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 factors is considered when search engines assign value to links?
A. The visual appearance of the link
B. An editorial endorsement footnote referencing the link
C. The use of a proper link title in the HTML tag of the link, matching the anchor text of the link
D. The date/time when that link was created and the temporal relationship between that link's appearance and other time-sensitive criteria
Q2. Which of the following pieces of information is NOT available from current keyword research sources?
A. Cost per click paid by PPC advertisers
B. Demographic data on searchers who use a particular term/phrase
C. Estimated volume of searches per month
D. Popular terms/phrases related to a given keyword
Q3. If you update your site's URL structure to create new versions of your pages, what should you do with the old URLs?
A. Use javascript to redirect them to new URLs
B. Create 404 pages with the old URLs so search engines & visitors know the content is no longer available
C. Shut them down and request removal via Webmaster Central in Google and Site Explorer in Yahoo!
D. 301 redirect them to the new URLs
Q4. Duplicate content is primarily created through content licensing deals and copyright violations of scraped and re-published content, it is an off-site problem.
Q5. What's likely to happen if multiple accounts on a single IP address vote up a story at Digg in a short time period?
A. Nothing special, just more Diggs
B. Your accounts will be suspended
C. Your story will be buried
D. Your accounts will automatically be grouped together into a network
Answers Are : Q1 (D), Q2 (A), Q3 (D), Q4 (B), Q5 (B),
