Fifteen years ago if we need information we had to go to library. Writing reports, and preparing for test required hours of scanning shelves filled with books, blowing large chunks of change in the copy matching, checking out a mountains of books, and squinting at microfilm. The internet has chanced all of that. Now when we need to learn something all we have to do is boot up a computer and connect to the internet.

Most people have an extensive favorites list on their computers, a simple click of the mouse and they are at their favorite website. This is a handy feature if you do a lot of online shopping at a particular store or spend a lot of time at a specific chatroom. When they need to use the internet to gather information most people consult an online search engine.

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help locate information. Most people are familiar with Google, yahoo, and ask.com. Search engines work when a user types a keyword into the little box. Once the user types in the word the search engine scans all its files. It then provides the user with a page that is full of options, generally twenty. The user scans the list of options and then opens the one that sounds like it best suits their needs. Search engines use something called search engine optimization to determine the ranking of each web address.

Search engine optimization is the art and science of making web pages attractive to the search engines. The more a website appeals to the search engine the higher it will be ranked.

Crawler based search engines determine the relevancy of a website by following a set of guidelines called algorithms. One of the first things a crawler based search engine looks for is keywords. The more frequently a website uses a certain keyword the higher the website will rank. Search engines believe that more frequently a word appears the more relevant the website.

The location of the key words is as important as the frequency.

The first place a search engine looks for keywords is in the title. Web designers should include a keyword in their HTML title tag. Web designers should also make sure that keywords are included near the top of the page. Search engines operate under the assumption that the web designers will want to make any important information obvious right away.

Spamdexing is a term used to describe a webpage that uses a certain word hundreds of times in an attempt to propel their webpage to the top of search engines rankings. Most search engines use a variety of methods, including customer complaints, to penalize websites that use spamming methods. Very few internet search engines rely solely on keywords to determine website ranking. Many search engines also use something called “off the page” ranking criteria. Off the page ranking criteria are ranking criteria’s that webmasters cannot easily influence. Two methods of off the page search engine optimization are link analysis and click through measurement.

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Doug Champigny is a well-known Traffic Master with over 100 websites and a number of blogs under his control, including the Top Traffic Tips Blog and the Top Traffic Tips Bootcamp. Doug has also authored numerous e-books on increasing traffic for Internet, niche and affiliate marketing. Be sure to bookmark his sites for the latest in targeted traffic generation to bring a flood of traffic to your web sites and blogs.
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Technorati Tags: basic search engine optimization, search engine basics, search engine help, website traffic basics, blog traffic basics, getting targeted traffic, Doug Champigny

Search engine optimization is the art and science of making web pages attractive to internet search engines. Some internet businesses consider search engine optimization to be the subset of search engine marketing.

In the middle of the 1990s webmasters and search engine content providers started optimizing websites. At the time all the webmasters had to do was provide a URL to a search engine and a web crawler would be sent from the search engine. The web crawler would extract link from the webpage and use the information to index the page by down loading the page and then storing it on the search engines server. Once the page was stored on the search engines server a second program, called an indexer, extracted additional information from the webpage, and determines the weight of specific words. When this was complete the page was ranked.

It didn’t take very long for people to understand the importance of being highly ranked.

In the beginning search engines used search algorithms that webmasters provided about the web pages. It didn’t take webmasters very long to start abusing the system requiring search engines to develop a more sophisticated form of search engine optimization. The search engines developed a system that considered several factors; domain name, text within the title, URL directories, term frequency, HTML tags, on page key word proximity, Alt attributes for images, on page keyword adjacency, text within NOFRAMES tags, web content development, sitemaps, and on page keyword sequence.

Google developed a new concept of evaluating internet web pages called PageRank. PageRank weighs a web page’s quantity and quality based on the pages incoming links. This method of search engine optimization was so successful that Google quickly began to enjoy successful word of mouth and consistent praise.

To help discourage abuse by webmasters, several internet search engines, such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask.com, will not disclose the algorithms they use when ranking web pages.The signals used today in search engine optimization typically are; keywords in the title, link popularity, keywords in links pointing to the page, PageRank (Google), Keywords that appear in the visible text, links from on page to the inner pages, and placing punch line at the top of the page.

For the most part registering a webpage/website on a search engine is a simple task. All Google requires is a link from a site already indexed and the web crawlers will visit the site and begin to spider its contents. Normally a few days after registering on the search engine the main search engine spiders will begin to index the website.

Some search engines will guarantee spidering and indexing for a small fee. These search engines do not guarantee specific ranking. Webmaster’s who don’t want web crawlers to index certain files and directories use a standard robots.txt file. This file is located in the root directory. Occasionally a web crawler will still crawl a page even if the webmaster has indicated he does not wish the page indexed.

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Doug Champigny is a well-known Traffic Master with over 100 websites and a number of blogs under his control, including the Top Traffic Tips Blog and the Top Traffic Tips Bootcamp. Doug has also authored numerous e-books on increasing traffic for Internet, niche and affiliate marketing. Be sure to bookmark his sites for the latest in targeted traffic generation to bring a flood of traffic to your web sites and blogs.
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Note to Webmasters & Bloggers: You may use any article from this site provided you do so without altering the text, and that you include the author’s resource box with the links fully operational on you sites or blogs.

Technorati Tags: search engine optimization, search engine rankings, search engine help, web site traffic, blog traffic, targeted traffic, Doug Champigny