Why Website Optimization is Important

People not involved in website optimization often have difficulty to understand search engine optimization and the different methods that are involved. If you have to explain the basic SEO concepts to your boss, the following list will help you:

1. Link building is important

Links are like votes for a website. The more votes a website has, the better the rankings.

2. There are different link types

Search engines consider the relevance of the links. Links from unrelated websites don't help as much as links from relevant websites. A link from a website that has many inbound links for itself counts more than a link from an unpopular website.

3. It's important to keep on link building

It does not help to get more links than your competing web pages. At least one of your competitors will continue to build links and pass your website. For that reason, it's important to know that link building is an ongoing activity.

4. Buying links can get you in trouble

Search engines don't like paid links because they consider the links to your website as editorial votes. Google has officially stated that it considers paid links as an attempt to game the system.

Google penalizes websites that buy links. Even if Google cannot automatically find all paid links to your website, your competitors might report your website.

5. Redirects can cause problems

Redirects have been used by spammers in the past and some search engines still have difficulties with that. If you have to use redirections on your website, only use 301 redirects.

A 301 redirect is the only server side redirect that is defined as a permanent redirect. That means that search engines will follow the links and pass the links from the old URL to the new URL.

6. Duplicate content can cause problems

Search engines want to return as many different results as possible in their results. That is why search engines only list one copy of a document in their search results.

For that reason, you shouldn't promote more than one domain for the same website and you should have unique content on your web pages.

Near copies are also considered duplicate content, for example, when the same article is listed on more than one website.

8. Why your web pages must be optimized

Search engines use simple software programs to index web pages. These web pages analyze the text on a web page to determine what it is all about.

If a keyword is mentioned in the right places and in the right frequency, search engines will consider the web page relevant to that keyword. If a keyword is mentioned too often, search engines might penalize a website because it looks like a spamming attempt.

9. Keywords are the key to your success

It's important to choose the right keywords for search engine optimization. Single word keywords can be very popular but they seldom lead to sales. Industry specific keywords can be so special that no one searches for them. The perfect keyword is targeted, has a high search volume and leads to sales.

How the age of your and other people's websites affects your rankings

High rankings on all major search engines are influenced by the number of web pages that link to a web page and by the quality of the web pages that link to a page.

Links from popular and trusted web pages have a bigger impact on the search engine rankings of a web page than links from less popular and trusted pages.

A new patent application with the name "Ranking Domains Using Domain Maturity" indicates that there is another factor that helps search engines to determine the quality of a web page.

How the new method can be used to detect high quality links

Here's the abstract of the new patent application:

"Ranking domains for search engines is provided herein. To rank a domain, contributing domains associated with the domain are identified. Additionally, the maturity of each of the contributing domains is determined.

A rank for the domain is then determined based at least in part on the maturity of each of the contributing domains. The domain rankings may then be used to order results for search queries."

The patent applications indicates that newer domains are more likely to be spam or part of a link system that tries to game search engine algorithms.

Web pages that have links from older domains may be ranked higher than other domains in the search results.

Why do search engines think that new domains are likely to be spam?

Domain names are cheap and some domain name registrars even offer free domain registration and trial periods.

Spammers can easily take advantage of these offers to build a network of websites that link to each other (a so-called link farm).

The new patent describes how search engines can use the age of websites to specify the value of their links. For example, links from websites that are several years old could have a high effect on the search engine positions of the ranked sites while links from newly created websites might not have any effect at all.

A major Google algorithm update might be on the way

What changes did webmasters notice in Google's search results?

Not all webmasters noticed the same changes. Here's an overview of what has been reported:

• Some established websites that did not spam dropped out of Google's index early March.
  
  
• It seems to take much longer now until new websites get indexed by Google.
  
  
• Rather less relevant results have received higher rankings because some relevant pages either dropped out of the index or lost some of their inbound links.
  
  
• The Cache data doesn't seem to be updated.
  
  
• The site: and inurl: queries on Google that normally fluctuate for large websites now report the same numbers every day.

Changes like these are usually a clear indicator of an upcoming ranking algorithm update.