VijayWeb.com

Search Engine Optimization…..Optimization??? then there is something web analysts can be helpful here?

Search Engine Optimization is a process of optimizing a website with an intention of (I think I should say “with a hoping of” : ) getting the site listed in the top 10 results for relevent search query for the business.  There is a reason why I said “hoping of” – if you are a search engine optimizer I am sure you would know, else you will know by end of the reading this blog post.

I think it is important that we should know where we started on this.  Before Google, there were search engines like altavista, lycos etc., were widely used eventhough there were only a few documents on the web.  As the web growing rapidly the importance of search engine has grown with the similar trend.   Now, let’s briefly understand how traditional search engines used to rank pages compared to the modern ones like Google, Yahoo, Live.com.

Internet Search Engines used to look at the meta data (data bout data) that is embedded in the html tags or meta tags to understand what a specific document is about.  One of  the  Meta Tags is Keyword tag, it stores “keywords” relevant to the page – it had utmost importance in such that the Search Engines were looking specifically in this area and  rank the pages if the user performs a search with these keywords.   Webmasters were realized that they get lot of traffic from search engines compared to any other channel and most people started misusing this meta-tags in such a way that their website gets lot of traffic.  And, SPAMERS became champions in this   Search Engines had to find new ways to understand the web document so that they can list it in the top 10 results for the searcher query.  Imagine you go to a search engine and do a search for “web analytics articles” and it gives totally irrelevant results because of the SPAMMY documents, would you take them as relevant to what you need?  and continue love that search engine.  So, it is important for the search engines to continue in the business they consistently need to provide the relevant results to the searchers needs.

Then, our beloved Google entered the industry with the refreshing look and feel web page, selling speed and relevance as the USP.  Google came up with a patented page-ranking technology which gives ranking score to each page in the website based on internal linking and external linking.  This kind of system was very much viable in the begenning since poeple post links to the other sites as they feel they are useful for others and absolutely for non-commerical benefits.  But, again most webmasters and marketers started misusing this by buying and sellings links, exchanging links and creating programs exclusively to get inbound links to their websites.

Imagine Google doesn’t have strong algorithms so that SEO’s and webmasters would easily get good ranks in Google….The users include ourselves would end up with frustration as we all are completely dependent on search engines like Google.

Google and other today’s search engines are also studying many other factors to understand what the document is all about.  They are studying the actual text on the web document, its font size, colors, backgrounds, images, alignment, theme of a section/site and much more.  Though most ethical SEO’s would optimize the sites in an ethical manner still there are people stuff the keywords here too to make search engines understand the document is relevant to something that actually it is not.

Marketers should realize more relevent traffic means more revenue but not just any traffic to the site.

The Approach I am proposing “A Data Driven Approach to Usability Centric Search Engine Optimization” would talk about using Web Analytics and Usability Principles to create an SEO strategy for your site.  Moving from the perception of “SEO is SPAM” to “SEO is Good Design”

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