What Is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is the action that one will take to enhance and improve his/her website in the hope that the website will be placed at a better position at search engines' "organic" result page when someone is searching for relevant keywords. Though ranking mechanism is treated as business secret, and not a single search engine company has revealed how many factors that they have taken into account, nor what weightage is each factor counted into the final ranking. We still can optimize our websites to have a better position based on some common principles of ranking, like the following:
Relevant content shall prevail over irrelevant content.
High quality content shall out-rank low quality content.
Faster and user friendlier websites should be positioned higher.
Junk, scam, immoral, unethical, pornographic websites shall be filtered out or have little visibility.
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SEO focuses on improving the "natural", un-paid, "organic" rank of a website at search engine result page. Paid Inclusion, money wise list bidding are not considered as part of SEO, they fall into a broader category as of search engine marketing (SEM).
How Does Search Engine Work?
Search engine visits a website and grabs the content of the website.
Search engine analyses the content and indexes it.
Someone puts in his query and searches.
Search engine interprets the search and retrieves related content from its indexes.
Search engine ranks all those pages and presented it to the user.
User see the returned results.
Why SEO Is Important To Your On-line Success?
As the exploding of data and websites created on the internet each and every single day, it become more and more difficult for your website to be founded by its visitors, simply because there are so many similar data, information, goods, service are out there, and you would have to compete with growing numbers of similar websites coming from any corner of the world.
When it comes to intensive competition for the very limited top placement, each and every small improvement might mark as critical. There is no specific reason that your websites should stand out unless you put in the efforts to make it happen, or otherwise they will end up by drowning in this mega internet data ocean. SEO provides a way to differentiate and stand out.
Traffic is the key to internet success of a website, especially so if your site is heavily depending on the traffic from the internet. Search engine is one of the major visitor source for internet traffic. If you have a good search engine rank, you would have more traffic to your website instead to your competitors', hence more deals, more business, more revenue, and you will be at a better position of surviving and thriving.
If you have a poor search engine rank, very few people or nobody might found you or use your service, buy your products, eventually your site or the on-line business will be left to a lonely island of extinction. That's not the purpose of your site, and surely it is a vast waste of time, money and energy for its creation.
By implementing SEO principles, optimizing varies parts of your online business, you actually bring your websites to a better shape and hence to a higher level at a winning edge.
What Is The Challenge of SEO?
The very nature of SEO suggests that there is no guaranteed position at the top. You might have put large amount of time, effort, energy into optimizing your site, that doesn't automatically lead to a satisfied placement. There are two reasons why it is so, first, search engine ranking algorithm is out of your control. what deem to be important to you might not be equally considered as important to search engines, you might miss the shots by putting too much energy into factors that are having very little impact to the overall ranking, or by putting too less effort to factors that are critical for search engines; second, you have no control over the degree and intensity of your competition. You never know what your competitors are doing and what are the resources they have put in, or how determined are they. After all top placements are limited, and good positions are what everyone want to occupy, SEO is not an easy job, only those who are guided by those common principles, equipped with proper tools, persistently fine-tuning, constantly improving will deserved to be at the top spots.
SEO Knowledge Test Sample Questions
1. Which factor is NOT used by the major search engines to measure relevance or popularity in their ranking algorithms?
(1) Keyword usage in the URL and page title
(2) Anchor text of links pointing to a page
(3) Keyword density in the body text on the page
(4) Global traffic of a page
2. Which of the following is an acceptable way to show HTML text to search engines while creating a graphical image to display to users?
(1) CSS layers - show the text on a layer underneath the image atop
(2) User-agent based cloaking - show search engine agents text and browser agents the image
(3) IP-based Cloaking - show search engine IPs with text and other IPs with image
(4) CSS image replacement - create a rule in the CSS file that replaces the text with an image based on a given class
3. Spammy sites or blogs begin linking to your site. What effect is this likely to have on your search engine rankings?
(1) It will boost your rankings at Bing, keep them the same at Yahoo! and lower them in Google as the three engines treat spammy links in different ways
(2) It may negatively affect your rankings as search engines associate your site with bad neighbors on the web
(3) A very slight positive effect is most likely, as search engines are not perfectly able to discount the link value of all spammy sites
(4) No effect - the search engines discount all spammy sites from passing link value, but do not penalize sites for receiving these links
4. Which of the following is a bad practice for creating high quality page title?
(1) Write compelling copy that encourages users to click
(2) Include an exhaustive list of keywords
(3) Limit the title to be around 65 characters, including spaces
(4) Make sure the title is unique for every page
5. If your site is ranked as the top 1 organic result for a given query, advertising in the top paid position for that search result will generally not produce an additional volume of search traffic.
Answers Are : Q1 (4), Q2 (4), Q3 (3), Q4 (2), Q5 (2),
