Friday, May 2, 2008

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is an active practice of optimization of web sites through different elements taken into consideration. Optimizing internal and external aspects of a particular website in order to increase the traffic to the site from search engines. Optimizing a website is different in all the search engines. Each and every search engine will have its own Algorithm to identify the loop points and good points from a particular website. Search Engines optimize certain unique things such that you can easily identify the loop points of a particular website. We need to make each and every website search engine friendly such that we can generate immense traffic to our website.

Search Engines are the primary method to navigate all the internet users i.e to get the traffic to your website. Experience has shown that Search Engine Traffic can make or break any organization's success. Immense visitors to a website can provide publicity, revenue and exposure that we would like to have. The technology used by the search engine is very much advanced and they are always working to improve their technology more and more. SEO helps search engines to crawl to unlimited extent. This is very much helpful to boost the rankings of a particular website and to have very fast searches in search engines.

Relevance and Popularity: Relevancy is the main term to know the content of particular page in a website. When a user searches for a particular page with a word he should be able to visit our website. This can be done by increasing the terms or phrases queried by the user in the title and important headlines and sub headers.

Popularity increases mainly when a user's query matches a given document from a search engine. The popularity of the document increases with every other document referencing to it.
These two terms were change in the form of document analysis and link analysis. Link analysis and document analysis together combine and overlap hundred factors that can be easily measured and filtered through the search engine algorithms. This helps in determining the score and list results for a particular document and its importance. In simple way, we can say that if hundreds or thousands of website link to your website, then you site must be popular and it should have a great value.

Keywords are the main aspects to for a particular search terms. Search engine mainly relies on Keywords. Search Engine trusts on many aspects that are very much worthful. Web is such a commercial place, with so many parties interested in ranking well for particular searches, the search engines have learned that they cannot always rely on websites to be honest about their importance. Search engines rely on the terms queried by users to determine which results to put through their algorithms, order and return to the user. But, rather than simply recognizing and retrieving exact matches for query terms, search engines use their knowledge to construct intelligent matching for queries.
Keyword research is one of the basic advantageous process of SEO. Without this component, your efforts to rank well in the major search engines may be mis-directed to the wrong terms and phrases, resulting in rankings that no one will ever see. Keyword research involves diferent phases and each phase has its own importance. There are different components for a site's ability to be crawled, indexed and ranked by search engine spiders.

Content of the Site: URLs, title tags and meta tag components are all information that describe your site and page to visitors and search engines. Keeping them relevant, compelling and accurate are key to ranking well. You can also use these areas as launching points for your keywords, and indeed, successful rankings require their use.

Link Bait: Link baiting is one of the best process that helps in getting worthy links. When attempting to create the most link worthy content, create a document, tool or service that's truly revolutionary that can provide necessary boost. The links that you earn with and existing release stay with your site for a long time, providing search visibility long after a long time.
While developing a great website is half of the SEO equation, the other half is promotion. Search Engines are very particular about growing their ability to detect artificial manipulation and link spam, so effective SEO's who want to promote sites to the fullest extent must use natural, organic link building processes in order to have success.

Competetors Analysis: Looking at the links obtained by your top competitors and pursuing methods of your own to get listed on those sites/pages is an excellent way to stay competitive in the link building race. It's also a good way to get natural traffic, as these are the links and sites that send your competitors their traffic, they will also bring visitors to your site. The methodology for investigating a competitor's links is fairly straightforward, although more complex methods can be used by the advanced researcher.

SEO is also a long-term process, both in application and results - those who expect quick rankings after completing a few suggestions in this guide will be deeply dissapointed. Search engines can often be frustratingly slow to respond to improvements that will eventually garner significant boosts in traffic. Whether you're considering running an SEO campaign yourself, or hiring a professional, get the best possible information that requires in building a website.

Will Your Website Pass a Google Review?

Google Search Editors easily use algorithms to detect

1.sites that they send a lot of traffic to relative to its total traffic (comparing ratios between toolbar data and search traffic)

2.sites which have seen a rapid spike in traffic from Google

3.sites which people quickly bounce away from (and do not later return to)

4.sites which get a lot of traffic from Google but get few navigational queries and flag anything out of the ordinary for human review.

How do you not get flagged for review?

1.Build enough quality signals and direct traffic that your site looks like a real part of the web.

2.Build something people keep coming back to.

3.Do not make drastic changes to your site unless you are comfortable with it going under review.

How do you pass a review?

1.Longer term is best if your site satisfies a few criteria

2.exclusive content that people value and keep coming back to (Google loses if they remove the best content from their index)

3.a brand that people care about and search for (Google looks dumb if they do not rank your site)

4.a meaningful and reliable traffic stream outside of Google (many quality signals may stem from this exposure, which will help keep your overall profile more organic)

5.you could cause public relations harm to Google and diminish their brand value in the eyes of thousands of people (removing your site has real opportunity cost).

Can Your Website Influence Search Engines?
It can be important to make web pages easy and pleasing to use, which can be particularly important for web pages that is desired to monetize. If such web pages are not easy and pleasing to use, the money-making potential of those web pages can be in difficulty. Web pages with good usability usually have a higher conversion rate than cluttered web pages. Web pages with good usability often have a higher quality than other web pages and search engines try to return high quality web pages in their search results.
Factors that search engines analyze to determine the clutter of web pages?
The list of web page elements that can be analyzed to determine the clutter of a web page:
Total number of links
Total number of words
Page area (total)
Page length
Dimensions of fold
Fold area
Total number of font sizes used for links
Total number of font sizes used for headings
Total number of font sizes
Total number of ads
Total ad area and soon..
Good website usability can greatly improve the conversion rate of your website. If your website gets many visitors but only a few sales then it might be that your web pages are too cluttered and that you have to improve your website design.

Best Link Building Techniques?
1.Whenever you make use of several vendors in an industry or have a depth of experience with them, create a blog post, article or content page with a list of your "favorites" ranked in a particular order, then email each of the mentioned sites and tell them that they're welcome to use a "testimonial" quote you've written about them and also link to the "rankings" page. Companies love to link to anything ego-boosting.
2.Have a quick trigger finger on popular news sites that allow comments and try to be one of, if not, the first comment and mention a URL on your site that better explains your point or offers more insight. This works particularly well with politically focused stories. The only caveat is that you need a repository of relevant material to draw on. Also note - if your URL is long, you can use tinyurl.com for this purpose (which also creates a sense of mystery as to what you might be linking to). The comments themselves are nofollowed (or don't even allow hyperlinking), but even just the printed URL will get plenty of copy-and-paste traffic from big sites.
3.Be on of the first users of a given social network, and make sure to mention or include your URL in either your username or your account profile. Frequently, new services will blog about who joined them just after launch.
4.Create a wallpaper and screensaver with your company's brand and submit it to all the free wallpaper/screensaver galleries. The vast majority allow you to link back to your original source i.e your website.

The Role of Outbound Links:-

Outbound links play a critical role in overall linking strategy. This runs counter to the philosophy that used be popular in the industry, that of hoarding PageRank. Reading has become less about the notion of hoarding PageRank these days than we used to, but still many publishers do not fully understand why outbound links are important.
It comes down to what we need to do to receive authoritative links. We need get inside the head of the person who is going to make the decision about linking to us or not. If we don't understand their mindset, our chances of success go down dramatically. Remember that these people are going to the sole judge and jury in terms of deciding whether or not to give us a link.
How the age of your and other people's websites affects your rankings?
High rankings on all major search engines are influenced by the number of web pages that link to a web page and by the quality of the web pages that link to a page. Links from popular and trusted web pages have a bigger impact on the search engine rankings of a web page than links from less popular and trusted pages.
links from websites that are several years old could have a high effect on the search engine positions of the ranked sites while links from newly created websites might not have any effect at all. The age of the websites that link to a web page is not the only factor that influences the position of your website in the search result pages. That are several factors that decide whether your website will get top positions on Google or not. Having them all in place makes the difference between a successful website and a website that no one visits.

Does your website look like spam to search engines?
Is your website nowhere to be seen in Google? It might be that Google doesn't like your website because it looks like spam. The following list is to find out whether your website might look like spam or not.
1.Domain name factors that can indicate a spammy website:
The domain names of spammy websites are often very long and contain many hyphens. Those domain names often contain commercial high value keywords Spammy domains are often registered by people who own a very large number of domains. The more domains a person owns, the more likely it is that the quality of a single domain isn't high. Spammy domains are often very young and have a short registration period. Spammy websites often have many keyword-stuffed sub domains.
2.Content factors that can indicate a spammy website:
Spammy websites often show very many ads. They also often contain high-commercial keywords. The keyword density and the keyword frequency on low quality websites is often very high.Spammy websites often have duplicate content and content scraped from other websites. Low quality websites usually don't have unique content. Low quality websites usually don't contain a privacy policy, a copyright notice page and "Contact us" page with a full address.
3.Link factors that can indicate a spammy website:
Spammy websites often have many links to spam others and low quality websites aren't likely to have links from trusted sites.
4. Technical factors that can indicate a spammy website:
Spammy website often use redirects (JavaScript, MetaRefresh, etc.) from landing pages. Spammy websites also often use cloaking. Of course, other spam elements such as hidden text also cause problems with search engines.
If your website uses many of the elements mentioned above then it could be classified as spam. In that case, you should consider a redesign of your website.

What are Google Sitelinks?
Google Sitelinks are a collection of links that appears below the result of a website. These additional links link to main pages of the website. They are randomly and automatically chosen by Google's algorithm.

How to get Google Sitelinks for your website?
Many webmasters wonder how they can make Google display additional Sitelinks for their websites.Google seems to use the first level links on a website for the Sitelinks. That means that all links that are not present on the homepage of your site won't be used as Sitelinks.
The links should be descriptive text links or image links with a descriptive IMG ALT attribute. JavaScript or Flash links are not considered for Sitelinks. Google uses 2 to 8 links for the Sitelinks of a website. Unfortunately, it's unclear how Google assigns the number of links to each website.
The text that is used for the Sitelinks can be the text that are used for the link (anchor text) on the homepage or the title of the linked page. It seems that Google prefers links that appear at the top of a web page.