Search Engines and My Lessons on SEO:

Search Engines and My Lessons on SEO:

First I will like to let you in on what SEO means.

SEO means Search Engine Optimization. Simply put, it is the act of ranking in search engines, Technical right? Now let’s break it down.

SEO makes use of three major factors namely

· Crawling

· Indexing

· Ranking

· CRAWLING: Search Engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo use software known as bots to fetch contents on the internet. What are bots, they are just like robots. The word bot is taken from the word robot. And just as it father robot they replace what human being will manually do and do it more effectively and efficiently. Bots move from site to site searching for answers to questions that have been asked by users. This aspect of the behind the scene activity is called crawling. The speed is alarming, you cannot comprehend it. Some search results appear in 0.3- 0.26 seconds. That is phenomena I must say.

26 seconds usually happens in cases where the search result is very large. For example, a search that has 100 results will load faster than the one that has 92,000 results to display. Some others call bots spiders, whichever one you come across, they mean and do the same thing.

Search Engines need access to crawl your site or web pages. Access to your web pages can be denied if you instruct the bots not to crawl them. By doing so, such web pages will not appear in search results. Another thing you can do for bots is to sitemap your contents.

Sitemaps are links to all your web contents. It is also important to note that only valuable contents of your site you are advised to sitemap. Do not sitemap irrelevant contents. Bring the visitors in with the quality contents; they will get to see other contents on your site when they are already on your page. But if the low quality content brings them in, they will bounce back and go. That will count against your progress in search ranking.

INDEXING: In a layman’s term, indexing is the process of adding web pages into search. Everything you do on your site needs to be indexed in order to make it visible to searchers. Indexing allows search bots to label your site and contents, giving them a special specific metrics that allows each item on your site to be singled out without any confusion. Kind of a way to put orderliness, you may say.

· RANKING: this is the act or behind the scene algorithm that search engines uses to determine a sites relevance to a specific search query by a user. There are various other factors that Search Engines like Google uses to rank or determine the relevance of a site, actually there are about 200+ of them. But when all this is carried out and a particular website gets the number one spot on the "SERP" > search engine result page, this is what SEO optimization is all about.

As a webmaster, you want your site to get good ranking, you don’t wish it, you work it!

How you may ask. First and foremost, you will have to create good content that human beings can be attracted to and glued to. It must offer value. You also need to read the mind of your audience ahead by pre-determining what they are most likely to read and the way they are most likely going to search for it i.e. the words they will use to reach your content.

Reading their mind is not enough so it is not just about using the words that will bring them to your site, they must find value and stay long on your site to improve your relevance and also find your content worthy of sharing. Not forgetting subscribing to your news letter or RSS. All of these activities on your site will tell search engines such as GOOGLE, BING AND YAHOO that your site is relevant and should be given a higher ranking.

Now, it is worthy to note that this does not come overnight and you should not manipulate the Search Engines to get the result over night. Doing it naturally brings lasting success and huge return on your investment and efforts but a manipulated system will not last. Keep it real!

Tell Search Engines What Your Page Is About

After doing all of the above, there is something else you must do and that is helping Search Engines know what your page is about.

Let’s break it down:

Search Engines will crawl, index and rank your contents, right?

When they do they will deliver the result to the searchers, right?

Now, let’s see how you can tell Search Engines what exactly your page should be known for in order to categorize it.

This is where you come in. You can make the work of the bots very easy by simply identifying what a particular post should be known for.

All you have to do is include the keyword you wrote/blog about in your Title, Heading and Meta tags. Simply put, you should have your keyword that you want to rank for in at least four distinctive places as mentioned above in your post when you write. You do not need to overdo it but repeating a certain keyword over and again naturally (necessarily) in your post will suggest to the Search Engines that your post should be ranked for that keyword. In otherwords, even though other keywords appear in that post a particular word or phrase is more prominent. That is how you tell Search Engines what your posts is all about.