Search Engine Optimization Simplified

 Chances are good that at some point in your life you ran a search
on an online search engine and instead of one hit you received pages
and pages of possible hits. Have you ever wondered if the order the
websites appear on search was just a random grouping or if they had
been placed in a specific order that just appeared disorderly to you?
The answer is that there is a very elaborate system used to determine
where a website appears during an internet search. The process is
something called search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization is the science and art of making web pages
attractive to search engines.

Next time you run an internet search look at the bottom of the page.
Chances are good that there will be a list of page numbers (normally
written in blue) for you to click if you can't find exactly what you
are looking for on the first page. If you actually look farther then
the second page you will part of a minority. Studies and research have
shown that the average internet user does not look farther then the
second page of potential hits. As you can imagine it's very important
to websites to be listed on the first two pages.

Webmasters use a variety of techniques to improve their search engine
ranking.

The first thing most webmasters (or website designers) do is check
their meta tags. Meta tags are special HTML tags that provide
information about a web page. Search engines can easily read Meta tags but they are written with special type of text that is invisible to
internet users. Search engines rely on meta tags to accurately index
the web sites. Although meta tags are a critical step in search engine
optimization they alone are not enough to have a web site receive top
ranking.

Search engines rely on a little device called a web crawler to locate
and then catalog websites. Web crawlers are computer programs that
browse the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Web
crawlers are also sometimes called automatic indexers, web spiders,
bots, web robots, and/or worms. Web crawlers locate and go to a website and "crawl" all over it, reading the algorithms and storing the data. Once they have collected all the information from the website they bring it back to the search engine where it is indexed. In addition to collecting information about a web site some search engines use web
crawlers to harvest e-mail addresses and for maintenance tasks. Each
search engine has their own individual web crawlers and each search
engine has variations on how they gather information.

Most webmasters feel that proper use and placement of keywords helps
catch the attention of web crawlers and improve their websites ranking. Most webmaster like to design their websites for ultimate search engine optimization immediately but there aren't any rules that say you can't go back to your website at any time and make improvements that will make it more attractive to search engines.