Analysis of the application of selected search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and their effectiveness on Google's search ranking algorithm

Due to the exponential growth of the Internet in recent years, search engines have the complex task of sorting through billions of pages and displaying only the most relevant pages for the submitted search query. Google has become an essential link between people and the information they seek online. For this reason, any webmaster or search engine optimization (SEO) engineer should be actively learning the techniques that drive visitors to their site. This paper describes the application of selected Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to a newly created website across the entire website lifecycle, from inception, through development, and finally to launch and optimization of the site. Several SEO experiments were defined and evaluated by collecting and analyzing real traffic and visitor data through the use of Google Analytics. This research further analyzes search engine ranking factors and their effectiveness on Google's search ranking algorithm by analyzing the number of users who visit the site and site rankings. The metrics for effectiveness of the SEO techniques were Number of Visitors, Pageviews and Ranking. The results of the research confirmed that there was a noticeable increase in the number of users who visited the site and the search engine rankings also increased. The implementation of SEO showed a positive effect on the Google search rankings and the increase in traffic. The results of this research confirm and extend results of earlier SEO research. This paper provides a thorough analysis and step-by-step implementation of selected search engine optimization techniques that are shown to increase visibility, get more visitors and achieve higher rankings in search results for a general class of website. For this reason, it is hoped that this paper can be used as a guidebook for new SEO engineers and as a basis for later continued SEO research.