Traffic on the internet is said to be highly influenced by search engines, since nearly 90% of people who are online rely on these sites to find exactly what they are looking for. In this regard, search engine optimization (SEO) has become more vital in determining the traffic volume, success rate, and profitability of a website. If a website does not implement any SEO techniques, it can be very difficult for internet surfers to chance upon their links in search engine results pages (SERP).
Now, how are websites included in SERPs in the first place? The answer lies in indexing. This is the task accomplished by search engine programs called spiders, bots, or crawlers. These bots visit as many websites as they can, gather info about them, search for relevant aspects of the sites, then include them in the index of the said search engine. In this manner, when an internet surfer types a query in the search engine box, Google or Yahoo will then list down sites from their index, and these sites are those that are most relevant to the search query being made.
How does the site become relevant to the query? This is through keywords, which the web designer must integrate into the website. These phrases can be found in the page title, the content itself, on anchor texts, as names of graphics files, or even as META tags within the HTML code. However, keywords do not just have to be stuffed into a website without considering how they are used. Of course, they should be sensibly integrated into the articles or content, as well as adhering strictly to the keyword density rule imposed by the search engine. Unwise use of too many keywords at a given time may result in the banning of a website from the search engine index.
Links are also essential whenever you want your site to be included in SERPs, which is why link building is a powerful strategy often employed. For bots or spiders to travel from one website to another, they follow all the links that they find in a site. Likewise, if your URL is found on a friend’s or business partner’s site, this creates a path for bots to go to your site and index it too. In a way, you can say that these links point towards your site, for both bots and internet visitors. These types of links are called back links, and it should be a priority for web masters to distribute as many back links as possible across the web, may it be through blogs, comments, partner sites, and more.
An aspect that determines which websites are listed first in SERPs is their page rank. This is determined through various factors, such as volume of traffic on a daily basis, the number of back links directed to it, and the degree of implementation of SEO methods. In short, if you see a site listed on the first SERP, these have a good page rank for sure. A high page rank is, more often than not, the sum total of all SEO goals.
