The Basics Of SE Design (SEO 4)

Search engines are limited in how they crawl the web and interpret content. A webpage doesn't always look the same to you and me as it looks to a search engine. In this section, we'll focus on specific technical aspects of building (or modifying) web pages so they are structured for both search engines and human visitors alike. This is an excellent part of the guide to share with your programmers, information architects, and designers, so that all parties involved in a site's construction can plan and develop a search-engine friendly site.

 

In order to be listed in the search engines, your most important content should be in HTML text format. Images, Flash files, Java applets, and other non-text content are often ignored or devalued by search engine spiders, despite advances in crawling technology. The easiest way to ensure that the words and phrases you display to your visitors are visible to search engines is to place it in the HTML text on the page. However, more advanced methods are available for those who demand greater formatting or visual display styles:

	Images in gif, jpg, or png format can be assigned “alt attributes” in HTML, providing search engines a text description of the visual content. Search boxes can be supplemented with navigation and crawlable links.

	Flash or Java plug-in contained content can be supplemented with text on the page. Video & audio content should have an accompanying transcript if the words and phrases used are meant to be indexed by the engines.

Seeing Like a Search Engine

Many websites have significant problems with indexable content, so double-checking is worthwhile. By using tools like Google's cache, SEO-browser.com, or the MozBar you can see what elements of your content are visible and indexable to the engines. Take a look at Google's text cache of this page you are reading now. See how different it looks?

Whoa! That's what we look like?

Using the Google cache feature, we're able to see that to a search engine, JugglingPandas.com's homepage doesn't contain all the rich information that we see. This makes it difficult for search engines to interpret relevancy.

That’s a lot of monkeys, and just headline text?

Hey, where did the fun go?

Uh oh... via Google cache, we can see that the page is a barren wasteland. There's not even text telling us that the page contains the Axe Battling Monkeys. The site is entirely built in Flash, but sadly, this means that search engines cannot index any of the text content, or even the links to the individual games. Without any HTML text, this page would have a very hard time ranking in search results.
It's wise to not only check for text content but to also use SEO tools to double-check that the pages you're building are visible to the engines. This applies to your images, and as we see below, your links as well.

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Why Search Engine Marketing is Essential For (SEO 3)

An important aspect of Search Engine Optimization is making your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand. Although search engines have become increasingly sophisticated, in many ways they still can't see and understand a web page the same way a human does. SEO helps the engines figure out what each page is about, and how it may be useful for users.

A Common Argument Against SEO

We frequently hear statements like this:

“No smart engineer would ever build a search engine that requires websites to follow certain rules or principles in order to be ranked or indexed. Anyone with half a brain would want a system that can crawl through any architecture, parse any amount of complex or imperfect code and still find a way to return the best and most relevant results, not the ones that have been "optimized" by unlicensed search marketing experts.”

But Wait...

Imagine you posted online a picture of your family dog. A human might describe it as "a black, medium-sized dog - looks like a Lab, playing fetch in the park." On the other hand, the best search engine in the world would struggle to understand the photo at anywhere near that level of sophistication. How do you make a search engine understand a photograph? Fortunately, SEO allows webmasters to provide "clues" that the engines can use to understand content. In fact, adding proper structure to your content is essential to SEO.
Understanding both the abilities and limitations of search engines allows you to properly build, format and annotate your web content in a way that search spiders can digest. Without SEO, many websites remain invisible to search engines.
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How People Contact with Search Engine (SEO 2)

One of the most important elements to building an online marketing strategy around SEO is empathy for your audience. Once you grasp what the average searcher, and more specifically, your target market, is looking for, you can more effectively reach and keep those users.

We like to say "Build for users, not search engines." When users have a bad experience at your site, when they can't accomplish a task or find what they were looking for, this often correlates with poor search engine performance. On the other hand, when users are happy with your website, a positive experience is created, both with the search engine and the site providing the information or result.
What are users looking for? There are three types of search queries users generally perform:

• "Do" Transactional Queries - Action queries such as buy a plane ticket or listen to a song.
• "Know" Informational Queries - When a user seeks information, such as the name of the band or the best restaurant in New York City.
• "Go" Navigation Queries - Search queries that seek a particular online destination, such as Facebook or the homepage of the NFL.

When visitors type a query into a search box and land on your site, will they be satisfied with what they find? This is the primary question search engines try to figure out millions of times per day. The search engines' primary responsibility is to serve relevant results to their users.
It all starts with the words typed into a small box.
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How does Search Engine work? (SEO 1)

Search engines have two major functions 

      Crawling & building an index, 

and 

providing answers by calculating relevancy & serving results.

Imagine the 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.

The link structure of the web servers to bind the pages altogether.

Through links, search engines’ automated robots, called “crawlers,” or “spiders” can reach the many billions of interconnected documents. Once the engines find these pages, they next decipher the code from them and store selected pieces in massive hard drives, to be recalled later when needed for a search query. 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 datacenters all over the world.These monstrous storage facilities hold thousands of machines processing large quantities of information. After all, when a person performs a search at any of the major engines, they demand results instantaneously – even a 1 or 2 second delay can cause dissatisfaction, so the engines work hard to provide answers as fast as possible.

Search engines are answer machines. When a person looks 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 usefulness. It is both “relevance” and “importance” that the process of SEO is meant to influence.
To a search engine, relevance means more than simply finding a page with the right words. In the early days of the web, search engines didn’t go much further than this simplistic step, and their results suffered as a consequence. Thus, through evolution, smart engineers at the engines devised better ways to find valuable results that searchers would appreciate and enjoy. Today, 100s of factors influence relevance, many of which we’ll discuss throughout this guide.

How Do Search Engines Determine Importance?

Currently, the major engines typically interpret importance as popularity – the more popular a site, page or document, the more valuable the information contained therein must be. This assumption has proven fairly successful in practice, as the engines have continued to increase users’ satisfaction by using metrics that interpret popularity.
Popularity and relevance aren’t determined manually. Instead, the engines craft careful, mathematical equations – algorithms – to sort the wheat from the chaff and to then rank the wheat in order of tastiness (or however it is that farmers determine wheat’s value).
These algorithms are often comprised of hundreds of components. In the search marketing field, we often refer to them as “ranking factors” Moz crafted a resource specifically on this subject – Search Engine Ranking Factors.

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