SEO Basics and Understanding February 10, 2010
Posted by simarprit in : Search Engines, SEO, Uncategorized , trackbackI am a part of training session, this is series of thoughts which are passing through my mind as the trainer is going through his slides.
- Understanding definition of search engine is essential
- Search engines are nothing without the BOTS which do the job of crawling around from them and populating them
- Query mapping has a role to play, query mapping works on the basis of Search Engines algorithm applicable at that time.
- Cache of websites play a role but with social media penetration that role is changing quickly. Now you can get many results without the search engine cache being updated
- Algorithms work on essential parameters – 1. Tags (Title, Description, Keywords) and H1 tags are essential parts of it
- Giving a correct result is priority and purpose of a search engine
- For a search engine it is important to focus on freshness of the content. A usefulness of a search engine depends on its ability to aggregate User Generated Content from numerous sources and process them on the basis of merit
- Assigning of weights is becoming a bigger challenge for search engines
- More unique the content, more need by search engines to have you there. It is also important to keep in mind the users of these unique content and their needs to be mapped against current availability
- Size of page matters to the BOT and to the surfer
- Images right sized and properly tagged are a permanent asset to SEO
- Relevancy Matrix remains a yardstick for search engines to capture a holistic view of the website
- Domain Age helps to a certain degree only. At one point of time it was very important. Domain name generic attributes remain important.
- Links from and to your site make the neighborhood you belong too. And neighborhood matters. Good neighborhood matters to a good extent.
- What do you want the user to do on your site, it is important to know and plan on how much time you want your user to spend on the site.
- Hidden text can hurt big time, you can’t have a strategy of cheating a search engine while defining your SEO plan.
- No of links on a page have two parts to play, allow BOTS to create map for crawling and allow users to navigate
- Your understanding of your domain name makes a difference to your SEO strategy. Try to read your domain in staggered words not initially intended. If your domain name is IndianaProfile. It would read also as IndianAProfile
- Search Engines can read dynamic codes now and they do. It is not a question of reading dynamic code, it is a question of reading data held in tables and deriving it the same way a surfer would do while doing natural navigation
- If you map your structure with Yahoo/ Google or DMOZ directory structure the site would have a tested and proven navigational approach
- Is your layout talking in the same language as a bot would like to hear
- Navigational steps should be well documented and should carry the objective through and through
- I am sure Google does consider everything good about your site including Meta Description and Meta Keywords
- Multiple usage of a word in a long URL may not hurt you with search engines. Adjacency matrix of a search engine usually works on content but he same matrix may have a use in mapping out URL stuffing.
- Search Engines are based on fundamentals, it doesn’t matter if the site is on WordPress or on Drupal or on Joomla it treats all of them as a “Content Management System” and works it s way around the, A searchengine needs content in a structured manner and any CMS does that. So fundamentally any bot or serachengine would move the world to talk to any popular CMS and reach to all its inside folds.
- Junk on your site is your junk and search engines are bound to hate it. Keep the trash out and keep your site clean.
- Site-maps help and having them updated would help you big time at every stage
- Broken link audit of your site should be part of the job. If you are the owner and there is a team which works on the site, make sure you check manually the homepage for important links
Thank you Manish
Comments»
Very nicely documented and can be used as the basic document on knowing what an SEO is all about.
Thanks Usha, that was the idea