Search Engine Optimization : An Introduction

Search Engine Optimization is a technique used to optimize web sites in order to make them rank better in search engine indexes.

Almost all the search engine, like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc... use a specific algorithm to rank the web pages in their index. This rank mainly depends on the importance of the website for others. Means, if other websites link to your website, then you get a better ranking in the index.

The process of indexing and ranking the web pages goes like this...

The search engines crawl the whole web at regular intervals of time using their automatic robot programs called search engine crawlers. In crawling process the crawler checks the contents of the web page and the links to it. Then according to the contents and number of link backs, the search engine indexes the web page and ranks it in the index.

Crawlers may also look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled. In order to get assured indexing and a better ranking we optimize our web pages using the search engine optimization techniques.

The main steps which come under SEO are...

1. Generating Robot.txt
2. Adding meta tags, mainly of keywords and description.
3. Using search engine crawler friendly content on the web pages.

These days SEO industry is coming up at a very fast pace. Many people have set up SEO firms and sell their services in optimizing websites for others. However, doing the SEO the wrong way, might get you penalized by various search engines, specially by Big G i.e. Google. Hence you should only trust best seo companies, to do SEO for you, as they have many years of experience and know the in and out of the same.

In the era of Google penalizing sites using Panda and Penguin updates, you should be very sure in deciding best seo company for you, because doing it wrong would cause more damage then by not doing it at all. Always stay away from grey hat and black hat SEO.

Gone are the days, when people wanted a user friendly and fast loading website. Almost all the websites are user friendly and fast in loading now. But when you have over 5 billion websites and trillions of web pages running in the whole world, and giant search engines crawling the whole web everyday, then you need something extra to remain in demand. SEO provides you the power to get ahead of others.