SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for websites
It is about time to reveal the big secret, but before we get into this topic in particular and too understand better, how SEO is working, we need to understand the functionality of search engines.
Simplified its all about links (or backlinks, as described later) and keywords (or keyphrases) respectively a preferably best combination of both, but there is more.
From all the gathered data an indexer is creating huge databases, organizing the gathered information to prepare the next step, the query processing. The index contains content data already arranged in alphabetical order with other relevant values assigned to each item and among others stop words (e.g. a, an, and, for, is, it, yes, no, not, on, or, so, than, that, the, then, here, there, these, they, this, to, too, was, us, we, were, yet, you, your etc.) already removed. One of these values for example is the number of occurrences of a given keyword, which is important to calculate its relevance for the given topic on the one hand, and to detect spam (keyword stuffing) on the other hand.
The result of the query processing are the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP), were all found websites for the particular keyword are arranged into descending order. In SEO this is the ranking list, containing the order, in which the websites included appear as a result of a search for the given keyword.
Although the next goal is to teach the search engine more and more languages (e.g. to analyze and evaluate Javascript content as well), the native language of the search engine is (Hyper Text Markup Language), additionally for the evaluation of sitemaps XML (eXtensible Markup Language).
The outcome of every single method of website creation is a programmed or generated HTML code, where the appearance of the content can be managed by linking one or more CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) or even embedding other types of code (e.g. Javascript for special purposes or effects).
Website creation has changed a lot and so has HTML, where there are different code systems, each one with its own rules to follow. Today in most cases websites are constructed using a CMS (Content Management Systems), where the HTML code is generated mostly on the basis of PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor, formerly Personal Home Page).
Keywords
In SEO proper keyword usage within all the tags of the website’s content on the one side, and within the anchor text of hyperlinks on the other side is the only way to improve ranking factors for a given website. The professional procedure here is keyword positioning, defining the optimum number for the given keyword, its density, the placement for the occurrence within the content, its prominence) and in case of more then one keyword important is the proximity of the given keywords.
Links
Links, hyperlinks or backlinks are the traffic roads of the whole internet, no matter where they lead, either to a specific anchor on the same page or to another page within the same domain or to a webpage on another domain.
To each link belongs a link value, that’s why in SEO there is a big difference between internal and external links, because search engines are reading links as kind of votes for the place they lead to. To put it simply a link to a page within my own website tells the search engine to take into consideration a given topical relationship, meanwhile I vote for my own website, a kind of self-praising. However a link to another domain delivers quite the same message, but has a much higher reputation, which is of course reflected in its value.
The total of the link values pointing to a website contributes a lot to the website popularity of the destination website, which is a major ranking factor for this website and at the same time the basis for the link popularity of this website which again increases the link value of its outgoing links, together with other factors as Page Rank (with decreasing importance), Trust Rank, damping factor, domain popularity, IP popularity etc.
The golden combination
With links it is possible to hand over information to search engines related to the given links using the proper tags to do so. In case of text links this can be the anchor text or in addition a title tag, which again can be used with image links, that have an image alt text tag to provide additional information, in SEO used to create and/or consolidate the relationship between the topics at the starting and the destination point of the hyperlink. Meanwhile quite important is the text surrounding the link and this again has become part of SEO.
The big secret
In fact there are two big secrets, the frequently changing algorithm of the major search engine on the one hand, and the secret of practicing SEO successfully without even bothering about the uncertain number one secret. Regardless the representatives of the major search engine Google are emphasizing quality of content as the main criterion, it is the power of links that decides the position of a given webpage within the ranking list for each keyword. Now here is the big secret: More and more SEO companies outnumber the competitors of their websites und of the websites of their clients in quality links. A new industry is growing, creating content for the purpose of links and there is no other possibility than following that practice.
Comparing the internet with a market place, where any geographical distance between all of the businesses has disappeared, the SEO specialist would be the barker, using all possible techniques to be the loudest one or at least one of the loudest. Instead of repeating a message into a megaphone, it has to be spread around the world wide web by creating more and more, but preferably unique related content with the purpose to be picked up and evaluated by all the web crawlers passing through.
To be continued.
