AJIBOYE Forums - Internet Marketing - Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Google Introduced New Search Index â�� Caffeine

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:00:00 EDT

Being interested in the internet technologies and making my living from writing about internet marketing and search engine optimization here and there, today I started my day as usual – browsing some news web pages to get some fresh information on what is going on in the Kingdom of Internet. As usually, among the pages I visit, was the Google official blog. And the post I noticed there captured all my attention and even took my breath away for a moment, giving a chance to my imagination to dream about how the web search is going to look tomorrow.

So, here is the big news – Google has just introduced the new search index, called Caffeine. No, I would better do this in capitals to highlight the importance and solemnity of the moment – GOOGLE INTRODUCED NEW SEARCH INDEX – CAFFEINE. If you like coffee, you will like this name, and if you like Google, beware ‘cause it may be addictive :-)

To better understand the practical meaning of this innovation to all, who use Google as the default search engine, it is necessary to remind that the search index is, actually, the core of search engine. It keeps all the information about every single page in the Internet, and every time when you type in your search query, search index returns the entries, linked with the keywords from your query. In simple words, search index is like a table of contents in your phone book. It tells you which page to open, if you look for a grocery store, for example.

The new search engine is said to be much quicker in updating its information. That means, it will generate more fresh content for the search queries and people will always get the freshest and the newest information they are looking for, whether it was published on a forum, site, or blog.

Years before, Google search index had a structure, resembling a tile or multiple layers structure. Some of these layers were updated daily, but others took weeks to update. It means, some web pages could require days and even weeks for being available through web search, because there was some delay between a moment Google spider finds a web page and time the information is updated in the search index.

Now, Google has announced a new structure of its search index. It really looks like a web, where multiple links and lines are interconnected. Officials claim it to be super fast in processing new pages just to supply people with the most updated information they are looking for. Furthermore, Google notes that today content is not only about texts, it is also much about video and other types of multimedia. Caffeine is better tuned to work with such forms of content as well.

According to Google, Caffeine engine is capable of processing hundreds of thousands of pages simultaneously. The information of the search index is kept within a database of nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage with hundreds of thousands of gigabytes added each day. Wow, imagine what kind of server they need for that…

However, aside of technical innovations and technological novelties, which can be appreciated at their true value by software engineers or web application experts, actually, I believe that we, typical web users, may not even notice the transition to a new search index. However, those, involved in internet marketing and search engine optimization, will definitely benefit from Caffeine. Now, with this trend for super new content, sites will literally need to become live. Weekly and even daily updates may no longer be sufficient for successful internet marketing. Content will need to be updated even more frequently. Besides, the role of social media platforms is going to progress with their rapidly user-generated content.

Ok, with all these news about Caffeine, I now feel an urgent call for some dose of caffeine for myself… I am going to have some coffee… Oh, thanks for reading!

Whatâ��s New on Google This Week?

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:00:00 EDT

Whether you want it or not, search engine optimization as part of the internet marketing strategy will always go hand-in-hand with search engines. Web masters and SEO experts need to be familiar with all the novelties, suggested or implemented by the developers of the major search engines, because the trends of search algorithms evolution are important to consider while developing and implementing a particular internet marketing concept.

Google, being one of the key representatives of the search engine market, is often treated as the etalon for SEO experts. Many internet marketing programs are optimized in accordance with the guidelines and recommendations, issued by Google. Thus, it could be a good idea to keep an eye on the news from this company, as it can be a valuable source of some hints and tips, you can use in your SEO efforts.

Every week Google publishes a message in its official blog with the highlights on the innovations, introduced during the previous week. This time we have the following novelties from Google announced:

1) New look of the Google homepage. Now it is possible for a user, who has an account with Google, to upload his own picture and set it as the background for the homepage. Of course, in terms of internet marketing, this can hardly be used in SEO. On the other hand, such steps from Google are called to increase the loyalty of users and encourage them to register and sign into their Google accounts. This, in its turn, translates into better understanding of how people are using Internet and, respectively, results in making internet marketing more deliberate and sophisticated experience.

2) Mobile applications appear in mobile search. The owners of Android-powered and iPhone mobiles, who look for specific mobile applications for their devices, will now see the direct links to the apps available right at the top of search results. Each entry is supplied with a title, price, publisher, and, surely, a link to the installation page of the chosen mobile application.

3) Spelling corrections suggests. Google correction option (Did you mean: …) is a known feature, which appears at top of the search results page, if a user misspelled a searched keyword or phrase, giving him a chance to redo the search with a properly spelled query. Now this hint of correct spelling will appear even earlier, pointing you to the correct word or phrase right at the moment you are typing your text in the Google search field. It will now be a part of Google Suggest, another useful feature, which suggests full search query as you type your search query letter by letter. This is done by Google in efforts to make search process quicker, taking you to the search results quicker and giving some chances to relax for your fingers.

We will go on following the news from Google and other companies, which might be useful or just interesting or amusing for everyone, involved in SEO and internet marketing.

Social Media Marketing

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 00:00:00 EDT

Social media websites are among the fastest-growing web resources these days. Their owners get serious financial benefits from such resources, though almost all the content in there is created by people - participants of that network. However, there are some opportunities to make use of social networks websites, such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter, and make them work a bit for the promotion of your own web project or even offline business. So, whether you are a beginner or an expert in the Internet marketing issues, you definitely do not want to lose the chance of getting one more tool of Internet marketing, which is, pretty powerful and, at the same time, one of the less expensive ones.

The idea of social media marketing or promotion of your Internet resource or business through multiple social networks is pretty simple. Since the latter are much about talking, online discussions, latest news and information sharing, you just have to participate in all such activities giving links to your website. Of course, you should not do that in a spam-like way, posting links to your online pharmacy on the discussion boards, where people talk about the mountain bikes. Just find and participate in the activities, which are relevant to your own interests or to the particular business you would like to promote.

By the way, business actively uses social networks for its internet marketing purposes – it is not only a simple way to get in touch with a huge audience of potential consumers, it is also one of the easiest and cost-effective ways to receive feedbacks from real people. Some companies may even start discussions on a particular products or services to find out what people think about them in order to adopt their business strategy accordingly.

So, if you need to quickly populate your website or tell people about the products or services, you offer, why don't you do that at Twitter or Facebook. It can be a much quicker way to receive first customers, than waiting for Google to index your site and generate traffic for it.

The Power of Local Search

Mon, 31 May 2010 00:00:00 EDT

Local search is considered to be among the most effective means of internet marketing. The point is that, according to statistics, about ninety percents of online commercial searches result in offline local purchases. In other words, people now tend to look for products and services online, but they still buy those products in their local shops and stores. Furthermore, about half of Americans have substituted phone books with online searches. So, why loose this powerful advertising source?

Google now helps website owners introduce themselves for local audience through the service of Google Places (renamed from Google Local Business Center). Here you can add the information about your company, its address and type of services or products offered, so that Google display your company when people from your neighborhood search for relevant products or services. Yahoo also offers its own program for local search (Yahoo Local Search), so does Live from Microsoft (Live Search Local Listing Center).

There are also a few other ways to succeed in local searches and move your site to the top results in the local online searches.

First, provide your location at every page of your website. It is necessary for search engines to be able to define your location and put your site into appropriate local category listing. Besides, it is a great advantage when visitors see your location and phone number and thus can contact you right away.

Also, local online directories and local search engines, if any, are helpful. Submit your site to local business directories and online phone books. This will also generate your some traffic of the audience from the exact location, you are working at.

Using Video for Internet Marketing

Mon, 31 May 2010 00:00:00 EDT

The popularity of video streaming resources, such as YouTube, has grown rapidly these days. Apart of its core entertaining purpose, video has turned into a powerful instrument for internet marketing. Many companies produce advertising video these days to attract internet surfer’s attention and lead them to their online shops, corporate websites, or other online resources. However, it is only an easy-going, interesting, and useful video that can work efficiently as the medium for advertising.

Of course, in order to make online video working for your internet marketing campaign, you will need to follow some recommendations. First of all, do not try to create a full-length movie about your company or the products, you sell. People in the web rarely spend more than 3 minutes for watching a single video. So, try to make it amusing and not boring from its first seconds.

After video is ready, you will need to upload it. At this stage it is important to be especially attentive and make everything to the best of your abilities. When you are asked to supply keywords relevant to your video – do you best to specify all the keywords, you think your customers will be looking for. Remember, along with entering your keywords in the field provided, you’d better also use keywords in the title of the video, its description, and even in the name of a file for uploading.

Finally, prepare the landing page, where you will direct people, watching the video. This can be either a page with detailed information on the theme, shown in video, or a page of the online store, where one can quickly and easily buy the promoted product. Of course, video sharing can hardly be considered as the only internet marketing strategy, but it can definitely be and often should be among the core constituents of any promotional campaign.

Browser Toolbars for SEO expert

Fri, 28 May 2010 00:00:00 EDT

Search engine optimization or SEO is a part of internet marketing, which is much about analysis. Doing SEO, it is necessary to analyze many aspects of the web resource, from its domain name to a number of backlinks and to keywords density on website’s pages. Analysis of such information gives you a solid ground to start building you internet marketing campaign and reach you business objectives.

Today there are plenty of multiple SEO tools: some of them are commercial and others are offered for free, some tools are really effective and others are completely useless or even harmful. In this post I would like to focus on a specific group of SEO tools, known as browser toolbars. These are small add-ons, which can be installed into your browser (Firefox is leading in this regard). Such SEO toolbars are mostly distributed for free, however, they can be used as quick and efficient sources of information on a number of website parameters and data, crucial for effective search engine optimization.

After installing a particular SEO toolbar, it sits in your browser, ready to monitor the sites you open and show you the required information. Some of the toolbars are working constantly (which can be pretty annoying, since you do not need SEO analysis of all the websites you are visiting), others work in more sophisticated way, waiting for your command to start SEO analysis. When choosing among toolbars to install, please, spend some time on reading the description and functionality in order to choose the solution, meeting your expectations in the best possible way.

So, let’s get closer to the point and name some of the most popular browser toolbars, which can be used for the purposes of search engine optimization.

SEO Tools for Firefox

This extension works by adding more information to Google search results. When you search for something in Google, this tool displays additional SEO information right below each search result in the list.

What information is available:

- Google pagerank

- Age of the website

- Links (both to a domain and to a particular webpage)

- Number of .edu and .gov backlinks

- Presence in dmoz catalogue

- WhoIs information

SEO Quake

This tool is aimed to help web masters, who deal with search engine optimization and internet marketing. This Firefox add-on offers a huge range of SEO parameters available, including but not limited to the following:

- Google PR and Index

- Yahoo index

- MSN, Google, and Yahoo links

- Dmoz directory

- Alexa rank

- Wikipedia

- IP lookup and whois information

SEOmoz Toolbar

This is another powerful browser toolbar for experts in search engine optimization. Along with the common and typical SEO parameters, this toolbar will also show you:

- Linkscape metrics

- Meta tags, description and other internal factors of SEO

- Robots file status

- Page load time

- Detailed information on backlinks

Of course, this is only a small fraction of browser toolbars available for SEO masters. Visit the official website of your internet browser and look for full list of SEO toolbars.

SEO Tips on Website Content

Tue, 04 May 2010 00:00:00 EDT

Content is often called a king of search engine optimization. Indeed, content is among the basic constituents of the successful website design and internet marketing. While there are no predefined rules of working with content, below we will still try to summarize some of the best practices of creating content for the web and give it to you as some practical tips for you to use in your own internet marketing project.

Keeping in mind the golden rule of SEO, saying that content is a king, develop high quality and original content for your site. Focus on adding only authentic content, since duplicated materials will not do any good for you in terms of SEO. You can either write the content by yourself or take the most of working with professional web content writers, who are experienced in creating content based on particular keywords.
Update your content regularly. Working with the content is not a one-time assignment. If you want to be successful with internet marketing and improve your site rankings, you will have to make you site “live” by adding new and new content to it. This can be done with news releases, articles, corporate news, new products descriptions, etc. Basically, whatever format you will choose, the more fresh content you have on your site – the better it is for site ranking by search engines.
Working with content, try to focus not only on the keywords, for example “furniture”, but also on search phrases as “modern furniture”, “hand-made furniture”, etc. This will give you more chances to get higher ranking in the narrow search phrases. Besides, such keywords phrases will generate more deliberate traffic to your site. Only those, who search for hand-made furniture, will visit your site.
Use local identification in your content. Writing articles or other web content, try to define the location of your business. This will help your site to climb up in the local search results. For example, if you offer furniture in Texas, there is no point of struggling for good rankings in European search results. Just bind your keywords with the location, for example “hand-made furniture in Texas” and you will get more visits from your local potential customers.
Try to use the keywords not only in your textual content, but also in the site description tag, in the <alt> tags for the used images, and even in the domain name if possible.
Do not overdo with keywords density. If you feel your text sounds unnaturally because of abnormally high frequency of keywords used – rewrite such text to make it more natural for real visitors. Generally, it is recommended to use one keyword per 100 words of the text. So, in the usual web article of 400-450 words you can use the same keyword about 4 times.
Use one keyword phrase for one page of content. Do not try to optimize a single page for several different keywords.
Make your web content viral. Well, it does not mean you have to spread viruses or spam. Just allow your visitors post comments on your postings, add some consumer’s ratings mechanisms, or polls, allowing visitors to express their own thoughts and feelings on your site.

SEO Tips on Link-building Strategy

Tue, 04 May 2010 00:00:00 EDT

If content is the king of search engine optimization, then links-building strategy should be called the queen of it. Backlinking or creating links to your site from other Internet resources is among the most popular practices to improve site ranking and its position in the generic search results. Some of the advices on links-building are presented below.

The more high quality links, leading to your website, you have – the better. The amount of backlinks belongs to the key factors considered by Google and other search engines during the evaluation of the particular website and specifying its place in the search results.

Use anchor text properly. Anchor text is a visible part of the hyperlink, which users can read and click to visit your site. It is important to use keyword-based anchor texts. For example, instead of “click here” use “hand-made furniture”, etc.

When creating external links, use your domain name as the target URL. For example, if your home page is http://www.mysite.com/index.html, in the backlinks use only http://www.mysite.com.

Choosing among links sources, your priority should be with high-quality, reputable sites. One really good site can give you much more traffic than dozens of forums posts or plain online catalogues.

Writing content for your site, you or your author will use keywords, linking them to the relevant sections of your site. Try to make the text of the whole page and the anchor text of your links semantically close. For example, if you use “hand-made furniture” as your keyword, your whole page should be about the hand-made furniture.

Try to get links from reputable sources, such as dmoz.org, yahoo catalogue, or .edu websites.

Links from social websites, such as Twitter or Facebook, can be really helpful for the promotion of your web-site.

Link Baits in Search Engine Optimization

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 EDT

Link baits are actively used these days among other effective tools of the internet marketing or search engine optimization. Link bait is virtually anything (textual content, image, widget, gadget, etc) that is interesting enough to lure a visitor download such element and place it on his own website or blog. This is said to be a powerful marketing instrument with viral nature.

The examples of link baits include the following:

- Informational, news, or humor hooks

- Tool hooks and widget hooks

- Unique content hooks

- Evil hooks

Basically, the key goal of link baits is to ensure building as many relevant and high-quality backlinks as possible. In order to achieve that goal, link baits need to be really interesting, attractive and useful for visitors. In that case people are likely to use your link baits on their own web resources, promoting your web site and spreading a word about it to their audience.

Off-page Optimization

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 EDT

Internet marketing and search engine optimization covers a whole range of multiple tools, techniques, and methods. Some of them work on the web site itself and others involve activity on other web resources in the Internet without making any direct changes to the advertised resource. These are so-called off-page optimization techniques, which are called to improve the ranking of a particular web site by the search engines, such as Google or Yahoo.

The most commonly used methods of off-page optimization are:

- Article and press-releases distribution

- Social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc)

- Backlinks building (banners, links exchange)

- Directory listing

- Blogging and forum posting

- Pay-per-click advertising campaigns

- Multiway linking or webrings

The Role of Geotargeting and ccTld in Search Engine Optimization

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 EST

Search engine optimization involves a number of different techniques, and an appropriate domainname registration is one of them. Basically, the core idea of any SEO project or internet marketing campaign is to promote a particular web site among the targeted audience. Often targeted audience means people living in a particular geographical area.

Since recently Google, which is one of the leading search engines, has been using geotargeting in showing its search results. For example, searching for “SEO news” from the UK you will show UK-based results on the first page, but if you do the same searching from the USA you will see different results at the top of your search results.

Such approach has made the country-code top level domains or ccTlds extremely valuable for search engine optimization. Now, if your site aims at selling computers in the UK, you just use the co.uk domain level. Using such ccTld instead of top-level domain, such as .com or .net, is more beneficial these days, because it clearly tells Google what is your target audience. Besides, it is easier to win the competition for a particular keyword at a local level than at a global one.

However, there is still one more option to influence geotargeting without changing a domain name or physic location of the web site. With the help of Google Webmaster Tools, one can specify the location of the site via Site Configuration – Settings.

Google Recommendations on Website Content

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

Today search engines generate the major part of internet traffic. That is why an internet marketing campaign can be successful only if it is build in compliance with certain guidelines and basic recommendations, provided by most popular search engines. Below we will speak about the recommendations from Google, one of the leaders of internet search industry. So, if you are about to dive into internet marketing, read the following statements and the knowledge will help you achieve your goals:

Your site should have a strict and clear hierarchy; there are should be at least one link leading to each page of your website;
Sitemap is important. Google recommends offering sitemap to your visitors to make their browsing experience more convenient; furthermore, sitemaps are of crucial importance for Google search engine itself. If you provide your sitemap to Google, it will be easier for them to detect all the pages of your web resource;
Website content should be useful and informative for readers; besides, website content should be relevant to your website key idea (if you want your website to help you sell furniture, it may not be the best idea to publish fashion newsletters on it);
Research your keywords – basically, keywords are those words that you think your potential customers would type into Google, searching for necessary products or services. The next step is to include those keywords into your website content (articles, descriptions, news, etc.);
Text is more preferable than images when you need to display important content, names, or links. Always supply images with relevant “alt” tags to describe what is displayed on them;
Make sure the <title> tag is present and it contains the relevant information on your website;
Ensure correctness of HTML code and absence of broken links;
Remember that static pages are better than dynamic in terms of search engine optimization.

Donâ��ts from Google

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

Success of internet marketing depends much on search engines and on the level of your website compliance with the basic rules and recommendations defined by search engine administration. Thus, along with webmaster guidelines Google also has a few basic don’ts for webmasters to be aware of. So, if you want to achieve success in Google search results, remember the following:

Do not use hidden text or hidden links (for example, do not use text with zero font size or text in white on the white background);
Do not use cloaking (cloaking means showing different content to users and to search engines);
Do not trouble Google with automated queries;
Do not spam with keywords (using too much of keywords on the web page or using; irrelevant keywords may be considered as spam);
Do not duplicate content (do not create multiple pages, domains, or sub-domains with similar content);
Keep away of phishing activity as well as installing viruses from your website;
Avoid using doorways
If you participate in affiliate program, take care to offer some original content to your visitors along with the affiliated content.

Copywriting for Search Engines, Directories and Websites

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

To get the best listings in search engine and directory queries, keywords and key phrases must be placed advantageously throughout your web pages. In summary, your search engine optimization procedure needs these words in phrases in:

Title tags
Meta-tags (keywords and descriptions)
Headings
Body text
Alt-attribute in the image source tags

When marketing professionals optimize a website for search engine and directory queries, they should not spend most of their time redesigning the layout (in HTML) or submitting the site to the search engines. The majority of their time should be spent on researching, writing good copy that will index well in search engines, and writing comprehensive, accurate descriptions for directory submissions. Good web copy must contain well researched and diverse keywords and key concepts, based on a web page's topic. It should accurately reflect the web pages' content and must be well placed throughout a web.

It is extremely important that most of the sales and advertising fluff be eliminated. Web copywriting should contain keywords and key concepts without all the fluff. Web copy must flow and be well placed to get your web pages ranked highly in search engine and directory queries. Your potential customers will also be grateful for being able to find what they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible.

Good copywriting is an essential element of both online and offline marketing. If you do not have experience in writing good copy for the web, it may be a good idea to hire an online marketing consultant to write the initial copy for you. Then you can learn from the copy you paid for.

Using Meta Tags as an Online Marketing Strategy

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

The use of meta tags can play an extremely important role in your search engine optimization approach. A meta tag is an HTML tag that gives information about the content of a web page, such as what HTML specifications a web page follows or description of a web page's content. However, a meta tag does not always affect how a web page is displayed on a browser. For online marketing, the most common uses for meta tags are the keyword, description and robots exclusion attributes.

One of the most common misconceptions about meta tags is that they are the secret ingredient to obtaining the best possible search engine rankings. In fact, only some major search engines use meta-tag content for relevancy. Some search engines use meta-tag content when they show the results of a search query. Some search engines, and almost all directories, do not use meta-tag content in any way.

The Meta Tag Description Attribute

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

The meta tag can play an important part in your search engine optimization procedure. When writing meta tag content, it may be more beneficial to spend more time writing a good description than writing a keyword list. With respect to online marketing, the description is more important than the keywords list.

As some major search engines use meta tag descriptions when displaying the results of a search query, it is important to write a meta tag description that achieves two things:

1. Helping to get a good search engine ranking in the search engines that use meta tags for relevancy.

2. Generating a call-to-action, i.e. encouraging people to click on the link to your website.

Many search engine optimization specialists use the list of keywords in the meta tag description. Not only is this search engine optimization strategy akin to spam, it is also a inadequate method of encouraging visitors to click on the link to your site.

Using a business name in a meta-tag description

Unless a business has a keyword in its company name, you probably do not want to use it in a meta tag description or possibly move it to the end of the description or a keyword list. For example, "inc." really is not a keyword unless the site is Inc. magazine.

Using singular and plural words in meta-tags

Studies have shown that many people tend to type in the plural version of a word more than they type in the singular version of a word in search engine queries. For that reason, it is good practice to emphasize the plural version of a word in the meta tags.

When you analyze your site statistics to see which variations of your keywords and keyword phrases people are using to find your website, optimize your web pages for most commonly used keywords.

The Meta Tag Keywords Attribute

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

The use of meta tags can play an important role in the search engine optimization of your website. When choosing words to place in the meta tag keywords attribute, you must choose keywords that correctly reflect the content of the web page. If a word appears in your meta tags that does not appear in your main body content, then your web page will more than likely receive a spam penalty from the search engines. In the worst case, it could possibly get your website permanently removed from the search engine databases.

When selecting keywords and keyword phrases for the meta tag attribute, you should pay attention to the following variations:

1. Singular vs. plural

When building your keywords list, position the version of the keyword that your site visitors use the most at the beginning of your keyword list.

2. Uppercase vs. lowercase

Most search engines do not use case sensitivity as an element of their algorithms. Therefore, using all versions, such as all uppercase, all lowercase and initial capitalization of keywords and keyword phrases is a waste of time. This can also result in a spam penalty for keyword stacking.

3. Commas vs. no commas

It makes no difference to the search engines that use the meta tag keywords attribute whether or not you use commas or spaces to separate your keywords and keyword phrases. If it is easier for you to view your keyword phrases with commas, then use them. Using commas will not affect your web page's relevancy.

4. Misspelled keywords

As some keywords are commonly misspelled, you may like to include a misspelled keyword in your meta tags. But remember that if that misspelled word does not appear in your main body text, this approach is a waste of time. Search engines use both keyword frequency and keyword placement in their algorithms. If you are putting a misspelled keyword in only one place (i.e. your meta-tag keywords attribute), it is not assisting your web page's relevancy as the keyword concentration for that one word is practically nothing.

The Meta Tag Refresh Attribute

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

The meta tag plays an important role in the search engine optimization of your website. Some website designers use the meta tag refresh attribute as a method of animation. Other sites have content that needs to be updated in real time, such as a site that displays sports scores or stock prices, might also use this attribute.

Unfortunately, most people who use the meta tag refresh attribute are spammers who want search engines to index one web page (for relevancy) and to display another web page. As a result of these spammers, the majority of the search engines consider the use of this attribute spam.

Subsequently, if you want to use animation on your website, it would be best to create an animated gif instead of using this tag. As for the sites that must use this tag for real time display, it is best to contact the search engine companies directly so that your URL does not receive a spam penalty.

Link Popularity and Search Engines

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

When you are looking at the search engine optimization of your website, you will need to consider the concept of link popularity. Link popularity has become important among the search engines because link popularity goes hand in hand with search engine optimization. Therefore, it is very important for any business with a web presence to create a link development plan.

Many online marketing specialists consider that link popularity is merely obtaining as many links as possible. However, the quality of the link holds more weight than the quantity of links. You will achieve better results in the search engines if you have link popularity from sites that have significant traffic.

To build up popularity for your website, you should submit your site to the most visited directories. Also, to expand link popularity more, you should consider sites/directories that are industry specific to your business.

Even more importantly, it can assist your search engine ranking if your site is reviewed by a directory that is coupled with a search engine. To be accepted into a major directory, it is a good idea for your site to have content that can show credibility in your field. A tips page, links page, or a how-to page can showcase your credibility on your product or service.

Obtaining links from other websites is not enough to obtain long term results on both the search engines and directories. People must actually click on those links to your website and browse your website. Also, they need to return to your website when they see the quality content, products, and/or services that you offer. That is the definition of "popularity" according to the major search engines and directories.

Therefore, both link popularity and click-through popularity are crucial for obtaining the best possible search engine placement.

Keep in mind that a search engine position is not permanent as the search engine companies change their algorithms all of the time. Being listed in directories and other sites can dramatically drive traffic and sales, especially if your site is listed in specialized directories.

Search Engine Optimization Essentials

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

The process of search engine optimization (SEO) consists of designing, writing and coding web pages to increase the probability that they will appear at the top of search engine results for targeted keyword phrases. Many alleged SEO experts allege to have reversed engineered search engine algorithms and use strategically created doorway pages and cloaking technology to maintain long-term search positions. Regardless of all of these claims, the basics of a successful search engine campaign have not really changed in many years.

To get the best overall, long term search engine positions, there are three components that must be present on a web page:

Text component
Link component
Popularity component

All of the major search engines use these components as a part of their search engine algorithms. Sites that have all of the components on their web pages, and have the best possible levels of all the components do well in the search engines on the whole.

SEO - Text Component

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

One of the main components of search engine optimization is the text component. As search engines create lists of words and phrases on URLs, then it naturally follows that in order to do well on the search engines, you must place these words on your web pages in the strategic HTML tags.

The most important element of the text component of a search engine algorithm is keyword selection. In order for your target audience to find your website on the search engines, your pages must contain keyword phrases that match the phrases your target audience is typing into their search queries.

When you have determined the best keyword phrases to use on your web pages, you will need to put them within your HTML tags. Bear in mind that different search engines do not place emphasis on the same HTML tags. Therefore, to do well on all of the search engines, it is best to place keywords in all of the HTML tags possible, without keyword stuffing. Then, regardless of what the search engine algorithm is, you know that your keywords are contained in your documents.

SEO - Link Component

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

One of the main components of search engine optimization is the link component. The strategy of placing keyword rich text in your web pages is ineffective if the search engine bots have no way of finding the text. The way your pages are linked to each other, and the way your website is linked to other websites, impacts significantly on your search engine positions.

Even though search engine bots are powerful data gathering programs, HTML coding or scripting can prevent a bot from effectively crawling your pages. Examples of site navigation schemes that can cause problems are:

Poor HTML coding on all navigation schemes. Browsers can display web pages with poor HTML coding, however, search engine bots are not as forgiving as browsers are.

JavaScript. The major search engines are not able to follow links embedded inside of JavaScript, including mouseovers, arrays and drop-down menus.

Dynamic or database-driven web pages. Pages that are created using scripts, databases and/or have a ?, &, $, =, +, or % in the URL can present major problems to search engine bots.

Flash. At present, none of the search engines can follow the links embedded in Flash documents.

Therefore, to make sure that search engine bots are able to record the data on your web pages, it is a good idea to have two methods of navigation on a web page: one that pleases your end users, and one that the search engine bots are able to track.

SEO - Popularity Component

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

Another one of the main components of search engine optimization is the popularity component. The popularity component of a search engine algorithm consists of several sub-components:

Link popularity
Click-through popularity
Web page popularity

Obtaining the best popularity component is not merely getting as many links as possible to a website. The quality of the sites linking to your site holds more weight than the quantity of sites linking to your site.

Achieving links from other sites is not enough to maintain the best possible popularity. The major search engines and directories are measuring how often end users are clicking on the links to your site and how long they are staying on your site. They are also measuring how often end users return to your site. All of these measurements constitute a site's click-through popularity.

The search engines and directories measure both link popularity (quality and quantity of links) and click-through popularity to establish the overall popularity component of a website.

What to Look for in a Search Engine Optimization Specialist

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

Search engines are the most important way most people find websites, but often web site designers forget to think of this when they are building their sites. Frequently, site designers will make the error of creating the website first and then contacting a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist to make that site search engine friendly.

What many site owners do not realize is that a search engine optimization specialist should be included in the design process early, not after the site has been completed.

Many alleged search engine optimization specialists are people who palce keywords and keyword phrases inside of HTML tags without thinking about an overall online marketing strategy. On the other hand, there are people who can write for the search engines, analyze site statistics, have a complete knowledge of bot friendly HTML, have considerable experience with SEO in multiple industries and stay up-to-date on search engine happenings.

Keyword Research

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

The majority of a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist's time should be spent on researching the keywords your target audience is most likely to type in a search query. They should then incorporate these words and phrases into your web pages. You may be very surprised to see what your target audience is typing in.

The most important tags in an SEO specialist's armory are title tags and the main body text. Meta tags, alternative text and comment tags are supplemental. The presence of extra keywords in these tags alone will not provide long term results.

Cloaking and Gateway/Doorway Pages

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

When you are looking at the search engine optimization of your website, you may come across the practice of cloaking and gateway pages. Search engines have made it very apparent that the web page delivered to the search engine spider and the web page delivered to the end user must be the same. If they are not, the search engines consider it spam and will have the site promptly removed from the search engine database.

Some search engine optimization companies use scare tactics to persuade people that cloaking is essential. They will tell you that others can figure out your online marketing strategy just by looking at your web pages. This is not an accurate reflection of the situation. In reality, meta-tags alone are merely not effective.

If the content of your web page is taken by someone else, then it is copyright infringement. Cloaking can hide copyright violation behind the stealth script. This is one of the many reasons why search engines do not like cloaking and in due course may ban its use. Another reason may be that search engines lose control over where they direct users. If a sneaky marketer procures code for a top position of "flowers" and then redirects the searcher to a furniture outlet store, it reflects negatively on both the search engine and its users.

Online Promotion Using Signature Files

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

When you are considering the search engine optimization of your website, you may like to think about the use of signature files to help promote your website. A signature file, usually known as a sig file, is the set of text that you attach to the end of all of your emails that identifies you, your business and your products and services.

Your signature file should contain the following information:

Your name
Your business or company name
Preferred means of contacting you
Marketing slogan or information showing the clear benefits of contacting you

Your sig files should always identify the person writing the email, the company you work for and the preferred means of contacting you. For example, if you prefer that your potential customers contact you via email, you should include your URL and email address in your sig file. If you prefer that your potential customers contact you via your toll free number, then you should include your toll free number in your sig file. It is quite common to include all of your contact information in your sig file.

Signature files are a fantastic method to promote your online business without offending the people who read your messages. If you offer free information, products, services, or tips on your website, you can include a simple line pointing people to your free products or information.

Signature files are critical for creating brand name recognition, particularly if your website is a good source of information.

If you post to newsgroups or moderated discussion groups, potential customers will visit your website from the information in your sig file. You can change the message in your sig file depending on the discussion topic.

Sig files should only contain a maximum of 6 lines of information. Any more than that and your readers will lose interest.

What is SEO Made Up Of?

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

Search engine optimization (SEO) is made up of a number of factors. Some of these you may need professional help with, however, if you have an easy to use content management system (CMS) many you can implement yourself. The main components are;

1. SEO Tags and Meta information - these are the terms that you use to tell the search engines what your page contains.

2. Page Rank - Used by Google, this measures the number of links to your site and the popularity and content of those sites. In short Google uses a link to your site as a vote of popularity.

3. Content and keyword density - The amount of keywords used in the copy of a page will increase your likelihood of showing for this search request.

4. Search engine friendly web design - This refers to the development and structure of your website applied by your web developer.

What are SEO Tags and Meta Information?

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

The understanding of meta tags is very important in your search engine optimization procedure. Meta tags are used to communicate the information of a web page's content to the search engines. For a long time the implementation of these tags has been limited to specialists that have programing knowledge, however, this is not the case today. Today there are many advanced content management systems (CMS) which can be used to easily add these tags to a page or content level. The hardest aspect of the addition of the SEO tags is understanding what content should be entered. So what exactly are these tags?

Title Tags

Title tags highlight to the search engines the name of the page and the content that it represents, it is located in the top left hand corner of a browser. There is a limit to the amount of words that the search engines will read and the best practice is somewhere between 8 - 12 words.

Meta Description Tags

This is a short description of the page's content and is limited to approximately 250 characters. This is the text that is displayed on the search results page and can greatly influence the click through rate that your pages receive from being shows on a search engine results page.

Meta Keyword Tags

Key words are used to strengthen your pages content. These should be limited to 500 characters and should be closely linked to the keywords that appear throughout the copy of the web page.

Tips for Selecting Keywords

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

An extremely important component of your website search engine optimization procedure is the selection of keywords. Below are a few points for you to consider.

Long Tail Keywords vs Short Tail

When you look at creating a keyword strategy for your website you need to look at long tail keywords versus short tail keywords. A long tail keyword refers to a more detailed request being entered into a search engine such as "car insurance New York", whereas a short tail keyword has less specific detail such as "insurance".

When looking at the two possibilities, it is important to consider that even though a short tail keyword will have far greater traffic, a long tail keyword will return a more relevant result to a user and this may lead to greater conversions. A long tail keyword is also significantly less competitive and will lead to quicker returns on your SEO investment.

How Do I Find Out What People are Searching For?

One of the most powerful tools used through the SEO industry is the Google Keyword tool. This permits you to look into the level of search volumes around different keywords.

Enter the keywords that you are considering using for your SEO campaign and assess that the level of traffic is enough. It is important to note that the most popular "short tail" keywords are always the most competitive and will need a refined SEO strategy to accomplish satisfactory results.

Writing Keyword Specific Content

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

Creating content is one of the most important components of any search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, however, it is also one of the most difficult and time consuming. Not only does the content need to appeal to visitors to your website, but it must also communicate successfully with the search engine bots that crawl your site. One of the biggest mistakes that businesses can make is leaving copy writing to the last moment of the project. You need to give yourself time and spread the task throughout you business to make certain you obtain great quality copy.

A few items you should consider when writing good quality SEO copy are:

Create a specific content focus for each page
Attach ALT tags for all images throughout the site
Use your keyword in the title
Use bold and/or italics with your keywords to make them stand out
Use a good mix of keywords to content, which should be between 2-4%

Title Tags

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

Title tags are a very important component of your search engine optimization procedure. Even though they are not visible on the page, they are the single most important on-site optimisation factor, so they definitely should not be overlooked.

1) Try and aim for 65 characters as this is the cut-off point in Google when listed with search results. It also helps to keep your title tags concisely targeted towards the most important keywords.

2) Include keywords towards the start of the title tag.

3) Make sure you have consistent branding in the title tag. This comes down to personal preference, however, the branding value of having your business name seen several times when listed in search results can be extremely valuable. Some people choose a consistent style of “Keywords | Brand”, but this really is down to personal preference. If you have a long brand name, it may be worth abbreviating this down in some fashion.

Meta Description Tag

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

The meta description tag is a very important component of your search engine optimization procedure. Like the title tag this does not appear directly on a web page, however, a meta description tag is often listed as the result snippet when a site is listed in the search engines.

1) Try and include the keywords you are targeting in the meta description tags, these are highlighted in bold when searched for so they can help to increase a search listings click through rate.

2) Make sure your writing encourages the user into clicking your listing when it appears in the search results. Think of this as a Google AdWords ad where you can try to influence the click through and conversion rate of an ad by making is sound interesting. You will need to clearly describe the landing page and add a call-to-action, so that users know what they should be doing once landing on your website.

Headings

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

The use of headings is very important to the search engine optimization of your website. Below are a few items for you to consider regarding the use of headings.

1) Use one H1 heading per page to highlight the most important keywords on that page to the search engines.

2) Synchronise headings with title tags, to make sure primary terms are targeted as effectively as possible.

3) Use H2-H5 headings to optimise for secondary terms and ensure these are used as sub-headings.

4) All content should have unique title tags and headings. This ensures, that you will target different variations of keywords, as opposed to competing with itself for the same search terms.

How Web Hosting Aids in SEO

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

How Web Hosting Aids in SEO

You probably know by now that web hosting is a popular service millions of people rely on to create their websites. These services are used for everything from blogs and personal sites to e-commerce and community sites. What many people don’t know is the importance of web hosting as it relates to search engine optimization. You can truly benefit from search engine traffic by leveraging your hosting solution and devising a sound SEO strategy.

Domain and URLs

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Domain and URLs

Before even purchasing a web hosting plan, you probably want to get yourself a domain first. If you already have a name registered with another host, it shouldn’t be difficult to transfer it over to a new provider. If not, you can easily register one for about $10 a year. When it comes to SEO, both your domain and URLs are extremely important. This is because when the search engine spiders come crawling, they index your pages individually opposed to the website itself. With most hosting solutions, you have the ability to create custom URLs, so when used in conjunction with your domain name, it makes a great way to increase visibility in the eyes of the search engines.

Search Engine Friendly Features

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Search Engine Friendly Features

The features a web hosting provider offers can also benefit your SEO efforts. Because optimizing for targeted search engine traffic has proven to be effective, many hosts now offer tools that help research and choose the best keywords for your site. Another great feature is the handy web application. These utilities give you graphical statistics on your website traffic, showing when visitors came in and where they come from. They usually show you which search engine spiders visited your site as well. Then you have companies that offer free search engine submissions, free marketing credits, Google webmaster tools and more. The average web hosting package is loaded with an arsenal of tools that can aid in SEO.

Finding the Right Solution

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Finding the Right Solution

Although web hosting plays a major role in SEO, the actual results all depends on the hosting company. This is why it is so crucial to put an emphasis on quality and reliability rather than the cost of service. There are many types of hosting out there and finding a cheap solution is easier than ever before. When looking for a service, you need to keep in mind that you are essentially placing the fate of your search engine rankings in the hands of another company. This is one relationship where trust is key. Without doing your research and rushing into a service, you can end up with a solution that does more harm to your visibility than good. Worst of all, you may not even be aware of it.

Essential Elements of SEO - Keywords and Phrases

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Essential Elements of SEO - Keywords and Phrases

The most basic and effective SEO technique of all is the use of keywords and key phrases. Keywords simply refer to the terms users commonly enter into a search engine. Search engine robots or spiders are trained to crawl the web and find these terms. Once these words are found, the corresponding web page is indexed by the spider and then listed in a search engine. For the most part, key phrases are like keywords but simply have more words bundled together. Key phrases may be presented in the form of a question or other formats commonly associated with a particular niche. When used properly, both can be the determining factor in the success of your SEO campaign.

Essential Elements of SEO - Page Titles

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Essential Elements of SEO - Page Titles

If you take a look in the top of left corner of your browser, you will find text detailing the site you’re on and perhaps a brief description of what the page is about. This is the title of a web page, often overlooked but oh so important. Some webmasters don’t realize it, however, the title is one of the first elements a search engine spider will detect when landing on your site. Because of this, you want to make sure your web pages have relative, keyword-rich titles. When incorporating keywords into your titles, it is important to make sure you keep them relative and to a minimum. Search engine spiders are designed to ignore sites that contain keyword stuffed pages. This is why you want to be very careful not to overuse them.

Essential Elements of SEO - Keyword Density

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Essential Elements of SEO - Keyword Density

Because keyword stuffing is often looked down upon by the search engines, one must be cautious of going overboard. In fact, overusing them can actually be more damaging than using none at all when it comes to getting rankings. Keyword density is a way to make sure this doesn’t happen. This technique basically refers to the number of keywords divided by the number of words on a web page. On a page consisting of 500 words, experts suggest that anything over 5% is considered keyword stuffing while anything less is considered to make less of an impact. For this reason, you want to find out what is appropriate density for the number of words on your pages.

Innovative Approaches to Link Building

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Innovative Approaches to Link Building

Establishing link popularity can be very time consuming, especially when it comes to sending out requests. However, this is a critically important aspect of SEO and something that must be done if you truly want to maximize your potential. Here are a few tips that will make your link building campaign much easier:

1. Get Active - You can learn a lot by playing an active role in the online forums and groups relative to your niche. If you become popular in these communities, people will seek your advice and want to link to you.

2. Article Submission – One of the most effective ways to create quality links is publishing articles on a large variety of websites. This could be information sites, social media sites, ezines or even article directories. Try to focus on sites that service your market, make yourself familiar with the type of content that is published, and modify the style of your articles accordingly.

3. Publish a Newsletter – You can also use a newsletter to build good links to your website. You can encourage readers to link by letting them know if they enjoyed the newsletter, they can link to the permanent version of the content located on your site. Do forget to include the URL.

4. Publish Great Content – This is not necessarily new, however it works just as well as any of them. By publishing great content on your website, people will be more likely to want to link to you. Great content is well written and most importantly, delivers excellent value to your visitors.

5. Award Sites - An innovative way to get yourself some quality links is to submit your website to award sites. You would be delighted at the number of people who have had success with this method.

6. Get in Good with Online Directories - There are several online directories that accept volunteer editors. This will allow you to submit your own personalized reviews of many sites, as well as your own. This also gives you the chance to better understand your market.

Cloaking

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Cloaking

The term cloaking refers to having one page designed to attract search engines and others specifically made for your visitors. While this may seem like a viable strategy, cloaking should be avoided if you want to remain on favorable terms with the search engines. It might have worked a few years ago, but today’s search engine’s are sophisticated enough to detect this and other unethical forms of SEO.

SEO Guarantees

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Guarantees

The web waters are infested with companies looking to bank off the prevalence of SEO. These firms often guarantee services that will put you on the first page of Google in the number one spot. What you should know is that no company can guarantee such rankings. The fact that most of the top ranked sites report to having no dealings with SEO firms should be enough for you not to rely on outlandish claims.

Multiple Search Engine Submissions

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Multiple Search Engine Submissions

Contrary to popular belief, submitting your website to search engines regularly can be a mistake. There are some companies that offer services utilizing special software that will automatically submit your site on a regular basis. Don’t buy into this as it can actually get you penalized and hinder your efforts.

Too Flashy

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Too Flashy

If at all possible, Flash is a technology you want to do without. Though nice from a visual aspect, Flash can leave your site heavy and difficult to process, making it nearly impossible for search engine spiders to interpret. The best technologies are integrated with HTML as this the language embraced by all search engines.

Moving Too Fast

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Moving Too Fast

Good SEO takes equally good patience. This is an ongoing process, not something you can do just once and put to the side. Reaching a top search engine position in two days or even two weeks is virtually impossible. So, even though an SEO firm may claim to get you there in a short amount of time, stay away from the these bogus claims and keep your money. Take your time and if the right methods are being employed, you will be rewarded with the search engine notoriety you seek.

SEO Myths Debunked - 1

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Myths Debunked - 1

Search engine optimization is vital for anyone looking to attract targeted traffic to their website. Being that it is such a hot topic, the web community is constantly in talks about which methods work, and which ones don’t. The purpose of this article is to debunk seven of the most common myths associated with SEO. Whether you intend to hire an SEO firm or go at it alone, this knowledge will give you a better idea of what to expect.

1.) All Meta Tags are Created Equal

Though some are extremely important, other meta tags do not play a determining factor in your search engine visibility. Because spammers are quickly becoming infamous for leveraging keywords, search engines are relying more on genuine website content and less on meta data.

2.) Regular Search Engine Submissions are a Must

There is a large perception that you should manually submit your website to search engines on a weekly or monthly basis. This couldn’t be further from the truth because all it takes is one submission to each search engine you intend to target. What many of the expert firms won’t tell you is that if your site is properly optimized, the search engine bots will automatically find you.

SEO Myths Debunked - 2

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Myths Debunked - 2

1.) Good SEO is Expensive

For the most part, SEO is a very cost effective form of online marketing, generally much cheaper than banner or sponsored advertising. This is especially the case when optimizing to achieve organic rankings. If you couple a quality site design with good networking and links, you can end up paying little to nothing for your SEO campaign.

2.) Homepage Optimization is the Key

Some have the belief that once you sprinkle a few keywords and links into your homepage, optimization is done. However, you can and should optimize all the pages within your site. Each page should have its own keywords and pay attention to the appropriate meta tags. Keep in mind that search engines rank individual pages, not entire websites.

3.) You Should Stay Away from Competitive Keywords

Many avoid using competitive keywords and phrases in fear that they just don’t have enough to fight with. The truth is that you should still aim for relevant keywords regardless of the competition surrounding them. Don’t run away from terms that you can get you noticed just because someone else is targeting them.

SEO Myths Debunked - 3

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Myths Debunked - 3

1.) PPC is More Effective than SEO

While a PPC campaign can work wonders at promoting your site, SEO is far more effective over the long haul. It is a known fact that most web surfers use the search engines and rarely find their content through sponsors advertisements. They simply trust the organic results more than the sponsored content. Even though PPC can get you to show up in the results, this is only a short term solution that could weigh heavily on your budget.

2.) Good as a Guarantee

There are a number of SEO firms in the business of making guarantees on superior optimization and ranking. In reality however, there is no firm that can make you any guarantees for ranking in any search engine. Some companies are actually out to help you, while others are simply looking to fatten their pockets.

The Importance of Search Engines

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The Importance of Search Engines

A search engine is like the local Yellow Pages book. Whereas the Yellow Pages only contains listings in your area, a search engine offers world wide reach. Each uses robots or spiders that crawl the web in search of pages to index in their database. Search engines are driven by keywords as this is what a user types in the box to find the content they are looking for. While keyword implementation and link popularity play a major role in getting your site to rank well, manually submitting your site is equally important.

SEO and SEM: Whatâ��s the Difference?

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO and SEM: What’s the Difference?

SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) are two of the hottest concepts on the internet today. While these terms are often referred to as one in the same, there is actually a big difference between the two methods. SEM is rather broad and can be used to describe various aspects of website marketing as it relates to the search engines. In this regard, SEO can simply be considered as an essential element of SEM. Whereas SEO primarily consists of keywords and links, SEM is far more extensive.

When applying SEO tactics to your blogging activities

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When applying SEO tactics to your blogging activities

Following are three main tips to keep in mind when applying SEO tactics to your blogging activities:

Tip #1: Build 3-5 Blog Sites to Fully Optimize Your Blog Campaign

To take full advantage of the weight given to blogs by the search engines, you should be aggressive when it comes to building and maintaining blog sites. Start with 3-5 general blog sites based on your keyword list and add more specialized topic sites as you go. You may end up with 10-15 blog sites before you know it! This may seem like a lot to maintain daily, but if you keep your posts short and to the point, you should not have a problem keeping up with them all.

Tip #2: Choose Blog Titles Carefully

Another important point is to choose the titles of your blog sites wisely. Purchase keyword-rich domain names and aim the content of your blog sites to them. A blog site’s title is one of the best ways to optimize every blog post that gets posted.

Tip #3: Pay Attention To Linking Opportunities

By adding fresh content each day, you will find the searchbots coming back quite often to your blog site. Take full advantage of this searchbot frequency by properly linking to your primary websites, other blogs, and deep links within the current blog. Some of these links can be placed within the blog post with keyword-rich anchor text, and some of these links can be permanent links that run alongside every blog entry that gets posted. Anyway you look at it, over time these links are very powerful and will attribute high keyword rankings to the pages they are pointing to.

Critical CMS features for SEO

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Critical CMS features for SEO

* URLs free of tracking parameters and session IDs — Sticking session or tracking information such as the user’s clickpath into the URL is deadly for SEO. It usually leads to incomplete indexation and duplicate content issues.

* H1 tags — No H1 tags on a given page is not desirable. Too many H1 tags on the page is not desirable. Low-value content (such as the publication date) marked up as an H1 is not desirable. The article title is typically the best content to have wrapped in an H1.

* Customizable URL structure — If the default URL structure of the CMS doesn’t suit your needs, you should be able to change it. For example, if you don’t want /archives/ in the URLs of all your archived articles, you should be able to remove it. Or if you want to reference the article name instead of the article’s database ID in the URL, you should be able to do it.

* 301 redirects to canonical URL — Duplicate content is the bane of the existence of many a dynamic website owner. Automatic handling of this by the CMS through the use of 301 redirects is a must.

Tips for choosing the most memorable domain name for SEO

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Tips for choosing the most memorable domain name for SEO

* keep it short and easy to spell.

* make use of keywords or popular search terms whenever possible.

* generic terms are like gold dust if you can get them.

* the more unusual but familiar sounding a domain, the better.

* add a twist, some domain names are remembered for being different to what you would expect to find there.

SEO Dos and Don'ts: Don't Submit Your Website Using Website Submission Services

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Dos and Don'ts: Don't Submit Your Website Using Website Submission Services

There is no reason to pay for a website submission service when search engines spider websites for free. Also, most specialists that do search marketing for Google and other search engines will discourage you from using the free submit on the various search engines, because typically in the past, this option has been heavily abused by search engine spammers. Google and other search engines are much more receptive to web pages that they find naturally through spidering. So how do you get your domain found by search engines if you can't use website submission services?

SEO Do's

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Do's

1) Make your website simple to navigate. Have an SEO plan for your web page hierarchy and ensure your links are clearly defined.

2) Form a site map so to insure fast and accurate indexing of your website's pages.

3) Come up with important and accurate keywords. Use them as link anchor text. If you have a blog as well then use them as the category titles and in your separate post titles.

4) Ensure that plain text image tags use your appropriate keywords as well. Search engines only index plain text and not keywords or text embedded in image files.

5) You should not have any broken links.

6) HTML tags should be accurate.

7) The "robots.txt" file should be regularly updated and exact and not block the Google Crawler Bot.

SEO Don'ts

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Don'ts

1) Don't put irrelevant content on you website in order to enhance search engine rankings. It will do the opposite. All keywords and content must be relevant and add importance to the search.

2) Avoid tricks and "link schemes" designed to enhance rankings on the search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo. They really don't work and lots of them are just a way for someone else to make money.

3) Don't include "hidden text and links".

4) Don't send automated queries. Websites should be manually submitted to search engines for the best possible results.

Linkability

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Linkability

Can search spiders find and see your content. Dynamic database driven content is a killer for SEO. You want to make sure your text and links are presented to browsers in a static form that can be read by search spiders. Dynamic menu navigation using javascript or DHTML can also be a problem. The way to correct this linking problem is to employ a site map. Link to the site map from a text link on your home page. Search spiders will follow the link to the site map and find all your pages from there.

The Use of Flash and SEO

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are many things you need to consider when looking at search engine optimization for your website and one area involves the use of flash. If you must use flash, make certain you always include alternative text.

Flash and search engines do not mix well. However, if you must use flash you should provide alternate text that describes exactly what the flash element includes. If you use Flash for your whole site, you should provide an alternate version of the complete site in HTML so that search engines and non-flash browsers can view it also.

The best use of flash on websites is as small segments of the website which are preferably non-critical. Search engines are not able to view flash as they see them as images. According to Google Webmaster Central, websites that effectively use flash "use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation."

Where to Place Your Web Pages in Your Site Hierarchy

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization of your website, there are many aspects you need to consider. One such aspect where to place your pages in your websites hierarchy. The best advice is to keep your web pages close to the root directory.

The higher your web pages are in your sub-directories, the better they will rank in search engines. This is because pages that are listed right off the root directory are generally more important than pages that are found four or five levels deep in the site.

More on Keywords

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are many things you need to consider when looking at search engine optimization for your website and one area involves the use of keywords. There are many things to keep in mind with respect to the use of keywords on your website and here are a few more.

Keep your keywords together

Search engines rank keywords in pages regardless of where they are found. But if you are trying to rank well for a particular keyword phrase, if you keep the keywords together, it will help the search engines recognize that they are related.

Use your keyword phrase in your meta description

Many search engines use the meta description field as the description they return in their search results. Therefore, it is very important to have a great description. Including your keyword phrase in the meta description tag is another location that the search engines can see your keywords. This isn't a silver bullet, but it is still good practice.

Use your keyword phrase in named anchors

A named anchor, which can also be called a bookmark, is a helpful tool for building navigation within a web page. For search engines, it also signifies that the text defined by and following the anchor has more importance. If you use your keyword phrase in some of your named anchors, that will give that text more standing.

Secondary Keywords

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization of your website, there are many aspects you need to consider. One such aspect is the use of secondary keywords.

It is a great idea to try and optimize your website for a few secondary keywords. Once you have a keyword phrase, you can select one or two other keywords to optimize for as well. But be careful with these and make sure that the density of your secondary keywords is not greater than 1-2%. If it is any higher, you risk confusing the search engine and weakening the power of your main keyword phrase.

Use Different Forms of Words For Your Keyword Phrase

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are many things you need to consider when looking at search engine optimization for your website and one area involves the use of keywords. It is a good idea to use different forms of words for your keyword phrase.

This can also be referred to as stemming. Most search engines know that one word stemmed from another is really the same word. For example, plural versions of nouns (cat and cats), active verbs (run and running), etc. By using different forms of your keywords, you can make your page more interesting for your visitors and still optimize for the search engines.

Use Synonyms For Your Keywords

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization of your website, there are many aspects you need to consider. One such aspect is the use of synonyms for your keywords.

Like keyword stemming, synonyms are another way to mix up your text for your visitors whilst still optimizing for search engines. Most modern search engines have an authoritative synonym library and so identify that words like "cat" and "feline" mean the same thing.

However, be careful using this approach on non-English pages. Most search engines were created in English-speaking countries, and have more comprehensive English vocabularies than other languages.

You should also remember that tools like keyword density readers often don't identify synonyms, so your page may be denser in keywords than they report if you use lots of synonyms.

Do Not Link to Lots of External Sites

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are many things you need to consider when looking at search engine optimization for your website and one area involves the links you have on your website. It is a good idea not to link to lots of external sites.

Linking to web sites that are not on your site is a good idea, but it is not advisable to fill up your pages with them. At best, you will weaken the effectiveness of your page in the search engines, and at worst your page will look like a list of links and get slightly penalized by search engines. Also, when you many external links, you have more to check on a regular basis, to make sure that those pages don't go bad or turn into pages you don’t want your readers to visit.

Register a Separate Domain Instead of a Sub-Domain

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When you are considering the search engine optimization of your website, you need to think about whether it is a good idea to register a separate domain instead of a sub-domain.

Sub-domains are a good way to create new websites without needing to register a new domain. But sub-domains are not acknowledged by search engines, or customers, as separate sites. The other problem with sub-domains is that most people think that URLs should begin with "www". Sometimes www.subdomain.domain.com will work, but sometimes it won't.

If possible, it is better to move all sites that are on a sub-domain onto a real domain name of their own.

Use Hyphens or Underscores to Separate Words in URLs

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The search engine optimization of your website should consider the use hyphens or underscores to separate words in URLs.

Just as you do for your domains, you should separate words in your URLs with hyphens (-) or underscores (_). Hyphens are better, but outside of the domain, underscores can work also. Hyphens work better because many search engine bots identify hyphens as the end of a word, but see underscores as part of the word. Also, underscores can be viewed as a space by your customers because the underline of the link and the underscore merge together, and they will then get upset if they try to type the URL with a space and cannot get to the page.

Write Short Pages

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

One of the aspects of search engine optimization you will need to consider is the length of the web pages you write. The best advice is to write short pages.

The shorter your page is, the less times you need to repeat your keyword phrase and keep the density just right. In addition, short pages load more quickly, which will be well received by your visitors.

As a general guide, try and keep pages under 30KB in size. You can split long pages into several pages and optimize each page on its own.

Do Not Host Your Website with a Host That Allows Spammers

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The search engine optimization of your website involves many things and one thing you should not do is host your site with a host that allows spammers.

You should really avoid all types of spammers, but particularly search engine spammers. If you are not sure what your host's policy is towards spammers, find out. There should be some words in their terms and conditions about malicious activity. If your IP is blacklisted, you'll be blacklisted right along with it, even if your site is completely innocent and not involved in any malicious activity.

Avoid Hosts With Lots of Downtime

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When you are considering the search engine optimization of your website, you should pay close attention to your host and avoid a host that is down a lot of the time.

Even though search engines will not deliberately discriminate against a website that is down, if they can't get to your URL because it's down, then they are unable to index it. Worse still, if your site is down several times when the bot tries to access it, it could be flagged as gone and then the bot will not come at all. Find out from your hosting provider what their uptime rates are and what they guarantee. Anything less than 97-98% uptime is not good and maybe you should be looking somewhere else.

Avoid the Use of Session IDs

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization of your website, there are many aspects you need to consider. One such aspect is the use of session IDs. It is strongly recommended that you try and avoid the use of sessions IDs.

Similar to dynamic URLs, search engines don't really like URLs with session IDs on them. Actually, session IDs appear to result in even more problems with search engine bots than plain dynamic URLs. The problem is that every time the bot comes to a site with session IDs it can index that site as a completely new URL, even though the content is identical. This can lead to the search engine believing you are attempting to spam them with identical content and could even get your site banned. Google guidelines state that id= URL parameters are acceptable, but that doesn't mean that other search engines are able to handle them okay.

Avoid the Use of the Meta Refresh Tag to Redirect Users

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When you are looking at the search engine optimization of your website, you should try and avoid the use the meta refresh tag to redirect users.

It can be very attractive to set up redirects on your website with the meta refresh tag, however, this can be a bad idea. Many spammers use them to try and trick search engines into thinking that a page is about one thing and then refreshing to something totally different. Also, meta refresh does not provide information to the search engine about why the redirect is happening. It is a much better idea to set up a permanent HTTP 301 redirect when you must redirect your visitors to a different URL.

Avoid the Use of 302 Redirects

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The search engine optimization of your website involves many aspects and one such aspect is the use of 302 redirects. You should try and avoid 302 redirects.

A HTTP 302 server redirect is intended to be used when a page is temporarily moved from one location to another on a server. However, spammers use 302 redirects because that provides them with lots more URLs to the same final page and consequently numerous more ways to get to that page.

The only time you should use a 302 redirect is if you have ugly URLs with many parameters on them. The 302 redirect tells the search engine that this is not a permanent redirect, but rather an alternate URL. For all other redirects you should use a 301 redirect.

Avoid Making Constant Minor Changes to Content

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

One of the things you should consider when looking at the search engine optimization of your website is trying to avoid making constant minor changes to content.

Even though you want search engines to see that you update your content, making minor changes such as correcting spelling errors, or changing 10 or 20 characters, could indicate that you are just trying to get the updated date changed. This appears like you are trying to trick the search engines into thinking that you update your pages more than you actually do.

It is a great idea to spend the time and update your pages, but make sure the updates are significant.

Avoid Separating Content Artificially

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When you are looking at the search engine optimization of your website, you should try and avoid separating your content artificially.

You should not display different content based on IP, browser type, browser version, operating system or anything else. This can be very attractive for some web designers, as it is a way to demonstrate that you know how to write JavaScript or another programming language. However, it can look like you are trying to fool the search engine by showing it something different to what you are showing your visitors.

If it is essential that you must display alternate content based on some artificial measure, create separate web pages for each, rather than using the same URL for all the content. Alternatively, keep the content that is different as minimal as possible and don't create a whole new site for each IP or browser type.

Avoid Using robots.txt to Ban Large Sections of Your Website

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are many things to consider when you are looking at the search engine optimization of your website. One aspect you will need to look at is the use of the robots.txt file. It is advisable that you do not ban large sections of your website using the robots.txt file.

Generally speaking, using a robots.txt file to keep certain areas of your site off-limits to search engine bots can be a good idea. However, if you ban large sections of your site, say more than half, search engine bots may mark your site as "forbidden" and stop spidering your site as frequently. This will result in your site being spidered less often, with fewer pages will be added to the directory and updated in rank.

Why Control the Search Engine Robots?

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

How you control search engine access to your website can play an important role in your search engine optimization thinking. So why should you control the search engine robots?

There are occasions where you do not want the robots roaming freely anywhere they like on your website, these may include:

1. You may have semi-private areas that are not password protected and you do not want them scanned.

2. Some areas of your web site may contain programs or other non-content, such as the cgi-bin directory, which does not need to be scanned.

3. Maybe you don't have lots of bandwidth and don't want what you have wasted on a robot.

How to Communicate with Search Engine Bots

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Here are some ideas if you are going to control the access to your website using the robots.txt file as part of your search engine optimization routine.

The first thing a robot does when it comes to a new website is to look for a file on the root of the web server called "robots.txt". If there is no file, it assumes that robots are allowed anywhere they can find on the site.

This robots.txt file contains two or more lines:

1. The name of the robot or user-agent that is not allowed on the site. Normally this is left to "*", meaning all robots:

User-agent: *

2. The area of the website that that agent is not allowed into. All files and sub-directories under that directory will not be scanned by the robot. If there is more than one directory you want to disallow, then copy this line as many times as you need it.

Disallow: /private/

Examples

If you wanted to stop all robots from going to any area of your website, your robots.txt file would look like:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

If you want to prevent only a specific web crawler from crawling your site, you need to list it by name in the User-agent line. To stop Google from spidering your site, you would write

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /

Some Caveats on the Use of robots.txt

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Controlling access to your website by search engines may form part of your search engine optimization approach. If you are using the robots.txt file to restrict the access of search engine bots to your website, there are a couple of caveats to keep in mind.

1. The robots.txt file is case-sensitive. If you create a file called Robots.txt or robots.TXT the spiders will ignore its contents.

2. The robots.txt file has to be in the root directory of your web server. This means that if you have a web page like http://www.yourbusinessname.com/~wallyhackett/ you will need to ask your administrator to add your disallows to their root level directory.

3. There is no way to "allow" a bot, you can only disallow. So if you have one page in a group of 160 others that you want spidered, you should move it out of the disallowed directory. Alternatively, you could explicitly name every file you want disallowed.

Avoid Creating Flash Splash Pages

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

One of the things you should consider when looking at the search engine optimization of your website is not using flash to create splash pages.

Search engines are not able to read images and unfortunately they see flash as a giant image. So it is important to remember that flash and search engines do not go well together. If you do not have extensive alternative HTML that displays when flash is not enabled, then your website will not rank well in search engines. Make sure you test your website with a browser with flash disabled to observe what the search engine sees.

Advantages of Using Flash

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Flash is a powerful tool, but like every tool in the web developer's toolbox, it should not be used to solve every problem. Some problems are best solved with flash, whilst others are not. In terms of search engine optimization, if you know how to use flash effectively, you can increase your page views and customers.

Here are some advantages of using flash.

Cross-platform compatibility

Flash is very well supported by web browsers and if you build a site or application in flash, you know that it will be viewed correctly by anyone who has the flash plugin. It is operating system and browser independent.

Animations

Flash was originally used primarily as an animation tool and that is what it does best. It is simple to create animations in flash, as well as being easy to view them.

Video

Video works well in flash applications because it doesn't require an operating system dependent plugin like QuickTime or MediaPlayer.

Games

Many people enjoy games and Flash games do not have the browser support issues of Ajax the bandwidth limitations of server-side games written in CGI.

Vector graphics

Vector graphics can look smoother and more attractive using flash. Flash permits developers to build applications with smooth lines requiring that the customer have a vector-graphic tool installed on their hard drive.

Image replacement for special fonts

Web designers who need a special font family in their web designs can use an image replacement technique called sIFR (or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) which replaces text in the design with flash to get specific fonts.

Flash applications can also carry out script actions, collect data and do most of the things that server side scripts can do.

Disadvantages of Using Flash

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Here are some disadvantages of using flash.

Bandwidth and speed limitations

Unless the designer works very hard to optimize flash, most flash applications and websites can be very large and slow to download. In many circumstances, the whole flash site must be downloaded before it can be used. Even though it is possible to add in graphical countdowns and other features to make the time pass more quickly, many people will not stick around and wait.

Usability is impaired

One of the most important buttons on a web browser is the back button. It is frequently by most people browsing the web. Unfortunately, a flash site usually removes that functionality. When a visitor hits the back button after exploring a large flash website, they are taken back to the website they were on before they visited your site. Then, if they return to your flash site, they have to renavigate to where they were previously. Most people will not be willing to do that two times.

Accessibility is also impaired

As most flash sites are based on images and do not normally have lots of alternative text, they can be very tricky, or even impossible, for a screen reader to read.

Search engines cannot read them

Search engine bots are very similar to screen readers in that they cannot parse images. In addition, many of them have trouble following links that are not standard HTML links and most links in flash are not in HTML, they are in flash. As a result, many flash developers have a difficult time getting their flash sites to rank highly in search engines. Generally most flash sites that do rank well, do so because they have two versions of the site, one flash and one HTML. This means they must maintain two versions of the website.

Flash requires a plug-in

Even though a majority of web browsers have the plugin pre-installed, the fact is that flash does require a plugin which some people and companies do not permit.

Some people just don't like flash pages

Just like sound and animated graphics, flash has developed a reputation among some customers as being more of an annoyance than a benefit to a web page. This is especially true when the flash serves no purpose other than to decorate a page, like as an animated banner or splash page.

Never Redirect to Another Domain

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are many things to consider when you are looking at the search engine optimization of your website. One aspect you will need to look at is redirecting to another domain. It is advisable that you never direct to another domain.

Redirecting to another domain is not a 100% guarantee that you will be banned from search engines, however, it is a very common spammer trick used in conjunction with doorway pages and cloaking. If you set up a redirect that goes to a new domain, you need to write it as a 301 HTTP redirect, not a 302 or meta refresh. This tells the search engine that this redirect is permanent and they should change to the new domain in their directory.

You should also be careful redirecting to new domains as you could be banned by the search engines. As this trick is frequently employed by spammers, it is a good idea to avoid doing it. Search engines can be difficult to get back into if your site is banned by mistake.

Never Link to Invisible Images

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When you are looking at the search engine optimization of your website, you should never link to invisible images.

Invisible images are images that are 1x1 pixels in size and cannot be seen by the naked eye on a web page. As links are given some priority in ranking a web page, linking images that cannot be seen by your customers appears to be aimed only at search engine bots.

You also should not link single pixel images. This is similar to hiding text or displaying different content to search engines than to your visitors. D not assume that search engines cannot read CSS or HTML tags that resize full sized images. If you do this to optimize your pages, your site runs the risk of being banned.

Never Display Different Content to a Search Engine than Visitors

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are many things to consider when you are looking at the search engine optimization of your website. One aspect you may consider is displaying different content to a spider than customers. It is highly advisable that you never perform this technique or you will run the risk of being banned by the search engines.

This is often called cloaking because it is an effort to cloak what your site delivers in something that might be seen as more palatable to search engines. It can be very attractive to use cloaking, and even though it may provide better results at first, search engines do not like the practice.

Cloaking Hurts

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The search engine optimization of your website can involve many different aspects. One aspect you may be thinking about considering is cloaking, which is showing search engine bots different content to what your visitors sees. You should really think hard about following this path as cloaking can hurt.

Cloaking is basically lying to get a better ranking with search engines. By cloaking your website you are deceiving the search engine providers and consequently anyone who comes to your site from those search engines.

Cloaking is also frowned upon by most search engines. Google and other highly ranked search engines will remove your site from their listings completely and sometimes blacklist it, resulting in other engines not listing it either, if you are discovered cloaking. This means that while you may benefit from higher ranking for a time, in the end you will be caught and lose all your rankings completely.

As a final point, cloaking does not work. Many search engines use other methods other than just what is on a page to determine the ranking of the page.

Cloaking Hurts - Or Does It?

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When you are looking at the search engine optimization of your website, you may be tempted to become involved in cloaking your website. This is where you basically show search engine bots different content to what your visitors see. It is highly recommended that you do not engage in cloaking as it can easily result in your website being banned from all the search engines.

However, if you engage an optimization firm that engages in cloaking, they will probably tell you many reasons why it isn't a bad thing.

"The content is still relevant"

While it may still be relevant, it's still lying to your customers and providing them something different than they may have been expecting.

"We need to protect the HTML code"

With many websites around the world already having many other websites proving similar, protecting the HTML code is basically ludicrous. Most professional designers can imitate and improve a website just by looking at it.

"You won't get caught"

It can sometimes be tricky to prove that a site is cloaking content, especially if they are very devious, but that does not make it right. The reality is, if your website gets very popular, you will eventually get caught.

"You can't compete without it"

If your website cannot compete on its own merits, then maybe it shouldn't be competing. Competition through dishonest business practices is an ethical slippery slope that can only lead to bigger and worse scams against your potential customers.

Organic Search

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When you perform the search engine optimization of your website you will come across many different terms. One such term is organic search, which is explained further below.

Most search engines offer two types of search results to their customers: paid results (typically at the top or on the side of the results page) and organic or natural results. While paid results can get your website to rank higher for a specific keyword phrase because you have paid to be high in the results, most customers consider these results to be little better than advertising. As such they will often skip over them in favor of the natural or organic search results.

An organic search is a search that generates results that were not paid advertisements. Many customers feel that these results are a more accurate reflection of what they might want when searching for a specific phrase because they are generated by popularity and common usage of other web searchers.

When you do SEO you are trying to modify the content of your web pages to rank well in the organic search results.

Do Not Omit alt text for Images

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are many things you need to consider when looking at search engine optimization for your website. You should avoid omitting alt text for images especially for images inside the text.

Images inline with your text can make your web page look great, but if you do not include the alternative text (alt text), search engines will not pick up the content relevance. Also remember that the more images you have on your web page, the less likely that search engines will rank it highly. Text is what gets ranked in most search engines, and alt text is a poor alternative.

What is the alt Attribute?

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

One of the easiest ways to make your website more reachable is to use an alt attribute in your image tags. It is astonishing how many people forget to use this simple attribute. If you want to write valid XHTML, the alt attribute is essential for the img tag, and yet people still leave it out.

What is the alt Attribute?

The alt attribute is an attribute of the img tag and is intended to be an option for non-visual browsers when they come across images. This means that the text is intended to be used when the image is not visible on the page. Instead, the alternative text is displayed.

Most browsers display the alt text when the visitor hovers their mouse over the image. Therefore, you should make certain that the text is clear and easy to read and not produce a huge popup for users pausing their mouse on your page.

Adding alt text is easy, all you have to do is use the alt attribute on your image:

Tips for Writing alt Tags

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

1. Be brief

Some browsers will not like it if you have alt text that is too long. Even though it may seem nice to describe what is exactly in the image, that is not the purpose of the alt tag. Rather, it should describe exactly the words needed to put the image in context and no more.

2. Be clear

Do not be so concise that the context becomes bemused. Remember, some people will only see the text in your alt tags, so if it is too short they may not comprehend what you are trying to show them. For example:

a tree - good
a sycamore tree - better
a 10-foot tall sycamore tree with mostly brown leaves and possibly something wrong with its bark - too much

3. Be contextual

Do not describe the image if it is meant to be viewed in context. For example:

If you have an image of the company logo, you should write "Company Name" and not "Company Name Logo"

4. Don't display your site's inner workings

If you are just including spacer images, just use a space for your alt text. If you write "spacer.gif" it just calls attention to the site, rather than providing useful information.

5. Be search engine conscious

If you have good, concise, clear alt text, that can actually assist your search engine optimization, as the images on your page support and improve your keywords.

6. Don't use it only for search engine optimization

Many sites think that if they use alt text as an SEO tool, they can trick the search engines into optimizing their site for a keyword they don't have there. However, this can go wrong if the search engine decides you are trying to fake your results and removes you from the results completely.

Do No Use Images Instead of Text Links

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are many things you need to consider when looking at search engine optimization for your website and one is you should avoid using images instead of text links.

Search engine optimization is all about text. If you use images instead of text, even if you have good alt text, search engines will have a difficult time ranking your website. This is particularly the case for navigation. Search engine bots crawl through your website by following links, and links on images are trickier for them to follow and rank compared with text links. Also, using images rather than text makes your pages slower to load. You are far better off formatting your text with CSS rather than using images.

Use CSS Text Instead of Images to Speed Page Downloads

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Images make your web pages load slower. It is very important that you learn how to optimize your images, as this is a crucial skill for creating web pages. However, another problem with images is when website designers choose to use them for every remotely styled text on your web page, even if the text is only styled a little.

It is true that images are the only way to get your web page fonts to display exactly how you want them to look in every situation. However, the solution results in more problems than simply bowing to the way the web works. Remember that all images will not be displayed on all browsers, are not as accessible as text and load much more slowly than CSS and text.

Do Not Misspell Keywords in Your Content

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization of your website, there are many aspects you need to consider. One such aspect is to try and avoid the misspelling of your keywords in your content.

It can be very appealing to try and optimize your website for misspellings. Even though it will not harm your site in search engine rankings, particularly if you choose the misspelled version as your keyword phrase to optimize on. However, it will harm your credibility with your customers. For every one person who misspells the word, there are at least two to three who will use the correct spelling. If they end up on your page for some reason, they will think your site is unprofessional. In addition, many browsers and search engines have spell checkers built into the forms, so the popularity of misspellings will become less into the future.

Do Not Try to Optimize for Too Many Keywords

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are many things you need to consider when looking at search engine optimization for your website and one is how many keywords or phrases you should try and optimize for.

Don't try to optimize for more than 2-3 keywords and phrases

It is a good idea to avoid trying to optimize your website for more than 2-3 keywords and phrases. This is called keyword dilution. If you have too many topics on a given page, it will be hard for both search engines and customers to decide what you are talking about. If you have lots to say on several topics, it is better to write a number of short pages on each topic, rather than trying to cram them all into one long page.

Don't use your keyword phrase too much

Keyword stuffing is the practice of repeating your keywords or keyword phrases over and over in a page until there is nearly no other text other than the keyword phrase. Check your keyword density to determine if you have used it too much. As a general rule, 10% or higher is too much.

It is worth noting that if you are too obvious about stuffing keywords, you could get your site excluded from search engines.

Avoid Relying on Links from Domains on the Same IP

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization of your website, there are many aspects you need to consider. One such aspect is to try and avoid relying on links from domains on the same IP.

Even though Google does not discriminate against domains that have the same IP (for example, domains that use virtual hosts), other search engines may. Therefore, it is best to try and avoid increasing your inbound links with links from other domains that you own. The same is true for domains hosted on the same hosting provider, coming from the same C-level IP address. Google does not penalize sites like this, yet other engines might.

This is another condition where if it becomes obvious that you are doing it, you could get all your sites excluded from search engines.

URL SEO Tips

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are many things you need to consider when looking at search engine optimization for your website and one area involves your choice of URL.

Do not have more than 10 words in your URL

If possible, you want to have your keywords in your URL (and domain if you can), longer URLs can look more spam like to both visitors and search engines. Nonetheless, this should not be a serious concern, and if you need to have 11 or 15 words in your URL, it shouldn't be a problem, so long as you are not doing it all the time.

Do not use URL parameters

If you have parameters on your URLs it makes them long and difficult for people to read. Search engines can get confused by them, particularly if the parameters are meant to hold customer information and not specify a separate web page. Also, search engines do not always rank dynamic pages as high as static pages, and most dynamic pages use parameters on the URL to indicate the correct page. If you must use parameters, you may want to think about using a URL rewrite to static URLs, at least for your more significant pages.

Do not use dynamic URLs

In general, search engine bots prefer static URLs to dynamic ones. Even though it is possible to rank high with a dynamic URL, it is easier if you redirect dynamic URLs to shorter, static URLs.

Website Content

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization of your website, there are many aspects you need to consider. One such aspect is the content you plan to include on your website. In terms of SEO, the content of your site is an extremely high priority.

Write great content

Great content is where your website starts. You can have all the keywords in the world, but if your content is no good, visitors will not hang around on your site and search engines will not determine your site to be valuable.

Write unique content

It is important that the content is unique. You should generate content that has different information than what is on other sites and other web pages.

Add new content regularly

Websites that have new content added on a regular basis are viewed as more reliable than sites that rarely do. This also assists in increasing the amount of relevant content on your website and also improves your rankings.

Keyword Phrase Selection

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are many things you need to consider when looking at search engine optimization for your website and one area involves your choice of keywords and keyword phrases.

Create a great keyword phrase

The very first thing you should do when developing your search engine optimization is obtain a great keyword phrase for that page. You should not try to optimize your entire website to one keyword phrase, but rather you should concentrate on writing pages for specific keywords and phrases.

Choose a phrase that is popular, but not too popular

When you are choosing a keyword phrase, it is a good idea to find one that is popular but not too popular. This may appear counter-intuitive, however, the reality is that extremely popular keywords are very desirable and subsequently very competitive. It is better to try to optimize your website for keywords that can rank you higher. You will get more page views from a less popular keyword when you are on the first or second page of the search engines, than from a extremely popular keyword that you only make it to page 50 of search engines.

The Most Important Part of Your Page

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization of your website, there are many aspects you need to consider. One such aspect is the title of your web page. In terms of SEO, web page title is an extremely high priority.

As with lots of writing, the title is often the most important part of your web page. It lets people know what your page is about and what they can expect to find on the page. However, people starting out in web page development often think that the first heading on their page is actually the title and this can result in a misunderstanding.

What is the Title?

In HTML, the title is the text contained in the <title></title> tag. This tag is stored in the <head></head> of the document.

One of the reasons the title is often forgotten is because it is not an obvious part of the page. The HTML title is displayed in two places on the page: the title bar of the web browser and in the bookmarks and favorites.

The title Tag

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

<title> Description:

The <title></title> element defines the title of the document. The title generally shows in the title bar of the browser window or on a status line. With most browsers it becomes the default name when the page is bookmarked.

<title> Usage:

Standard title

<head>

<title>Your Web Page Title</title>

</head>

<title> Special Notes:

A well written descriptive title will improve any page you build. It is usually the first thing a visitor sees on the page, so it should be concise but clear.
Search engines use the title as the link.
Most browsers use the title for the default name on the bookmarks, so you want your title to make sense when it is read out of context.

Where to Use Your Keywords and Phrases

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are many things you need to consider when looking at search engine optimization for your website and one area involves where to use your keyword and keyword phrases.

Obtain a domain with your keyword phrase

Putting your keyword phrase in your domain name is a great way to optimize for that phrase.

Use the keyword phrase in your URL

Even if you cannot have your keywords into your domain name, you can put them into your URLs. Search engines read the URLs and assign value to the text they find there.

Use your keyword phrase in headlines

Headline tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) are a fantastic place to use your keyword phrase and secondary keywords. Search engines recognize that headlines are more important than the surrounding text and assign greater value to keywords found there.

Use your keyword phrase in anchor text of links

Link text is another great place to put your keyword phrase. Links stand out on most web pages and are given higher priority than surrounding text.

Handling of Links

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization of your website, there are many aspects you need to consider. One such aspect is how you handle links on your web page. In terms of SEO, handling of links is an extremely high priority.

Use your keyword phrase in anchor text of links

Link text is a great place to locate your keyword phrase. Links stand out on most web pages and so are given higher priority than surrounding text.

Ask other people for links to your page

A great way to get inbound links is to simply ask people for them. But keep in mind that excessive cross-linking can be viewed as spam like behavior, so be careful about trading links or buying links on external sites.

Try to get your keyword phrase inside incoming links

Inbound links are a fantastic way to improve your page rank on search engines. The problem is you cannot control how people link to your pages. Chances are they will not use a phrase that is anything like your keyword phrase. Don’t forget they are doing you a favor by linking to you. If it makes sense, you can ask them to change the text of the link, but be careful, as people can be very sensitive and you might just get your link removed.

Another approach to getting your keyword phrase included in inbound links is to provide your customers with a ready made link text, for example:

Please link to this page: <a href="http://www.yourwebsite.com/reviews/cat_food/yum_yum.htm">Yum Yum Cat Food</a>

How Content Relates to SEO

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization of your website, there are many aspects you need to consider. One such aspect is the content on your web pages.

Create as much content as you can

There is an old saying, “content is king”. The more content you have on your website, the more there is to be indexed and appear in search engine results.

Keep your site content inside one theme

The theme or topic of your entire site is very important also. If you have many pages all around one basic theme, it will lend more credibility to each page that follows that same theme.

Keep your site live as long as possible

Older pages, at the same domain, will rank higher than newer ones.

Sitemaps

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are many things you need to consider when looking at search engine optimization for your website and one area involves the creation of a sitemap.

Create a sitemap

Search engines really like sitemaps, not necessarily for ranking, but for locating links on your site. It is not crucial that you create an XML sitemap or Google sitemap, plain HTML sitemaps work just as well.

What is an XML Sitemap?

An XML sitemap is a relatively simple XML file that contains information about one or more URLs on your website. The information that is stored in the file helps search engines bots find their way around your site. It only needs to contain a list of URLs for your website, but to get more out of it, you may want to include other information as well, such as:

When the site was last modified
How often the file is modified
A definition of the page priority

Where Do I Place My Keywords and Phrases?

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization of your website, there are many aspects you need to consider. One such aspect is the placement of your keywords phrases on your website.

Place your keyword phrase in the first paragraph

Repetition of your keyword phrase is important in your content. But it is extremely important in the first one or two paragraphs of your text. If you can repeat it once in the first paragraph that will help increase its priority.

Place your keyword phrase at the top of the HTML

In addition to placing your keyword in the first paragraph, you should also try to move your content towards the top of the HTML document. This also includes your keyword phrase.

Put your keyword phrase in alternative text

If you have images, they are a great place to put your keyword phrase, in the alternate text. This is an approach to include your keyword phrase into your document without being repetitive. Be careful not to overdo it, as you do not want to appear to be keyword stuffing which could result in getting your website banned.

Increase the font size of your keyword phrase

Search engines understand that larger fonts compared to the standard font size on the page indicate text that is more important. Achieve this by using CSS or the font tag. Also, apply font size changes to headline tags.

Format your keyword phrases to stand out

Use <strong> and <em> where suitable to make your keyword phrases be noticeable. Search engines read those tags and will recognize that text that is emphasized is often more important than the surrounding text.

Linking to Your Own Pages

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are many things you need to consider when looking at search engine optimization for your website and one area involves how you handle links.

Link to your page from within your site

Links are very important to SEO and linking from one page to another on your own site is a very simple method to generate links. They are not as important in search engine ranking as links from external sites, but they do help. If nothing else, they help the search engine bot locate all the pages on your website.

Put up links that flow within the text

Links that make sense within the context of the document, whether they are from external sites or your own site, will rank higher than lists of links or other forms of artificial links. This is because search engines value content, and links that make sense within the context of the content are more definitely related to that content than links that are inside lists.

Keep asking for inbound links

The older the links are the better. If you obtain 100 links added all at once, it appears to the search engines that you are buying link placement and that can be interpreted as spamming.

Link All Major Images

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization of your website, there are many aspects you need to consider. One such aspect is the linking of all your major images.

Link all major images

It is very important to always link images because people click on images and search engines value content that has been linked. The key is to always provide alternative text, so that the search engine has text to rank. Any image that your visitors can see on the web page should be linked.

Meta Tags and SEO

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization for your website you should consider the use of meta tags. It is important to remember that meta tags are not the “silver bullet" that will rocket your website to the top of all search page listings. However, meta tags are a tool that will assist in improving your standings in search engines that use them.

Also remember that many search engines look at the body of text on your web pages, along with the page title. This information has a higher relevance than any meta tags. Therefore, make certain you always have an appropriate <TITLE> on your web pages and applicable content in the body of the page. This will improve your rankings more than only meta tags.

What is a Meta Tag?

A meta tag is a hidden tag that is located in the <HEAD> of an HTML document. It supplies additional information about the HTML document. The meta tag has three possible attributes: content, http-equiv, and name. Meta tags always supply information in a name and value pair. The name and http-equiv attributes give the name information and the content provides the value information. Meta tags do not have a closing tag.

content

This attribute is always found in a well formed meta tag. It shows the value information in the name and value pair. It can be any valid string, which should be enclosed in quotes.

name

This is the name part in the name value pair. You can use any name that you would like or that might be useful.

http-equiv

This attribute is also a name for the name and value pair, but it is used by the server to include that name and value pair in the MIME document header passed to the Web browser before sending the actual HTML document.

Meta Tags - name Attribute

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization for your website you should consider the use of meta tags. The meta tag has three possible attributes: content, http-equiv, and name.

The name attribute is the name portion in the name value pair. You can use any name that you would like or that might be useful to you. Some common names are:

keywords - words that classify what the page is about, generally used in search engines

description - a short description of the page

author - the authors name and maybe an email address

robots - to allow or disallow indexing by robots

copyright - the copyright date of the page

Meta Tags - http-equiv Attribute

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization for your website you should consider the use of meta tags. The meta tag has three possible attributes: content, http-equiv, and name.

This http-equiv attribute is also a name for the name and value pair, but it is used by the server to include that name and value pair in the MIME document header passed to the Web browser before sending the actual HTML document. Some of the more common http-equiv types are:

charset - defines the character set used in the page

expires - the expiry date of the document

refresh - defines the number of seconds to reload the page, or reload to a new page

Reload the page every 10 seconds:

Reload to a new page after 10 seconds:

How To Use a Meta Tag

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization for your website you should consider the use of meta tags. So how do you use a meta tag?

Meta tags are found in the <HEAD> of an HTML document. If you want to use meta tags to get a better standing in search engines, then you should concentrate on your description and keywords.

The description tag

The description tag is used to describe what your web page is all about. Search engines that use it will provide the content of this tag when displaying a list of links. For example, when you do a search you will see the description listed on the search results page.

The keywords tag

The keywords tag assists search engines to classify your website and to let people find your pages more quickly. However, many search engines have limits on the number of meta keywords that can be viewed. Therefore, it is a good idea to evaluate your keywords and ensure they are as succinct and explicit as possible.

Use Meta Tags to Store Information About the Page

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When you are considering the search engine optimization of your website, you should pay close attention to the use of meta tags. Meta tags can be used to provide information about a web page, including:

Use the "author" meta tag to show the email address of the person who wrote the page:

Use the "date" meta tag to show when the page was created:

You can also create your own meta tags to present other information, such as:

There are lots of meta tags for all kinds of uses. Many specialist websites contain huge listings of meta tags.

SEO Basics

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Here are some basic principles to consider when looking at the search engine optimization of your website.

1. Write strong content.

If you only concentrate on only one thing, it should be the content of your web pages. Search engines are looking to provide links to relevant pages and they are continually adjusting their algorithms to read and review the content of web pages to ensure that it really is about what you say it is about. Content is king on a web page, for both readers and search engines.

2. Write valid HTML.

This is often one step in SEO that many website developers forget. They concentrate so much on other components of SEO that they forget that simple things like valid HTML can help your pages get spidered much more than meta keywords and meta descriptions.

3. Locate good keyword phrases.

The composition of a good keyword phrase can be difficult, however, that is what you should be optimizing your page for. Do not attempt to produce every keyword phrase possible. Rather, concentrate on one phrase that really captures what your page is about and make certain that phrase is repeated in the content, the headlines and links within the page.

4. Do not optimize your entire website.

Some website developers want to come up with one keyword phrase and optimize every page on the site for that phrase. Whilst that may make your life easier, it will not get any of the pages the exposure that you would otherwise want. Instead, concentrate on optimizing one page at a time by finding the keyword phrase that works for that page and optimize it. Then move on to the next page in your site. If you treat every page as a possible entry page on your web site, your readers will have a greater number of ways to find the site.

SEO - Things to Avoid

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When you are considering the search engine optimization of your website, there are a number of things you should try and avoid. There are some ideas or methods on web pages that are web clichés and you should try and avoid them.

Pages without content

There are many sites on the Internet that have almost nothing on them. Not just splash screens which are so popular right now, but actual web pages where there are lots of words or pictures, however, there is no real reason for people to visit there. If you are writing about a topic that you are passionate about, chances are your page will have interesting content. However, if you are just putting up a page because you can, then it is more than likely going to be boring and uninteresting to anyone else.

"Under Construction"

This is almost always a given when it comes to websites. If your website has no information when you put it up and promote it, most people will not bother to come back, even if you say that the site is under construction. Build a website that has the information people want to see, and don't bore them with things they more than likely already know.

Lists of links

If you are listing your favorite links, say so, and explain why each link is on the list.

Huge graphics

Huge graphics take a long time to download and should be optimized to reduce their size and hence their download time.

Using Links

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website you should consider how you are writing for the web. One of the important aspects of writing well for the web is how you handle links on your web page.

Do not use “click here”

If you are like many people, you have the words “click here” scattered generously throughout your pages. You may be thinking, what does that matter? Well, those two words can completely destroy the flow of any document.

Do use title tags and "inter-paragraph" links

A good way to add in links to web pages is to add them after you have written the text. You can then go back and highlight textual elements as links so your readers can obtain more information. A way to do this is to use title tags in the HREF, so that readers with title enabled browsers will know where they are going.

Keep it Personalized

It is a good idea to let your readers know that there is a person behind the web pages they are reading. When you generate your pages, make certain you have some way to contact you on the web page. If you do not want to be listed on every mailing list in the country, then at least put your name so people can give you credit.

Good Navigation

More than likely you will have many pages on your website that have information of interest to your readers. It is good practice to include navigation at the top, bottom, or sides that says "Next", "Previous", "Back", "Top", etc.

One of the beauties of the Internet is that you never know where a link will take you or how people will find your page next. Don’t assume that because you set up a good-looking table of contents that anyone but you will use it. Your links should tell people where they are going, preferably as part of a sentence, but they shouldn't be reminded to use their mouse to get there.

SEO Made Simple - Step 1

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Getting visitors to come to your website can be a huge challenge. Search engine optimization tries to take some of the guesswork out of this challenge by getting your web pages to place highly in search engines. When you use search engine optimization, you are not using tricks or hacks, but rather writing your pages so that they provide exactly what your customers want, whilst at the same time showing it to the search engines effectively. There are a number of tips to help you learn search engine optimization to get better rankings for your web pages.

Step One: Pick a Target Phrase

When using search engine optimization, you need to establish one phrase that describes accurately what your page is all about. This is often referred to as your target phrase. A target phrase for your web page should satisfy three criteria:

Important - Your phrase should be an important part of the page information. If your page is about dog food, then your target phrase should include "dog food" and not just the word "dog".

Accurate - One of the commonly tried hacks with search engine optimization is to try to optimize on a phrase that is not accurate for the content of the page. Just because the term "free" is popular, it doesn't mean you should optimize for it on your dog food page.

Popular - If your page is about dog food, your target phrase should be one that people will search for. People probably do not search for "dog chow" nearly as much as they search for "dog food", so "dog food" is a better choice.

There are several online search engine optimization tools you can use to find good target phrases.

SEO Made Simple - Step 2

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Step Two: Analyze Your Competition

The second step in search engine optimization is to establish who your competition is. Remember that when you are doing search engine optimization, you are working at the page level, not the entire web site. So while you may consider any site on pets to be your competition, for your target phrase "dog food", your competition is probably more specialized.

Check the major search engines to see what shows up when you search for your target phrase.
Examine the pages on the first page, note where and how they use your target phrase.

Keep in mind that the more popular a target phrase is, the more competition there is likely to be. It may make sense to target a less popular phrase where you can corner the market, rather than aiming for the most popular phrase there is.

SEO Made Simple - Step 3

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Step Three: Write Your Page

Search engine optimization is not just about meta tags. In fact, if you only focus on meta keywords it will only help you a little bit and if you go overboard it can actually hurt your ranking. Take the following approach to search engine optimization:

1. Include your target phrase twice in the meta title tag <title>. Ensure that your title is "clickable". This is what most people see when they search, so keep your title logical and descriptive.

2. Include your target phrase twice in the meta description. This description is used by most search engines as a short paragraph below the clickable title. Ensure it expands on the title and doesn't just repeat what the title already says.

3. Include your target phrase in the meta keywords. Do not flood your keywords, use just a few and do not get carried away.

4. Include your target phrase in the title or headline for your page. Write that headline using a header tag for your headlines, as search engines often weight words in these tags higher.

5. Include your target phrase in sub-headings, using header tags here also.

6. Finally, make certain you include your target phrase in the first paragraph of your page, and twice if possible. Also include it in other locations on the page, including external links, headlines, and sidebars.

SEO Made Simple - Steps 4 and 5

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Step Four: Promote Your Page

Make certain that when you publicize your page, you use your target phrase in both the link text and any explanatory text. If you run a blog, then blog your page with at least two references to your target phrase.

Step Five: Check Your Results and Tweak

If the main search engines do not crawl your site on a regular basis then submit your page to them. Wait about a week and then go to those engines and test your search engine optimization target phrase. Your goal should be to get to the first or second page of search results for your target phrase.

How To Prepare Your Page For Search Engines

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website you should consider how you are writing for the web. If you want your pages to show up in the search engines, you need to prepare your pages so that they are optimized for the engines. Here is how:

1. Write a descriptive <title> for the page. Ensure your title is clear and contains many of the keywords within the page itself. The title tag is always found in the <head> and is required.

2. Write a description within the <meta name="description" content=""> tag. Keep the description to around 200 characters and check that it uses keywords found within the page itself.

3. Put keywords in the <meta name="keywords" content=""> tag. You do not need to use commas or other punctuation. Try not to repeat keywords over and over, but put in keyword phrases.

4. Make sure that your page includes the keywords, phrases and the title. Most search engines look at the repetition of the phrases in your title, description and keywords within the page.

Here are a few tips:

1. The meta keywords and description are not as important as the title. Focus more on your title rather than your meta tags.

2. It is essential that your keyword phrases are included in the actual text of the page.

3. If you repeat a word in the meta tags that is not on the page, your page may be penalized in the search engines.

Keyword Density

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When you are considering the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website, you should pay attention to your keyword density. Keyword density is a term in SEO that refers to the number of times your keyword phrase appears on the page.

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword, or keyword phrase, is found in your page content. For example, if you have a web page with exactly 100 words on it including all headlines, captions, alt text, and advertising, and you have a keyword phrase that is on the page 3 times, your keyword density is 3%:

Number of repeats of the keyword / total number of words on the page * 100 = Keyword Density

The keyword density applies to the page as it displays live on your website. Some people will produce content with a high keyword density and then place it on their website with a lot of navigation, images, and advertising content and their actual density will go down.

As a general rule of thumb, you should look for a keyword density of approximately 5% or less. However, there is no hard and fast rule for what your keyword density should be. But too little and it will not be clear to search engines what the page is about and too much and it will look like you are trying to spam them. Also, the more times you repeat a keyword phrase, the more the page won't be palatable to your readers.

SEO Friendly Writing Does Not Mean Writing for Search Engines

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The leading thought in your mind when you are creating content for your web pages should be that you are writing for people and not for search engines. If you must select between a method that is good for your readers, but not so good for search engines, choose that which is good for your readers. Ultimately, search engines want to offer content that is interesting and informative for their customers and a page that is over optimized is not much fun to read.

Fortunately, most of the approaches that make good web writing also make good search engine optimization also.

Write relevant content

Search engines have methods of recognizing when a page is not really about what it might seem to be about. If you are playing games with your content to try and fool search engines, you will eventually be found out and you may lose rank or even be banned. It is far better to write content that is relevant to your topic.

Put conclusions at the beginning

Another way to think of this is that you want your keywords to be denser towards the top of your article. You want to mention your keyword in the title and first sentence. Do not start using synonyms for your keyword phrase until the second or third paragraph.

Use lists instead of paragraphs

Lists are easier to get your SEO content into without your repetition seeming strange.

Make your links part of the copy

This is particularly important if your links include your keyword phrases. If you've linked to the Bengal Tiger Trust on your Bengal tiger page, make certain that you link the words "Bengal Tiger Trust" and not something unrelated like "click here".

Include internal sub-headings with your keyword phrase

Use heading tags for your sub-headings and repeat your keyword phrase.

Proofread your pages

It doesn't do any good to concentrate on the keywords "Bengal tiger" if you spell it "Bengal tigre" a couple of times on the page. Also, the spelling and grammar errors make your content look unprofessional, which may mean people are less likely to link to your page.

Your Layout Can Impact your SEO

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When you are creating a web page and you want it to be optimized for search engines, you will need to set up the page content so that the most important parts of the document come first in the HTML.

This is because search engines read HTML linearly. Search engine bots crawl through your HTML and read it in the order that it is written in the page. Most search engines give a slightly higher priority to text that appears towards the beginning or top of the HTML document. This is because search engines are not able to recognize what parts of the page are the most relevant or most important.

Put the Most Important Content First

When you create a web page and optimize it for search engines, you want to put the most important content first in the HTML. This implies items like navigation should come after your main content. The closer you can get your content to the <body> tag, the higher priority it will have in the search engines.

But the problem is that placing your content first can be tricky with most layouts. For example, if you create a 2-column layout with navigation on the left, the navigation will, by necessity, appear first in the HTML in a table. But with CSS, you can create a layout where the navigation appears to the left, but is in the HTML second.

Float Your Layouts

The simplest method to create a layout that allows the content to be first, but the navigation column to be wherever you would like it, is to float the columns. Just place your content in the first division of your HTML and float that to the right. Then place your navigation in the second division of your HTML and float it to the left.

Do Not Write Your Content With JavaScript

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

While search engines will not penalize a web site for using JavaScript, they generally do not index the contents of the scripts. So if your web pages use JavaScript to display the contents, it will be harder to get high ranks for those pages. This includes pages that use scripts to show and hide text and pages that use Ajax for the content.

SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Develpers- Non-spiderable Flash Menus

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Develpers- Non-spiderable Flash Menus

Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.

SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers - Image and Flash Content

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers- Image and Flash Content

Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.

SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers - Overuse of Ajax

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers - Overuse of Ajax

A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because Ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.

Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.

SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers - Versioning of Theme Design

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers - Versioning of Theme Design

For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (ie. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.

SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers - â��Click Hereâ�� Link Anchor Text

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers - “Click Here” Link Anchor Text“

You probably see this a lot where people use "Click here" or "Learn more" as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for "Click Here". But if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”

Warning: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.

SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers - Empty Image Alt Attribute

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers -Empty Image Alt Attribute

You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. The alt attribute is what describes your image to a blind web user. Guess what? Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.

Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results. For example, Google image search brings me hundreds of referrals everyday for the search terms "abstract" and "dj".

PageRank

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

PageRank

Some professional SEO’s pay attention to Google’s PageRank and some don’t. In my experience it doesn’t hurt to have a high Google PageRank. It’s a nice little benchmark to let you know how important Google sees your web page as. You can improve your PageRank by following the tips above and building-up quality backlinks.

The Importance of Links in Search Engine Ranking

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The Importance of Links in Search Engine Ranking

Links are currently the single most important component that a search engine uses to rank a website. Incoming links (links to your web page from another website), are highly valued by search engines, as they are difficult for a Webmaster to control and manipulate the ‘results’. Because of this they are considered by the search engines to be genuine indicators as to the true nature of the content of your website.

There are three key things that a search engine considers when assessing your incoming links:

Popularity

Relevancy

Link Text

SEO Strategy - Incoming Links and SEO Strategy

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Strategy - Incoming Links and SEO Strategy

If you truly want your site to succeed in the search engines, a major part of your SEO strategy must focus on the importance of incoming links. The process of submitting your site to the search engines can take from a few weeks to several months. However, even a new site will be indexed rapidly, if it has incoming links.

Google explains that, "The best way to ensure Google finds your site, is for your pages to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google's robots jump from page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we'll find you quickly."

Importance of Links in SEO and PR Growth!

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Importance of Links in SEO and PR Growth!

There is always a cat and mouse game between Bloggers and Google webmasters related to Page Rank. Bloggers work hard to attain a good page rank to their blog by concentrating on factors in the existing page ranking algorithm, in the mean while Google webmasters change the algorithm just before the PR update leaving no hint of the factors that are used in the changed algorithm.

Importance of links in SEO

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Importance of links in SEO

Links: Links are really crucial for SEO, in fact webmasters/advertisers give huge Priority to the internal, inbound, out bounded links to your blog or website. Make sure that you have good number of back links from different blogs/websites under your niche but, don’t have too many links to/from the same blog or website as this is often considered as spamming.

Anchor Text That Matches the URL: Always remember while linking your blog to Different Forums, websites and blogs your Anchor text should match the URL of your link, this is a really important factor that increases your PR Incredibly.

Origin of the link: Links from blogs/Web sites with good PR always helps in increasing your PR; this is often referred as origin of the inbound link. Make sure that you have good number of inbound links from pages with good PR.

Importance of Links and Link Popularity in SEO

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Importance of Links and Link Popularity in SEO

Links are connection between the pages. They make the web interconnected. Links allow the visitors to navigate from one website to another. Links are what make the World Wide Web moving on.

Link Popularity holds a major role in a ranking strategy. It refers to the number of ways in which your site's link is popular across the Internet. Generally link juice and link reputation are the terms associated with link popularity.

In order for your link to provide links back to your website, it must appear in the search engine databases. The search engine robots must index the web page that includes the link to be included into the search engine databases. Backlinks are a measure of popularity of your site on the internet.

Link Building is considered as an off-page SEO factor because the value is determined by another page. Anchor text in your inbound links is the main factor when building backlinks. The Search engines manly rely on link popularity, the higher the link popularity the greater the chance of your site's visibility.

However, the popularity is only part of the link building process. The quality and context of links is also taken into consideration. It mainly includes quality and quantity of links, relevancy of sites that link to your site and the anchor text.

The Link popularity of any given page within a site is typically related to the overall link popularity of the site's main and important page-the home page. This is because most inbound links come into a site's home page. They are very important because every major search engine now considers them as a part of their ranking algorithms.

But many of the webmasters began to use crooked ways of increasing their Popularity in the form of link farming. Link farming is nothing but a group of sites that link to each other (irrelevant linking) with the intention of increasing their popularity in search engines.

Rules for advance SEO technique

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Rules for advance SEO technique

There are 3 rules that you MUST follow to make your site a success.

1. Only target keywords that are receiving traffic

2. Only target keywords that have a commercial value.

3. Target keywords with a low enough competition.

The importance of Internal Linking for SEO - Types of internal links on your site

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The importance of Internal Linking for SEO - Types of internal links on your site

1. Navigation Links – Always ensure that if you use JavaScript or image based navigation that you provide a html version as well to help the search engines spider your site effectively.

2. Footer Navigation – This is different to the main navigation, and should always be written in a list format. Use your most competitive keywords as the anchor text.

3. Inline Text Links – These are some of the most important links on the page. Why? Because you can surround them with relevant text to increase their ‘worth’ to the search engines. You can also use them to direct users around your site, and hopefully eventually towards a conversion.

4. Sitemap links – By providing a sitemap you are giving the search engines a valuable list or ‘contents page’ of all the page’s within your website. This is useful for both the search engines and your visitors, especially if you have a large site with a lot of pages to visit.

Anchor Text Links

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Anchor Text Links

Anchor text links are links that point to a specific page and that are also targeting specific search terms. A link to my link building teleclass for example is specifically displaying and targeting "link building" as the search term. These types of anchor text links are usually contributing to the ranking of the target page.

Navigational Links

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Navigational Links

Navigational or so called "Run of Site" links are links that are contained within the main global navigation of a website or that appear on every page of a website, e.g. within a shared border section or the like. These links are taken into account by the search engines for the ranking as well, but are likely to count with less importance, because the search engines are today capable to identify such links as navigation. This means the links will be followed and indexed by the search engine spiders all right, but for the ranking of the target page they are not weighted too heavily.

Contextual Links

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Contextual Links

Contextual links are the links that appear within the actual body or main content section of a web page. These links are counted with much more importance in regards to the target page ranking than the standard navigational links. Needless to say, that the search engines are able to identify these links as links within the content area of a page. It is therefore assumed that these links represent direct webmaster link recommendations and useful resources of whatever kind and this is why contextual links are therefore regarded with much higher importance. The link importance will even increase if the anchor text and the link and page theme will be relevant and related to the targeted webpage´s topic.

Directory Links

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Directory Links

As the name suggests, directory links are links to a website or webpage that appear within the listings or search results of a web directory or other pages whose main purpose is to link to other websites. These links count more than navigational links, the link value however will be proportional to the number of links on the directory page. Also the importance of the directory of course will count. Niche directories that specify on a limited number of major topics only, even when they are small, seem to count with more importance than very general directories.

What's more important for a link â�� keyword relevancy or PageRank?

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

What's more important for a link — keyword relevancy or PageRank?

All other things being equal, the more PR a linking page has, the more value your landing page will receive from an inbound link. However, it is worth noting that the PR factor itself is not tied to a particular keyword. PageRank is an algorithm that is based solely on where a link originates and where a link goes. A link from a page with high PR is not necessarily going to improve your landing page's rankings for every keyword phrase that the page is optimised for. If the keyword phrase you are trying to optimise for is not used anywhere on the high PR page, then the PR you receive will not have the result you might expect. In fact, it is often more valuable to obtain a link from a lower PR page that actually uses the keywords you are optimising your page for.

If you want to receive significant benefit from any inbound link to one of your landing pages, the linking page should be very similar in theme to the landing page. Ideally, the page will directly use the keyword phrase you are targeting. While links from similarly themed pages are more valuable than links from pages that are completely off topic, links from pages that use the exact keyword phrase you are trying to optimise for are far more valuable. The next-best case in terms of a link's keyword relevance is a page that uses some words from the exact phrase for which you are optimising. For example, a link from a site that uses the one-word phrase "marketing" would be more helpful than a link from a site about "advertising" if I was trying to optimise for the phrase "search engine marketing".

Outbound links from a purely SEO perspective

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Outbound links from a purely SEO perspective

a. Not too many links (apparently too many outbound links can be frowned upon by SE’s)

b. Keep them relevant (link to other sites/pages that are on a similar topic to you)

c. Use appropriate keywords as anchor text (the words you use as the link can help both you and the site you’re linking to with SEs)

d. High ranking sites (some SEOs argue that if you link to highly ranking sites for the keywords that you’re after that it will have more impact).

Reasons to Link

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Reasons to Link

There are other reasons that it can be useful to link out from your blog including these two:

* building relationships with other bloggers/webmasters – linking out and sending traffic to other sites is one way to get on the radar of their owners

* perceived expertise – showing your readers that you have your finger on the pulse of a niche by showing what other sites are doing can increase their perception of you as someone who knows what they’re talking about.

Outbound Link Relevance & Anchor Text

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Outbound Link Relevance & Anchor Text

The clearest way that outbound links can affect Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is through their anchor text.

Outbound links' anchor text affects a page's search engine ranking in much the same way that inbound links' anchor text affects search engine ranking. Anchor text of inbound links is arguably the most important factor in search engine rankings for particular keywords. For instance, if "fuzzy keyword" is in the anchor text of a link to a webpage, that webpage may well appear in SERPs for "fuzzy keyword" even if neither the word "fuzzy" nor "keyword" appears anywhere on your site.

Outbound links' anchor text works the same way, though it is slightly less powerful. If you have a particular keyword in the anchor text of a link on a webpage, that webpage will likely show up in search engine results -- even if it appears nowhere else on the page, and even if there are no inbound links with that anchor text.

Look at your web traffic logs. Check out the search engine traffic to specific pages. You'll likely see plenty of instances of the page getting traffic for search strings that appear nowhere else on the page but in the anchor text of outbound links.

How to shoot yourself in the foot with outbound link anchor text relevance

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

How to shoot yourself in the foot with outbound link anchor text relevance

There are four main ways to shoot yourself in the foot by mishandling outbound links' anchor text:

1. Don't include relevant outbound links on the webpage.

2. Don't include off-site outbound links on the webpage.

3. Include irrelevant links.

4. Include relevant outbound links, but forget the anchor text.

Outgoing Links Influence Search Engines

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Outgoing Links Influence Search Engines

The web pages to which you link form the "neighborhood" of your web site. If you link to spammy web sites then search engines might think that your web site is also spam.

Links to link farms and automated linking systems can actually hurt your Google rankings. For that reason, it is important that you take a look at the quality of a web site before you link to it.

Outgoing Links Influence Web Site Visitors

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Outgoing Links Influence Web Site Visitors

The web sites to which you link help your web site visitors to put your web site into a larger context. If you link to high quality sites with useful content, web surfers will associate your web site with these high quality sites.

If you link to other web sites show your web site visitors that your web site can be trusted. You wouldn't send visitors to other pages if they could find negative information about your products or services on other sites.

Links add value to your web site, they show your visitors that you have nothing to hide and that you have confidence in your site.

Linking Out Encourages People to Participate (Social Networking)

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Linking Out Encourages People to Participate (Social Networking)

Some companies still don’t get it that Social Media is the new era of marketing. By linking out you are encouraging participation by the community at large. Nothing feels better (and you know this yourself) then getting a link from a highly trafficked source pointing to your works. Linking out to other bloggers and sites helps build cred with the rest of the community and will help your site grow more than you could imagine. By linking out in a consistent matter you are engaging other sites to be a part of your community – and that is where SEO and marketing both are heading.

Search Engines Like It

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Search Engines Like It

For years it was thought that search engines really didn’t pay attention to outbound links unless you were linking to spammy sites or content that didn’t exist. In those cases your reward as actually a punishment, especially if you were linking to spammy web properties. While that is still the case today, there is also evidence to suggest that the search engines are rewarding link out behavior to good sites now as well.

SEO Outbound Links

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Outbound Links

With all of the emphasis in search engine optimization on inbound links, OUTBOUND LINKS play a supporting role. Outbound links build the reputation of your site. The stronger your site reputation, the more customer confidence you can inspire. The more confidence the customer has in you, the more likely they are to subscribe, participate or purchase from you.

Make your site "transparent"; with links to quality related content sites you are adding value to your site for your visitors. Valuable links on your site show the visitor you are interested in what they need, instead of trying to keep them hostage on your site.

In addition you are showing your visitors that you respect their time by providing links to the information that can help them - saving them search time.

Outbound links help your visitors see your product or service in the big picture and create confidence in the content of your site. The outbound links you place on your site build traffic relationships with other sites; when webmasters review their visitor statistics, the "referrer" is an important category because the search engines use this information to calculate link popularity.

On-site SEO

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

On-site SEO

On-site search engine optimisation is exactly what it states, on the site. This means all factors involved are on the pages of the website. On-site search engine optimisation is the first half of the project which involves everything from keyword research to on-site SEO changes. The goal of this process is to enhance the structure and ability to convey relevancy.

Off-Site SEO

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Off-Site SEO

Off Site search engine optimisation is an integral part of any search engine optimisation campaign. Off-site search engine optimisation is a combination of backlink development, link building and off site search marketing. The combination of these factors generates off site popularity that aids in a websites natural search performance. Backlinks create additional website popularity, increase the websites PR and provide additional means for visitors to find the website.

Link Building Campaign

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Link Building Campaign

* Benchmarking- Using 4 different sources for benchmarking gives us the necessary benchmarks to measure both quantity and quality of link growth during the link building campaign.

* Keyword Research & URL Targeting- We perform Keyword Research utilizing your website and third party tools. Our goal is to find approximately 25 target keywords and then map the target keywords to URLs on the website. We then identify between 5-10 target keywords as candidates for Link Building.

* Website Promotion- Our initial website link building activity focuses on build trust for the core domain including both Free & Paid Directories, Article Marketing, Blog Posts, Social Bookmarking, and Social Network Profile Creation.

* Keyword Campaigns- Our keyword campaigns focus on 2 to 4 the high priority target keywords through placement of Blog Articles, Article Marketing, Paid Directories (General & Niche), and Social Bookmarking Services

* Online PR- Advanced link building tacticsthat can be deployed include Web 2.0 Content, Micro Sites & Blogging, Web-based PR , Blog Engagement, and Personal Networking.

Tips on Asking Bloggers for Links - Part 1

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Below are a couple of tips when you are emailing other bloggers with links. These approaches could form part of your search engine optimization strategy.

1. Look to see if they have already written about it. This is a pretty basic requirement. If you are telling someone about a breaking story that they have already posted about, it is not a good start. At the very least, view their front page prior to sending them an email.

2. Do not be insulted if they do not reply to you or use your link. Many bloggers receive lots of ‘check out this link’ emails every day. It is not possible for them to link to everyone or even acknowledge everyone with a formal reply.

3. Make certain that your link is appropriate and helpful. You should be choosy in which posts you promote in this fashion. Try and send only the relevant stories out to bloggers who have a particular interest in that niche.

4. Be choosy in which posts you promote. Even though the post may be extremely interesting to you, it may not have a wide appeal. Carefully pick the absolute best to promote in this fashion, or you could develop a reputation for being a spammer.

Tips on Asking Bloggers for Links - Part 2

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Below are a couple of tips when you are emailing other bloggers with links. These approaches could form part of your search engine optimization strategy.

5. Make your post more personal. In a time where you can tell thousands of people about something with the click of a mouse, it is astonishing what using a person’s name can accomplish. Show the blogger that you have taken the effort to send them, and only them, an email by referring to their blog, name, etc. This may greatly enhance your chances of it being read and answered. If you are sending emails to more than one person, be really careful that you do not send an email out with someone else’s name on it by mistake.

6. Keep in mind that you may not be the only person giving them the tip. It is quite common for a blogger to get the same story from several people. Most people like to credit their sources of information, however, it can be very difficult when you could link to 10 people.

7. Introduce yourself. Think about providing a quick introduction. Blogging is about relationship, people tend to link to people they know, respect and have some form of a relationship with. A brief introduction of who you are and what your blog is can start to build relationship. It is also a good idea to include a signature at the end of your post with your details.

8. Keep it short. Most people are very busy and do not have the time to go through long emails with long-winded explanations or introductions. Try and keep it concise and to the point.

Tips on Asking Bloggers for Links - Part 3

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Below are a couple of tips when you are emailing other bloggers with links. These approaches could form part of your search engine optimization strategy.

9. Keep it enlightening. If your email says ‘check out this link’, it does not give the reader any reason to check it out. However, if you tell the reader the topic you might just spark their interest. But remember, be concise but give the main point in a few words of what the story is.

10. Give something away. This may not be suitable for every post you write, but one thing you can do is offer the free use of a picture that you have on your post. This may be particularly relevant if you are notifying someone of a post you have written on a product blogs. The picture must be yours to give away, or copyright free.

11. Be bighearted with your own links. You may not consider whether the person requesting a link has linked to you, but probably in the back of your mind is a memory of a past relationship with the person. If you have linked up to them before, you might have made an impression.

12. Original content is greatest. If you are looking for a link to your own story, you will have a greater chance of a link if it is your own original content. If you are just linking to someone else you are not likely to get a link. If it is a story that you are linking to ensure you add your own comments, or take on the story and try and make it your own in a sense.

13. Learn from your experiences. As you go through this process more and more you will learn a few things. Firstly, you will learn who responds well to being alerted and who does not. Secondly, you will learn about the type of links people respond to and the type they pay no attention to. Make sure you learn from this and let your future practicing of it be impacted by it. If someone never responds or links up, maybe it is not worth emailing them anymore.

Buying Text Links

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

As part of your search engine optimization strategy, you may want to consider buying text links.

When you purchase a link on another site you will certainly get a little ‘Google Juice’ for your linked to website, in other words it will contribute to search engines ranking you higher. But keep in mind that these links need to be maintained and to continue your page ranking you will need to continue to pay for these links. If you do not renew your text link, and it is removed from the site where you buy it, you risk losing page rank. A text link is not a once off proposition, it must be maintained over time and this cost should be included in your initial purchase.

The greatest and most successful incoming links to your website will always come from high ranking and relevant sites. So if you want to purchase a link to your ’hi-fi system’ website, the most efficient way to do so would be to find another highly ranked website with similar keywords to link to you by using a keyword that you are targeting in your link. Other links might help too, however, do not rush into buying any old link.

It is advisable to buy from reputable sites. Links from spam sites that have poor search engine optimization practices can be penalized by search engines. Websites with lots of outbound links on them to other websites are not considered to be as powerful as sites that only have a few such links. Preferably you want to be linked to on a site which is not seen to be a spam site in any way.

Keywords in Titles

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

One of the easiest ways to maximize your positioning in search engines is by simply including the keywords that they would like to be found for in your website titles. To put it frankly, when it comes to website SEO, your page and post titles are incredibly important. Some search engines seem to value the words in your title incredibly highly.

Whilst some people feel the temptation to be clever with page titles every now and then, be aware that you do not get traffic from search engines then a fairly significant part of your income could disappear.

So if you are writing about a new ‘Green Widget’ consider carefully the words that a potential reader will use to search for to find the information you are presenting. Think about how you would search the net for information on ‘Green Widgets’?

Without a doubt we would all include ‘green widget’ in the search. We might refine it by including a another word like ‘price’, ‘review’, ‘advice’, ‘problems’ etc (which may be worthwhile words to include either in the title or body of content) but the best words to include in the title are ‘green widgets’. If you don’t, you have no chance of being found for that search term unless no one else is writing about them.

Bear in mind that when people search the web a lot for names of products and people and that they are often quite specific their searches. If you are writing about something specific make your title reflect this.

Use Keywords and Phrases in Your HTML Title Tag

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When you are looking at the search engine optimization for your website, it is important to consider the use of key words and phrases in your HTML title tag.

After you have identified your keywords and phrases, it is very beneficial to use them in the most important place where search engines will consider them. Search engines give the content of the title tag the highest weight of any single element on the page, so your most suitable key phrases must be located there.

If you are using a content management system (CMS), make sure you know which input field will complete the title tag, this is normally the headline. There are many online resources you can use to determine what your keywords and phrases should be. Try to imagine yourself as the searcher and ask what terms you would use on a search engine if you were looking for a particular piece of inforamtion. Those terms should be in your head and page title tags.

You can also use strong and popular keywords in the title, description and tags of your videos you post on YouTube and elsewhere online.

Never Retire or Change Page URLs Without a 301 Redirect

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When you are looking at the search engine optimization for your website, it is important to consider what you will do if you retire or change one of your web pages.

You should never retire or change one of your webs page URLs without providing a 301 redirect. Search engines react to a number of responses from a Web server when a search engine asks for a URL that is no longer there. A "404", or page not found response, is the worst response your server can provide. It should, instead provide a 301 redirect, which informs the search engine to which new URL it should transfer the old URL's SERPs position. There are many web pages which describe how to do a 301 redirect in many CMSs and scripting languages.

SEO Depth Analysis- Do Company Names Belong in the Title Tag?

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Depth Analysis- Do Company Names Belong in the Title Tag?

The answer is a resounding YES! I've found that it's fine to place your company name in the title, and even to place it at the beginning of the tag! In fact, if your company is already a well-known brand, I'd say it's essential. Even if you're not a well-known brand yet, chances are you'd like to be, right? The title tag gives you a great chance to further this cause.

This doesn't mean that you should put *just* your company name in the title tag. Even the best-known brands will benefit from a few good descriptive phrases added, because they will enhance your brand as well as your search engine traffic. The people who already know your company and seek it out by name will be able to find you in the engines, and so will those who haven't heard of you but seek the products or services you sell.

Optimization by Using Search Engine and SEO in website

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Optimization by Using Search Engine and SEO in website

The search engine is a machine which, if entered a keyword relevant, will bring thousands and even millions of websites from around the world related to the keywords you enter. We always use a search engine as a place to ask something. If we want to learn, buy, and others, search engines are a loyal friend for it. Do you have a website? If you know about internet marketing, it is a good thing. Because we will talk about internet marketing, SEO and sales here.

Internet marketing is generally done by each of the works on the internet. They work and earn money through internet marketing. How do they sell? Namely the promotion. Promotions like what? Like put them on a website advertising website. However, this does not become very effective. This was caused by Internet users rarely find something they want to look for in an ad site. They prefer to look at the search engine. Because very simple and easy to use.

What is "SEO Web Hosting?"

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

What is "SEO Web Hosting?"

SEO web hosting is a type of web hosting that gives companies more control to keep their clients Internet properties (domains) seen as separate web properties with Search Engines. This helps our clients keep their clients domain rankings from being filtered by web hosting filters.

The Ecommerce SEO Checklist- On-Page Search Optimization - Basic Keyword Clarity

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The Ecommerce SEO Checklist- On-Page Search Optimization - Basic Keyword Clarity

To achieve good keyword focus, limit yourself to just one keyword per content page. Appropriate use of your keyword won't shoot you to the top of the search engines but it can help a little, especially if your keyword is not highly competitive. Consider on-page keyword optimization to be a freebie because it's so easy. Just don't go overboard and annoy your visitors.

* Distinguish between "content" and "administrative" pages - then optimize only content pages.

* Choose just one keyword phrase per content page

* Use the keyword in your page's file name; delimit with dashes (eg. keyword-marketing-ladder.html)

* Use keyword in the page title, "meta description" (twice if possible) .

* Place the keyword in the "meta keywords" area. This is only for your own reference.

* Use keyword in a headline (use H1 or H2). Usually this is your page title.

* Use keyword several times in the body text where reasonable.

* Make sure your content is useful. Ok, search engines aren't that smart, but visitors are.

* Don't stuff the keyword everywhere. It destroys your content without helping.

* Don't stuff the keyword in alt tags: It doesn't help and you go to hell for screwing with blind people.

The Ecommerce SEO Checklist- Site Optimization - Search-Friendly Site Structure

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The Ecommerce SEO Checklist- Site Optimization - Search-Friendly Site Structure

Site Optimization is the most powerful SEO area over which you have total control! Site optimization is all about how you link your pages together. If done properly, it can have a significant impact -- all the more so because most companies cannot or will not make the effort.

The core idea is this: the search engine primarily knows your pages by through links and link text. Always link to a page with the same URL and try to use the target keyword whenever possible.

* Don't use both www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com. Pick one or the other and stick to it. (Otherwise your SE Mojo will be shared with a 'ghost' site.)

* Don't link to your home page as index.html. Google only knows pages by link target -- so you can easily divide your home page mojo by four just by linking to it in these four different ways: http://mysite.com/, http://mysite.com/index.html, http://www.mysite.com, http://www.mysite.com/index.html

* Each content page should be linked to with one consistent keyword-friendly URL, and never with parameters -- ever.

bad: http://mysite.com/forum.php?topic=873736

good: http://mysite.com/my-keyword-tp873736.html

* Link to each content page with static text links (not JavaScript, not Flash, not Images) and the anchor text of links should contain the target page's keyword phrase.

bad link: "click here for split testing tools" - this just confuses the search engine

good link: "click here for split testing tools"

* Don't link back to your home page with the link text "home"... unless you're Home Depot.

* All links to non-content pages, such as your "Login" page, should include rel="nofollow".

This conserves your precious search engine mojo for real content pages. Warning: highly controversial tactic!

eg: <a href="contact.htm" rel="nofollow">Contact Us</a>

* Interlink between content pages from within paragraph text. These links seem to "count" more.

eg: ebiz-monitor is a free tool which protects your site from downtime!

* When linking to external websites, always use rel="nofollow" unless you are willing to vouch for the quality of that site. Remember, a link is a "vote" for which your site is held responsible.

SEO for many reasons

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Search Engine Optimization for many reasons

Search Engine Optimization for many reasons including the following,

- Generating business leads

- Selling Products or services

- Branding

- Reduce cost of doing business (customer service)

Increased Visibility

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Increased Visibility

On the World Wide Web,there are hundred and thousands of websites . Thousands are being added everyday, so your website has every chance of becoming lost and we would go so far as to say that it will surely get lost. Herein, emerges the primary role of SEO services. They will increase your visibility on the internet and thus increase the chances of someone actually coming across your site and using it.

Higher Rankings

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Higher Rankings

The words ‘Search Engine Optimization’ refer to the optimization of content for the benefit of Search Engines. How do people search for a particular site? They do so, with the help of search engines. What search engines do is that they send spiders crawling through the website, in order to rank them. Optimization is considered a success when these search engines enable your website to rank higher then other websites who answer to the same ‘word’ or ‘phrase’ search. This is the innate purpose of SEO Services.

Internet Marketing

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Internet Marketing

Search engine optimization is one of the most important components of Internet Marketing. Each and every technique that is used in online marketing fails or succeeds on the basis of SEO. If the optimization of the website is effective than the chances are that your endeavor of marketing products and services on the internet will be successful. At the end of the day its SEO services that prop up the online marketing process of a company. No SEO, No online marketing. As simple as that!

Link Farms

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Link Farms

This practise involves the linking of websites that are not relevant to each other just for the purpose to increase the websites link popularity. This sort of artificial and under the table link building is transparent, and when the search engine crawlers and bots pick it up, they will penalise you.

Strangely this ‘black hat SEO’ used to be perfectly ok to the search engines, but some people went over the top and now these techniques are frowned upon by the general SEO community at large. These black hat SEO practices can provide short term gains in rankings, but if you are discovered using these spammy techniques (and you will be) on your Web site, you will be penalised by search engines.

In short, they are an outdated and easily spotted technique that you should not go near with a barge pole. We only ever utilise fully white hat search engine approved link building and seo techniques.

SEO Tips - Part 1

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Here are a couple of tips on how to optimize your website to help increase its search engine ranking:

Be bold

Make use the <b> </b> tags around some of your keywords on each web page. It is not a good idea to use them for every one of your keywords. Once or twice should be enough.

Deep linking

Ensure you have links coming in to as many pages as you can. When you have lots of other web sites linking to different pages on your site, it tells search engines that you obviously have lots of useful content. When you have lots of links are coming in to your home page, it tells the search engine that you have a shallow site of little worth, or that your links were created automatically rather than by the value of your site.

Become a foreigner

Other countries, like Canada and the UK, have lots of directories for websites of companies. If you reside in the US, can you get a business address in one of those countries?

Social bookmarking

Make it simple for visitors to social bookmark your website, which in turn will create vital links that the search engines value. There are many free social bookmarking widgets available.

SEO Tips - Part 2

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Here are a couple more tips on how to optimize your website to help increase its search engine ranking:

Newsletters

Provide articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. Often these links live for many years in their archives.

First come, first served

If you have image links in your navigation bar, include text links also. But make certain the text links show up first in the source code as search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. The search engine bots will not follow additional links to the same page.

Multiple domains

If you have a number of topics that could each sustain their own website, it may be worth considering having multiple domains. This is because search engines normally only list one page per domain for any given search, and you might deserve two. Another reason is that directories generally only accept home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way.

SEO Tips - Part 3

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Here are a couple more tips on how to optimize your website to help increase its search engine ranking:

Article exchanges

Link exchanges are generally useless. However, even though article exchanges are similar to link exchanges, they are much more useful. They work by you publishing someone else's article on the history of chocolate cake, with a link back to their website. They publish your article on the top ten chocolate cake recipes, with a link back to your website. This way you both have content and you both get high quality links.

Titles for links

It is also important for links to have titles also. This assists visually impaired visitors in knowing where you are sending them, but also some search engines include this into their relevancy for a particular page.

Not anchor text

Try not and use anchor text too much. You do not want all your inbound links looking identical because that looks like automation, which is something search engines do not like. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, "chocolate cake" occasionally, "Get chocolate cake" as well, and others, etc.

Site map

A large website needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This assists the search engine robots finding every page with just two clicks. Even a small website needs a site map also. This is referred to as a navigation bar.

Link Strategy

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When considering your search engine optimization, you will need to develop a link strategy. Here are a few of the linking factors that will influence whether a person searching using your keywords will discover your website:

1. The total number of incoming and outgoing links.

2. The importance of the sites you link to and from.

3. The relevancy of the sites you link to and from.

4. Which pages on their sites and on your site are being linked.

5. What you include in the incoming and outgoing links.

6. Where on the page the links are placed.

7. How many links are on those pages.

8. How many pages are linked to or have outgoing links.

9. The ratio of links to content on the pages involved.

You can put into practice the strategy yourself, but it may be worthwhile hiring somebody to put it together for you. Ask the person what factors they would consider when building a strategy for you. If they do not mention several of those mentioned above, you may be better looking somewhere else.

SEO and Pictures

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The old saying goes that a picture may be worth a thousand words, however search engines do not read pictures. When you are looking at the search engine optimization of your website, ensure that your key search terms are written out in text and are not part of a graphic title that you have included on your page. This also means that you should not just show pictures of your goods, but also write out the names, and even a keyword description with the title.

SEO and Your URL

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization of your website, it is important to consider the URL of your website. Your business name will not help you there, however, your key search term will. If you were creating a website on baby toy safety, you may select the URL www.baby-toy-safety.com, if that is one of your top keyword phrases. It is probably a good hire to hire somebody who knows what they are doing to help you develop the right keyword strategy for you even before you choose your domain name.

Hidden Links

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization for your website, you may want to consider the implications of using hidden links and hidden text. A hidden link is simply a link that search engine robots will follow, but is invisible to the naked eye. It could be a one pixel by one pixel graphic the same color as the background. Hidden text could be keyword written in the same color as the background.

Hidden links and hidden text are big trouble and something you should never consider for your website.

If a search engine identifies text in the same color as the background, it may possibly penalize or even ban your website. Some people have suggested that if your background is, say, white, and you have a black table with white text on your page, search engines may read that as hidden text (white background, white text) even though the text is clearly visible in the black table. So, you may want to consider your color selections carefully too.

So, why are hidden links and hidden text considered to be so bad? Basically, because they try to cheat the rules and cheating is bad.

Duplicate Pages

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization for your website, you may want to consider the implications of using duplicate pages.

Duplicate pages are big trouble and something you should never have on your website. Search engines like original content made for human visitors. If you have four pages with the identical article, it is seen as spamming, even if you changed "television repair" to "fix your television” in the second version and to "tv repair" in the third.

Duplicate pages are not a good idea because they try to cheat the rules and cheating is bad. Search engines do not like this behavior.

Doorway Pages

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization for your website, you may want to consider the implications of using doorway pages.

A doorway page is a page carefully created to do well on search engine results, but is never intended to be used by humans. Often there is then a link to a website or there is some form of redirect. The use of doorway pages on your website is not a good idea.

You are far better optimizing your website for the keywords you want, rather than try to trick the search engines. It probably be less expensive to hire a good search engine optimizer and not have your website banned.

The use of doorway pages is bad because they try to cheat the rules and cheating is bad. Search engines do not look favourably on the use of doorway pages.

However, do not get doorway pages confused with entry pages. It is quite okay to get traffic entering your website through one or another of your articles. So long as these are real articles with real content, designed for human eyes and optimized for the search engines. This is a great approach, as it adds content, which is exactly what search engines are looking for.

There is More to SEO than Just Rankings

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

One of the biggest misunderstandings regarding search engine optimization is that ranking at Google and Yahoo is all that counts. Many website owners have a single goal to get them a top-ten ranking at Google.

Let’s consider the reality of the situation. You can get you a top-ten placement at Google, but...

1. If the placement is for "dirty green socks", it probably will not help your shoe business one bit, even if you have the first place ranking. This is because not many people are going to search for that term.

2. Depending on the term, even being at number ten might not help much. People searching for "Vital Nectar liquid nutrients", will more than likely click on the first result they see. On the other hand, someone searching for "liquid nutrients" may check through two pages of results to familiarize themselves with the available options.

3. If your title tag reads like a discounted list of search terms, it will not be attractive. For example, if it reads: "nutrients, liquid nutrients, multinutrients, multi-nutrients", you may skip over it in favor of the next result that reads "Liquid nutrients from the Liquid Nutrient Supplements Store".

4. If your description tag is a jumble, people will probably skip over your listing, even if it does rank number one, in favor of one that sounds closer to what they are searching for. Most search engines use the description tag when the term searched for is found in it, so you should include your key search terms in a description tag that actually reads well.

Multilingual Keyword Research

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

You have translated your website into German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and French. So now you have to draw traffic to the newly translated sites. There are many ways to draw traffic, but the search engines are just as important in German or Spanish as they are in English.

Surprisingly, search engine optimization in Spanish, French, English, German...or any Roman alphabet language is not all that different. The main thing is to be able to move around in the language. If you are not fluent, ensure a translator cleans up any text edits without removing the changes crucial to your multilingual SEO efforts.

For this exercise, we assume the original site is in English and the translation into French is already complete. You also have a list of English keyword search terms.

The first step is to identify equivalent French search terms. This may not provide you the same number of search terms. This may mean that you need to create more landing pages for French search engine surfers. You can also obtain ideas through free translation services that can give you some quick ideas to work with.

The next step is to determine which of the search terms are worth chasing. You could try all of them, as it will take almost no effort to get top rankings for little searched French or Spanish terms. But you may miss out on some related terms that are well-searched. .

The third step is to group the search terms together into natural groupings and assign each group to a page on the website, the same as you would do in English, so that the terms that balance each other are grouped onto the same web page.

This process is not that different from English, but you do have to be able to move through the other language. For this approach, fluency is not needed, but being able to understand what you read and come up with related search terms is essential.

How to Generate Quality Inbound Links - Part 1

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization for your website, one of your considerations will be how to develop good quality inbound links. So how do you go about getting such links?

Quality Content

There are many different kinds of link generating systems available but the best way to get links to your website is to write great quality content that people will want to read. You can request links with others, or sign up for different link building programs, or even buy text links on other sites, but the least expensive and safest approach is to build inbound links in a natural organic way as other people link to your quality content.

Notify Relevant Bloggers of Your Content

Even though you should not spam other bloggers and ask for links, it is still a good idea to write a quality post on a topic that you know will interest another blogger and then send them a short email letting them know of your post. Do not be upset if they don’t link up, but you may just find that they do. In addition to the direct traffic that the link generates, it also helps build your own page rank in the search engines.

Directories

Another method of generating inbound links is to submit your links to directories. There are many people who vow by the benefits of such a strategy. The first thing they do when starting a new website is to do go around to various directories submitting links to key pages with appropriate keywords in the links. There are plenty of directories out there and many offer free submission.

How to Generate Quality Inbound Links - Part 2

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization for your website, one of your considerations will be how to develop good quality inbound links. So how do you go about getting such links?

Inter-link your Blogs

More and more bloggers are starting or joining blog networks and are enjoying the benefits of many sites and writers working together. One of the advantages of website networks is that they generally link to one another. With such an approach, you have complete control over how your websites are linked to from multiple domains. You should be aware, however, that if all your websites are hosted on the one server, search engines may work out what you are doing and the impact will be reduced.

Buy Links

There are some professional web masters who have a budget to buy links from other highly ranked and relevant websites. However, you should think carefully before you consider the purchase of links. Some search engines have been cracking down on sites that use this process. They may not be able to catch everyone, but some have been caught and seem to have been punished for doing so.

Swap Links

Many bloggers will swap links with other bloggers. This can occur pretty naturally, for example you see someone linking to you so you link back, but in many cases the links are strategic ones and formally arranged between site owners. There is some benefit in such link swapping, however, you should be careful as many SEO experts believe that the search engines have methods for tracking such strategies and devaluing the links.

Inbound Links

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, one of your considerations will be how to develop good quality inbound links.

Off site SEO techniques are, as the name suggests, factors coming from outside the website itself, for example from other sites, that can impact your website ranking in search engines. Lots of these factors are outside your control, however, they are still useful to know. The most obvious and probably most influential offsite factor are inbound links.

Most people accept that the links that point to a website are one of the most powerful way of climbing search engines results pages. Some argue it is the most important factor. In its most basic form, every link to your website is seen by the search engines as being a vote of confidence in your site.

In an ideal world, the best inbound links have three main qualities:

1. They are from higher ranked sites than your own.

2. They are relevant to the topic you are writing about.

3. They link to you using relevant keywords to your page.

Even though you may not have complete control over who links to you, these are the types of links that you should be hoping for.

Keyword Rich Content

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, one of your considerations will be how to develop keyword rich content.

In order to create keyword rich content you need to identify a few keywords for your page that you’re hoping will get indexed highly by the search engines. Do not pick too many but consider the following questions:

How do I want people to find this post in the search engines?
What will they type into a search engine if they want information on the topic you’re writing?
How would I find information on this topic in the search engines?
What results come up when I do plug these keywords into a search engine?
What other keywords are other websites using?

The answer to these questions will provide you a guide as to what words you will want to see repeated throughout your page on several occasions. These keywords must be the most common words used in on your page. You can use them in some, or all, of the following ways:

Keywords in post and page titles
Keywords in URL of page
Keywords in outbound links
Keywords in bold tags
Keywords in heading tags
Keywords in image alt tags
Keywords in the general throughout the text of your page, but more importantly early on in the first few sentences
Keywords in meta tags

It is easy to go over the top with keywords on web pages and let it destroy your content, but if it fits with what you have written, tweak it to include the words you are targeting a few extra times.

Also, be careful you do not sacrifice your readers experience of your site just for the sake of SEO. Keyword density can be important in climbing the search engine rankings, but it is more important that your content and design are user friendly and helpful to readers. There is nothing worse than a site that is stuffed with keywords, as these sites can appear cheap, nasty and spammy.

Themed Websites

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, one of the things you may like to consider is the use of themed sites.

Themed sites are one of the growing theories of SEO, where it is thought that you are more likely to rank well if you have a substantial amount of pages on a similar theme. For example, a specialized topic page will probably rank higher than a general page that covers many different topics. Create a website with over 200 pages of content on the same theme and you will increase your likelihood of ranking well as search engines will see you as an authority on the topic. The advice here is to keep to a specialized topic, niche or theme for your website.

Website Design

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, one of the things you may like to consider is your website design.

Search engines like well laid out, well coded and simple to navigate sites. Ensure all your pages validate and that they are viewable on all the major web browsers. In general, search engines do not like too much Flash, Frames or Java Script in your website. If you keep it simple and clean, the search bots will be able to index your site faster and more accurately. It is also good practice to keep your website free from dead links, which can become more challenging for older websites.

Interlinking Your Website

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, one of the aspects you will need to consider is the interlinking of your website.

The way that search engines index your website is to send little robot crawlers to your site to track what you have written and follow the links. You can make it easier for them to get around your site by intelligently using internal linking. Many SEO experts recommend that you provide a site map, which means that every page on your website is just a link or two away from every other page. If you have a blog, you can have your category pages in the sidebars. Also make certain that every page links back to your main page and any other important pages on your website. If you are writing on a topic you have written about before, consider linking to what you have previously written.

Update Regularly

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, one of the aspects you will need to consider is how regularly you update your website.

The more you update your website the more often search engines will send their bots to your site to index it. This will result in your new content appearing in their index within days, or even hours, rather than weeks. This is especially relevant to, and a natural benefit of, blogging.

Outbound Links

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, you will need to consider how you handle outbound links from your website.

There continues to be some debate over how search engines treat outbound links from your website. Some people believe that relevant outbound links improve your site’s ranking in search engines. In general, it is good practice to link out to quality relevant sites that you think readers will find useful.

Linking to websites outside your own site does mean you end up sending traffic away from your site, so you need to count the cost of such an approach. You should always link to reputable and relevant sites from your own page. Keep in mind that too many outbound links can have harmful impact upon your website. It is like most things in SEO, moderation is the key.

Choose Your Domain Name Carefully

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, you will need to consider the choice of your domain name carefully.

There are many factors to keep in mind when choosing a domain name. If possible, you may like to include your keyword in it. You should also do a little research to see if someone else has used the domain previously. This could have both a positive and a negative impact. If it was a quality website with inbound links you might reap some benefits, however, if it was a banned spam site you could still be banned from search engines for a long time.

Domain Name Registration Period

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, one of the aspects you will need to consider is how long to register you domain name for.

It appears that some search engines consider the length of your domain’s registration when ranking your website. They do this because many spam sites have short registrations and a longer registration indicates that you are building a site with substance and plan to be around for some time.

How Many Topics per Post?

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, you will need to think about how many topics you include per post.

Ideally, you want to write about one topic per post. The more strongly focused the theme of a page, the better when search engines will rank it. If you are a blogger, you may find yourself sometimes writing long posts that end up discussing a number of different topics. The topics may relate loosely, however, if search engine ranking is what you are seeking, it would be more beneficial to break up your post into smaller more topic specific pieces.

Optimal Length Posts

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, one of the aspects you will need to consider is how long your posts should be.

In the world of SEO, some people believe that web pages that are too short can get passed over for high rankings. A general guideline is to try and write posts of at least 250 words. Even though you may write a post that is shorter, if you are writing a post that you want to rank well, you should try and give it some substance in terms of length.

In contrast, try not to make it too long either because in doing so you make it hard to keep your keyword density up and this could result in a less tightly focused page. It has also been shown that longer articles can have a dramatic drop off rate in readers after the text gets to the end of the first screen of the article.

Avoid Duplicate Content

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, you will need to think about the problems associated with duplicated content.

Search engines warn website publishers in their guidelines about having the same content on several pages. This applies for both multiple pages that you own and also pages that other people own. This stems from a tactic of spammers where they would often reproduce content on many pages and even steal content from other websites.

There is some discussion over what constitutes duplicate content. For example, lots of bloggers use ‘free articles’ as content on their blogs and these articles often appear on hundreds and even thousands of other websites. This could be seen as being duplicate content. The best advice is to be very careful about how many places your content appears.

How Much Content?

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, you will need to think about how much content you need.

In SEO circles, many people believe that bigger sites tend to rank better than smaller sites. Even though it is possible to rank highly with a small site, it is generally not the case. Search engines will see your website as more comprehensive and authoritative with the more content you have.

You will also increase your odds of being found in search engines if you have more web pages. Bear in mind that it is of no use just putting up miscellaneous rubbish on your website. You must be careful and considered, and build up a large and comprehensive website over a period of time.

Submit to Search Engines

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, you should not forget to submit your website to the search engines.

As a website owner, you can complete all the best onsite SEO strategies available to you and still get nowhere because the search engines have not found you to start with. Every search engine has a method of telling it about your website, a way of submitting your URL to be included in their index.

Remember that this can take some time. Possibly a faster and more efficient method is to get linked to by a site already indexed by the search engine. It is also possible to use some of the services around that offer to submit your sites to search engines on your behalf.

White-Hat SEO Tactics: Writing For Others

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

White-Hat SEO Tactics: Writing For Others

You know more about your business that those around you so why not let everyone know? Whether it be in the form of articles, forum posts, or a spotlight piece on someone else's website, creating content that other people will want to read and post on their sites is one of the best ways to build links to your website that don't require a reciprocal link back.

White-Hat SEO Tactics: Site Optimization

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

White-Hat SEO Tactics: Site Optimization

The manipulation of your content, wording, and site structure for the purpose of attaining high search engine positioning is the backbone of SEO and the search engine positioning industry. Everything from creating solid title and meta tags to tweaking the content to maximize it's search engine effectiveness is key to any successful optimization effort.

That said, it is of primary importance that the optimization of a website not detract from the message and quality of content contained within the site. There's no point in driving traffic to a site that is so poorly worded that it cannot possibly convey the desired message and which thus, cannot sell. Site optimization must always take into account the maintenance of the salability and solid message of the site while maximizing it's exposure on the search engines.

Black-Hat SEO Tactics: Keyword Stuffing

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Black-Hat SEO Tactics: Keyword Stuffing

This is probably one of the most commonly abused forms of search engine spam. Essentially this is when a webmaster or SEO places a large number of instances of the targeted keyword phrase in hopes that the search engine will read this as relevant. In order to offset the fact that this text generally reads horribly it will often be placed at the bottom of a page and in a very small font size. An additional tactic that is often associated with this practice is hidden text which is commented on below.

Black-Hat SEO Tactics: Hidden Text

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Black-Hat SEO Tactics: Hidden Text

Hidden text is text that is set at the same color as the background or very close to it. While the major search engines can easily detect text set to the same color as a background some webmasters will try to get around it by creating an image file the same color as the text and setting the image file as the background. While undetectable at this time to the search engines this is blatant spam and websites using this tactic are usually quickly reported by competitors and the site blacklisted.

Black-Hat SEO Tactics: Cloaking

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Black-Hat SEO Tactics: Cloaking

In short, cloaking is a method of presenting different information to the search engines than a human visitor would see. There are too many methods of cloaking to possibly list here and some of them are still undetectable by the search engines. That said, which methods still work and how long they will is rarely set-in-stone and like hidden text, when one of your competitors figures out what is being done (and don't think they aren't watching you if you're holding one of the top search engine positions) they can and will report your site and it will get banned.

Black-Hat SEO Tactics:Doorway Pages

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Black-Hat SEO Tactics:Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are pages added to a website solely to target a specific keyword phrase or phrases and provide little in the way of value to a visitor. Generally the content on these pages provide no information and the page is only there to promote a phrase in hopes that once a visitor lands there, that they will go to the homepage and continue on from there. Often to save time these pages are generated by software and added to a site automatically. This is a very dangerous practice. Not only are many of the methods of injecting doorway pages banned by the search engines but a quick report to the search engine of this practice and your website will simply disappear along with all the legitimate ranks you have attained with your genuine content pages.

Black-Hat SEO Tactics: Redirects

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Black-Hat SEO Tactics: Redirects

Redirecting, when used as a black-hat tactic, is most commonly brought in as a compliment to doorway pages. Because doorway pages generally have little or no substantial content, redirects are sometime applied to automatically move a visitor to a page with actual content such as the homepage of the site. As quickly as the search engines find ways of detecting such redirects, the spammers are uncovering ways around detection. That said, the search engines figure them out eventually and your site will be penalized. That or you'll be reported by a competitor or a disgruntled searcher.

Black-Hat SEO Tactics: Duplicate Sites

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Black-Hat SEO Tactics: Duplicate Sites

A throwback tactic that rarely works these days. When affiliate programs became popular many webmasters would simply create a copy of the site they were promoting, tweak it a bit, and put it online in hopes that it would outrank the site it was promoting and capture their sales. As the search engines would ideally like to see unique content across all of their results this tactic was quickly banned and the search engines have methods for detecting and removing duplicate sites from their index. If the site is changed just enough to avoid automatic detection with hidden text or the such, you can once again be reported to the search engines and be banned that way

Black-Hat SEO Tactics: Interlinking

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Black-Hat SEO Tactics: Interlinking

As incoming links became more important for search engine positioning the practice of building multiple websites and linking them together to build the overall link popularity of them all became a common practice. This tactic is more difficult to detect than others when done "correctly" (we cannot give the method for "correct" interlinking here as it's still undetectable at the time of this writing and we don't want to provide a means to spam engines). This tactic is difficult to detect from a user standpoint unless you end up with multiple sites in the top positions on the search engines in which case it is likely that you will be reported.

Black-Hat SEO Tactics: Reporting Your Competitors

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Black-Hat SEO Tactics: Reporting Your Competitors

While this may seem a bit off, the practice of reporting competitors that you find using the tactics noted above or other search engine spam tactics is entirely legitimate and shouldn't be considered at all unethical. When we take on search engine positioning clients this is always incorporated into our practices when applicable (which happily is not that often).

When a competitor uses unfair tactics to beat you it is entirely fair to report them.

If you have competitors that you feel are using illegitimate tactics to beat you on the search engines feel free to visit our "Report Spam" page for links to where to go on the major search engines to report spam results and sites to them. Just make sure you're own site is clean when you do.

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics

The following tactics fall in the grey area between legitimate tactics and search engine spam. They include tactics such as cloaking, paid links, duplicate content and a number of others. Unless you are on the correct side of this equation these tactics are not recommended.

Remember: even if the search engines cannot detect these tactics when they are used as spam, your competitors will undoubtedly be on the lookout and report your site to the engines in order to eliminate you from the competition.

It is definitely worth noting that, while it may be tempting to enlist grey-hat and black-hat SEO tactics in order to rank well, doing so stands a very good chance of getting your website penalized. There are legitimate methods for ranking a website well on the search engines. It is highly recommended that webmasters and SEO's put in the extra time and effort to properly rank a website well, insuring that the site will not be penalized down the road or even banned from the search engines entirely.

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics: Cloaking

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics: Cloaking

There are times when cloaking is considered a legitimate tactic by users and search engines alike. Basically, if there is a logical reason why you should be allowed to present different information to the search engines than the visitor (if you have content behind a "members only" area for example) you are relatively safe. Even so, this tactic is very risky and it is recommended that you contact each search engine, present your reasoning, and allow them the opportunity to approve it's use.

Arguably, another example of a site legitimately using cloaking, is when the site is mainly image-based such as an art site. In this event, provided that the text used to represent the page accurately defines the page and image(s) on it, this could be considered a legitimate use of cloaking. As cloaking has often been abused, if other methods such as adding visible text to the page is possible it is recommended. If there are no other alternatives it is recommended that you contact the search engine prior to adding this tactic and explain your argument.

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics: Paid Links

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics: Paid Links

The practice of purchasing link on websites solely for the increase in link-popularity that it can mean has grown steadily over the last year-or-so with link auction sites.

When links are purchased as pure advertising the practice is considered legitimate, while the practice of purchasing links only for the increase in link-popularity is considered an abuse and efforts will be made to either discount the links or penalize the site (usually the sellers though not always).

As a general rule, if you are purchasing links you should do so for the traffic that they will yield and consider any increase in link-popularity to be an "added bonus".

Meta Tags

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Meta Tags

* Meta Robots: This tag enjoys full support, but you only need it if you DO NOT want your pages indexed.

* Meta Description: This tag enjoys much support, and it is well worth using.

* Meta Keywords: This tag is only supported by some major crawlers and probably isn't worth the time to implement.

* Meta Everything Else: Any other meta tag you see is ignored by the major crawlers, though they may be used by specialized search engines.

Definition of tags

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Definition of <Meta> tags

The History of the Description Tag

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The History of the Description Tag

The Meta description tag is located in the area of your website's HTML code and its content is sometimes displayed in the results page of crawler search engines. The description tag looks something like this in your code:

It used to be that all search engines would pull this information and use it as part of their search results. Not only would your search engine listing include information from your title tag, but also below it would be a copy of your Meta description tag. With this predictable structure, search engine marketers could manipulate the way their website listing was displayed in the search engine results by changing these tags. In addition, the Meta description tag would have great importance when determining which position your website showed up in the search results. The number of keywords, their relevance and density within the description tag could be manipulated to help achieve the elusive #1 position on the search engine results.

Meta Tag Analyzer

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Meta Tag Analyzer

Using this tool you can:

- See how search engine robots analyze your or your competitors web site
- Receive tips on how to improve your Meta Tags
- Check the keywords used on the page and find the keyword density
- Check web server operating system where site is hosted
- Check website load time
- Check website file size
- Check URLs and links found on the page

Meta Tags and Search Engine Optimization: Friend or Foe?

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Meta Tags and Search Engine Optimization: Friend or Foe?

Meta tags are HTML tags that provide information describing the content of the pages a user will be viewing. These tags are hidden from the viewer and only seen by browsers and search engine spiders. Meta tags can either be your greatest friend or, if you're not careful, your biggest foe. Why? If you create meta tags that do not accurately describe your content, you run the risk of poor search engine rankings and possibly getting banned from some search engines.

Most used in SEO

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Most used in SEO

*series of keywords representing your web page's content, listed according to importance

* if supported, search engines often use keywords found here to categorize your web page based on proprietary algorithms which index your site in their databases

Meta Tags in Search Engine Optimization: Tips

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Meta Tags in Search Engine Optimization: Tips

* focus on main (relevant) keywords, then elaborate using synonyms/related words

* prioritize your keywords (position the most important ones first)

* reinforce the terms you think a page is important for

* separate phrases with a comma and no space (most engines treat commas as a space)

* add common misspellings of these words

* avoid word repetitions as this may hurt your ranking (and be considered spamming)

* never

insert the same word twice in a row (even variations)
repeat the same keywords / descriptions or put them next to each other in your meta tags

* avoid using more than 20-25 words (no more than four or five phrases)

* do not use words such as "a", "the", "and", "by", "with", etc.

Why Internet Marketing Does Not Work Without SEO?

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Why Internet Marketing Does Not Work Without SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) should be considered a critical element of any Internet marketing strategy. This is important because there is so much which can be gained from SEO in terms of Internet marketing and advertising.

Failure to optimize your website for search engines can result in a considerable loss in terms of free advertising which is essentially gained from ranking well with search engines. This article will provide insight into what SEO is and will explain why Internet marketing requires at least some degree of SEO.

SEO optimization is a strategy in which a website is designed to obtain favorable search engine rankings from popular search engines. This may be achieved in a variety of different ways and optimal SEO strategies combine a variety of different strategies to complete one well orchestrated SEO campaign.

There are several elements to consider when attempting to optimize your website for search engines. This may include keyword density, prominence, META tags, titles and inbound links. Keyword density is one of the most common SEO strategies and essentially involves using relevant keywords often in the content of a website to demonstrate the relevance of these keywords to the website. This is important because search engines are likely to reward websites with optimal keyword densities with favorable search engine rankings in an effort to provide Internet users with the most relevant websites for particular search terms.

The Importance of SEO in Internet Marketing

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The Importance of SEO in Internet Marketing

If you are already running an Internet marketing campaign or are about to embark on an Internet marketing campaign, one concept you cannot afford to skimp on is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is one of the most popular buzz words in Internet marketing but unfortunately most Internet marketers simply do not know enough about SEO to make this strategy work for them. Even those who are knowledgeable about SEO may have difficulty executing their SEO strategies to produce the desired affect.

Advertising is a very important part of running any type of business. You need to advertise to reach new customers and market your products or services. Whether you run your business online or not you probably already realize how important it is to advertise but if you are running your business online you should understand there is a great deal of free advertising available in the form of optimal search engine rankings.

Internet Marketing the Easy Way

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Internet Marketing the Easy Way

An effective, Internet marketing strategy is to hire a consulting firm with search engine optimization (SEO) experience to assist you in achieving high search engine rankings. While the concept of SEO can be rather complex and understanding the most effective strategies and how to properly implement them may take years of experience as well as continual education, the ability to hire a qualified SEO firm is as simple as knowing how to interview candidates and select the most qualified one. Handling your own SEO efforts can be rather difficult but hiring another firm to take care of this for you is not only easy but it can have a significant impact on your website traffic because high search engine rankings typically translate to improved web traffic. This is because Internet users trust search engines to serve the most relevant websites first and typically only visit the best ranking websites when they search for a particular term.

Similarly another simple way to enjoy Internet marketing success is to hire a consulting firm to plan and execute your Internet marketing strategy. Just like SEO, Internet marketing is essentially a full time job. Business owners may have a great deal of difficulty trying to run their business and organize their Internet marketing. Outsourcing this work eases the burden on the business manager and will likely produce more favorable results.

Using Your Content for Internet Marketing

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Using Your Content for Internet Marketing

The content on your website is very important because it can greatly influence your search engine rankings. This is critical because high search engine rankings help your business to reach a considerably larger audience. Internet users are typically looking for information quickly and want immediate results to their inquiries. Search engines understand this profile and write complicated algorithms which help them to supply the most relevant websites when a user searches for a particular word or phrase.

This is important to business owners because Internet users realize the value of search engines and are likely to only visit websites which rank well in the search engines. This includes websites which rank on the first page or two of search results. Your business might sell football jerseys and you may have a well designed website, a superior inventory and excellent prices but if your website does not rank well in search engines you are missing out on a great deal of free advertising. If your website lands on the third page or lower most visitors who search for relevant terms will not likely visit your website because they will have found what they were looking for on earlier pages. This is where the content on your website becomes important. Websites containing content which has been optimized for particular keywords will likely rank well with search engines.

When Choosing your SEO...

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

When Choosing your SEO...

1. A commitment to Ethical SEO and business practices (no black hat or tricky practices).

2. An excellent client reference base, testimonials, and case studies.

3. A record of solid, lasting results and outstanding service.

4. Custom search engine marketing solutions for each unique client.

5. An attitude of partnership with the client for the long term. (Invested in your success)

6. Cutting edge industry tools, knowledge, and talent. Always up-to-date and learning more about the industry.

7. An experienced team of professionals: programmers, web designers, copy writers, SEO specialists, branding experts.

8. Outstanding client communications and education.

9. A commitment to excellence in all products and services.

10. A company base of solid, good sense business and marketing principles.

Increases findability with search engine optimization (SEO)

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Increases findability with search engine optimization (SEO)

Accessibility techniques increase the findability of web pages by exposing content to search engines, both internally (within a website) and externally (across the World Wide Web). For example:

* Alternative text for images and multimedia is available to search engines

* Most search engines access text and not images

* Some search engines give higher weight to text that is marked up as headings

* Some search engines are unable to access some script-generated content such as mouse-overs

Steps to Getting the Search Engine to Discover and Index Your Whole Site

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Steps to Getting the Search Engine to Discover and Index Your Whole Site

Here's what to do, when you discover that there are pages not indexed by the search engine.

1. Check Whether Search Engines are Blocked from that Page

The first thing to do is to check your robots.txt file, and make sure it complies with the rules of a robots.txt file. Many webmasters, new and old, unintentionally block a search engine from a part of their site by having errors in their robots.txt file.

Another thing you might want to do is to make sure that your web page does not have a meta tag that prevents a robot from indexing a particular page. This may occur if you have ever put a meta "noindex" tag on the page, and later wanted it indexed but forgot to remove it.

2. Create a File Using the Sitemap Protocol

The major search engines, Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask, all support something known as a Sitemap file. This is not the "Site Map" that you see on many websites, including thesitewizard.com. thesitewizard.com's Site Map and others like it are primarily designed to help human beings find specific pages on the website. The sitemap file that uses the Sitemap protocol is, instead, designed for search engines, and is not at all human-friendly.

Sitemaps have to adhere to a particular format. The detailed specifications for this can be found at the sitemaps.org website. It is not necessary to use every aspect of the specification to create a site map if all you want is to make sure the search engines locate all your web pages. Details on how to create your own sitemap will be given later in this article.

3. Modify Your Robots.txt File for Sitemaps Auto-Discovery

As a result of the sitemap protocol, an extension to the robots.txt file has been agreed by the search engines. Once you have finished creating the sitemap file and uploaded it to your website, modify your robots.txt file to include the following line:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/name-of-sitemap-file.xml

You should change the web address ("URL") given to the actual location of your sitemap file. For example, change "www.example.com" to your domain name and "name-of-sitemap-file.xml" to the name that you have given your sitemap file.

The search engines that visit your site will automatically look into your robots.txt file before spidering your site. When they read the file, they will see the sitemap file listed and load it for more information. This will enable them to discover the pages that they have missed in the past. In turn, this will hopefully send them to index those files.

Improving Your Page Rank on Google

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Improving Your Page Rank on Google

There are numerous tips floating around in webmaster circles about how to improve your ranking in search engine results on Google.

1. Get Those Inbound Links

Since Google ranks your pages according to the number of links pointing at your page, it stands to reason that you should try to get as many links pointing at your pages as possible. This is so obvious that I'm only mentioning it for completeness sake.

2. Your Title Tag

Google seems to give weight to the title of your page. By title, I mean the text that is sandwiched between the HTML <TITLE> tags in the <HEAD> section of your web page. If you use a Web editor that automatically inserts a title like "New Page", remember to change it to some meaningful text with your keywords inside to reap the benefit of this feature.

3. Content-Laden Pages (Keyword Density)

It has often been observed that Google considers keyword density a large factor in ranking pages in search engine results, more so than many other search engines.

4. Keyword-laden Links?

According to a paper published by one of Google's founders, if the links pointing to your page has the relevant keyword text in them, it will cause your page to be ranked higher in search engine results. For example, a link with the text "Cheap Shoe Store" pointing at your site will cause your site to be listed earlier if a visitor searches for "cheap shoe store" than if the link simply said "click here". You can find a copy of the paper online at The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

Other Google Tips

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Other Google Tips

1. Will Disabling Caching of Your Page Affect Your Page Rank?

Some time ago, it was claimed that Google would penalise pages that forbade it from caching their pages. As you know, Google caches the pages it indexes unless otherwise instructed. To avoid problems with people who feel that this is a copyright infringement (and other reasons), they allow sites to instruct the Google spider not to cache those pages using various means.

Google has apparently publicly denied that disabling caching would affect the page's ranking in any way.

2. Dynamic Pages and Google

Unlike some other search engines, Google is able to index dynamically generated pages, so long as a link exist to those pages somewhere. So if you have a dynamically generated page that you think should be indexed, make sure you put a link to it somewhere on your site.

3. ALT tags on Images

If you have been placing images on your website without bothering to place ALT tags, now is a good time to add ALT tags. Google apparently indexes the text given in the ALT tags of images.

4. META Keywords Tag is Ignored

Google ignores the META keywords tag, so, the optimization of this tag is not going to help you any with Google.

The Google Toolbar

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The Google Toolbar

The Google Toolbar can be obtained free of charge for Firefox and Internet Explorer. It gives you an idea of how important Google thinks your site is (in general) by showing the Page Rank of any page that you visit.

Unfortunately, to obtain the page rank of the pages you visit, the toolbar actually transmits information about the pages you visit to Google. Thus if you are worried about people tracking your Internet activity, you might want to restrict its use to times when you check your site's ranking. You can easily enable or disable the Page Rank feature from its Options menu.

Add Text to Your Images, Flash and Videos

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Add Text to Your Images, Flash and Videos

The first thing you should note about search engines is that their software can only read text. When I say text, I don't mean text that you embed in an image or text that you place inside a Flash file or those that appear in a video.

While it's true that some search engines have the rudimentary ability to scan a Flash file, you cannot assume that this ability is sophisticated enough to obtain all the information you want them to have. In fact, I suspect that only Google can do this, and even then only to extract straightforward links embedded in the file. And certainly no search engine I know can view an image file or video and determine the text that it contains.

This is not to say that you cannot create a photo-album site, Flash game site or a video site that ranks in the search engine results page. You can still place your pictures, Flash, videos on your site. However, you should write content for each of these non-text elements to describe them.

For example, you should describe each picture in the "alt" text for the image. For those who don't know what I'm saying, images are put into a web page using HTML code like the following:

Notice the "alt" part in the example HTML code above. Here, I described the image as a picture of a search engine ready website. You should of course replace that text with a brief description of what your image really shows. While search engines cannot actually see your picture, they can read your "alt" text and will include that in their index for your web page.

Likewise, for sites with video files or Flash file, you should include additional text on that web page describing what your video shows or what the Flash file does.

To put it another way, when designing your website, make your website more accessible for blind and other visually impaired visitors and you will also reap the side benefit of making your site more search-engine friendly.

Create Relevant Title Tags

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Create Relevant Title Tags

Many search engines give additional weightage to the text appearing in the HTML <TITLE> tag for your page. Note that this is not the title that you see in the body of your web page. Rather, it is the non-visible text in the HTML code that the browser uses to display in the title bar of the browser window. The search engines use that tag as part of its algorithm to determine what your page is about.

A number of new webmasters don't bother to set the title tag to something meaningful. Instead, they just put their site name in the title tag of every page on their website. They should, instead, put the site name only in the title tag of their home page, and place a meaningful title on each individual page of their site. For example, on a page that describes a product "CMS ASD", the title tag should read "CMS ASD Product Features" or something like that. If you feel that the name of your website is important to have on every title tag, place it at the end of your title for the sub-pages on your site, for example, "CMS ASD Features - Ajiboye Company".

The Old, No-longer Recommended Solution: Keyword Tag

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The Old, No-longer Recommended Solution: Keyword Tag

In ancient times, people used to list variant spellings and misspelled words in their keyword tags. For example, if their page is about the word "misspelled", they may have a META tag like the following (angle brackets around the META tag omitted below to avoid problems with certain email software):

in the HEAD section of their page, while perhaps using only one form in the BODY.

However, search engines, including Google, no longer bother to index that META tag anymore, so this technique is useless. In fact, there was even a time when Alta Vista specifically documented that it discriminated against sites that use keywords in the META tags that do not occur in the body, so using META tags in this way may actually harm your search engine position.

Embedding All Variants and Misspellings in Your Text

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Embedding All Variants and Misspellings in Your Text

With the keyword tag no longer usable, it looks like the only thing left to do is to embed all the possible variants and misspelled words in the main body of your web page.

Needless to say, this is not an elegant solution.

If you leave misspellings or variant spellings without comment in your text, some readers may leave your site with the impression that you don't know how to spell, and thus feel that your site is less than professional.

The alternative, is to weave sentences with variants or misspellings subtly (or perhaps not so subtly) into your text. For example, I have somehow managed to include the various misspellings and variants of the word "misspelt", such as "mispelled", "mispelt", "misspelled" and misspelt", into this very sentence you're reading.

Unfortunately it is difficult to keep doing this throughout your site without making your article or page seem extremely clumsy. Not to bother with less important keywords, and only take the trouble with crucial keywords that you know will drive traffic to your site. This will help you get the most from wrong spellings and variant spellings, while hopefully minimizing the problem of over-wordy sentences and clumsy constructions.

Product & Service Pages

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Product & Service Pages

If you sell a product or a service you need pages dedicated to providing details about what you offer. Many small sites can put all their product information on the home page. This is great, but you still need to provide a page with additional details. If you have more than one product, then it's likely you need a page for each and every product or service you sell.

Product pages need to provide your visitors with everything they need to know to make an informed purchase decision. Price, style, expectations, specifications, size, benefits are all required information, depending on what you're selling. Your product page can never have too much information, provided it's laid out in a user friendly format that sells the product.

Promotional Tools

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Promotional Tools

Promote your web site through various public relations and marketing methods online and off-line. Some suggestions include:

* Print your web site and email addresses on all of your marketing materials, including business cards, letterhead, brochures, advertisements, and product packaging.

* Include a hotlink to your web site in your email signature file along with your name, address, and the name of your business. (A signature file is a closing which automatically appears at the bottom of an email message. In effect, it's an "electronic letterhead.") If your email software doesn't support hotlinks in signature files, be sure that your URL is at least spelled out.

* Participate in discussion groups. In discussion groups, you can promote your image by contributing suitable and useful information to discussions. It's bad form, however, to blatantly advertise your web site, company or product in these forums.

Register Your Site with Search Engines

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Register Your Site with Search Engines

Search engines direct users to web sites that are relevant to keywords or concepts they have entered. If you register your site properly with search engines, users who are unaware of your site will still find it when they search for the information your site contains. For example, if you manufacture a unique line of pet accessories, someone using a search engine to find information on cat supplies should be directed to your site.

Visit the home pages of major search engines - especially those you want to be picked up by - and research their Help or General Search Tips hotlinks to understand what they search for and how they display results. Then carefully determine what your key words and phrases should be and modify your HTML files accordingly so your site will be placed high in search listings. It's surprising and important to know that keywords on graphics will NOT be recognized by a search engine; again, be sure they are included in the code. Search engines might look in a variety of places for your keywords - in your HTML Title, Metatags, Alternate Text, and the first few sentences of your Body.

Expect that there will be a delay in having your registration go into effect with the search engines. Some search engines take days, others take weeks, to update their catalogues. Some crawl around nightly but don't update what they find until their catalogues are updated.

The process of submitting and verifying listings can be very time-consuming and frustrating when they are submitted to dozens or hundreds of search engines. There are search engine submission sites that charge you a fee to submit your site to various search engines. If you decide to go this route, look carefully at what search engines they are submitting to. Submitting your site to numerous obscure search engines that have little traffic themselves will not be helpful.

Keep up with your listing. Strange things can happen. Sometimes pages disappear and links are incorrect. Resubmit information if you identify a problem.

SEO Marketing Strategies That Propel Website Traffic

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Marketing Strategies That Propel Website Traffic

In the Internet, SEO marketing is the way to go if you want your business to be seen and noticed. There is such a thing as a SEO marketing specialist who aids clients and website owners in their quest to have bigger sales and more traffic to the site.

The Aim of SEO Marketing:

SEO marketing has mainly one aim and that is to bring traffic to a certain site. Traffic is seen as prospective buyers and clients of the site owner. Therefore, traffic is a much needed "commodity". Many Internet users visit sites that they have been redirected to or sites that have been presented by search engine results, and they get hooked on these sites. In other words, some users do not specifically seek out that particular site but they might have been led to it by it being in the top ten high ranking sites presented after a search engine query.

The Value of SEO Marketing

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The Value of SEO Marketing

The value of SEO marketing is that people who work to market your site know what they are doing and may be objective about what your site requires. By hiring and working with a SEO marketing expert is also a way of fully understanding how the search engines work and what is needed to meet the requirements of being in the top ten pages of a search engine.

SEO Marketing Tools and Strategies

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Marketing Tools and Strategies

There are many ways of getting your site in front of many Internet users. These strategies are all included in search engine optimization and website optimization. Most sites are optimized to suit the requirements of search engines. Many search engines index and catalog sites in accordance to the data and information that the site owners have submitted and the data and information that the search engine crawlers have gathered from the web site. The way that the data and information is presented in the site is important and so is the submissions that are given to the search engines. It is the role of the SEO marketing expert to be able to fully recognize the right data and information to supply for the site and submit to the search engines. SEO marketing companies are hiring, at an unprecedented pace, SEO marketing consultants to accommodate the increasing demand for quality SEO marketing experts that can handle search engine optimization and SEO marketing for various sites

Among the many SEO marketing tools that can propel a site to the first page of a search engine result is content. Content that is relevant to the site is what sites need to make it stand out from others that have irrelevant content and improper web design. This is the importance of keyword or key phrases that are integrated ion to the article used for the site. These articles carry the information that robotic crawlers need in order to properly index a site according to what it contains and what it can offer to users. The relevance factor holds true when link building. One way inbound links from relevant sites are extremely relevant.

SEO Technique

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Technique

With the Internet becoming a big marketplace for your products and services, it is important to promote your business websites through effective SEO strategies. Internet marketing is becoming the most cost-effective method for companies and businesses to reach a wide audience thereby making their online presence stronger. One of such internet marketing strategy is SEO which refers to the techniques used to achieve higher rankings in search engines for the targeted keywords. In other words, anything that is online should be optimized to create an online presence for your products and services. It is optimization that helps you reach your potential customer. Hence, it is important to understand some of the SEO techniques that can provide you the path to your prospective customer.

Small Business SEO Checklist: The Doâ��s - 1

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Small Business SEO Checklist: The Do’s - 1

1. Commit yourself to the process. SEO isn’t a one-time event. Search engine algorithms change regularly, so the tactics that worked last year may not work this year. SEO requires a long-term outlook and commitment.

2. Be patient. SEO isn’t about instant gratification. Results often take months to see, and this is especially true the smaller you are, and the newer you are to doing business online.

3. Ask a lot of questions when hiring an SEO company. It’s your job to know what kind of tactics the company uses. Ask for specifics. Ask if there are any risks involved. Then get online yourself and do your own research—about the company, about the tactics they discussed, and so forth.

4. Become a student of SEO. If you’re taking the do-it-yourself route, you’ll have to become a student of SEO and learn as much as you can.

5. Have web analytics in place at the start. You should have clearly defined goals for your SEO efforts, and you’ll need web analytics software in place so you can track what’s working and what’s not.

Small Business SEO Checklist: The Doâ��s - 2

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Small Business SEO Checklist: The Do’s - 2

1. Build a great web site.

2. Include a site map page. Spiders can’t index pages that can’t be crawled. A site map will help spiders find all the important pages on your site, and help the spider understand your site’s hierarchy. This is especially helpful if your site has a hard-to-crawl navigation menu. If your site is large, make several site map pages. Keep each one to less than 100 links. I tell clients 75 is the max to be safe.

3. Make SEO-friendly URLs. Use keywords in your URLs and file names, such as yourdomain.com/red-widgets.html. Don’t overdo it, though. A file with 3+ hyphens tends to look spammy and users may be hesitant to click on it. Related bonus tip: Use hyphens in URLs and file names, not underscores. Hyphens are treated as a “space,” while underscores are not.

4. Do keyword research at the start of the project. If you’re on a tight budget, use the free versions of Keyword Discovery or WordTracker, both of which also have more powerful paid versions. Ignore the numbers these tools show; what’s important is the relative volume of one keyword to another. Another good free tool is Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, which doesn’t show exact numbers.

5. Open up a PPC account. Whether it’s Google’s AdWords or Yahoo’s Search Marketing or something else, this is a great way to get actual search volume for your keywords. Yes, it costs money, but if you have the budget it’s worth the investment. It’s also the solution if you didn’t like the “Be patient” suggestion above and are looking for instant visibility.

Small Business SEO Checklist: The Doâ��s - 3

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Small Business SEO Checklist: The Do’s - 3

1. Use a unique and relevant title and meta description on every page. The page title is the single most important on-page SEO factor. It’s rare to rank highly for a primary term (2-3 words) without that term being part of the page title. The meta description tag won’t help you rank, but it will often appear as the text snippet below your listing, so it should include the relevant keyword(s) and be written so as to encourage searchers to click on your listing. Related bonus tip: You can ignore the Keywords meta altogether if you’d like; it’s close to inconsequential. If you use it, put misspellings in there, and any related keywords that don’t appear on the page.

2. Write for users first. Google, Yahoo, etc., have pretty powerful bots crawling the web, but to these bots have never bought anything online, signed up for a newsletter, or picked up the phone to call about your services. Humans do those things, so write your page copy with humans in mind. Yes, you need keywords in the text, but don’t stuff each page like a Thanksgiving turkey. Keep it readable.

3. Create great, unique content. This is important for everyone, but it’s a particular challenge for online retailers. If you’re selling the same widget that 50 other retailers are selling, and everyone is using the boilerplate descriptions from the manufacturer, this is a great opportunity. Write your own product descriptions, using the keyword research you did earlier to target actual words searchers use, and make product pages that blow the competition away. Plus, retailer or not, great content is a great way to get inbound links.

4. Use your keywords as anchor text when linking internally. Anchor text helps tells spiders what the linked-to page is about. Links that say “click here” do nothing for your search engine visibility.

5. Build links intelligently. Submit your site to quality, trusted directories such as Yahoo, DMOZ, Business.com, Aviva, and Best of the web. Seek links from authority sites in your industry. If local search matters to you, seek links from trusted sites in your geographic area—the Chamber of Commerce, etc. Analyze the inbound links to your competitors to find links you can acquire, too.

SEO - How it works!

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO - How it works!

Search engines use what is called a spider to reach out into the Internet to find new and updated websites. As a page is published, the spider stumbles upon the page depending on what words, images, video or other content is on the page. The spiders don’t actually recognize the images or the videos; they recognize the words in the description of the image or video. When someone does a search that includes these words, the search engine pulls that up in its results. These words are called keywords. The more often these keywords are used in a webpage the better chance the search engine will see it and put it up on the results. The more keywords, including combinations of keywords, the higher the page will show up in the search engine ranking.

The spider also used to refer to the Title and the Meta tags on the page, Heading, content and links to the site from other websites. But you have to make sure that you stock each of these areas well with your primary keywords (for which you are optimizing your site) but don’t overdo it because the spiders do seem to have a temper and pages do get banned. A 2% to 7% density of keywords is the preferred standard. Also it depends upon the page. If it sounds good and relevant to your page content, then there is no problem even if the percentage increases to 12.

This is why the webpage code is so important. Many people spend a lot of time making their web pages look visually appealing to people, but they don’t think about the spiders in the search engines. Spend more time on your web site’s code for search engine optimization and you will find yourself getting high rankings.

SEO techniques for top ranking: Title

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO techniques for top ranking: Title

This is the name that you can see at the top of the window of your web browser (Blue Bar), also called the Title Bar. Make sure that your title is short and descriptive. It also needs to contain the targeted keywords that are relevant to your site. The search engines also use to show this title in the search engine results. Hence, it should clearly describe your sites content so that the users will be interested in coming to your site.

SEO techniques for top ranking: Keywords

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO techniques for top ranking: Keywords

Keywords are an important part of SEO techniques. Unfortunately many webmasters overdo it. Keywords are one of the most important factors in ranking high on search engines. You will find many tips on adding keywords, such as ALT tags, anchors and other areas. While these are meant to be used if you want to help boost your keywords, they should be relevant to the image or the place where you are linking. Many people try to stuff keywords into every possible place. As a general rule, I would say you can optimize one page with 3 keywords or phrases. You can starting with one or two. But never overuse the keywords. Again, it is wise to put other relative key words (secondary & tertiary) that are similar but not quite the same as your main key words. The main benefit of using such keywords for bringing new visitors to your site through long tail key phrases. By having a wide variety and volume of key words in your webpage you may very well be the only result when someone uses one of those combinations of keywords in their search. This technique is very successful but many people do not use it. When trying to get new visitors to your site you will want to use as many strategies as possible. Using alternative keywords is a strategy that you should use for every page just like you use main keywords.

SEO techniques for top ranking: Links

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO techniques for top ranking- Links:

When other sites on the web link to your site, the search engine spider finds these links and counts it as a vote of support. The more quality pages that link to your page, higher ranking in the search engine. A great way to get one way links is directory submission. Also if you have unique and informative content on your page, then other sites will be interested in linking to your site and refer their visitors to your site.

Many websites don’t get visitors because of low search engine rankings. Use the above discussed SEO techniques to maximize your search engine rankings and achieve your objective with good number of visitors through organic results.

SEO techniques for top ranking: Meta-tag

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO techniques for top ranking: Meta-tag

There are two parts to the Meta-tag:

1. Description

2. Keywords

The description should be short, but it should sound logical and descriptive to the reader. Many times this will be the text that is seen under your title during the search. You will want to give the reader a small overview of the page. Write something that will make them understand what the page is all about and force them want to click on your site.

The keywords will be the same keywords that you have thought of while running your SEO research. These are the same key words that are also in the text of your page.

Hidden Text

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Hidden Text

Hidden Text is a huge no-no. You as a human might not be able to see the white text on a white background, but you can bet that the bots can and you will get penalized for it. Think about it: bots are automated and they cannot “see” a page as we humans would, therefore they are reliant upon the source code of your site. Text that is the same color as the background sets off alarm bells. It’s not a clever way to stuff your site with extra keywords. It’s also something that you really want to watch out for. A site with less than adequate security can easily be exploited and injected with tons of spammy hidden text, so it’s a good thing to regularly check your logs and source code to be on the lookout for these things. Google doesn’t care if someone else did it to you – all they know is that it’s there, it’s bad, and you will punished for your ignorance.

Cloaking

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Cloaking

Cloaking is the practice of showing different content to the spiders that crawl your site than you show to your actual human users. Search engines don’t like it one bit, and no matter whether your intentions were pure or deceptive, they won’t care – you will be slapped with a penalty when they find out. You may even get banned and de-indexed, which really just defeats the purpose of doing SEO in the first place.

Duplicate Content

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is another big no-no. Search engines only want to index original content, not the same thing 50 times. When duplicate content is detected, only one of them is likely to be indexed, and the others will probably end up in the dreaded supplemental index. These duplicate pages won’t rank.

On a similar note, doorway pages are also a very bad idea. These are pages designed specifically to draw search engine traffic to your site. How do you spot one? In general, if you can’t get to the page by following the site’s navigation, then it’s likely a doorway page. These pages serve no useful purpose than than attracting the attention of search engine users who will click the result, go to the site, and find that what they’re looking for is not on the page.

Keyword Stuffing

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Keyword Stuffing

On-page SEO is undoubtedly important, and some argue that on-page keywords have far more weight than those you stuff in your keyword meta tag. However, stuffing your site with an excessive number of keywords isn’t good, and delicate balance should be maintained. Sure, you want to rank for a specific keyword and the more times you use it on the page, the more likely you’ll rank for it. Just don’t go overboard. Try to keep your writing natural and use the keywords as you feel suitable. Using them too many times will make your site look spammy, which doesn’t sit well with either your actual human visitors or the spiders that crawl your site. It’s not likely to get you banned, but may in fact hurt your TrustRank, which is like your credibility and reputation with the automated bots.

Link Farms

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Link Farms

Just say no to link farms. Link farms are sites whose only purpose is to artificially inflate link popularity through link exchanges. Google knows who they are, and if they’re not on their list yet, you can bet they will be soon. They’re considered “bad neighborhoods”, and will hurt your rankings. You may likely be penalized, and your site can even get banned for participating in these schemes. Avoid the problems, and don’t give into the temptation. An endorsement from a bad site is much more harmful than no endorsement at all.

White-Hat SEO Tactics: Internal Linking

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

White-Hat SEO Tactics: Internal Linking

By far one of the easiest ways to stop your website from ranking well on the search engines is to make it difficult for search engines to find their way through it. Many sites use some form of script to enable fancy drop-down navigation, etc. Many of these scripts cannot be crawled by the search engines resulting in unindexed pages.

While many of these effects add visual appeal to a website, if you are using scripts or some other form of navigation that will hinder the spidering of your website it is important to add text links to the bottom of at least your homepage linking to all you main internal pages including a sitemap to your internal pages.

White-Hat SEO Tactics: Reciprocal Linking

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

White-Hat SEO Tactics: Reciprocal Linking

Exchanging links with other webmasters is a good way (not the best, but good) of attaining additional incoming links to your site. While the value of reciprocal links has declined a bit over the past year they certainly still do have their place.

A VERY important note is that if you do plan on building reciprocal links it is important to make sure that you do so intelligently. Random reciprocal link building in which you exchange links with any and virtually all sites that you can will not help you over the long run. Link only to sites that are related to yours and who's content your visitors will be interested in and preferably which contain the keywords that you want to target. Building relevancy through association is never a bad thing unless you're linking to bad neighborhoods (penalized industries and/or websites).

If you are planning or currently do undertake reciprocal link building you know how time consuming this process can be.

White-Hat SEO Tactics: Content Creation

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

White-Hat SEO Tactics: Content Creation

Don't confuse "content creation" with doorway pages and the such. When we recommend content creation we are discussing creating quality, unique content that will be of interest to your visitors and which will add value to your site.

The more content-rich your site is the more valuable it will appear to the search engines, your human visitors, and to other webmasters who will be far more likely to link to your website if they find you to be a solid resource on their subject.

Creating good content can be very time-consuming, however it will be well worth the effort in the long run. As an additional bonus, these new pages can be used to target additional keywords related to the topic of the page.

SEO

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO

Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site.

How to Use SEO Search Algorithms

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

How to Use SEO Search Algorithms

# Understand the relevance of keywords in SEO search algorithms. Keywords that are relevant to the topic are included in the text and HTML of a website. It is important to maintain a balance of relevant keywords. There is no specific formula but if a person puts too many keywords into the searchable text of a website, the site can incur a penalty relative to page rank. Put too little and the site will not get significant page ranking.

# Keep the content on the web site and specific pages relevant. An SEO search algorithm wants content that is relevant to web site. For instance, if a site sells blenders, do not put up content about ringtones just because ringtones are a popular search term.

# Publish fresh content on the web site weekly and if possible daily. SEO search algorithms are designed to obtain the newest information on a given search topic. If the site update occurs too infrequently, the SEO search algorithm could drop the site as a dead site.

# Realize that each major SEO search algorithm uses a different set of rules. Therefore, it is difficult to please each one. Follow the basic rules of relevant and fresh keywords and content.

# Link with as many other sites as possible and have these sites return the favor. SEO Search algorithms need to see that a particular site is simply not alone on the Internet. Connectivity with other sites is a key when using SEO search algorithms to a site owner's advantage.

SEO - Algorithms

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO - Algorithms

Search results aim to give their visitors the best results on a consistent basis. In the eyes of the Internet surfer the best results are those that display relevant information about a specific topic. In order to do this, search engines employ algorithms to determine where a page appears on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

Studying and determining the precise formula employed by the search engine algorithms is generally futile and unnecessary. For the most part, providing high quality website content, having a good basis of inbound links (one way links from pages on a similar topic are given greater priority), and avoiding anything that may be deemed as being underhand are the main factors of any algorithm. Page accessibility, dead links, and other factors are important but a general rule does apply to on page aspects of algorithms.

Create websites primarily for visitors.

That goes against virtually everything that most SEO professionals will tell you. Keyword inclusion in your text does undoubtedly play a part, but the anchor text, and number of inbound links is believed to be much more important.

Any information you generally find on the Internet is either so vague it must be true or complete supposition. Google and other search engines go to extreme lengths to ensure the secrecy of the specific algorithm requirements. Many search engines change their criteria on a very regular basis to prevent any webmaster or SEO from taking advantage.

What the Heck is This SEO Stuff, Anyway?

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

What the Heck is This SEO Stuff, Anyway?

There are so many people out there that claim to know about Search Engine Optimization and who claim to know what it means to have an SEO-friendly website, it makes one wonder if all of these people really know what the process is all about.

Chances are you, the website owner, hired someone with the idea that you were getting great SEO result and found that your results were only mediocre at best.

Oddly enough, it is not just smaller companies that are confused by the entire SEO issue, but larger firms suffer from SEO confusion. Also, higher priced doesn’t always mean better service. Shop around and ask the hard questions before hiring an SEO firm.

The thing to remember is that SEO has changed since the beginning. Search engine algorithms have evolved and are far more sophisticated. This evolution means that the guidelines are continually changing.

SEO Today

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Today

SEO today is improving the volume of website traffic and the quality of visitors to the site via the use of targeted keywords. An SEO expert has to think like their consumer, and they also have to understand how the algorithms work. SEO should involve the site’s code, overall design, text-rich content, accurate navigation and eliminate anything that would prevent a spider from crawling the entire site.

In addition to organic searches to the site, a good SEO firm will establish a pay-per-click advertising campaign to boost site visibility. Google considers popularity a major factor when ranking a page.

A well-conceived plan will attack the web from several different angles at the same time. Social networking is an important factor as well as inbound links. The inbound links have to be chosen carefully and have a relationship to the website in some way. Otherwise, Google may consider the site simply a link farm.

Internet Marketing and SEO

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Internet Marketing and SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the concept that is inevitable for any effective Internet Marketing campaign. People either know very less about SEO or have difficulty executing their SEO strategies to produce desired effects.

Most popular search engines like Google use complex algorithms to rank a website. Therefore, your website should be optimized for relevant search terms so that your website is placed high on search engine rankings. Usually the Internet users review only the first few results of the search engine.

You can hire a SEO specialist to accomplish your work. Some of the common factors that are considered by search engines are Keyword Density, MTA tags, titles, contents, website traffic, and inbound links.

Backling and SEO

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Backlink and SEO

SEO is known as Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a collection of techniques and strategies. It’s used to optimize web site for the search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. If these search engines optimize the web site then your site can get better rankings on the search results of those engines.

Backlinking is really related to SEO. It has much value for your website or blog ranking and optimization. I prefer to spend some time for backling. Backling is the process of exchanging links with other site or with other pages of your site.

I always prefer to spend some time to contact other webmaster who have similar site about the same subjects as yours and try to exchange text links. Moreover, you can use several keywords for backlinking of your site or blog. Just use those keywords that you target to anchor text of those links. But avoid to use the same keywords as backlining. You may use the synonyms and variations of those keywords as the backlinking.

But remember to consider a link exchange only with sites which has the same subject. Try to get backlinks as much website as you get. I prefer to try to get at least 50 backlinks on 50 different website. It really boost your site ranking on search engines. And the ultimate benefit is that your site visit traffic will be increased very high. That’s all about backlinking and the effect of backlinking on SEO.

How sitemaps improve SEO - HTML Sitemaps

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

How sitemaps improve SEO - HTML Sitemaps

An HTML sitemap is usually a single page which contains links to all the pages of your website. Normally, this is accessible via a link in the footer section of your website, which should be displayed on every page.

On large sites, visitors can get lost and struggle to find a specific page (another important reason to have a search box on your site as well). Assuming your site architecture is designed well, the HTML sitemap will help guide your site visitors to the page they’re looking for.

Ajiboye.com has a pleasing, simple, yet well designed HTML sitemap which can easily serve as a template for many sites. Each page in their website has a footer which contains the link to this sitemap page.

How sitemaps improve SEO - XML Sitemaps

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

How sitemaps improve SEO - XML Sitemaps

The popular search engines — Google, Yahoo and Bing — use the XML sitemap as one part of their process for indexing the pages of a website. A good XML sitemap will tell the search engine what pages are in your site, how often those pages are updated, and when they were last modified. This way, the search engines know which pages to revisit more regularly and are likely to do a better job of indexing them.

How Often Should Sitemaps Be Submitted?

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

How Often Should Sitemaps Be Submitted?

Google recommends initially submitting your sitemap using their Webmaster Tools. This ensures that sitemap details are readily viewable on the first tab of the Sitemaps page in Webmaster Tools. Sitemaps can also be submitted (and resubmitted) by sending a HTTP request to Google and including the sitemap location in your robots.txt file(See details below).

You should resubmit a sitemap to search engines about once every three months. This allows you to update the search engines about any new pages in your site. If you create new pages on a daily basis, you may want to submit your sitemap more frequently.

Include your Sitemap location in your robots.txt file

To tell search engines about the location of your sitemap, include the following line in your robots.txt file:

sitemap: http://www.your-domain.com/sitemap.xml

Updating Sitemaps

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Updating Sitemaps

To resubmit a sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.

2. Under Site configuration, click Sitemaps.

3. Select the Sitemap you want to resubmit, and then click Resubmit.

To resubmit a sitemap by sending Google an HTTP request

If you do this, you don’t need to resubmit it using Webmaster Tools. The Submitted column will continue to show the last time you manually clicked the link, but the Last Downloaded column will be updated to show the last time our system has fetched your Sitemap.

Deleting Sitemaps

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Deleting Sitemaps

You can delete a sitemap from your Google account so that it no longer appears in Webmaster Tools. Google will, however, continue to fetch your sitemap data until you remove the sitemap file from your webserver. If you want to keep the Sitemap on your server for use by other search engines, you can use your robots.txt file to prevent Google from accessing it.

To delete a Sitemap from your Google Webmaster Tools account:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.

2. Under Site configuration, click Sitemaps.

3. Select the Sitemap you want to delete, and then click Delete.

If you delete a website from your account, all associated sitemaps will be deleted as well. If you delete all sitemaps associated with a website, that website will still be listed in your account so you can view information about it.

Final words

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Final words

Google does not require sitemaps but mentions they are strongly recommended. Both HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps are a good step in the right direction to improve your website’s exposure. You will most likely find your search engine rankings climb after submitting a sitemap the first time. This is just one small part of search engine optimization and there is much more you can do to improve how search engines rank the pages on your site and your website’s visibility.

Pros and Cons of SEO

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Pros and Cons of SEO

Pros:

* Search engine optimization does not necessarily require financial investments, other than the salary of the labour involved in the optimization process. Search engine optimization can be done either in-house or it can be outsourced to a specialized company.

* Search engine optimization may be the most cost-efficient marketing method for some companies and increase sales tremendously.

Cons:

* It may take weeks, months or even years for a web site to obtain good organic ranking. This fact makes it nearly impossible to execute quick marketing campaigns with search engine optimization.

* A company may put a lot of effort and money into search engine optimization, but receive no return, because there is no guaranteed method to get to the top of the natural results. Therefore, search engine optimization is not as reliable as some other marketing methods.

* It is hard to determine the value of high organic ranking, prior to putting in the effort and money. The estimated traffic from a particular term may be much lower than initially expected, thus lowering the value of the term. It should be noted that it might also be much higher.

* Maintaining a stable position at the top of the natural SERPs is not guaranteed. A web site may rank number one in the organic results of a search engine on one day and disappear from the SERPs completely the next day.

How SEO Can Improve Your Social Media Campaigns

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

How SEO Can Improve Your Social Media Campaigns

A cornerstone of SEO is keyword analysis. Through this powerful marketing research tool, you’ll uncover what your prospects are actually searching for. Once you discover these phrases you’ll be in a better position to improve your social media campaigns.

You can use these keywords in your LinkedIn profile, your tweets, and in the titles and descriptions of your YouTube videos and your Flickr photos, just to name a few examples.

Using tools like Google Insights you’ll be able to track trending topics, which provide great fodder for your social media activities and are great for status updates.

Why Organic (or Natural) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Why Organic (or Natural) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important ingredients to an Online Business being able to prosper. The purpose of search engine optimization is to increase traffic (visitors) to a website. Increased traffic means more opportunities to sell the products or services being offered on a website. Put simply, to sell your products or services on the Internet you have to be able to be found.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of making websites more search engine friendly to attract traffic by ranking higher for relevant search phrases, and keywords, as being used by people in the search engines. Ajiboye is an experienced company in the field of search-engine-optimization. We will research the phrases and keywords that would be most effective for your business. With this very important information we then optimize your website based on the search phrase and keyword research, and analysis conducted. With proper research, analysis, and optimization of the website, higher organic (or natural) rankings can be achieved that will drive high quality targeted traffic to your website via the major search engines.

The primary search engines are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. They handle 92% of all Search Engine traffic. Today’s Search Engines drive 85% of all first time traffic to websites. Search Engines have organic and sponsored results. The organic results attract 80-90% of all search engine traffic. 10-20% will be sponsored results. It is important for any online business to rank well in the organic results to attract relevant traffic.

Benefits of Organic Search Engine Optimization

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Benefits of Organic Search Engine Optimization

Some of the benefits of Organic (Natural) Search Engine Optimization:

* Increase in Search Engine Traffic - When a website ranks well for the targeted search phrases and keywords which people are using, it results in an increase in qualified traffic from those improved search engine rankings.

* Return on Investment - Compare organic (natural) listings search traffic with other types of online advertisements, or even with offline traditional advertising and you will see that search engine optimization is the most cost effective option for increased visibility that can result in increased sales.

* Always on Marketing - With proper search engine optimization, the search engines will promote your website 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The importance of this being a steady stream of targeted high quality traffic to your website.

Why the Ajiboye E-Commerce Solution?

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Why the Ajiboye E-Commerce Solution?

There are many e-commerce shopping carts on the market today but none offers the functionality, flexibility, or support that Ajiboye does. Ajiboye is a feature rich, reliable storefront solution, utilizing industry leading security, backed by state-of-the-art hosting facilities, and unmatched network connectivity. If you need an e-commerce solution that will increase your business, is cost effective, easy to administrate, and offers advanced search engine optimization features, then Ajiboye is the answer.

Ajiboye enables small to large businesses to leverage the internet for a competitive advantage that they can use to build upon their company success. However, Ajiboye is much more than just e-commerce software, it is our people. You will have access to the same people who developed, program, operate, and support Ajiboye every day. We are here for you, to help you get your online store setup, and running quickly, and smoothly, to give you the help you need when you need it. Ajiboye is truly a complete e-commerce solution.

SEO Feedback Time Frame

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Feedback Time Frame

When you search a search engine you are not searching the web. You are searching their cache of the web. It takes search engines some finite amount of time to find and properly index new links and pages.

If you are new to SEO (or are just beginning to do SEO on your website) it may take up to six months or more to gain a top ranking for a competitive phrase. If you work hard enough you can usually rank well for less competitive phrases in as little as a couple months.

Algorithms

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Algorithms for spelling suggestion may incorporate several information resources to determine candidates for misspelled words and the words' likely correct replacements, including the following:

• Frequency of a word's occurrence in reliable data sources

• Search query logs

• List of frequently misspelled words

• Domain specific data resources (eg: corpora of medical terms)

Grammar checker

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A grammar checker in computing terms is a program, or part of a program, that attempts to verify written text for grammatical correctness. Grammar checkers are most often implemented as a feature of a larger program, such as a word processor, but are also available as stand-alone application that can be activated from within programs that work with editable text.

The implementation of a grammar checker makes use of natural language processing.

Vertical search design and advertising models

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

In terms of design and implementation, several models are emerging in vertical search:

The vertical search engine as a destination or portal: Often media companies that own these destination sites optimize them and buy keywords on Google to drive their audience to visit.

Vertical search as a complementary Web site application: This model entails embedding a search engine box on an existing, already trafficked site. One example is CertMag.com.

Parametric search: This tool, more prevalent in engineering and other product-specific, information-intensive, procurement-driven industries, often allows for side-by-side product and manufacturer comparison.

In terms of revenue that these vertical search engines generate, a variety of advertising programs are gaining favor, including:

• Cost per click, in which the advertiser pays only for each time that a user clicks on the ad.

• Cost per thousand/cost per impression/cost per view, the standardized, traditional method of online advertising, is now emerging as an option in vertical search environments.

• Cost per action, an emerging model in which the advertiser pays, not on click, or for impressions, but only if the consumer performs a specific action, such as purchases a good.

• Flat fee/fixed fee, the most popular early ad model for most of the vertical search engines.

• Web order entry/self W service, a system whereby marketers can buy, monitor and revise their ad campaigns themselves simply by entering their credit card information through a password-protected interface.

• Paid inclusion, the practice of inserting “editorial-like” ads or more traditional ads into the actual organic search results.

• Paid listing, in which ads appear on top of or beside organic listings and are clearly identified as sponsored links.

• Free, plus, in which the site is completely free for both those listing and those searching, with additional features available for those who pay.

Metasearch engine

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A meta-search engine is a search tool that sends user requests to several other search engines and/or databases and aggregates the results into a single list or displays them according to their source.

Metasearch engines enable users to enter search criteria once and access several search engines simultaneously.

Metasearch engines operate on the premise that the Web is too large for any one search engine to index it all and that more comprehensive search results can be obtained by combining the results from several search engines. This also may save the user from having to use multiple search engines separately.

The term "metasearch" is frequently used to classify a set of commercial search engines, see the list of search engines, but is also used to describe the paradigm of searching multiple data sources in real time. The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) uses the terms Federated Search and Metasearch interchangeably to describe this web search paradigm.

Operation of Metasearch engines

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Metasearch engines create what is known as a virtual database. They do not compile a physical database or catalogue of the web. Instead, they take a user's request, pass it to several other heterogeneous databases and then compile the results in a homogeneous manner based on a specific algorithm.

No two metasearch engines are alike. Some search only the most popular search engines while others also search lesser-known engines, newsgroups, and other databases. They also differ in how the results are presented and the quantity of engines that are used. Some will list results according to search engine or database. Others return results according to relevance, often concealing which search engine returned which results. This benefits the user by eliminating duplicate hits and grouping the most relevant ones at the top of the list.

Search engines frequently have different ways they expect requests submitted. For example, some search engines allow the usage of the word "AND" while others require "+" and others require only a space to combine words. The better metasearch engines try to synthesize requests appropriately when submitting them

Quality of results

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Results can vary between metasearch engines based on a large number of variables. Still, even the most basic metasearch engine will allow more of the web to be searched at once than any one stand-alone search engine. On the other hand, the results are said to be less relevant, since a metasearch engine can’t know the internal “alchemy” a search engine does on its result (a metasearch engine does not have any direct access to the search engines’ database).

Metasearch engines are sometimes used in vertical search portals, and to search the deep web.

Metabrowsing

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

With the popularization of the Internet in the late 1990s, different approaches to browsing Web-based information emerged as alternatives to the standard Web browser. According to LexisNexis the term "metabrowsing" began popping up in mainstream media in March 2000.

Since then the meaning of "metabrowsing" seems to have split into a popular and a more scientific use of the term.

Popular use: Akin to metasearch, the popular use of the term "metabrowsing" describes an alternative way to viewing Web-based information other than a single Web-page at a time. "Simply put, metabrowsing is a tool or service that enables the user to view more than a single Web page at a time inside a single display unit."

According to Dr. Linda Gordon, Liberal Arts Professor at Nova Southeastern University, "metabrowsing is transforming our understanding of the web; therefore, the vocabulary of this new perspective must demonstrate the nature of the metamorphosis. The etymological root 'meta', from the Greek, means 'change' and 'transcendence', and thus we can understand the dynamics of metabrowsing as a view of the web from a higher level. What is this higher level? To speak metaphorically, think of the limitations of street signs for navigation: metabrowsing will become the GPS of the internet."

Scientific use: There are several scientific papers that use the term to describe the browsing of "graphical representations" of documents. In this context "metabrowsing" refers to a high-level way of browsing through information: instead of browsing through document contents or document surrogates, the user browses through a graphical representation of the documents and their relations to the domain.

The Importance of Keywords Meta Tag in SEO

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The Importance of Keywords Meta Tag in SEO

When in comes to achieving top search engine rankings how large of a role do keyword tags actually play? This is a simple question with no easy answer. Not only does the answer vary depending on which search engine a marketer is targeting, but it also depends upon the changing valuations search engines place on these tags.

At one point in time the keywords tag had an impact on a web site’s position within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Now the keywords tag has little impact on where a site will appear in the search results. When search engine first started determining the relevancy of a site they placed a larger emphasis on these tags.

Soon every webmaster used these them and oftentimes overused these tags and therefore the search engine placed less importance on them. After all, not every site that adds “SEO Company” into their keywords tag can have a top 10 ranking within the SERPS for the phrase “SEO Company”.

What are meta tags?

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

What are meta tags?

Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted into the header on a web page, after the title tag. They take a variety of forms and serve a variety of purposes, but in the context of search engine optimization when people refer to meta tags, they are usually referring to the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag.

The meta description tag and the meta keywords tag were proposed so that webmasters would have a consistent method for providing meta document data to user agents, such as search engines. Unfortunately, so many unscrupulous webmasters have abused the meta description and meta keywords tag that search engines have had to de-emphasize their importance.

In addition to the well-known meta description and meta keywords tags, there are other useful meta tags, including the meta http-equiv tag, meta refresh tag, the meta robots tag, the meta copyright tag, and the meta author tag, among others.

Web metabrowsing applications

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Quick browse was one of the first Web-based metabrowsing applications, enabling users to combine multiple pages into one vertical, continuously scrollable page for faster viewing.

Onepage.com and Octopus.com offered more sophisticated systems for combining not just entire Web pages but bits and pieces of different pages into a new "combo page".

Octopus received more than $11.4 million in venture capital funding. Onepage received $25 million in venture capital funding.

Sybase acquired Onepage in 2002 changing the service from an end user oriented business model to an enterprise-driven concept. In the end Onepage was terminated. Calltheshots.com was acquired by Akamai and then also disappeared, as did Katiesoft and iHarvest.com.

Meta Tag Keyword

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Meta Tag Keyword

Even if the main search engines do not look at this Meta Tag, some smaller search engines or directories take them into consideration in their algorithm. So, it doesn’t cost that much to input those meta tag. You should have a maximum of twelve unique keywords, otherwise it would consider your site as spammy. You can include different solutions of misspellings of a specific keyword (and plurals), but they must be separated by space and coma, and even more often, a coma and a space.

Some SEO experts use the meta tag only to keep track of which keywords people are using to optimize their webpages, as they consider it is not so important for Google.

How to Use a Meta Tag

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

How to Use a Meta Tag

Meta tags are included in the <HEAD> of an HTML document. If you are using meta tags to improve your standing in search engines, then you should focus on your description and keywords.

The description tag

Use the description tag to describe what your page is about. Engines that use it will supply the content of this tag when displaying a list of links.

The keywords tag

Keywords help search engines to categorize your site, and to allow people to find your pages more quickly. However, most search engines have limits as to how many meta keywords are viewed. It is a good idea to review your keywords and make sure that they are as concise and specific as possible.

Before you write Metatags

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Before you write Metatags

There are a lot of meta tags to use, and while they all serve some purpose, simply adding all of them to your site doesn't improve your search engine placement. Instead, having a lot of extraneous tags can slow down your page loading, and some search engines might penalize you for "spamdexing".

Some reasons for meta tagging:

* search engine ranking

* internal search engine

* internal categorization

* control the browser, robots or other things

Depending upon which (if any) you want to focus on, will help you determine how to best maximize your efforts towards meta tags.

Technology

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Web-based metabrowsing services such as Quickbrowse, Octopus and Onepage differed in their technological approach.

Quickbrowse only allows the combination of complete Web pages. The service retrieves the HTML of designated pages and then combines it into a new "combo page" server-side. This "raw" approach does not work with all types of Web pages, especially cascading style sheets whose HTML does not combine well. Quickbrowse also disables JavaScript components so as to avoid problems that would arise from the combination of disparate and unrelated sources of JavaScript code. Unwanted layout distortions may result when combining pages. Services like Octopus and Onepage, both out of business, used a more sophisticated Java-driven approach that enabled users' browsers to retrieve and combine bits and pieces from disparate Web sites client-side.

Internal Categorization

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Internal Categorization

If you're looking at improving internal categorization, you might want to start requiring meta tags like:

* the author of the page

* the copyright date

* last updated

Web browser

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A Web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users to easily navigate their browsers to related resources.

Although browsers are primarily intended to access the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access information provided by Web servers in private networks or files in file systems.

The major web browsers are Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera for Windows and Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Opera for Macintosh.

Interact with Browser and Web Server

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Interact with Browser and Web Server

You can include meta tags that impact the browser:

control the caching of the page
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">
indicate when the content expired
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="0">
disallow indexing of a page
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
refresh the current content
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30">
refresh to an entirely new page
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10;url=http://webdesign.ajiboye.com/">

Meta tags are a powerful tool for your site, but you need to be sure you're using only what you need. Once you understand what you need you're site will be more effective.

Function

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The primary purpose of a web browser is to bring information resources to the user. This process begins when the user inputs a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) into the browser. The prefix of the URI determines how the URI will be interpreted. The most commonly used kind of URI starts with http: and identifies a resource to be retrieved over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Many browsers also support a variety of other prefixes, such as https: for HTTPS, ftp: for the File Transfer Protocol, and file: for local files. Prefixes that the web browser cannot directly handle are often handed off to another application entirely. For example, mailto: URIs is usually passed to the user's default e-mail application, and news: URIs is passed to the user's default newsgroup reader.

In the case of http, https, file, and others, once the resource has been retrieved the web browser will display it. HTML is passed to the browser's layout engine to be transformed from markup to an interactive document. Aside from HTML, web browsers can generally display any kind of content that can be part of a web page. Most browsers can display images, audio, video, and XML files, and often have plug-ins to support Flash applications and Java applets. Upon encountering a file of an unsupported type or a file that is set up to be downloaded rather than displayed, the browser prompts the user to save the file to disk.

Information resources may contain hyperlinks to other information resources. Each link contains the URI of a resource to go to. When a link is clicked, the browser navigates to the resource indicated by the link's target URI, and the process of bringing content to the user begins again.

Features -- User interface

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Available web browsers range in features from minimal, text-based user interfaces with bare-bones support for HTML to rich user interfaces supporting a wide variety of file formats and protocols. Browsers which include additional components to support e-mail, Usenet news, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), are sometimes referred to as "Internet suites" rather than merely "web browsers".

All major web browsers allow the user to open multiple information resources at the same time, either in different browser windows or in different tabs of the same window. Major browsers also include pop-up blockers to prevent unwanted windows from "popping up" without the user's consent.

Most web browsers can display a list of web pages that the user has bookmarked so that the user can quickly return to them. Bookmarks are also called "Favorites" in Internet Explorer. In addition, all major web browsers have some form of built-in web feed aggregator. In Mozilla Firefox, web feeds are formatted as "live bookmarks" and behave like a folder of bookmarks corresponding to recent entries in the feed. In Opera, a more traditional feed reader is included which stores and displays the contents of the feed.

Furthermore, most browsers can be extended via plug-ins, downloadable components that provide additional features.

Most major web browsers have these user interface elements in common:

• Back and forward buttons to go back to the previous resource and forward again.

• A refresh or reload button to reload the current resource.

• A stop button to cancel loading the resource. In some browsers, the stop button is often merged with the reload button.

• A home button to return to the user's home page

• An address bar to input the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) of the desired resource and display it.

• A search bar to input terms into a search engine

• A status bar to display progress in loading the resource and also the URI of links when the cursor hovers over them, and page zooming capability.

• Major browsers also possess incremental find features to search within a web page.

Web browser other feature

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Privacy and security

Most browsers support HTTP Secure and offer quick and easy ways to delete the web cache, cookies, and browsing history. For a comparison of the current security vulnerabilities of browsers, see comparison of web browsers.

Standards support

Early web browsers supported only a very simple version of HTML. The rapid development of proprietary web browsers led to the development of non-standard dialects of HTML, leading to problems with interoperability. Modern web browsers support a combination of standards-based and de facto HTML and XHTML, which should be rendered in the same way by all browsers

Browser wars

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Browser wars are a metaphorical term that refers to competitions for dominance in the web browser marketplace. The term is often used to denote two specific rivalries: the competition that saw Microsoft's Internet Explorer replace Netscape's Navigator as the dominant browser during the late 1990s and the erosion of Internet Explorer's market share since 2003 by a collection of emerging browsers including Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera.

GeoBrowsing

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Geobrowsing is a term used to describe the act of seeking and accessing information on the Internet via a method that is reverse of the traditional Web navigational path. Rather than navigating through a series of linear or non-linear hyperlinks, users browse content visually - typically on a map - similar to the way they think, and then navigate down to the textual information.

An example of this would be the confluence of "points of interest," the user's location and a virtual map coming together to allow the user to efficiently find what they are looking for within a specified radius from where they are standing. Other tenets of Geobrowsing would include the user's presence and the presence of friends, the ability to interact among those friends and other contextual information.

Rick Robinson published the principles and (unreleased) prototype for AOL in 1998-99, and later maintained a geobrowsing.com website.

Today XOHM is being credited for pioneering initial demonstrations of Geobrowsing on its mobile broadband network.

Layout engine

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A layout engine or rendering engine, is software that takes marked up content (such as HTML, XML, image files, etc.) and formatting information (such as CSS, XSL, etc.) and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer. A layout engine is typically used for web browsers, e-mail clients, or other applications that require the displaying (and editing) of web contents.

The term "layout engine" only reached popular usage when these became easily separable from the browser. For example, Gecko, the Mozilla project's open-source layout engine, is used by a variety of products derived from the Mozilla code base, including the Firefox web browser, the Thunderbird E-mail client, and Seamonkey application suite. Trident, the layout engine from Internet Explorer, is used by many applications on the Microsoft Windows platform to render HTML, as in Outlook Express, some versions of Microsoft Outlook, and the mini-browsers in Winamp and RealPlayer.

Similarly, Opera Software's proprietary Presto engine is licensed to a number of other software vendors, as well as being used in Opera's own Opera web browser, and KDE's open-source KHTML engine is used both in KDE's own Konqueror web browser as well as being used, in an adapted form, as the basis for WebKit, the rendering engine in Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome web browsers.

The term rendering engine can also refer to text rendering engines like Pango, International Components for Unicode (ICU) or Uniscribe which make multilingual texts present in proper shape, taking into account bidirectional text, combinations of "basic characters" with accents, and other intricacies of multilingual text.

Page zooming

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

In computing, page zooming is the ability to zoom in and out at page level. It is usually found in applications related to document layout and publishing, e.g. word processing and spreadsheet programs, but it can also be found in some web browsers as it improves accessibility for people with visual impairment and people using handheld devices which have a relatively small screen.

While most web browsers have the ability to resize the text on a page, some cannot truly zoom a page. Page zooming and text resizing are two very different things; in page zooming, not only text, but also images, other multimedia objects, and viewports are all resized. When zooming in, a horizontal scroll bar will appear when the screen is not large enough to hold the page content. In contrast, text resizing just increases the font size, with wrapping to avoid horizontal scrolling, leaving the size of the images the same.

This concept has also been extended to home entertainment devices. Most media players of recent generations such as DVD and Blu-Ray include (via buttons on a remote) the ability to "zoom" in and out, and to change the focus of the zoom in any direction in two dimensions.

Usage share of web browsers

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The usage share of web browsers is the percentage of visitors to a group of websites that use a particular web browser.

For example, when it is said that Internet Explorer has 58% usage share, it means that some version of Internet Explorer is used by 58% of visitors that visit a given set of sites.

Accuracy

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Measuring browser usage in the number of requests (page hits) made by each user agent can be misleading.

Overestimation

Not all requests are generated by a user, as a user agent can make requests at regular time intervals without user input. In this case the usage of that user agent would then be overestimated.

Some examples:

A web browser that refreshes the webpage at a regular time interval.

A feed reader that requests the RSS or Atom feed at a regular time interval.

Extra files like CSS hacks and JavaScript hacks are often sent to Internet Explorer.

Gecko-based browsers (such as Firefox) can prefetch linked web pages, potentially increasing hits. Link prefetching in Gecko-based browsers is used on pages with enhanced markup, including Google search results.

A user who revisits a site shortly after changing or upgrading browsers may be double-counted under some methodologies; overall numbers at the time of a new version's release may be skewed.

Certain anti-virus products fake their user-agent to appear to be popular browsers. This is done to trick attack sites that might display clean content to the scanner, but not to the browser. The Register reported in June 2008 that traffic from AVG Linkscanner, using an IE6 user-agent, outstripped human link clicks by nearly 10 to 1.

Many types of software, such as Web validators or crawlers, fetch web pages, and send fictitious user-agent strings to appear more like normal traffic.

Browsers such as Safari maintain a dashboard of frequently visited sites. This generates hits to those sites on browser start or at times on launch of a new tab, in order to update the thumbnail images.

Underestimation

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

It is also possible to underestimate the usage share by using the number of requests, for example:

A graphical browser typically results in more hits than a text browser, as it downloads files referred to by the HTML document (e.g., images, CSS, and JavaScript).

Many browsers and download managers spoof a different user agent string to the web server to prevent erroneous or malicious browser sniffing which could result in receiving broken or incompatible code, or being completely blocked, and thus increasing the statistics for other browsers (as an example, prior to version 9, the Opera web browser had "Identify as Internet Explorer" as the default user setting). Sometimes you can detect these spoofing browsers based on other things but some people do not do it. (An example is IEMobile which ships in Windows Mobile 6.1.4 and 6.5 with the default user agent string as IE6 WinXP but if you look at the other HTTP Headers you can actually tell it is IEMobile)

Text-based and audio-based browsers do not download any web bugs at all.

Gecko-based browsers since Firefox 1.5 and Opera use fast Document Object Model (DOM) caching. JavaScript is only executed on pageload from net or disk cache, but not if it is loaded from DOM cache. This can have an impact on JavaScript based tracking of browser statistics.

Some browser extensions and security programs (such as the popular Firefox extension NoScript) block javascript, flash, applets and some forms of HTML (HTML blocked through ClearClick) for non-whitelisted sites. This may also affect JavaScript based tracking of browser statistics.

Many browsers accessing a site via one proxy are apt to be counted as only one access if the proxy caches the result; it is usual for browsers on mobile phones in particular to access the web via proxies (many of which violate HTTP's specifications for proxies; even if a web bug is designed to work despite proxying, the proxies run by mobile operators may well mislead it).

While most browsers generate additional page hits by refreshing web pages when user navigates back through page history, some browsers (such as Opera) reuse cached content without resending requests to server.

Generally, the more faithfully a browser implements HTTP's cache specifications, the more it shall be under-reported relative to browsers which implement those specifications poorly.

Many plug-ins can change (generally append strings to) the User Agent. This can lead to Browser Detection flaws.

User Agents are not guaranteed to be a certain format. As an example of the inconsistency almost every User Agent pretends to be Mozilla 5.0. Some ISPs mainly mobile phone ISPs have begun stripping the user agent strings

Search aggregator

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A search aggregator is a type of metasearch engine which gathers results from multiple search engines simultaneously through RSS search results. It combines user specified search feeds (parameterized RSS feeds which return search results) to give the user the same level of control over content as a general aggregator.

Soon after the introduction of RSS, sites began publicising their search results in parameterized RSS feeds. Search aggregators are an increasingly popular way to take advantage of the power of multiple search engines with a flexibility not seen in traditional metasearch engines. To the end user, a search aggregator may appear to be just a customizable search engine and the use of RSS may be completely hidden. However, the presence of RSS is directly responsible for the existence of search aggregators and a critical component in the behind-the-scenes technology.

Search aggregator advantages and disadvantages

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Advantages

This system has several advantages over traditional metasearch engines. Primarily, it allows the user greater flexibility in deciding which engines should be used to perform the query. They also allow for easy addition of new engines to the users personal collection (similar to the way a user adds a new news feed to a news aggregator.)

Disadvantages

Because the search results are not displayed on the search engine's own page, the user does not get the benefit of the full-featured search engine site. The separate (but related) tagging and social bookmarking services are, however, evolving rapidly, and these shortcomings could possibly be addressed in the near future.

Functional overview of search aggregator

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A search aggregator typically allows users to select specific search engines ad-hoc to perform a specified query. At the time the user enters the query into the Search Aggregator, it generates the required URL "on the fly" by inserting the search query into the parameterized URL for the search feed. A parameterized URL looks something like this:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q={SEARCH_TERMS}&ie=UTF-8&output=rss.

In this case, the {SEARCH_TERMS} parameter would be replaced with the user requested search terms, and the query would be sent to the host. The Search Aggregator would then parse the results and display them in a user-friendly way.

Multi search

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Multisearch is a multitasking search engine which includes both search engine and metasearch engine characteristics with additional capability of retrieval of search result sets that were previously classified by users. It enables the user to gather results from its own search index as well as from one or more search engines, metasearch engines, databases or any such kind of information retrieval (IR) programs. Multisearch is an emerging feature of automated search and information retrieval systems which combines the capabilities of computer search programs with results classification made by a human.

Multisearch is a way to take advantage of the power of multiple search engines with a flexibility not seen in traditional metasearch engines. To the end user, a multisearch may appear to be just a customizable search engine; however, its behind-the-scenes technology enables it to put a face to the search process and to retrieve and display also a results set which has been classified by a human during a multisearch session and automatically included in the documents index. There are additional features available in many search engines and metasearch engines, but the basic idea is the same: reducing the amount of time required to search for resources by improvement of the accuracy and relevance of individual searches as well as the ability to manage the results.

Query expansion

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Query expansion (QE) is the process of reformulating a seed query to improve retrieval performance in information retrieval operations. In the context of web search engines, query expansion involves evaluating a user's input (what words were typed into the search query area and sometimes other types of data) and expanding the search query to match additional documents.

Query expansion involves techniques such as:

Finding synonyms of words, and searching for the synonyms as well

Finding all the various morphological forms of words by stemming each word in the search query

Fixing spelling errors and automatically searching for the corrected form or suggesting it in the results

Re-weighting the terms in the original query

Query expansion is a technology studied in the field of computer science, particularly within the realm of natural language processing and information retrieval.

Web crawler

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms or Web spider, Web robot, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutter.

This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a Web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).

A Web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit, called the seeds. As the crawler visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the crawl frontier. URLs from the frontier are recursively visited according to a set of policies.

Characteristics that make Crawling difficult

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There are important characteristics of the Web that make crawling it very difficult:

its large volume,

its fast rate of change, and

dynamic page generation.

These characteristics combine to produce a wide variety of possible crawlable URLs.

The large volume implies that the crawler can only download a fraction of the Web pages within a given time, so it needs to prioritize its downloads. The high rate of change implies that by the time the crawler is downloading the last pages from a site, it is very likely that new pages have been added to the site, or that pages have already been updated or even deleted.

The number of pages being generated by server-side software has also made it difficult for web crawlers to avoid retrieving duplicate content. Endless combinations of HTTP GET (URL-based) parameters exist, of which only a small selection will actually return unique content. For example, a simple online photo gallery may offer three options to users, as specified through HTTP GET parameters in the URL. If there exist four ways to sort images, three choices of thumbnail size, two file formats, and an option to disable user-provided content, then the same set of content can be accessed with forty-eight different URLs, all of which may be linked on the site. This mathematical combination creates a problem for crawlers, as they must sort through endless combinations of relatively minor scripted changes in order to retrieve unique content.

As Edwards et al. noted, "Given that the bandwidth for conducting crawls is neither infinite nor free, it is becoming essential to crawl the Web in not only a scalable, but efficient way, if some reasonable measure of quality or freshness is to be maintained." A crawler must carefully choose at each step which pages to visit next.

Web crawler policies:

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The behavior of a Web crawler is the outcome of a combination of policies:

a selection policy that states which pages to download,

a re-visit policy that states when to check for changes to the pages,

a politeness policy that states how to avoid overloading Web sites, and

a parallelization policy that states how to coordinate distributed Web crawlers.

Selection policy

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Given the current size of the Web, even large search engines cover only a portion of the publicly-available Internet; a study by Lawrence and Giles showed that no search engine indexes more than 16% of the Web in 1999. As a crawler always downloads just a fraction of the Web pages, it is highly desirable that the downloaded fraction contains the most relevant pages and not just a random sample of the Web.

This requires a metric of importance for prioritizing Web pages. The importance of a page is a function of its intrinsic quality, its popularity in terms of links or visits, and even of its URL (the latter is the case of vertical search engines restricted to a single top-level domain, or search engines restricted to a fixed Web site). Designing a good selection policy has an added difficulty: it must work with partial information, as the complete set of Web pages is not known during crawling.

Cho et al. made the first study on policies for crawling scheduling. Their data set was a 180,000-pages crawl from the stanford.edu domain, in which a crawling simulation was done with different strategies. The ordering metrics tested were breadth-first, backlink-count and partial Pagerank calculations. One of the conclusions was that if the crawler wants to download pages with high Pagerank early during the crawling process, then the partial Pagerank strategy is the better, followed by breadth-first and backlink-count. However, these results are for just a single domain.

Najork and Wiener performed an actual crawl on 328 million pages, using breadth-first ordering. They found that a breadth-first crawl captures pages with high Pagerank early in the crawl (but they did not compare this strategy against other strategies). The explanation given by the authors for this result is that "the most important pages have many links to them from numerous hosts, and those links will be found early, regardless of on which host or page the crawl originates".

Abiteboul designed a crawling strategy based on an algorithm called OPIC (On-line Page Importance Computation). In OPIC, each page is given an initial sum of "cash" that is distributed equally among the pages it points to. It is similar to a Pagerank computation, but it is faster and is only done in one step. An OPIC-driven crawler downloads first the pages in the crawling frontier with higher amounts of "cash". Experiments were carried in a 100,000-pages synthetic graph with a power-law distribution of in-links. However, there was no comparison with other strategies nor experiments in the real Web.

Boldi et al. used simulation on subsets of the Web of 40 million pages from the .it domain and 100 million pages from the WebBase crawl, testing breadth-first against depth-first, random ordering and an omniscient strategy. The comparison was based on how well PageRank computed on a partial crawl approximates the true PageRank value. Surprisingly, some visits that accumulate PageRank very quickly (most notably, breadth-first and the omniscent visit) provide very poor progressive approximations. Baeza-Yates et al. used simulation on two subsets of the Web of 3 million pages from the .gr and .cl domain, testing several crawling strategies. They showed that both the OPIC strategy and a strategy that uses the length of the per-site queues are better than breadth-first crawling, and that it is also very effective to use a previous crawl, when it is available, to guide the current one.

Daneshpajouh et al. designed a community based algorithm for discovering good seeds. Their method crawls web pages with high PageRank from different communities in less iteration in comparison with crawl starting from random seeds. One can extract good seed from a previously-crawled-Web graph using this new method. Using these seeds a new crawl can be very effective.

Restricting followed links

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A crawler may only want to seek out HTML pages and avoid all other MIME types. In order to request only HTML resources, a crawler may make an HTTP HEAD request to determine a Web resource's MIME type before requesting the entire resource with a GET request. To avoid making numerous HEAD requests, a crawler may examine the URL and only request a resource if the URL ends with certain characters such as .html, .htm, .asp, .aspx, .php, or a slash. This strategy may cause numerous HTML Web resources to be unintentionally skipped.

Some crawlers may also avoid requesting any resources that have a "?" in them (are dynamically produced) in order to avoid spider traps that may cause the crawler to download an infinite number of URLs from a Web site. This strategy is unreliable if the site uses URL rewriting to simplify its URLs.

Path-ascending crawling

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Some crawlers intend to download as many resources as possible from a particular web site. So path-ascending crawler was introduced that would ascend to every path in each URL that it intends to crawl. For example, when given a seed URL of http://llama.org/hamster/monkey/page.html, it will attempt to crawl /hamster/monkey/, /hamster/, and /. They found that a path-ascending crawler was very effective in finding isolated resources, or resources for which no inbound link would have been found in regular crawling.

Many path-ascending crawlers are also known as Harvester software, because they're used to "harvest" or collect all the content — perhaps the collection of photos in a gallery — from a specific page or host.

Focused crawling

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The importance of a page for a crawler can also be expressed as a function of the similarity of a page to a given query. Web crawlers that attempt to download pages that are similar to each other are called focused crawler or topical crawlers. The concepts of topical and focused crawling were first introduced by Menczer and by Chakrabarti et al.

The main problem in focused crawling is that in the context of a Web crawler, we would like to be able to predict the similarity of the text of a given page to the query before actually downloading the page. A possible predictor is the anchor text of links; this was the approach taken by Pinkerton in a crawler developed in the early days of the Web. Diligenti et al. propose to use the complete content of the pages already visited to infer the similarity between the driving query and the pages that have not been visited yet. The performance of a focused crawling depends mostly on the richness of links in the specific topic being searched, and a focused crawling usually relies on a general Web search engine for providing starting points.

Crawling the Deep Web

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A vast amount of Web pages lie in the deep or invisible Web. These pages are typically only accessible by submitting queries to a database, and regular crawlers are unable to find these pages if there are no links that point to them. Google’s Sitemap Protocol and mod oai are intended to allow discovery of these deep-Web resources.

Deep Web crawling also multiplies the number of Web links to be crawled. Some crawlers only take some of the <a href="URL" shaped URLS. In some cases, such as the Googlebot, Web crawling is done on all text contained inside the hypertext content, tags, or text.

SEO Contract Agreement

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Contract Agreement

Client agrees to pay “Company” a fee as stated in “Proposal.” Fee must be received prior to the start of any services provided. SEO Services are intended to provide the client with preferential positioning in selected search engines and report results on an ongoing and timely basis. SEO Services include:

• Research keywords and phrases to select appropriate, relevant search terms. Number of keywords is listed in the Proposal. Additional keyword purchases will require Addendum or separate contract.

• Edit various html tags and page text as necessary prior to submission to selected search engines and directories.

• Create as required, additional web pages for the purpose of “catching” keyword/phrase searches.

• Hand-submit your pages to the engines and directories stated in this agreement.

• Create positioning reports for main site and any associated pages showing rankings in the major search engines and under which keywords.

Re-visit policy

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The Web has a very dynamic nature, and crawling a fraction of the Web can take a really long time, usually measured in weeks or months. By the time a Web crawler has finished its crawl, many events could have happened. These events can include creations, updates and deletions.

From the search engine's point of view, there is a cost associated with not detecting an event, and thus having an outdated copy of a resource. The most-used cost functions are freshness and age.

Selection-based search

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A selection-based search system is a search engine system in which the user invokes a search query using only the mouse. A selection-based search system allows the user to search the internet for more information about any keyword or phrase contained within a document or webpage in any software application on his desktop computer using the mouse.

Traditional browser-based search systems require the user to launch a web browser, navigate to a search page, type or paste a query into a search box, review a list of results, and click a hyperlink to view these results.

Customer Acknowledgements

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CUSTOMER ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Customer understands, acknowledges and agrees that:

* Company has no control over the policies of search engines or directories with respect to the type of sites and/or content that they accept now or in the future. Customer's web site(s) may be excluded from any search engine or directory at any time at the sole discretion of the search engine or directory entity. Company will resubmit those pages that have been dropped from the index.

* Some search engines and directories may take as long as two (2) to four (4) months, and in some cases longer, after submission to list Customer's web site(s).

* Occasionally, search engines and directories will stop accepting submissions for an indefinite period of time.

* Occasionally, search engines and directories will drop listings for no apparent or predictable reason. Often listing will "reappear" without any additional submissions. Should the listing not reappear, Company will re-submit the web site(s) based on the current policies of the search engine or directory in question.

* Some search engines and directories offer expedited listing services for a fee. Company encourages Customer to take advantage of these expedited services. Customer is responsible for all expedited service fees unless otherwise noted in the Order Form.

SEO Services

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO SERVICES

Company agrees to provide Customer with SEO Services as described in the Order Form and an Agreement. Company is authorized to use the specific keywords and/or phases set forth in the Order Form for development, improving the ranking of, and/or positioning the contents of the Customer's URL(s) (as set forth in the Order Form) in search engines and/or directories. SEO Services are intended to provide the Customer with preferential positioning in selected search engines and report results on an ongoing and timely basis. SEO Services include:

* Research keywords and phrases to select appropriate, relevant search terms. The number of keywords is set forth in the Order Form. Additional keyword purchases will require a separate Order Form.

* Submit Customer's pages to search engines and directories as set forth in the Order Form or this Agreement.

* Create positioning reports showing rankings in the major search engines and under which keywords.

Characteristic features of a selection-based search system

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Three characteristic features of a selection-based search system are:

• The user can invoke search using only his mouse from within the context of any application on his desktop (for example Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader, Mozilla Firefox, etc.),

• receive categorized suggestions which are based on the context of the user-selected text (or in some cases the wisdom of crowds),

• View the results in floating information boxes which can be sized, shared, docked, closed and stacked on top of the document that has the user’s primary focus.

In its simplest form, selection-based search enables users to launch a search query by selecting text on any application on his desktop. It is commonly believed that selection-based search lowers the user barrier to search and permits an incremental number of searches per user per day.

Selection-based search systems also operate on the premise that user’s value information in context. They may save the user from having to juggle multiple applications, multiple web browsers or use multiple search engines separately.

The term selection-based search is frequently used to classify a set of search engine systems, including a desktop client and a series of cloud computing services, but is also used to describe the paradigm of categorizing a keyword and searching multiple data sources using only the mouse. The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) uses the terms selection-based search and mouse-based search interchangeably to describe this web search paradigm.

Dynamic Website SEO Terror Level Downgraded to Yellow: Rule# 1

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Dynamic Website SEO Terror Level Downgraded to Yellow:

Rule #1: Be sure that search engines can follow regular HTML links to all pages on your site

Any website needs individually linkable URLs for all unique pages on the site. This way every page can be bookmarked and deep linked by users, and indexed by search engines. But dynamic websites have an additional concern: making sure the search engine robots can reach all of these pages.

For example, suppose you have a form on your website: you ask people to select their location from a pull-down, and then when people submit the form your website generates a page with content that is specifically written for that geographical area. Search engine robots don't fill out forms or select from pull-down menus, so there will be no way for them to get to that page.

This problem can be easily remedied by providing standard <a href> type HTML links that point to all of your dynamic pages. The easiest way to do this is to add these links to your site map.

Operation

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Selection-based search systems create what is known as a semantic database of trained terms. They do not compile a physical database or catalogue of the web on the users' desktop computer. Instead, they take a user's selected keyword or keywords, pass it to several heterogeneous online cloud services, categorize the keyword(s), and then compile the results in a homogeneous manner based on a specific algorithm.

No two selection-based search systems are alike. Some simply provide a list of links in a context menu to other websites, such as the proposed Internet Explorer 8 Accelerators feature. Others only allow the user to search his desktop files such as Macintosh Spotlight, or to search a popular search engine such as Google or Yahoo!, while others only search lesser-known search engines, newsgroups, and more specialized databases. Selection-based search systems also differ in how the results are presented and the quality of semantic categorization which is used. Some will open links to content in a new browser window. Others return content in floating information boxes which can be sized, shared, docked, etc.

A key challenge for selection-based search is that a long or nested list of categories quickly becomes unwieldy for the user. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the selection-based search system to both categorize the user-selected text and to identify those online services which most naturally apply to the selected text. For example, when the user selects an address, the system needs to identify the address as most suitable for an online mapping service such as Google Maps. When the user selects a movie title, the system needs to identify the selection as suitable for a movie database such as Internet Movie Database. When the user selects the name of a company, the system needs to identify the concordant stock symbol and an appropriate financial database such as Yahoo! Finance.

Quality of results

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Usability can vary widely between selection-based search systems based on a large number of variables. Even the most basic selection-based search systems will allow more of the web to be searched by the user in the context of his work than any one stand-alone search engine. On the other hand, the process is sometimes said to be redundant if the system applies no intelligence to categorizing the selected text and matching it to an online service, and simply provides a link for the user to his or her preferred search engine(s).

Website Parse Template

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Website Parse Template (WPT) is an XML based open format which provides HTML structure description of website pages. WPT format allows web crawlers to generate Semantic Web’s RDFs for web pages. WPT is compatible with existing Semantic Web concepts defined by W3C (RDF and OWL) and UNL specifications.

Dynamic Website SEO Terror Level Downgraded to Yellow: Rule# 2

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Dynamic Website SEO Terror Level Downgraded to Yellow:

Rule #2: Set up an XML site map if you can’t create regular HTML links to all of your pages, or if it appears that search engines are having trouble indexing your pages.

If you have a large (10K pages or more) dynamic site, or you don’t think that providing static HTML links is an option, you can use an XML site map to tell search engines the locations of all your pages.

Most website owners tell Google and Yahoo! about their site maps through the search engines' respective webmaster tools (Links: Google Yahoo!). But if you're an early adopter, you should look into the new system whereby a site map can be easily designated in the robots.txt file using sitemap autodiscovery. Ask.com, Google and Yahoo! currently support this feature. Cool!

Dynamic Website SEO Terror Level Downgraded to Yellow: Rule# 3

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Dynamic Website SEO Terror Level Downgraded to Yellow:

Rule #3: If you must use dynamic URLs, keep them short and tidy

Another potential problem - and this is one that is subject to some debate - is with dynamic pages that have too many parameters in the URL. Google itself in its webmaster guidelines states the following: "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few."

Here are a few guidelines you should follow for your website parameters:

* Limit the number of parameters in the URL to a maximum of 2

* Use the parameter "?id=" only when in reference to a session id

* Be sure that the URL functions if all dynamic items are removed

* Be sure your internal links are consistent - always link with parameters in the same order and format

Dynamic Website SEO Terror Level Downgraded to Yellow: Rule# 4

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Dynamic Website SEO Terror Level Downgraded to Yellow:

Rule #4: Avoid dynamic-looking URLs if possible

Besides being second-class citizens of search, dynamic-looking URLs are also less attractive to your human visitors. Most people prefer to see URLs that clearly communicate the content on the page. Since reading the URL is one of the ways that people decide whether to click on a listing in search engines, you are much better off having a URL that looks like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/church-bells/discount/

rather than this:

http://www.yourseite.com/prod.php?id=23485&blt=234

Static-looking, “human-readable” URLs are more likely to receive inbound links, because some people will be less inclined to link to pages with very long or complicated URLs.

Furthermore, keywords in a URL are a factor, admittedly not a huge one, in search engine ranking algorithms. Notice how, in the above example, the static URL contains the keywords “discount” and “church bells” while the dynamic URL does not.

There are many tools available that will re-create a dynamic site in static form. There are also tools that will re-write your URLs, if you have too many parameters, to "look" like regular non-dynamic URLS.

Dynamic Website SEO Terror Level Downgraded to Yellow: Rule# 5

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Dynamic Website SEO Terror Level Downgraded to Yellow:

Rule #5: De-index stubs and search results

Have you heard of “website stubs?” These are pages that are generated by dynamic sites but really have no independent content on them. For example, if your website is a shopping cart for toys, there may be a page generated for the category “Age 7-12 Toys” but you may not actually have any products in this category. Stub pages are very annoying to searchers, and search engines, by extension, would like to prevent them from displaying in their results. So do us all a favor and either figure out a way to get rid of these pages, or exclude them from indexing using the robots.txt file or robots meta tag.

Search results from within your website is another type of page for which Google has stated a dislike: “Typically, web search results don’t add value to users, and since our core goal is to provide the best search results possible, we generally exclude search results from our web search index.” Here’s our advice: either make sure your search results pages add value for the searcher (perhaps by containing some unique content related to the searched term), or exclude them from indexing using the robots.txt file or robots meta tag.

WPT Syntax

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Website Parse Template consists of following sections:

• Ontology, where publisher defines concepts and relations which are used in the website.

• Templates, where publisher provides templates for groups of web pages which are similar by their content category and structure. Publisher provides the HTML elements’ XPath or TagIDs and links with website Ontology concepts.

• URLs, where publisher provides URL Patterns which collect the group of web pages linking them to "Parse Template". In the URLs section publisher can separate form URLs the part as a concept and link to website Ontology.

Website Parse Template begins with opening <icdl> tag and ends with closing </icdl> tag. Single Website Parse Template is referred to the same host, while single host may have several Website Parse Templates describing its HTML structure. It is required to specify the host for Website Parse Template at the beginning in <icdl> tag:

WPT Ontology

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Ontology section contains enumeration and definition of all concepts used in website. Listed concepts must be enclosed within <ontology> </ontology> tags. It is required to specify the ontology name (any rational string) and indicate supported language ("icdl:ontology", "owl" or "unl:uws") which is used to specify the concepts In computer science and information science, ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the properties of that domain, and may be used to define the domain.

The core meaning within computer science is a model for describing the world that consists of a set of types, properties, and relationship types. Exactly what is provided around these varies, but they are the essentials of ontology. There is also generally an expectation that there be a close resemblance between the real world and the features of the model in ontology.

SEO Site Maps

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Site Maps

What is a "Site Map" and why is it so important to SEO?

Site maps are at the heart of Search Engine Friendly Design. They make it very quick and easy for the search engines to find and index every page on your web site by putting links to every page in one spot.

Site maps also allow you to help the search engines to clearly understand what your web site is about and presents some unique opportunities in optimization. "Keyword density" is a term often used to describe the number of times a particular search phrase appears within your site. Site maps should make maximum use of your most relevant and important keywords. It should contribute to your keyword density within the link text on the page.

All links should be plain text and point to every page within your site with descriptive words that make it easy for both visitors and search engine spiders to understand what they will find on each page linked to from your site map page. Site maps are essential as an optimization technique and should always be linked to from your index page or home page.

Web Ontology Language

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontology’s, and is endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium.

This family of languages is based on two (largely, but not entirely, compatible) semantics: OWL DL and OWL Lite semantics are based on Description Logic, which have attractive and well-understood computational properties, while OWL Full uses a semantic model intended to provide compatibility with RDF Schema. OWL ontology’s are most commonly serialized using RDF/XML syntax. OWL is considered one of the fundamental technologies underpinning the Semantic Web, and has attracted both academic and commercial interest.

In October 2007, a new W3C working group was started to extend OWL with several new features as proposed in the OWL 1.1 member submission. This new version, called OWL 2, has already found its way into semantic editors and semantic reasoners.

W3C announced a new version of a standard for representing knowledge on the Web, OWL 2, on 27 October 2009.

OWL Ontologyâ��s

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The data described by OWL ontology is interpreted as a set of "individuals" and a set of "property assertions" which relate these individuals to each other. OWL ontology consists of a set of axioms which place constraints on sets of individuals (called "classes") and the types of relationships permitted between them. These axioms provide semantics by allowing systems to infer additional information based on the data explicitly provided. For example, an ontology describing families might include axioms stating that a "hasMother" property is only present between two individuals when "hasParent" is also present, and individuals of class "HasTypeOBlood" are never related via "hasParent" to members of the "HasTypeABBlood" class. If it is stated that the individual Harriet is related via "hasMother" to the individual Sue, and that Harriet is a member of the "HasTypeOBlood" class, then it can be inferred that Sue is not a member of "HasTypeABBlood". A full introduction to the expressive power of the OWL language(s) is provided in the W3C's OWL Guide.

Relation to description logics

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Previous attempts to build large ontology’s have been plagued by a lack of clear definitions. For example, one review found 18 different uses of the "Is-A" relationship. OWL tries to avoid this by having an explicit logical basis for the language, based on Description Logics.

Description logics (DLs) are a family of logics that are decidable fragments of first-order logic. The semantics for OWL is given through translation to a particular DL. Therefore OWL is both syntax for describing and exchanging ontology’s, and has a formally defined semantics that gives them meaning. For example, OWL DL corresponds to the SHOIN (D) description logic, while OWL 2 corresponds to the SROIQ (D) logic. In addition, sound, complete, and terminating reasoners (i.e. systems which are guaranteed to derive every consequence of the knowledge in ontology) exist for many DLs including those underlying OWL.

OWL Lite

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

OWL Lite was originally intended to support those users primarily needing a classification hierarchy and simple constraints. For example, while it supports cardinality constraints, it only permits cardinality values of 0 or 1. It was hoped that it would be simpler to provide tool support for OWL Lite than its more expressive relatives, allowing quick migration path for systems utilizing thesauri and other taxonomies. In practice, however, most of the expressiveness constraints placed on OWL Lite amount to little more than syntactic inconveniences: most of the constructs available in OWL DL can be built using complex combinations of OWL Lite features. Development of OWL Lite tools has thus proven almost as difficult as development of tools for OWL DL, and OWL Lite is not widely used

OWL DL

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

OWL DL was designed to provide the maximum expressiveness possible while retaining computational completeness, decidability, and the availability of practical reasoning algorithms. OWL DL includes all OWL language constructs, but they can be used only under certain restrictions (for example, number restrictions may not be placed upon properties which are declared to be transitive).

OWL DL is so named due to its correspondence with description logic, a field of research that has studied the logics that form the formal foundation of OWL.

OWL Full

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

OWL Full is based on a different semantics from OWL Lite or OWL DL, and was designed to preserve some compatibility with RDF Schema. For example, in OWL Full a class can be treated simultaneously as a collection of individuals and as an individual in its own right; this is not permitted in OWL DL. OWL Full allows an ontology to augment the meaning of the pre-defined (RDF or OWL) vocabulary. It is unlikely that any reasoning software will be able to support complete reasoning for OWL Full.

SEO - Brilliant Internet Marketing Search Engine Optimization Strategies

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO - Brilliant Internet Marketing Search Engine Optimization Strategies

Many people recognize the need for search engine optimization in their websites. However, these same people neglect to recognize that their internet marketing efforts require the same attention. In fact, depending on the techniques you employ, internet marketing search engine optimization could be even more important than the optimization of your own site.

This is due to the page rank of your site compared to the rank of the sites you are using in your internet marketing strategies. There are many cases in which your internet marketing activities could appear before your own site in the search engines. Here are a few examples:

* Listings submitted to high profile directories

* Online classified ads submitted to high profile sites

* Articles submitted to article directories

In order to make this so, you have to optimize your internet marketing content the same way you would your website content. Otherwise another more optimized entry in the directory will take your place in the search engines. You can do this by making sure your company descriptions, articles, and classified ads are all optimized for your primary and secondary keywords.

This optimization is slightly different from optimizing your site. Your site, and your article marketing, should not have more than one to three percent keyword density. This means that a three hundred word article should have no more than one to three keywords. However, classified ads and directory listings are so short this is not practical. Instead, list each keyword only one time but include as many as you possibly can without making the ad or listing sound repetitive.

The Proof's in the Code

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The Proof's in the Code

Ideally, we would always like to have the code available for us to modify if needed. This constant accessibility allows us to set up server behavior recommendations as well as change the way that things work or function in order to ensure that they are more effective for your SEO campaign. Many vendors will not give out their codes unless you pay them a premium, sometimes upwards of $10,000 per site using that code only, and many vendors may be reluctant to allow even that option.

Search engines only care about resulting code, meaning the HTML is sent to the browser post-parse. So, for an e-commerce website to have an effective SEO campaign, the SEO company you've enlisted may need the ability to modify how the software displays the code while the page is being dynamically built. This usually includes any category pages, product pages, or even some of the more "static" pages, such as the privacy policy, site map, and home page.

OWL Characteristics

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

OWL provides the capability of creating classes, properties, defining instances and its operations.

• Classes: User-defined classes which are subclasses of root class owl: Thing. A class may contain individuals, which are instances of the class, and other subclasses. For example, Employee could be the subclass of class owl: Thing while Dealer, Manager, and Laborer all subclass of Employee.

• Properties: A property is a binary relation that specifies class characteristics. They are attributes of instances and sometimes act as data values or link to other instances. There are two types of simple properties: data type and object properties. Datatype properties are relations between instances of classes and RDF literals or XML schema datatypes. Object properties are relations between instances of two classes. Although it should be noted, that this statement illustrates a fundamental defect with OWL (and indeed most data modelling methodologies but it is so easy in OWL). Due to its serialization being RDF/XML it has limited expressivity i.e. it assumes directionality in it's relationships. In fact relationships should not be expressed as verb phrases (with implicit directionality). In this example the relationship "ownedBy" should in fact be named as "ownership" - an object i.e. noun and not a verb phrase (please note the common suffix -ship; there are other similar suffixes such as -iage e.g. carriage, marriage etc. which indicate a noun for a relationship; the ultimate recourse is the gerund of the verb.) The class Vehicle then participates in the relationship playing the role of "property" or "chattel" or some such. The Person then participates in the relationship playing the role of "owner". These roles may then have other constraints such as min / max cardinality of participation applied. These roles and constraints are applied to the participating class. There seems to be little recognition of the need for relationships of greater arity than 2, however as early as Elmasri and Navarthe we know that in general n-ary relationships cannot be decomposed to binary. Properties may possess logical capabilities such as being transitive, symmetric, inverse and functional. Properties may also have domains and ranges.

• Instances: Instances are individuals that belong to the classes defined. A class may have any number of instances. Instances are used to define the relationship among different classes. For example, Mr. Smith is the instance of Manager Class and Mr. Shah is the instance of Dealer class then Mr. Smith is connected to Mr. Shah. By customer-dealer relationship. This is how OWL helps to establish various relationships among classes and instances of web content.

• Operations: OWL supports various operations on classes such as union, intersection and complement. It also allows class enumeration, cardinality, and disjointness.

Website Parse Template foresees several predefined concepts that are general for all kind of websites:

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

“Menu” - navigation bar/menu

“Logo” - design element/logo

“Content” - element that contains main textual content of the page

“Advertisement” – advertisement/banner

“External Link” – element that contains external links

WPT Templates

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Templates section contains number of templates for groups of similarly structured web pages. Either of those templates refers to a single group of similarly structured web pages. HTML elements’ XPath references or TagIDs are used for linking structured content with defined concepts. The template description starts with opening <template> tags and ends with closing </template> tag. In <template> tag it is required to specify template name and language used for templates description. As a template name can be chosen any string, but for the language it is necessary to indicate supported language type, e.g. "icdl:template", "rdf" or "unl:expression".

Customizable Product Administration

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Customizable Product Administration

Sometimes we run across platforms that allow us to customize certain attributes of pages from the back-end administration, including Title tags, Meta tags, and body content. This is a great advantage when working with an e-commerce solution that does not provide any sort of code access, as that provides the only way for us to "individualize" the hundreds of dynamic pages that may be present on your website when working on your SEO campaign.

Occasionally, however, the administration sections for your e-commerce solution are not all that robust, and once we have proper access to the underlying code, we have to develop code "hacks" in order to get the recommendations for your SEO campaign onto the website. For instance, when adding these "hacks" to client websites, they often take the form of what appears to be a small configuration file with our recommendations attached to variables. And depending on the page, our configuration file will spit out the proper recommendations for that page, manually adding them where they need to go. Unfortunately, this is usually only accomplished with direct access to underlying code in your e-commerce solution. Furthermore, if direct access is not given, we're often stuck between a rock and a hard place.

URLs section

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

It defines the URLs/URL patterns that are corresponding to groups of similarly structured web pages described in Templates section. In accordance with Templates section URLs section also may consist of several blocks and either of those blocks should start with <urls> tag and ends with </urls> tag.

As URLs block name can be chosen any string, but for the template it is necessary to indicate certain template name described in previous section. RegExp specifications are used for URL patterns descriptions. The concepts necessary for URL pattern definition (such as "id" and "fullname") are to be defined previously in Ontology section.

Flexibility is Key

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Flexibility is Key

Often, an SEO company will need to change how a page is displayed or what is displayed and when, perhaps in order to boost rankings and traffic for your SEO campaign. This is where the flexibility of the software comes into play for any effective e-commerce solution. For instance, there is an e-commerce solution that can provide header, footer, and page templates directly through the backend administration.

However, there are some vendors that prefer to lock away the templates by hard-coding them into the site code. The real paradox is when they won't give you access to the code to modify these things for yourself. This kind of inflexibility can spell disaster for any SEO campaign.

Social search

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Social search or a social search engine is a type of web search method that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users. When applied to web search this user-based approach to relevance is in contrast to established algorithmic or machine-based approaches where relevance is determined by analyzing the text of each document or the link structure of the documents.

Social search takes many forms, ranging from simple shared bookmarks or tagging of content with descriptive labels to more sophisticated approaches that combine human intelligence with computer algorithms.

The search experience takes into account varying sources of metadata, such as collaborative discovery of web pages, tags, social ranking, commenting on bookmarks, news, images, videos, knowledge sharing, podcasts and other web pages. Example forms of user input include social bookmarking or direct interaction with the search results such as promoting or demoting results the user feels are more or less relevant to their query.

History of social search

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The term social search began to emerge between 2004 and 2005. The concept of social ranking can be considered to derive from Google's PageRank algorithm, which assigns importance to web pages based on analysis of the link structure of the web, because PageRank is relying on the collective judgment of webmasters linking to other content on the web. Links, in essence, are positive votes by the webmaster community for their favorite sites.

In 2008, there are a few startup companies that focus on ranking search results according to one's social graph on social networks. Companies in the social search space include Sproose, Parse.ly, Mahalo, Jumper 2.0, Wikia Search, Qitera, Scour, Wink, Eurekster, Baynote, Delver, OneRiot and SideStripe. In 2008, a story on TechCrunch showed Google potentially adding in a voting mechanism to search results similar to Digg's methodology. This suggests growing interest in how social groups can influence and potentially enhance the ability of algorithms to find meaningful data for end users.

The term Lazyweb has been used to describe the act of out-sourcing your questions to your friends, usually by broadcasting them on Twitter or Facebook (as opposed to posting them on Q&A websites such as Yahoo Answers). The company Aardvark has created a more targeted version of this, which directs your questions to people in your social networks, based on relating the content of the question to the content of their social network pages. Aardvark users primarily use the Aardvark IM buddy to ask and answer their questions. The company Cofacio released a beta platform in August 2009 in the UK which marks a return to the open, broadcast method of social search for the Twitter/Facebook generation.

Benefits of social search

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

To date social search engines have not demonstrated measurably improved search results over algorithmic search engines. However, there are potential benefits deriving from the human input qualities of social search.

• Reduced impact of link spam by relying less on link structure of web pages.

• Increased relevance because each result has been selected by users.

• Leverage a network of trusted individuals by providing an indication of whether they thought a particular result was good or bad.

• The introduction of 'human judgement' suggests that each web page has been viewed and endorsed by one or more people, and they have concluded it is relevant and worthy of being shared with others using human techniques that go beyond the computer's current ability to analyze a web page.

• Web pages are considered to be relevant from the reader's perspective, rather than the author who desires their content to be viewed, or the web master as they create links.

• More current results. Because a social search engine is constantly getting feedback it is potentially able to display results that are more current or in context with changing information.

Concerns of social search

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

• Risk of spam. Because users can directly add results to a social search engine there is a risk that some users could insert search spam directly into the search engine. Elimination or prevention of this spam would require the ability to detect the validity of a user's' contribution, such as whether it agrees with other trusted users.

• "The Long Tail" of search is a concept that there are so many unique searches conducted that most searches, while valid, are performed very infrequently. A search engine that relied on users filling in all the searches would be at a disadvantage to one that used machines to crawl and index the entire web.

Spell checker

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

In computing, a spell checker (or spell check) is an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Spell checkers may be stand-alone capable of operating on a block of text, or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.

Operation of a spell checker

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Simple spell checkers operate on individual words by comparing each of them against the contents of a dictionary, possibly performing stemming on the word. If the word is not found it is considered to be an error, and an attempt may be made to suggest a word that was likely to have been intended. One such suggestion algorithm is to list those words in the dictionary having a small Levenshtein distance from the original word.

When a word which is not within the dictionary is encountered most spell checkers provide an option to add that word to a list of known exceptions that should not be flagged.

Design

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A spell checker customarily consists of two parts:

• A set of routines for scanning text and extracting words, and

• An algorithm for comparing the extracted words against a known list of correctly spelled words (ie., the dictionary).

The scanning routines sometimes include language-dependent algorithms for handling morphology. Even for a lightly inflected language like English, word extraction routines will need to handle such phenomena as contractions and possessives. It is unclear whether morphological analysis provides a significant benefit.

The word list might contain just a list of words, or it might also contain additional information, such as hyphenation points or lexical and grammatical attributes.

As an adjunct to these two components, the program's user interface will allow users to approve replacements and modify the program's operation.

One exception to the above paradigm are spell checkers which use based solely statistical information, for instance using n-grams. This approach usually requires a lot of effort to obtain sufficient statistical information and may require a lot more runtime storage. These methods are not currently in general use. In some cases spell checkers use a fixed list of misspellings and suggestions for those misspellings; this less flexible approach is often used in paper-based correction methods, such as the see also entries of encyclopedias.

History

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The first spell checkers were widely available on mainframe computers in the late 1970s. A group of six linguists from Georgetown University developed the first spell-check system for the IBM Corporation. The first spell checkers for personal computers appeared for CP/M and TRS-80 computers in 1980, followed by packages for the IBM PC after it was introduced in 1981.

Developers such as Maria Mariani, Soft-Art, Microlytics, Proximity, Circle Noetics, and Reference Software rushed OEM packages or end-user products into the rapidly expanding software market, primarily for the PC but also for Apple Macintosh, VAX, and UNIX. On the PCs, these spell checkers were standalone programs, many of which could be run in TSR mode from within word-processing packages on PCs with sufficient memory.

However, the market for standalone packages was short-lived, as by the mid 1980s developers of popular word-processing packages like WordStar and WordPerfect had incorporated spell checkers in their packages, mostly licensed from the above companies, who quickly expanded support from just English to European and eventually even Asian languages. However, this required increasing sophistication in the morphology routines of the software, particularly with regard to heavily-inflected languages like Hungarian and Finnish. Although the size of the word-processing market in a country like Iceland might not have justified the investment of implementing a spell checker, companies like WordPerfect nonetheless strove to localize their software for as many as possible national marketspart of their global marketing strategy.

Recently, spell checking has moved beyond word processors as Firefox 2.0, a web browser, has spell check support for user-written content. The web browsers Konqueror and Opera, the email client Kmail and the instant messaging client Pidgin also offer spell checking support, transparently using GNU Aspell as their engine. Mac OS X now has spell check in virtually all bundled applications and many third party applications take advantage of this as well.

Functionality

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The first spell checkers were "verifiers" instead of "correctors." They offered no suggestions for incorrectly spelled words. This was helpful for typos but it was not so helpful for logical or phonetic errors. The challenge the developers faced was the difficulty in offering useful suggestions for misspelled words. This requires reducing words to a skeletal form and applying pattern-matching algorithms.

It might seem logical that where spell-checking dictionaries are concerned, "the bigger, the better," so that correct words are not marked as incorrect. In practice, however, an optimal size for English appears to be around 90,000 entries. If there are more than these, incorrectly spelled words may be skipped because they are mistaken for others. For example, a linguist might determine on the basis of corpus linguistics that the word baht is more frequently a misspelling of bath or bat than a reference to the Thai currency. Hence, it would typically be more useful if a few people who write about Thai currency were slightly inconvenienced, than if the spelling errors of the many more people who discuss baths were overlooked.

The first MS-DOS spell checkers were mostly used in proofing mode from within word processing packages. After preparing a document, a user scanned the text looking for misspellings. Later, however, batch processing was offered in such packages as Oracle's short-lived CoAuthor. This allowed a user to view the results after a document was processed and only correct the words that he or she knew to be wrong. When memory and processing power became abundant, spell checking was performed in the background in an interactive way, such as has been the case with the Sector Software produced spellbound program released in 1987 and Microsoft Word since Word 95.

In recent years, spell checkers have become increasingly sophisticated; some are now capable of recognizing simple grammatical errors. However, even at their best, they rarely catch all the errors in a text (such as homonym errors) and will flag neologisms and foreign words as misspellings.

Spell-checking other languages

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

English is unusual in that most words used in formal writing have a single spelling that can be found in a typical dictionary, with the exception of some jargon and modified words. In many languages, however, it's typical to frequently combine words in new ways. In German, compound nouns are frequently coined from other existing nouns. Some scripts do not clearly separate one word from another, requiring word-splitting algorithms. Each of these presents unique challenges to non-English language spell checkers

Context-sensitive spell checkers

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Recently, research has focused on developing algorithms which are capable of recognizing a misspelled word, even if the word itself is in the vocabulary, based on the context of the surrounding words. Not only does this allow words such as those in the poem above to be caught, but it mitigates the detrimental effect of enlarging dictionaries, allowing more words to be recognized. The most common example of errors caught by such a system is homophone errors.

The most successful algorithm to date is Andrew Golding and Dan Roth's "Winnow-based spelling correction algorithm", published in 1999, which is able to recognize about 96% of context-sensitive spelling errors, in addition to ordinary non-word spelling errors. A context-sensitive spell checker appears in Microsoft Office 2007, in Ginger Software, in Spell Check Anywhere and in Ghotit context spell checker tuned for people with dyslexia.

Criticism

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Some critics of technology and computers have attempted to link spell checkers to a trend of skill losses in writing, reading, and oral skill. They claim that the convenience of computers has led people to become lazy, often not proofreading written work past a simple pass by a spell checker. Supporters claim that these changes may actually be beneficial to society, by making writing and learning new languages more accessible to the general public. They claim that the skills lost by the invention of automated spell checkers are being replaced by better skills, such as faster and more efficient research skills. Other supporters of technology point to the fact that these skills are not being lost to people who require and make use of them regularly, such as authors, critics, and language professionals.

An example of the problem of completely relying on spell checkers is shown in the "Spell-checker Poem" above. It was originally composed by Dr. Jerrold H. Zar in 1991, assisted by Mark Eckman with an original length of 225 words, and containing 123 incorrectly used words. According to most spell checkers, the poem is valid; although most people would be able tell at a simple glance that most words are used incorrectly.

Not all of the critics are opponents of technological progress, however. An article based on research by Galletta et al. reports that in the Galleta study, higher verbal skills are needed for highest performance when using a spell checker. The theory suggested that only writers with higher verbal skills could recognize and ignore false positives or incorrect suggestions. However, it was found that those with the higher skills lost their unaided performance advantage in multiple categories of errors, performing as poorly as the low verbals with the spell-checkers turned on. The conclusion points to some evidence of a loss of skill.

Spelling suggestion

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Spelling suggestion is a feature of many computer software applications used to suggest plausible replacements for words that are likely to have been misspelled.

Spelling suggestion features are commonly included in Internet search engines, word processors, spell checkers, medical transcription, automatic query reformulation, and frequency-log statistics reporting.

Ethical Search Engine Optimization

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Ethical Search Engine Optimization

Everyone in e-business wanted to list their websites at the top position of search engine ranking in order to catch an immediate attention of net users. They left no stone unturned to achieve their goals from their side, but they hardly realize the fact that how smart and ethical services they are receiving from the SEO company who are innumerable in number and very hard to recognize whether their services are ethical, result oriented or not.

While optimizing a website there are various things which are needed to be taken care of and the most important factor is the ethical way of optimizing the website. Some SEO company follow black hat or unethical practices while optimizing your website to attain a good search engine ranking and consequently your site will be penalized or banned completely from search engine causing great loss to your business.

Economical SEO-Multiple Domain Name

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Economical SEO-Multiple Domain Name

It is often said that more than one domain name, better is the chances to rank high in search engine. It may seem lucrative and real when we consider, yes! If one site is discarded, other will show the way. But there is no other dangerous strategy than following the aforementioned idea because preparing a domain more than one obviously takes more time, hard work and more cost too.

Just building a website is not enough to make your website compatible to search engine, it must be optimized accurately and linked properly with potential websites of same sector and go for separate submission of each domain naturally takes more time. It obviously takes sufficient time to prepare a website then just imagine what would be the case if you are going to work equally on each additional domain.

Nowadays, web site submission is not free, major search engines like Yahoo charges $299 per website per year and just think about submitting more sister domains say about 10-15, the cost will touch the sky and it would be difficult for you to manage these websites for long. In the process, it directly hit your business in reverse manner causing grave loss to your business. Another fact associated with submitting more domains is that search engine often considered sister domain as mirror domain and refuses to index them and ultimately penalize or banned your websites completely from search engine. So, never ever deceived by such myth but be practical, try and taste your work first, concentrate on single domain, concentrate on its ranking, spend your time and money optimizing your single domain, spread incoming links and gain more link popularity that enhances the chances of good search engine ranking.

Economical SEO- Resubmit Your Website Every Week Or Every Month

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Economical SEO- Resubmit Your Website Every Week Or Every Month

People often have the misconception that website need to be submitted time to time (weekly/monthly) in order to be visible at an influential position in search engine, but the fact is just the opposite because once the website is in search engine's database, it won't go away or lost but it will remain there as long as it is made correctly, without the inclusion of any fake ideas.

As far as the visibility on natural listing irrespective of any payment strategy is concerned, it may take some time but if it is well optimized and back linked properly, result may come earlier than expected. Whatever may be the case, it is not wise to give an ear to false promise making small SEO companies that prophecies your success on repeated submission of your website and charges you for each submission that yields no result. One more thing you need to be cautious about is that major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista considers this repeated website submission approach as spam and banned your website completely from search engine.

Therefore, if you really want your site to fulfill your purpose of gaining best return on investment (ROI), then take help from professional SEO team, who can bring real difference in your business.

Economical SEO- You Must Attain Number One Or You Must Be In Number One Page

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Economical SEO- You Must Attain Number One Or You Must Be In Number One Page

There is a myth that you must be in number one position or in first page of search engine result page but this is not at all true. If you continue to focus just on attaining the top position, your name could be vanished completely from search engine without your knowledge at any possible time.

Search engine optimization and search engine marketing not only focus on ranking of the website but it aims in optimizing the website with best possible keywords and phrases placed proportionately across site's content. The mission is to build a strong portfolio that is potent enough to generate more business lead and increases sale. Your top placement must be supported by targeted keywords and phrases that help achieving maximum ROI by attracting potential clients/buyers. If the site is well optimized by following ethical SEO practices then it will automatically locates itself to a suitable place in search engine.

Test PPC Ads -- Turn to social media marketing

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Find someone who is good at generating a representative sampling and asking the appropriate questions, and then test your creative. Use several different offers, creative, keywords, and search engines. Use the results to tweak your ads.

Turn to social media marketing. If you don’t already have a social media marketing strategy, now is a great time to create one. And if you do already have a social media marketing strategy, now is the time to tweak it. Some great ideas include adding video and other media to your website, and participating in social communities. Consider hiring an internet marketing expert to help you determine how to use social media marketing to your advantage.

Test PPC Ads -- Monitor usability

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Hopefully you had a large number of visitors to your site during the holiday season. If so, you probably received from feedback from those visitors about how to make your site more user-friendly. Take that feedback and make changes that can help visitors navigate your site more easily and find what they are looking for.

The goal is to grow your business. Like a mutual fund, successful search engine optimization is comprised of a multitude of carefully selected SEO tactics and requires diligent investment over a period of time. Once implemented and managed, the reward is a website which will generate more qualified business that leads from the free organic search engine listings and high quality links.

Test PPC Ads â�� Checking keywords

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

What were your top converting keywords for the fourth quarter last year? Pay particular attention to the keywords that had some conversion numbers but low traffic. Those keywords may have been getting low search engine placement, or they may have gotten interested parties to your site who then couldn’t find what they were looking for.

The most important part of building backlinks to your website is being able to locate the best keywords to uses as anchored text. Anchored text are the words that you use to link back to your website. When you use your keywords as anchored text, it lets the search engines know that your website is relevant for that keyword. This practice is what is responsible for ranking well for your keywords.

Keyword density

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.

In the late 1990s, which was the early days of search engines, keyword density was an important factor in how a page was ranked. However, as webmasters discovered this and the implementation of optimum keyword density became widespread, it became a minor factor in the rankings. Search engines began giving priority to other factors that are beyond the direct control of webmasters. Today, the overuse of keywords, a practice called keyword stuffing, will cause a web page to be penalized.

Many SEO experts consider the optimum keyword density to be 1 to 3 per cent. Using a keyword more than that could be considered search spam. The formula to calculate your keyword density on a web page for SEO purposes is (Nkr / Tkn) * 100, where Nkr is how many times you repeated a specific keyword and Tkn the total words in the analyzed text. This will result in a keyword density value. When calculating keyword density, be sure to ignore html tags and other embedded tags which will not actually appear in the text of the page once it is published.

When calculating the density of a keyword phrase, the formula would be (Nkr * Nwp / Tkn) * 100, where Nwp is the number of words in the phrase. So, for example, for a page about search engine optimization where that phrase is used four times and there are four hundred words on the page, the keyword phrase density is (4*3/400)*100 or 3 percent.

Keyword stuffing

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical search engine optimization (SEO) technique. Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags or in content. The repetition of words in meta tags may explain why many search engines no longer use these tags.

Keyword stuffing had been used in the past to obtain maximum search engine ranking and visibility for particular phrases. This method is completely outdated and adds no value to rankings today. In particular, Google no longer gives good rankings to pages employing this technique.

Keyword optimization

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

It would not be a very wise decision to rush into search engine marketing without having a set of relevant keywords ready beforehand. Search engines are all about keywords. The web surfer type in their search in the form of keywords and the search engines show results analyzing the relevance of those keywords in the web world.

A website that wishes to rank itself in the search engine result pages must have their most related keywords ready before they begin their Search Engine marketing program. These set of keywords are usually segregated into the primary, secondary and other related key words or phrases which best match the core content of the websites. Many web masters also tend to optimize their website with, keywords based on their products, services or content.

The selection of a wrong or unrelated set of keywords will hamper the traffic flow of your website and will inversely affect the conversion rate of the site. It is also important to choose high demand keywords as your relevant keywords. High demand keywords on the search engines are those keywords that are most commonly searched by the surfers. Selecting less popular keywords again will not be effective in attracting influx to your websites.

Test PPC Ads -- Track offline conversions

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

What's happening is that consumers - in increasing numbers - are researching online before buying offline (ROBO). According to ecommerce software provider MarketLive (as reported in Internet Retailer magazine), "The picture emerging from the data shows many consumers using the web to search for deals, moving quickly from site to site, and often going into stores to buy after researching online."

Many sales that take place offline started with online research, so figure out how many offline sales are somehow connected to research conducted on your website. This can help you increase sales in the future. Which promotions were successful online? Which were successful online? Use this information to your advantage.

Test PPC Ads -- Optimize your site for local search

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Thirty-two percent of all search engine queries are for products or services local to the person conducting the search. Optimize your website for your town or state.

Most of the companies offer following conversion optimization services:

•Website design and content/offer variation testing.

•A/B testing.

•Advanced offline and online consumer tracking analytics.

•Proprietary consumer behavioral research.

Monitor your search engine results

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Where is your company name and product or service showing up on the search engine results page? Who is at the top of the search engine results page when you search for variations on your company name? Are there any instances of negative feedback or negative comments when you search for your company name? If so, add your own clarifying comments or contact the commenter directly to see what you can do to improve his or her experience with your company.

Test PPC Ads -- Using data and Pay attention to PPC

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

It’s so much easier to reach returning customers than new ones, so find out just how much of your company’s business comes from returning customers. Talk to your returning customers and find out what they like about your product/service/website and about what kinds of improvements they suggest. Take this information to heart as you constantly strive to be the best.

Try new terms and outlets for your PPC efforts that will more effectively and efficiently reach your target demographic.

Test PPC Ads -- Use consistent language

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Whether your marketing efforts are focused online or offline, make sure you’re using consistent language across the board. When your message is solid and cohesive, you will reach a broader spectrum of potential customers.

Be sure to consult your internet marketing professional as you focus on each of these priorities. He or she will be able to advise you about how best to make each one work for the success of your company.

Cookie Cut SEO Solutions

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Some SEO professionals offer a range of packages at set costs, and those costs are generally based on an estimated number of hours. The challenge behind hiring a professional who offers cookie cut packages is that your needs may not fall into the set of services included in that package. Before hiring an SEO professional who charges per package, find out what provisions he has for services that fall outside of those included in the package.

Hourly Rates

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Hourly rates can vary as much as package rates can, but using a professional who charges by the hour is a little bit riskier.

Will the professional be available when you need him or her or will he or she be working on someone else’s project during your darkest and most desperate hour?

Using a professional who charges by the hour offers more flexibility than using one who charges by the package. You are more likely to be able to pick and choose the services you need, and that can be a great advantage in some cases.

Hybrid Customized SEO Package

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO 1 Services outlook on pricing on search engine optimization services is clear: Customized SEO is the right approach to successful SEO! Hourly SEO will be very costly, and we are not fan the "one size fits all packages" approach. Every business, industry, internet marketing strategy is unique and therefore requires a customized SEO solution. This personalized approach, by definition, covers most of the clients needs and restrict the need for hourly consulting time only to specific projects like copywrite or staff training.

Regardless of whether you choose a package deal or an hourly rate, there are some aspects of SEO that you will be charged for, and some that you won’t. Here are the aspects of SEO for which you should expect to be charged.

Market research

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

In order to do his job, the SEO professional must be familiar with the industry and the target audience.

Copy writing

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Writing the text for your website is daunting task, but it can make or break the success of your business.

Copywriting is the use of words to promote a person, business, opinion or idea. Although the word copy may be applied to any content intended for printing (as in the body of a newspaper article or book), the term copywriter is generally limited to such promotional situations, regardless of media (as advertisements for print, television, radio or other media). The author of newspaper or magazine copy, for example, is generally called a reporter or writer or a copywriter.

Tracking and Analysis

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

It really doesn’t matter what your SEO professional does if she can’t determine its effectiveness and can’t make changes based on objective results. Tracking and analysis are a crucial part of SEO evaluation and success.

Remember, search presents unique challenges and opportunities. With the potential for your listing to show in different areas on the results page, (organic listing, local listings, and paid listings), search presents an exciting potential to dominate your space

Is Your Conversion Rate Skewed?

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Web statistics only report what happens on your website. Visitors come and are recorded as a click-through from your ad to your site. Visitors click to different pages; the stats pick up on their movements. A conversion takes place online; it's noted. But, what if the customer leaves to buy offline? Then, you record a click-through, but no conversion. Instead, it can drive your bounce rate up while stalling out your conversion rate.

Stats programs aren't capable of tracking offline movements. So, when a Web searcher clicks from a PPC ad to your site and then leaves the site to purchase in your retail store or calls your 800 order line, it isn't calculated. It still counts, however. You made the sale. The person is arrives at your location to buy… he just isn’t buying from your site. It's sort of like the old question, "If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around, does it make a noise?"

Depending on your definition of a conversion, you may be doing much better than you think you are with your PPC campaign. Even if you have the most sophisticated analytics software available today, ROBO shoppers could be skewing your results. The problem is there's no accurate way to track offline conversions.

Off-site optimization

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

This includes link-building as well as submitting your site to search engines and directories.

You may also find that you have to pay for consultative services via email and phone, training, and report preparation. But by no means should you ever pay for automated submissions to directories or reports generated by SEO software. You should also steer clear of any SEO professional who wants to charge for regular optimization of your website. On-site optimization should be a one-time endeavor except for optimizing new pages that are created later or making necessary changes to current pages that will improve your return on investment.

In sum, there is really no way to estimate how much SEO will cost without first talking to a professional yourself. But before you do so, determine whether a cookie cut package, hourly rate, or the preferable customized approach that will best serve your needs, and be prepared to intelligently discuss what is and isn’t included in the price you plan to pay. You’ll be glad you did!

Search Engine Penalization

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The low-budget method of SEO, either hiring a less-than-optimal firm or having someone do SEO in-house, often results in getting your website penalized, or even banned, by the search engines.

While some SEO professionals deliberately use inappropriate techniques (Black Hat SEO) to increase rankings, other overzealous in-house experts can end up getting your business penalized because they use questionable techniques without even knowing it.

While these questionable techniques might get quick results, the ultimate result is penalization by the search engines, which puts your company in an even worse position than it was when you weren’t pursuing SEO at all.

Cheap SEO is Expensive

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Simply put, if you invest money in SEO and it’s done poorly, you lose. You lose the money that you already invested, plus the additional money that you’ll have to shell out to get the job done correctly.

This is actually the issue that concerns most companies the least since they understand that there is risk involved in pursuing an endeavour that the company has never before tried.

Time & SEO

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Businesses are quickly realizing the benefits of search engine optimization, particularly given the current state of the economy. SEO is relatively inexpensive when compared to other marketing strategies and it levels the marketing playing field between large and small businesses.

So it’s definitely the bandwagon on which you want to find yourself. The difficulty with SEO, however, is that it takes a long time before you’ll see noticeable results. And that’s if you have a seasoned professional doing it for you. If you take the time to train someone who already works for you, or if you hire someone who isn’t very good at SEO, you’re losing valuable time in which your competitors are potentially gobbling up your business. You need to do SEO, and you need to do it well and quickly.

The Give-Up Factor

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Unfortunately, when businesses have bad experiences with SEO, either because they hired someone who was under qualified or because they tried to train someone in-house, they give up on the whole process altogether. They decide that SEO simply doesn’t work simply because they didn’t have the right person or people doing it. When companies give up on SEO altogether, they make a huge sacrifice. They sacrifice the revenue they might have earned had they made the initial investment in high-quality SEO, and they sacrifice the opportunity to get the word out about their business via people who have found the website and have told others about it.

Every business is obviously concerned about spending money in the right places, and the temptation is great for them to skimp when it comes to SEO, particularly if they are suspicious about its results in the first place. But the truth is that mismanaging SEO can cost more than hiring a reputable, high-quality firm from the get-go. Don’t let it happen to you! Cheap unqualified SEO is expensive

The rise of social media has created a whole new world for internet marketing, but it has also created a potential nightmare for companies who encounter less-than-optimal public relations situations. Disgruntled customers can share their bad experiences within minutes, and crises that put large number of people at risk can spell doom and gloom for businesses that don’t have a plan.

Pillars of online reputation management -- 1

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What Could Go Wrong? Plenty, that’s what. Sit down and consider all of the possible things that could go wrong and how to respond if one of those things should happen. As you’re making your list, you’ll notice that the possibilities fall into broader categories, making it easier to determine what to do in each case.

Pillars of online reputation management -- 2

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

‘Fess Up.

It’s a viral world, and you’re only going to shoot yourself in the foot if you try to hide from it or ignore it. The first thing to do is to go public with an accurate retelling of the story. Make sure everyone is on the same page so that the story is same no matter who tells it.

Pillars of online reputation management â�� 3, 4

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Implement the Plan: If you’ve done #1, then you’ll be prepared to implement whatever plan you’ve created to address the issue.

Communicate Creatively: The first thing most folks will do when they hear about a crisis is to turn to the internet. Find out where most of your potential customers and others will be turning in order to find credible information about the situation. Then show up there, too, clearly communicating your solution to the problem.

Pillars of online reputation management â�� 5, 6

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Be Present Both Online and Offline: Make sure your story is consistent whether it’s being told on the internet or on the local news. Different media sources will try to develop their own stories about your crisis. Cut down on the amount of information they can use to distort the issue by making sure your story is consistent.

Keep the Information Flowing: Many internet users will continue to follow up on the story day after day to see if there are any new developments. Keeps the information coming in the form of podcasts, investor communications, and blog posts?

Pillars of online reputation management â�� 7

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Keep Your Message Up Front. Use both natural and paid search to keep your own message at the top of the search engine results rather than letting the top spots be usurped by negative messages about your company. You may need to hire an internet marketing professional with experience in reputation management.

Pillars of online reputation management â�� 8

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Seek Out Friends. There are just as many friends out there willing to support you as there are viral detractors, so find those friends and let them work for you. The best way to do this is to keep telling your story truthfully and allow people to support you through positive PR and links.

Pillars of online reputation management â�� 9

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Continue to monitor.

The buzz will die down soon enough, but that doesn’t mean you can stop monitoring the internet. You’ll find that negative information will stick around for a long time, thanks to the archiving nature of the internet. Continuing monitoring and addressing the negative stuff that you find should be an ongoing process.

Pillars of online reputation management â�� 10

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Find the Teaching Moments. Once the crisis is over, sit down with your team and evaluate the issues. How can the crisis be avoided in the future? Did the plan you made in #1 work effectively? How will you change it for the next time? Repeat this exercise anytime you hear of another company experiencing a crisis of online reputation management. Discuss the mistakes they made, as well as the effective responses, and adjust your own plan accordingly.

You can handle many of these steps on your own, of course, but always consider the possibility of hiring an internet marketing professional to help you create your plan and implement. It’s time, and money, wisely spent.

Services offered by various companies

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

•On-site SEO services: revise metadata, implement targeted keywords into content development, create and optimize landing pages, build internal linking and establish company blogs.

•Off-site SEO services: build external links, submit to Web directories, optimize widgets, establish social media profiles, post to external blogs, join online communities and interact on discussion forums.

•Feed optimization services: develop XML sitemaps and integrate local RSS feeds into your affiliate sites for customized local traffic.

•Web analytics: track website traffic, manage rank changes for targeted keywords in metadata and body content, suggest keyword revisions, monitor all links to your site, provide up-to-date reports on your competitors’ sites and keywords, follow your internal blog ranking and more.

What is Search Engine?

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. Although search engine is really a general class of programs, the term is often used to specifically describe systems like Google, Alta Vista and Excite that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web and USENET newsgroups.

Typically, a search engine works by sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible. Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query.

Spider trap

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A condition of dynamic Web sites in which a search engine’s spider becomes trapped in an endless loop of code where a spider’s request for a page from a Web server is met with a the server’s request for an information input from the spider, which cannot provide information to the server as it is only collecting data for the search engine’s index. Spider traps are the result of poorly written cgi scripts and potentially can crash a server and/or prevent the spider from returning to a site.

Meta tag

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A special HTML tag that provides information about a Web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page's content. Many search engines use this information when building their indices.

Deep link

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A hyperlink either on a Web page or in the results of a search engine query to a page on a Web site other than the site’s home page. Typically, a Web site’s home page is the top page in the site’s hierarchy, and any page other than that is considered “deep.”

Some in the industry have opposed the proliferation of deep links as they drive users away from a site’s home page where there are advertisers paying for space based on page views.

Web search engine

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A web search engine is a tool designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike Web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input.

How web search engines work?

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A search engine operates, in the following order

• Web crawling

• Indexing

• Searching

Data about web pages are stored in an index database for use in later queries. A query can be a single word. The purpose of an index is to allow information to be found as quickly as possible.

Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas others, such as AltaVista, store every word of every page they find. This cached page always holds the actual search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it. This problem might be considered to be a mild form of linkrot, and Google's handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations that the search terms will be on the returned webpage.

This satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects the search terms to be on the returned pages. Increased search relevance makes these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data that may no longer be available elsewhere.

The index is built from the information stored with the data and the method by which the information is indexed. Most search engines support the use of the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query.

Boolean operators are for literal searches that allow the user to refine and extend the terms of the search. The engine looks for the words or phrases exactly as entered. Some search engines provide an advanced feature called proximity search which allows users to define the distance between keywords. There is also concept-based searching where the research involves using statistical analysis on pages containing the words or phrases you search for. As well, natural language queries allow the user to type a question in the same form one would ask it to a human.

Crawler-based search engines

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Crawler-based search engines are those that use automated software agents (called crawlers) that visit a Web site, read the information on the actual site, read the site's meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects to performing indexing on all linked Web sites as well.

The crawler returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. The crawler will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the administrators of the search engine.

Anchor Text

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink. The text that a user would click on to follow a link. In the case the link is an image the image alt attribute may act in the place of anchor text.

Search engines assume that your page is authoritative for the words that people include in links pointing at your site. When links occur naturally they typically have a wide array of anchor text combinations. Too much similar anchor text may be a considered a sign of manipulation, and thus discounted or filtered. Make sure when you are building links that you control that you try to mix up your anchor text.

Web search query

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A web search query is a query that a user enters into web search engine to satisfy his or her information needs. Web search queries are distinctive in that they are unstructured and often ambiguous; they vary greatly from standard query languages which are governed by strict syntax rules.

Types of web search query

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are three broad categories that cover most web search queries:

Informational queries – Queries that cover a broad topic (e.g., colorado or trucks) for which there may be thousands of relevant results.

Navigational queries – Queries that seek a single website or web page of a single entity (e.g., youtube or delta airlines).

Transactional queries – Queries that reflect the intent of the user to perform a particular action, like purchasing a car or downloading a screen saver.

Search engines often support a fourth type of query that is used far less frequently:

Connectivity queries – Queries that report on the connectivity of the indexed web graph (e.g., Which links point to this URL?, and How many pages are indexed from this domain name?).

Characteristics of web search query

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Most commercial web search engines do not disclose their search logs, so information about what users are searching for on the Web is difficult to come by. Nevertheless, a study in 2001 analyzed the queries from the Excite search engine showed some interesting characteristics of web search:

• The average length of a search query was 2.4 terms.

• About half of the users entered a single query while a little less than a third of users entered three or more unique queries.

• Close to half of the users examined only the first one or two pages of results (10 results per page).

• Less than 5% of users used advanced search features (e.g., Boolean operators like AND, OR, and NOT).

• The top four most frequently used terms were, (empty search), and, of, and sex.

Structured queries

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

With search engines that support Boolean operators and parentheses, a technique traditionally used by librarians can be applied. A user who is looking for documents that cover several topics or facets may want to describe each of them by a disjunction of characteristic words, such as vehicles OR cars OR automobiles.

A faceted query is a conjunction of such facets; e.g. a query such as (electronic OR computerized OR DRE) AND (voting OR elections OR election OR balloting OR electoral) is likely to find documents about electronic voting even if they omit one of the words "electronic" and "voting", or even both.

Index (search engine)

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Search engine indexing collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, physics and computer science. An alternate name for the process in the context of search engines designed to find web pages on the Internet is Web indexing.

Popular engines focus on the full-text indexing of online, natural language documents. Media types such as video and audio and graphics are also searchable.

Meta search engines reuse the indices of other services and do not store a local index, whereas cache-based search engines permanently store the index along with the corpus. Unlike full-text indices, partial-text services restrict the depth indexed to reduce index size. Larger services typically perform indexing at a predetermined time interval due to the required time and processing costs, while agent-based search engines index in real time.

Indexing

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The purpose of storing an index is to optimize speed and performance in finding relevant documents for a search query. Without an index, the search engine would scan every document in the corpus, which would require considerable time and computing power.

For example, while an index of 10,000 documents can be queried within milliseconds, a sequential scan of every word in 10,000 large documents could take hours. The additional computer storage required to store the index, as well as the considerable increase in the time required for an update to take place, are traded off for the time saved during information retrieval.

Index Design Factors

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Major factors in designing a search engine's architecture include:

• Merge factors: How data enters the index, or how words or subject features are added to the index during text corpus traversal, and whether multiple indexers can work asynchronously. The indexer must first check whether it is updating old content or adding new content. Traversal typically correlates to the data collection policy. Search engine index merging is similar in concept to the SQL Merge command and other merge algorithms.

• Storage techniques: How to store the index data, that is, whether information should be data compressed or filtered.

• Index size: How much computer storage is required to support the index.

• Lookup speed: How quickly a word can be found in the inverted index. The speed of finding an entry in a data structure, compared with how quickly it can be updated or removed, is a central focus of computer science.

• Maintenance: How the index is maintained over time.

• Fault tolerance: How important it is for the service to be reliable. Issues include dealing with index corruption, determining whether bad data can be treated in isolation, dealing with bad hardware, partitioning, and schemes such as hash-based or composite partitioning, as well as replication.

Index Data Structures

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Search engine architectures vary in the way indexing is performed and in methods of index storage to meet the various design factors.

Types of indices include:

Suffix tree: Figuratively structured like a tree, supports linear time lookup. Built by storing the suffixes of words. The suffix tree is a type of trie. Tries support extendable hashing, which is important for search engine indexing. Used for searching for patterns in DNA sequences and clustering. A major drawback is that the storage of a word in the tree may require more storage than storing the word itself. An alternate representation is a suffix array, which is considered to require less virtual memory and supports data compression such as the BWT algorithm.

Tree: An ordered tree data structure that is used to store an associative array where the keys are strings. Regarded as faster than a hash table but less space-efficient.

Inverted index: Stores a list of occurrences of each atomic search criterion, typically in the form of a hash table or binary tree.

Citation index: Stores citations or hyperlinks between documents to support citation analysis, a subject of Bibliometrics.

Ngram index: Stores sequences of length of data to support other types of retrieval or text mining.

Document-term matrix: Used in latent semantic analysis, stores the occurrences of words in documents in a two-dimensional sparse matrix.

Challenges in Parallelism

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A major challenge in the design of search engines is the management of parallel computing processes. There are many opportunities for race conditions and coherent faults. For example, a new document is added to the corpus and the index must be updated, but the index simultaneously needs to continue responding to search queries. This is a collision between two competing tasks. Consider that authors are producers of information, and a web crawler is the consumer of this information, grabbing the text and storing it in a cache (or corpus).

The forward index is the consumer of the information produced by the corpus, and the inverted index is the consumer of information produced by the forward index. This is commonly referred to as a producer-consumer model.

The indexer is the producer of searchable information and users are the consumers that need to search. The challenge is magnified when working with distributed storage and distributed processing. In an effort to scale with larger amounts of indexed information, the search engine's architecture may involve distributed computing, where the search engine consists of several machines operating in unison. This increases the possibilities for incoherency and makes it more difficult to maintain a fully-synchronized, distributed, parallel architecture.

Inverted indices

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Many search engines incorporate an inverted index when evaluating a search query to quickly locate documents containing the words in a query and then rank these documents by relevance. Because the inverted index stores a list of the documents containing each word, the search engine can use direct access to find the documents associated with each word in the query in order to retrieve the matching documents quickly. This index can only determine whether a word exists within a particular document, since it stores no information regarding the frequency and position of the word; it is therefore considered to be a Boolean index. Such an index determines which documents match a query but does not rank matched documents. In some designs the index includes additional information such as the frequency of each word in each document or the positions of a word in each document.

Position information enables the search algorithm to identify word proximity to support searching for phrases; frequency can be used to help in ranking the relevance of documents to the query. Such topics are the central research focus of information retrieval. The inverted index is a sparse matrix, since not all words are present in each document. To reduce computer storage memory requirements, it is stored differently from a two dimensional array. The index is similar to the term document matrices employed by latent semantic analysis. The inverted index can be considered a form of a hash table. In some cases the index is a form of a binary tree, which requires additional storage but may reduce the lookup time. In larger indices the architecture is typically a distributed hash table.

Index Merging

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The inverted index is filled via a merge or rebuild. A rebuild is similar to a merge but first deletes the contents of the inverted index. The architecture may be designed to support incremental indexing, where a merge identifies the document or documents to be added or updated and then parses each document into words. For technical accuracy, a merge conflates newly indexed documents, typically residing in virtual memory, with the index cache residing on one or more computer hard drives. After parsing, the indexer adds the referenced document to the document list for the appropriate words. In a larger search engine, the process of finding each word in the inverted index may be too time consuming, and so this process is commonly split up into two parts, the development of a forward index and a process which sorts the contents of the forward index into the inverted index. The inverted index is so named because it is an inversion of the forward index.

Compression

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Generating or maintaining a large-scale search engine index represents a significant storage and processing challenge. Many search engines utilize a form of compression to reduce the size of the indices on disk. Consider the following scenario for a full text, Internet search engine.

An estimated 2,000,000,000 different web pages exist as of the year 2000.

Suppose there are 250 words on each webpage (based on the assumption they are similar to the pages of a novel.

It takes 8 bits (or 1 byte) to store a single character. Some encodings use 2 bytes per character.

The average number of characters in any given word on a page may be estimated at 5.

The average personal computer comes with 100 to 250 gigabytes of usable space.

Given this scenario, an uncompressed index (assuming a non-conflated, simple, index) for 2 billion web pages would need to store 500 billion word entries. At 1 byte per character, or 5 bytes per word, this would require 2500 gigabytes of storage space alone, more than the average free disk space of 25 personal computers. This space requirement may be even larger for fault-tolerant distributed storage architecture. Depending on the compression technique chosen, the index can be reduced to a fraction of this size. The trade-off is the time and processing power required to perform compression and decompression.

Notably, large scale search engine designs incorporate the cost of storage as well as the costs of electricity to power the storage. Thus compression is a measure of cost.

Document Parsing

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Document parsing breaks apart the components (words) of a document or other form of media for insertion into the forward and inverted indices. The words found are called tokens, and so, in the context of search engine indexing and natural language processing, parsing is more commonly referred to as tokenization. It is also sometimes called word boundary disambiguation, tagging, text segmentation, content analysis, text analysis, text mining, concordance generation, speech segmentation, lexing, or lexical analysis. The terms 'indexing', 'parsing', and 'tokenization' are used interchangeably in corporate slang.

Natural language processing, as of 2006, is the subject of continuous research and technological improvement. Tokenization presents many challenges in extracting the necessary information from documents for indexing to support quality searching. Tokenization for indexing involves multiple technologies, the implementation of which is commonly kept as corporate secrets.

Tokenization

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Unlike literate humans, computers do not understand the structure of a natural language document and cannot automatically recognize words and sentences. To a computer, a document is only a sequence of bytes. Computers do not 'know' that a space character separates words in a document. Instead, humans must program the computer to identify what constitutes an individual or distinct word, referred to as a token. Such a program is commonly called a tokenizer or parser or lexer. Many search engines, as well as other natural language processing software, incorporate specialized programs for parsing, such as YACC or Lex.

During tokenization, the parser identifies sequences of characters which represent words and other elements, such as punctuation, which are represented by numeric codes, some of which are non-printing control characters. The parser can also identify entities such as email addresses, phone numbers, and URLs. When identifying each token, several characteristics may be stored, such as the token's case (upper, lower, mixed, proper), language or encoding, lexical category (part of speech, like 'noun' or 'verb'), position, sentence number, sentence position, length, and line number.

Language Recognition

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

If the search engine supports multiple languages, a common initial step during tokenization is to identify each document's language; many of the subsequent steps are language dependent (such as stemming and part of speech tagging).

Language recognition is the process by which a computer program attempts to automatically identify, or categorize, the language of a document. Other names for language recognition include language classification, language analysis, language identification, and language tagging.

Automated language recognition is the subject of ongoing research in natural language processing. Finding which language the words belongs to may involve the use of a language recognition chart.

Format Analysis

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

If the search engine supports multiple document formats, documents must be prepared for tokenization. The challenge is that many document formats contain formatting information in addition to textual content. For example, HTML documents contain HTML tags, which specify formatting information such as new line starts, bold emphasis, and font size or style.

If the search engine were to ignore the difference between content and 'mark-up', extraneous information would be included in the index, leading to poor search results. Format analysis is the identification and handling of the formatting content embedded within documents which controls the way the document is rendered on a computer screen or interpreted by a software program.

Format analysis is also referred to as structure analysis, format parsing, tag stripping, format stripping, text normalization, text cleaning, and text preparation. The challenge of format analysis is further complicated by the intricacies of various file formats. Certain file formats are proprietary with very little information disclosed, while others are well documented. Common, well-documented file formats that many search engines support include:

• HTML

• ASCII text files (a text document without specific computer readable formatting)

• Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF)

• PostScript (PS)

• LaTex

• UseNet netnews server formats

• XML and derivatives like RSS

• SGML

• Multimedia meta data formats like ID3

• Microsoft Word

• Microsoft Excel

• Microsoft Powerpoint

• IBM Lotus Notes

Options for dealing with various formats include using a publicly available commercial parsing tool that is offered by the organization which developed, maintains, or owns the format, and writing a custom parser.

Commonly supported compressed file formats

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Some search engines support inspection of files that are stored in a compressed or encrypted file format. When working with a compressed format, the indexer first decompresses the document; this step may result in one or more files, each of which must be indexed separately.

Commonly supported compressed file formats include:

• ZIP - Zip archive file

• RAR - Roshal ARchive File

• CAB - Microsoft Windows Cabinet File

• Gzip - File compressed with gzip

• BZIP - File compressed using bzip2

• Tape ARchive (TAR), Unix archive file, not (itself) compressed

• TAR.Z, TAR.GZ or TAR.BZ2 - Unix archive files compressed with Compress, GZIP or BZIP2

Format analysis can involve quality improvement methods to avoid including 'bad information' in the index. Content can manipulate the formatting information to include additional content.

Section Recognition

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Some search engines incorporate section recognition, the identification of major parts of a document, prior to tokenization. Not all the documents in a corpus read like a well-written book, divided into organized chapters and pages. Many documents on the web, such as newsletters and corporate reports, contain erroneous content and side-sections which do not contain primary material (that which the document is about).

Even though the content is displayed, or rendered, in different areas of the view, the raw markup content may store this information sequentially. Words that appear sequentially in the raw source content are indexed sequentially, even though these sentences and paragraphs are rendered in different parts of the computer screen. If search engines index this content as if it were normal content, the quality of the index and search quality may be degraded due to the mixed content and improper word proximity.

Two primary problems are noted:

Content in different sections is treated as related in the index, when in reality it is not

Organizational 'side bar' content is included in the index, but the side bar content does not contribute to the meaning of the document, and the index is filled with a poor representation of its documents.

Section analysis may require the search engine to implement the rendering logic of each document, essentially an abstract representation of the actual document, and then index the representation instead.

Meta Tag Indexing

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Specific documents often contain embedded meta information such as author, keywords, description, and language. For HTML pages, the meta tag contains keywords which are also included in the index.

Earlier, Internet search engine technology would only index the keywords in the meta tags for the forward index; the full document would not be parsed. At that time full-text indexing was not as well established, nor was the hardware able to support such technology. The design of the HTML mark-up language initially included support for meta tags for the very purpose of being properly and easily indexed, without requiring tokenization.

As the Internet grew through the 1990s, many brick-and-mortar corporations went 'online' and established corporate websites. The keywords used to describe web pages (many of which were corporate-oriented web pages similar to product brochures) changed from descriptive to marketing-oriented keywords designed to drive sales by placing the webpage high in the search results for specific search queries. The fact that these keywords were subjectively-specified was leading to spamdexing, which drove many search engines to adopt full-text indexing technologies in the 1990s.

Search engine designers and companies could only place so many 'marketing keywords' into the content of a webpage before draining it of all interesting and useful information. Given that conflict of interest with the business goal of designing user-oriented websites which were 'sticky', the customer lifetime value equation was changed to incorporate more useful content into the website in hopes of retaining the visitor. In this sense, full-text indexing was more objective and increased the quality of search engine results, as it was one more step away from subjective control of search engine result placement, which in turn furthered research of full-text indexing technologies.

Vertical search

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Vertical search, or domain-specific search, part of a larger sub-grouping known as "specialized" search is a relatively new tier in the Internet search industry, consisting of search engines that focus on specific slices of content.

The type of content in special focus may be based on topicality or information type. For example, an intelligent medical search engine would clearly be specialized in terms of its topical focus, whereas a video search engine would seek out results within content that is in a video format.

So, vertical search may focus on all manner of differentiating criteria, such as particular locations, multimedia object types and so on.

Vertical search vs. broad-based search

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Broad-based search engines such as Google or Yahoo fetch very large numbers of documents using a Web crawler. Another program called an indexer then reads these documents and creates a search index based on words contained in each document. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indexes so that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query.

Vertical search engines, on the other hand, send their spiders out to a highly refined database, and their indexes contain information about a specific topic. As a result, they are of most value to people interested in a particular area; what’s more, the companies that advertise on these search engines reach a focused audience. For example, there are search engines for veterinarians, doctors, patients, job seekers, house hunters, recruiters, travellers and corporate purchasers, to name a few.

The vertical search user

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

As the broad-based search engines have gotten broader, so have their search results. This has become increasingly frustrating to users who have turned to search engines to find information on a specialized topic, be it local information, travel sites or specific business channels.

This is especially true of the latter. In the business marketing profession, terms that have very specific meanings in certain industries will yield a host of irrelevant results when used as keywords on the big search engines. For example, say a dentist is looking for information on ceramics, a common material used in dental work. If the dentist performs a Google search on the keyword "ceramics", Google will serve up millions of results, but most of the entries on the first few pages will concern hobbies like pottery. On the other hand, if the dentist performs the same search on DentalProducts.net, a well-regarded media company Web site; it will return much more relevant results.

LookSmart, an online media and technology company that has launched more than 180 vertical search sites, contends that Web users will increasingly use the Internet the way they do cable television, opting for specialized channels that speak directly to their concerns. This company says vertical search engines will chip away at Google’s and Yahoo’s audiences the same way cable TV channels such as TLC and the National Geographic Channel have eaten into network audiences.

The buyer in vertical search marketing

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

On the simplest level, the vertical search buyer is a marketer that wants to be found by the user of one of these specialized search engines. When a business person searches the Web through a search engine or a directory, that person is considered to be in "hunt mode". Marketers understand that this hunt mode means the searcher may very well be somewhere in the buying cycle. That makes search engine results some of the best sources of targeted traffic, whether that traffic originates from "organic" unpaid search listings or paid advertising listings.

To take advantage of this phenomenon some sites have combined vertical search with comparison shopping (e.g. thefind.com, ninjatickets.com). This enhances the quality of traffic originating from these sites, as well as the "power" of the search engine itself.

Vertical search engines unite the motivations of the ad space buyer (to be exposed to a targeted audience) with those of the user (to be able to search across an entire vertical market). In achieving these goals, it allows users to collaborate in reviewing search results, and buyers to collaborate in attaining better ranking in universal search engine like Google, and thus lowering their cost of online ad spend.

Growth in vertical search

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Advertisers on vertical sites are able to reach potential customers who are much closer to making a purchase decision than the average user on Google or Yahoo, according to Greg Sterling, an analyst with The Kelsey Group. He told Forbes.com that that’s the whole motivation for advertising on vertical sites. For example, he said someone doing a search on Edmunds.com, an automobile search engine, is probably more serious about buying a car than someone doing a car search on a general search engine. The cost of advertising on the large search engines is also likely to drive more marketers to vertical search.

Examples

Travel search engines

Employment websites

Classified advertising aggregators

What is SEO?

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The acronym "SEO" can refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms, keyword stuffing and article spinning that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

SEO method -- Getting indexed

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The leading search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Some search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click. Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results.

Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both require manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that aren't discoverable by automatically following links.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.

SEO method -- Preventing crawling

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain.

Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots. When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled.

The robots.txt file is then parsed, and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish crawled. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam.

SEO method -- Increasing prominence

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A variety of other methods are employed to get a webpage shown up at the search results. These include:

Cross linking between pages of the same website. Giving more links to main pages of the website, to increase PageRank used by search engines. Linking from other websites, including link farming and comment spam.

Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrase, so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries. Adding relevant keywords to a web page meta tags, including keyword stuffing.

URL normalization of web pages accessible via multiple urls, using the "canonical" meta tag.

Web traffic

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. It is a large portion of Internet traffic. This is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit. Sites monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic to see which parts or pages of their site are popular and if there are any apparent trends, such as one specific page being viewed mostly by people in a particular country. There are many ways to monitor this traffic and the gathered data is used to help structure sites, highlight security problems or indicate a potential lack of bandwidth — not all web traffic is welcome.

Some companies offer advertising schemes that, in return for increased web traffic (visitors), pay for screen space on the site. Sites also often aim to increase their web traffic through inclusion on search engines and through Search engine optimization.

Search engine marketing

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

The industry peak body Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) founded by Barbara Coll in 2003, includes search engine optimization (SEO) within its reporting, and SEO is also included in the industry definitions of SEM by Forrester Research, eMarketer, Search Engine Watch, and industry expert Danny Sullivan.

The New York Times defines SEM as 'the practice of buying paid search listings'.

What is internet marketing?

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Internet marketing, also referred to as i-marketing, web marketing, online marketing, or eMarketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet.

The Internet has brought media to a global audience. The interactive nature of Internet marketing in terms of providing instant response and eliciting responses is a unique quality of the medium. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to have a broader scope because it not only refers to the Internet, e-mail, and wireless media, but it includes management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management systems.

Internet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including: design, development, advertising, and sales.

Internet marketing also refers to the placement of media along different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, e-mail marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies. Counting four types of interactions with company websites in addition to the hits from advertisements served from advertising networks, the authors found the potential for collecting data upward of 2,500 times on average per user per month.

Advantages of internet marketing

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

• Internet marketing is relatively inexpensive when compared to the ratio of cost against the reach of the target audience.

• Companies can reach a wide audience for a small fraction of traditional advertising budgets.

• The nature of the medium allows consumers to research and purchase products and services at their own convenience.

• Businesses have the advantage of appealing to consumers in a medium that can bring results quickly.

• Internet marketers also have the advantage of measuring statistics easily and inexpensively.

• Nearly all aspects of an Internet marketing campaign can be traced, measured, and tested.

• Marketers can determine which messages or offerings are more appealing to the audience.

• The results of campaigns can be measured and tracked immediately because online marketing initiatives usually require users to click on an advertisement, visit a website, and perform a targeted action.

• Since the Internet has no geographical constraints; it is good tool for marketing. One can advertise the products on the web to attract the potential customers. One need not be physically present to deal with the client.

• Internet marketing has become a great boom, as one need not travel anywhere for getting and meeting the prospective customers.

• Internet marketing can be done for 24x7x365. If a company maintains a website, this website can be viewed by customers any time during the day.

• In the traditional world of print and audiovisual, there is a limit to how much information can be passed on to a customer. In print the restriction is in the form of the size of the ad. In radio and TV ads one has the restriction, which is measured in seconds. These restrictions cannot be ignored. If a company is having a diverse product line, a website can be a more proper medium of conveying the information to the reader.

Limitations of Internet marketing

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Internet marketing is an outcome of the electronic wave that is sweeping the globe. It has been successfully harnessed and this has resulted in various advantages like online buying and selling of goods as well as the generation of business leads. And following are the limitations of internet marketing:

• Internet marketing requires customers to use newer technologies rather than traditional media.

• Low-speed Internet connections are another barrier. If companies build large or overly-complicated websites, individuals connected to the Internet via dial-up connections or mobile devices experience significant delays in content delivery.

• From the buyer's perspective, the inability of shoppers to touch, smell, taste or "try on" tangible goods before making an online purchase can be limiting. However, there is an industry standard for e-commerce vendors to reassure customers by having liberal return policies as well as providing in-store pick-up services.

• A survey of 410 marketing executives listed the following barriers to entry for large companies looking to market online: insufficient ability to measure impact, lack of internal capability, and difficulty convincing senior management.

• Internet marketing requires knowing beyond the means, methodology, and the other aspects of traditional marketing. The ever-changing and highly advanced technology of the internet requires technical knowledge too.

• Sometimes, error messages also appear. These websites which are overly complicated can have some bugs which can affect their overall internet marketing campaign.

White hat versus Black hat

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve. The search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing. Some industry commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO.

White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.

An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review. Infamous examples are the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. and the April 2006 removal of the PPC Agency BigMouthMedia. All three companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.

Many Web applications employ back-end systems that dynamically modify page content (both visible and meta-data) and are designed to increase page relevance to search engines based upon how past visitors reached the original page. This dynamic search engine optimization and tuning process can be (and has been) abused by criminals in the past. Exploitation of Web applications that dynamically alter themselves can be poisoned.

Gray hat techniques

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Gray hat techniques are those that are neither really white nor black hat. Some of these gray hat techniques may be argued either way. These techniques might have some risk associated with them. A very good example of such a technique is purchasing links. The average price for a text link depends on the page rank of the linking page.

While Google is against sale and purchase of links there are people who subscribe to online magazines, memberships and other resources for the purpose of getting a link back to their website.

Another widely used gray hat technique is a webmaster creating multiple 'micro-sites' which he controls for the sole purpose of cross linking to the target site. Since it is the same owner of all the micro-sites, this is a violation of the principles of the search engine's algorithms (by self-linking) but since ownership of sites is not traceable by search engines it is impossible to detect and therefore they can appear as different sites, especially when using separate Class-C IPs.

Local search (Internet)

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Local search is the use of specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a structured database of local business listings. Typical local search queries include not only information about "what" the site visitor is searching for (such as keywords, a business category, or the name of a consumer product) but also "where" information, such as a street address, city name, postal code, or geographic coordinates like latitude and longitude. Examples of local searches include "Hong Kong hotels", "Manhattan restaurants", and "Dublin Hertz". Local searches exhibit explicit or implicit local intent. A search that includes a location modifier, such as "Bellevue, WA" or "14th arrondissement", is an explicit local search. A search that references a product or service that is typically consumed locally, such as "restaurant" or "nail salon", is an implicit local search.

Local search sites are primarily supported by advertising from businesses that wish to be prominently featured when users search for specific products and services in specific locations. Local search advertising can be highly effective because it allows ads to be targeted very precisely to the search terms and location provided by the user.

Private label local search

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Traditional local media companies, including newspaper publishers and television and radio broadcasters, are starting to add local search to their local websites in an effort to attract their share of local search traffic and advertising revenues in the markets they serve. These local media companies either develop their own technology, or license "private label" or "white label" local search solutions from third-party local search solution providers. In either case, local media companies base their solution on business listings databases developed in-house or licensed from a third-party data publisher.

Traditional print directory publishers also provide local search portals such as Superpages and Yellow Pages in the US and Yell in UK. In fact, in most regions around print directory publishers have an online presence.

Mobile local search

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Several providers have been experimenting with providing local search for mobile devices. Some of these are location aware. In the United States, Google currently provides an experimental voice-based locative service (1-800-GOOG-411).

Many mobile web portals require the subscriber to download a small Java application, however the recently added .mobi top level domain has given impetus to the development of mobile targeted search sites are based upon a standard mobile specific XML protocol that all modern mobile browsers understand.

The advantage is that no software needs to be downloaded and installed, plus these sites may be designed to simultaneously provide conventional content to traditional PC users by means of automatic browser detection.

Business owners and local search

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Electronic publishers (such as businesses or individuals) who would like information such as their name, address, phone number, website, business description and business hours to appear on local search engines have several options. The most reliable way to include accurate local business information is to claim business listings through Google's, Yahoo!'s, or MSN's respective local business centers.

Business listing information can also be distributed via the traditional Yellow Pages, electronic Yellow Pages aggregators, and search engine optimization services. Some search engines will pick up on web pages that contain regular street addresses displayed in machine-readable text (rather than a picture of text, which is more difficult to interpret). Web pages can also use geotagging techniques.

Point of interest

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A point of interest, or POI, is a specific point location that someone may find useful or interesting. An example is a point on the Earth representing the location of the Space Needle, or a point on Mars representing the location of the mountain, Olympus Mons.

The term is widely used in cartography, especially in electronic variants including GIS, and GPS navigation software. In this context the synonym waypoint is common.

A GPS point of interest specifies, at minimum, the latitude and longitude of the POI. A name or description for the POI is usually included and other information such as altitude or a telephone number may also be attached. GPS applications typically use icons to represent different categories of POI on a map graphically.

POI collections

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Custom speed camera POI overlayed on a BMW navigation mapDigital maps for modern GPS devices typically include a basic selection of POI for the map area.

However websites exist that specialize in the collection, verification, management and distribution of POI which end-users can load onto their devices to replace or supplement the existing POI.

While some of these websites are generic, and will collect and categorize POI for any interest, others are more specialized in a particular category (such as speed cameras) or GPS device (e.g. TomTom/Garmin). End-users also have the ability to create their own custom collections.

Commercial POI collections, especially those that ship with digital maps, or that are sold on a subscription basis are usually protected by copyright. However there are also many websites from which royalty-free POI collections can be obtained.

Applications

The applications for POI are extensive. As GPS-enabled devices as well as software applications that use digital maps become more available, so too the applications for POI are also expanding. Newer digital cameras for example can automatically tag a photograph using Exif with the GPS location where a picture was taken; these pictures can then be overlaid as POI on a digital map or satellite image such as Google Earth and shared.

File formats

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Many different file formats, including proprietary formats, are used to store point of interest data, even where the same underlying WGS84 system is used. Reasons for variations to store the same data include:

A lack of standards in this area (GPX is a notable attempt to address this).

Attempts by some software vendors to protect their data through obfuscation.

Licensing issues that prevent companies from using competitor's file specifications.

Memory saving, for example, by converting floating point latitude and longitude co-ordinates into smaller integer values.

Speed and battery life (operations using integer latitude and longitude values are less CPU-intensive than those that use floating point values).

Requirements to add custom fields to the data.

Use of older reference systems that predate GPS (for example UTM or the British national grid reference system)

The following are some of the file formats used by different vendors and devices to exchange POI (and in some cases, also navigation tracks):

• ASCII Text (.asc .txt .csv)

• Topografix GPX (.gpx)

• Garmin Mapsource (.gdb)

• Google Earth Keyhole Markup Language (.kml .kmz)

• Pocket Street Pushpins (.psp)

• Maptech Marks (.msf)

• Maptech Waypoint (.mxf)

• Microsoft MapPoint Pushpin (.csv)

• OziExplorer (.wpt)

• TomTom Overlay (.ov2)

• OpenStreetMap data (.osm)

• Third party and vendor-supplied utilities are available to convert point of interest data between different formats to allow them to be exchanged between otherwise incompatible GPS devices or systems. Furthermore, many applications will support the generic ASCII text file format, although this format is more prone to error due to its loose structure as well as the many ways in which GPS co-ordinates can be represented (e.g. decimal vs degrees/minutes/seconds)

Search engines: General

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

• Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves)

• Baidu (Chinese)

• Bing (formerly MSN Search and Live Search)

• Cuil

• Duck Duck Go

• Google

• Kosmix

• Sogou (Chinese)

• Sohu (Chinese)

• Yahoo! Search

• Yandex (Russian)• Yebol

Geographical limited scope

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

• Accoona, China/US

• Alleba, Philippines

• Ansearch, Australia/US/UK/NZ

• Baidu, China

• Cadê?, Brazil

• Daum, Korea

• Goo, Japan

• Guruji.com, India

• Leit.is, Iceland

• Araby, Middle East

• Miner.hu, Hungary

• Najdi.si, Slovenia

• Naver, Korea

• Onkosh, Middle East

• Rambler, Russia

• Rediff, India

• SAPO, Portugal/Angola/Cabo Verde/Mozambique

• Search.ch, Switzerland

• Sesam, Norway, Sweden

• Seznam, Czech Republic

• Walla!, Israel

• Yandex, Russia

• ZipLocal, Canada/US

Search engines â�� II

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Accountancy

• IFACnet

Business

• Business.com

• GlobalSpec

• Nexis (Lexis Nexis)

• Thomasnet (United States)

Enterprise search

• AskMeNow: S3 - Semantic Search Solution

• Concept Searching Limited: concept search products

• Dieselpoint: Search & Navigation

• dtSearch: dtSearch Engine(SDK), dtSearch Web

• Endeca: Information Access Platform

• Exalead: exalead one:enterprise

• Expert System S.p.A.: Cogito

• Fast Search & Transfer: Enterprise Search Platform (ESP), RetrievalWare (formerly Convera)

• Funnelback: Funnelback Search

• Jumper 2.0: Universal search powered by Enterprise bookmarking

• ISYS Search Software: ISYS:web, ISYS:sdk

• Microsoft: SharePoint Search Services

Job

• Bixee.com (India)

• CareerBuilder.com (USA)

• Craigslist (by city)

• Eluta.ca (Canada)

• Hotjobs.com (USA)

• Incruit (Korea)

• Indeed.com (USA)

• LinkUp.com (USA)

• Monster.com (USA), (India)

• SimplyHired.com (USA)

• Naukri.com (India)

• Legal

• WestLaw

• Lexis (Lexis Nexis)

• Quicklaw

• Manupatra

Medical

• Bioinformatic Harvester

• Entrez (includes Pubmed)

• EB-eye EBI's Search Engine EMBL-EBI's Search engine

• GenieKnows

• GoPubMed (knowledge-based: GO - GeneOntology and MeSH - Medical Subject Headings)

• Healia

• Searchmedica

• WebMD

• PubGene

• Nextbio (Life Science Search Engine)

• VADLO (Life Sciences Search Engine)

News

• Google News

• Daylife

• MagPortal

• Newslookup

• Nexis (Lexis Nexis)

• Topix.net

• Yahoo! News

• People

• PeekYou

• Ex.plode.us

• InfoSpace

• Spock

• Spokeo

• Wink

• Zabasearch.com

• ZoomInfo

Real property

• Fizber.com

• Home.co.uk

• HotPads.com

• Rightmove

• Zillow.com

Video Games

• GenieKnows

• Wazap (Japan)

Search engines

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

By information type

Search engines dedicated to a specific kind of information

• Forum

• Omgili

• Blog

• Amatomu

• Bloglines

• BlogScope

• IceRocket

• Sphere

• Technorati

Multimedia

• Bing Videos

• blinkx

• FindSounds

• Google Video

• Munax's PlayAudioVideo

• Picsearch

• Pixsta

• Podscope

• Songza

• SeeqPod

• Veveo

• TinEye

• Yahoo! Video

• YouTube

Question and answer

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

• True Knowledge

• Wolfram Alpha

Natural language

• Ask.com

• Bing (Semantic ability Human answers

• Answers.com

• eHow

• Uclue

• Yahoo! Answers

• Stack Overflow

• DeeperWeb

Automatic answers

• AskMeNow

• BrainBoost

• is powered by Powerset)

• BrainBoost

• hakia

• Lexxe

• Powerset

By model

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Open source search engines

• DataparkSearch

• Egothor

• Grub

• Ht://dig

• Isearch

• Lucene

• Lemur Toolkit & Indri Search Engine

• mnoGoSearch

• Namazu

• Nutch

• OpenFTS

• Sciencenet (for scientific knowledge, based on YaCy technology)

• Sphinx

• SWISH-E

• Terrier Search Engine

• Wikia Search

• Xapian

• YaCy

• Zettair

Semantic browsing engines

• Evri

• Hakia

• Yebol

Social search engines

• ChaCha Search

• Delver

• EarthFrisk.org

• Eurekster

• Mahalo.com

• OneRiot

• Rollyo

• Sproose

• Trexy

• Wikia search

• Wink provides web search by analyzing user contributions such as bookmarks and feedback

Metasearch engines

• Brainboost

• ChunkIt!

• Clusty

• Dogpile

• Excite

• FuzzFind Web Search

• Harvester42

• HotBot

• Info.com

• Ixquick

• Kayak

• LeapFish

• Mamma

• Metacrawler

• MetaLib

• Mobissimo

• Myriad Search

• SideStep

• Turbo10

• WebCrawler

Visual search engines

• ChunkIt!

• Grokker

• Kartoo

• Pixsta

• PubGene

• Viewzi

Image meta search

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Image meta search (or image search engine) is a type of search engine specialised on finding pictures, images, animations etc. Like the text search, image search is an information retrieval system designed to help to find information on the Internet and it allows the user to look for images etc. using keywords or search phrases and to receive a set of thumbnail images, sorted by relevancy.

Specialized search engines, like in the fields of image search, are among the fastest growing search services on the internet. In 2005 alone the number of image searches increased by 91% (Nielsen/NetRatings 2006-03-31).

Many of the sites that today offer image search use a service powered by one of the big three; Google, Picsearch or Yahoo.

How image search works

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A common misunderstanding when it comes to image search is that the technology is based on detecting information in the image itself. But most image search works as other search engines. The metadata of the image is indexed and stored in a large database and when a search query is performed the image search engine looks up the index, and queries are matched with the stored information. The results are presented in order of relevancy. The usefulness of an image search engine depends on the relevance of the results it returns, and the ranking algorithms are one of the keys to becoming a big player.

Some search engines can automatically identify a limited range of visual content, e.g. faces, trees, sky, buildings, flowers, colors etc. This can be used alone, as in content-based image retrieval, or to augment metadata in an image search.

When performing a search the user receives a set of thumbnail images, sorted by relevancy. Each thumbnail is a link back to the original web site where that image is located. Using an advanced search option the user can typically adjust the search criteria to fit their own needs, choosing to search only images or animations, color or black&white, and setting preferences on image size.

Video search engine

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A video search engine is a web-based search engine which crawls the web for video content. Some video search engines parse externally hosted content while others allow content to be uploaded and hosted on their own servers.

Some engines also allow users to search by video format type and by length of the clip. Search results are usually accompanied by a thumbnail view of the video.

Design and algorithms of video search engine

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Video search has evolved slowly through several basic search formats which exist today and all use keywords. The keywords for each search can be found in the title of the media, any text attached to the media and content linked web pages, also defined by authors and users of video hosted resources.

Some video search is performed using human powered search, others create technological systems that work automatically to detect what is in the video and match the searchers needs. Many efforts to improve video search including both human powered search as well as writing algorithm that recognize what's inside the video have meant complete redevelopment of search efforts.

It is generally acknowledged that speech to text is possible, though recently Thomas Wilde, the new CEO of EveryZing, acknowledged that Everyzing works 70% of the time when there is music, ambient noise or more than one person speaking. If newscast style speaking (one person, speaking clearly, no ambient noise) is available, that can rise to 93%. (From the Web Video Summit, San Jose, CA, June 27, 2007).

Around 40 phonemes exist in every language with about 400 in all spoken languages. Rather than applying a text search algorithm after speech-to-text processing is completed, some engines use a phonetic search algorithm to find results within the spoken word. Others work by literally listening to the entire podcast and creating a text transcription using a sophisticated speech-to-text process. Once the text file is created, the website lets you search the file for any number of search words and phrases.

It is generally acknowledged that visual search into video does not work well and that no company is using it publicly. Researchers at UC San Diego and Carnegie Melon University have been working on the visual search problem for more than 15 years, and admitted at a "Future of Search" conference at UC Berkeley in the Spring of 2007 that it was years away from being viable even in simple search.

Non-agnostic search

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Search results are modified, or suspect, due to the large hosted video being given preferential treatment in search results:

AOL Video offers a leading video search engine that can be used to find video located on popular video destinations across the web. In December 2005, AOL acquired Truveo Video Search.

Google Video is a popular video search engine which permits visitors to upload videos. It searches its own hosted content, Youtube and many other video hosting sites.

Yahoo! Video Search Yahoo!'s search engine examines video files on the internet using its Media RSS standard. Is found on a direct link called "Video" off the main page above the text block.

Web search engine

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A web search engine is a tool designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits.

The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike Web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input.

How web search engines work

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A search engine operates, in the following order

1.Web crawling

2.Indexing

3.Searching

Web search engines work by storing information about many web pages, which they retrieve from the html itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated Web browser which follows every link on the site. Exclusions can be made by the use of robots.txt. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed (for example, words are extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields called meta tags). Data about web pages are stored in an index database for use in later queries. A query can be a single word. The purpose of an index is to allow information to be found as quickly as possible. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas others, such as AltaVista, store every word of every page they find. This cached page always holds the actual search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it. This problem might be considered to be a mild form of linkrot, and Google's handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations that the search terms will be on the returned webpage. This satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects the search terms to be on the returned pages. Increased search relevance makes these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data that may no longer be available elsewhere.

When a user enters a query into a search engine (typically by using key words), the engine examines its index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document's title and sometimes parts of the text. The index is built from the information stored with the data and the method by which the information is indexed. Most search engines support the use of the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. Boolean operators are for literal searches that allow the user to refine and extend the terms of the search. The engine looks for the words or phrases exactly as entered. Some search engines provide an advanced feature called proximity search which allows users to define the distance between keywords. There is also concept-based searching where the research involves using statistical analysis on pages containing the words or phrases you search for. As well, natural language queries allow the user to type a question in the same form one would ask it to a human. A site like this would be Askjeeves.com.

The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the result set it gives back. While there may be millions of web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the "best" results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve. There are two main types of search engine that have evolved: one is a system of predefined and hierarchically ordered keywords that humans have programmed extensively. The other is a system that generates an "inverted index" by analyzing texts it locates. This second form relies much more heavily on the computer itself to do the bulk of the work.

Most Web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue and, as a result, some employ the practice of allowing advertisers to pay money to have their listings ranked higher in search results. Those search engines which do not accept money for their search engine results make money by running search related ads alongside the regular search engine results. The search engines make money every time someone clicks on one of these ads.

Unethical Search Engine Promotion Methods and Tactics

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Unethical Search Engine Promotion Methods and Tactics

* Use of"link-farms" or -for-All (FFA) sites

* Spamming or bulk-mailing promotional messages

* Use of automatic Submission Program/Software for Site Submittal

* Misleading Keywords or Content

* Bait-and-Switch Cloaking Techniques

* Keyword Stuffing

* Invisible Keywords

* Duplicated Content on Multiple Pages

* Gateway Pages or Machine-Generated Pages

* Abusing Competitor's Names for the Sole Purpose of Generating Traffic

Are ethics important in SEO?

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Are ethics important in SEO?

Are ethics and ethical discussions even of value in the discussion of SEO--or in any other profession or business for that matter? Some would say the obvious and unarguable answer is yes. Other people are not so sure, while some SEO practitioners would say that ethics are not all that important, provided the client receives strong search engine rankings. As we can see, there are no definite answers.

Since an SEO professional has in effect two clients, there is really more than one set of ethics involved. First, there is the ethics in relationship to the website owner client. Second, and also very much a part of the ethical question, are the search engines themselves. Since the needs and requirements of the two clients are often diametrically opposed to one another, an SEO often experiences a dilemma.

The SEO practitioner has a responsibility to the website owner to attempt to achieve the highest possible search engine rankings. He must also consider the search engine webmaster guidelines. Where the search engine optimization professional draws the boundaries between website and search engines, and how those boundaries are explained to the website owner, is very important.

The SEO professional must also hold a serious discussion with the website owner concerning his client's real goals, and what level of penalty and banning risk that person is willing to assume. Not very professional SEOs will go as far as the webmaster wants to travel into grey and black hat territory. Different experts have different interpretations of where the boundaries between the search engine guidelines end and where the needs of the website owner begin.

Personally, I do not use any search engine optimization techniques that could be classified as black or even grey hat. My ethics allow for only purely white hat SEO methods. Not all SEO professionals, or even potential paying clients, agree with that ethical stance. In fact, many SEOs disagree completely with my position on ethics.

Search engine factor

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Search engine factor

How the search engines are viewed by the SEO is another important factor. Some SEOs consider the search engines to be their friends, while others view them as the mortal enemy. Still other optimization specialists consider the search engines to be either a necessary evil or just another tool in an overall Internet marketing program. It’s fairly easy to understand the reasons for each of these points of view.

For those people who see the search engines as friends, the SERPs are usually thought of as delivering what amounts to free customers. For minimal financial outlay, compared to most other Internet marketing efforts, a white hat optimized site can send paying customers directly from the free organic search results. These SEOs believe the search engines are, in fact, providing a free to the public service. For that reason, search engines are considered friends, to be helped by providing them with the best possible sites optimized within the search engine terms of service.

Other SEOs take a harder line on the search engines. Instead of thinking of them as good guys, they consider search engines almost as an enemy. They insist that search engines, instead of providing what are thought to be relevant search results, reward heavily spam and black hat sites with high rankings. Highly relevant sites, in direct terms of the search phrase, are pushed deep into the organic results. These SEOs argue that the search engine terms of service are merely a guideline that are not uniformly or fairly applied.

As a result of inadequate and spam filled SERPs, these SEOs believe the search engines are not fulfilling their stated goals and terms of service. Because of that failure on the part of the search algorithms to provide relevant spam free results, black hat SEOs believe there is no legal or moral obligation on the part of the SEO or the website owner to follow them either. In their opinion, if the search results reward bad sites, and by extension punish sites that follow the terms of service, the webmaster guidelines can be safely and honestly ignored.

Serach engine ethics- major objections

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Serach engine ethics- major objections

There are three major objections:

1. Most potential clients new to search engine optimization (SEO) don't have enough of an understanding (at least, initially) to effectively evaluate the claims of "good" vs. "bad" techniques.

2. An unethical or "bad" technique is defined purely in terms of what the search engines don't like. (But the search engines themselves are no moral authority.) This confuses the morality of an action with an action's results. (That is, using a "bad" technique can hurt your rankings or result in your site being banned or dropped from a search engine's database- if you're caught.) A more useful characterization of bad SEO techniques is that they're just bad business or counterproductive.

3. They distract focus from the more basic question: "How are these techniques helping me to better connect with my target audience?" The answers should not be shrouded in mystery. In general, if you have to create deceptive pages, content, or links that you would never want your real target audience to see, your efforts are not serving your users or helping you to connect with your users more. (And equally, you're potentially contributing to poor or irrelevant results on the search engines thereby alienating a strong resource.)

Most important SEO ethics

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Most important SEO ethics

• Use of unique and original content to make a useful, informative website.

• Unique and innovative website content.

• Smart use of the keywords / phrases.

• Concise your target audience by concentrating on your niche. In addition, focus largely on your target users prospective rather than just search engines.

• Hyperlinks help visitors in locating the related content or information on requirement.

• Ensure to provide site map for easy navigation.

• Title, keywords, description and all Meta elements must be specific and pertinent to the page content.

• Make efforts to acquire information about your visitors for future marketing or promotion strategy purposes. For this you may try newsletters.

• Stay away from the use of hidden text/links, sneaky redirects, and other such spam techniques.

• Update the website on regular basis.

SEO Ethics: A Principled Way

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Ethics: A Principled Way

In the present business world, Internet Marketing or Web Marketing is playing a very vital role in selling products of services around the globe. It facilitates easy categorization of the products and services, enabling users to come to know about your company with minimum efforts. In fact, this is the reason why search engines have become the most commanding supportive tool in presenting the exact search results in a relevant context to the searched phrase for any web business purpose, or website optimization. However, this is assured only if the webmaster works in accordance with the mentioned SEO ethics.

Search engines not only act as a humungous source of information on the web but also give users a way to search relevant and accurate sites on the web. Hence, in an endeavor to be extremely search engine friendly and generate more business, site owners or webmaster have started to use every possible technique of search engine optimization without giving significance to its substance and validation. This further, led the beginning of many unethical practices like spamming and other unprincipled business promotion tactics to boost rankings of their websites.

Search engine optimization has an obvious, significant part in online marketing. If done ethically and effectively, search engine optimization can bring home prolific results. As an important marketing tool, it has the capability to bring healthy returns on investment (ROI) to any business. Moreover, on the other hand, search engines also keep updating their algorithms to remain totally supportive to SEO ethics and restrict the occurrence of spammed and irrelevant results carrying unlooked for content.

SEO Code of Ethics E-mail

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Code of Ethics E-mail

Some search engine optimization companies and software developers use unethical tricks and techniques to artificially boost the search engine rankings of a Web site. This dilutes the quality of search results and the accuracy of search results becomes questionable.

For this reason, the search engines are continuously trying to trace out the spam techniques which webmasters might be using and penalize or ban them.

They continue to reconstruct their algorithms to prevent spammers from flooding the results page with irrelevant or low quality content.

If you use a Web site promotion tool that uses these unethical tricks and techniques, you'll put your Web business at severe risk.

Our products only use ethical search engine optimization methods. They only use techniques that produce lasting results and that don't offend search engines.

Search engines consider the following search engine optimization techniques as SPAM. For that reason:

* automatically generated doorway pages

* cloaking and false redirects

* keyword stuffing

* hidden text or hidden links

* pages loaded with irrelevant words

* duplicated content on multiple pages

* misspelling of well-known Web sites

* unrelated and centralized link farms

* other methods that try to trick search engines

Four states for anchor text passing

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Four states for anchor text passing

1. Linking page indexed but does not appear for unique anchor text

2. Linking and destination page indexed but only linking page appears for unique anchor text

3. Linking and destination pages indexed but linking page appears above destination page for unique anchor text

4. Linking and destination pages indexed and destination page appears above linking page for unique anchor text

SEO Metrics

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Metrics

A significant component you had better hold in place before considering any SEO package or campaign is a metric-tracking system. This comprises such an substantial element in a successful SEO program that most search engine optimization professionals will resist to accept a new campaign with a company that does not possess any website analytics in place. This is because they don’t wish to get months into an engagement and have the client questioning whether their campaigns and money have actually achieved anything.

At the very least, you need to recognize what your current general web site traffic is worth to your company in terms of direct sales, sales lead generation, related ad sales and/or brand education and impressions. If you do not possess any way of assessing these metrics, you definitely need to do a lot of research into web analytics programs or companies (see the analytic comparison below).

If your company is experiencing tight budget or other restrictions, it may be best to hire an SEO firm with experience in assisting customers handle both traffic and conversion measurement. There are free website metric programs that you will be able to easily implement to setup website analytics. Never invest in any marketing tactic to drive more traffic to your site unless you can measure and determine your bottomline ROI (return on investment). Of course, the more elaborate stats on the values of unique traffic streams, the better. The value of your current search engine traffic (not including PPC or paid listings leading to specified landing pages) should serve as a general rule of thumb to determine how much more you would make if you optimized to get additional traffic.

You need to have the critical data that ultimately will have an impact on the profit and loss statement – which is what the folks allocating the actual budget will be looking at. It might be sales, lead generations or any other type of goals or conversions. Whatever it is, the challenge is to figure out which numbers matter to you and your company and make sure the mechanism is in place to generate and analyze those numbers.

Web Page Content Optimization

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Web Content Optimization

The content of your website is important for the search engines as they consider your website's relevancy and importance based on both meta tags and content in relation to the important keywords. There are several guidelines you should follow:

Include keywords in text

You should make sure that all those keywords you have included in your meta tags and on which searches you wish to come up are included in the text of your site.

Consider 5-20% density of the keywords in text

You should make sure that about 5% to 20% of your text is keywords. Be careful not to overcrowd your text with keywords cause you might get penalized. Note that you should have the most important keyword(s) in the beginning of the page as thus they are given more weight.

Mind the formatting of the text

Formatting (bolding, titles, etc.) is also important to show the search engines that certain words are more important than others. Thus, if you bold your keywords in your text, they are perceived as more important than other words and thus your text becomes more relevant to these keywords.

Add regularly relevant content to site

You should make sure that you add relevant content to your website. This content addition invites Google to visit your site more often and increase its relevance and importance.

Content Optimization

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Content Optimization

Content optimization is very important aspect in Web promotion. Well optimized content always drives your web site into top position in Search engines. While optimizing your content never insert so many keywords which may turn into spam. Always your content should look informative and targeted.

Best content optimization method is collecting the more detail information about your products. Dig more about your products and publish the new content with that search engine definitely recognize your site.

Always categorize your targeted keywords in sub categories and describe each with unique descriptions. Remember if you always start the content with the first keyword which is in the title tags of that page. Insert only two keywords in 50 words paragraph. Your web site content always should look informative and never use the tough language. Content should be very easy to understand.

Content is the king. Every search engine is giving first and most important to content. Content optimization doesn't mean that insert so many targeted keywords in your web site. Content optimization means making your web site content more useful to the visitors with that we can attract the search engines also. Remember the ultimately customer is only source of any business.

Keywords for search engine

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Keywords for search engine

For keyword research, we'd like you to start with an overview of content development. This article desribes the overall context, strategy, and process for building good content. It explains the role that keywords play in search engines, and how this affects your content. It talks about the value of long-tail searches, and gives other tips on the mechanics of producing good content.

With this as background, you should then read more details about selecting and using the best keywords. The basic message is that you can write content that will be more likely to rank well by carefully choosing keywords, then writing naturally about those keywords. Doing this will cause you to naturally include the keywords in your content, which will give it the best chance for ranking. This is a large topic, and the referenced articles address the key areas in some detail.

Developing keyword-driven content -- that is, content specifically designed to rank well on specific keywords, which have been established before the writing begins -- is a large topic area that we will cover briefly here. We will provide a few guidelines that can be used when it's your goal to "laser target" an article for a specific keyword phrase. However most of the rest of this discussion applies equally well to less extreme optimization exercises. For example, when your topic is driven by other business objectives than pure optimization (such as establishing an authoritative body of content on a particular topic), or when you're retroactively editing an existing body of content.

For developing keyword-driven content, the most important considerations are:

1. Using the tools and techniques described in the keyword selection article, identify a small number (2-4) of keyword phrases to be used for each article. These phrases are often best if they're 2, 3, or 4 (or sometimes more) words long. Single keywords tend to be very competitive. On the other hand, "long tail" (3+ word phrases) tend to indicate much more focused searches on the part of the user, so you're likely to be seen by a much more qualified audience ("buyers" instead of "shoppers"). In addition, these phrases are much easier to rank for.

Having a site that does well with lots of "long tail" phrases is a much easier way to build traffic than going for the "home run" phrases.

2. Identify a similar number of secondary phrases to be used for each article. These secondary phrases will also be used throughout the article, and will allow the article to rank well for terms that are "just off the mark" from, but strongly related to, the central theme of the article.

3. Use these keyword phrases "several times" (there's no magic formula for this) throughout the document, but do it in a natural writing style The basic strategy is simple: if the theme of your article is clear, the keywords should "jump out" of that theme, and should automatically appear in appropriate ways in a well written, themed document (we assume this is what you're already writing!).

Fortunately, this is where search engines' and users' needs converge. If the document is "about" something, words associated with that something will naturally appear in the document (and with a little effort, you can make sure they appear in the right places within the document; more on this later). Magically, these words (combined with some other factors) tell the search engine what the page is about. Trying to analyze it in much more detail than this tends to be counter-productive. For example, forcing specific keyword densities is likely to both frustrate your reader, and miss the (ever changing, and not-so-simply quantified) mark with the search engines.

Put another way, don't let the quality of the document, from a reader's perspective, suffer due to attempts to impose keywords where they don't fit. Here are a few tricks to keep in mind:

1. The frame of mind to adopt is one of a general awareness of the keyword focus, but to otherwise forget about search engine optimization, and write for your readers.

2. It can be helpful to ensure your keyword focus is in place by using some standard writing techniques, like developing an outline, or an abstract, of your article before writing it. Simply ensure that your outline or abastract contains, and is oriented around, the keywords.

3. Alternatively, you can write your (focused, on topic) article without thinking about keywords explicitly, then go back and look for opportunities to replace or "tune up" phrases to more fully utilize your primary and secondary keyword phrases. Again, readability and a "natural style" trump all; don't force fit keywords.

4. A couple of items that must not be left to chance, and must directly address the use of keyword phrases, are the article title, first heading (<h1> tag), and first paragraph. Specific guidance for these key elements is provided below.

Consider the formulas provided above as a way to write articles that are pre-meditated to perform well on particular, pre-selected keyword searches. However, many sites contain large volumes of information with articles that range across a broad cross section of topics. In these cases, your strategic goal may to be to create an authorititative body of information that covers a topic area comprehensively. While less "concentrated", much of the thinking outlined above still applies. You can simply think of it as distributing a larger set of keyword phrases across an entire set of articles.

Similarly, in some cases you are retroactively editing existing documents, and do not have the luxury of starting out with keywords. In these cases, it is often helpful to simply apply the basic editorial technique of making sure that your article is well-titled, and using effective markup techniques, as described below.

Even if you didn't start out with keyword phrases in mind, it is usually straightforward to identify the keyword phrases (again, this is closely related to a tight "theme") that apply to an existing article, and to make sure that the title includes that phrase. Once again, this sounds like an SEO rule, but it's really just the same way you would ensure that any article is clearly themed and properly titled, regardless of the medium it's delivered on.

Effective Markup

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Effective Markup

For effective markup, there are some simple but important mechanical rules:

1. Construct your title (the <title> tag) carefully. This is the most valuable real estate on the entire page so treat it accordingly. It should be no more than 60 characters, and should have the following qualities:

* The first 40 characters should describe the topic (and not be wasted on generic terms or - in virtually all cases - branding)

* It must contain your primary keyword phrase

* It must convey the key content of the article in terms of value to the reader

* It must make sense when read out of context. Do not assume the reader knows what your site is about, or what page on your site that you're linking to this page from

* It must be unique from all other titles on your web site, and ideally unique across the entire web

* Use mixed case

2. There should be one, and only one, <h1> headline in each article. This headline should also contain your primary keyword phrase. This headline should be distinct from the title but, like the title, should convey the central message of the article.

3. Make use of other subheadings to organize your article. This is important for both SEO and readability. A related stylistic/structural note is that each paragraph should be "short and sweet", and contain one logical idea. You can display one subhead for each paragraph if you want, but you should be able to identify such a subhead, even if you don't use it.

* Try not to go more than three levels deep in nesting subheads, and avoid going more than four levels.

* Do not put two headlines (e.g., <h1> and <h2>) immediately adjacent to each other.

4. Use the top keyword phrase in the very first paragraph. You may also use additional keyword phrases in this paragraph, as long as it flows naturally.

5. Use unique captions for each image.

6. Create a unique meta description, of up to 150 characters, for each document. The meta description is often used as the short phrase describing your site, appearing below the title of your document in the search engine results. It should be written with this in mind. It should be a factual, yet inviting description of the contents of the page, informing and encouraging the reader to click through to your article. Avoid overly salesy prose and jargon in the meta description. Do use a few of the more important (primary and secondary) keywords in the description, as these will automatically be highlighted, and draw users' attention, in the search engine results.

Document Inter-linking

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Document Inter-linking

Hyperlinking is the central nervous system for the web, and it's central to providing good structure and navigation for your web site. It's also important from an SEO perspective, as it turns out that search engines learn a lot from how you link your documents together. Again, good editorial judgement rules the day. Use hyperlinks between documents when the linked document can provide value to the reader. In fact, you may find that hyperlinking allows you to create more focused documents by relegating subtopics, background information, and other related content to other pages, leaving your main page laser-targeted on its topic, which is a good thing.

The mechanics of hyperlinking are straightforward, but the choice of the "anchor text" you use in links is critical from an SEO perspective. As mentioned, the search engines learn about your document by what other people (including other documents on your site) say about it. Linking to a document with anchor text that describes the contents of the document is far more valuable than linking with generic text like "read more here", or "follow this link". Try to use your primary keyword phrase in the link anchor text of the most important inbound link to your article (deciding which is most important is covered briefly below).

If it's appropriate (from an editorial standpoint) to create multiple links to a document, try to vary the inbound link anchor text among the various links, and use some of your alternate keyword phrases, as long as doing so makes good editorial sense.

Usually your most important page, in this context, is the one with the highest pagerank, and/or the most relevant page on your site. Often your home page is the most important linking page. If there are multiple candidates to choose from, choose the most relevant page with the highest pagerank as the one to concentrate on (i.e., the one to try to link to using your primary keywords in the link anchor text).

Style

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Style

Here we want to discuss a few guidelines for writing style. The motivating factors are that the web is a less formal medium than print, readers tend to scan quickly rather than read, credibility is at a premiuim and must be established quickly, and the medium is increasingly dominated by search-based navigation. The implications for writing style are as follows:

* Use familiar words, not jargon. Use "old words" vs. "new words", where possible. Old words are familiar, and familiar words spring to mind when users search. In general, use words that match your target users' querying vocabulary. Customers/users define their needs, and hence their search queries, in familiar terms. Plain terms are, by definition, less "sexy" than marketingese, and it's tempting to dress up the language. Plain terms are also, by definition, plain because they're common and familiar. This is what most users will search for, and this is what your document should use to match their queries. Think "cheap hotels" vs. "value priced accomodations".

* Related to using plain language is avoiding an overly "salesy" style. The importance here is in not undermining credibility. Remember that most visitors are coming to an unknown remote server that hasn't been vouched for, and are approaching it with healthy skepticism. If you shout a sales message at them up front, you're likely to at least miss an opportunity to gain credibility, if not outright blow it. Some other things that help establish credibility:

outbound links to other sites (linking only internally is a signal that you are "hording" the user; linking out indicates that you're an active participant in the web, and are providing useful resources to the reader).
use a byline. Anonymity undermines credibility.

* Users are notorious for scanning, and hate to scroll. You must make it very easy to understand the main point and to find the key information. The most important information must appear at the top of the article. Use an "inverted pyramid" style, where you state your conclusion at the top of the article, along with a short summary of the remainder of the article.

* Each page must live independently from all other pages. Users can navigate directly to any page in your site from a search engine result, and haven't necessarily seen your home page or any other "lead in" page you've carefully crafted. Make sure the page can stand entirely on its own. One thing that can help is to link out from your page to supporting/background information (both on- and off-site).

* As mentioned, the web is usually relatively informal when compared to printed media. As such, users expect and appreciate a style that is clean, direct, friendly, personal, and (sometimes) humorous. Use simple sentence structures. Use familiar words. Omit unnecessary words. Limit paragraphs to one key idea.

* The web is international and egalitarian. Be careful of assuming too much about your readership. Be wary of puns and metaphors, as the requisite cultural context may not be in place to ensure that these work as intended.

* Use tables and numbered or bulleted lists more than you would in print. Users scan. Lists arrest the eye and capture attention.

* Spelling and grammar matter. Be sure to spell check and grammar check your documents.

What is the purpose of SEO?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

What is the purpose of SEO?

The purpose of SEO (indirectly) is to reduce the time a person spends searching for a relevant result.

This is accomplished through refinement and streamlining of various aspects of the target site and page ranging from the programming platform, the hosting environment, site architecture, tweaks to images content and tags, link popularity and most importantly the chronological order of events that transpire to cultivate a site into a top 10 candidate.

With so many strategies and methodologies for acquiring a high ranking position, the circumstances dictate which tactic will be the most effective. The competition also has an impact on just how challenging the position will be to acquire.

The takeaway is SEO is important, but it only serves as one component to a successful online marketing campaign. Curb appeal, great content, enticing visual elements, how professional your brand consolidates as a whole and so many subjective “feel good” factors are equally as important.

So, before you put the cart before the horse and start targeting keywords well beyond the scope of your sites range, a more methodical approach starting from content development, design and appeal should be your first priority.

Consumers are a fickle lot, with so many options available online, there are no guarantees that any visitor will commit a second more than necessary to take a mental snapshot of your site and determine if they wish to spend any more of their time move any further into your site to investigate your products, brand or service.

For this reason each of your pages should:

* a) Have a clearly delineated purpose – and use titles, images or reinforce the topic tactfully.

* b) Make it easy for the visitor to contact you – don’t hide the email, phone number or contact info.

* c) Have links to other useful pages – (preferably your own) using your main keywords as anchor text.

* d) Summarize the offer or call to action – the offer should be self evident.

* e) Have continuity and cohesive design – consistency is important, so create a template to maintain cohesion. If the design is disjointed, particularly if e-commerce is involved you will raise red flags which could jeopardize trust and diffuse potential conversion.

The real purpose of SEO is to be found, but once you have managed to get traffic to your site, fulfilling their impulses and providing an enriching user experience is what determines the extent of your online success.

SEO ethical components

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO ethical components

Prime Visibility will work with you to determine the best strategy for your business. Most of our SEO campaigns include the following essential and ethical components:

* Keyword research and quantification

* Website analysis and recommendations

* Optimizing meta data and page copy

* Improving call-to-action and conversion

* Directory submissions and link building

* Monthly analytics and reporting

Tips to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Here are a couple of useful tip to help you with improving your search engine optimization and subsequently your search engine ranking.

1. Even though a picture may be worth a thousand words, search engines still don't read them. Ensure your target keyword terms are written out in text and are not included as part a graphic title. You should also not just present pictures of items, but write out their names and a description including keywords.

2. Make sure you have multiple pages of content related to your website's theme. Have a unique keyword search term for each of the articles. For example, one page may use the term "safe toys for babies", while another page may use the term "baby safety".

3. You need to pay close attention to the URL of your website. Your business name may not help you, but your keyword search term will. It is probably a good idea to engage someone who knows what they are doing to create the correct keyword strategy for you prior to obtaining your domain name.

4. Make sure you don’t neglect the title of your page. Titles such as "Article" or "Contact us" don’t help you much at all, as search engine robots tend not to get too excited about terms like that. It’s highly unlikely that people will search for those terms either. Also remember that the title is the most important place to incorporate your target keyword phrases.

Multiple Domains

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

When considering your approach to search engine optimization, it may be worth thinking about the possibility of having multiple domains. If you have a couple of themes that could each support their own website, it is well worth considering having multiple domains. The first reason is that search engines normally only list one page per domain for a given search. Your topic may warrant two. The second reason is that directories generally only accept home pages. With multiple domains you can get more directory listings.

What is a Tag Cloud?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Tag cloud, word cloud, or link cloud is one of the recent ideas in website design, which involves visual or graphic presentation of the tags, links or words from the content of a particular web site. In fact, the major goal of tag cloud is to offer an alternative presentation of the web site content.

Tag Cloud usually contains a number of keywords, linked to a particular sections or categories of the web site. The interesting aspect of a tag cloud is that it uses larger font size or different font color to highlight the tags of higher importance or relevancy on the web site. In simple words, the most important word or phrase is displayed in the largest font size, while the keywords of minor importance are shown in small sized letters.

Among the first top web sites, that used and popularized tag clouds, were Flickr, Del.icio.us and Technorati.

How to Make Use of Tag Cloud for Search Engine Optimization?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

In recent years webmasters started to implement tag clouds on different web sites with the intention to improve the website rating in search engine results. Actually, tag clouds are known to be helpful for search engine optimization if they are keywords based and properly implemented to the particular web site. A tag cloud helps to increase the interlinking between the pages of the website or between different websites, which directly affects the page relevancy for search engines.

Besides, a tag cloud may be useful to improve the usability of the website, especially if it offers large amount of information. In this regard, some tips on how people perceive tag clouds are worthy to mention:

- large tags attracts more attention in comparison to small tags

- tags located at the center of the tag cloud attracts more user’s attention than those located elsewhere

- at a first glance users always pay attention at the upper left quadrant of a tag cloud

- users do not spend much time and do not read all the tags on a tag cloud.

SEO Should Not Have a Negative Ore

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Should Not Have a Negative Ore

SEO is all about growing the search visibility of your website, but just like everything else, a lot of people have been burnt by SEO. This is because SEO is new not a lot of people are up to knowledge with the term, so they do not acknowledge what to look out for. Below is what a lot of people pay money for and get burnt.

Search Submissions

There is no longer any need to submit to search engines, as they are able to crawl the entire web and index your web site this way. Companies that promise to submit your site to search engines on a monthly basis should be steered clear of, merely because this is in all likelihood what they will forever do which will not help your rankings.

FFA

Free for all pages used to work great when the search engines were in their infancy, but all of these links are now devalued and will probably not help you in the slightest.

Directory Submission

Again another technique that has been degraded by the major search engines, directory submission can now be done using several tools in no time at all, so an SEO company charging a fortune for thousands of directory submissions is in all likelihood not going to get you cracking rankings.

Keyword Stuffing

There are some SEO companies that actually do things to hurt your site, things that could get you penalized by the search engines, this includes major keyword stuffing your Meta and your content or making the content invisible by hiding it behind a back round colour.

Make no mistake SEO is utterly crucial for any on-line business; it’s all about filtering out the bad and leaving the good to optimise your website.

SEO Is Not About Cold Calling

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Is Not About Cold Calling

Cold calling is fast becoming a thing of the past, people no longer want to buy things that have been forced upon them, people are like this because of so many bad experiences in the past. But this is genuinely not about any type of cold calling, this is regarding cold calling for SEO services, a vast quantity of companies invest a lot of money into this but does it work?

In my belief it does not, SEO is still at its babyhood and a vast quantity of people still do not genuinely know what it is fully, hence by cold calling someone you are going to have a heck of a mountain to climb when it comes to converting them and keeping them as long terms clients.

SEO in my judgement should ideally be all about word of mouth referrals and traffic coming to your site, but not any type of traffic, it should fundamentally be organic, so let’s have a look at the reasons why these two options are better.

Referrals

Referrals are sometimes the best form of clients that you can get and they are more then likely to stick with you for the long term. I say this because of the fact that they have probably spoke to someone who received great results from you, so know exactly how long they need to wait and know that you are probably going to deliver a great deal.

Organic Search Referrals

This is actually another way in which clients will stick with you, if a client cannot find your website through the organic listings, what hope does that leave for them? Any agency should be constantly working on their organic listings in order to secure a place in the Top 10 for their company.

Optimise Your Blog For Better Ranking Than Before

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Optimise Your Blog For Better Ranking Than Before

Search engine optimization is the up-to-the-minute full term which indicates the technical and originative things which are exploited in making a site near trafficked and high ranking website. To ignore this job of search engine optimization is something like doing blunder with your profit. There are respective factors and several internal tasks that are to live established to cause the best effect out of Search Engine Optimisation. All these things are not done by one hand.

There is the need of several hands to make this huge work function possible. Furthermore, Search Engine Optimisation necessarily a batch of absorption as you will have to analyse the functional operation of the search engines first of all and work consequently. Thus if you pay your full attention in Search Engine Optimization only, it may be that your main business may get hampered in the meantime. Thence alternatively of bothering about of the monetary value that you want to assume it is better to attempt the facilitate of just about good SEO companion to experience the search engine optimization task done for you. And you yourself pay your attention on your main business. This is what almost all of the leading website owners do to get the maximum profit out of their business.

Among the important factors of seo service, one of the most crucial factors for Search Engine Optimization is the link building. Link building alone a vast subject which needs a lot of tiresome jobs done within it. Consequently alternatively of trying to act it altogether by yourself, near of the leading websites attempt the assist of around practiced SEO companion to get it through for their website. Another of import aspect of SEO is the article writing and the publication of the articles. This is a very important thing to do for better SEO results.

The contents and the articles play a big role in the world of search engine optimization and also help a great deal in link building also. Well-written contents in relevant topics have a great deal of role-play in search engine optimization. However, for better and effective search engine optimization the most important thing is the perfect planning. It is also to be kept in mind that you should have a thorough research on the current market demands and trends, preferences of customers and also the analysis of the other websites is also equally important. It is entirely then later the perfective executing of the preparation you can calculate along it to bear improve results on the search engine result pages.

Search engine optimization software as we altogether acknowledge is the software to operation by which the webmasters test to accomplish best ranking in the search engine result pages. The main objective of the webmasters is to get the maximum number of potential customers on their website. And this can be achieved only when you have the maximum number of visitors on your website. And that too is possible only when you have a good ranking on the search engine result pages. And here is the need for search engine optimization.

How Long Before I See an Improvement in My Ranking?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A popular question asked is, how long do I have to wait until I see an improvement in my search engine ranking after I begin using search engine optimization (SEO)?

How long you have to wait depends upon which techniques are used in your attempts to optimize your website. If you have completely rebuilt your site and re-loaded it onto your server, thus replacing your old files, you will need to wait somewhere from a few days (if you use a pay-for-inclusion service) to a few months.

However, if your site has previously been on the Internet, and is already shown in the major directories, you may start to see improvements in your search engine rankings within 4-6 weeks.

If your website is not currently listed in the major directories, adding it to the directories will result in an important positive impact.

Ultimately, a bottom-to-top rebuild of your website will provide an improvement in your search engine rankings fairly rapidly. You will continue to observe improvements for 6-9 months, as the alterations to your website are indexed in the databases that drive the major search engines.

Should I Think About SEO When Re-Designing a Website?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

If you are looking at re-designing your website, then you should already be thinking about search engines and search engine optimization, even before you hire a designer.

The first step when you are looking at a website re-design is to see how people are searching related to your products or services. When you are aware of what people are looking for, you will be in a position to develop content and a site map that provides them what they want. By producing content based upon keyword research, you are able to position your site to win for many keyword phrases.

When you create a site map centered on the known searching behavior of potential customers, you are greatly enhancing the usability of your website. You are speaking the same language as your customers. You are also giving yourself the best possible chance to win a wide variety of specific searches.

It is also important that you maintain the search engine listings you already have achieved when you re-design your website. Just because you are starting afresh with a new design and content, doesn't necessarily mean you have to lose the indexing you already have. The two important considerations are: files indexed by the search engines, and files having links pointing to them from other sites and directories.

Static HTML and dynamic PHP

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The same basic principles of search engine optimization (SEO) that apply to static HTML sites also apply to dynamic PHP sites, and these are:

1. Provide appealing and important content presented in an attractive design.

2. The page code should be free of errors and comply with the relevant standards.

3. Keywords which are appropriate to your subject matter should be used. It is not a good idea to try and use tricks that might end up damaging your search engine listing.

4. Persuade repeat visits by frequently updating, providing interactive features, offer a membership sign-up, newsletters and, if appropriate, provide free offers like contests, giveaways, downloads and other resources.

5. Promote linking to your website with copy and paste code. Reciprocal links build partnerships and have the potential to greatly increase your page rank. However, try and avoid hosting massive link farms and other locations for pointless website spam.

6. Take advantage of tools provided by search engines, such as creating a sitemap.

7. Teach yourself by reading the search engine FAQs and reading carefully independent forums for SEO tips and approaches.

Major Steps in SEO

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at search engine optimization, the major steps are:

Research effective keywords thoroughly.
Research your key competitors search engine positioning.
Choose applicable keywords carefully, add an effective header, use italics and underline proper keywords.
Take care to add a title, description and page text for every single page on your website.
Ensure the wording and meta tags, image source tags and other meta information are present.
Comprehend the significance of submitting your website manually to search engines.
Improve link popularity by trading links on a regular basis.
Consider other marketing and promotion techniques.
Submit your website links to free reliable advertisement websites.
Submit your articles in ezines and link the contents to your website.
Add fresh content regularly.
Attempt to obtain links from trusted websites.

SEO Dos

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Customize title tags

Every single page should have a unique title for that page alone.

Thoroughly research keywords

You cannot start optimizing your website until you have fully researched your keywords and know how the optimization will pan out.

Use keyword appropriate filenames for each web page

If a page is about men’s black shirts, then your file name should be mens-black-shirts.xxx. For example, yourdoman.com/ mens-black-shirts.html.

Have a properly organized directory structure

Do not have all your pages in the root folder. Conversely, don't have too many directories and sub directories. Keep it straightforward, yet structured.

Plan your internal links

Formulate your navigation efficiently, use no follows sparingly, link content to other pages generously and make use of absolute links.

Use content efficiently

Ensure your content sells to your visitors but is also bountiful in keywords. Be careful not to go over the top on keyword usage, but make sure it works best for the visitors.

SEO Don'ts

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Avoid junking up your code

Remove unnecessary code such as on-page styles, JavaScripts and unwarranted tables. Maintain a trim code and where possible clean and validate the code.

Be careful of including lots of junk links at the bottom of your pages

Links in the footer links are fine, but try and avoid junk links to pages that have no value to your visitors.

Steer clear of stock content

Invest the time to create custom content for your website. Avoid the use of manufacturer’s descriptions except if you incorporate your own descriptive content also.

Keep your URLs nice and clean

Maintain clean and tidy URLs without loads of surplus variables or session IDs.

Heading Optimization

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

An important aspect of search engine optimization is optimizing page headings. Header tags, or H1 & H2 headings, are a reasonably well weighed element of page content, and if implemented correctly can be effective in optimizing your search engine ranking.

The header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc) signify the start of a new section, or area, of page content and signal to search engines the relevancy of the content that follows the heading tag.

Optimization tips for headers:

Less is more. Do not over use. Typically, limit each page to one H1 & 1-2 H2s, then use H3s.
The length of the heading tags should be limited, as there are fewer words to remove weight from your target phrase.
Incorporate exact target phrases within the heading tags. However, try to use variations on the phrase to keep away from clear replication.
Target phrases should be placed at the start of heading tags for best performance.
The heading tags must appear in the correct order. H1 should appear first, then H2, H3 and so on.
The heading tag should be supported the relevant content. Every heading should come before a body of applicable content.
Standard headings are not appealing visually, so style your headings using CSS to change their look.

Image Optimization

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Don’t forget about your images when you are considering search engine optimization. Images have been important for optimization for a long time. But, now that most search engine provide convenient image search options, they have become even more important.

There are many ways to optimize your images for search, such as: applicable alt text, appropriate file naming and closeness to relevant content.

Placement of an image close to relevant content appears to increase the images likelihood of ranking for words applicable to the pages content.

This is a kind of passive optimization that generally occurs naturally. More focused and decisive optimization includes including relevant alt text and developing relevant naming conventions for the images on your websites.

Optimizing Image Alt Text

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Search engine optimization of image alt text is an important consideration when you are creating a website. Alt tags are the textual description of an image that shows when you hover a mouse over an image.

The alt text is also shown on the screen when an image does not load properly. They are also interpreted, or repeated, by screen readers for people who are visually impaired.

As search engine bots are unable to see image content, alt text provides a meaningful description of the image, the page content, or the page that a linked image is pointing to.

Some tips for optimizing your image alt text are:

Alt text should not be too long. Try not to fill it with needless words or even relevant phrases.
Keep away from placing alt text on unimportant images. Previous spam strategies included paragraphs of alt text in 1px images.
Try and use target phrases naturally in alt text.
Provide a sufficient description of the image. Remember, image alt text also provides visually impaired people with content.
Ensure you have alt text for images that link to other pages, as this behaves like anchor text in text links.
Don’t include HTML tags in alt text.

Optimizing Image File Names

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

As well as optimizing the image alt text, you should also consider the image file names themselves when you are investigating search engine optimization. Even though alt text optimization is older and well understood, employing applicable key phrases in your image file names can be very important and successful.

Similar to other optimization approaches you want to be careful and not get too get carried away with keywords or phrases, however, a natural use of applicable phrases in file names is a good approach to SEO. It is also follows the convention of good usability.

A few optimization tips for naming images include:

Do not make the image name too long. Even though there is a technical limitation of 127 characters, this is far too long for an effective image name.
Be sure to separate keywords, so they can be read as individual words. For example, avoid "hereisaseoguide.gif".
Incorporate target phrases at the beginning of the filename.

Optimizing Web Content

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

One of the most obvious aspects of search engine optimization, is the optimization of your page content. To be most effective, the content should be focused on one particular subject. Individual pages should maintain the particular theme, or possibly a small subset of associated themes, throughout the page.

It is common practice for many content writers to choose keywords or phrases first, for which they want to rank, and then create content to reflect those themes.

Another approach is to compose the basic page content first and then incorporate keywords and phrases throughout the content afterwards.

It does not matter which method you use, so long as keywords and phrases are included within the content.

Website content should be placed within the <body></body> of a document and should be crawlable by search engine bots. Do not place content in JavaScript, Flash or images, as these cannot be searched. There are no character limits for content, so create as much as you want.

Keyword Density

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

You should pay particular attention to keyword density for any search engine optimization. Search engine bots cannot interpret content the same way humans can. However, they can measure how often and how closely together keywords or phrases are present in web page content. This is commonly referred to as keyword density.

It is keyword density which assists a search engine bot to figure out what your website is all about. If you do not use a keyword very often, then the search engine doesn't place much value or significance on the page for that particular term. On the other hand, if you use a term too much, the bot may interpret this as spamming, and devalue the page for that keyword.

There are a number of popular textual density measurement tools which determine keyword density.

The current thinking is that approximately 3-5% keyword density is the best practice, however, there is no secret target keyword density, as it varies over time and across different phrases.

For very competitive phrases, you may need additional content with greater application of the target phrase, compared to less competitive phrases.

A good way of calculating a target keyword density is to look at the density of the websites with top rankings for your desired target keywords and try to achieve that keyword density figure.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:

* breaks search engine rules and regulations.

* creates a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site.

* unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

A lot of what is known as black hat SEO actually used to be legit, but some folks went a bit overboard and now these techniques are frowned upon by the general SEO community at large. These black hat SEO practices will actually provide short-term gains in terms of rankings, but if you are discovered utilizing these spammy techniques on your Web site, you run the risk of being penalized by search engines. Black hat SEO basically is a short-sighted solution to a long-term problem, which is creating a Web site that provides both a great user experience and all that goes with that.

Duplicate Content Kills

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Duplicate Content Kills

What is Duplicate Content in Terms of SEO?

Duplicate content, in terms of SEO, can mean a couple different things. For one, duplicate content can mean using the same textual content on multiple web pages. A common misconception about SEO is that the more pages you have the better, even if they contain the same content.

Duplicate content can also mean several different URL's for the same web page. This often happens on accident, but it can also be a purposeful technique to increase the number of web pages a search engine sees.

Simply put, this technique can cause you many serious problems down the road.

Duplicate Content Means Search Engines Only Index One Page

For one, search engines will consider duplicate content on the web a form of plagiarism, and so they will only display one page out of the duplicates to show on their SERP's (Search Engine Result Pages). This means that if you have 5 pages, only 1 will actually be added to a search engine's index. Since you don't know which one that will be, you put more power in the hands of the search engine than you really need to.

A Quick SEO Overview of PageRank

PageRank is the Google search engine's way of ranking web pages. Every web page gets a certain amount of PageRank for just existing. When a web page hyperlinks to another web page, they pass on some PageRank to the web page they link to. Therefore, the more inbound links (links coming to a web page from another web page), the higher the PageRank.

PageRank is used by Google as a major factor in determining where a web page lands on the SERP's, so getting and and conserving it is of utmost importance when it comes to SEO.

Why Duplicate Content is an SEO Nightmare in Terms of PageRank

The main reason duplicate content is a major SEO issue is due to problems with PageRank. If you have 5 web pages with the same content, each of these have an equal number of incoming links, and only one of them gets indexed, that means that the indexed web page only has 1/5 the amount of PageRank it could have if all of the inbound links were coming to it.

To put this another way, duplicate pages split up your PageRank, and since PageRank is going to pages that don't matter, it gets lost, never to be seen again.

One More Reason Duplicate Content Can Put a Stop to SEO

This one is the clincher: duplicate content is against most search engine's terms of service. This means that if Google finds out that you're using duplicate content they can penalize your site, rendering it virtually invisible on the SERP's.

Getting Keywords in URL's is Critical

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Getting Keywords in URL's is Critical

Getting keywords in your URL is one of the most overlooked techniques for SEO-ing a web site. Here's a quick overview of what you can do to work your URL into SEO shape!

What is a URL?

A URL (Universal Resource Locator) is the name of your web page which appears in a web browser's address bar. URL's are used by search engines as an identifier for your web page. They also store the URL in their index as one of the ways they determine the subject matter of a web site.

The first part of a URL consists of a domain name, like "www.ajiboye.com". The second part of the URL consists of the filename, or something like "/seo-optimization-article.html".

Use a Keyword Rich Domain Name for SEO

The first part of a URL is the domain name, which you can SEO by adding in some of the most important keywords regarding your web site. For instance, a web site selling CMS ASD might choose a domain name like "www.cms-asd.com" or "www.budget-cms-asd.com". Even if you have to be creative because the domain name you wanted initially isn't available, you can still SEO the domain name by getting in the keywords.

You also might have noticed that I used a dash between the keywords. This gives the search engine an easy way to separate the keywords from one another, giving the domain more SEO power.

Use a Keyword Rich Filename for SEO

The second part of the URL - the filename - is fairly easy to get SEO-ed. Using the same method you used with the domain name, you can create a keyword rich filename. Just add in the keywords the web page is focused on, separate them with a dash, and you're good to go.

One important thing to note is that you can over-SEO a URL, either causing a search engine to put up a red flag in regards to your site, or diluting the power of your keywords. The trick is not to use too many words in the domain name or the file name. This will keep the importance of your keywords from diminishing since they won't have to share significance with other, less important keywords.

Content Optimization Tips

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Below are a number of content optimization tips to consider when you are looking at the search engine optimization for your website:

Never host duplicate content. Try not to use too much similar content on multiple pages.
Do not place content in unreadable locations, for example Flash, JavaScript or images.
Make sure you limit the length of your content. When there is more content it can be difficult to obtain a target keyword density.
Try not to borrow content, as unique content is much more valuable to the ranking of your website.
It is best to incorporate target keywords and phrases at the start of sentences and paragraphs.
Place embedded links in your content pointing to applicable pages, as this creates relevancy for search engine bots and visitors.
Try not to show your content using dynamic approaches, like Flash, JavaScript or image headers.
Any new content attracts attention, so it is a great idea to write well and write regularly. The greater the content your website has about a subject, the more of an authority you become, resulting in your pages receiving more weight.

How Do I Keep the Query String from Having Negative Effects on My SEO Efforts?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

How Do I Keep the Query String from Having Negative Effects on My SEO Efforts?

The best thing to do is to get rid of the string altogether, thus allowing your web site to use SEO URL's. This is easier said than done, but there are a couple of tricks you can use pass those variables in the query string to your pages in a more SEO manner.

First, try to use session variables where you can. Session variables are stored on the server, and keep track of a visitor's information. If you move most of the query string into session variables, they will be invisible in the URL's.

Secondly, you can use tools that cause a URL to look a certain way to a visitor, and another way to the server. The actual technology you use will be different depending on weather you're using a Windows or a Linux web server, but there is information across the web on how to implement it. Just look up "url rewrite IIS" for Windows servers or "url rewrite apache" for Linux servers.

Once you get the query string out of the picture, your URL's will be squeaky clean for SEO.

Achieving Keyword Density

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Obtaining an adequate keyword density whilst keeping away from repetition and inane sounding copy can be difficult when you are looking to optimize your search engine ranking.

It is worth remembering that even though an exact match to the target keyword is the best result, you can also shore up the main target keywords by means of variations of the keywords that incorporate part of the phrase.

Here are some examples of how you can incorporate a partial match, reordered phrase, or broken up phrase to assist in obtaining a target keyword density:

Exact match	free investment guide
Partial match	investment guide
Reorder match	free guide to investment
Interrupted	free online investment guide

The Importance Of The URL In SEO

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The Importance Of The URL In SEO

While everyone agrees that a clean URL is important in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), I think it’s valued a lot less than it ought to be (in other words; it’s more important than most think). Whenever you search for certain keywords, those keywords are highlighted in the title, description & url of the search result pages.

The Title & Description speak for themselves. The title is what used to get the most attention, and the description may not mean a lot in SEO-points itself (content & semantics are they way to go), but its value is mostly to get users to click from the search result page, onto your webpage. It’s your entry-path. Your pursuading argument to win a visitor.

And that’s what the URL has been graduately evolving into. Nowadays, internet users tend to ignore the webpages’ title, and look at the URL in result pages.

Take the following search result for “dedicated servers“.

Website Hosting : Small business web hosting provider, cheap web ...

If you don't know much about websites and website applications software, ... Affordable web hosting solutions for shared hosting or dedicated servers. .... Partner Programs. Affiliate Referral Partners. AJIBOYE Developer Network ...

www.ajiboye.com/SPT-590-166-design011-Website_Hosting.asd - Cached

While the title is displayed in a larger font than the URL, most people will look straight down at the URL to see if their keywords are present. Because after all, if the webpages’ filename contains our keywords, it’s bound to contain the info we’re looking for. Right? ;-)

It also has the advantage of getting a lot of information, in one tiny spot. The domain name usually contains the company title – which is often stuffed at the end of a webpage title, to contain more keywords. It usually indicates a language as well, so you know straight away what you’ll dive into.

Thus it’s important to change URLs such as

domain.com/index.php?module_id=4501&lang_id=501&product_id=2101

domain.com/en/productinfo/teddy-bear-slippers/

A clean URL, that shows what the page will contain, in a blink of an eye.

While the Title-tag remains a great asset to get good rankings, it’s no longer the deciding factor to get users to click through. It’s time to spend some time, personalising & keyword-izing (if that’s even a word) your URLs!

Effective SEO Includes Relevant Incoming Links

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Effective SEO Includes Relevant Incoming Links

No matter how much work you do, submitting your site until you are blue in the face will not work if you do not have incoming link popularity to keep the search engine spiders coming back. Invest in the time to find high quality (relevant) incoming links.

Begin blogging for business purposes. Add links on your front page to the blogs. It is imperative that the blogs provide QUALITY content too. Remember to include static links on your blog that lead back to your site, along with relevant anchor text linking.

What Is SEO?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

What Is SEO?

SEO, stands for Search Engine Optimization. Ground-breaking stuff, right? By definition, SEO is the practice of trying to improve the overall volume and quality of traffic to a website via various souces, such as “organic” search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) and referring websites.

Typically, the higher your website ranks in the search engines the more traffic you will receive. This is just a generality of course, as this often depends on the keywords you’re optimizing for and the amount of search volume that keyword may (or may not) receive.

What Does SEO Involve?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

What Does SEO Involve?

Although there are too many factors to count in search engine algorithms, most SEO’s approach a Search Engine Optimization campaign the same way…by breaking it down into two basic functions.

1. On-Site SEO

2. Off-Site SEO

On-Site SEO refers to any work you do ON the website that may have any potential impact in your search engine rankings. This may involve such things as editing HTML, title tags, meta tags, adding hyperlinks, or placing Alt tags on your images. In the beginning of an Search Engine Optimization campaign, this is where a bulk of your time will be spent.

Off-Site SEO refers to any work you do for your Search Engine Optimization campaign that DOESN’T directly involve making changes on the website. This includes such things as link building, directory submission, local content optimization, video optimization, and even social media. While these efforts may often be overlooked, they become increasingly important over time. You can’t make major changes to your site forever, eh?

Why Is SEO Useful?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Why Is SEO Useful?

Not surprisingly, there are still many skeptics of the practice of SEO. In fact, I grow more and more assured that some people think SEO is pure witchcraft by the day. For those of you who may be considering signing on with an SEO company or starting your own campaign, here are a few useful reasons why it may be good for you.

1. Increased Volume of Traffic

2. Better Traffic Quality

3. More Exposure to Subsidiary Pages

4. More Opportunity for Leads!

This is all assuming that your SEO is solid from the get-go. However, if it’s done right you can see that investing in Search Engine Optimization is a solid long-term strategy for your business. I mean, who wouldn’t like more traffic and leads, right?

URL Optimization

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Optimizing your URL structure is important when you are considering search engine optimization. Even though search engines have been improving in how they crawl and index dynamic sites, URL structure can still be a barrier for many websites.

If you incorporate a basic URL structure practices, your website can keep clear off many indexing issues related to the URL structure.

The best approaches for URL structure comprise limiting the number of directory levels from domain to file, limit the number of name and value pairs or rewriting dynamic URLs entirely and incorporating directories and file names with applicable keywords.

URL Structure Optimization Tips

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Domain Names

Try and limit the length of your domain name. Even though the technical limitation is 63 characters, this is far too long for a successful domain name.

Look for a domain name which contains a keyword applicable to your targeted content.

Stay away from spammy URLs that have multiple hyphens or incorrect spellings.

Folder/File Names

Use a word separator like “-“ or “_” so folders and filenames can be read as individual words. For example, do not use "thisisafolder”.

Try and limit the overall length of folders by compressing the directory structure into a file naming convention in an attempt to reduce the number of directory levels.

Overall URL Structure

Do not use too many directory levels from the domain name to the file by avoiding the use of needless folders.

Try not to make the total length of the URL too long by staying away from needless words and characters.

Make use of keywords, phrases and real words. Do not include abbreviated or obscure words.

Steer away from session IDs and other session based parameters in URLs.

For dynamic URL strings, avoid any more than 2-3 name or value pairs.

Optimized Linking

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

One of the important aspects you need to look at when thinking about search engine optimization is optimizing your linking. In many ways, links to your site can be considered as votes for your site. The more votes, or links, you have, the more popular a search engine believes your site is.

Further, the quality of the page linking to you can affect how much value a search engine spider may place on that link.

An extremely relevant or highly authoritative website linking to you is far more valuable to your ranking compared to an unrelated or brand new website with links to your site.

Internal and Outbound Links

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Internal Linking

Your own website links do assist your pages by distributing link popularity, PageRank and relevancy.

The best approach is for your website to have a complete site wide navigation, as this helps visitors to navigate from page to page on your site, but more importantly assists the search engine bots to find all your pages and regularly index them.

The same guidelines apply to internal links as those for external links, in that you should make use of anchor text that includes keywords and phrases applicable to the content of the link page.

Outbound Links

It is worth keeping in mind that websites with lots of inbound links and very few outbound links look suspicious to the search engine bots, so try and avoid that happening.

Stay away from large link exchanges, but instead concentrate on building link relationships with quality sites that have complimentary content to your own website. Make sure you use applicable anchor text to link to appropriate and authoritative websites.

Optimizing Successful Pages on Your Blog

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Optimizing Successful Pages on Your Blog

One of the first things to do is to identify and analyze the pages that people are arriving to your blog on from Search Engines. If you’re like most blogs you’ll find that a handful of your old posts generate a significant percentage of your search engine traffic. Identify these pages and you can then go about increasing the ranking of those pages even further in Google by doing some of the following:

* Increasing keyword density of these pages – don’t add the keywords that people are searching for too many more times, but it can help to add them 1-2 times more, bold the keywords, add them to heading tags, add them to image tags etc.

* Increase the internal links to these pages – if you find a page that is getting a lot of search traffic, any extra links to the page that you can generate (from both within your blog and outside it) can help its authority. You might want to even highlight some of these pages in your sidebar or navigation – or to link to them within other posts on your blog on a similar topic.

Create More Content on Related Search Terms

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Create More Content on Related Search Terms

Once you start getting a handle on what type of information that people are searching for you should begin to make a list of other related topics that you might want to write about. You can get ideas from this by looking at keywords that people use to arrive on your blog and thinking about synonyms for those words but also by looking at online services like Google Trends which maps what people are searching the web for.

Another good tool for analyzing search traffic and coming up with new topics to write about it 103bees which gives some metrics on the questions people are asking to find your blog. These questions are topics your readers are actually asking which shows you what they’re typing into Google. Another great tool to try is Lijit which is a search tool you can use on your blog. This tracks what terms people are searching your blog for. The useful thing about it is that they also show you what terms people searched for that there was no search results on your blog for – very handy information.

There is A LOT more that you can do to increase the search engine authority of your blog.

Linking Optimization Tips

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Some linking optimization tips that you should consider as part of your search engine optimization are shown below:

Get links from a wide variety of applicable sources.
Stay away from large link exchanges, paying for link advertising on irrelevant websites and other similar approaches.
Make use of applicable anchor text at every opportunity.
Do not become too concerned with a websites PageRank, as relevancy is far more important than PageRank.
Any links from authoritative top level domains are weighted very heavily, so chase those when applicable.

Make SEO Goals Specific, Measurable and Timely

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Make SEO Goals Specific, Measurable and Timely

The goal cannot be simply "Increase search traffic" or “Rank better for footwear.” There is no way to succeed at these goals, or to fail. Instead, one should ask the following.

* Increase search traffic for what valuable keywords and phrases?

* By what date?

* How much increase is desired?

* By search traffic do you mean natural search only or does PPC count also?

* Is it really traffic you're after, or a conversion of some sort, such as revenue?

* Is it success to improve rankings without increasing sales?

A more measurable goal would be stated like this: "By December 2009, increase monthly non-branded natural search referred revenue by 50 percent over the prior year." This example goal specifies a time period, a baseline of comparison to measure the success, and a specific numeric value to achieve. Everyone involved should be clear on the achievement or failure to achieve the goal, resulting in easier discussions about course corrections and resetting expectations (whether higher or lower).

Optimizing Descriptions

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

It is very important that you have a unique, correctly written and optimized meta description for successful search engine optimization. When joined with an optimized page title, the meta description creates the page's relevancy for search engine bots.

It is also important to remember that the content of the meta description is also significant for attracting attention and encouraging more click throughs. This is because the meta description is frequently displayed as a snippet in the search engine results.

Ideally, the meta description should be short, however, it should contain your brand, target keywords or phrases and language that attracts searchers to visit your website when they see you listed in the search engine results.

Description Optimization Tips

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are a number of important tips to remember when you are considering description optimizations as part of your overall search engine optimization strategy:

It is very important to use unique descriptions and avoid the use of similar descriptions across different pages.
Try and limit the descriptions to no greater than 250 characters. The ideal number is somewhere between 180 to 250 characters.
Make sure you incorporate exact target keywords and phrases in the meta description. However, steer clear of obvious repetition.
Do not overdo the use of target keywords and phrases by having too many in the description.
Only include keywords and phrases which are applicable to your page's content. Stay away from keywords that have little relevancy to the content.
Try not to include comparable phrases close together.
Include adequate content in the description and not just keywords and phrases.
Incorporate convincing language and a call-to-action in the meta description.
Stay away from over the top adjectives like tremendous, supreme, best and do not use lots of exclamation points.

What Contributes to a Reasonable SEO Goal?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

What Contributes to a Reasonable SEO Goal?

To create a realistic goal, one must establish dates in which the goal should be met, a baseline to measure the goal, and values in which the goal should be measured, as follows.

* Date to Achieve: First and foremost, a date needs to be based on the frequency with which a site is crawled. If your site is crawled every two weeks, achieving measurable results in one month is unrealistic. Even if your site is crawled hourly, changes like content optimization and internal linking structures can take 30 to 90 days to drive results. External links tend to register more quickly.

* Baseline of Measurement: Make sure that the time period you choose to measure results is representative. Setting the baseline as the top of a seasonal sales peak will make it appear as if SEO efforts are hurting results when in reality the site is experiencing a typical seasonal downturn. Measuring year over year results or an average of multiple months will ensure that the baseline is more representative.

* Value to Achieve: This is the question most often asked: How much growth can you realistically expect? That depends entirely on how well the site is doing today. Factors like opportunity for growth in a keyword market, competition, strategies targeted and ability to implement all play a role in setting expectations.

Optimizing Page Titles

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

An important aspect of any search engine optimization is the optimization of the page title. In fact, the first step in successful search engine optimization is a well optimized page title. The page title creates the page's overall relevancy for the search engine bots.

The page title content is also significant for getting click throughs, as the page title content is usually displayed as the search results link.

Some tips for optimizing your page title include:

Place a limit on the number of keywords or phrases targeted on any given page, usually 2-3 is optimal.
The title length should be limited to a maximum of 85 characters. Ideally, the title should be around 40-60 characters.
The title should be limited to relevant target keywords and phrases.
If you have similar phrases, do not repeat them close together.
Only include keywords and phrases that are applicable to your page's content. Do not include terms that are irrelevant to your content.
Make sure you include your exact target phrase at least once, usually at the start of the page title.

Optimizing a web site for search engines requires looking at so many unique elements

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Optimizing a web site for search engines requires looking at so many unique elements:

* Review of your site content or structure

* Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript

* Content development

* Management of online business development campaigns

* Keyword research

Avoid Splash Pages

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

If you are serious about search engine optimization, then you should avoid splash pages. Splash pages became obsolete a long time ago. It is highly recommended not to use splash pages. A splash page is similar to a teaser to your real website. More often than not, they are large images or Flash animation.

The main issue with splash pages is that they do not contain any keywords or phrases. Also, they make a visitor wait, or force them to click on a link to get to where they actually wanted to go in the first place.

This is the first page a search engine bot will see. Therefore, you need to use this to your advantage, and don’t blow it on a pointless, old fashioned splash page.

Can a Search Engine Index a Password Protected Page?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

An important aspect to consider when you are looking at your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is whether a search engine can index any of your pages which are password protected. Unfortunately, the answer is no, search engines are not able to index password protected pages. Consequently, password protecting particular pages is an efficient method of preventing them from being indexed by search engines. If you don't want random visitors to see certain pages, password protection is very effective.

It is often the case that some businesses want to persuade visitors to "sign up" in order to access particular content on their website and they password protect that content in an attempt to encourage people into signing up. Regrettably, that protected content is frequently the top content available on a site and would result in great search engine results. For example, you may have a series of technical publications on your website that you would like people to read, but only after they sign-up. If you make them public, the technical papers may end up top on the search engine results for the phrases your potential customers are searching. A trade-off is required; you can either utilize your content to attract visitors from search engines, or you can pay for visitors from search engines and then request them to sign-up to see your content.

A possible way to steer clear of the trade-off is to permit visitors, and subsequently search engines, to see the first few pages of each of your articles, but require registration to view the full content. This will permit search engines to index some of your protected content, and would attract more visitors to your website.

Can I Speed Up My Website Listing?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

If you have a product which is time sensitive, and you are relying on your website to produce sales, then it is possible to go into a business relationship with the search engines themselves. For an expedited review and listing, you can submit your website to search engines for a fee. Or, you can pay for an advertisement on the search engines.

In you pay for inclusion, your pages will be indexed quickly and included in the search engine results, however, this does not guarantee a high ranking in the results. You cannot pay for inclusion in Google. Buying advertisements, such as Pay-Per-Click listings, makes sure your website gets a spot in the sponsored results of the major search engines.

A good way to go is to optimize your website and pay for immediate addition in search. You can employ a search engine optimization company to work on your website every time you include new time-sensitive product and then you can pay the search engines to rapidly add the new optimized pages to their indexes.

What is Search Engine Spam?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

In terms of search engines, spam is defined as the treatment of a web page to give it a false increase in the search engine rankings. In general, spam is what the search engines say it is, that is, it is defined by the search engines themselves. The major search engines provide detailed guidance which describes what webmasters should and should not do to their web pages in order to attain a higher search engine ranking.

When you are looking at your Search Engine Optimization, there are several methods which are universally deemed search spam and are described below:

Hidden Text

Hidden text is textual content which your visitors do not see, but which is readable by the search engines. The concept is to load a Web page with keywords, or phrases that would not be pleasant to read by visitors but improve the page's rankings in the search engine results. Hidden text is recognized as search spam by the major search engines.

Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are web pages constructed to specifically attract search engine visitors to your website. They are pages which standalone and only to act as doorways to your website. Doorway pages are a bad idea for many reasons. Doorway pages don't do a great job of generating traffic, as many users simply hit their back buttons when they come across a doorway page

Mirror Pages

Mirror pages are two websites that mirror each other in their content, but they have different keywords and meta tags. If you build two websites that mirror each other in content it will undoubtedly hurt your Internet marketing efforts. All the main search engines explicitly state that you should not submit sites with mirrored content. If you violate their rules is possible that one or both of your sites will be permanently banned by the search engines.

What are Doorway Pages?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

When looking at optimizing your search engine results there are a number of guidelines you must be aware of, and one is the use of doorway pages. Doorway pages are web pages which are created specifically to attract search engine visitors to your website. They are pages which standalone and only to act as doorways to your site. You should not include doorway pages for many reasons.

As a general guide, if you cannot reach the page by following the site navigation, then it is considered to be a doorway page. You are not supposed to "visit" the page. Rather, you are just supposed to find on the search results page and then click through to get to the site in question. Fundamentally, a doorway page is the same as a one-page click-through advertisement for a website. The problem is, when you are searching, the last thing you want to visit is a one-page click-through advertisement for a website. You want to visit the actual website which contains the content you were looking for. Doorway pages can be thought of as giant banner ads, only much worse.

You can tell if a page is a doorway page or just another web page by answering the following questions.

1. Is the web page essential to the contents of your website?

2. Do you have links to the page in your site navigation?

If you answered "Yes” to both, then the page is not a doorway page. If answered "No" to both, then the page is a doorway page.

Do Search Engines Index ALT Text Descriptions?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Most search engines do index ALT text descriptions for image files on web pages. There are some websites, in particular sites with lots of images, where ALT text is one of the few elements able to be indexed by search engines. A web page can still rank high in search engine results, even if it does not have a lot of text on it, by using ALT text.

Overall, in terms of search engine optimization, the impact of using ALT tags is low. This is because they have been abused by webmasters who have filled ALT tags with streams of keywords. As a result, major search engines have lowered the importance of ALT tags in their algorithms. But, ALT tags are an essential element for standards-based HTML coding, where all images must have a properly implemented ALT tag.

Keyword Optimization - Words or Phrases

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

When choosing keywords for your website optimization, it is important to consider the difference between individual words and phrases. Consider two pages which contain only large images. The first page has the following meta keywords tag:

(1) <meta name="keywords" content="historical research, historical writing">

The second page has the following meta keywords tag:

(2) <meta name="keywords" content="historical, research, writing">

If you search using the keyword phrase "historical research", with and without the quotation marks, the first page will rank higher than the second page every time (all other things being equal). The same goes for the keyword phrase "historical writing" and for the individual keyword, "historical." However, the second page will win for the keyword searches "research" and "writing."

If we now have a third page with an image and the following meta keywords tag:

(3) <meta name="keywords" content="historical research, historical writing, research, writing, historical">

The results for our competition are changed after the inclusion of the third page. Now the third page, which includes the words and phrases, wins for every single search, including historical research, historical writing, historical, research and writing.

It is good practice to duplicate words in similar phrases, but you should also include the individual keywords.

Link Popularity

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

When considering search engine optimization, you should understand the concept of link popularity. Generally speaking, link popularity is calculated by the number and quality of websites that have linked to your website. These are also referred to as “backlinks". There are 3 main effects of link popularity:

1. Links to your site provide web users with ways to locate your website whilst they are visiting other sites

2. Any links to your website provide search engine robots with paths to follow to locate and index (or re-index) your website

3. Search engine ranking algorithms essentially see links to your website as votes for your site, however, not all votes are counted equally.

If there are two sites with roughly equal search engine performance optimization for a given keyword phrase, the search engine will generally rank the one with more link popularity above the other.

Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

There are three main ideas you need to consider when looking at Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website:

1. How are customers searching for my products or services?

2. Which websites are winning those searches and why?

3. Which are the searches that can I win?

When you have chosen a number of keywords, or search phrases, that have potential, you are in a position to create a search engine optimization approach for your website.

The best first step is to look at your website and see if you have important content already present that matches closely with the keywords, or search phrases, you have chosen. It is good practice to have at least one page of well written and meaningful useful content for each keyword family you have identified. One keyword family should be the focus on each page. An example for you to look at is a page from an encyclopaedia. For keyword phrases which are highly competitive, you may need to allot whole segments of your website in an attempt to win the single keyword.

Search Engine Optimization Plan

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

If a complete guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) were to be written it would be the length of a book and would probably be out dated as soon as it was published. However, there are several tips below to help you build a website with SEO in mind:

1. All the pages on your website must have a unique HTML title tag, meta keywords tag, and meta description tag.

2. You must adhere to the W3C recommendations for the document structure of HTML. Start the body of your page with your keyword phrase, and replicate as the theme of your page throughout the copy. Include your keyword phrase significantly by including it in your page headers.

3. The use of text navigation on your website is very important, remembering to use keyword phrases you have chosen as the page links. If it is not possible to use text navigation, then have a footer at the bottom of every page with text links in it.

4. Create a site map in text and link to it from every page of your website.

5. Set up your navigation according to the level of keyword phrase importance. If your website is broken up into lots of pages, create links to the most important pages from every page. Create links to the other pages from section header pages and the site map.

6. Launch your website by submitting it to the major directories and then build your link recognition by submitting to web directories, search engines and asking for links from any related websites.

7. Last but not least, be patient. A SEO project can take some time to produce results.

Basics - HTML Title Tags

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

When writing HTML code, it is the <title> tag which specifies the title of your web page. The <title> tag is a piece of code which is placed inside the header of your web page and takes the following form:

<head>

<title> Making Title Tags for SEO & Web Ease of Use </title>

</head>

The <title> tag in a HTML document is described by The World Wide Web Consortium as:

The global structure of an HTML document - 7.4.2 The TITLE element

"Every HTML document must have a TITLE element in the HEAD section."

"Authors should use the TITLE element to identify the contents of a document. Since users often consult documents out of context, authors should provide context-rich titles. Thus, instead of a title such as "Introduction", which doesn't provide much contextual background, authors should supply a title such as "Introduction to Medieval Bee-Keeping" instead."

There lots of other tags that can be placed within the header tag also, including meta tags.

Title Tag Roles on a Web Page

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The <title> tag plays a very important role in any Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The <title> tag plays four main roles:

1. Resource librarians, directory editors and other webmasters use the title when they link to your web page. If you have a well written title, your web site will be reviewed quicker and will get favorable treatment by the editors.

2. The title is shown in search page results as the most important piece of information presented to searchers. You may want to take care that your <title> tag contains useful information and not just obvious search engine optimization terms.

3. The title will be shown in the visitor's web browser in the border of the viewable screen as they are viewing your website. This allows the visitor to know where they are on your website. Therefore, titles must plainly relate to their page and should include bread crumb or mouse trail data if space constraints permit.

4. It is the title which is used by major search engines as the most significant piece of information available to help them identify the theme of your web page. This is very important when they determine your page ranking in their search results. As the title is a very important contributor to your page ranking, it may be enticing to stack the title tag with keywords or phrases. However, this should be avoided because of the first three reasons presented above.

Meta Keywords

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Although meta keywords tags are not a main consideration for Search Engine Optimization, it is still a good idea to include them on a page. In fact, both the meta keywords tag and the meta description tag have a say in your search engine ranking. A meta keywords tag should be a short and succinct list of the most important topics of your page. The meta keywords tag looks like the following:

A great place to start writing a meta keywords list is by scanning the copy on your web page. Create a list of the most important words or phrases present on the page. Read back through the list and chose the 10 or 15 terms that most precisely describe the content of the page. If you have trouble narrowing your list down to 10-15 keywords, then your page may be rambling too much.

In order to have a chance to get a top ten placement on search engine results, web pages need to be extremely focused on one or two specific keyword phrases. For example, a page about northern Atlanta pears and western Californian oranges won’t have much of a chance to win for either "northern Atlanta pears" or "western Californian oranges." In order to have a chance to win, you will require one page for northern Atlanta pears and one page for western Californian oranges.

SEO and Meta Keywords Tag

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

A long time ago, the meta keywords tag was extremely valuable in assisting pages to rank highly on search engine results. Regrettably, many unprincipled webmasters abused the meta keywords tag and search engine algorithms had to de-emphasize their importance. However, you should not omit the meta keywords tag from your web pages.

The following guidelines should be used to define meta keywords tags:

1. The list of keywords, or keyword phrases, should be kept down to around 10 - 15 unique words or phrases.

2. The words or phrases should be separated using a comma. There is no need to leave a space between the words separated by commas.

3. It is bad practice to repeat words or phrases.

4. Place your most important keywords or phrases at the start of your list.

SEO and Title Tags

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

For Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a great title should satisfy the guidelines presented below:

1. The titles should be typed in Title Case (or Proper Case). This formatting mistake is one of the most overlooked errors when dealing with titles. Also, headers should be written using Title Case. There are exceptions to the Title Case rule, such as for FAQ pages, where it is okay to have the original question as the title to the page.

2. Titles should be clearly written to show what is available on the page for non-fiction or reference websites.

3. You must use a unique title for every page on your website. That is, do not place the same title on every page of your website.

4. The title must be able to obviously convey the contents of the web page to the reader and stand on its own without any further clarification required. The title should give the reader some context. A title such as "Home" or "About Us" tells the reader nothing about what is on the page when shown in search results. Also, when a person bookmarks your site, the title of your page becomes the title of their bookmark, so consider the text you want to be displayed next to a bookmark of your site.

5. The home page title presents unique needs. A home page establishes your business and is usually the best chance in a search engine optimization contest. Home page titles should plainly specify what content is available on the page. It is also important from a web credibility viewpoint, that the title clearly shows what business is represented on the page.

Using Keywords in Web Page Titles

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

It is important to consider whether the title chosen for a web page is the best in terms of Search Engine Optimization. The title tag is the most important piece of information used by search engines when making sense of your web page. This is the reason why the inclusion of target keywords, or phrases, in your title is very advantageous.

Imagine we have researched the keyword phrases related to title tags, undertaken a competitive analysis, and established that the following keyword phrases are our best targets: title tags; title tag limit; title tag; web titles; web page title; maximum length of a title tag; formatting title tag; and HTML title.

Our main title tag already has the phrase "title tags" which includes within it the phrase "title tag." By making a minor change to the tag, we can include one more of our keyword phrases without substantially reducing the title's ability to satisfy its main roles.

Original: Creating Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization & Web Usability

Edited: Web Page Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization & Web Usability

Therefore, the final title tag reads, "Web Page Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization & Web Usability".

SEO Services to Increase your Leads and Sales

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Services to Increase your Leads and Sales

You may have noticed that the traffic from search engines has become the lifeblood of your website, no matter how big or small your organization. Increasing search traffic can have a positive effect on the amount of people who buy your product, download your software or fill out your contact form.

Improving your site's search engine positioning generates more site traffic and more leads, leading to more sales and ultimately, more profit for your organization. Increasing your site's ranking in the search engine results through search engine optimization techniques leads to better exposure to potential customers in your marketplace. Optimization for the natural search listings (as opposed to Pay-Per-Click listings) is often called 'organic SEO'

Internet Marketing Services: SEO

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Internet Marketing Services: SEO

One of the most important factors in getting a website ranked high in search engines has to do with what is known as Backlinks. If another website links to your site, that is seen as a "vote" for your website in the eyes of the search engines. The more votes (links) you have pointing to your site, the better you will rank. Search engines also analyze the backlinks to your site in several other ways besides sheer number; they also look at how powerful each site is that links to you, how trusted those sites appear to be, and what those sites/pages are about that link to you.

If you want to rank high in search engines, you need to get other websites to link to you. Our specialty is getting other websites to link to your website based on the merit of what your site has. If you don't have any compelling reason for another site to reference your site, then we can create content for you, through our content development services that is compelling for other sites to link to. We also offer local marketing, Professional website creation services, social media marketing, as well as SEO consulting and training services. This is what makes us stand out when compared with other Internet marketing companies.

The Importance of Web Based Email Marketing Software

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The importance of Web Based Email Marketing Software

Tools that contribute to the management of mailing lists and email campaigns fall into the category of web based email marketing software. Business partners and clients get more numerous every day, and the manual mail creation can be a real burden and even an impossible task when the listings count thousands of addresses. Hence, a web based email marketing software creates and delivers mass mails to all your business prospects and customers, but this feature is only complementary to the creation of personalized newsletters, reporting and campaign success rate tracking.

Users can download web based email marketing software from various sources, and the choice variants range from free options to fee-based ones. The features are usually locked in free trial versions, hence you’ll only be able to perform a small number of tasks with such a tool. Then, the very opposite situation is that of programs that include so many features that users have difficulties at operating and understanding them all. It is important to choose a web based email marketing software that is user friendly with a simple interface that will not require any special computer knowledge.

If you are not sure which tool would be more suitable for your marketing plans, have a look over online reviews and see which are the best spoken of programs. Plus, a free version of a software can tell you a lot about the all-included program. Thus, when you test a product in its free version, direct experience will tell you what sort of quality to expect from the registered version. The usage easiness, the number of active and locked features, the speed with which it delivers mails, the reporting options, all make important aspects to consider before registration. And they can be very well identified in the free trial variants of the program.

It is important to realize whether a web based email marketing software is suitable for your business or not. The amount of tasks performed as well as the tool complexity will have a heavy role to play in your decision making. There’s no need to purchase some very expensive program jam-packed with intricate features that you’ll never get the chance to use. Hence, the wisest thing to do is to adapt the choice of the product to the context in which you intend to use it. The utility of the web based email marketing software has to justify the investment you make.

SEO Mistakes to Avoid for Effective Internet Marketing

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Search engine optimization is an important part of internet marketing. The quality of SEO is directly interlinked with the effectiveness of internet marketing and promotion. Thus, it may be of help to know some of the most common and typical mistakes to avoid, while optimizing a website.

Ignoring <title> tag. The title tag is much more important than just a cosmetic means to name your website. Along with being displayed in the browser, the title text will be displayed in the search results as your webpage title. So, the title text should be descriptive and clearly understandable for people, encouraging them to click your website address from the search results list. Besides, the words from the title tag are commonly treated by search engines as key words for your website, so be very careful and attentive while writing your title tag.

Choosing wrong keywords. Keywords strategy is the basement of all internet marketing. However, this is also the most challenging part of it. Try to think of the keywords, which other people are most likely to use while searching the products or services you offer on your website.

Flash over-use. Flash is definitely attractive for people, but not to search engines, that cannot read Flash content and thus index Flash Website properly. If you still want to use Flash, try to create alternative HTML version of the site to hint the search engines what your website is about.

Too complicated website structure. When a website has too complicated structure, it makes it difficult for visitors to navigate and find the information they look for. Every website should be visitor-friendly with a high level of usability. Try to evaluate your website from the point of view of a first time visitor. It is good to have an easy and understandable navigation bar at every page of the website – that will make accessing any page of your website just with one click.

Contact details missing. As a matter of fact, having contact details clearly defined on the website is a very important step towards gaining trust from your visitors. People are unlikely to use services or make purchases from someone without a name and distinct physical address.

Overestimation of meta tags. Many people consider providing keywords in meta tag to be the only component of internet marketing success. Actually, it is not that way at all. The importance of meta tags slowly decrease, because now search engine define webpage keywords, taking into account multiple other factors along with meta tags.

Sitemap missing. Many popular search engines, including Google, ask webmasters to supply their websites with sitemaps to make it easier for web spiders find all the webpages of a particular website. With the properly generated sitemap, you will not only direct search engines to all the locations of your website and ensure proper indexing of all the pages, but this will also ensure proper analysis of all inward links between the separate pages of your website.

What is Sitemap Serves for?

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Creating and submitting a sitemap to search engines is now an important component of effective internet marketing strategy. Being technically a map of a website, a sitemap is a file document, which contains listing of the separate web pages of a particular web site. All the pages are usually organized hierarchically to define major web pages and those of minor importance. Besides, modern XML sitemap protocol allows webmasters to show the value of a particular web page by indicating a “priority” attribute for that page. A sitemap also shows sections of the website as well as the interlinking between the pages.

The primary task of a sitemap is to help search engine crawlers find all the pages of your website. Nowadays, it is highly recommended to submit a sitemap to the most popular search engines, especially for Google. Bing, Yahoo, and Ask also support sitemap protocol these days.

Experts say that XML sitemaps have already replaced the old practice of submitting a website to search engines by filling an online form. Now, most of the webmasters either create a sitemap and submit it directly to the chosen search engine or they wait until the web crawlers find all the pages by themselves. Of course, the first method is more preferable, since it ensure more quick and proper web site indexing.

Benefits of Sitemaps Use

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The primary objective for any internet marketing project is to draw as much attention of visitors and search engine crawlers as possible to a particular website. Sitemap is one of the techniques to achieve that goal. Some of the benefits of sitemaps are outlined below:

- Sitemap helps to improve navigation and visibility of web pages for search engines.

- Sitemaps allows a webmaster to inform search engine crawlers about the frequency every page is updated.

- Sitemap is an easy way to have all the web pages of your website to be found by a web crawler, and then indexed by a search engine.

- Sitemap generated and submitted to a search engine may significantly reduce the time required by search engine crawlers to find and index the new site or updated pages of the existing web site.

How to Create XML Sitemap for Your Website

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Currently the XML format is the most widely used for creating sitemaps. Though there are multiple free online fully-automated applications to generate a sitemap, it may be helpful to understand how it works at the very basic level. Besides, creating a website manually may be a preferred way in certain situations, as this ensures better control over the components of sitemap and the applied attributes.

So, in order to create a sitemap we will need to know and understand the meaning of only a few XML tags, defined below. Besides, it is important that the sitemap file is in UTF-8 encoding. Here is a sample of sitemap document:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"

<url>

<loc>http://example.com/</loc>

<changefreq>daily</changefreq>

</url>

</urlset>

In this example, there is only one page included into the site map. It is located between <url> and </url> tags. If you need more pages to be included into the sitemap (well, it is definitely that you would need more;-), so just add <url> tag for each web page you need to include into the sitemap.

As you see, there are certain attributes to define for each URL you add to the sitemap. These are:

<loc> to provide the full URL of the separate web page.

<lastmod> to show the date, when a particular page was last modified. Write this attribute in YYYY-MM-DD format.

<changefreq> to show the frequency of page updating. There are many values to choose from: never, yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, and always. This attribute is used to invite a search engine crawler visit you page. However, do not expect that crawler will “sit” on you web page, if you only define “always” value for <changefreq> attribute without making any updates to your page in real.

<priority> to show the value of every page on your website. Priority can be chosen in range from 0 to 1 with 0.5 being the default setting. If you choose the value “1” for a particular web page, this will tell a search engine that you consider this web page to be of highest importance for you.

Well, that is actually everything we need to create a sitemap. Hopefully the information is helpful; and remember: a good sitemap is often a first step to build an effective internet marketing campaign.

The Benefits of Interlinking

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

One of the basic Google recommendations for webmasters says that we should create websites with the live visitors rather than search engines in mind. However, it has always been a dilemma on how to create a webpage, that would be interesting and useful for readers and, at the same time, that would be attractive enough for search engines to appear at their top search results.

Interlinking between the pages of the same website seems to be a simple but proven way of internet marketing and search engine optimization, which is beneficial for both site visitors and search engine crawlers.

Interlinking is actually nothing but creating links between all the separate pages of a particular website. This is usually performed either by supplying each page with the navigation menu or by inserting link tree at the bottom of each web page. Very often, webmasters do both things: create a navigation menu and link tree at every page of their websites.

Though this idea may seem to be old-fashioned or outdated, it should no way be neglected. Though navigation bars created in Flash look really amazing and appealing for us, search engines do not have eyes to estimate all the beauty of the moving images. Web crawlers, that index all the web pages, “understand” text much better than Flash elements; that is why, simple text or graphics with proper use of “alt” tag is considered to be more valuable for SEO purposes.

When there is a navigation menu or link tree on every page of the website, it is easy for visitors to navigate on the website, because every page is just one click from current location. Besides, internal links as well as external are good for increasing page ranks and for more efficient internet marketing. Try to use your key words in the navigation menu and do not forget that the amount of internal links and their relevancy are important for search engines.

Selecting Your SEO Competition: Who to pick a fight with

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

When doing SEO, it may not be that good to go head to head with the big guns immediately. You never know which of their techniques are most effective. Counting the number of backlinks won’t work because you never know which ones drive the most traffic or which ones have been there for a long time.

To get quick information and quick results, you can look to competitors who are successful but are not yet that established. If they have seen tremendous growth in the last year or last 6 months, you would certainly like to find out what they did or what they are currently doing. Doing what is successful for younger sites makes sure you are also doing what works now, preferably the backlinks that are around 2-3 years old. Plus new sites are those who are more likely to use new techniques.

SEO Analysis Tool

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO analysis tool, your results will be grouped into the following categories:

* General Status;

* Meta tag list;

* Meta tag analysis;

* General web page analysis;

* The page as displayed in search engine results;

* Keywords in anchor tags;

* Keywords found in alt attributes for images;

* Keywords found on the page;

* URLS found on the page;

* Headers returned by the web server.

SEO Analysis Tool: General Status

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Analysis Tool: General Status

General status includes very basic information about your page. This includes whether or not the page returns http errors, the date the page was last modified, information about the type of server which hosts the page and the character encoding and content type of the page. If you see that your page’s server is returning a 404 (page not found) error, then make sure that you’ve typed in the address of your site correctly in the SEO analysis tool and try again.

SEO Analysis Tool: Meta tag list

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Analysis Tool: Meta tag list

In this section, you’ll find the page’s title and the information contained in the meta tags for the page. Make sure that each of these is unique to avoid being penalized for repeating your keywords too many times.

SEO Analysis Tool: Meta tag analysis

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Analysis Tool: Meta tag analysis

This is the section of the results from the SEO analysis tool that most webmasters find to be the most useful for practical purposes. In this section, you’ll find a score for your page title, meta keywords and meta description on a 0% – 100% scale. Naturally, 100% is ideal, though any score which is rated as “excellent” should be fine.

If you’re getting a low rating, then you may want to look further down the page of results to find some keywords you may want to use instead of repeating keywords in your meta tags – this is one of the most likely causes of a low score. Remember to use page titles and descriptions which will make sense to visitors; it won’t do you a lot of good to rank well in the search engines if you’re bringing in visitors who expect something quite different than what they’ll find on your site.

SEO Analysis Tool: The page as displayed within search engine results

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Analysis Tool: The page as displayed within search engine results

What you see here is a preview of the way that your page may appear in search engine results. The preview used here is drawn from your body text rather than your meta description. It should be noted that search engines will generally use your meta description rather than body text in their results. While there are search engines which are starting to give less weight to meta description tags, you should definitely make this tag search engine optimized – since this text is what people will see in search results and what can make them decide to visit your page.

SEO Analysis Tool: Keywords found in the anchor tags, â��altâ�� attributes and on the page

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Analysis Tool: Keywords found in the anchor tags, ‘alt’ attributes and on the page

You may find these results useful if there’s a particular keyword you’d like to optimize a page for. If it’s been used on your page, it will be displayed here along with the number of times it has been used. You’ll also see links to results for these keywords on Google, Yahoo! and Bing so you can see how well your page ranks for these particular keywords. This can be very helpful if you’re trying to avoid keyword saturation.

SEO Analysis Tool: URLs found in the page

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Analysis Tool: URLs found in the page

This section is exactly what it sounds like: a listing of every link found on the page, including internal and outbound links. Try to avoid going over 100 links per page; Google recommends this as a limit for efficient indexing by their bots.

SEO Analysis Tool: Headers returned by the web server

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Analysis Tool: Headers returned by the web server

These probably won’t mean all that much to you or be of much use unless you’re having a connectivity issue with your site. These are the HTTP headers for your web server which browsers read when trying to access your page.

SEO Analysis and On-Page Optimization Strategy Implementation

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO Analysis and On-Page Optimization Strategy Implementation

After the initial planning stage of your search engine optimization campaign has been completed, the next step is to perform a full SEO analysis of your website to develop the proper implementation strategy. This strategy can and will comprise of targeting keywords with SEO content creation, writing strong SEO meta tags and improving crawlability and usability through website structure changes.

* Content Creation: Utilizing the completed keyword research, we will work with your team to develop a strategy for targeting keywords through SEO content writing and on page optimization that will grow the quantity of your website's content and ability to rank for your chosen keywords.

* Meta Tags: As part of the process of targeting your SEO keywords, we will create an effective SEO page title and SEO meta description for each page of your website. These tags will be written to highlight the benefits of your products and services, and will be designed to increase click-throughs from the search engines.

* Website Structure: While on page optimization is tremendously important, another strong SEO strategy is making your website search engine friendly. That is to say, the act of improving crawlability and website usability through structure changes to your site. Crawlability means we will implement linking and coding changes to ensure that the search engines can properly find (by crawling) all of your targeted content. Improving website usability is intended to improve the user experience and make it simple for your visitors to find your content, products and services.

All of these optimization strategies are vital to the success of your search engine optimization campaign. However, these strategies are not a one-time event. We will work with you and your website to grow and improve your rankings, traffic and conversions. For on-going SEO optimization, we utilize Google Analytics (or your analytics software of choice) to improve keyword and content targeting and to perform conversion rate optimization.

* Analytics Reporting: We utilize Google Analytics reports not only to report on the performance and growth of your SEO campaign, but it is also a tool for finding new keyword and content opportunities. Google Analytics can help us discover keywords that we had not previously considered targeting, but that are performing well despite that fact. We use this information to ramp up our efforts in targeting these "new" keywords to drive even more traffic and conversions. Additionally, Google Analytics reports can be used to find content gaps, or areas where we are not resonating with your website's visitors. Site usage stats can tell us if our SEO content writing is keeping visitors around or if we need to create new content that will satisfy their needs and search intent.

* Conversion Rate Optimization: You can perform all of the on page optimization in the world, but if your website does not convert visitors into customers - than what's the point? We will utilize some of the strongest tools in the industry, including Google's Website Optimizer, to implement a conversion rate optimization strategy. This allows us to continuously test headlines, body copy, buttons, images and even design changes to find the nuances of your site that lead visitors down the conversion path to becoming customers.

SEO: Using Keywords to Get Internet Traffic On the Web

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO: Using Keywords to Get Internet Traffic On the Web

When operating a website for profit, using proper keyword search engine optimization (SEO) is important to get Internet traffic to the website. No traffic translates into no profits. There are certain methods of keyword SEO that are built in or imbedded into the web pages that can help get Internet traffic to the website, but there are no guarantees. Pay per click advertising, if done properly, is a better method to get top page ranking on an Internet search.

Using Keywords for Search Engine Optimization

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Using Keywords for Search Engine Optimization

Keywords are the actual words that Internet users type into a search engine to find what they’re looking for on the Internet. Most people that search on the Internet know that using more words will narrow their search. For example, if someone is searching for home brew beer kits, they normally wouldn’t type in the word “beer.” By searching for the keywords “home brew beer kits” their search is narrowed to the exact product they’re looking for. Niche markets are much better for keyword SEO than a broader market.

Applying Keywords for SEO on a Web Page

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Applying Keywords for SEO on a Web Page

Search engine companies computers search the Internet for keywords that are embedded in web pages. Each page of a website is treated as a separate website. So specific web pages may show up on a search other than the home page (a.k.a. index), depending on the keyword usage on a specific web page. In order to get better SEO page rankings, the spider give priority to specific keyword placement.

* Bold-faced keywords separated from the main text like titles, subtitles and headings.

* Keywords placed in the first few words of the text main body.

* Keywords placed in the URL name of the web page and website.

* Keywords placed within the caption of a photo or image.

Choosing the Right Keywords for SEO

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Choosing the Right Keywords for SEO

In order to choose the right keywords that an Internet user will use, the web master has to think like a common Internet user. In the home brewed beer example, the common Internet user that’s wants to learn how to make their own beer might use words like “how to brew beer at home.” Another way they might phrase a word is “instructions on home brewing beer.”

SEO For Small Business

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO For Small Business

In today’s world, just about everything in business can be connected to the Internet. This applies to all types of business, from multimillion dollar companies to the smaller mom and pop stores. Small business can be losing out on a large customer base is they do not understand the power of the Internet and how maintaining a well optimized website has many benefits. When people seek information on services or products, most likely the Internet is the place where they will begin their search. Let’s take a look at SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and what this means for your small business.

SEO means search engine optimization. The acronym “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimizers” professionals who can take your website, optimize it correctly and in the end, bring you a lot of traffic and potential customers.

Let’s take a look at why this is so important and how this applies to a small business. Just about everyone has a website in today’s world, from international companies to personal sites. Phone books are rarely used anymore. When someone wants to find out about services or products, they turn to their computer.

Having a well planned out website is very important for a small business. You want any person to easily see who you are, what you offer and by which methods they may obtain your services or products. However, even if you have a wonderful website, this does not help you if no one can find you.

One business person created a well thought out, easy to read website and was very excited that when entering the search term for their business they came up first in the search results. However, it will do your small business no good if you can only be found by the particular name of your business.

You want to be found when people enter in certain keywords. What are keywords, you may ask. Keywords are words that the average person enters into a search bar to find out information. For example, if you sell hammers and nails you would want your small company’s website to come up high in the search results for “hammers and nails”.

The goal of most business websites is to appear on the first page of results. Very rarely does the average person look passed the first page. If they do, it is even more rare if they look passed the third page. You can always pay to appear first, this would be a sponsored listing. However, if you website text is optimized correctly, you can appear highly ranked for the key words of your choice.

The object of optimizing a site is to edit the content and HTML coding to both increase its significance to particular keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The majority of people search via Google, although other search engines are used as well. In most cases, a website should be created to please Google and other search engines will follow along. Do SEO for your small business and you will be been by more people than you thought possible. If you are not optimized correctly, you could land so far back in the search results that no one will ever find you. Never underestimate the need for proper SEO for your small business.

Start your movement

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Start your movement

It's time for an Search Engine Optimization company that gives their customers what they want.

We understand that the more you get your business services and products available to your customers the better your business does. We strive to better your business by making your choice easy by providing you with the most effective and affordable advertisement available on the internet. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the key method to which to increase volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines by promoting content and link exchanges. Let our team of experienced SEO technicians increase you're cliental far beyond your expectations while keeping things easy and affordable for you. Let us start your search movement...www.ajiboye.com

Use a relevant page title

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Use a relevant page title

Since every article on your website is unique every unique article deserves a unique title that rightly represents your article. The entire essence of your article often lies in the title of your page so take your web page title very seriously. The title should consist of a meaningful phrase and it should contain the main keywords being covered in your title.

Even it matters to the search engines how you frame your title and that is why they take your title into consideration while ranking your web pages. On the search engine result pages your web page title appears as a hyperlink and people click on your link if they find your web page title compelling enough.

How to Write Successful SEO Friendly Content

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

How to Write Successful SEO Friendly Content

Writing SEO friendly content can seem like a daunting task at first, but do not be alarmed. There are a handful of ways to make writing SEO friendly content easy and successful, and plenty of other online sources to turn to for help.

The first thing to remember is that you are writing content. You are not stringing a bunch of letters together solely to make a search engine happy, though it does help. While the purpose is to increase your search engine ranking, you are still trying to provide good content for readers across the web. Without good content, you will not get continued support. Without continued support, whatever possible profitable benefit you might have been accruing for your work would lose its backbone and your content will be pointless.

Secondly, in order to make the search engine happy, you do have to use a few keywords, and you will need to repeat them a handful of times. Make sure you are not overloading your article with keywords, but repeat them 2-5 times throughout an article. You can do this naturally by including them in the title, as well as the subtitle or first sentence of the article. In addition, if you take advantage of lists, you will find it is easier to incorporate your key words when writing in list format rather than paragraphs. Your choice in keywords is important. Consult with an Ajiboye SEO and internet marketing specialist if you need help.

As far as lists go, they can be a very comprehensive way for the reader to get the information they are looking for from your site or article. After organizing your information into lists, it is also a good idea to use boldface texts. This will direct the reader’s attention to the important parts of your article.

Before posting your article, make sure you proofread it for errors. If people want to attack your article with their grammar teacher’s red pen, that is not a good sign. And finally, unless you want your article to become dustier than an Encyclopedia, update your content often. Make sure it is a living, breathing document, and cite other sources to prove it.

How to Find a Good SEO Expert

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

How to Find a Good SEO Expert

The impact of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has caught the web by storm. Many website owners are now seriously contemplating employing this strategy in their own business. You happen to be one of them. You recognize that if you want it to be professionally done and with greater chances of success, you need to hire a highly competent SEO expert. But where do you start in your efforts?

1. Be familiar with the basics of SEO. Prior to hiring, know the specific needs of your business so that this can be addressed properly. Since you are after the expertise of a professional, you need to know what kind of service you would need. That is why a little effort to be literate on this process will help achieve better understanding with an SEO expert.

2. Be active in your search. After you have determined the necessary help you need, it is then time to make sure that a reliable SEO expert can act properly on your concerns. And you would need all the help that you can get to be able to locate such a professional. This may be achieved by linking with your networks. There is always a buzz out there, website owners can tell you who is reputable among the SEO firms and who is not, by their testimonials. Do not underestimate your own ability to assess the advertisements of SEO firms or specialists.

3. Take your time. Since you have encountered quite a few names of firms and specialists, do not jump into hiring one but get to know what they can offer. There is always wisdom in choosing patiently, so that your website will not fall into the wrong hands or your business be short-changed with your expectations. So do not hire immediately just because they are a big SEO firm or because a specialist appears on top of the search list.

4. Get to know your potential candidate. Remember that having an SEO expert in your business means establishing a professional relationship. Your satisfaction or unhappiness in your professional dealing depends upon your choice. As early as possible communicate the goals of your business and ask what concrete steps he has in mind to meet your goals. By making your expectations clear from the very start, you are conveying to the person the clarity of the goals you have for your business.

Applying the simple steps above will definitely increase your chances of finding a good SEO expert. The selection process is pretty much like searching out from a basket full of apples. When you are careful enough, you are sure that you will not end up with the rotten ones.

SEO is the Up-and-Coming Choice for Online Marketers for Web Sites

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

SEO is the Up-and-Coming Choice for Online Marketers for Web Sites

Search Engine Optimization is the latest buzz in the online industry. Is it new? NO, but it is new to the buzz of the people entering the industry. If you want to be visible to the worlds you have two options:

1. Pay for advertising,

2. Take advantage of Search Engine Optimization.

How do you do Search Engine Optimization and how does it work?

A Web site is optimized by using many different Internet SEO strategies. The main process used for search engine optimization is to do multiple link building strategies to achieve higher page rankings in the SERPs (Search engine results pages) of different engines for targeted phrases. The visibilities of a site in the engines are dependent on the quality and quantity of links coming into your site. So one of the major things you will use to work on Search Engine Optimization is to have a strong link build strategy to get links into your Web site.

Many SEO consultants have different offering of Internet Solutions. What makes one different from another are the methods and Search Engine Optimization methods they choose to use. In an ideal world a marketing company would start with a strategic keywords analysis of your Web site so see if is optimized for the correct set of keywords or phrases.

After you complete analysis of your keywords, the Optimization process is followed by many on and off site modifications. When you start your on page factors you need to look at meta tags, title tags, URLs and the actual content on the page. For offsite you need to focus on carrying out a strategically planned link building strategy. You can start your link building offsite optimization by submitting to link directories, blog submissions, forum commenting, article submission and distributing press release. Some of the more advanced SEO techniques with Social Bookmarking and full page ads are also being followed to get a large amount of quality inbound links to your site.

The impact of personalization on SEO

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The impact of personalization on SEO

Personalization of search has been a growing topic of interest for a while, but has stayed under the radar for most people until now. With Google's widespread integration of personalization into standard search results, search marketers' attention has finally been firmly riveted on the issue. Up until recently, Google provided two personalization options:

* You could customize your Google Personalized Homepage for quick access to information of your choice (email messages, news headlines, etc.).

* You could get automatic personalization from your search history.

Recently, Google started combining the above two options for users who sign up for services through their Google accounts. When you sign in, you get access to tailored results utilizing information from your search history and your Google home page. If you don't wish to see results based on your past searches, you simply sign out of your Google Account or turn the option to track your history off in your Account settings.

To quote Danny Sullivan, "...anyone who signs-up for any Google service using a Google Account (such as Gmail, AdSense, Google Analytics among others) will automatically be enrolled into three additional Google products: Search History -- Personalized Search -- Personalized Homepage." In the past, Google Accounts required you to manually enable Search History. However, with the recent change, personalized search has been enabled for all accounts, new and old alike. All accounts also automatically get home pages generated based on account information.

Benefits and Drawbacks for Users and Site Owners

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Benefits and Drawbacks for Users and Site Owners

Personalization benefits users because it can help make their searches more relevant based on past search behavior. It also can help Web site owners who have excellent content and well-written Titles, since the Web sites with the "stickiest" content will be weighted more favorably. However, in both cases there is also the possibility of closing out potentially useful resources because they do not fit a user's previous history.

In addition to good content, Web pages need good Title and Description Meta tags. Because these are displayed on the search results page, they represent the way human users will judge the site and decide whether or not to click through.

You can also gain by getting yourself on the Google personalized homepage of many search users. One way to do this is to offer users a feed, a Google gadget, or Add To Google buttons on your pages so users can subscribe to your content. Another tip is to put Google Bookmark buttons on your pages, such as those provided by AddThis. The more a visitor relies on your site, the better ranking it will receive when that user performs searches related to your keywords. The winners in personalized search are those who make a connection to their users because the results reward loyalty.

The Challenge of Competitor Intelligence

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The Challenge of Competitor Intelligence

In-depth competitor intelligence can reveal what's working and what's not for a site's strongest competitors. It can reveal which sites are competitively strong (or weak) compared to the client's site, regardless of what the respective ranking numbers would show with rank checking.

New age competitor intelligence will tell you what optimization factors are most important for specific competitive landscapes. Technicians will learn the true competitive nature of a keyword phrase rather that just the number of results returned for a specific query. They will know exactly what SEO factors to work in order to strengthen their client's position rather than guesstimate based on general guidelines.

In-depth competitor intelligence will tell practitioners how to prioritize the SEO factors to be optimized, revealing semantic relationships between the client's content, the competitors' content, and the semantic nuances of a keyword phrase related to search personalization of user results. Optimization in the era of personalization requires robust competitive intelligence, and this will pay big dividends to those who master analyzing the competitive landscape.

It is undoubtedly true that search will change dramatically once personalization is widely adopted. However, SEO is an art that is extremely flexible and will adapt with widespread use of search history to affect rankings. SEO practitioners have always been creative, and we will develop new techniques to achieve search visibility for our clients as personalized search becomes more prevalent.

Promote your business- SEO Strategy

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Promote your business

SEO Strategy

Search Engine Ranking, demystified!

SEO is short for "search engine optimization." To have your site optimized for the search engines means to attempt to have top placement in the results pages whenever a specific keyword is typed into the query box. There are many search engine optimization services to choose from, so here are some things to keep in mind when seeking SEO services or developing an SEO strategy of your own.

Search engines have two types of listings: those that are paid for, which are usually distinguished as "sponsored links" and those that are organic.

To the right is a screen shot of a Google® search results page. The listings in red are paid ads, and the listings in the green area are organic results.

Organic Listings

Organic search engine listings are those that appear down the middle of the page. Search engine optimization services are devoted to optimizing sites to appear in the organic listings space. See the diagram above to see where organic listings and paid listings appear in the Google search engine results page.

Spider-driven search engines such as Google®, Yahoo!® and MSN® use "robots" or "crawlers" to score Web sites across the Internet. Robots "spider/crawl" each site and "score" pages based on how relevant they are. A Web site's score or placement within a spider driven search engine is derived from hundreds of variables such as link popularity, density and frequency of keywords in page content, HTML code, site themes and more. You will want to focus many criteria in your SEO strategy to position yourself well among the major search engines. Here are two of the most influential factors:

1. Link Popularity

Spider-driven search engines use robots to spider Web sites across the Internet by traveling through links from web page to web page. A Web site's score or placement within a spider driven search engine is derived from hundreds of variables such as, link popularity, click popularity, keyword density, Web site themes and more.

Google is the most popular spider-driven search engine. Its database currently has about 4 billion pages indexed and is known for finding the most relevant information. When Google spiders the Web, it finds sites by traveling through links. The more sites that link to you, the more important the engines believe your content to be. You should focus on getting many important sites to link to your site. You can do this in many ways: submit to online directories, exchange links with business partners and industry-related sites, or participate in Link Building.

2. Page Content

Search engine spiders can only spider through text. They will use the content on your site to determine what your site is about, which in turn will help to decide how highly your site will be ranked for specific keyword phrases when visitors type them into the search engines. For this reason, keyword research is critical to obtaining natural search engine placement and should be at the top of your list when mapping out your SEO strategy.

You will need to know how many people are searching for your keyword phrases and what kind of competition you are facing when attempting to obtain a top spot in the search results. Keyword research, text writing, submissions and site analysis are all included with our search engine optimization packages.

Why Search Engine Optimization?

Studies have proven that top placement in search engines generally provide a more favorable return on investment compared to traditional forms of advertising such as, snail mail, radio commercials and television. Search engine optimization is the primary method to earning top 10 search engine placement. Learn more about the search engine optimization process and discuss an SEO strategy for your site when you contact a search engine specialist today.

Paid Listings

Yahoo!'s Pay-Per-Plick (PPC) Program shows paid ads at the top and right of the results pages. Web sites that show up here bid on keyword phrases and pay Yahoo!® a small fee each time the ad is clicked on. The more you bid per phrase the higher your ad will appear on the results page. Yahoo! PPC is a great way to help drive traffic quickly to your Web site. You can set a daily budget. When you max out your budget, Yahoo! will pull your ad for the remainder of the day.

A comprehensive search engine marketing campaign may encompass both organic optimization for long-term success and a pay per click campaign for immediate results. Feel free to contact a search engine marketing consultant at 1-800-548-9824. We can help put together a marketing strategy for your site's needs.

Each organic search engine ranking places emphasis on variable factors such as the design and layout, keyword density and the number of relevant sites linking to it. Search engines constantly update and refine their ranking algorithms in order to index the most relevant sites.

SEO: Definition & Information

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Definition

The process of choosing targeted keyword phrases related to a site, and ensuring that the site places well when those keyword phrases are part of a Web search.

Information

There is much confusion about search engine optimization (SEO) and its relation to search engine spamming. Generally, legitimate search engine optimization adds to the user experience, while search engine spamming takes away from the user experience, although there is much gray area between the clear-cut examples on either side.

Optimization involves making pages readable to search engines and emphasizing key topics related to your content. Basic optimization may involve nothing more than ensuring that a site does not unnecessarily become part of the invisible Web (the portion of the Web not accessible through Web search engines). Advanced optimization may include significant research into every element of page design, site structure, and off-the-page criteria.

Before pages can be optimized, research must be done to determine which keywords to target. This involves finding relevant keywords, determining their popularity, assessing the amount of competition, and deciding which keywords can be best supported with quality content.

Pricing Models Include:

one-time flat fee
monthly fixed fee
pay-per-click
pay-per-ranking
revenue sharing

Search Engine Marketing- Invisible Web

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Invisible Web

Definition

The portion of the Web not accessible through Web search engines.

Information

The invisible Web sounds very mysterious, but surfers visit it regularly, perhaps without even realizing it. "Invisible" Web pages are often dynamic pages within database-driven sites, whereas much of the "surface Web" consists of static pages. The URLs can often be identified by symbols such as the question mark (?).

Search engines are well aware of the invisible Web, but limitations in time and money could make it unfeasible to index all of the dynamic page possibilities. Even if resources were no issue, dynamic pages tend to present more challenges than static pages in terms of ranking useful results.

Most of the dynamic, database-driven sites in question do feature site search, so unearthing information becomes much easier if you can pinpoint the most appropriate site to search.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of improving internal and external features of your web site, resulting in an increase in visitors from search engines. SEO is a highly specialized and technical field. Optimizing a web site for search engines can necessitate the investigation of many unique elements. The majority of internet traffic is driven by the major search engines - Google, Yahoo!, Bing. If your web site can not be easily found using these search engines, then you are potentially missing out of a large volume of traffic being directed to your site.

An important aspect of SEO are search queries. These are the words that a user types when they are looking on a search engine. Properly constructed SEO will help direct traffic to your site when people enter search queries which relate to the services or goods your business offers. Search engine traffic has a tremendous bearing on the success, or otherwise, of a business. Targeted visitors can provide revenue, publicity and exposure for your business.

A properly implemented SEO approach can result in many visitors, the wrong approach can bury your business listing way down in the search results where visibility is minimal. As well as making the content of your web site available on search engines, SEO can also assist in improving your page rankings so that your content is more likely to be found by searches.

How to Improve Search Page Ranking

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

One way to improve the search engine ranking of your web site is by the use of links. Your site will be ranked higher with more links coming into your site. Below are some common ways of increasing incoming links:

Online Directories

It is important to list your web site in popular online directories. Research the online directories you are considering listing in, as some are considered more authoritative than others depending upon their process of vetting listings.

Article Directories

Your SEO will be helped by submitting high quality, original articles which contain keywords and phrases to important article directories. The resource box at the bottom of each article includes some information about you, and more importantly, your web site address. This means that when someone uses your article on their web site or blog, they must include the resource box with your link inside.

Reciprocal Link Building

You want to be careful who you trade links with, however, if you link with people who are in your niche, search engines see this as authoritative, as the incoming and outgoing links are from sites on a related topic. It is even better to trade articles or blog posts.

Internal Links

Internal links within your own web site are also important. Creating links between articles you have already written makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site.

In summary, building links is an important part of any SEO process.

SEO Tips - The [title] Tag

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

The [title] tag is what major search engines display on their results page. (It is also the text which appears at the very top of a browser window.) To help with increasing your page ranking on search engine results, you must place keywords in your web sites [title] tag.

The words placed in the [title] tag are an important consideration that search engines use within their various algorithms to determine page rankings. The [title] tag is closely linked with pages the search engines will display when search terms are entered.

It is good practice to limit the number of words in your [title] tag to less than 10 and keep the number of characters to less than 65. More than this and the search engine may truncate the extra characters. The [title] tag must contain all your keywords, but only once. It must be relevant to a searcher. It must also engage the searcher, as it acts as an introduction to your site.

To increase your SEO, it is better to place your keywords towards the beginning of the [title] tag. If you want to place your name or company name then it is best to place it at the end of the tag.

SEO Keywords

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

The proper use of keywords and phrases for metadata and text on our website can help improve your search engine ranking.

Keyword research is an extremely important part of any SEO process. If the you have the wrong keywords or phrases, search engines may never find you, which means customers may never find you. Keywords must be relevant to your services or products and connect your business with potential customers. Consider what you are selling and do not expand your keywords to a point where they do not directly relate to your product.

Consider these keyword research steps:

Root Word - Analyze the core topic of your web site and the product you offer. Condense this concept to a single, all encompassing root word, for example "furniture".

Synonyms - After defining your root word, develop all the words and phrases that are similar. This expands your keywords list and provide terms that you can use in the title, description and keyword tags.

Colloquialisms - Include any colloquial, or informal, words that customers may enter into search engines.

Expand with Modifiers - You can expand your keywords to make phrases which customers may search for.

Once your keywords are defined, you need to ensure that the keywords will bring the right customers who are looking for your products and are ready to purchase.

Some useful questions to ask an SEO

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:

* Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?

* Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?

* Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?

* What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?

* What's your experience in my industry?

* What's your experience in my country/city?

* What's your experience developing international sites?

* What are your most important SEO techniques?

* How long have you been in business?

* How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

Be sure to understand where the money goes

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Be sure to understand where the money goes

While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they "control" other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn't work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.

What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?

One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

What are some other things to look out for?

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

What are some other things to look out for?

There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It's far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:

* owns shadow domains

* puts links to their other clients on doorway pages

* offers to sell keywords in the address bar

* doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages

* guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway

* operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info

* gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware

* has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google

What Serves to Make a Good SEO Article?

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

What makes an article SEO? The use of a key phrase or keywords sprinkled liberally throughout a pile of gibberish? That does work, occasionally and if you’ve ever done your search and pulled up a page that had absolutely nothing to do with what you were looking for, then you were likely taken in by the duplicitous use of SEO articles.

SEO articles increase the search engine worthiness of a website. In fact the catch phrase of many web designers is content, content, content. Developing quality content is important for a web site whether it sells vitamins, candles, kids clothing or photography equipment.

Since the Internet still possesses a large number of possibilities for entrepreneurs, setting up a one man shop operation to sell any type of product to an audience that can span a continent or several is entirely possible. Setting up a website is integral to any business and not just the big boys. A part of setting up the ideal website is to make it SEO compatible, allowing search engines to not only find the website but deliver it in response to various search parameters.

Imagine opening a small storefront in a local town and providing niche items. The likelihood of finding customers is there, but you won’t be doing a $100,000 plus a year in profits in the first year by limiting to a local market. Adding a website expands the market to a wider area. Funnily enough, people in the local market may very well shop the website when they might not even have driven to the store! But when a business opens their Internet doors to commerce, they need to populate their presence across the search engines and that is where SEO articles and design come into play.

SEO articles are how businesses can increase their web traffic through visibility to search engines. Niche stores can offer decorating tips, craft advice and more. By using key phrases in entertaining and informative articles, their SEO articles fulfill a two-fold purpose: increase their visibility to search engine spiders and giving customers a reason to surf in and then stay. The possibilities for content creation are as limitless as the imagination and it doesn’t take a large company to deliver a good product or good content, it just takes a little wherewithal and creativity.

SEO Success Pyramid

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

SEO Success Pyramid

What’s It All Mean?

Commitment: Every successful project I’ve ever worked on has involved a client whose team is enthusiastic and engaged. Whether you’re big or small, one uninterested department or person can sabotage everything.

Planning: Success in any pursuit begins with setting goals and developing a plan to achieve them — detailing the strategies and tactics you’ll use, the people and resources needed, and so forth. Search marketing is no different. Read: Planning an SEO Campaign

Product/Service: Although you can fool some people into buying crap for a while, real long-term success involves a product or service that people want or need. There’s no substitute for quality.

Education/Information: You’re a business owner; you don’t need to become an SEO expert. But you’ll succeed faster if you have access to great information. And as fast as the search marketing industry changes, ongoing access to intelligent information is critical.

Patience: True, there are exceptions every now and then, but for the vast majority of companies big or small, search marketing is a process that takes time to implement correctly. There are no short cuts, no quick fixes. Success almost always takes many months, if not a year or more.

Design & Usability: Yes, there are some ugly sites that make lots of money; but there are more that don’t. Your best bet is to have a web site that’s attractive and easy to use. Get out of your customers’ way and let them do what they came to your site to do.

Keyword Research: If you target the wrong keywords, you’re doomed to fail. You’ve heard that a million times, I hope. More than that, you also need to know what to do with your keywords.

Analytics: How will you know you’re successful if you have no way of measuring what you’ve done? Measure, analyze, adjust strategies and tactics as needed.

Tools: Having access to appropriate SEO tools can give you an advantage over the competition. Of course, more important than the tools is knowing how to interpret the data they provide.

Crawlability: A search engine cannot index pages that its spider cannot crawl. Be careful with the Flash movies, the complicated DHTML and javascript, the robots.txt file, etc. Here are 5 common crawlability mistakes you need to know about.

Content: This can take many forms: a blog, articles, videos, a FAQ page, or even user-generated content like product/service reviews. When you get this one right, you’ll have an easier time getting…

Links: Your great content isn’t going to rank well without links, preferably from relevant, quality sites. I brain-dumped (almost) everything I know about links early last year.

Social/Local Findability: Let me explain this since I might be inventing a new term. Social Media Marketing and Local Search are musts. The size and scope of your company may dictate which you emphasize more, but neither should be ignored. Local SEO is a must for most small businesses, but social media can work, too. Bigger companies that target an audience more than a location will find social media offers a lot of opportunities. In either case, the goal is findability. You want customers to be able to find you as easily as possible, and you can do this on social media sites that make local networking easier.

Reputation Management: It’s imperative to know what people are saying about your company. This isn’t just for Big Business, either: An old client of mine runs the only roller skating rink in our area, yet is probably losing business because they have a couple negative reviews on a certain Local Search site. Given the growing influence of user reviews, knowing how to manage your reputation is a must.

Trust: In my first post of 2007, I said trust is the No. 1 factor, and nothing has changed since then. Trusted domains are powerful domains. When you have trust, from users and search engines, you’re on the way to search marketing success.

As you climb the pyramid, you’ll find buzz/word-of-mouth marketing or maybe community helping you along. To a large degree, these are two sides of the same coin. It’s the people factor, the human element that often separates the winners and losers in search marketing. Get people talking positively about you, whether it be one-to-one conversation among friends or in the larger setting of an online community, and you’ll climb the pyramid that much faster.

Content Is King?

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Content Is King?

This is a phrase that’s thrown around by the SEO industry. So what does it mean, and how is it useful? For search engine spiders, having a lot of content in a site means having a large number of web pages with html text that target keyphrases. For internet users, having a lot of content means having useful information, tools, or offers. For search engine optimization, it is important to have content that satisfies both search engines and users. Having a lot of content for search engines provides ranking opportunities for a range of keyphrases. Having a lot of content for users gets more relevant links to your site from other sites, which is an important factor in all major search engine ranking algorithms.

Not only is it possible for a website’s content to fail a search engine or user or both, but it is almost always the case. Sites often have useful information that is hidden from search engines in images, Flash, or frames that doesn’t need to be hidden in images, Flash, or frames. And sites very often have loads of html text that is filler written by a copywriter that is not useful or doesn’t have keyphrases. Neither of these scenarios is good for SEO.

Good Content For the User

SEOs often only talk about content in terms of html text – this is, after all, what is useful to a search engine spider. This overlooks an important factor in all search engine algorithms: link popularity. It also overlooks the fact that not everything that is useful for an internet user can be visible to a search engine – or even seem important to a search engine because of a search engine’s inability to understand meaning. Useful content is anything that a user thinks is valuable and might recommend to others. This often comes in the form of excellent deals that beat the competition or tools that make certain actions easier. For a company site, these types of content are often much more important than informational content. This is the content that makes a site worth linking to. Non-trivial informative content is not really possible or desirable to provide for a lot of industries because of economic or audience considerations. This is true if useful technical information for an industry is worth too much to provide in a website or if the primary buyer of a product/service doesn’t care about details surrounding the product/service. Some of the best content can be (necessarily) a couple lines long, exist in flash, or be otherwise hidden from a search engine.

Companies developing a new site almost always will put up something pretty that offers descriptions of their products or services with contact information, and call it a day. These companies can expect to do – at best – just as good as their competition. Providing a lot of descriptive information is the status quo – unless your company is well branded or otherwise has some sort of irrational advantage, it won’t be enough.

Companies should work to provide something novel with their site. If a site is going to be valuable it has to provide something valuable.

Good Content for Search Engines

Good content for a search engine is html text with keyphrases. This is almost never good content for a user. Anyone can create some text and throw in a few phrases that are being targeted. Long pieces often don’t use keyphrases, even though they are the most useful resources for those keyphrases. I could write the most useful article in the world about writing good content for search engines, and never use the phrase “content for search engines” once. Search engines are very literal – they use programs to understand what a page or site is about – this will always cause externalities that a copywriter will have to consciously deal with.

When creating content for a site, make sure you are targeting keyphrases in html text. This is especially important to remember if your site’s best content for internet users is hidden from search engines, or won’t stand out to search engines like it will with users (who understand meaning and the importance of certain combinations of words).

Content is King

Almost all results in search engines are commercial in nature. This is true for all search engines. If a page has ads, is trying to sell something, belongs to a site that is primarily trying to sell something, is a gateway to a site that is trying to sell something – it is a commercial page. This is because commercial sources have money to create a site in the first place and because they are most effective at marketing their content. They know to put in keyphrases and actively seek out links. The phrase “content is king” doesn’t mean that you need to provide something that is non-commercial.

“Content is king” means a site needs to satisfy both search engines and users by providing keyphrase targeted html text on a page that provides something useful to a user. This kind of content will make it easy for search engines to determine what a page is relevant to and will acquire links, improving link popularity and search engine rankings. There are other factors that are important to rankings, but it is always important to provide something that is targeted, catchy, popular, and useful to some extent. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to write a textbook, provide truthful information, or even be particularly interesting to people who are knowledgeable in your industry.

The Truth Revealed

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

The Truth Revealed

What if you discovered the powerful way to optimize your articles for the search engines to achieve greater search engine visibility? Have you been longing for a dream like start to your online entrepreneurial set up but don't know where and how to begin? This article will show you how utilizing the SEO writing services you can achieve big ticket sales even if you are not a great writer. Here are 3 simple steps to get you started.

Step 1 - Writing superior SEO articles in a bulk.

Step 2 - Creating numerous back links for greater SEO results.

Step 3 - Achieving, reporting and tracking top search engine ranking.

Here are step by step details that you can apply quickly and easily.

Step 1 - Writing superior SEO articles in a bulk -

A lot of research with regard to the keywords, title, body matter and keyword placement goes into writing an efficient SEO article. Here in comes the SEO writing services that undertake this endeavor in its totality, on your behalf. The articles once written have to be linked together, generating higher search engine ranking.

Step 2 - Creating numerous back links for greater SEO results -

After writing the articles and listing it in the various high traffic article directories, it is also the job of the SEO service to create a large number of back links for the same. A greatly linked and interlinked article is the key to ultimately getting good sales. A beautifully written SEO article results in greater search engine ranking, which has to be improved and tabbed continuously.

Step 3 - Achieving, reporting and tracking top search engine ranking -

Obtaining a better search engine visibility, in turn resulting in greater sales is the forte of a good SEO article writing service. After achieving it, it is equally important to report the same and keep track of it in the future.

SEO Companies, Firms and Services

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

(SEO) Companies, Firms and Services

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a specialized process that involves analyzing your website's underlying code, architecture, visible content, and link popularity and making enhancements so that the site is returned more prominently in the search results of relevancy-based, algorithm-driven search engines (such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN). The best way to develop a sound search engine optimization strategy is to work with an experience search engine optimization (SEO) firm.

Though there are many firms who engage in organic optimization activities, the process is by no means easy. Getting listed in the top of a search engine's results page requires a great amount of strategy and only an experienced company who understand the intricacies of organic optimization will be able to accomplish such a feat.

With so many search engine optimization firms out there is can difficult to find a competent firm that has the experience required to help you achieve your search engine placement goals -- and strong track record of success to prove it. This page provides a directory of some of the top search engine optimization companies in the world. Each company on this page has been in the search engine optimization business for several years and specializes in organic search engine optimization and marketing.

Brain storm some search terms

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Brain storm some search terms

Start by brain storming possible search terms. Try to think like a potential customer of your products. What would you be searching for, if your fish needs medication?

Get a few friends or collegues together and ask.

If you already have customers, ask some of them on the phone. Write down everything that comes up — at this stage you want ideas, not opinions on the quality of the ideas. That comes later.

Your brain storming session has resulted in "fish, sick fish, ill fish, fish medication, fish doctor, fish medicine". Not a lot, but it is more than enough to get started. This is because you can expand this short list with the help of keyword suggestion tools.

These keyword tools will not only return how often Searchers look for specific search terms, they also suggest other search terms, which might be useful. Your mission is to analyse the results of these keyword tools to increase your short list, until you can isolate the one or two top performing search phrases, which can attract the most visitors to your web site.

Finding and integrating these top performers in your online shop will take some time. But it will be time well spent, if you want your shopping cart to be busy.

You can only optimize your web site for a small number of search terms. So the better they are, the better your results will be.

Do it yourself SEO?

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

DIY SEO?

If someone at work were to ask you where the closest Grease Monkey shop was so that they could get their car tuned-up would you tell them to read up on how to change their own oil and to do it themself? If someone were to ask you if you know of a good plumber would you tell them to talk to someone at Home Depot and then do it themself? How about if someone needed a good physical therapist to aid them in recovery, would your response be, “just do it yourself?” Or if someone were to ask you if you knew of a good place to get barbecue ribs would you hand them a recipe and tell them to just make it themself? Probably not. So then why tell someone to take on all the design and marketing responsibilities of their website themselves?

I know what you’re thinking; you’re thinking but they CAN do their own SEO. I don’t disagree. People can do just about anything they set their mind to; so I have no doubt they could do it themselves. But, the reality is that we pay for things all the time that we could do ourselves. In fact just recently I paid a good bit on money to have someone build a flagstone patio in my backyard. I could have done the job myself, the skills required to do the job aren’t great, but for me to do the job would actually cost me more money because my time is more valuable than that. In addition, the guys I hired are professionals; there’s no doubt they did a better job than I could have done. I also pay people to change the oil in my car and I even pay people to make and deliver pizzas to me. I pay for all sorts of things I could do myself, and so do you.

Importance of Domain name in SEO

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Role of Search Engine friendly domain name in successful SEO

Experienced and successful SEOs use different SEO techniques to achieve top search engine ranking. These SEO techniques include both off page optimization and on page optimization techniques. On page optimization techniques include optimizing web page elements like Meta tags. Alt tags, page headings, keyword density etc. where as off page optimization techniques comprise ofincreasing the link popularity by web site submissions, link building and other link popularity techniques.

Very few SEOs know the importance and the role which a SEO friendly domain name plays in the success of SEO process. You can get quick results if you choose a domain name which includes your main keyword. I have done SEO on so many web sites from scratch, right from the selection of domain name. Whenever I was given the option to choose the domain name, I always took advantage of my selected domain name in SEO.

Google considers your domain name as a part of its algorithm or ranking criteria. If your web site is well optimized and your domain name contains your main keyword, you definitely have better chance of higher placement on SERPS.

Having Trouble With Search Engine Optimization

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Having Trouble With Search Engine Optimization

On OK to Make Money Online, let’s take a more in-depth look at Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO comes down to nothing more than staying on subject with your blog or website and using properly researched keywords or long tail keywords.

The problem for Google is it has only started using natural language, so it has to resort to taking your article text apart and trying to figure out what your site’s main subject or topic is. When this is done, it can send you the most appropriate ads to be displayed on your site. However, it may not be the best words to drive traffic your direction, and isn’t this the point?

So let’s take a look at a cooking site. What is the main subject? Is it clearly spelled out? Does it have multiple food categories? Is there any related content other than food, say food from Paris or Italy? Do the pictures match the recipe?

If we look over at a cooking site, can you find the main topic? Would it be desserts, beef, American, French, or general? Now therein lies the problem: the information is too general. If we are doing a niche site, we need to be more specific. So we need to break a general site into ten or twenty sites, with each site concerned with one food group, say beef or salads. Now we are talking about a niche. Got the idea?

After we have all your topics reduced to a few categories, we will next to build a website or blog for each one. How you do that? We will use a tool that Google supplies to the advertisers in the Adwords section of the Google website. It is called the Keyword Tool. This tool is available to anyone and is used to locate a term or keyword that has been entered in a search request. With the search request, we have a frequency and amount spent per month per keyword identified. This is how you can locate a keyword or keyword phrase.

When you have gathered your keywords, run over to Blogger or check the URLs for your keyword being available. If it’s not, add a few words to the back or front to create a unique keyword, but don’t use hyphens to separate your keywords. After installing your site, create your privacy page, about page and your introductory page making sure to use your keyword.

Once you’re done, break the articles you have on the original site into major subjects and copy them to each new website. Rewrite the articles using the keyword for that site, making sure that the title, first paragraph, last paragraph, and one or two percent of the article body contains the keyword.

If you have pictures or graphics on a page, make sure you work your keyword into the picture information area of the HTML code. This will assure the spider that the picture relates to the article or keyword topic. However, be true to your readers. Some of the black hats will put up any old picture so they can imbed the keyword text. Remember, at some point you want traffic, and you want your readers back. Don’t given them trash; give then something they want to come back for.

Last, make sure not to exceed one or two uses of your keyword per one hundred article body words, or Google may flag you site for keyword stuffing and sandbox you until you correct the problem.

Let’s review: make sure your sites are narrow in scope but not too narrow, research your subject, pick the best keyword or key phrase, use your keyword in everyplace you can, but don’t overuse in articles. This will help you make money online.

Awareness of Web SEO PPC

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Web SEO PPC is reflexive but then it is also gaining.

If you are looking to advertise on the internet you should be aware of Web SEO PPC.If you are unacquainted to these terms then SEO is Search Engine Optimization and PPC stands for Pay Per Click.It is important for the webmasters, advertisers, and the providers to know both of these concepts.If you are amongst those webmasters who wishes to make money without much effort then it is advisable that you know the facts of these concepts.Because of the popularity of the internet, it comes as no surprise that it has developed its own set of rules.Someone who is new to using the internet can know about it at a faster pace if he has the knowledge about these set of rules.The initial concept in web SEO PPC is the search engine optimization.

This term is self explanatory and it means that you optimize your website so that your page gains a higher page rank and it appears high in search engine results, preferably in the first place.You will definitely get the first click if your website is at the top of all the search results.There are many ways to achieve this but adding articles having proper keywords is one way.There are many users who are not aware of how search engine works.Whether a particular website is related to the particular search or not is very well known by the search engine optimizers.One more easy and effective way in web SEO PPC is the pay per click method.According to this process the web master is paid by the advertiser only when there is a user or a visitor who clicks upon his ad.

This process is not same as the method through which advertising communicates with other media.Even though internet has reached all parts of the globe, not every one uses the internet.It is not possible to select a particular time to display your ads.All they do is publish their ads and then hope for their fortunes to work.

How Can The Best SEO Training Course Help You Succeed Online

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

How Can The Best SEO Training Course Help You Succeed Online

Success in your online business is not just about earning more than you usually do. It’s being able to stay on top, adding more quality, traffic and income to your business or website promoting that business and the ability to just keep on competing without any pressure. Moreover, having to gain priceless knowledge and skills add up to your success not just in financial aspects but also in general. You also get to enjoy the success if you are no longer threatened of the challenges and any other issues which you are about to face in the future especially when it comes to the fluctuating standards and trends in the world of SEO and Internet marketing.

As you can see, things revolving around the web are continuous; thus you should be able to adapt to its constantly changing environment. What you know right now may no longer be applicable in the next days to come. A successful Internet marketer is one who confidently deals with all or most obstacles concerning his or her online business knowing he or she has something that can lend a hand. No matter how the current flows, you should be able to stand in your ground as failing and not fighting back again will assure you total devastation considering the many competitors all aiming to take the lead.

Valuable and incomparable knowledge and skills are what successful SEO experts or Internet marketing gurus usually gain in the course of their attempts to achieving online success for their various businesses. Typically, they start with just a single and simple kind of business until such time that they can effectively make their business grow and remain efficient on a steady ground. From there on, more and more different kinds of business emerge since they already know how to deal with various situations especially that resources and information can be highly-accessible if you’ll just look on the right places.

And truth be told, none of the gurus in the field of online business or e-commerce made it possible to reach the top without having to take part in certain trainings and other methods of learning. Usually, those who want to succeed in marketing their businesses particularly when learning about SEO, Internet marketing and many other imperative information which can greatly contribute to the development and success of your business find and participate in an SEO training. Indeed, undergoing SEO training can certainly help you not just to improve your business but lift it to the top so the whole world will know what you can offer.

In fact, most SEO gurus are doing their best to encourage people having online businesses to have their selves trained for more chances of success. If you can find the best Internet marketing class, then you are sure to gain more than you can possibly think of. You should know that the best SEO training course can provide you with various essential knowledge, skills and information which you cant simply get by doing things on your own. But, if you dare to participate in an Internet marketing class, you will not only equip yourself with those stuffs which can help your business but even your entire life.

SEO trainings can be attended either in the convenience of your home or by attending various seminars and trainings where you will have the chance to meet up with other online marketers. The best part is, you can get connected with some successful and expert Internet marketers as well as SEO specialists. By being able to gather up as much valuable information and connection as well as resources as you can, the road to online business success will no longer be hard to perceive and achieve.

Avoiding SEO Errors

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Avoiding SEO Errors

Despite the notion that SEO is simple, one mistake from syntax or a flawed setting could take weeks for a website to recover. Be warned, SEO is more than just writing content, building links and changing meta tags.

Just remember Murphy’s law when implementing modifications and take precautions, such as backing things up and logging changes “just in case”. SEO involves a holistic understanding of how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and making frivolous changes all have an impact which could inadvertently rank or tank a website.

Implementing SEO tactics on a level that transcends obviousness requires an understanding of a vast array of intricacies which all culminate across multiple metrics. For example, one unclosed tag or error in code could unravel a website and send rankings plummeting unless corrected; and the longer it is before you catch the mistake, the longer it will take to get re-indexed by search engines…

To fathom the administrative mindset, consider that each layer of optimization has a unique skill set and degree of mastery required to perfect its application to produce the right effect at the right time. This type of administrative intelligence is not always second nature, it is based on testing, trial and error, analysis of the results and the experience to “KNOW” what to do, when to do it and why.

However the reality is, it is more a point about competence, experience and observation…

You have to know what to look for before you can fix it, which takes analysis, but analysis without experience means you may not be able to identify what you are looking at which goes back to competence.

SEO techniques may be obvious, but the reason behind when to use them or why one tactic or technique is more appropriate than another. For example, say you are using a shopping cart for eccommerce. The website is already going to be challenged by components of duplicity and duplicate content across multiple pages due to the inherent nature of the shopping cart to simply “swap out” the descriptions and titles but leave everything else intact.

If you knew better, you would consolidate link flow to one category page which would then feed your child / subordinate pages such as make, model, color or manufacturer. This would be obvious to a developer or SEO who had experimented with various formats or settings and made enough mistakes to learn from to optimize the entire site properly.

What if that same shopping cart performed revisions to your site architecture, but there were settings within the CMS system and other manual settings from other areas of your website. Simple quandaries such as broken links, a robots.txt file being overwritten or a .htaccess file conflicting with other settings could put a major crimp in sales.

Under the same premise, a less experienced individual could potentially deindex a site, undermine the sites trust from creating mass 404 errors without even being aware it occurred in the first place.

The point is, specialists exist for a reason, they are familiar with the various nuances that could potentially arise and have a number of workarounds they can implement to produce the same end-result. The example of modifying critical files that affect server settings may have been a but excessive, but the point still rings true.

What about changing a title on a page or removing a link? What possible impact could that have on rankings. The answer, it depends on (a) which page (b) how long it was indexed and passing link flow to other pages (c) if it was integral to the vital link ecosystem of the site (such as supporting a landing page or other top level page) and (d) what that page is intended to rank for.

The gist of the post is, for every change you make, there are repercussions; and just to change things without structure, rhyme or reason could leave you in a quandary when something breaks and those ever so important details that may have been overlooked are now the root cause in a daisy-chain of unfortunate events.

For example, When you are dealing with keywords it pretty straight forward. Its either a keyword that (1) you haven’t identified or optimized yet (2) a keyword in process meaning on its way up the ladder on the way to the top 10 or (3) a keyword that has already passed the tipping point and is in the top 10 and you have zeroed in on another variant or related key phrase.

Depending on which one it is, there are different ways to cultivate the results such as (a) creating and cultivating more content in the instance of #1 to provide structured layers of topical content (b) adding sufficient internal or external links to increase rankings for #2 or (c) testing conversion on segmented landing pages to get the highest ROI in the case of #3 to get the most out of optimization efforts.

The ball pen hammer approach to “make it work” vs. using the right tool for the job “like a screwdriver instead” are all experiences gained at the expense of experimentation and / or deliberate programming.

So, before you go in and make changes to settings, revise content or dabble with a sites settings that have already been optimized. Take it from someone with experience, experiment on new pages, test the results and then apply what works on a larger scale if it works without creating other consequences.

We spend enough time fixing other peoples mistakes, who may have had the best intentions while they made them, but just like trying to change your own oil with the wrong tools. One missed step like forgetting a bolt during reassembly could cost you a motor if the oil leaks out.

SEO is a process that takes time to reach full potential. Understand that it involves layering processes for days, weeks, months or years, depending on the keywords.

So, to pull up the roots just to see if the plant is growing means you have to plant it again and let new roots dig in. Much in the same way, you have to cultivate a website holistically bridging relevance across multiple nodes (site architecture, content, server settings, link building and social media engagement, conversion optimization and analytics, usability testing) the list goes on and on.

The term itself may imply the objective of achieving higher rankings for specific keywords and / or key phrases, but in reality SEO is about developing an authoritative domain capable of supplanting a competitors less optimized website.

To do that, it goes back to the details and each one matters, so, if you are paying a specialist for SEO services, then respect their methodologies, time lines and techniques. What may not be obvious now, will become a reality later, which you can measure to gauge the effectiveness of a campaign.

SEO Your Title Tags

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

SEO Your Title Tags

The power of a good title can make or break subsequent SEO efforts. With millions of pages being added each day, user agents *a.k.a web crawlers or search engine spiders have their hands full keeping tabs on what’s hot and what’s not. To increase rankings and relevance, you should SEO your title tags on each page in your website for optimal meaning and context for the pages respective content.

This is one more reason that you don’t want to leave it up to them to determine what the topicality of your pages are really about. If you use the main keywords in “exact match” first in the title, this indicates to them through a hierarchical method called proximity, that these keywords “in this order” are more important than those that follow.

Also consider, the more keywords you add to the title, the less effective or diffused each one becomes as it is interpreted as a mixed signal or relevance.

This means that less is more when it comes to titles. You are better off creating addition keyword-specific pages and using exact match titles to summarize what that piece of the semantic puzzle means and how it fits into your website, than stuff the keyword full or irrelevant keywords that sparsely appear on the page.

If you consider the web from a top down approach, you will find that term frequency, title tags, co-citation from other websites and the websites internal site architecture are responsible for providing cues of topicality.

A great title and enough links from authoritative sites that are also theme-specific is one sure-fire ranking tactic from most SEO’s playbooks. However, in order for a title to be effective, it should be based on a solid premise of contextual information you would expect to find ON THAT PAGE.

Don't get ignored or even worse

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Don't get ignored or even worse...

The rules are changing fast. It's getting so easy to get your site banned by over submitting, keyword stuffing, Link farms or any aggressive marketing tactics used to get better rankings. We don't use any dirty tricks. We develop content rich pages that are relevant to searchers and search engines.

There’s a fine line between using web marketing and Search Engine Optimization to increase your web traffic… and using it to spam the heck out of the search engines… don’t cross that line.

Google, Yahoo and even MSN are banning web sites in record numbers and it's not just with the help of filters and algorhythms. In their quest to offer only the best high quality search results to their visitors, the search engines are adopting directory-like human reviewing techniques!

Search engines now have employees whose job is to surf the web looking for spam and ban every web site they feel should NOT be on the first page.

At the top of their lists for human review are web sites that get complaints (usually Adsense type sites) that allow do-gooder surfers to easily report web sites and point to them as spammers. Some folks even volunteer to rat on spam sites. And if that’s not enough, there is a good chance your competitors will put your sites through the ringer and if they find any spam they will rat you out.

Actually, it's very likely that it is the competition that is fingering the sites to get banned as they may be angry at losing the top spot to a competing marketer. The only solution is to play by the rules! Wait - there are no published rules... just a mantra that says do no evil... It's simple, If you play by the rules, you won't get banned. "' Put the Internet to work -for you"

Keyword stuffing, is a blackhat SEO technique!

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Keyword stuffing, is a blackhat SEO technique!

Did you know that keyword stuffing isn’t considered ethical SEO, and that it is a blackhat SEO technique that can get you penalized from the search engines?

Keyword stuffing is nothing more than a blackhat SEO technique, that involves the over usage of repeated keywords or keyword phrases to attempt to manipulate a webpage’s relevancy for a search term. At one time it worked very effectively, but today’s search engines are much wiser, and they penalize sites which are caught using such techniques. Furthermore, you could even get your website banned from Google and any other search engine which doesn’t condone these blackhat SEO methods. It is said, that Google, actually assigns a lower pagerank (PR) value to sites which are caught using such SEO tactics, so it isn’t worth the risk!

On the other side of the spectrum, you have people who are innocent which have inadvertently stepped over the line. It is easy to do when you are concentrating on your keywords, that you want to promote when writing your article. The next thing you know, you have stepped over the boundaries, and now you find yourself in bad territory.

Where is the great divide located between good keyword density and keyword stuffing?

Most search engines have a predetermined algorithm to handle keyword stuffing, which isn’t disclosed. Furthermore, if that were to be known, writers would use the maximum amount of keywords in their articles. These articles would have a much higher tendency to border more on the side of black hat SEO and lack content.

Since the search engines won’t divulge these limits, how do you know where to draw the line?

One of the best methods to use, is to do a Google search for your keyword terms and then compare the title, description, keywords and page content of the top ten results. There are many free SEO keyword density tools available on the Internet, that you can check your article keyword density ratio with. – - A good starting point for keyword density for page content, is from 3% to 5%.

- – Remember, avoid blackhat SEO techniques! – -

Production methodology on Search Engine Optimization

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Production methodology on Search Engine Optimization :

» Comprehensive Research on the key word and key phrases.

» Market study on competitors’ website.

» Content Optimization.

» Insertion of meta tags and keywords.

» Advance site optimization like alt tag at images, textual links etc.

» Submission on relevant search engines.

» Insertion of reciprocal link.

» Comprehensive report on the search submission with search engine rank for 6 months.

» Re- submission on every 3 month.

Are Keywords in Meta Tags Important for SEO

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Hyper text markup language or HTML includes specific tags, which can be used by webmaster to define the keywords for a particular web page. These meta tags were widely used at the beginning of search engine development as the tools to tell the search engines about the content of the websites. In year 1995 AltaVista and Infoseek started to use meta tags with keywords to understand what the web page is about. However, in two years, search engines understood that using provided keywords only is not the best way to render the websites, since webmasters could easily manipulate key word meta tags just to bring visitors to their websites.

Since then the importance of meta tags with keywords started to decline. By early 2000s most of the search engines dropped the practice to rely on keywords from HTML meta tags in understanding the content of the website and their ranking. AltaVista was the only search engine that considered keywords meta tags, but they also stopped considering them by year 2002.

Since there are not many official statements from search engine developers on their attitude to the keywords, provided by webmasters in the meta tags, the question still remains highly disputable. Some experts say that search engines still consider keywords tags provided that the same keywords are used in the text of the corresponding web page. Others deny any importance of keywords.

As a matter of fact, in 2007 a group of leaders in search engine optimization concluded that the importance of keywords provided in meta tags is close to zero these days. Besides, in 2009 Matt Cuts from Google confirmed that they no longer consider such keywords in their search algorithms. On the other hand, Yahoo still makes use of the meta tags with keywords in their searches along with other multiple factors.

As a conclusion, it seems like keywords do not carry a primary meaning for search engines any more, and if you plan to promote your website with this technique only, your efforts will unlikely to be successful. However, the use of adequate keywords in the tags along with high quality texts on the web pages will definitely help in achieving your goals in the internet marketing. All in all, remember that just like search engines now consider dozens or even hundreds of different website values, a webmaster should also implement a whole complex of different techniques to be successful in website promotion.

How do I increase my web siteâ��s ranking in search engines?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Search Engine Rankings

Studies have proven that web users do not look past three pages of results when trying to find a relevant site. If your web site is not within the top 30 results, your firm will not be found. This article details how to improve your web site’s rankings through four basic techniques: having reciprocal links, adding relevant content, editing your meta tags, and registering your web site with search engines.

1. Reciprocal Links
As stated by Google, which provides over 80% of search results, the best way to ensure a top listing is for your web site to be linked to a lot of other web sites. This is known as link popularity. Google’s automated search robots jump from page to page on the Internet via hyperlinks. The more sites that link to your firm, the more likely it is that Google will list the firm’s web site. To raise your web site’s link popularity, your firm needs to contact other legal web sites, search engines, and web portals and ask for reciprocal links. With each new relevant link, your web site increases its rank.

2. Relevant Content
Most potential clients will not search for your firm by name. Rather, potential clients will search for a law firm by typing in “attorney florida workers’ compensation” or “how do I implement a labor law plan?” Search engines rank web sites higher if they offer relevant content that contains such words or subjects. For your law firm to be found, your site needs to offer authoritative information on your practice areas through articles, newsletters, bulletin alerts, links, statistics, and more. By offering this information, the search engines will associate your web site with key words that will allow potential clients to find your site.

3. Edit your Meta Tags
Meta tags are HTML-coded information that search engines look at when crawling on your web site for information. In the simplest form, meta tags consist of a title, a description, and relevant key words. To optimize the web site, your firm should decide on the most important words to place in title, keyword, and description meta tags. In addition, your firm should create different meta tags for each page of the web site. This will allow each page to be indexed differently by the search engine, thus creating several mini-web sites.

4. Register your Web Site
To capitalize on your firm’s link popularity, meta tags, and content, your web site needs be registered with the top search engines and as many other web sites as possible. Your firm’s web site registration process should include:

A. Submission to free search engines, including Google, Open Directory Project, other major search engines/portals, and other community and local search engines
B. Submission to paid search engine, including Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, FAST, Overture, Looksmart, Google AdWords
C. Registration at Findlaw.com, Law.com, Martindale.com, and other legal sites.
D. Exchanging reciprocal links with professional organizations, clients, trade groups, consultants, publishers, educational institutions, and other relevant organizations.

How We Can Help

Ajiboye Web Design has extensive experience developing, re-designing and optimizing law-related web sites. Our expertise can save you time and money while increasing your firm’s business traffic. Why have a web site if no one can find it?

What is search engine optimization (SEO)?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

What is search engine optimization (SEO)?

SEO is the process of improving your website's ability to be discovered naturally by the search engines. The best way to do this for any website is to have content that can be discovered. Step One of all SEO is based on good content.

Further critical elements to successful optimization involve additions and changes to your site's content on a frequent basis. Code updates to reflect technology improvements as well as external factors such as refining the quality of other links pointing to your site are also part of SEO.

Why is search engine optimization important?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Why is search engine optimization important?

As the online market for professionals grows, selection becomes more competitive, and the cost of pay per click advertising rises - it's more important than ever before to have a website that ranks highly in the organic search results.

Adding content to your site that is informative and based on the information your client is looking for is the key. Build your content based on the questions you have been asked by clients, not on the features and benefits that maybe important to you. After all, it is what your clients search for NOT what you search for.

Search engine optimization to your content is an investment that will continue to grow. Where “Pay Per Click” (PPC) campaigns die as soon as you stop them, organic content that is indexed by Google stays there forever. And the more you have of it the more “relevant” you are to Google.

It is the best long term Return On Investment you can have online.

What do you know about SEO?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

What do you know about SEO?

* Top listings in organic search results can boost your traffic by 600% or more.

* Research indicates that 9 out of 10 searchers click on the organic results over the pay per click results. What do you do?

* Natural rankings provide much more quality traffic than sponsored paid listings.

* Your prospective clients will use search engines to research you by name as well as by business.

* Targeted content and proper optimization of the content can significantly improve your prospect to client conversion

* Optimization can boost your online visibility in social media, blogs, press releases & more.

INTERNET MARKETING THAT WORKS!

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

INTERNET MARKETING THAT WORKS!

Search engine optimization and submission used to be easy. In the early days, if you were one of the few businesses with a site, there wasn't much else competing for your customers' attention. Now if you want to use your web site as a way to attract customers, you have to know how to play by the search engines' rules and optimization is the key.

Why search engine optimize your website?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

WHY SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE?

Doing search engine submission and just having a site isn't enough anymore – you have to get customers to find you. To do that, your web site has to use certain techniques and technologies that make search engines rank your site high on their results list when your customers do a search for your kind of business. That is called "search engine optimization."

Increasing your search engine rankings is not that easy. With millions of web sites vying for your customer's attention, "search engine optimization" is the only reliable way to bring customers in through the internet. Sure, you can get customers to your web site through other kinds of expensive advertising and by handing out your cards, one by one. But if you want the Internet to bring customers to you, "search engine optimization and manual search engine submission" is the best way to go.

What is search engine optimization anyway?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ANYWAY?

Search engine optimization and search engine submissions are half art and half science.

There are some things well-known about how search engines operate and some things one learns after working at it for a long time. And there are some things that you know only by keeping up with the technology that changes almost by the day.

For example, certain design and writing techniques influence where your web site will be ranked by a search engine, as does how and where you use certain key words. (Which keywords you use, how often, and where are all extremely important to your search engine rankings.) Some technologies used by web designers can seriously hurt your search engine rankings and search engine optimization, and you need to avoid those, no matter how cool they are.

Then there are meta tags, and links, both of which can affect your ranking. Whether or not your site is even listed at all on some of the most popular search engines depends entirely on how your search engine submission is done and on knowing the rules for each search engine. All these tools are part of search engine optimization, which optimizes your site for higher search engine rankings.

Unfortunately, it's not something you can learn by reading any search engine optimization article in a magazine.

Why choose Ajiboye for search engine optimization?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

WHY CHOOSE AJIBOYE FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION?

Ajiboye Software Development specializes in search engine optimization. Unlike some providers, Ajiboye doesn't promise to do anything and everything related to your web site. Search engine optimization is such a technical and ever-changing field that it demands specialization. Because we specialize, we have been able to help hundreds of companies get top-10 rankings on the major search engines, exceeding their goals for business brought in through the internet.

Ajiboye focuses on your needs. There is no cookie-cutter path to search engine optimization. Ajiboye will customize a flexible marketing plan to meet your marketing goals and advertising budget, and to help make your business succeed and your search engine rankings soar.

Ajiboye has a record to be proud of. We've been in business since 2001 and hope you'll take a look at what our clients have to say. In today's environment, it can be hard to know who to trust.

Making your web site better for the users and the search engines

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Making your web site better for the users and the search engines

My website optimization services include the following:

* Studying your site and comparing it with those of your competitors.

* Researching the keyword phrases that your potential customers are using in the search engines.

* Editing the text of your site for clarity and use of the proper phrases.

* Improving the structure of your site for easier navigation.

* Cleaning up the code to make pages load more quickly and removing any questionable elements that could get you banned from the search engines.

* Getting the right sites to link to yours.

Why should you use SEO services?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Why should you use search engine optimization services?

There are other ways to increase the traffic to your site, but none of them provide the advantage of real search engine optimization:

* You can spend your money on massive databases of email addresses and send out ads, but those lists usually contain numerous duplicates and bad addresses. Besides, if you're like me, you probably delete emails like those without even opening them.

* You can buy into pay-per-click advertising programs, but they become increasingly expensive over time and must be constantly monitored.

* You can try to fool the search engines using cloaking or spamming techniques, but that's likely to get your site banned.

Apart from being expensive and risky, these methods all fail to improve the user experience, which is the only thing that will turn increased traffic into increased business.

The first step to SEO success; KNOW how search engines (such as Google) work!

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

SEO is absolutely one of the biggest things in the online marketing world today. SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, which you may easily surmise is essentially optimizing your site to be picked up by a search engine – such as Google, Yahoo Search, or Bing.

Before beginning your venture into the world of SEO for your own website, it's a great idea to first educate yourself with how search engines work. Although each search engine has its own way of searching, ranking, and displaying your search queries, they essentially work mostly the same way – i.e. they find, index, then display what you need.

To make things clearer, think of making a search on the web like looking for something from a very large book, only this book has a massively detailed index (not just a simple table of contents) that tells you exactly where everything is found, down to the very page. When you ‘Google’ something, the engine whizzes through the entire index, determines the most relevant items, and spits them out onto the screen.

Google for example has a three-stage process - Crawling, Indexing, and Serving.

The Crawl!

Crawling is the process by which Google finds websites, both new and recently updated ones and adds them to the Google index. Google uses computer farms to fetch or "crawl" billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (This is what is known as a Bot or spider). As the Googlebot visits a website, it detects links on the page and lists them down and ‘crawls’ them, and the process repeats billions of times. In this process, new sites are found, updated sites are identified, old sites are moved down the list, and dead pages are removed. Remember that Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more than others.

Indexing

The Googlebot then processes each page and compiles a massive index of the words and their location on each page, as well as in the content tags, Title tags, and ALT attributes.

Serve Search-ala-Google

When people type in a query, now known as the verb “Google it,” Google searches its massive index for matching pages and return the results it believes are the most relevant. The RELEVANCE is the important part. This is determined by hundreds of factors known only to Google, but we know one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank.

How to choose an SEO Company

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

When choosing a company to do your SEO for you, there are some very important things you need to consider. Of course the price is one important factor, but more than that, there’s things like:

Case studies: Can this SEO company you are looking to hire provide you with case studies of successful projects? If not, then it’s probably safer to keep shopping around.

What guidelines does the company follow? There are many ways to do SEO, and not all of them are above board. Some SEO companies resort to ‘tricks.’ It will be good to note that there are no ‘tricks’ in SEO, only good SEO and bad SEO.

Does the company you’re looking to hire have other online marketing services they can offer? The real good SEO companies provide more than just SEO advice as SEO in truth is just one part of what you can call the Internet marketing mix.

What is their experience in your particular industry? If their main experience is in cosmetics, and your business is automotive, then it might be a good idea to keep looking. Not that you should overlook those without experience in your field, just that it is better working with those who have knowledge of what you do than with those that do not.

These are some key decision points that you need to think about before signing on the dotted line.

SEO for small business is still advisable

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Small businesses are becoming more aware of the power of online marketing. However, they are at a constant disadvantage. Large companies with large budgets typically get the best spots and even the best search rankings, but that does not mean your small business is already out of the game. If you are thinking of jumping into the internet marketing and SEO game, then remember that you have something big companies don’t - the NEED to do the best job you can on a tight budget. Adversity always creates the best outcome for any endeavor.

To do well in Internet marketing, particularly SEO, you need commitment. SEO isn’t like buying web space, where you buy a chunk and then forget about it until you run out of storage. It is a game of tactics, and you need to be in it for the long haul. You need to turn yourself into a student of SEO, even if you hire someone else to implement it.

But more than that, there are key things in SEO that can level the playing field between large companies and small businesses. First, you need to build a great website. It does not matter if you are number 1 on the search results, when the person visits your site and it looks like rubbish, all you get is that one page visit and they’re gone. The goal is impressions leading to sales. Second, you need create content for the users first, not the search engines. Search engines get people into the site, the content keeps them there, and should, if good enough, sell your product or service. Third, SEO does not mean stuffing your site with keywords like a thanksgiving turkey. The best done SEO is when you don’t feel like there is SEO implemented on the site, not when every sentence it lit up with keywords.

One last note - you should make sure your traffic comes not only from search engines but from social networking, blogs, and email newsletters as well. Why? Because honestly, SEO is one part of the equation, and if one day your ranking goes down, where will your traffic come from while you’ve yet to re-configure your SEO to get back on top?

It's not the keyword popularity, but the keywords that matter to your business that counts

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Some people make the mistake of angling for the best – and costliest – keywords, but in truth they’re only useful to you as long as they’re relevant to your site. There's also no point in paying high costs for high ranking keywords and keyword phrases no one will search for. For example, you fix cars, what would keywords or key phrases related to buying new cars get you? Nothing.

Before you start on your SEO, determine what your audience will likely search for to get to your business. Instead of looking for the top words, you can also look at targeted two or three-word phrases. It should go without saying that keywords you select should target your potential customers and your site's content. Also, better crawler rankings come with better linking. Keep your links static as much as possible. Though there are merits to dynamic linking, if your website isn’t as massive as the NY Times for example, it is pointless to get dynamic linking and better to use static links to improve search. As much as possible, put keywords and key phrases into your URL.

Improving SEO on graphics heavy sites

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Here’s a conundrum, if your business is about graphics, graphic design, animation, video editing, flash development, industrial design, housing, etc. design, how can you implement SEO when you rely so obviously (and so heavily on graphics) to lure clients?

Sites designed with heavy graphics, frames, Flash, dynamic databases, or other codes that are not HTML based require specific optimization techniques to get properly indexed by the major search engines. Here are some techniques for graphic heavy sites to get good positioning in search engines.

Domain Name Selection – The domain name (URL) can be key to improving your search engine positioning. Don’t just pick the first available URL, or use acronym, unless you are as popular as CNN, or SI (sports illustrated), or WSJ (wall street journal).

Web Site Copywriting – If you are graphics heavy, added the right amount of Web page copy is vital. Why? Crawlers need machine-readable content and HTML in order for them to rank your page. Basically, no text, no rank. Good captioning for graphics, and savvy descriptions can help if you want to maintain your more graphic heavy look.

Also, if graphics heavy, invest in a good Site Map – A site map, although not a replacement for good text is key in providing links to your pages that crawlers can find, and if crawlers can find then, your searchers can.

Tools of the SEO trade

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

For the budding SEO marketer, here are some tools that you may want to brush up on before you go forward with SEO on your website. Like all crafts, SEO has its own set of tools. Understanding these tools is of course essential to your success.

Spider Analysis - Spider Analysis provide you with a record of what a spider or crawler bot is doing while it goes around your website. It also shows you when your website was crawled, and which pages it indexed. If some of your web pages were omitted, then it’s probably worth investigating why so that the next time you get crawled, more of your website gets exposure and gets indexed. Spider analysis can also help you prevent unwanted crawlers like email harvesters that are used by spammers.

Robots Exclusion File – A robot exclusion file is simply a robots.txt file in your website’s root directory. Why? Ask the search engines, because for some reason, some search spiders will not index your site if the robots.txt file is not there.

Link Popularity – When a link is popular, search engines pick up on it and it plays a major part in ranking your site. This is what Google calls PageRank. Basically, the websites that link to you, and the more popular those sites are make you more popular. Get it? So it pays to make yourself or your site more popular especially to those sites that are popular too.

Selecting the right keywords for SEO

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

The keywords you choose to optimize for can make or break your SEO efforts. One of the things that should guide you when deciding on your keywords is to make sure they fit into the theme of your site or what it is all about. Choose keywords that describe your site or your business.

When selecting keywords that directly connect to your theme, search engines will ‘favor’ your site and will give your page a higher ranking in search listings. But you also have to think of potential customers. Place yourself in their shoes. What sorts of keywords will they think of using in order to search for websites or businesses such as yours?

Some keywords can be really competitive and, therefore, expensive. More and more businesses and website owners will bid for popular keywords. If you have the bucks and the time to focus on winning this bid then go for it. But for small and medium-sized businesses who do not have the same capability, it’s better to choose a keyword that may be less competitive but cost cheaper and still fits into your site theme. And because they’re cheaper, you can come up with other keywords that do not cost much. By spreading out your keywords this way, you might just bring in the same amount of people as a competitive keyword will. Ultimately, let your customers guide you. Know them well and know what they will likely search for.

When making your selection, it’s really good to think long and hard about making sure that the money you spend on optimizing keywords for your site will not be put to waste. Remember that some of the traffic will be converted to sales while some will just be plain visitors to your site.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Creating a well-designed good-looking website is only a fraction of its success… We all need websites to bring visitors to us, either it is a personal blog or an online store. All the webmaster and website owners wish to make their web projects friendly with the popular search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and others, because these are mainly responsible for driving visitors to a particular website. That is particularly where search engine optimization can help.

The term search engine optimization or SEO came into use approximately in year 1997. In the modern understanding, SEO is a set of techniques to improve the quality and quantity of traffic from search engines to a particular website. For example, if someone sells handmade jewelry online, he wants people, typing “handmade jewelry” in Google, see his website address at the top of the search results. Search engine optimization professionals work to achieve that goal.

There are a whole bunch of tools to increase the search engine traffic, including directory submission, content development with properly defined key words and keywords density, back links creation and many others.

However, it is important to understand that search engine optimization is not a magic wand that will move your website to the top position in the search results in a glance of an eye. This is a time-consuming process, which requires deep understanding of search engine algorithms and SEO techniques. Thus, it is better to have SEO professionals analyze your website and develop an individualized plan of action to promote your website in the search engine results.