketing efforts. The SEO in essence does not provide optimization services to the client and lets the computer do all the ?work.? This type of SEO does not serve the client?s best interest and will seldom produce favorable results.

Be aware that search engine spiders will eventually find every website on the Internet, even poorly designed, non-optimized and those lacking in relevant keywords compared to their site content. The key to effective SEO does not lie entirely on search engine listings, to the surprise of many. If mass-marketing tools were all that was needed to effectively market a website, SEO’s would be out of business in a heartbeat. Fortunately for the successful SEO and Internet Marketing companies, there is more to SEO than meets the eye and their jobs will be secure long into the future.

Remember this: A non-optimized website that shows up ?somewhere? in search results may never be found due to its unfavorable ranking. In that case, ranking “somewhere? may as well equate to ranking nowhere.

On Google, for instance, the search term ?speech writing? yielded 26,400,000 results as of this posting. The list of web page results displays ten related sites per page.

If a site is poorly optimized for the phrase speech writing, it may actually show up in the results ?somewhere?, but could be buried among those 26 million results and could even be listed last! The likelihood of anyone weeding through all of those results to find a poorly optimized website is nil and if relevant results are not found on the first couple of pages, most people will refine their searches anyway.

Most search engine users will find precisely what they are looking for on the first page, even though there may be extremely relevant pages on the first three to five pages or 50 listings.

Reputable SEO’s will research the client’s industry, analyze their competitors and keyword relevance, create a shopping list of relevant, highly targeted key words, phrases and descriptions to focus on, make recommendations for revisions to meta tags and page content, and may advise on a site redesign for ease of navigation by the search engines and site visitors. Additionally, they will make recommendations for advertising as necessary, and provide ongoing analysis and reports to the client. Advertising may bring direct traffic results to your site and may also have a branding effect.

SEO experts should have extensive technical experience as well as project management, system design, and systems integration experience. (Some people say that SEO is not rocket science but several of AZhttp’s staff associates have related experience just in case!)

There are many criteria which should be taken into careful consideration in choosing an SEO firm for Internet marketing and planning efforts. Consulting with an expert or specialist SEO consultant might be the best investment you will ever make.

Internet Marketing Services and SEO Overview

Define Objectives
Define Goals
Identify the Current State of Site or Sites
Identify the Target Audience for each Site
Identify and Select Strategies
Research
Site design recommendations
Search engine placement campaigns
SEO Monitoring and Reporting

Choose an SEO expert to ensure a successful SEO campaign to improve your online sales and Internet marketing efforts and to aggressively promote your products and brands using acceptable practices as outlined by the major search engines.

Oftentimes, a commercial website has an extreme number of competitors. All websites cannot be listed first, therefore an SEO company might focus on other products to increase his client’s results, or focus advertising on a specific product or target a region or city in order to get a segment of the market for their client’s services or products. Search engine results are ever-changing, so analysis should be ongoing. Lastly, the SEO should be heavily involved in monitoring the client?s advertising campaigns or they could put a company out of business by mismanagement.

AZhttp has seen a multitude of poorly rated, badly designed client websites with extensive sloppy or careless use of html coding,or those that do not even have meta tags such as title, description or keywords. Additionally, we’ve seen code that actually sends search engines away from the site rather than code that encourages the search engines to visit and follow links.

Following is one example of how the source code below the header of a properly constructed page should appear. To view the source code, visit the website, place your cursor in the body of the?page (where there is content), right click and select ?view source? from the menu:

<title>INSERT THE TITLE OF THE PAGE HERE</title>
<META NAME=”Description”CONTENT=”DESCRIBE THE?PAGE HERE, INCORPORATING TEXT FROM THE BODY OF THE WEB PAGE”>
<META NAME=”KeyWords” CONTENT=”LIST INDIVIDUAL KEYWORDS AS THEY RELATE TO AND APPEAR ON THE WEBPAGE, USING COMMAS AS SEPARATORS”>
<META NAME=”robots”CONTENT=”index,follow”>THIS CODE TELLS SEARCH ENGINE WEBCRAWLERS TO INCLUDE THE PAGE IN THEIR DATABASE AND TO FOLLOW THE LINKS ON THE PAGE

Arizona High Tech Talent Partnership is an integrated marketing solutions marketing agency that specializes in search engine optimization. Please browse through the entire Internet marketing services website for additional information about our complete line of services including search engine optimization, SEO, search engine marketing, SEM, Internet marketing, lead generation, brand awareness, and public relations.