There are many misconceptions about SEO
techniques that has sprung up in the early years, which now makes it difficult
both for the site operators and the SEO service providers to determine what is the most effective way to optimize
their websites. How to do this SEO optimization is a very critical question,
because if some over aggressive techniques are used to rank the websites higher
in the search results, then the search engine has full authority to ban the
website from their search results. This is why most of the providers have their
own code of ethics which they adhere to, in order to prevent banning of the
websites. By 1997, the search engines discovered that the webmasters or web
developers are making desperate attempts to rank high in their search results,
by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords. So the search engines had to adjust their
algorithms to prevent the web developers from manipulating the rankings in
their search results. As a result, the service providers now do a highly scientific
research before modifying the contents of their websites. The basic steps
followed during this research are as follows:
·
Keyword research: A proper
research on what the users are searching for must be done, because there is no
use in incorporating those keywords which are not searched by the users. There
is no use in incorporating useless keywords, that would only lengthen and cramp
up the website. Incorporate as less number of words as possible, but do that
wisely.
·
Web site architecture: the most
popular areas of the website that is the pages where the optimization has been
done are featured in the main navigation. The search engine assigns ranking
based on the contents of the main navigation.
·
Choose and apply which keyword
belongs to which pages. It is totally unnecessary to incorporate all the
keywords in every page of the website, because when a user is searching for a
particular keyword, he prefers to see the most relevant and appropriate
contents, and not a page which merely contains that keyword once or twice.
·
The success of SEO can be
measured by tracking the rankings in the search engines for various keyword
phrases. But there are some problems with this measurement. The words searched
for may vary from person to person, though they may be trying to find the same
thing. Also the search engines do not assign any fixed ranks; same search if
performed during different times of the day may yield different rankings. So
the alternative way to measure efficiency is by keeping track of how much
targeted traffic is delivered.
