Search Engines – Must-Know Basics
Many people think the internet is an enigma, but just like most everything else, the more practice you get at it, the easier it becomes. If you keep at it long enough, you will eventually be able to do it without thinking.
People go to the internet to find information – it may be a product or a service, entertainment, or they are looking for a solution to a problem. Most people start their search with a major search engine such as: “Google, Yahoo, or MSN,” or a meta search engine such as “Dogpile.com, Looksmart.com, or Lycos.com.”
The Search Engines are basically huge websites that stores (cache) information about every page they can find (index) on the internet. If you’ve seen the movie Bruce Almighty, you’ll remember the analogy of when “GOD” opens the massive file cabinet to pull out a file about Bruce – the file is like a website, and the pages inside the folders are like pages on a website.
Search engines like Google find web sites with software (spiders) that crawl the internet – starting at highly visible sites (such as Wikipedia.org) and following the links they are connected to and so on. This is a continuous process.
Since the biggest search engine – Google claims that it has followed over 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) links on the internet, it’s no wonder that 85% of people go to the search engines first to look up what they’re searching for.
You may also think of the search engines as like a giant phone book, but instead of listing companies in alphabetical order, the search engines have mathematical algorithms that rank all the pages on the internet in terms of the value of the content for a specific search term such as “exotic pet stores in Dallas, Texas”, for example.
The more relevant to the specific search term the algorithm finds the information, the higher it will rank in the results – known as SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). Needless to say, the more specific the search term entered into the search engine, the more accurate the results will be.
Although the Search Engine algorithms are closely guarded secrets, there are two main factors which determine ranking positions:
On page (on site) optimization: This is the optimization of the content found on the website -these factors include things like meta-tags and keyword density (frequency). Meta-tags are located in the HTML code of a web-page that is not visible when viewing the site. An example of meta tags for SEO are:
SEO Meta-tags:
<head>
<title>On-page Search Engine Optimization</title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=” on page, optimization, search engine, rankings, seo”>
<META NAME=”description” content=”Factors that affect on-page optimization in the Search Engines”>
</head>
Off Page (off-site) optimization: These are the techniques implemented to increase the number of links to a site that will drive traffic to it. The purpose is to sell a product or service, create a community, offer information, or express an opinion. Links can include from many different sources such as directory submissions, social networking websites, article marketing, blogging, and link exchanges.
There are other techniques that many search engine optimizers implement that attempt to cheat the search engines into thinking their pages have value – known as black-hat SEO. The search engines keep revising their algorithms in an attempt to eliminate high rankings from black hat search engine optimization. Because of this, black-hat SEO results are often short-lived, and companies end up paying a bill for work that doesn’t last.
Adventure Capitalism implement natural, organic (white-hat) practices only, which results in high lasting results in the search engines. Call us now at 1-888-688-6326 to learn how we can help drive traffic to your site and increase your sales today!!