SEO – What’s that?

Whenever you enter a search query in a search engine and hit ‘enter’ you get a list of web results that contain that search query term.

Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the search query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines. 

 

How Search Engines Work

The first thing you need to know is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren’t. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.

First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 48 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.

After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimising it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings.

When a search request is made, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically its millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string.

There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give different search result pages for the same search query. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Google, Yahoo! and Bing periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you’d like to be at the top. The last step in search engine activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in a web browser – i.e. displaying to the end user in his web browser the endless pages of search results that have been sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant according to the search query.

Differences between the Major Search Engines

Although the basic functionality of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. For different search engines different factors are important. There were times, when SEO experts joked that the algorithms of Bing were intentionally made just the opposite of those of Google. While this might have a grain of truth, it is a known fact that most major search engines like different things and if you plan to conquer more than one of them, you need to optimize carefully.

There are many examples of the differences between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are very, very important. Also, for Google sites are like wine – the older, the better, while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time till your site gets mature to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!

We Guarantee Page 1 Rankings - How and Why

Many people ask us how we can guarantee a page 1 Google Ranking. They say that it is not possible to guarantee any Rankings on Google unless you are one of Google’s own SEO Engineers. They are 100% correct. Nobody can guarantee you a page 1 Google Ranking.

However, our partner company has been involved in Search Engine Optimization since 1995 and has accumulated a fair amount of experience in optimizing websites and on-line adverts for page 1 Google Rankings. Their success rate varies slightly but never drops below 97%. This gives us the confidence to offer all our clients a full money back guarantee in case we fail to live up to our promises.

In order to achieve and maintain a high standard our partner company analysis a client’s site in great detail, locating any errors on the site and then restructuring various elements of the site. In many cases this restructuring may include a partial or full re-writing of site content.

They simply create a site signature which matches and complies with the requirements of Google’s latest Algorithm. There are certain aspects of SEO – Search Engine Optimization that are known and which are openly revealed by Google itself. Matt Cutts, Department Head of Google Search frequently talks about what to do and what not to do, and there are many videos available on YouTube.

There is also a great deal of SEO work which is done based on experience alone, since Google will never reveal all. Our partner company has followed Google from the very first day of its life as a Search Engine, and it is the long term experience and following all the changes Google has implemented over the years which has helped them more than anything else to achieve page 1 Google Rankings.

BlueChip IT has partnered with a top web development and SEO company to supply its clients with a premium SEO solution for as little as €15 per week with a money back guarantee. Even if you do not have a website and you want to have your business listed on page 1 of Google, you can contact BlueChip IT for further info and have your business promoted on The Portugal News Business Directory Portal - http://ads.theportugalnews.com

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