Is There Any Need to Perform SEO for A Website?

Of course Yes. SEO is about manipulating search engines — to an extent. There are several appropriate and ethical factors which can build your site’s search engine visibility, and it’s not as simple as getting a ton of unrelated links from unrelated sites. Your web site is much like that one person in the huge crowd. In the larger picture your site is nearly invisible, even to the search engines that send crawlers out to catalog the Web. To get your site noticed, even by the crawlers, certain elements must stand out. And that’s why you need search engine optimization.

It takes time to turn a dead site around or build up a new one from scratch. Sure, you can quickly become visible in Google, MSN or Yahoo, but if your visitor traffic is largely from Google, you’re going to have to focus on creating good content, getting relevant links from other sites and directories, and being patient. This approach gives the website credibility and stability in the long term, too.

So what exactly can and can’t you do? To achieve a high or better position in search results, a website must be more than simply recognizable by a search engine spider or a crawler. It must satisfy set of criteria that not only gets the site indexed, but can also get it indexed above most (if not all) of the other sites that fall into that category or topic. Some of the criteria by which a search engine crawler determines the rank a site should have in a set of results include:

• Site Content
• Proper Anchor text
• Site popularity
• Link context
• Thematic links
• Title tags
• Keywords
• Site language
• Domain or Site maturity

As an estimation, there are several hundred more criteria that could also be considered before a site is ranked by a search engine. Some of the criteria listed also have multiple points of view. For example, when looking at link context, a crawler might take into consideration where the link is located on the page, what text surrounds it, and where it leads to or from.

These criteria are also different in importance as for some search engines, quality or quantity of external links or both, are more important than site maturity, and for others, links have little importance. These weights and measures are constantly changing, so even trying to guess what is most important at any given time is a pointless exercise. Just as you figure it out, the criteria will shift or change completely. By nature, many of the elements are likely to have some impact on your site ranking, even when you do nothing to improve them. However, without your attention, you’re leaving the search ranking of your site to chance. That’s like opening a business without putting out a sign. You’re sure to get some traffic, but because people don’t know you’re there, it won’t be anything more than the curiosity of passersby.