Yesterday during class we went over Chapter 1.1 for the SEO booklet. Because the internet expanded so fast in such a small amount of time we needed a way to extract information in a relatively small amount of time. The answer was search engines and now 84% of web-site visitors use them. Search Engines are only surpassed by email in popularity. A search engine “is a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found.” The most popular search engine is by far Google, which is utilized twice as much as the competitors. The major Search Engines include: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Alta Vista, HotBot, IWon, Lycos, Netscape, and AllTheWeb. A Web Directory “is a web search tool compiled manually by human editors.” The two largest directories include: Yahoo!, and Dmoz.
After we went over this Section of the Certification Book we continued to Chapter 1.2. In this chapter we went over two subjects involving the page rank of a website from a search engine and the spamming techniques and tactics of Search Engine Spam. Search engines are broadly based on two concepts; Crawler based search engines and Human powered directories. The factors of page ranking are On-page and Off-page. “On-page factors include keyword targeting, HTML tags, Content, Anchor Text and URL while Off-page factors include Link Building, Link Popularity and Anchor Text.” Spam is the use of techniques and unethical tactics to raise ones page rank. Links, repetition of words and hidden text are only a few examples of this crime.
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