Santosh Rathod

Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a science? An art? Is it hidden behind a black curtain? We still find lively debate on headline tags — H1 versus H-anything else — and whether metatags have any value. When all the dust settles, the principles remain the same: crawlable site architecture, attractive content that everyone important wants to link to. Here’s how it works.

How do Search Engines Rank Sites?
A search engine sends a “spider” (AKA “bot”) to crawl the servers on the world wide web to find documents to bring back to its index or database. In the index, it filters documents according to the search engine’s rules (such as, to weed out duplicates) and stores those which meet its quality criteria.

When a searcher makes a request, the search engine evaluates the sites in its index, assessing which are the most relevant to the requested information, based on area of expertise as evidenced by keywords in content, and references in the form of links from authoritative sites. Note that the links that count with search engines are the ones pointing to your site.

How Does SEO Help?
Search Engine Optimization clears and maintains a path for search engines in four ways:
1. Addressing the limitations of the “bots” with crawler-friendly site architecture, as well as addressing indexing filter issues.
2. Making the site accessible to searchers by identifying keywords most used by the target audience and writing the keywords — sensibly — into the text of the website.
3. Attracting inbound links from authoritative sites and targeting those links to searchers’ interests.
4. Analyzing visitor activity on the site — human and “bot” – to look for ways to improve the search experience for both.

When you do this right, you help the search engines do a better job serving their visitors the information they seek, and they display your site to the visitors you seek. Everybody wins.

“Google really does want to encourage appropriate SEO; we want to help you rank better if you follow our guidelines,” said Matt Cutts, Google’s senior software engineer on a radio interview last month. You’ll find those guidelines at

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html .

Why Is SEO Important to Your Site?
In the “everybody-knows-that” department, studies reveal that 70% of searchers click on natural or organic listings. But with Google, that jumps to 87%. Nearly 50% of all searches are done on Google — more than half, if you add in AOL, which displays Google search results. So, do the math. Of 1000 searchers, 555 (55.5%) will use Google or AOL, and 483 (87%) of these will click on links that are not “sponsored”. Of the remaining 445 non-Google searchers, 311 (70%) will choose organic listings over paid. Altogether that’s 794 out of 1000 searchers! Who wants to pass up that many visitors? What’s more, research last year showed that 60% of searchers click on one of the top three organic listings if it interests them. (Just how to capture their interest, well that’s a topic for another time.)

There you have it. Search engine optimization to get some of those top rankings is vital to website success. Fortunately, successful SEO rests on following through on some basic principles for your site. If you haven’t begun SEO already, now’s the time to begin.

DEFINITION - A content management system (CMS) is a system used to manage the content of a Web site. Typically, a CMS consists of two elements: the content management application (CMA) and the content delivery application (CDA). The CMA element allows the content manager or author, who may not know Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), to manage the creation, modification, and removal of content from a Web site without needing the expertise of a Webmaster. The CDA element uses and compiles that information to update the Web site. The features of a CMS system vary, but most include Web-based publishing, format management, revision control, and indexing, search, and retrieval.

The Web-based publishing feature allows individuals to use a template or a set of templates approved by the organization, as well as wizards and other tools to create or modify Web content. The format management feature allows documents including legacy electronic documents and scanned paper documents to be formatted into HTML or Portable Document Format (PDF) for the Web site. The revision control feature allows content to be updated to a newer version or restored to a previous version. Revision control also tracks any changes made to files by individuals. An additional feature is indexing, search, and retrieval. A CMS system indexes all data within an organization. Individuals can then search for data using keywords, which the CMS system retrieves.

A CMS system may also provide tools for one-to-one marketing. One-to-one marketing is the ability of a Web site to tailor its content and advertising to a user’s specific characteristics using information provided by the user or gathered by the site (for example, a particular user’s page sequence pattern). For example, if you visit a search engine and search for “digital camera,” the advertising banners will advertise businesses that sell digital cameras instead of businesses that sell garden products.Two factors must be considered before an organization decides to invest in a CMS. First, an organization’s size and geographic dispersion must be considered especially if an organization is spread out over several countries. For these organizations, the transition to CMS is more difficult. Secondly, the diversity of the electronic data forms used within an organization must be considered. If an organization uses text documents, graphics, video, audio, and diagrams to convey information, the content will be more difficult to manage.