SEO, Social Media & eCommerce Talk @RTMLWise

Let us admit that most of what we call SEO is targeted at Google search engine. And why not? After all over seventy percent of searches are conducted through Google. In fact, the word googling has been accepted as a phrase. How many times have you heard people saying “Google it ”. This supreme supremacy has not come about by chance. Google started as a pure play search engine and continues to be passionately driven by search. It is a thought leader in search technology and has most of the internet population under its thrall. No doubt many of us spend hours learning about Google. It is a fascinating world which can consume your time and sometimes become an obsession and an addiction. Sometimes I wonder if the time spent on reading about Google is worth it, but then fortunately it is part of my so called job. I will call it a hobby masquerading as a job.

But let me turn to more mundane and possibly rewarding things other than meandering away with stray thoughts. I will spend my time explaining some interesting terms . First of all I would like to get my readers to click on this link http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/ . This is probably the best place to start learning about SEO and also the last authoritative words straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth.

Crawling

The first thing which any search engine has to do is index or collect information about websites. This is a complex process since many thousands of sites are added , some hundreds of thousands modified , links created and dead links left scattered all over the internet. The googlebot which is also called a bot or spider crawls all over the internet looking for additions and modifications ,finally indexing them for use by the Google search engine. Googlebot uses sitemaps extensively to index websites and this means you must create a sitemap if you want to get indexed ( get all your web pages indexed ). I feel an understanding of the process is important since we come to realize the importance of certain procedures which we may not appreciate otherwise.

Indexing

The next process is called indexing. Googlebots crawl through websites and index the web pages. While indexing , Google says “ In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.” Can you now associate the Title tag with SEO? Your Title tag should contain the keyword you are interested in. The keyword should be placed right in the beginning of the Title tag ,for obvious reasons. I will take up indexing in more detail in a later post. Suffice to say now that indexing process encompasses Title tags and ALT attributes , which is why they are important.

Serving results

The last part of the search jigsaw puzzle is the actual search process. Ever wonder how search engines throw up results involving millions of sites in a few seconds? When you type in the query or search word, the search engine goes through the indexed pages and gives appropriate results. This also means that information provided by search engines is actually dated and not real time . For example ,it took Google more than a few hours to provide information about Michael Jackson’s death. I suspect it was a manual intervention on the part of Google which resulted in such quick indexing because it was a huge event . Normally, it will take days for your website to be indexed and presented by search engines. This leads us to an important question- Is it possible to develop technology which will work on real time basis? Many research groups are working on this problem and we may soon find search engines which are much faster and more accurate.

To conclude this post I wish to emphasize the following:

1. Search engine crawlers search through the internet and use sitemaps to access new sites. Sitemaps are therefore important.
2. Indexing is a process by which search engines collect and store information about web pages. Title tags and ALT attributes play an important role in the process. You must pay particular attention to these if you want good search engine ranking.
3. Results provided by search engines are from the index . Information is therefore dated and historical rather than real time. If you don’t find changes made to your website reflected immediately on search engines you must not be surprised.