Volume 4, Issue 3, March 2014 ISSN: 2277 128X International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering Research Paper Available online at: www.ijarcsse.com Analysis of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques Gurpreet Singh Bedi, Ms. Ashima Singh Department of Computer Science, Thapar University, India
Abstract— This paper shows the importance of some techniques of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This paper covers previous work done on the subject of SEO, the early beginning of SEO, its goals and ideas such as White Hat SEO, Black Hat SEO, On page SEO, Off Page SEO, their benefits, summary and conclusion. It also describes strategies used by Google, Microsoft in support of SEO. This paper illustrates that SEO is fast growing and technology keeps changing and so SEO concepts.
Keywords— Black Hat SEO, White Hat SEO, On Page SEO, Off Page SEO, Google Panda, Google Penguin, Robot, Sitemaps.
I. INTRODUCTION TO SEO Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing website‟s degree of exposure to the public. It means that it helps spectators to find the website. SEO is a process in which website achieves solid, high rankings of pages of Search engines for most of the important keywords. This could be done by doing some modifications which makes the website search friendly. If the website appears at top position of the search engine, the more visitors it receives. SEO basically optimizes the webpage code, the webpage content by implementing its own relevant algorithm and thus it helps the search engine to fetch the webpage. So SEO is one of the techniques for fetching the web traffic. However there are also several other technologies to meet the goal like Pay Per Click (PPC) model in which advertisers pay their promoter only when their ads get clicked by the visitors [1]. So advertisers bid on the particular keyword search.
II. WORKING OF SEARCH ENGINE Search engine uses indexing software which is generally known as robots or spiders. These are programmed to find either the new documents or updated documents. Spider crawls the website, finds these new documents. It does so by following the hyperlinks of those websites which are already in the database of the search engine. Search engine then makes the index of the content and add it to their databases. Search engine ranks website by using factors and assign the weight by using their own mathematic formula. The index considers the words that are on the crawled webpage, the location where they are listed and their coding. So when the user enters the query in the search engine, the search engine first checks its own index by scanning its list, and if it finds the matching record it sends the result back to the user.
III. IMPORTANCE OF SEO The main importance of SEO is in internet marketing [2] because most of the people don‟t go beyond 20-30 webpage while searching on the search engine. If the customer has intention to buy some products on the internet and if your website is not listed on top of the search engine results then its high probability that u would lose your business. They simply visit some other website. So SEO helps to achieve the ranking and increases the chances of spectators coming to your website. IV. EVALUATION OF SEO Effort was started when the internet came into existence in 1990. Since then, anyone who wants to submit their website on the internet considers the only option Yahoo. The algorithms were introduced which had their own criteria to rank the page. At that time the more the word repeated on the webpage which visitor was looking for on the internet the higher ranking it got. In 1995, Optimization was born under Yahoo. Around 2000, Google has changed the whole concept and introduced Page Rank Algorithm as one of the best way to rank the webpage on the search engine. Google introduced new software called bots or spiders that scans the whole website, picks the duplicate content both on webpage and the associated back links and calculates the keyword density and back links [3]. Google does not give any significance to the number of times the keyword being searched appears on web page. Page rank is a class of algorithms, assigns weights to the hyperlinked web pages. Google sees a link from one page to another as a vote. A hyperlink to the web page interprets as a vote. Page Rank is a trademark of Google. If any site had more backlinks then another website then the site would receive high ranking. In 2005, „no follow‟ tag was introduced to allow the crawler not to crawl the web pages that are not important or irrelevant to the user. In 2010, Google introduced Caffeine Algorithm [4] and build a new indexing system. In the old indexing system, to refresh a part of the web page there was a need to analyze the whole web. But with the Caffeine, one can analyze the entire web in smaller portions and thus the information gets updated in smaller amount of the time. A Caffeine algorithm can process thousands of the web pages parallel and that too in few
© 2014, IJARCSSE All Rights Reserved Page | 563 Bedi et al., International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering 4(3), March - 2014, pp. 563-566 seconds. As the time passed the Google Testers become smarter and in 2011, Google introduced Panda Algorithm that used artificial intelligence [5]. Quality testers were introduced to rate the websites on the basis of quality rather then backlinks, including design, speed. Google made further changes and in 2012 Penguin algorithm was introduced [6]. Google Penguin instead of increases the ranking of the websites, it decreases rankings of websites that violate Google‟s Webmaster Guidelines [16] by using black-hat SEO techniques which includes keyword stuffing, cloaking. We can also suggest Google not to take into account the low-quality links. Google introduced a tool named „Disavow Tool” which serve the purpose [7][8]. V. PROCESS OF SEO Process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) starts with identifying the relevant phrases that will be used in optimization [9]. This step requires good decision making approach to find good set of phrases that balance the two factors: high usage of the keyword by the users and low competition of the search engines [10]. After identifying the keyword phrase, second step is goal setting to know the areas that need to work and also consider some important factors like popular content and bounce rate. So this step act as a baseline for the success of the website. Next step is page optimization either it is on page or off page optimization as content is most important in search engine optimization. Next step is link building i.e. number of the relevant web pages linked to the particular web page. So all these steps can be done at regular intervals.
Fig.1. PROCESS OF SEO
VI. CATEGORIES OF SEO TECHNIQUES 1). White Hat SEO techniques - White Hat SEO techniques follow some rules and guidelines suggested by the search engines. It is also called ethical because it follows certain legal guidelines and policies to achieve high ranking. Some most popular white Hat SEO techniques include Quality Content, Quality inbound links, certain tags, effective keyword use [11]. 2) Black Hat SEO techniques- These techniques on the other hand are unethical way of manipulation of search engine‟s algorithm. These techniques are not recommended as there is a risk of website getting removed from the search database index. So it does not always increases the ranking but also increases the chances of the website getting banned by the search engine. So these techniques are not approved by the search engines. Some most popular Black Hat SEO techniques include hidden text or links that are same color as the background color, keyword stuffing means loading a webpage with the keywords, Doorway Pages which takes the visitor to the page where products or services are promoted, cloaking [5] purpose is to present a different page to the visitor and the search engine, link farms which takes to the spammed sites. VII. CLASSIFICATION OF SEO TECHNIQUES On Page SEO is done on the page includes contents, tags. Various forms of On Page SEO technique are there- 1) Use of Heading Tags- Visitors only read first few characters of heading of the webpage, so heading tag known as H1 tag should be important keywords in the heading tag. 2) Alt tags- Alt tags must be used so that visitors are able to see the content behind the image when they move over mouse on the picture. 3) Some tools- Google Analytics reports are used as the part of on page optimization techniques which tell us what keywords an search engine the visitors used to locate our website. 4) Meta tag- These tags describes what the page is about. So if we don‟t include important keywords in meta tag [12], we may miss a chance that someone comes across on our website. 5) Sitemaps- Sitemaps lists the urls in our website is helpful to both visitors as well as search engines to crawl the website as search engine makes the index of those websites. One can easily generate the sitemap of the website. Off page optimization means giving back links [13] to our websites includes advertising the website on blog, social networking media like orkut, facebook, twitter. It includes incoming links from other websites. Make sure to have
© 2014, IJARCSSE All Rights Reserved Page | 564 Bedi et al., International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering 4(3), March - 2014, pp. 563-566 good incoming links. Small amount of high quality inbound links are far better than large amount of low quality inbound links. So one must think quality not quantity. Search engine usually takes weeks to index new pages so bounded links should be good enough to be listed at one of the topmost positions of the search engine. One should also avoid flash and multimedia content [14].
VIII. MICROSOFT SEO: A CASE STUDY There are several SEO toolkits available in the market. The Internet Information Server (IIS) SEO Toolkit is one of the toolkits provided by Microsoft [15] to improve the discoverability of the website. With the help of the site analysis report one can easily find the bugs in their website like broken links/tags, slow pages means the pages with heavy information difficult to load in the less time interval. Microsoft has introduced its own SEO toolkit to improve website ranking. Three main components robots inclusion, sitemaps and site analysis tools are available in the toolkit. The purpose of robot inclusion to manage the contents of robot.txt file. If we don‟t want to take into account the irrelevant content then we can use this feature. It prevents crawlers/robots to search for that content. The instructions are defined there in robot.txt file. Search engine basically looks for the information contained in these files. We can update the information in these files. We can disallow files like configuration file, service file which are not useful for the visitor. Using analyzing report we can analyze various features like pages linking to current page, pages linked to the page, routes to the current page which is being analyzed. Sitemap is a XML file that lists urls of web pages of your website with some metadata like change frequency, last modified date, priority assigned to the webpage. We can add url entries in this sitemap file and can analyze using site analysis report [17]. Now we have created sitemap file and we can add it into robot.txt file. Main features for optimizing the search engine are shown below: 1) Adding Allow and Disallow Rules These rules are meant to inform the search engine to crawl or not to crawl the specific paths. For example one can disallow the configuration file of their own website so that user can‟t be able to search it. Some scripts, images, pages may also be put under disallow rules like Login page of the administrator. The content of Robot.txt file mainly looks like as shown below:
Disallow: / Disallow: /Config.aspx Disallow: /Login.aspx Disallow: /scripts Disallow: /images 2) Adding URL’s to the sitemap Sitemap is a XML file that contains URL‟s with relevant data like priority of the web page, change frequency, last date at which the webpage modified. In this way one can add various features in the sitemap. Sitemap file can be updated with the website updating and its looks similar to this:
IX. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION The availability of information on the internet is growing dramatically. But it will be useful if the user finds the correct information in less amount of time. So in order to stand out from the competition means in order to increase the sites visibility, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays an important role. SEO is cost-effective process to promote internet marketing. It helps to bring the customers to the website. SEO can be done by two ways- on page and off page SEO [19]. On-Page optimization can be done on the page like to check broken tags, links, checking Meta tags, Alt tags etc. Off-Page optimization means giving quality back links to the particular web page to improve the website ranking. SEO is a process consist of various stages keyword research, goal setting, page optimization, content development, link building and then to follow-up the entire process. This paper has shown SEO research that has done to increase website ranking and thus to fetch the website traffic. So this paper can be used as basis for SEO engineers. In the upcoming years, a simple approach is not enough. Efficient SEO
© 2014, IJARCSSE All Rights Reserved Page | 565 Bedi et al., International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering 4(3), March - 2014, pp. 563-566 requires managing three basic pillars- the content, the keyword and the link building. With the help of these three pillars one can create basic SEO structure that will support high ranking of the web pages in the coming future.
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