SEO Consult Blog

Search engine optimization is about making your website as ’search engine friendly’ as possible, thus achieving a high page rank when people do searches. There are so many pages on the web that you cannot rely on your website being found with a hit and miss strategy. Even if it is indexed in a search return, there may be thousands of returns - and people are not going to wade through them all. The contest is to get into the top ten, or even the top twenty.

Googlebot

Googlebot is the web crawler used by Google. It crawls the web searching for pages, and then passes them on to the Indexer, which sorts every word and then stores those pages for future searches. It starts with a list of URLs, then investigates hyperlinks on the page, and adds them to its list of URLs to search.

Two of the main problems for search engines are the huge number of pages on the web, and the fact that fresh information is being produced all the time. For that reason Googlebot has two versions, the Deepbot for deep searches, and the Freshbot, which only looks for fresh content.

Googlebot discovers pages by investigating the links from every page that it searches. For it to find a web page, it needs to be pointed there from a link on an existing page that it visits.

Searchable content

Because of the way the crawler works, it is important to use a number of links to other sites, and to other pages on your site, to point the crawlers to your page. It is particularly useful to have links to sites that achieve a high page ranking. Reciprocal site links are understood to be less effective than One Way Links; therefore interaction with other sites is advantageous but only if they are of excellent quality to the user.

Meta tags and keywords are important too, so that the indexers can clearly distinguish the pertinent content on your page, in order to sort it for search queries. However, pointless keyword usage to maximise keyword density can have a negative effect, as it looks like spam and your site can be ‘blacklisted’ by the crawler. More important is to have good quality content, with only necessary keywords.

Fresh content on your site is crucial. Once your site has been discovered and is being listed for visits, regular Fresh Content will ensure more regular visits. The more popular the site, and the higher the page ranking, the more regularly the Freshbot will check it.

SPAM and what not to do

If your site is identified as spamming, it will be excluded from further crawls. Keyword density for the sake of it could easily result in your site’s exclusion.

One may have to protect one’s site from other people’s spamming, too. For example, there’s a known practice of people leaving comments on your site purely for the purpose of creating a link back to theirs. If one suspects this practice, one can follow a “no-follow” strategy, whereby you specifically tell the crawler not to visit those links.

Search Engine Optimisation is one of the most jargonistic and acronym heavy online industries that a new Webmaster attempts get their head around. As such, it can prove very difficult for the first time or novice SEO (which also means Search Engine Optimiser as well as Search Engine Optimisation) to truly get to grips with the topic. Most recently, terms like LSI and SEPS have come to the fore because they offer a genuine insight into how the search engines value and subsequently rank organic websites crafted with the end user in mind.

Search Engine Indexing Techniques

Search engines use various techniques in order to try and promote high quality web pages and consign over optimised, or unnaturally written, websites to the lower rankings. The adoption of LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing is one such move because it negates the need to over optimise content for a specific keyword and instead promotes the use of Related Keywords within the content of a page and within the building of a link profile.

Latent Semantic Indexing

Latent Semantic Indexing is not a search specific indexing technique and has been used by libraries and other major document indices in order to help cross referencing and searching. The principle is that a document that is indexed for one particular keyword can naturally be documented for a number of other topically or semantically related keywords. For example, a page on SEO could legitimately also be indexed under Internet marketing or online marketing because SEO is both of these.

Semantically Related Keywords

In order for search engines to legitimately use LSI within the formulation of their search results, they use semantic dictionaries. These are lists of keywords cross references to semantically related keywords. As well as using this list to identify other relevant keywords to index a page under, search engines also use this information to help them judge whether a site has been written organically or is designed solely to manipulate their search results.

Semantic Keyword Inclusion

Pages written about SEO should naturally contain other semantically related keywords. SEO is short for search engine optimisation and therefore the search engines would expect to see both of these terms on relevant pages. They would also look for other related keywords like those mentioned earlier – Internet marketing and Online Marketing. Pages that include these semantically related keywords are more likely to perform well in the search results.

Latent Semantic Indexing And Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation is constantly changing because search engines are always striving to improve their own search results. Their ultimate goal is to provide a list of high quality pages that are laser targeted to the term that a surfer used when searching their index. As a part of this, search engines naturally look for methods to promote sites that offer value and relevance to their own visitors. Latent Semantic Indexing is one such method and numerous patents have been filed by Google and other search engines related to this form of semantic indexing and topical indexing.