Internet Search And SEO
Friday, November 03, 2006
Internet Search
For the last decade the Internet has emerged itself into an
integral part of our everyday life. What previously was mostly
a network of research institutions has become an unprecedented
medium for commercial and social use. With the number of web
pages now exceeding 12 billion it is extremely difficult to
find information without using search engines.
Search engines appeared almost immediately once the WWW was
born. A pioneering search engine called Archie was created in
the University of Montreal in 1990 and was used to search files
located on public FTP sites. The first search engine created to
crawl and index text files on the web, World Wide Web Wanderer
or Wandex, was introduced in 1993 in MIT and worked on
principals similar to those used by the modern web search
engines.
However it was not until late 90s when search engines have
become the major tool to find information on the Internet.
Before Internet directories such as Yahoo! or BestOfTheWeb were
used to locate web pages. But it didn't take long for web users
to recognize the usefulness of the Internet search, once
indexing and ranking algorithms have reached a state where
search engines were able to quickly return highly relevant
results
Search Results Relevancy
It is all about the relevancy of results. In their infancy
search engines were utterly vulnerable to abuse. Originally
search engines used to index file names and later meta-tags. It
doesn't take much to stuff file names and meta-tags with popular
keywords which are irrelevant to the document's content. When a
user queried a search engine with a keyword he received results
that couldn't satisfy him. That is why Internet directories with
pages classified into directories by human reviewers were far
more useful than the search engines of those days.
The problem of relevancy has become increasingly important with
the growing commercial use of the Web. The profits of commercial
websites depend on their exposure and if there is anything that
can help improve the exposure in search results - it must be
done. And the first attempts to influence the search results by
using popular but not relevant keywords to drive more traffic
were made.
With their increasing computational and storage capacity search
engine have become able to index the entire content of a page.
But it was still possible to abuse search results by using
excessive keyword stuffing, hidden keyword-rich text or many
other spammy techniques. Basing solely on the page content it
was impossible to ensure the relevancy of search results and
more advanced ranking algorithms were introduced.
Search Engine Optimization
But even modern sophisticated search engine algorithms are not
perfect and can't guarantee 100% relevancy. There still exist
many loopholes that can be exploited to manipulate search
results. Search results manipulation is not necessarily an
unethical conduct. Consider three biggest travel websites:
http://Travelocity.com, http://Expedia.com and
http://Priceline.com. They provide booking service of a similar
quality and are equally relevant for keywords like 'vacation' or
'airline tickets'. But nevertheless they rank differently in
search results, and it is natural for a lower ranked site to
try improving its position by using search engine optimization
techniques.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is about defining what
factors influence the placement of a page in search results and
adjusting these factors to obtain a higher position. To optimize
the relevance of a page you have to adjust keyword frequency and
proximity, add keywords into headings and bold text. It must
look natural though - excessive keyword stuffing might have
negative effects. To increase the popularity of a page you must
obtain incoming links with targeted keywords in the anchor text,
and make sure that links come from authoritative pages but not
from irrelevant link farms.
Search engine optimization is an extremely dynamic field. Once
a loophole in ranking algorithms becomes known and widely used,
search engines change their algorithms to neutralize its effect.
Every algorithm update can drastically affect positions and
traffic of websites utilizing aggressive crash and burn
optimization strategies. Such strategies are based on the most
recently discovered loopholes and tricks and are able to put
your pages into top positions quite quickly. Their effect
however lasts only to the next algorithm update.
Another far more time-consuming approach is the creation of
websites with high quality content following so-called Google
quality guidelines. This approach emphasizes the website's
value for users and persuades against using tricks to
manipulate search results. In short - good websites eventually
will rank high. But it takes years and tons of effort to make a
site popular this way. Some sites are by their nature difficult
to promote this way. For example few grocery stores can afford
turning their websites into top Internet grocery portals; it
just wouldn't be worth the effort.
SEO alone can't guarantee a lasting effect. Not using SEO at
all requires too much effort to promote a site. The wise way to
make a website popular is make sure that it is useful for users,
obtain quality incoming links and do not forget to fine tune
your pages focusing the targeted keywords. Follow the famous
Brett Tabke's Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone -
after four years it is still a valid approach.
About The Author: Oleg Ishenko, Berlin, Germany. BSc in
Telecommunications Industry Business Management. Master student
in Humboldt University Berlin. MCSE and MCDBA certifications.
Get more useful information at our Comprehensive SEO and Online
Marketing Research - http://www.seoresearcher.com
posted by Dennis Cheesman @ 6:55 AM,
