SEO in an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of improving a web-site's profile by carefully building and configuring the site to be correctly indexed by the robots that Google™and the other search engines use to index the World Wide Web.
How does it work?
There are many ways in which a site can be optimized for SEO.
Search engines, like Google™ and Microsoft's Live Search™, include small programs, known as search bots (Search Robots), such as Googlebot, that trawl the web constantly, indexing each web-site that they find. They are also know as Web crawlers, Web spiders and Web robots.
These search bots are basically algorithms - or programmed rules - by which sites are assessed and added to the huge databases that these companies maintain.
By understanding something of the mechanism by which they work, pages can be built that are placed higher up the lists of results, that are returned by searches on certain keyword lists. To get some idea of how mathematically complex these algorithms are, try reading this page on Google's Page rank explained at WebWorkshop. - Yes, the main Google ranking algorithm is really some variation on PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn)) !
The information is here:http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/head/meta.html but the relevant main points are:
- Search engines look at all the fields which have the name "description" and "keywords".
- To avoid being truncated by search engines, the description should be brief--no more than 200 characters.
- Keywords are separated by commas and may be considered case sensitive by search engines.
- If the same keywords are repeated too often in the META element, some search engines will not index the document.
- Search engines typically only process the first 1000 characters of the keywords list.
- Search engines are also concerned with the actual text on each page and have no interest in graphics and other multimedia.
- Search engines are very concerned with links, both within the site and external to it.
- The best way to improve a site's page rank is to get lots of other large, respectable and popular sites to carry a link to it.
As an example, our latest completed project is the not-for-profit English language international drama group, The InPlayers, based in Amsterdam, Netherlands (as are we).
