Search Engines

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo are engines that allow people to search though many millions of websites in a fraction of a second. All the data must be organised and indexed by the spiders in the search engines automatically - quite a thought! The spiders are usually little computers that have the job of trying to find as many pages on a website as possible. After that they then take a copy of the data found for indexing purposes. The index is used later when a search is performed, it provides a quick way to look though those millions of pages and return a small set of results.All that in a fraction of a second!

Links

Some search engines rely on the basis of good quality links on a page has multiple, and the better that resource is. As a simple example, the BBC is considered a good website, it's homepage currently has a Google page rank of 9/10. If a link was to appear on that homepage which contained the text "lorem ipsum" linking to this website, then anyone who went to google.com and did a search for "lorem ipsum" will find that this website should rank higher in the search results. This is simply because a good quality link says the destination URL is about "lorem ipsum".

The other important thing is the text found within the links. For example if a large number of websites linked the word "failure" to a particular website, then search results for "failure" will show an interesting result. The page in question does not need to contain the word, but because of all the links the has been associated has been made. This is one of the reasons it becomes quite important to use the alt attribute on images within links.

Another basic SEO rule, is ensure you get good links pointing to a website, as this shows the website is a reputable and that is a valuable and popular source.

Most search engine spiders are developed by people like Matt Cutts, who create algorithms used to find website authors trying to cheat the system - if this happens then a website can get black listed.

A good example of how a link can be broken is though the incorrect use of JavaScript. If a link replaces content on a page with the use of tools like AJAX, then unless there is an alternative for non JavaScript enabled browsers, then the search engine spiders can also be effected! The result? ~The spider will not waste resources executing the JavaScript, which may not even be a link and because the result of the action might not create a URL that anything can be linked to.

More about Meta tags

Not so many years ago it was considered good web development practice to ensure to include the "keywords" and "description" meta tags for each page, but now it can be finally said they are slowly dying out!.

At first worked well, because search engines only had enough storage space for a few words per page, and there were not that many website developers trying to trick the search engine spiders. But now, with storage space becoming a lot cheaper, the amount of words indexed is now rarely a problem.

Perhaps the main issue with these meta tags is because there not usually visible to website visitors. Due to this fact they are now ignored by most search engine spiders. The search engine views that it is much better to index the content on the page that the website visitor will see, rather than some hidden text. That is why content is king!

There is still food reason for the "description" meta tag. Even if its content is most likely ignored when doing the search (theory), it can be displayed on the search results page. For example, with Google, normally under the search results title there is a block of text that highlights some of the search words and their surrounding content, this is designed to give a basic idea on the relevance of the content. But in some cases the search engine it might just show a bit of text found at the start of the document. In most cases, this is irrelevant, but it can be over-ridden if a "description" meta tag exists.

Helping the spiders

Always think of the search engines as basic computers. They will not execute, JavaScript, submit forms or spend much time looking at Flash. The only thing that you can rely on them finding is the simple link. Without these links the search engines spiders will find it very difficult finding all the pages on a website.

Additionally the navigation bar on the website needs to be basic and this is the job of the website designer to ensure that it is as easy as possible to find all the pages on the website, so that the website receives good ranking and is found in the search engines results.

Beware of duplication of content

If a website contains duplicate content,that is when you have two pages with the same content, then some search engines might detect this and they may either penalise that website or they could even ignore that page entirely. Neither of these have been confirmed, but there is definately side effects of having duplicate content. Also the number of links to those pages will be divided between them - the less links, the less popular that page is and therefore the less relevant that page might be.

Ideally all duplicate pages, and even domain names should be removed and setup with "301 redirects".

SEO Companies

To sum it up, pay attention and take note of what you read!

It is not possible for any company toguarantee a number ranking with (ref Google) Unfortunately there are a lot of companies which are trying to sell ways to improve search ranking through unorthodox ways, ie though the use of link farms.

Most websites can improve their ranking in the search results by making sure the search engine spider can access the website (use of simple links), getting good links to the website from other related websites and ensuring there is no duplicate content.

Additionally there is one area which an SEO company can help. They can ensure that the text on the page is optimised for a search engine. This is not done by using lots of keywords as these are detected by the search engine spiders but make sure that the words used and words that potential visitors might search for and that all the text remains releveant to the page without any unnecessary duplication.

Use the addition of useful pages that other websites might link to. As these SEO companies should be looking at the website from the visitors point of view, they might have interesting ideas that could have been overlooked by the website authors.