Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the amount and quality of traffic to a website by making its contents Search Engine friendly. In Search Engine Optimization a website is prepared and altered to make it as compatible as possible with Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN and it also focuses the contents to the keywords and key phrases desired by the customers. It is preferred to get optimization of a website during its construction because structure of the website is to be designed according to the rules and regulations of search engines but it can also be optimized after publishing a website on internet. Many website designing and development companies in Pakistan are offering Search Engine Optimization service during construction of website and even after designing and publishing of a website. These companies can be easily found through Search Engines by putting any keyword like “Search Engine Optimization in Pakistan” or “SEO experts in Pakistan”.

Many small and large entrepreneurs are focusing on online services like online shopping, fashion boutiques, hotels & accommodation, event management, real estate, travel agencies, outsourcing and different unique services. Entrepreneurs get developed their company website but forget to invest on its Search Engine Optimization. They either don’t know about it or they are unaware of its importance. From now on, job of SEO experts starts to follow rules and regulations of famous Search Engines to make available optimized website against keywords by the visitors in a search engine. Although there may be thousands of competitors of a particular website with its products or services but only those websites will be seen in Search Engines’ top results which will be properly optimized. Many Search Engines maintain database of new & old websites automatically and many store information manually but it depends on the algorithm of the Search Engine that how do they operate.

Search Engines work by following this specific order i.e. Web crawling, Indexing and Searching. Web crawling is the process in which a crawler (also known as Spider- a program that browses websites automatically) visits all available links of a website to store information of its webpages. Search Engines’ crawlers continuously crawl websites after specific time to get its up-to-date information to make it available on the keywords by the search engine users. Normally Google takes 20 days and Yahoo takes 30 days to revisit a website for its latest information. Indexing collects and stores data of websites for its fast and accurate information retrieval. Search Engines usually extract information of the website from its title, description, heading, special fields (meta-data) and file names. When a keyword or keyphrase is entered in a search engine to search information then the keyword is checked against the search engine’s index of all the web pages it has analyzed. The best URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) are then returned as hits and ranked in order with the best results at the top as process of Searching.

While optimizing a website, two important aspects of Search Engines should never be forgotten: Robots.txt and Sitemap. Robot.txt is being used to prevent access of web spiders to different parts of the website for its publicity. So spiders will leave those webpages which will be mentioned in the Robots.txt at the root directory of uploaded website on the internet. Sitemap is used to inform Search Engines about available webpages on a website for its crawling. Sitemap also facilitates to mention webpage’s importance and date of last modification so that Search Engines can crawl it easily to get latest information available on the website.

Many of SEO Experts play tricks with Search Engine to come into top ranking which is known as Black-hat or Spamdexing but famous Search Engines do not follow one algorithm to rank websites. People should avoid such tricks because if a website is found doing such activities then it is very difficult to get good ranking in famous Search Engines and more importantly a website can loose the trust of visitors if they are not able to find their required information on the website.

Search Engine Optimization plays a vital role to increase traffic of relevant visits to the company website that in turn, increases the visits of potential customers as well. This helps to attain major objective of the website i.e., online business. If you are planning to build a new website, you must optimize your website according to SEO rules and regulations during its construction. If your company already has a website then it must be optimized to get good ranking in Search Engines and more customers from all over the world.

[Article by M. Munir Bhatti]