What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the practice of improving a web site's content by using specific methods to increase the occurrences of the targeted website in search engine results. This is absolutely necessary because nowadays most of the web traffic is driven to your web-site from search engine results. This practice is absolutely necessary, as most of the success website's traffic comes from search engines, and the user usually clicks on one of the first 5 search results.

Why SEO? What can it provide to me and my company?

Traffic. And money. Lots of money.

It doesn't matter what your website provides: content, products or communities. SEO will bring more visitors to your site than you could even imagine before. You can convert visitors to money using ad campaigns or selling products/services.

How does a search engine work?

Crawling & Indexing

The first step a search engine does is crawling the web and indexing the pages it finds. The crawling is done with specialized software called search bots or search spiders and the indexing is done by creating a table with the most relevant keywords in each page.

Finding web pages that match your keywords

Search engines on the web use keywords to find relevant information for your query. Normally, you can ask a search engine a question in plain English, but, in fact, what the algorithm behind it will do is that it will change the question to its most relevant keywords and bring you the search results based on those keywords.

Example: searching for What's the best seller book in the world? will bring you the keywords "best", "book" and "world" and will provide you the Wikipedia corresponding page. Please note that the common words were removed from your query: "what", "the" and "in".

Providing you the most relevant search results that match your query

Once the search engine has determined which results are a match for your query, the search engine will deterimne which of these results are relevant to you. This is done by Google using the PageRank algorithm.

Improving your web sites' awareness to search engines:

Here is a quick checklist to make your site Search Engine-friendly:

• Read carefully the Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Make sure the information you provide in your website is genuine and cannot be found elsewhere on the Internet in this form
• Make sure that all your page titles exist and include the site name
• Include in your articles meta keywords, meta description and meta keywords. Use Google Trends to find the most efficient keywords. For our example - an online store - you might find out that "Christmas" and "Easter" are pretty relevant keywords to insert in your site.
• Use Search Engine Friendly URLs (SEF) (e.g. http://www.site.com/category/article-name)
• Generate and maintain an XML Sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools
• Make sure that you can reach any of your pages in the site with less than 3 clicks from the home page
• Limit your articles to a maximum of 3-4 paragraphs and 300 words. Longer articles will get your readers bored.
• Use HTML heading tags to make your text more visible (h1, h2, h3, strong, italic etc.)
• Avoid hidden or commented text in your HTML
• Avoid duplicate information or whole pages in your site
• Make sure you have less than 100 links on a single page
• Make sure that your most important web pages are visible direclty through a link (not after a form submission or login
• Use a simple and easy to use design and layout. Use divs instead of classic html frames and tables in your site
• Customize your design using CSS
• Use widgets that create internal links: tag cloud, most recent articles, latest comments
• Maximize the number of articles/products per page view (minimum 10)
• Use RPC XML Ping to notice search engines about your new articles
• Check that your site works on all browsers (Opera, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari) and on mobile devices
• Install an XML sitemap module and submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools
• Provide full articles in an RSS feed to your visitors
• Create an account on Online Social Networks and Social Bookmarking Sites for your site. Most used social networks in Romania include Twitter, Hi5, Facebook, Netlog, Flickr, LinkedIn, Neogen, Netlog, XING. You can also include on your site widgets from social networks
• Find web-sites with the same theme and exchange links or banners with them
• You can check anytime which links from your site are included in Google search results in Google Webmaster Tools or by searching Google for "site:domain.com"
• You can check which sites link to you either from Google Webmaster Tools or by searching Google for "link:domain.com".
• Monthly check your web statistics for the best referrers, demography of your visitors, best referer keywords etc.
• Submit your site to the most important (pageranks 4 and above) global and local web directories. Once they accept your site, other directories will copy the information. Here are some web directories relevant for Romanian web-sites:

botw.org, de.campusreporter.net, dir.acasa.ro, dir.gofind.ro, director.crosmedia.ro, director.netul.ro, directorweb.felicitari-virtuale.ro, director-web.k24.ro, director-web.phg.ro, directory.zeromedia.ro, guia.ofertaformativa.com, hoppa.com, inregistrare.domeniu.net, niallok.com, ponturifierbinti.com, search.hereuare.com, a2zwebindex.com, aboutromania.com, addmyurl.info, adresa.ro, agroInfo.ro, anaximanderdirectory.com, artemotore.com, arttouse.ro, biobees.com, bumerang.ro, bunrui.info, cere.ro, clickmybrick.com, cmcstudent.com, coolchat.com, crestinortodox.ro, culture.ro, director-web.santamia.ro, directorybird.com, dl.ro, dordetara.ro, downloadsnet.com, earthstation9.com, easyq.de, e-oferta.ro, esearchnet.com, esiq.org, fast.ro, federal.ro, gaire.com, gimpsy.com, gofind.ro, goguides.org, heraldextra.com, hinduwebsite.com, hot100.ro, hugi.is, idilis.ro, index.zona.ro, index2000.ro, intelseek.com, iraqdirectory.com, itbox.ro, ivis.ro, joeant.com, joinweb.co.il, journeymart.com, jsurfer.org, laiasi.ro, legaturi.ro, limier.be, linkaddurl.com, links2go.com, linkuri.ro, londovor.com, looker.ro, massivelinks.com, mccgz.org, mkiwi.com, monitor.neogen.ro, mpiperu.com, mylanguage.gov.au, njmusicsociety.org, norlinks.com, online.ro, pealese.com, phg.ro, phpsecure.info, ponturifierbinti.com, prolinkdirectory.com, promovare-site.ro, publivest.com, rank-up.ro, rashmagazine.com, raulken.it, re-quest.net, rol.ro, romania-on-line.net, roportal.ro, siweb.ro, startpage.ro, statistici.ro, statistics.ro, stocuri.com, surfy.com, thaipost.com, thebest25sites.com, thedirectoryindex.net, theopendirectory.biz, thep.gr, top1.ro, top25.ro, top300.ro, toplinks.ro, trafix.eu, transilvania.info, tre.ro, urls.ro, visiobrand.com, vrancea.ro, vreau.com, w1.ro, w3c-at.org, web-top.ro, weburl.ro, west.ro, xchange.ro, zeroo.be