What Is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is the action that one will take to enhance and improve his/her website in the hope that the website will be placed at a better position at search engines' "organic" result page when someone is searching for relevant keywords. Though ranking mechanism is treated as business secret, and not a single search engine company has revealed how many factors that they have taken into account, nor what weightage is each factor counted into the final ranking. We still can optimize our websites to have a better position based on some common principles of ranking, like the following:
Relevant content shall prevail over irrelevant content.
High quality content shall out-rank low quality content.
Faster and user friendlier websites should be positioned higher.
Junk, scam, immoral, unethical, pornographic websites shall be filtered out or have little visibility.
...
SEO focuses on improving the "natural", un-paid, "organic" rank of a website at search engine result page. Paid Inclusion, money wise list bidding are not considered as part of SEO, they fall into a broader category as of search engine marketing (SEM).
How Does Search Engine Work?
Search engine visits a website and grabs the content of the website.
Search engine analyses the content and indexes it.
Someone puts in his query and searches.
Search engine interprets the search and retrieves related content from its indexes.
Search engine ranks all those pages and presented it to the user.
User see the returned results.
Why SEO Is Important To Your On-line Success?
As the exploding of data and websites created on the internet each and every single day, it become more and more difficult for your website to be founded by its visitors, simply because there are so many similar data, information, goods, service are out there, and you would have to compete with growing numbers of similar websites coming from any corner of the world.
When it comes to intensive competition for the very limited top placement, each and every small improvement might mark as critical. There is no specific reason that your websites should stand out unless you put in the efforts to make it happen, or otherwise they will end up by drowning in this mega internet data ocean. SEO provides a way to differentiate and stand out.
Traffic is the key to internet success of a website, especially so if your site is heavily depending on the traffic from the internet. Search engine is one of the major visitor source for internet traffic. If you have a good search engine rank, you would have more traffic to your website instead to your competitors', hence more deals, more business, more revenue, and you will be at a better position of surviving and thriving.
If you have a poor search engine rank, very few people or nobody might found you or use your service, buy your products, eventually your site or the on-line business will be left to a lonely island of extinction. That's not the purpose of your site, and surely it is a vast waste of time, money and energy for its creation.
By implementing SEO principles, optimizing varies parts of your online business, you actually bring your websites to a better shape and hence to a higher level at a winning edge.
What Is The Challenge of SEO?
The very nature of SEO suggests that there is no guaranteed position at the top. You might have put large amount of time, effort, energy into optimizing your site, that doesn't automatically lead to a satisfied placement. There are two reasons why it is so, first, search engine ranking algorithm is out of your control. what deem to be important to you might not be equally considered as important to search engines, you might miss the shots by putting too much energy into factors that are having very little impact to the overall ranking, or by putting too less effort to factors that are critical for search engines; second, you have no control over the degree and intensity of your competition. You never know what your competitors are doing and what are the resources they have put in, or how determined are they. After all top placements are limited, and good positions are what everyone want to occupy, SEO is not an easy job, only those who are guided by those common principles, equipped with proper tools, persistently fine-tuning, constantly improving will deserved to be at the top spots.
SEO Knowledge Test Sample Questions
Q1. The de-facto version of a page located on the primary URL you want associated with the content is known as:
A. Home Page
B. Heretical Version
C. Preferential Version
D. Canonical Version
Q2. Let's assume that you're running SEO for an auction website with many listings, sorted by categories and subcategories. To achieve the maximum search engine traffic benefit, what should you do with individual product/auction pages after the auction has expired and the product is no longer available?
A. 301 redirect them to the most appropriate category page associated with the product
B. Nothing, leave them alone in case they have links to them
C. Drop the pages and leave a 404 error code on the URL so search engines and visitors know the page is no longer accessible
D. Place a "noindex, nofollow" on them
Q3. How can you avoid the duplicate content problems that often accompany temporal pagination issues (where content moves down a page and from page to page, as is often seen in lists of articles, multi-page articles and blogs)?
A. Display each page in a new tab
B. Add a meta robots tag with "noindex, follow" to the paginated pages
C. Link to paginated pages with rel="nofollow" in the link tag
D. There are no duplicate content problems associated with pagination
Q4. When is it advisable to leave a page's meta description off?
A. When you don't want people to know what the page is about
B. When a large amount of pages exist and the options are between using a single meta description for all of the pages vs. leaving them with none at all
C. When the page is very focused toward one keyword, and a description wouldn't help.
D. When the page is targeted to so many keywords that writing a meta description might hurt the click-through rate from the search results
Q5. Which of the followings is LEAST likely to decrease the value of a link for Page Y, assume Page X links to Page Y?
A. Page Y has a link somewhere that points at Page X (reciprocal links)
B. Both domains for Page X and Y are registered under the same organization and hosted on the same IP address
C. The link at Page X contains the tag - rel="nofollow"
D. Page X is not indexed
Answers Are : Q1 (D), Q2 (A), Q3 (B), Q4 (B), Q5 (A),
