Search Engine Optimization

Whenever you hear the word “search engines” there are few specific brands and logos that come in to your mind. Google, Yahoo and bing are the three most popular search engines and according to various researches, the most commonly used and the most popular search engine is Google. 

When a person wants to find information about a product or a company, he/she types key words related to their search in these search engines. With the improvements in technology, within seconds those search engines produce millions of related search results but, only 10 ads are displayed in the first page. So, have you ever paid any attention to the fact that what is the reason behind this and how your site can be shown among those first 10 results, because as you all know, no one spends their time browsing through all the results pages. Therefore it is really important to get your sites among that 10.

There is a reason for only 10 sites to be appeared in the first page and that is called Search Engine Optimization. The strategies or the techniques that are used to increase the number of visitors to a website by obtaining a higher rank in the search result page of a search engine are generally known as Search Engine Optimization. 

To make this concept more clearly I am going to explain it in simpler terms. Just think of your website as a cake. According to Victoria Edwards, Your links, paid search, and social media acts as the icing, but your content, information architecture, content management system, and infrastructure act as the sugar and makes the cake. Without it, your cake is tasteless, boring, and gets thrown in the trash. Therefore you have to make sure that your website is properly designed in order to increase the traffic for your website.

There is a misconception to get a higher rank in search results  you have to pay the search engine. That is not true. Google does not charge anything from a website to rank it among the top results, unless if it is a paid ad. You just have to clearly understand what a search engine is looking for and meet those criterion.

Now I am going to talk about what exactly a search engine is looking for, from a website.

• Content: The texts, titles and descriptions are known as content.
• Performance: How fast your site is, is it up to date and does it function properly?
• Authority: How good is the content of your site and how often the other authoritative sites use your site?
• User Experience: How user friendly the design of your site is and how useful and the sufficient enough your content is?

You also have to consider some facts that you should not be doing when trying to carry out search engine optimization.

• Overuse of keywords on the page 
•  Poor user experience design: you should not include unnecessary ads because it makes it difficult for the user to grab the content he/ she wants

When a user enters a query, the machines search the index for matching pages and return the results it believes are the most relevant to the user. This relevancy is calculated using an algorithm which considers over 200 factors in determining the rank of the website.

Key Success Factors of SEO

1.Website crawl-ability
2.Keyword research
3.Site structure & KWD mapping
4.Content building and formatting
5.Page titles & Meta data
6.Use of images and videos
7.Internal linking structure / Navigation
8.URLs
9.Link popularity (Authority building)
10. Website maintenance
Source: Search Engine Marketing by Mr. Suranga Priyashantha
 
If you meet the above stated requirements at the same time stay away from the facts you should not be doing,  it is guaranteed that your site will be appeared among the top results without having to incur any financial cost.