Thursday, November 5, 2009

Review On Techniques Of Search Engine Optimization

By Justin Harrison

As the use and knowledge of the Internet has spread, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become an ever more popular concept. It is increasingly true that a successful business needs a strong online presence to compete successfully. A great variety of techniques have been developed to improve a website's ranking in the search engine result pages. Some of these techniques are entirely ethical and above-board. (The term for these techniques is "White Hat SEO".) Some of them are not so ethical. (Black Hat SEO.)

Using White Hat SEO tactics is the best strategy to achieve top ranking. They will not lead to penalties being imposed by search engine companies, and will improve your company's reputation. After all, it isn't just a high rank on the search engine result pages that is important, rank stability is also important. The quick boosts in ranking achieved by Black Hat SEO techniques usually vanish quickly, with little to no long-term gain.

White Hat SEO Techniques: Internal linking is a big factor in your website's ranking. How the different portions of your site are linked will either make it easier or harder for search engines to spider and index pages. ("Spidering" refers to the process the engines use to search for content.) Search engine spiders are very simple programs, and are mainly concerned with text. They tend to ignore images, scripts, frames, directories, and such. Drop-down navigation, for instance, is a bad idea from an SEO point of view. It may look fancy, but as it contains little text it will tend to be ignored by the spiders, leaving the content behind it unseen. It is critical to leave text links to your most important internal pages at the bottom of your home page. (This includes the sitemap, if any.)

White Hat SEO Tactics: Internal linking A good website ranking by the search engine is marred by making the task of spidering and indexing difficult for it. Scripts may help in providing drop down navigation in websites but they may not be crawled and indexed by the search engine bots. Search engine drivers are insensible to images, scripts, frames and directories etc. and hence drop down navigation may not the identified by it. The look of the website may be enhanced by scripts and navigation but the function of spidering by SEO gets failed. So it is vital to include text links at the base of your landing page with links to you key internal pages together with the site map.

Don't make the mistake of linking with just anyone, though. What separates White Hat from Black Hat is, in part, who you link to. Share links with friendly, relevant sites that are related to your own site in some way. Focus on linking to sites with quality content and not just fluff.

Take your time and link to the best sites, because you are who you keep company with. It will take a long time to build up a robust system of links. However, once you've done it, your traffic will soar, and maintenance of the system will be negligible.

Optimizing Your Website There is a wide spread acknowledgement presently for optimization, a one another White Hat SEO technique. Visibility and coverage of your site is achieved by optimizing your site where the layout, structure, presentation, and content are enhanced.

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