What is SEO( Seach Engine Optimization)

This post is especially for people planning to become an SEO. But still, they are not clear about the common word like search engine optimization, NoFollow, Dofollow, noindex, doindex, meta robots, crawlers ….so on. All these words plays important role in SEO Basics. In this post, I will be explaining these words.

What is Search engine optimization?

Manipulation and Processing of each keyword within a webpage element is known as search engine optimization. To perform this optimization each search engine has their own set of rules and algorithms.

What is a Search engine?

Search engines are the automated software/programs that process the content on the internet, all the individual web pages and links (from one website to another website) to gather the information. After that processing the gathered information to formatted data for their needs (i.e. to generate the index). The Search engines maintain a good valuable database index. This database index is called the backbone of a search engine. These indexes help search engine to quickly deliver the search results to the visitor’s queries.

Note: Search engines are also known as crawlers, spiders, robots and bots

What are meta robots and bots?

The Search engine robots /bots are simple automated data retrieval programs, browse through all the pages of the website to find information and links. They only understand the text,picture and videos which are not meaningful to them.The main goal of these programs is to access and read all internet contents and to generate search engine indices database. These optimized search engine indexes are knowns as the backbones of search engine optimization strategy.

How does robots /bots work?

 Robots stores all the links of a web page. They follow those links to get other internet-linked content. This justifies the original idea/concept behind the giant linked relationship model (. i.e. connections are inter connected). This is how the robots look to the content.When a bot arrives at a website, the bots looks for a file called “robots.txt”. This file is used to tell robots about the limits and rules of website . Some bots ignores this file but all most all website should have this file, it may not have any data (i.e. blank file).

Tips: Search Engines looks for (Meta tags, Title tag, Comments tags, alt tags, attribute tags, content, Dublin Core Tags, etc.). This collected information becomes part of the search engine and directory ranking process. Bots regularly visit the websites, so they can easily identify any changes that are made to the website's pages, and they will ensure to have the most current data.Bots cann't  access your website during maintainance. Then the website may not be re-indexed in the search engine database. This may impact the rankings of that website (i.e. Ranking will drop)

What is NoFollow & Dofollow?

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) has an attribute called NoFollow. It tells search engines/bots that a hyperlink should not be considered for the ranking in the search engine’s index. This HTML attribute helps search engine for faster processing the content of the website , to generate correct indexing and prevent spam index generation. Proper usage of this attribute will improve the quality of search engine results for the specific website.

Difference between NoFollow and Dofollow:

NoFollow: 

This HTML attribute instructs search engine not to follow the links inside the webpage. (i.e. “NoFollow” is set for the specific link by the website owner). Humans are allowed to follow the links.

Example:

<a href=”http://www.techtitsbits.in/” rel=”nofollow”> TechTitsBits </a>

Dofollow:

All Search Engine and Humans are able to follow the links. Dofollow is allowing keyword in the anchor text to be followed. The targeted keyword as anchor linking to any website or page.

Example:

                    <a href=”http://www.techtitsbits.in/”> TechTitsBits </a>

 Note: Generally all the hyperlinks are Dofollow. Website developer do not have to do anything to make a link as do-follow.

No-Follow Meta Tag

  Robots Meta Tag: <meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />

  The bots/crawlers are instructed not to follow links on the website full page.

No-Follow Attribute

     Link Attribute: <a href=”http://www.techtitsbits.in” rel=”nofollow”>

Search engines are instructed not to count the link in terms of ranking pages of the website.