Monday, March 31, 2008
SEO GUIDE
SEO is having a long term web marketing strategy and a commitment to building a site full of quality information and SEO has its place. Small businesses are growing more aware of the need to understand and implement at least the basics of search engine optimization. But if you read a variety of small businesses blogs and Web sites, you'll quickly see that there's a lot of uncertainty over what makes up "the basics." Without access to high-level consulting and without a lot of experience knowing what SEO resources can be trusted, there's also a lot of misinformation about SEO strategies and tactics. If we follow good steps we can get maximum positive results. Below are some tips should keep in mind and follow-:
Commitment and Patience-: 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. 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.
Learning Attitude-: 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. Luckily for you, there are plenty of great Web resources (like Search Engine Land) and several terrific books you can read. Aaron Wall's SEO Book, Jennifer Lay cock's Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin are three I've read and recommend.
Web Knowledge-: An SEO should have clearly defined goals for SEO efforts. And will need web analytics software in place so he can track what's working and what's not. I'm sure you want to show up on the first page of results. Ask yourself, "Is my site really one of the 10 best sites in the world on this topic?" Be honest. If it's not, make it better.
Keyword Research-: Before you start project do keyword research. 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.
Unique & Relevant Title Description -: 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.
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.
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. Use hyphens in URLs and file names, not underscores. Hyphens are treated as a "space," while underscores are not.
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. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It's called the navigation bar. See how the second navigation bar at the bottom of Last Minute Florida Villas is like a mini-site map?
Social Networking-: If your small business has a visual element, join the appropriate communities on Flickr and post high-quality photos there. If you're a service-oriented business, use Yahoo Answers to position yourself as an expert in your industry. With any social media site you use, the first rule is don't spam! Be an active, contributing member of the site. The idea is to interact with potential customers, not annoy them. Optimize your site to catch local traffic by showing your address and local phone number prominently. Submit your site to the free local listings services that the major search engines offer. Make sure your site is listed in local/social directories such as CitySearch, Yelp, Local.com, etc., and encourage customers to leave reviews of your business on these sites, too.
Search Engines Tools-: Take advantage of the tools the search engines give you. Sign up for Google's webmaster Central and Yahoo's Site Explorer to learn more about how the search engines see your site, including how many inbound links they're aware of. Google especially, love blogs for the fresh content and highly-structured data. Beyond that, there's no better way to join the conversations that are already taking place about your industry and/or company. Reading and commenting on other blogs can also increase your exposure and help you acquire new links. Related bonus tip: Put your blog at yourdomain.com/blog so your main domain gets the benefit of any links to your blog posts. If that's not possible, use blog.yourdomain.com.
There is a lot more to search engine optimization, and there are always more details when looking at an individual site. But these tips should help any website significantly improve its rankings. Google may bring you 70% of your traffic today, but what if the next big algorithm update hits you hard? What if your Google visibility goes away tomorrow? Newsletters and other subscriber-based content can help you hold on to traffic/customers no matter what the search engines do. In fact, many of the tips in this list—creating great content, starting a blog, using social media and local search, etc.—will help you grow an audience of loyal prospects and customers that may help you survive the whims of search engines.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Challenges for Search Engine
As the technology and the circle of web network is growing the challenges for searh engine are also growing fastly. The Web search queries one can make are currently limited to searching for keywords, which may result in many Type I and type II error positives, especially using the default whole-page search.
Better results might be achieved by using a proximity search option with a search-bracket to limit matches within a paragraph or phrase, rather than matching random words scattered across large pages. Another alternative is using human operators to do the researching for 'organic' search engine users
The Web is growing much faster than any present-technology search engine can possibly index .A web page must be reindexed each time it is changed. Dynamically generated sites may be slow or difficult to index, or may result in excessive results, perhaps generating 500 times more web pages than average.
Many dynamically generated websites are not indexable by search engines; this phenomenon is known as the invisible web. Some search engines specialize in crawling dynamic content on the invisible web that is password protected or requires forms to be filled out.
To be higher in the list of search results websites uses tricks for number of keywords. It can cause polluted results by search engine which contain little or no information matching to the keywords. And it will lead the required and relevant pages pushed down list
Better results might be achieved by using a proximity search option with a search-bracket to limit matches within a paragraph or phrase, rather than matching random words scattered across large pages. Another alternative is using human operators to do the researching for 'organic' search engine users
The Web is growing much faster than any present-technology search engine can possibly index .A web page must be reindexed each time it is changed. Dynamically generated sites may be slow or difficult to index, or may result in excessive results, perhaps generating 500 times more web pages than average.
Many dynamically generated websites are not indexable by search engines; this phenomenon is known as the invisible web. Some search engines specialize in crawling dynamic content on the invisible web that is password protected or requires forms to be filled out.
To be higher in the list of search results websites uses tricks for number of keywords. It can cause polluted results by search engine which contain little or no information matching to the keywords. And it will lead the required and relevant pages pushed down list
Working Of Search Engine
A search engine performs in the following sequence
Web crawling
Indexing
Searching
Web search engines work by storing information about a large number of web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated Web browser which follows every link it sees.
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.
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.
When a user enters a query into a search engine (typically by using key words), the engine examines 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. Most search engines support the use of boolean opraters AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. Some search engines provide an advanced feature called which allows users to define the distance between keywords.
There may be many webpages as the result of a search for a particular word or phrase. some are more popular, authoritative and relevant 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.
Web crawling
Indexing
Searching
Web search engines work by storing information about a large number of web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated Web browser which follows every link it sees.
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.
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.
When a user enters a query into a search engine (typically by using key words), the engine examines 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. Most search engines support the use of boolean opraters AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. Some search engines provide an advanced feature called which allows users to define the distance between keywords.
There may be many webpages as the result of a search for a particular word or phrase. some are more popular, authoritative and relevant 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.
Search Engine
A tool is designed to search information on internet is known as search engine. User can search web pages, impages and other types of files. Search engine works as a mixture of algorithmic and human input. The first tool used for searching on the internet was Archie. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a database of file names; however, rchive did not index the contents of these files.
Gopher led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Like Archie, they searched the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers. While the name of the search engine "Archie" was not a reference to the Archie comic book series, "Veronica"' and "Jughead" are characters in the series, thus referencing their predecessor.
Wandex was the first web search engine. Another very early search engine, Aliweb, also appeared in 1993, and still runs today.JumpStatioin (released in early 1994) used a crawler to find web pages for searching, but search was limited to the title of web pages only. One of the first "full text" crawler-based search engines was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any webpage, which became the standard for all major search engines since. It was also the first one to be widely known by the public.
Google search engine rose to prominence. The company achieved better results for many searches with an innovation called PageRank. This iterative algorithm ranks web pages based on the number and PageRank of other web sites and pages that link there, on the premise that good or desirable pages are linked to more than others. Google also maintained a minimalist interface to its search engine. In contrast, many of its competitors embedded a search engine in a web portal .
As of late 2007, Google was by far the most popular Web search engine worldwide. A number of country-specific search engine companies have become prominent.
Gopher led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Like Archie, they searched the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers. While the name of the search engine "Archie" was not a reference to the Archie comic book series, "Veronica"' and "Jughead" are characters in the series, thus referencing their predecessor.
Wandex was the first web search engine. Another very early search engine, Aliweb, also appeared in 1993, and still runs today.JumpStatioin (released in early 1994) used a crawler to find web pages for searching, but search was limited to the title of web pages only. One of the first "full text" crawler-based search engines was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any webpage, which became the standard for all major search engines since. It was also the first one to be widely known by the public.
Google search engine rose to prominence. The company achieved better results for many searches with an innovation called PageRank. This iterative algorithm ranks web pages based on the number and PageRank of other web sites and pages that link there, on the premise that good or desirable pages are linked to more than others. Google also maintained a minimalist interface to its search engine. In contrast, many of its competitors embedded a search engine in a web portal .
As of late 2007, Google was by far the most popular Web search engine worldwide. A number of country-specific search engine companies have become prominent.
SEO Techniques
SEO techniques are classified by some into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Some industry commentators classify 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.Blackhat 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 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.
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.Blackhat 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 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.
SEO - A Marketing Strategy
Recent analyses have shown that searchers scan a search results page from top to bottom looking for a relevant result. Placement at or near the top of the rankings therefore increases the number of searchers who will visit a site. However, more search engine referrals does not guarantee more sales. SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator's goals.A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic search results to pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes, and improving a site's conversion rate.
SEO may generate a return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors. It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic.
SEO may generate a return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors. It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic.
Search Engine Optimization
Understanding of Search EngineOptimization (SEO).
Search Engine Optimization is a process of influencing search engine results and bring targeted traffic to your web site. Search Engine Optimization is a tool to increase the size of traffic to a web site from earch engine via search results for targeted keyworda. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specifivertical search engines.
As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users. Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indexes.
The SEO can also refer to search engine optimizers, 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.
Search Engine Optimization is a process of influencing search engine results and bring targeted traffic to your web site. Search Engine Optimization is a tool to increase the size of traffic to a web site from earch engine via search results for targeted keyworda. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specifivertical search engines.
As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users. Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indexes.
The SEO can also refer to search engine optimizers, 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.
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