SEO Technology

SEO Technology

SEO (search engine optimisation) technology has come a long way. Initially, the first search engines were directories such as Yahoo! and Galaxy. Due to this, their site technology in their index was not a matter of concern. But when spider based search engines were introduced such as Lycos and AltaVista, how effective robots or search spiders could be was a matter of major concern.

Robots or search spiders are bits of SEO software that some search engines use to find out the content on certain websites and then send their report on the database of a search engine. On the basis of such reports, search engines are able to rank websites according to an algorithm that sets out certain priorities to features of the database, and then orders those sites that appear in the search engine rankings, as a result.

However, certain features of site coding could be impediments to search engine robots since many of them were first programmed when the first batch of search engines came out. This means that their reference to HTML is rooted in the mid or late 1990s. Even parsing HTML proves to be difficult, and is often taken as given by webmasters. These include framesets, image links and maps, JavaScript/dHTML and embedded tables.

Having said that, some robots have grown well, such as Googlebot, but many others could never keep pace with time and have been stuck in a groove. Translated, this means that an SEO company must know the nuts and bolts of site coding and how that can stand in the way of search engine robots functioning optimally. It also means that site coding could throw up several opportunities to better a site’s rank by making or introducing simple technical changes to the site.

Sometimes, site coding is used to artificially inflate a site’s rankings—something that should not be done as this translates into spam by search engines and may be the cause of being barred by these search engines.

Sometimes, sites use the method of what is commonly known as cloaking to fool search engines. By cloaking, sites recognize visitors by their browser or robot name or by their IP address. If this happens, a site can very easily present pages specially optimized for certain set search engines, which really means that each search engine can be optimized individually. If this is easily possible, obviously it means that it can be abused, and considering this, many search engines have already banned those sites who indulge in cloaking.

So, though SEO technology has come a long way, much more has to be done to make it relevant and futuristic.