Search Engine Optimisation FAQ's

What does website optimisation mean?
Website optimisation is the process of adding to your website elements that will enable search engines to identify, understand and rank your website. This includes: find niche keywords, write meta tags, add alt tags, calculate keyword density, length of your body text, link popularity and more. These modifications play a key role in your website ranking.

What is search engine optimisation?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is designing, writing, and coding (in HTML) your entire web site so that there is a good chance that your web pages will appear at the top of search engine queries for your selected keywords and key phrases.

How do search engines rank web pages?
Search engines have to deal with hundreds of millions of web pages. They follow a set of rules, known as an 'algorithm'. Exactly how a particular search engine's algorithm works is a closely-kept trade secret. However, all major search engines follow the general rules (frequency of a keyword in a web page, meta tags, the number of links that point to your site, content, etc.)

What is the difference between a search engine and a directory?
A search engine is a database of websites. Each search engine has a dedicated spider that regularly crawls the net. Search results are displayed according to the keywords entered by Internet users. A directory is catalogue of websites classified by categories. Unlike search engines, submitted websites are reviewed by a human editor.

What can cause my position to change on the search engines?
Your position on the search engines can change dramatically and unpredictably as new competitors go online. The search engines also frequently re-indexes, sometimes altering the criteria used to determine ranking.

Why is Link Popularity important?
Link Popularity is important to several groups for different reasons. Link Popularity (a concept mostly pioneered by Google) is important to the major search engines because it provides one of the strongest methods available for delivering highly relevant search results. If a search engine cannot deliver useful and relevant information to its users, those users will find another search engine. For the website owner or operator, Link Popularity becomes a strategy or tactic that can be used to boost site referrals and develop new online relationships. Market researchers and analysts are interested in Link Popularity because it provides a real-time marketing performance metric that is based on an index of independent and publicly available data sources (i.e. Google, FAST, Alta Vista, AOL, MSN, HotBot).

Why is an online marketing strategy crucial?
Website promotion has considerably changed over the past years. A few years ago, search engines robots used to crawl the net looking for websites to fill their content. With the increase of websites on the Internet, it's getting harder to get listed and rank high in the search engines. It is now crucial for website owners to consider having an online marketing strategy to increase visibility and drive targeted traffic to a website.?

What are ORGANIC search engine listings?:
Organic search engine listings are the webpages displayed when a set of words are searched on a search engine. These listings are the areas a search engine optimisation solution will mainly concentrate on.

What are PPC search engine listings?:
PPC or Pay Per Click search engine listings are the additional sponsored adverts, which appear at the side or at the top of organic listings on many search engines. Each time a search engine user clicks a PPC advert it can cost the advertiser anywhere between 10 pence to over 10 pounds.

What is search engine spamming?
Search engine spamming is an illegal method to achieve top ranking on search engines. The following are regarded as spamming: heavy repetition of words, hidden words, indiscriminate use of multiple pages at multiple domains that point to the same place, or the use of automatic redirection that takes viewers to a different URL than the one submitted to the search engine. Though these techniques may lead to immediate results, they are considered illegal by the search engines. Search engines will ban a site from indexing for spamming. Avoid any techniques that are regarded as Spam.

What is a search engine robot?
This refers to a program that mimics a browser to download web pages automatically to the searche engine cache. A spider is a type of robot that is also referred to as a Webbot.

What is a robot.txt file?
This is a file on a web site in the root directory of a website that is used to control which search engine spiders have access to which pages within a website. When a spider or robot connects to a website, it checks for the presence of a robot.txt. Only spiders that adhere to the Robots Exclusion Standard will obey a robots.txt command file.

What is a search engine spider?
A spider is the robot program used by a search engine to index the World Wide Web content. A spider captures specific information about a page. Some capture the title and the first so many characters of content, some capture the title and meta tags, some capture specific inbound link information, some look for keywords in specific places and some use a combination of all of these methods.

What are keywords and keyphrases?
A keyword or keyphrase is the word or phrase someone enters into a search resource of a search engine to find whatever they are looking for. While optimising a web site for top rankings on search engines it is important that the site is optimised for the most important keywords and phrases.

What is a title tag?
Titles are critical elements for search engines. A title reflects the subject of a page in about four or five words. Include the most important keywords in the page title. The most important string a search engine reads is your page's title. This is the title appearing on the top bar of your web browser and also listed under the menu when you bookmark a site. If a keyword(s) in a search query are found in your page's title, it will be indexed ahead of those sites containing the keyword in the body text only. The search engines consider this the best description of your web page's content and index it accordingly. Therefore, always use the most powerful and relevant keywords in your pages title.

What is a meta tag?
META Tags are HTML tags which provide information that briefly describes the content of a web sites' pages. Most of the search engines use this resource as a component in controlling a web sites search engine positioning and descriptions in search engine results.

What is a meta description?
A meta description is a one or two sentence description for each page with an accurate and interesting description of the page. Always try and include the important keyword phrase in the description.

What is a meta keyword tag?
The content in this tag is ignored by some search engines but is worth doing. Fill in the content of the meta keywords tag with keywords and keyword phrases relevant to the topic of the page. Include common misspellings of keywords, mix in capitalized versions of appropriate words, as well as plurals. Don't separate words with commas. Never repeat words more than three or four times and be sure to separate repetitions and similar words.

What is link popularity?
The number of 'quality inbound links' to a web site is termed as Link Popularity. The link popularity is determined by the number of web sites that are linking to your site, the link popularity of the sites are that are linking to your site, the similarity of the content on sites that offers link to your site. The other terms synonymous to Link Popularity are Reciprocal Links or Link Exchanges.

What is a reciprocal link?
When two websites swap links to point at each other it is called a Reciprocal Link.