Understanding SEO Concepts

Since Google(wikipedia link) is the main player in the Web search industry, this article will focus mainly on Google. The Search Engine Optimization effort is all about three simple concepts:

1 - Listing your Web Site in Google

Google crawls Web sites and stores them as cache on Google's Servers.

What you can do:

Unless Google crawls and stores your Web pages, your site will not be listed in Google's search results. Therefore, search engine visibility is extremely important. The best way to achieve this visibility is to submit an XML sitemap(wikipedia link) to Google.

What we can do to help:

We can generate an XML sitemap and submit it to Google for you. We can also regenerate and re-submit it on a scheduled basis to ensure that all of your changes and new pages are being listed.

2 - Content Recognition

Google tries to understand the content of each of your pages using artificial intelligence and other techniques. Google also tries to associate your site with commonly used search queries known as keywords(wikipedia link). All such associations are combined in the Google index.

What you can do:

Though the algorithms Google uses are kept secret, there are number of things you can do to help with the content recognition. First, make sure your page content is meaningful. Be sure that your pages have proper titles, headers, and valid HTML. If necessary, optimize your pages. Google has a guide(Google PDF) document you can review. This entire process is called on-site search engine optimization (SEO)(wikipedia link).

What we can do to help:

We can assist you with the entire SEO process. We can optimize your site, or we can provide a complete report on the aspects of your site that will need modification to achieve the desired results.

3 - Getting Results

Once a user submits a search query, Google locates all relevant pages in its index and outputs them in order of relevance.

What you can do:

First, make sure that your site is hosted by a fast hosting environment. Next, ensure that there are links from other sites pointing to your pages. Google believes that the importance of your page is determined by the number and quality of inbound links(wikipedia link); therefore, publicity is still extremely important. This entire process called off-site SEO.

What we can do to help:

Our company can help you with all your off-site SEO needs, such as managing link solicitation campaigns, creating link magnets, etc. We can also verify your environment and create a complete report on elements you can fix to improve your Web site's position in Google's results.