SEO: The Free Beginner’s Guide | Search for a title, author or keyword | ||||||||
SEO: The Free Beginner’s Guide SEO: The Free Beginner’s Guide From SEOmoz. SEO ( Search engine optimization ) is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines. The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines - Google, Bing and Yahoo! Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops in a big city subway system. Each stop is its own unique document ( usually a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPG or other file ). The search engines need a way to “crawl” the entire city and find all the stops along the way, so they use the best path available – links. Or, at least, all those that the engines can access. Through links, search engines’ automated robots, called “crawlers” or “spiders” can reach the many billions of interconnected documents. Once the engines find these pages, their next job is to parse the code from them and store selected pieces of the pages in massive hard drives, to be recalled when needed in a query. Search queries are the words that users type into the search box. To accomplish the monumental task of holding billions of pages that can be accessed in a fraction of a second, the search engines have constructed massive datacenters in cities all over the world. These monstrous storage facilities hold thousands of machines processing unimaginably large quantities of information. After all, when a person performs a search at any of the major engines, they demand results instantaneously – even a 3 or 4 second delay can cause dissatisfaction, so the engines work hard to provide answers as fast as possible. When a person searches for something online, it requires the search engines to scour their corpus of billions of documents and do two things: first, return only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query, and second, rank those results in order of perceived value ( or importance ). It is both “relevance” and “importance” that the process of search engine optimization is meant to influence. Today, hundreds of factors influence relevance and importance, many of which we’ll discuss throughout this guide.
|
|||||||||
SEO: The Free Beginner’s Guide | Disclaimer: this link points to content provided by other sites. |