s from the search engine databases by penalizing the offending websites. If your website still uses machine generated doorways, your rankings are likely in trouble. Assuming that the pages are valid, 100% error-free HTML documents, some coding methods are more attractive to the search engines than others. Evaluation of code is critical for search engine optimization as some layouts, while valid, may actually impede the engines.
Link popularity is also critical. Related websites linking to a company site greatly improve your scoring. Introduced with Google's Page Rank technology, the concept of assigning relevance to websites based on incoming links has been adopted by some engines. Basically, the more links point to a site from related domains, the more relevant your website is deemed for the particular topic or category. Link popularity is a long-term strategy that should be emphasized from day one (Notess, 2002).
Search engines utilize formulas to rank the sites which they index. The search engine formulas are closely guarded secrets, and are constantly evolving as the search engines seek to increase relevance of their search results. However there are several things which the majority of search engines look for, including the title, keywords, description (META tags), page text, the alt tags for graphics. The search engines also usually rank sites based on how early the text appears, giving a boost to sites which have the text early in the page.
There are certain techniques that have been developed that help increase the chances that a business could be listed in the upper ranks of a search engine. This paper will explore some of the techniques that are being used today, after a section that clarifies what search engines can and cannot do. The paper will begin with definitions which are essential to understand some of the formulas that follow.
The Internet is based on sets of standard protocols called TCP/IP (Transmi...