Search Engine Optimisation Part-1

In my earlier article on professional website design, I have illustrated importance of look and feel of the website. The visitor should be pleased to browse through the pages and should get impressed by the high quality status of the company.  However, the first requirement is to attract visitor to your site. Unless it is found by him through internet search, it is rare that he would visit your site, even if, you have the thing that he is in search of. It is therefore, far more important to pay attention to design of the site for high ranking  by search engines. This is called as search engine optimization.

 Website owners feel that their website should be visited by maximum number of people and mainly those who are in need of the product or services they are offering. However, most of the times website name does not convey the information about the contents in the site and the name also is not known to many except those related to the organization. Naturally people in need of products or services search the suppliers on the internet by using popular search engines like yahoo, google, bing or rediff. 

As soon as they  write the name of product or type of service in address bar, the search engines give a list of thousands of websites having contents similar to the request text. This list is segregated in number of pages. Generally, the websites listed in the first few pages only get visited by the users. As the search encompasses the entire worldwide websites, it becomes very difficult to have a place for our website in the first few pages of search results. 

Special techniques are required to be implemented write from web design stage to its continuous maintenance for making the site search engine friendly so that chances of its ranking in the first few pages can be assured. As almost every serious company employees these techniques, there remains a stiff global competition in this effort.

We cannot comprehend how the search engine displays long list of websites in few seconds. Lot of preparatory work is being done continuously by search engines to speedup the search process. In order to design a search engine optimized website, it is necessary to understand the mechanism and procedure of search engines in ranking the websites based on content relevance. Google search provides lot of information about the working of search engines.

Every search engine does this work in three steps

The crawler (or spider)- This is self actuating program ( robot) which crawls (or works like spider) and  records contents in all websites at regular time intervals and creates a raw data for search operation. It visits every old or new website and makes changes in archived data if the contents are changed or adds data of new sites. It should  to be remembered here that it is a computer program, who blindly goes through the page source and collects information. For example, it cannot see or recognize images, unless you specify description of image by alt tag. It however takes note of meta tags, links, header tags. 

The Indexer – Indexer program classifies the gata gathered by the crawler and fills it in appropriate database tables.

The Ranker – This is most important part of search engine. This program reads the request information filled by the user in address bar and based on preferences and relevance, sorts the web pages, gives rank numbers and displays the entire list in  page wise format to the user.