Optimizing your e-business with SEO

The world wide web was estimated to connect approximately of 10 billion web pages in 2004 [1]; therefore, there is a serious competition from organizations all around the world struggling to appear on top of search engine lists. This competition is becoming more serious once an organization realizes that 73 % of internet users never look beyond the first page of page lists generated by search engines [2]. There are more than 200 different factors used by Google in ranking those web pages [2] and some of them will be discussed in this article.

Document-based analysis

In document based analysis, search engines explore the content of a page for its title, meta tags, url and the body of the page [3]. If the keywords entered by a search engine user are matched to the document content, the web page will probably be listed in search results.

URL, title and Meta tags
It is highly recommended that the url, title and meta tags used in a web page provides hints to keywords that might be used by internet users. For example, if a web page provides information on e-business, then it will be very wise if the assigned url, title and meta tags for the page represents it content and contains ‘e-business’ and other related key words.

Keywords appeared at the body of web pages
If the keywords entered by users are found frequently in the content of a web page, search engines will consider that the web page is relevant to user queries [3].

Hypertext link analysis
Hypertext link analysis was introduced by Google in 1998 in order to tackle the problems raised from document-based analysis [1]. This new approach values the link structure of a page in addition to the conventional content based analysis.

The number of inbound link to a web page
Web pages with plenty of incoming link leading to them will be more likely to have better positions in search engine results. However, it is not recommended for web masters to generate spam links to their websites. A link from trusted web site such as CNN.com is rewarded with better position than 50.000 links from guestbooks, forum signatures or reciprocal link directories [ 3].

Other related topics:

What is E-Business?
How does e-business earn money online?
What makes a good website?
What is CRM? How can it affect on e-business?
Linkspam: What is that and how to deal with it?
How does search engine work?

[1] Berkley University in Langville, A.N. and Carl D. Meyer (2006). ,Google’s Page Rank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings, Princeton University Press, New Jersey,

[2] Based on Jansen and Spring in Evans, M.P. (2007). Analysing Google Rankings through Search Engine Optimization Data. Internet Research. 17:1, p 21-37. http://www. emeraldinsight.com/1066-2243.htm

[3] Fishkin R., Beginner’s Guide to SEO, http://www.seomoz.org/articles/beginners-1-php#0%230, Date accessed: April, 28 2008