SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of effectively modifying a web site so it shows up high in the result page by a search engine. Basically, an SEO’d site is more spider friendly than a non-SEO’d one. What happens when a spider visits a web page? It looks at the title tag, the Meta tag, the ‘alt’ tag in images on the site, and so on. All these need to be filled in, and filled in well. ‘Well’ here means that they should be accurate reflections of what the site is about, and that they should be dense enough for the spider to get sufficient information from them. There are, of course, several ways of boosting search engine rankings. For example, a site may put in a lot of hidden text that will drive users to the page- a pornographic site may include hidden text about , say , “windows” , so that the page shows up along with ‘windows’ results when you are looking for info on windows . Similarly, one may repeat keywords hundreds of times on a page, so that the site ranks high for that keyword. Take cloaking for example. A popular definition says cloaking is “the process by which your website can display different pages under different circumstances. It is primarily used to show an optimized page to the search engine and a different page to humans.”Most search engines penalize a site of and when they discover it is using cloaking. SEO is a big business, especially because of the exponential growth of the number of pages on the web.