Wednesday, March 23, 2011

WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION


        You’ve probably come across the phrase “optimize your website” and the  acronyms SEO/SEM. These terminologies refer to the process of making  your  website highly accessible among  the millions of websites in the internet. SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization, an artistic and scientific procedure to help your prospective customers/audience find you easily when they need your product or service. SEM means Search Engine Marketing, the process of creating, offering, and delivering goods and services to customers through the strategic use of search engine optimization principles.



     Here are a few essential SEO terms. Most of these were either lifted or  adapted from www.seamoz.org,unless otherwise indicated. Others are my own explanations. (You may check for other available definitions if necessary):

Aging delay. Search engines have  a  way of recognizing if a website  is  very new and these newly-launched sites are allowed to wait until they come of  age. This is similar to the term: “first come, first served.” Senior websites (6 months old and up) get prioritized for higher ranking.
Black Hat. These are optimization practices that are against search  engine policies. The penalty is removal from the index of  search engines.
Bot. (robot, spider) This is a program which acts autonomously. Search  engines use these to index or retrieve web pages. Spammers  use  bots, too, for their questionable intentions.
Cloaking. The  practice of delivering different content to the search  engine spider than seen by the human users. This is considered a  Black Hat” tactic  and carries a virtual death penalty of the website or domain. It is  banned from the  search engine  results once discovered.
CMS. Content Management System. This is a publishing system that is  used for storing, controlling, revising, semantically enriching, and  publishing  documents such as articles, movies, pictures, phone numbers, scientific data, etc. (adapted  from  Wikipedia)
Content. (text, copy,images) The part  of a  web page  that is  intended  to  have value for and be of interest to the  user.
Density. (keyword density) the percentage of times a keyword or key phrase appears on a page in proportion with the total number of words on the same page.

 The more times the keyword appears in relation to the total number of on page words, the greater the overall keyword density. 
Doorway. (or gateway) A  web page  that is  designed  specifically  to  attract  traffic  from  a search  engine which immediately  redirects users  to  another   site or  page. This is also considered as cloaking. 

Stay around for more optimization terminologies in the next blogs. Copyright 2011 Ma. Francia O. Bengco. (All rights reserved)




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