I am involved in search engine optimization (SEO) since 2005 and did much research to find out the behavior of the bots that indexes web site content with their relevant search engines.
None of these search engine providers, such as Google, Yahoo or MSN, released the index algorithm to public. So how can anyone say how to search engine optimize your site?
Well it is a long process. You can do some changes and check the results in search result page. This is time consuming process, as each change you make may take days to reflect in search result page, but it is possible. So I thought to test this matter and here I am, after 30 months of research, to tell you the findings.
First of all, I have to warn you about the SEO companies out there, charging tons of money to SEO your site. It is wise to spend to get your site search engine optimized, but the question is ob the company you select could deliver on their promise?
I was wondering about these dot com companies and went to check there own web site for SEO. To my surprise 11 out of 143 sites I checked, have not the minimum SEO to their own web site. So, how could you expect them to provide a service to you, that they themselves could not perform on their web site?
The minimum you could do is to tag your home page with title, description and keyword tags in the head section of your HTML page. This is very easy to implement. Sadly, many SEO companies could not perform this little piece of information.
Check it for your self! Visit your SEO provider's site and right click and select "view page source" in Firefox or "view source" in Internet Explorer. If you do not find them there, than I would suggest moving away from them since they do not know what they are promising to do.
These tagging should be done to every page of your site with the relevant information. So a bot visiting your site can pick the correct information and it will help you by getting your site indexed under the correct keyword. (The keyword has to be placed in the content section as well, but that's another story.)
The SEO does not end there. It is just the beginning. Here is another aspect of the bots. You know that you can format the heading of an article with font size, color, etc. but when the bot visits your site, it has no way to know that it is the heading. Since the bot do not understand the formatting. To inform the bot that is a heading indeed, you have to format the heading with heading tag.
With the availability of complex content management system (CMS), these techniques can be implemented easily within the template.
Search Engine Optimization is important to drive targeted visitors to your site, called organic traffic, but getting the right SEO Company is the biggest challenge the companies are facing today. It has even become more important to spend the cash wisely after the recent financial crisis the world is facing and it is going to be tougher in the future than today.
