Website for SEO - Search Engine Optimization Tools for Webmasters

Finding top keywords and phrases for optimizing your website.

For the target audience to find a site on the search engines, the page must contain keyword phrases that match the phrases the target audience is typing into search queries.

When a search engine spider analyzes a web page, it determines keyword relevancy based on an algorithm, which is a formula that calculates how web pages are ranked. The most important text for a search engine is the most important text for the target audience - the text your target audience is going to read when they arrive at your web site.

At its worst, SEO becomes spamdexing, the promotion of irrelevant, chiefly commercial, pages through taking advantage of the search algorithms. Indeed, many search engine administrators say that any form of search engine optimization used to improve a website's page rank is spamdexing. However, over time a widespread consensus has developed in the industry as to what are and are not acceptable means of boosting one's search engine placement and resultant traffic.

Arguably, the most ethical method is to have worthwhile content on one's Web site, to which many other Web sites will voluntarily link. There are also few who would question the ethics of informing other relevant sites around the web of one's own content and asking for links, although as relevance diminishes this becomes a more dubious practice.

Equally, virtually no one would question the ethics of choosing the vocabulary of your site (and especially of your page titles) to emphasize words that you know are often searched for by people in your market. Again, the ethics of this becomes shadier if the words in question are not relevant.

It is certainly ethical (in fact it is highly recommended) to add a "site map" page to your site, linked either from the home page or from every page on your site. Such a page guarantees that once a spider has found your site, it will be able to traverse and index the entire site.

Web search engines work by storing information about a large number of web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated web browser which follows every link it sees. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed (for example, words are extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields called meta tags). Data about web pages is stored in an index database for use in later queries. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas some store every word of every page it finds, such as Altavista.

This cached page always holds the actual search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it. This problem might be considered to be a mild form of linkrot, and Google's handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations that the search terms will be on the returned web page. This satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects the search terms to be on the returned pages. This relevance to the search makes these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data that may no longer be available elsewhere.