Onsite Search Engine Optimization

Search results are the most important thing for any searchengine. Giants like Google, Yahoo, MSN are working more onproducing the filtered results, so that results match thequeries. I still feel organic SEO will have edge over others.Sites which are well structured and have balanced contents willimprove there rankings. Soon SE's will filter out maximum siteswhich have duplicate contents or involved in content spamming.Below are the few things which should be the focus areas for awebsite owner:

Ranking mostly depends upon the maturity of the site. Oldersites will have better rankings and will have more indexed pages.

 Site structure is the most important factor in producinghigher rankings. I am not debating the theme based sites or ajournalized site, but talking about structuring the contents ofthe site in a proper manner. SE's should know where your homepage is located.

Relevancy of contents. This is another important aspect andsite owners need to work on it. Meta tags are irrelevant to someextent, but important is relevant contents on site. Each sectionof the site should contain unique contents, to obtain desiredresults.

Design the site for humans not for crawlers. Usability factorshould be analyzed properly and more and more focus should begiven towards human visitors so that they can easily navigateyour site.

Say no to invisible texts. This is unacceptable practice. I still believe larger texts which can be read clearly by human eyes. Invisible text or contents may lead your site to delete permanently from search index

Review and updates for your sites. Your designer must focuson designing clean codes. A monthly updates in your site willhelp a lot. Each month or biweekly you must review your site'sperformance and act according to that

How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.