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.
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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. Which of the following is the best method to insure that a page does not get crawled or indexed by a search engine?
A. Submit a negative listing through the search engines' submission forms
B. Restrict known IP addresses of search engine spiders from reaching the page
C. Restrict the page using robots.txt
D. Only link to the page with the rel="nofollow" attribute
Q2. Is it generally considered acceptable to have the same content resolve on both www.seocert.net and seocert.net?
A. No, this may cause negative indexing/ranking issues
B. Yes, the search engines recognize they're the same thing
Q3. What is the generally accepted difference between SEO and SEM?
A. SEO focuses on organic/natural search rankings, SEM encompasses all aspects of search marketing
B. SEM implies association with a traditional marketing company, while SEO is usually independent or unaffiliated with traditional marketin
C.
D. SEO refers to organic/natural listings while SEM covers PPC, or paid search
E. SEO is more difficult than SEM
Q4. Which of the following strategies is the best way to lift a page out of Google's supplemental index?
A. Submit a re-inclusion request
B. Change the last-modified date so it looks like that the page was recently updated
C. Increase relevant keyword density on the page
D. Link to it internally from strong pages
Q5. Which of the following site architecture makes it the most difficult crawling job for search engine spiders?
A. Web page that contains lots of pictures
B. Page that requires form submission to reach its content
C. Website without a robots.txt file
D. Dynamic pages with 2 or more variables in the URL string
Answers Are : Q1 (C), Q2 (A), Q3 (A), Q4 (D), Q5 (B),
