Search Engine Optimization is widely known as optimizing your website to be visible in the search results of a search engine’s query or in a search result of a directory.

Basicall, SEO is one of the marketing strategy for your site to the public and to be listed in top 10 of search results of search engine/ directory will guarantees a return of investment. Search engine optimization can be considered as a new form of publicity for a website which secure regular visitor and targeted traffic for a site. One of the top rated search engine available today is Google and practicing SEO could promise you to be included in the top ranking search result of Google search engine.

Search engines usually use a crawler to search for the site most relevant to a certain category or field. Google’s crawler is called a spider. It is a bot designed to crawl websites for keywords and site linkings. It has developed their Googlebot to be pretty efficient and fast.

Directory and Search Engines

Directory and Search Engines are two different entities. But for some user they will look the same. For a webmaster who interested in optimizing their website, it is important to distinguish between the two. Whereas the search engine uses bots to crawl websites, Directories are searchable databases of websites that are categorized, reviewed and ranked by humans.

Yahoo is the most popular Directory listing on the web. Another important directory is the ODP or Open Directory Project.

Once, website submission was once a good way for your site to be visible on a search results rank of a directory. But website submissions for some directory listings may require fees and does not even guarantee a high ranking in the search results. It may take them long to approve the submission and the visibility of the site in the search ranking will still be dependent upon the keywords and site links. A good marketing practice for your site is just to optimize it. Optimizing your site may require extensive effort on relevant keywords to be used in your site, optimizing the content, images, links, title and tags.

How do you SEO your site?

A site can be optimized for search engine/directory listing through many ways. It can be with the use of keywords in the title and description fields of your Meta tag and through site linking. A search engine’s crawler uses these leads generated by a user’s query to look for the most pertinent site related to the query. So a good practice of SEO is to custom tailor your sites’s content and reflect this on the keywords visible on your site. SEO is not only dependent on the keywords your site has. The freshness of the contents also counts. It is advisable from time to time to change the look and feel of your site.

Author: I.D Safairis Amat Noor