What is Search Engine Optimization and Why do you need it?

Why do you need to optimize your site?

After having invested in a web-site for your product, you find that very few visitors come to the site, which affects possible inquiries/lead generation. One way to drive traffic to your site (and generate leads) is by advertising heavily, but this is costly. A much more cost-effective and sustainable method of driving traffic to your site is via search engines, indexes, link collections and other sites that will link to your site.

Did you know that...
Search engines deliver the highest volume of traffic at a cost lower than any other form of online advertising? Numerous research studies have proved that more than 80% of Internet users find out about new web sites through search engines?

It is not enough to be merely listed on search engines - for every frequently searched phrase, there could be millions of results thrown up. The ranking of your site on major search engines is very important. Site optimization is a process that works to enhance visibility of your site by increasing the number of listings and increasing the ranking.

How Search Engines Work

The term "search engine" is used generically to describe both crawler-based search engines and human-powered directories.

Crawler-Based Search Engines

Crawler-based search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. They "crawl" or "spider" the web using robots, then this data is indexed into their database for people to search on. They repeatedly visit your site and update their index with changes you have made since the last visit of the robot.

Human-Powered Directories

A human-powered directory, such as Yahoo, depends on humans for its listings, categorization and ranking. You submit a short description to the directory, and their editors review this.

"Hybrid Search Engines" Or Mixed Results

Earlier, most search engines either presented crawler-based results or human-powered listings. Today, it is extremely common for both types of results to be presented. For instance Yahoo shows its human-powered listings, but backs it up with crawler-based results (provided by Google), especially for the more obscure queries.

Major Search Engines appear similar, but are very different

Each crawler-based search engine uses a different algorithm for ranking and indexing, which is why the same search on different search engines usually produces different results.

Myths about Search Engine Registration

Many people expect to instantly generate a lot more hits after registering their site. This will not happen, as it may take weeks or months for the increased traffic to become noticeable. After registration with a particular search engine or index, it can take anything from 5 seconds to 5 months for them to actually list you, if in fact they actually do. Registration with human powered indexes doesn't guarantee that you'll actually be listed; many indexes are very selective and only list a small percentage of the submissions they get. And the major search engines all take months to add new listings.

Furthermore, just because you are listed by a particular site doesn't mean that your listing will appear on any particular search. A search for "project management software" on Google showed 2.45 million listings, and only 10 of which are on the coveted "first page." So registration by itself isn't enough; you have to have pages that "rank highly" with the search engines.

How do search engines rank sites?

Most search engines use the location and frequency of keywords on a web page as the basis of ranking - in response to a query containing those words. The exact mechanism is slightly different for each engine. In addition to location and frequency, some engines may give a page a relevancy boost based on links, hits and other factors. The major factors influencing ranking are:
Location and frequency of keywords
Meta tags
Link popularity
Content relevancy
Link relevancy
Direct hits

All major search engines penalize sites that attempt to "spam" in order to improve their position. One common technique is "stacking" or "stuffing" keywords on a page, by repeating the words many times in a row. If the search engines catch a spamming technique, they may downgrade a page's ranking or exclude it from listings altogether. Some of these techniques (which should be avoided) are:
Meta Refresh
Invisible Text 
Tiny Text
Link Farms