SEO Frequently Asked Questions
(Page 1 of 3 )
Search Engine Optimization Frequently Asked Questions.
1. What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
2. Why is search engine traffic so important?
3. What are META tags?
4. What are spiders / crawlers / robots?
5. Is optimization a difficult task?
6. How do I go about optimizing my website?
7. How long will it take before I start ranking better?
8. Will virtual / name based hosting be an issue?
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
Search Engine Optimization (abbreviated by SEO) is the process of designing, writing, coding, programming, and scripting your entire Web site so that there is a good chance that your Web pages will appear at the top of search engine queries for your selected keywords.
Why is search engine traffic so important?
A very large percentage of people looking for stuff on the internet find what they're looking for through search engines. Given that most people will only browse through 20 or 30 results in order to find what they're looking for, it is important that your website rankings highly, otherwise you risk loosing a vast amount of traffic to competitors.
What are META tags?
META tags are a part of the HTML code which is viewable only to those that are specifically looking for it. The META tags cannot be seen directly through a browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape. These META tags can be used in order to supply information to spiders / crawlers or other robots that are looking for alternate information. These tags may present information such as keywords, site description and title etc.. Some search engines no longer use these tags but some still do.
What are spiders / crawlers / robots?
The terms "spiders", "crawlers" and "robots" all refer to a computer program which is designed to browse websites and download information. The information that it usually downloads is the HTML source code. In the case of search engines, this source code is stored in a large database and later analyzed.
Is optimization a difficult task?
No, but it requires a lot of work and patience. The work part involves making the changes to your HTML code manually, which can take a while. The patience part involves nothing more than waiting and monitoring the results of your optimization in search engines.
How do I go about optimizing my website?
Firstly, you need to have the correct tools at hand. Such tools would include keywords density analyzers, server header checkers, meta tag analyzers, spider simulators etc.. Such tools can be found in abundance on the internet. Check out Search Engine World for some tools which are of vital importance.
Next you will need to decide for exactly which search terms you wish to optimize your site for. It is extremely difficult to optimize a site for more than 3 or 4 search terms. Do some research with some keyword suggestion tools and try to discover which search terms both currently bring you the most traffic, and which ones are most used by web surfers.
The exact optimization procedure varies by search engines and it changes over time. For the latest tips on optimization for any given search engine, check out the
SEO Chat Forums. After you find out what changes you need to make, employ those changes to your site / HTML code. More often that not changes will need to be made to the directory structure of a website, along with changes to filenames and resources.
How long will it take before I start ranking better?
Generally speaking the search engines update once a month. However, because the information presented in a given update gets crawled a few weeks previous, it can take as long as 6 to 8 weeks before changes to your site will be reflected in search engines.Some search engines, such as Google, are making some rapid changes in technology which allow them to update their database faster, sometimes within 24 hours. Sometimes you will be lucky enough to get a quick update, and sometimes not.
Will virtual / name based hosting be an issue?
No. Almost every search engine spider is capable of handling multiple domains with the same IP address. Although having a unique IP address is beneficial for some reasons, there are no serious disadvantages to using virtual hosting. Next: 9 Through 16 >>
More Search Optimization Articles
More By Darrin Ward
