SEO Analysis Paper

SEO may be defined as the optimization of a website for search engines, so that the search engines views it in an optimal manner. Various techniques and methods are available to achieve high rankings and become visible on search engines. Various processes are gradually evolving for optimizing the website, by observing the working of search engines. Every major search engine has its own respective algorithm. All the power of ranking the websites on the results page is with these algorithms. Website relevance and ranking are two important factors that are addressed by search algorithms. (Humayun, 2009)
Search algorithms do have some weaknesses and many website owners do take this to their benefit. In order to address this problem, search engines keep their algorithms up to date. Google makes changes in its algorithm almost on a daily basis. So, it can be said that both SEO techniques and search algorithms are gradually developing in a vicious circle.
Sean A. Golliher (2008) states that as search engines disapprove the manipulative strategies and punishes the websites by removing them from their index; therefore it is very important for webmasters to follow the guidelines of search engines for implementing only ethical SEO
techniques). There are various ethical techniques which can be implemented for improving visibility in search engines. Although none of these techniques assure a particular ranking position in the search engine results pages, the implementation of these SEO techniques and strategies improve prospects of the websites to gain visibility on search engines. Ultimately this results in receiving visitors to the website and consequently leads to increased sales and revenue for the website.

Empirical research:
Many researchers attempted to understand the important SEO factors by analyzing the high ranking websites on the search engine results pages.
They studied and analyzed the usage of different elements in the highly ranked pages. They used the deductive research methods for identifying the factors influencing the ranking of a website. Alternatively, some of the other researchers adopted the inductive reasoning method for their research work; they implemented the SEO techniques on websites, analyzed the results empirically and formed their observations on the basis of the results achieved. The focus of research in the past has been mainly to identify the on-page SEO factors influencing visibility and ranking of the websites on search
engines

Evans P. M. (2007) - conducted a research: ‘Analyzing Google rankings through search engine optimization data’, to identify the popular SEO elements implemented for gaining higher rankings in Google. He analyzed top 50 ranking sites in two categories. The factors he examined in the high ranked sites include: the usage of page rank, total number of website pages, number of incoming links to a website, age of the domain, and the popularity on third party sites or web directories, and social bookmarking sites. After conducting this analytic study he found that:
• High number of pages within a website partially influences the ranking
• Although higher page rank does influence the website ranking considerably, but sometimes websites having lower page rank value outrank the websites having higher page rank
• High number of incoming links to a website results in higher ranking for the website; at the same time, the quality and relevance of these links is another critical factor determined by search engines to calculate the actual value of these incoming links
• Website listing in the Dmoz directory is a favorable factor for higher ranking
• Old domains with higher age do influence the ranking to some extent
• Social bookmarks from popular sites like Delicious.com have a positive effect on the ranking