Search Engine Optimization...

All the time people are engaged with needs and wants, if they have any need they try to fulfill that, for that they follow buyer decision making process. First they identify the gap between what they really need and what they already have, and they find ways to fulfill those uncatered needs, in that they try to engage with more information relating to their subject. We can see many people engage with different information sources such as parents, friends, printed media, TV and other media. Among those sources internet search has became the top of all. Most of the people use digital equipment to do their works therefore they usually engage with internet search. They search what they need on search engine and find results to continue with the buying process.

Search engines are programs that search documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. A search engine is really a general class of programs, however, the term is often used to specifically describe systems like Google, Bing and Yahoo! Search that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web.

Typically, Web search engines work by sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible. Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query.

Many companies have taken steps to ensure that they pop up in the searches done by customers and the searches will show more positive content. Any company would want their company web site to come at the top of the result given by search engine for search done regarding a particular search. At this point we discuss and want to know about Search Engine Optimization. What is SEO?

 “SEO includes all technical tasks that help search engines to effectively crawl and index all relevant content of a website and; all marketing tasks that enhance the authority and relevancy of the website for a given subject, so that the website can gain high ranking in organic search results when users search for terms related to the subject matter of the website.”

Simply we can say, “This is the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.”

Key Success Factors in SEO

·         Key Word Research

It is important to understand what are the key words actually used by customers in searching the products company offer. This will help you in making sure you optimize your page to the correct key words.

·         Crawlability

Search engine has got some system that crawls through your website and indexes the data in those pages. So in order to make your web site more relevant to the searches, you have to ensure that the crawlers have access to all the pages in your site. Also simple meaningful URLs will help the crawlability further. You can find out how many pages the crawlers has access to by doing a search as "site:www.yourwebsite.com".

·         Site Structure

It is important to have a proper site structure to make your web site more attractive as well as to optimize the quality. Traditionally, consumer get exposure to the product at the market place and then buy and consume the product and give positive or negative feedback. But today web site will be the place where people can get 1^st impression on particular brand. Therefore need to worry about structure of the web page.

·         Content Building

It is very important to have a considerable amount of valued content in your web site. This will be included corporate information, customer reviews, videos, etc. To be a unique brand You must use differentiate content than others usually done. It’s better to use keywords in content to optimize search results.

·         Images & Videos

It’s better to have images & videos in the web site. But when including images and videos we have to ensure that the file names are appropriate to the content and that you provide alternate tags. Because search engines can’t read images, the crawlers will view the image file name and include the web site on search results based on that image file name.

Following tools help to carry out success SEO,

·            Similar Page Checker

·         Keyword Density Checker

·         Domain age tool

·         URL Rewriting tool

·         Keyword suggestion tool

·         Backlink Builder

·         Backlink Summary

In conclusion SEO can be discussed in terms of the Sri Lankan corporate sector. Most of the Srilankan companies have got their own website to carry out the business process, but they have little knowledge on activities to be done through internet such as SEO. Still there are a few companies which, actually get the use of SEO in Sri Lanka.

As an example, when typing the “Foods in Sri Lanka” as keywords on google, we can see a few tagged images and Cargills food city in top of the search result. It’s more beneficial for the Cargills food city. Sometimes this can be a competitive advantage for the company as well.

Therefore it can be concluded that Sri Lankan Companies should focus more on getting the maximum benefit of using marketing tools like SEO at a relatively low cost to traditional marketing.