Search Engine Optimization Guide

Links to More Information and Resources

2008-04-05T21:03:00.000-07:00

Daily Blogs on SEO/M

Threadwatch - A popular community blog on all things search
SearchEngineWatch Blog - SEW, operated by Danny Sullivan, is one of the most respected sources for SEO and search news inside and outside the webdev community
SEO-Scoop - Donna Fontenot's personal and often introspective take on SEO
StuntDubl - Todd Malicoat's SEO tips and tricks journal
Cre8pc Blog - Kim Krause Berg presents on usability, marketing, webdev, and the search markets
Jim Boykin's SEO Thoughts - The owner of WeBuildPages, a reknowned development and SEO shop, Jim's blog is geared to industry insiders and those who want an expert view
Matt Cutts - One of Google's search engineers, Matt is Google's official representative to the SEO world
SERoundtable - Barry Schwartz's roundup of all things search related
SEOBook - Aaron Wall's accompaniment to his excellent book on SEO
Link Building Blog - Patrick Gavin and Andy Hagans of Text Link Ads combine for great advice on the subject of where and how to get links to your site
Search Engine Journal - Loren Baker's collection of posts and guest writers about events and phenomenon in SEO/M
Marketing Pilgrim - Andy Beal's journal of the search engine space and SEO events
Google Blogoscoped - Philipp Lenssen's journal of Google events, with an SEO bend

SEO/M & Webdev Forums

Cre8asite Forums - Cre8asite is an open community of dedicated SEOs, usablity professionals, web developers, and others who come together to provide some of the best advice related to online marketing and development on the net. It's also where you'll find myself (randfish) moderating and posting on a daily basis
SEW Forums - Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch website's online forums. A place where many high visibility folks in the SEO/M space come to post
HighRankings Forums - Jill Whalen, a very well-known and respected SEO, runs HighRankings, a place where you'll also find experts like Scottie Claiborne, Dan Thies, and Alan Perkins
DigitalPoint Forums - Shawn Hogan's incredibly popular (and somewhat noisy) forum on everything related to the web
WebProWorld Forums - A large web development and SEO forum with a very diverse group of posters

Industry Conferences

Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conferences - Each year, SES runs 6-10 conferences worldwide, including several shows in North America that I'll typically speak at
WebMasterWorld (WMW) Conferences - 2-3 Times each year, Brett Tabke, the owner of WMW, runs conferences that attract a large group of SEOs
Ad:Tech - An interactive marketing conference that has begun to address many of the issues of SEO and search marketing as well
SEO by the Sea - An industry insider event sponsored by Bill Slawski, as well as a blog on SEO events and subjects

How Search Engines Operate

Modern Information Retrieval - The reference standard textbook on Information Retrieval Science by Ricardo Baeza-Yates
How Search Engines Work - from Danny Sullivan in 2002
Search Engine Reference Page - from Wikipedia
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine - by Larry Page & Sergey Brin, founders of Google
A Comparison of Search Engines and a Guide to How they Operate - from Berkeley University's Internet Guide
List of IR Resources Online and Books/Publications - from Avi Rappoport of SearchTools.com

Link Analysis

Search Engine Ranking Factors - From SEOmoz; see section on "Factors Affecting the Value of a Link" for link analysis information
Block Level Link Analysis - From Microsoft Research on how search engines can segment pages into pieces of content to help devalue links from non editorial content

Keyword Research

Wordtracker - Keyword research software
Overture Tools - Measuring keyword popularity
Digitalpoint KW Tool - Free data from Overture & Wordtracker (though shortened in each)
Keyword Research Services - From Dan Thies; $100 reports are worth thousands
Dan Thies' Blog at Sitepoint - Coverage of a range of SEO issues with a focus on KW research
Measuring Keyword Competition - HighRankings Thread (9 Pages)

Accessibility

Dive into Accessibility - From Mark Pilgrim, a guide to making a site accessible in 30 days
Making a Great Website for Everyone - From Carmen Mardiros of Mardiros Internet Marketing
Mistakes to Avoid - From IBM's articles on WebDev

Information Architecture

Louis Rosenfeld - Information Architecture expert and author of the O'Reilly Book on the subject
Introduction to Information Architecture - from Subha Subramanian at Sitepoint

Duplicate Content Issues

Copyscape - Tool to search for copies of your pages on the web
Aaron Wall on Dup Content Penalties - Citing posts at WMW
Review of Dr. Garcia's Speach at SES San Jose on Dup Content - From SERoundtable
What is Duplicate Content - From Sitepoint Forums

Usability

Steve Krug - Usability consultant and author of Don't Make Me Think, my favorite book on usability
Kim Krause Berg's Usability Reports - A steal for a corporate review at $800
Usability Guidelines - From the National Cancer Institute; a great list
Website Usability Evaluation Form - From MIT

Web Design

A List Apart - Blog and Resources for Web Designers
Applying CSS to Web Design - from Intensivstation
Using Pattern Design to Lay Out Web Pages - from 37 Signals
Sample Web Color Schemes - from Return of Design
Biggest Design Mistakes of 2004 - from Web Pages That Suck

Content Writing for the Web

50 Writing Tools - from Poynter Online
Write Effectively for the Web - from the LifeHacker blog
Resurrect Your Writing - from Digital Web Magazine
Writing, Briefly - from Paul Graham
The Nitty-Gritty of Writing for Search Engines - from Jill Whalen (of HighRankings); it's $50 but worth every penny
Crappy Content - thread from HighRankings forum by Scottie Claiborne

Link Bait

The Art of Linkbaiting - by Nick Wilson of Performancing
Linkbaiting for Fun & Profit - by yours truly at Search Engine Journal
Examples of Link Bait - from SEOBook

Community Building

20 Tips for Community Building - from Threadwatch
Implementing a Forum - a HighRankings thread with lots of generalized tips on community, too
Building an Online Community - from Digital Web Magazine

Press Releases

Optimization of Press Releases - Paid services from SEO-PR
Writing for the Press - From Michael Iwalaski in the HighRankings Newsletter
Online PR and Press Release Optimization - by Lee Odden at ISEdb
Press Release Service - From PRWeb (free and paid options)
Press Release Service - From PRNewswire (also has free and paid options)

Public Relations

Public Relations as a Submarine - from Paul Graham
Trends to Watch in PR - by Erica Iacono at PR Week
List of Popular PR Weblogs - from PubSub
How to Get Blogged - from TechCrunch

Link Building

Advanced Link Building Tactics - from SEOmoz
131 Link Building Strategies - from Chris Sherman at SEW
Technique for Selecting Sites for a Link Request - by Eric Ward (see more articles from Eric, the godfather of linking, here)
Jump Start Link Building (while dodging the Sandbox) - by Andy Hagans

Search Spam

Google, Yahoo!,& MSN - Spam reporting links for each of the major search engines
Debate on White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO Techniques - from SEOmoz, a discussion on the pros and cons of spamming the search engines
Manipulating Search Rankings - An interview with Greg Boser of WebGuerilla in Wired News
SpamDexing - Another name for search engine spamming; definition from Wikipedia

Website Analytics and Visitor Tracking

Web Metrics - Book by Jim Sterne
Key Performance Indicators to Track - from the Web Analytics Association
Web Analytics for Retailers, Parts 1, 2, & 3 - by Brian Eisenberg at ClickZ
Top 10 Ways to Use Analytics to Improve your Site - from Conversion Rater
Web Analytics Blog - from Omniture

Selecting an SEO/M Firm

SEOmoz's List of Trusted SEO/M Firms - I've personally met or worked with all of the folks on this list and can vouch for their ability and integrity
Google's Recommendations for Choosing an SEO Firm - with advice on how to avoid companies that could hurt your site
Resources to Help Select a Firm - from Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing
Reputable SEO Companies - Thread from SEW Forums
Checklist of What to Look for in an SEO Company - from Stuntdubl

Implementing an SEO Strategy

2008-03-25T20:29:00.000-07:00

The process of SEO is not easy to tackle, largely because so many pieces of a site factor into the final results. Promoting a site that writers on the web are unlikely to link to is as deadly as creating a fantastic website no one will see. 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.

Patience is not the only virtue that should be used for successful SEO. The strategy itself must have a strong foundation in order to succeed. The best sites adhere strictly to these guidelines:

Unique Content - Something that has never before been offered on the web in terms of depth, quality, or presentation (i.e. a unique value proposition)
Access to an Adoptive Community - Connections or alliances with people/websites in an existing online community that is ready to accept, visit, and promote your offering
Link-Friendly Formatting - Even the best content may be unlikely to be linked to if it displays ads, particularly those that break up the page content or pop-up when a visitor comes to the site. Use discretion in presenting your material and remember that links are one of the most valuable commodities a site/page can get, and they'll last far longer than a pop-up ad's revenue.
Monetization Plan - Intelligent systems for monetizing powerful content must exist, or bandwidth, hosting, and development costs will eventually overrun your budget.
Market Awareness - If your site is targeting highly competitive terms, you should make available an online marketing budget, including funds for link buying, and hire or consult with someone experienced in bringing newer sites to the top of the SERPs.

If you take these steps and have a robust knowledge of the methods described in this guide, you are ready to begin an SEO campaign.

Quantity vs. Quality

In order to optimize a site to rank well in the search engines, pay diligent attention to the quality of your website and the effectiveness of your promotional tactics. While creating thousands of pages targeting every conceivable keyword may seem like a viable tactic, in fact, a single, phenomenal article or content source on a single term is far more likely to be profitable and less likely to be flagged for spam by the search engines.

This same rule applies to the sphere of promotion. While thousands of low quality, spammy pages or reciprocal free-for-all links pointing to you may provide some boost in the SERPs, a far greater effect can be achieved with just a few highly valuable, well-placed links from relevant sources that will drive both traffic and rankings. In the age of advanced link spam analysis, search engines will give greater credit to one link from CNN.com, Berkeley.edu, or Usability.gov than from 50,000 guestbooks, forum signatures, or reciprocal link directories.

Measuring Success: Website and Ranking Metrics to Watch

One of the most valuable sources for data, analysis, and refinement in an SEO campaign is in the statistics available via website tracking and measuring programs. A good analytics program can provide an incredible amount of data that can be used to track your visitors and make decisions about who to target in the future and how to do it.

Below is a short list of the most valuable elements in visitor tracking:

Campaign Tracking - The ability to put specific URLs or referrer strings onto ads, emails, or links and track their success.
Action Tracking - Adding the ability to track certain actions on a site like form submission, newsletter signups, add to cart buttons, and checkout or transaction completions and tying them together with campaigns and keyword tracking so you know what ads, links, terms, and campaigns are bringing you the best visitors.
Search Engine Referral Tracking - Seeing which search engines sent which visitors over time and tracking the terms and phrases they used to reach your site. Combined with action tracking, this can help you determine which terms are most valuable to target.
Referring URLs & Domain Tracking - This allows you to see what URLs and domains are responsible for sending you traffic. By tracking these individually, you can see where your most valuable links are coming from.
First-Time vs. Return Visitors - Find out what percentage of your visitors are coming back each day/week/month. This can help you to figure out how "sticky" and consistently interesting your site is.
Entry Pages - Which pages are attracting the most visitors and which are converting them. You can also see pages that have a very high rate of loss - those pages which don't do a good job pulling people into the site.
Visitor Demographics - Where are your visitors coming from, what browsers are they using, what time do they visit? All these questions and many more can be answered with demographics.
Click Path Analysis - What paths do your visitors follow when they get to your site? This data can help you make more logical streams of pages for visitors to use as they navigate your site, attempt to find information, or complete a task.
Popular Pages - Which pages get the most visitors and which are neglected? Use this data to help improve low popularity pages and emulate highly trafficked ones.
Page Views per Session - This data can tell you how many pages each visitor to your site is viewing - another metric used to measure "stickiness."

Applying the information you learn from your visitor tracking is a science unto its own. Experience and common sense should help to discover which terms, visitors, referrers, and demographics are most valuable to your site, enabling you to make the best possible decisions about how and where to target.

Working with a Pro vs. Do-It-Yourself SEO

As in many other areas of web development, a long-standing argument exists between those who feel that learning and practicing SEO should be done in-house, vs. those who feel it is best left to the professionals. There are advantages to either side, and it's best to weigh these against each other when making a final decision:

Advantages of Working with a Professional SEO

Diverse Experience - Professionals with several years of SEO experience under their belts can tell you what to expect from the search engines as you conduct the optimization process. They can also interpret and understand rankings data and "hiccups" in the results that may indicate certain trends or strategies that should be implemented or avoided.
Pre-Existing Relationships - Many SEOs have contacts inside the SEO industry to folks with experience in certain fields and expertise in unique areas (i.e. press releases, article distribution, directories, etc.) that can have a great impact on the success of your efforts. Several SEOs even have personal relationships with the folks at the search engines, although the use of these contacts is very rare and SE representatives pride themselves on not showing favoritism.
Link Building Knowledge - Professionals will have the ability to quickly identify topical communities and the most popular and relevant sites in them, thus saving time when link building. SEOs also have considerable experience with link acquisition and will recognize the requirements of certain sites for paid links, link requests, etc.
Identifying Linkable Content - SEOs are often masters of crafting and launching content. Not only can they identify the content most likely to get links from the specific web community, they're also experienced in how to package and promote it.
Fixing Possible Problems - Professionals are competent at identifying and managing issues that can cause a lack of indexing, low rankings, or penalties from the search engines. This is a skill that can be very hard to develop without years of practice and experience. If you have a ranking issue, an SEO can be of great value.
Time Savings - SEO can be an exceptionally time-consuming endeavor. An experienced SEO has the processes and systems of optimization down to a science, and can use that efficiency to provide better service in less time.

Advantages of Do-It-Yourself SEO

Complete Control - With personal responsibility comes complete control for each element of your site's progress. There can be no question as to who or what created a link or modified a document.
Learn from Your Actions - The ebb and flow of the SERPs will quickly teach an amateur SEO what works and what doesn't. Certain links, timing, and on-page changes will be fully visible and recordable, making it a learning process.
Personal Responsibility - Your success or failure will depend entirely on your own efforts, narrowing responsibility and preventing overlaps in work or issues of blame.
Cost Savings - Doing SEO yourself means you don't have to pay someone else. If you find that your time is less expensive than hiring an outsourced provider, do-it-yourself SEO can be a great way to save money.

With these pieces of information in mind, you're prepared to make an informed decision. Remember, too, that many SEOs offer consulting services, which provide you with a strategic plan that can be implemented and a helpful consultant to provide advice as needed on the project. This type of arrangement may offer a good balance if you're torn about which direction to choose. Look for costs between $100-$300 per hour, depending on the experience and notoriety of the consultant.

If you choose to outsource to an SEO firm, be well aware of the many pitfalls that await the uninformed. SEO has classically been an industry that has attracted many untrustworthy and dishonorable firms, resulting in an unfortunate perception from many. Pay particular attention to the following:

Manipulation & Search Spam - Overly aggressive tactics can get you banned from search engines.

Link Exchanges & Free-for-All Links – While the promise of easy link building through link exchanges or link farms is tempting, these tactics often achieve subpar results. Natural, organic inbound links from sites that your competitors can’t get links from are the best way to rank well in the long term.

Optimizing Pages for Search Engines vs. Visitors – Professional SEOs should have specialist copywriters who can craft well-written pages that attract both users and search engines. Repetitive keyword use (as noted above) is largely useless, but compelling, intelligent dialogue is a great way to get both searchers and engines interested in your content.

Guaranteed Rankings – Guaranteeing rankings is often one of the first indications that you’re dealing with a less-than-reputable firm. No SEO can guarantee rankings, because the search engines are responsible for the results and are constantly changing. Be wary, too, of promised success at “thousands of engines” (remember that the top 4 account for 95%+ of all search traffic), daily submission (completely unnecessary), and other “tricks” or “secrets”. Great rankings come from having great sites with quality links – no tricks or secrets required.

Investigate – The firm you work with should be able to provide references, preferably from both customers and industry folks that will let you know their skill and ability. Use your best judgment here – if a review or response seems canned or fishy, it probably is.

Finally, if you opt for do-it-yourself-SEO, be aware that are many, many parts of the SEO process not covered by this guide. SEO is a practice that has even the most respected professionals learning and researching every day to keep with trends on the web and algorithmic shifts in the search engines. A business or site owner will certainly want to join several SEO web communities (see the list in the links section) and keep up-to-date with information and best practices from the industry experts.

Where to Get Questions Answered

Whether you're considering running an SEO campaign yourself or hiring a professional, there are thousands of additional questions about the practice that I discover each day. Getting these questions answered quickly with the best possible information may require paying an SEO consultant, but the online SEO forums offer a second alternative.

Of particular value is the "Website Hospital" at Cre8asiteForums, where some of the world's best SEO professionals (including many of the folks who contributed to the creation of this guide) offer advice and input about posted websites. Other forums, like HighRankings & SearchEngineWatch, can provide good advice in both general and specific areas of SEO. A full list of forums can be found in this guide's list of resources.

Finally, if after reading this guide, you have questions that need a quick, direct response, you're always welcome to email Rand (the author).

Growing a Site's Popularity

2008-02-10T20:21:00.000-08:00

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 SEOs who want to promote sites to the fullest extent must use natural, organic link building processes in order to have success.

The techniques and approaches described below are all ultimately designed to improve search engine rankings by growing the number and quality of links that point to a website. However, each also offers natural growth of your user base and provides visitors that come through systems other than search engines. Strangely, although the goal of SEO is better search rankings, the best sites in each industry often receive 50% or fewer of their total visitors from search engines. Why? Because if thousands of visitors are anxiously visiting your site via bookmarks, links, and direct type-ins at the address bar, you've achieved the content and status necessary to not only be ranked exceptionally well, but have visitors that know your site and want to visit, no matter what the search engines say. This methodology is particularly valuable because a site that doesn't rely entirely on search engines for traffic, ironically, has a far better chance of getting visitors through them.

Community Building

Creating a user base that develops into a full-scale community is no easy task, but it's one of the holy grails of online marketing and promotion. The idea is to develop frequently updated content in the form of a blog, forum, wiki, or other muti-user input system that can become a central reference and gathering point for a significant number of individuals in an industry.

Once a community is established, the input of individual members and coverage of events in these systems are natural sources for incoming links from bloggers and writers in the field, be they members or simply browsers. In addition, many members who run sites of their own will point to the community as their gathering place, creating even greater link value. Community building requires finesse and good online relationship skills, but the rewards are tremendous.

Press Releases and Public Relations

Influencing mainstream or niche press outlets to cover your company or its actions can be a highly effective way to drive attention to your site, which, if link worthy, can earn a fantastic number of links in short order. Press release sites like PRNewsWire and PRWeb are good starting places for driving traffic and links, and as both feed the major online news search engines (Yahoo! & Google News), they can provide high visibility as well. Optimizing press releases is a unique practice in and of itself - placement of text in the title and in visible headlines, compelling story writing, and proper content structure are all important elements. One of the most touted experts in this field (Greg Jarboe) runs a site with specific advice (SEO-PR) on the subject of optimizing press releases in particular.

Beyond releases, however, is influencing journalists to write editorial news stories about your subject and including a link or mention of your site. Some of the most highly touted PR (public relations) firms in the world charge a fortune for this service, but on a small scale it can be performed in-house. The trick is to have content and information so compelling and interesting that journalists would love to cover it. If you have the makings of a great story with a near-perfect fit for your site, email a few journalists whose work you've found to be on similar topics. Don't start with the New York Times, though. Go local, independent, and friendly to increase your chances of success. For a great example of how standard PR techniques operate, read Paul Graham's article on the effectiveness of PR firms on the web.

Link Building Based on Competitive 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.

The best source of linkage data is Yahoo!. Google purposely does not report accurate link data with their link: command, and MSN's rankings of links can often show less valuable and effective links at the top. Yahoo!, however, currently shows the greatest accuracy in numbers of links, and also sorts well, typically placing more valuable links near the top of the results.

At Yahoo!, the following searches can be used to find pages that link to other sites/pages:

Linkdomain:url.com
This command will show you all the pages that link to any page hosted at the domain url.com.
Link:http://www.url.com/page.html
This command will show only those pages which link directly to the specified page.
Linkdomain:url.com word
This search will show all pages with the term "word" that link to pages hosted at the URL. You can use this to find topical linking pages that may be providing benefit for specific areas.
Linkdomain:url.com -term
Use the - sign to indicate that pages which include a particular term should be excluded from the search; for example, searching for all links that point to a site that don't contain your company name on the page (i.e. linkdomain:seobook.com -seomoz). Note that searches can contain multiple - signs and terms if you require very specific information (or wish to exclude lots of noisy data).
Linkdomain:url.com -site:url.com
In addition to the - sign as a term remover, you can remove sites from the results as well. This can be especially valuable if one large site links to the target site on every page, and you wish to see the links that don't include that site. It can also be valuable to remove the site itself, (i.e. linkdomain:seomoz.org -site:seomoz.org), so as not to see results from internal pages.

Competitive analysis also includes using the top search results themselves as sources for links. If a site or page ranks particularly well for many related searches, a link from that site can send a healthy number of interested surfers to you. Rankings in the SERPs is also an excellent way to determine the value of a link, so if a page ranks highly for the term or phrase you're targeting, a link from that page is sure to provide great assistance in your goal to achieve top placement.

Building Personality & Reputation

The cult of personality on the Internet provides excellent opportunities for charismatic, well-written individuals to make headlines, friends, and links through online networking. A variety of social interaction sites operate across industries on the web, delivering ready-made sources for building a reputation and earning links. The keys to this methodology are to provide honest, intelligent contributions to existing discussions while maintaining a connection between yourself and the communities.

Online forums are great places to start, and can frequently lead to additional venues for the engagement of your colleagues. In building a successful reputation in an online forum, honesty, integrity, and openness provide the best chances to be taken seriously and seen by others as an expert on your subject matter. Forums typically offer a built-in system for referring folks to your site - the signature link. Although debate exists on whether search engines count these links for ranking purposes, there can be little doubt about their effectiveness in driving forum visitors to your site. One last tip for forums is to use a single link to your site in your signature - ensuring that people identify you with one unique online property, rather than several. Combining these effective techniques of forum posting and signature links with blogging can also be very valuable.

In addition to forums, outlets like blog comments (which frequently use the "nofollow" attribute, and are thus valuable for live visitors but not search engines), ICQ Channels, chatrooms, Google groups, and privately hosted boards or chatrooms can all serve a similar purpose. Stay consistent in each format - using the same voice, avatar (the accompanying photo on many forums), and username in order to build reputation and recognition.

Highly Competitive Terms & Phrases

For some terms and phrases, even the best websites with the most diligent promotional efforts will have a very difficult time penetrating the top 10-20 results. In these instances, it can be tempting to rely on efforts outside of the search engines' guidelines. However strong this temptation may be, be advised that search engines do not tolerate spam or manipulation via automated links, nor do they allow such results to flourish for long. Although these methods, commonly referred to as "black hat SEO", may have some effectiveness in the short term, they have little chance of long-term success in the SERPs and may become permanently banned from search results.

For highly competitive results (from "mortgage" to "car insurance" to "university degree"), targeting the above described "long tail" (the more niche-related search terms for which a smaller degree of heavy competition exists) can be the best method. Search engines are also careful to consider the age of a site and its links and give heavy weight to those sites with long-held, highly trusted links. Thus, while rankings may be sparse at first, over time an enterprising site owner can achieve some measure of notice, even in the most competitive of searches.

Critical Components of Optimizing a Site

2008-02-09T20:04:00.000-08:00

Each of the following components are critical pieces to a site's ability to be crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engine spiders. When properly used in the construction of a website, these features give a site/page the best chance of ranking well for targeted keywords.

Accessibility

An accessible site is one that ensures delivery of its content successfully as often as possible. The functionality of pages, validity of HTML elements, uptime of the site's server, and working status of site coding and components all figure into site accessibility. If these features are ignored or faulty, both search engines and users will select other sites to visit.

The biggest problems in accessibility that most sites encounter fit into the following categories. Addressing these issues satisfactorily will avoid problems getting search engines and visitors to and through your site.

Broken Links - If an HTML link is broken, the contents of the linked-to page may never be found. In addition, some surmise that search engines negatively degrade rankings on sites & pages with many broken links.

Valid HTML & CSS - Although arguments exist about the necessity for full validation of HTML and CSS in accordance with W3C guidelines, it is generally agreed that code must meet minimum requirements of functionality and successful display in order to be spidered and cached properly by the search engines.

Functionality of Forms and Applications - If form submissions, select boxes, javascript, or other input-required elements block content from being reached via direct hyperlinks, search engines may never find them. Keep data that you want accessible to search engines on pages that can be directly accessed via a link. In a similar vein, the successful functionality and implementation of any of these pieces is critical to a site's accessibility for visitors. A non-functioning page, form, or code element is unlikely to receive much attention from visitors.

File Size - With the exception of a select few documents that search engines consider to be of exceptional importance, web pages greater than 150K in size are typically not fully cached. This is done to reduce index size, bandwidth, and load on the servers, and is important to anyone building pages with exceptionally large amounts of content. If it's important that every word and phrase be spidered and indexed, keeping file size under 150K is highly recommended. As with any online endeavor, smaller file size also means faster download speed for users - a worthy metric in its own right.

Downtime & Server Speed - The performance of your site's server may have an adverse impact on search rankings and visitors if downtime and slow transfer speeds are common. Invest in high quality hosting to prevent this issue.

URLs, Title Tags & Meta Data

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.

The URL of a document should ideally be as descriptive and brief as possible. If, for example, your site's structure has several levels of files and navigation, the URL should reflect this with folders and subfolders. Individual pages' URLs should also be descriptive without being overly lengthy, so that a visitor who sees only the URL could have a good idea of what to expect on the page. Several examples follow:

Comparison of URLs for a Canon Powershot SD400 Camera

Amazon.com - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007TJ5OG/102-8372974-
4064145?v=glance&n=502394&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&n=3031001&s=photo&v=glance

Canon.com - http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?
act=ModelDetailAct&fcategoryid=145&modelid=11158

DPReview.com - http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canonsd400/

With both Canon and Amazon, a user has virtually no idea what the URL might point to. With DPReview's logical URL, however, it is easy to surmise that a review of a Canon SD400 is the likely topic of the page.

In addition to the issues of brevity and clarity, it's also important to keep URLs limited to as few dynamic parameters as possible. A dynamic parameter is a part of the URL that provides data to a database so the proper records can be retrieved, i.e. n=3031001, v=glance, categoryid=145, etc.

Note that in both Amazon and Canon's URLs, the dynamic parameters number 3 or more. In an ideal site, there should never be more than two. Search engineer representatives have confirmed on numerous occasions that URLs with more than 2 dynamic parameters may not be spidered unless they are perceived as significantly important (i.e. have many, many links pointing to them).

Well written URLs have the additional benefit of serving as their own anchor text when copied and pasted as links in forums, blogs, or other online venues. In the DPReview example, a search engine might see the URL http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canonsd400/ and give ranking credit to the page for terms in the URL like dpreview, reviews, canon, sd, 400. The parsing and breaking of terms is subject to the search engine's analysis, but the chance of earning this additional credit makes writing friendly, usable URLs even more worthwhile.

Title tags, in addition to their invaluable use in targeting keyword terms for rankings, also help drive click-through-rates (CTRs) from the results pages. Most of the search engines will use a page's title tag as the blue link text and headline for a result (see image below), and thus it is important to make them informative and compelling without being overly "salesy". The best title tags will make the targeted keywords prominent, help brand the site, and be as clear and concise as possible.

Examples and Recommendations for Title Tags

Page on Red Pandas from the Wellington Zoo:
- Current Title: Red Panda
- Recommended: Red Panda - Habitat, Features, Behavior | Wellington Zoo

Page on Alexander Calder from the Calder Foundation:
- Current Title: Alexander Calder
- Recommended: Alexander Calder - Biography of the Artist from the Calder Foundation

Page on Plasma TVs from Tiger Direct:
- Current Title: Plasma Televisions, Plasma TV, Plasma Screen TVs, SONY Plasma TV, LCD TV at TigerDirect.com
- Recommended: Plasma Screen & LCD Televisions at TigerDirect.com

For each of these, the idea behind the recommendations is to distill the information into the clearest, most useful snippet while retaining the primary keyword phrase as the first words in the tag. The title tag provides the first impression of a web page and can either serve to draw the visitor in or compel him or her to choose another listing in the results.

Meta Tag Recommendations:

Meta tags once held the distinction of being the primary realm of SEO specialists. Today, the use of meta tags, particularly the meta keywords tag, has diminished to an extent that search engines no longer use them in their ranking of pages. However, the meta description tag can still be of some importance, as several search engines use this tag to display the snippet of text below the clickable title link in the results pages.

In the image to the left, an illustration of a Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) shows the use of the meta description and title tags. It is on this page that searchers generally make their decision as to which result to click, and thus, while the meta description tag may have little to no impact on where a page ranks, it can significantly impact the # of visitors the page receives from search engine traffic. Note that meta tags are NOT always used on the SERPs, but can be seen (at the discretion of the search engine) if the description is accurate, well-written, and relevant to the searcher's query.

Search-Friendly Text

Making the visible text on a page "search-friendly" isn't complicated, but it is an issue that many sites struggle with. Text styles that cannot be indexed by search engines include:

Text embedded in a Java Application or Macromedia Flash file
Text in an image file - jpg, gif, png, etc
Text accessible only via a form submit or other on-page action

If the search engines can't see your page's text, they cannot spider and index that content for visitors to find. Thus, making search-friendly text in HTML format is critical to ranking well and getting properly indexed. If you are forced to use a format that hides text from search engines, try to use the right keywords and phrases in headlines, title tags, URLs, and image/file names on the page. Don't go overboard with this tactic, and never try to hide text (by making it the same color as the background or using CSS tricks). Even if the search engines can't detect this automatically, a competitor can easily report your site for spamming and have you de-listed entirely.

Along with making text visible, it's important to remember that search engines measure the terms and phrases in a document to extract a great deal of information about the page. Writing well for search engines is both an art and a science (as SEOs are not privy to the exact, technical methodology of how search engines score text for rankings), and one that can be harnessed to achieve better rankings.

In general, the following are basic rules that apply to optimizing on-page text for search rankings:

Make the primary term/phrase prominent in the document - Measurements like keyword density are useless (see kw density myth thread), but general frequency can help rankings.

Make the text on-topic and high quality - Search engines use sophisticated lexical analysis to help find quality pages, as well as teams of researchers identifying common elements in high quality writing. Thus, great writing can provide benefits to rankings, as well as visitors.

Use an optimized document structure - The best practice is generally to follow a journalistic format wherein the document starts with a description of the content, then flows from broad discussion of the subject to narrow. The benefits of this are arguable, but in addition to SEO value, they provide the most readable and engaging informational document. Obviously, in situations where this would be inappropriate, it's not necessary.

Keep text together - Many folks in SEO recommend using CSS rather than table layouts in order to keep the text flow of the document together and prevent the breaking up of text via coding. This can also be achieved with tables - simply make sure that text sections (content, ads, navigation, etc.) flow together inside a single table or row and don't have too many "nested" tables that make for broken sentences and paragraphs.

Keep in mind that the text layout and keyword usage in a document no longer carries high importance in search engine rankings. While the right structure and usage can provide a slight boost, obsessing over keyword placement or layout will provide little overall benefit.

Information Architecture

The document and link structure of a website can provide benefits to search rankings when performed properly. The keys to effective architecture are to follow the rules that govern human usability of a site:

Make Use of a Sitemap - It's wise to have the sitemap page linked to from every other page in the site, or at the least from important high-level category pages and the home page. The sitemap should, ideally, offer links to all of the site's internal pages. However, if more than 100-150 pages exist on the site, a wiser system is to create a sitemap that will link to all of the category level pages, so that no page in a site is more than 2 clicks from the home page. For exceptionally large sites, this rule can be expanded to 3 clicks from the home page.

Use a Category Structure that Flows from Broad > Narrow - Start with the broadest topics as hierarchical category pages, then expand to deep pages with specific topics. Using the most on-topic structure tells search engines that your site is highly relevant and covers a topic in-depth.

For more information on segmenting document structure and link hierarchies, see Dr. Garcia's excellent guide to on-topic analysis.

Canonical Issues & Duplicate Content

One of the most common and problematic issues for website builders, particularly those with larger, dynamic sites powered by databases, is the issue of duplicate content. Search engines are primarily interested in unique documents and text, and when they find multiple instances of the same content, they are likely to select a single one as "canonical" and display that page in their results.

If your site has multiple pages with the same content, either through a content management system that creates duplicates through separate navigation, or because copies exist from multiple versions, you may be hurting those pages' chances of ranking in the SERPs. In addition, the value that comes from anchor text and link weight, through both internal and external links to the page, will be diluted by multiple versions.

The solution is to take any current duplicate pages and use a 301 re-direct (described in detail here) to point all versions to a single, "canonical" edition of the content.

One very common place to look for this error is on a site's homepage - oftentimes, a website will have the same content on http://www.url.com, http://url.com, and http://www.url.com/index.html. That separation alone can cause lost link value and severely damage rankings for the site's homepage. If you find many links outside the site pointing to both the non-www and the www version, it may be wise to use a 301 re-write rule to affect all pages at one so they point to the other.

Building a Traffic - Worthy Site

2008-02-02T20:16:00.000-08:00

One of the most important (and often overlooked) subjects in SEO is building a site deserving of top rankings at the search engines. A site that ranks #1 for a set of terms in a competitive industry or market segment must be able to justify its value or risk losing out to competitors who offer more. Search engines' goals are to rank the best, most usable, functional, and informative sites first. By intertwining your site's content and performance with these goals, you can help to ensure its long-term prospects in the search engine rankings.

Usability

Usability represents the ease-of-use inherent in your site's design, navigation, architecture, and functionality. The idea behind the practice is to make your site intuitive so that visitors will have the best possible experience on the site. A whole host of features figure into usability, including:

Design
The graphical elements and layout of website have a strong influence on how easily usable the site is. Standards like blue, underlined links, top and side menu bars, logos in the top, left-hand corner may seem like rules that can be bent, but adherence to these elements (with which web users are already familiar) will help to make a site usable. Design also encompasses important topics like visibility & contrast, affecting how easy it is for users to interest the text and image elements of the site. Separation of unique sections like navigation, advertising, content, search bars, etc. is also critical, as users follow design cues to help them understand a page's content. A final consideration would also take into account the importance of ensuring that critical elements in a site's design (like menus, logos, colors, and layout) were used consistently throughout the site.

Information Architecture
The organizational hierarchy of a site can also strongly affect usability. Topics and categorization impact the ease with which a user can find the information they need on your site. While an intuitive, intelligently designed structure will seamlessly guide the user to their goals, a complex, obfuscated hierarchy can make finding information on a site disturbingly frustrating.

Navigation
A navigation system that guides users easily through both top-level and deep pages and makes a high percentage of the site easily accessible is critical to good usability. Since navigation is one of a website's primary functions, provide users with obvious navigation systems: breadcrumbs, alt tags for image links, and well-written anchor text that clearly describes what the user will get if he or she clicks a link. Navigation standards like these can drastically improve usability performance.

Functionality
To create compelling usability, ensure that tools, scripts, images, links, etc. all function as they are intended and don't provide errors to non-standard browsers, alternative operating systems, or uninformed users (who often don't know what/where to click).

Accessibility
Accessibility refers primarily to the technical ability of users to access and move through your site, as well as the ability of the site to serve disabled or impaired users. For SEO purposes, the most important aspects are limiting code errors to a minimum and fixing broken links, making sure that content is accessible and visible in all browsers and without special actions.

Content
The usability of content itself is often overlooked, but its importance cannot be overstated. The descriptive nature of headlines, the accuracy of information and the quality of content all factor highly into a site's likelihood to retain visitors and gain links.

Overall, usability is about gearing a site towards the potential users. Success in this arena garners increased conversion rates, a higher chance that other sites will link to yours, and a better relationship with your users (fewer complaints, lower instance of problems, etc.). For improving your knowledge of usability and the best practices, I recommend Steve Krug's exceptionally impressive book, "Don't Make Me Think"; possibly the best $30 you can spend to improve your website.

Professional Design

Elegant, high quality, high impact design is critical to gaining the trust of your users. If your site appears "low budget" or only marginally professional, it can hurt the chances of gaining a link and, more importantly, the chances of engendering trust in your visitors. The first impression of a website by a user occurs in less than 7 seconds. That's all the time you have to convey the importance and authority of your company through the site's design. I've prepared two examples below:

Workplace Office UK's Website

Amateur Logo Styles
Discordant Colors
No Clear Navigation Element
Basic Stock Photography
Template-Like Layout

Haworth Furniture's Online Catalog

Well-Defined Navigation
Elegant Color Scheme
Attractive Lines & Shading
High-Quality Photography
Design Creates Intuitive Flow to Information

Although the above examples are not perfect (note that Haworth is missing a critical element - a search bar, while Workplace Office UK has one), it's easy to see why consumers visiting websites like these would be more inclined to trust and buy from Haworth rather than Workplace Office. The application of professional design to sites can induce greater numbers of links from visiting content creators, greater number of users who return to the site, higher conversion rates, and a better overall perception of your site by visitors.

Although high quality, professional design is not one of the factors directly ranked by search engines, it indirectly influences many factors that do affect the rankings (i.e. link-building, trust, usability, etc).

Authoring High Quality Content

Why Should a Search Engine Rank Your Site Above All the Others in its Field?

If you cannot answer this question clearly and precisely, the task of ranking higher will be exponentially more difficult. Search engines attempt to rank the very best sites with the most relevant content first in their results, and until your site's content is the best in its field, you will always struggle against the engines rather than bringing them to your doorstep.

It is in content quality that a site's true potential shows through, and although search engines cannot measure the likelihood that users will enjoy a site, the vote via links system operates as a proxy for identifying the best content in a market. With great content, therefore, come great links and, ultimately, high rankings. Deliver the content that users need, and the search engines will reward your site.

Content quality, however, like professional design, is not always dictated by strict rules and guidelines. What passes for "best of class" in one sector may be below average in another market. The competitiveness and interests of your peers and competitors in a space often determine what kind of content is necessary to rank. Despite these variances, however, several guidelines can be almost universally applied to produce content that is worthy of attention:

Research Your Field
Get out into the forums, blogs, and communities where folks in your industry spend their online discussion time. Note the most frequently asked questions, the most up-to-date topics, and the posts or headlines that generate the most interest. Apply this knowledge when you create high-quality content and directly address your market's needs. If 10,000 people in the botany field are seeking articles that contain more illustrated diagrams instead of just photos, delivering that piece can set your content (and your site) apart from the competition.

Consult and Publish in Partnership with Industry Experts
In any industry, there will be high-level, publically prominent experts as well as a second tier of "well-known in web circles" folks. Targeting either of these groups for collaborative efforts in publishing articles, reviewing your work or contributing (even via a few small quotes) can be immensely valuable. In this manner, you can be assured that your content is both link and visitor-worthy. In addition, when partnering with "experts", exposure methods are built-in, creating natural promotion angles.

Create Documents that Can Serve as One-Stop Resources
If you can provide a single article or resource that provides every aspect of what a potential visitor or searcher might be seeking, your chances for success in SEO go up. An "all-in-one" resource can provide more opportunities than a single subject resource in many cases. Don't be too broad as you attempt to execute this kind of content creation - it's still important to keep a narrow focus when you create your piece. The best balance can be found by putting yourself in the potential users' shoes - if your piece fits their needs and covers every side of their possible interests while remaining "on-message," you're ready to proceed.

Provide Unique Information
Make sure that when you design your content outline, you include data and information that can be found nowhere else. While collecting and amalgamating information across the web can create good content, it is the unique elements in your work that will be noticed and recommended.

Serve Important Content in a Non-Commercial Format
Creating a document format that is non-commercial is of exceptional importance for attracting links and attention. The communities of web and content builders are particularly attuned to the commercialization of the web and will consciously and sub-consciously link to and recommend resources that don't serve prominent or interfering advertising. If you must post ads, do so as subtlety and unobtrusively as possible.

One Great Page is Worth a Thousand Good Pages
While hundreds or dozens of on-topic pages that cover sections of an industry are valuable to a website's growth, it is actually far better to invest a significant amount of time and energy producing a few articles/resources of truly exceptional quality. To create documents that become "industry standard" on the web and are pointed to time after time as the "source" for further investigations, claims, documents, etc. is to truly succeed in the rankings battle. The value of "owning" this traffic and link source far outweighs a myriad of articles that are rarely read or linked to.

Link Bait

When attempting to create the most link-worthy content, thinking outside the box and creating a document, tool or service that's truly revolutionary can provide a necessary boost. Even on corporate image or branding sites for small companies, a single, exciting piece of content that gets picked up en masse by your web community is worth a small fortune in public relations and exposure. Better still, the links you earn with an exciting release stay with your site for a long time, providing search visibility long after the event itself has been forgotten.

With content that generates links becoming such a valuable commodity, creating solely for the purpose of gaining links has become a popular practice for talented SEOs. In order to capitalize on this phenomenon, it's necessary to brainstorm. Below are some initial ideas that can help you build the content you need to generate great links.

Free Tools
Automated tools that query data sources, combine information or conduct useful calculations are eminently link worthy. Think along the lines of mortgage calculators and site-checking tools, then expand into your particular area of business/operation.

Web 2.0 Applications
Although the term Web 2.0 is more of a buzzword than a technicality, applications that fit the feature set described by the O'Reilly document do get a fantastic number of links from the web community and followers of this trend. Think mashups, maps, communities, sharing, tagging, RSS, and blogs.

Collaborative Work Documents
Working in concert with others is a good way to produce content more quickly and with generally higher quality. If you can get high-profile insiders or several known persons in an industry to collaborate, your chances for developing "link-bait" substantially increase.

Exposes of Nefarious Deeds
Writing a journalistic-style exposé detailing the misdeeds of others (be they organizations, websites, individuals or companies) can generate a lot of links and traffic if done in a professional manner (and before anyone else). Make sure you're very careful with these types of actions, however, as the backlash can be worse than the benefit if your actions provoke the wrong type of response.

Top 10 Lists
Numbered lists (of tips, links, resources, etc.), particularly those that rank items, can be a great way to generate buzz. These lists often promote discussion and thus, referencing.

Industry-Related Humor
Even the most serious of industries can use a bit of humor now and again. As with exposés, be cautious not to offend (although that too can merit mentions) - use your knowledge of stereotypes and history inside your market to get topical laughs and the links will be yours.

Reviews of Events
Industry gatherings, from pubcrawls to conferences to speeches and seminars, can all garner great links with a well-done review. Write professionally, as a journalist, and attempt to use as many full names as possible. It's also wise to link out to all the folks you mention, as they will see the links in their referral logs and come check you out.

Interviews with Well-Known Insiders
Anyone inside an industry whose name frequently appears in that industry's internal press is a great candidate for an interview. Even if it's a few short questions over email, a revealing interview can be a great source of links, and esteemed professionals are likely to answer requests even from smaller sources, as they can benefit from the attention, too.

Surveys or Collections of Data
Offering large collections of industry data culled from polling individuals, an online survey, or simply researching and aggregating data can provide a very link-worthy resource.

Film or Animation
Particularly in industries where video clips or animations are rare (i.e. Geology, not Movie Reviews), a high quality, entertaining, or informative video or animation can get more than a few folks interested.

Charts, Graphs, or Spreadsheets
These standard business graphics should certainly include analysis and dissection, but can provide a good source of links if promoted and built properly.

High Profile Criticism
Similar to the exposé system, well-written critiques of popular products, companies, sites, or individuals in a sector have the ability to pull in quite a few links from folks who agree and disagree.

Contests, Giveaways, and Competitions
Giving away prizes or public awards (even if they're just website graphics) can get a lot of online folks interested and linking.

Trend-Spotting
Identifying a story ahead of the crowd is commonly called "scooping" in journalism. Do this online, and all (or many) blog posts on the subject will reference your site as the first to "call it."

Advice from Multiple Experts
If you're creating an article that offers advice, pulling opinions from the well-known experts in the industry is a great way to make sure links flow your way. The experts themselves will often be inclined to link.

There are dozens of other great ways to get bloggers, writers, and website editors in your field to add links to your site. Imagine yourself as an industry blogger, seeking to cover the most exciting, unique trends and pages in the sector. If this individual stumbled across your content, would they be likely to write about it? If the answer is yes, it qualifies as link-bait.

How to Conduct Keyword Research

2008-01-29T20:02:00.000-08:00

Search engines have a short list of critical operations that allows them to provide relevant web results when searchers use their system to find information.

Crawling the Web
Search engines run automated programs, called "bots" or "spiders", that use the hyperlink structure of the web to "crawl" the pages and documents that make up the World Wide Web. Estimates are that of the approximately 20 billion existing pages, search engines have crawled between 8 and 10 billion.
Indexing Documents
Once a page has been crawled, its contents can be "indexed" - stored in a giant database of documents that makes up a search engine's "index". This index needs to be tightly managed so that requests which must search and sort billions of documents can be completed in fractions of a second.
Processing Queries
When a request for information comes into the search engine (hundreds of millions do each day), the engine retrieves from its index all the document that match the query. A match is determined if the terms or phrase is found on the page in the manner specified by the user. For example, a search for car and driver magazine at Google returns 8.25 million results, but a search for the same phrase in quotes ("car and driver magazine") returns only 166 thousand results. In the first system, commonly called "Findall" mode, Google returned all documents which had the terms "car", "driver", and "magazine" (they ignore the term "and" because it's not useful to narrowing the results), while in the second search, only those pages with the exact phrase "car and driver magazine" were returned. Other advanced operators (Google has a list of 11) can change which results a search engine will consider a match for a given query.
Ranking Results
Once the search engine has determined which results are a match for the query, the engine's algorithm (a mathematical equation commonly used for sorting) runs calculations on each of the results to determine which is most relevant to the given query. They sort these on the results pages in order from most relevant to least so that users can make a choice about which to select.

Although a search engine's operations are not particularly lengthy, systems like Google, Yahoo!, AskJeeves, and MSN are among the most complex, processing-intensive computers in the world, managing millions of calculations each second and funneling demands for information to an enormous group of users.

Speed Bumps & Walls

Certain types of navigation may hinder or entirely prevent search engines from reaching your website's content. As search engine spiders crawl the web, they rely on the architecture of hyperlinks to find new documents and revisit those that may have changed. In the analogy of speed bumps and walls, complex links and deep site structures with little unique content may serve as "bumps." Data that cannot be accessed by spiderable links qualify as "walls."

Possible "Speed Bumps" for SE Spiders:

URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters; i.e. http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom% (spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors)
Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each one)
Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages)
Pages requiring a "Session ID" or Cookie to enable navigation (spiders may not be able to retain these elements as a browser user can)
Pages that are split into "frames" can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.

Possible "Walls" for SE Spiders:

Pages accessible only via a select form and submit button
Pages requiring a drop down menu (HTML attribute) to access them
Documents accessible only via a search box
Documents blocked purposefully (via a robots meta tag or robots.txt file - see more on these here)
Pages requiring a login
Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic)

The key to ensuring that a site's contents are fully crawlable is to provide direct, HTML links to each page you want the search engine spiders to index. Remember that if a page cannot be accessed from the home page (where most spiders are likely to start their crawl), it is likely that it will not be indexed by the search engines. A sitemap (which is discussed later in this guide) can be of tremendous help for this purpose.

Measuring Relevance and Popularity

Modern commercial search engines rely on the science of information retrieval (IR). That science has existed since the middle of the 20th century, when retrieval systems powered computers in libraries, research facilities, and government labs. Early in the development of search systems, IR scientists realized that two critical components made up the majority of search functionality:

Relevance - the degree to which the content of the documents returned in a search matched the user's query intention and terms. The relevance of a document increases if the terms or phrase queried by the user occurs multiple times and shows up in the title of the work or in important headlines or subheaders.

Popularity - the relative importance, measured via citation (the act of one work referencing another, as often occurs in academic and business documents) of a given document that matches the user's query. The popularity of a given document increases with every other document that references it.

These two items were translated to web search 40 years later and manifest themselves in the form of document analysis and link analysis.

In document analysis, search engines look at whether the search terms are found in important areas of the document - the title, the meta data, the heading tags, and the body of text content. They also attempt to automatically measure the quality of the document (through complex systems beyond the scope of this guide).

In link analysis, search engines measure not only who is linking to a site or page, but what they are saying about that page/site. They also have a good grasp on who is affiliated with whom (through historical link data, the site's registration records, and other sources), who is worthy of being trusted (links from .edu and .gov pages are generally more valuable for this reason), and contextual data about the site the page is hosted on (who links to that site, what they say about the site, etc.).

Link and document analysis combine and overlap hundreds of factors that can be individually measured and filtered through the search engine algorithms (the set of instructions that tells the engines what importance to assign to each factor). The algorithm then determines scoring for the documents and (ideally) lists results in decreasing order of importance (rankings).

Information Search Engines Can Trust

As search engines index the web's link structure and page contents, they find two distinct kinds of information about a given site or page - attributes of the page/site itself and descriptives about that site/page from other pages. Since the web is such a commercial place, with so many parties interested in ranking well for particular searches, the engines have learned that they cannot always rely on websites to be honest about their importance. Thus, the days when artificially stuffed meta tags and keyword-rich pages dominated search results (pre-1998) have vanished and given way to search engines that measure trust via links and content.

The theory goes that if hundreds or thousands of other websites link to you, your site must be popular, and thus, have value. If those links come from very popular and important (and thus, trustworthy) websites, their power is multiplied to even greater degrees. Links from sites like NYTimes.com, Yale.edu, Whitehouse.gov, and others carry with them inherent trust that search engines then use to boost your ranking position. If, on the other hand, the links that point to you are from low-quality, interlinked sites or automated garbage domains (aka link farms), search engines have systems in place to discount the value of those links.

The most well-known system for ranking sites based on link data is the simplistic formula developed by Google's founders - PageRank. PageRank, which relies on a mathematical formula (based around finding a given document in a random pattern of clicking on links), is described by Google in their technology section:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Google uses a PageRank “proxy” value, which logarithmically translates the actual PageRank of a document to a value between 1 and 10, to rank Web sites listed in its directory (which offers a PageRank order or an Alphabetical order for listings) and in its toolbar (below).

Google's toolbar (available here) includes an icon that shows a PageRank value from 0-10

PageRank is, in essence, a rough system for estimating the value of a given link based on the links that point to the host page. Since PageRank's inception in the late '90s, more subtle and sophisticated link analysis systems have taken the place of PageRank. Thus, in the modern era of SEO, the PageRank measurement in Google's toolbar, directory, or through sites that query the service is of limited value. Pages with PR8 can be found ranked 20-30 positions below pages with a PR3 or PR4. In addition, the toolbar numbers are updated only every 3-6 months by Google, making the values even less useful. Rather than focusing on PageRank, it's important to think holistically about a link's worth.

Here's a small list of the most important factors search engines look at when attempting to value a link:

The Anchor Text of Link - Anchor text describes the visible characters and words that hyperlink to another document or location on the web. For example, in the phrase "CNN is a good source of news, but I actually prefer the BBC's take on events," two unique pieces of anchor text exist - "CNN" is the anchor text pointing to http://www.cnn.com, while "the BBC's take on events" points to http://news.bbc.co.uk. Search engines use this text to help them determine the subject matter of the linked-to document. In the example above, the links would tell the search engine that when users search for "CNN", SEOmoz.org thinks that http://www.cnn.com is a relevant site for the term "CNN" and that http://news.bbc.co.uk is relevant to "the BBC's take on events". If hundreds or thousands of sites think that a particular page is relevant for a given set of terms, that page can manage to rank well even if the terms NEVER appear in the text itself (for example, see the BBC's explanation of why Google ranks certain pages for the term "Miserable Failure").

Global Popularity of the Site - More popular sites, as denoted by the number and power of the links pointing to them, provide more powerful links. Thus, while a link from SEOmoz may be a valuable vote for a site, a link from bbc.co.uk or cnn.com carries far more weight. This is one area where PageRank (assuming it was accurate) could be a good measure, as it's designed to calculate global popularity.

Popularity of Site in Relevant Communities - In the example above, the weight or power of a site's vote is based on its raw popularity across the web. As search engines became more sophisticated and granular in their approach to link data, they acknowledged the existence of "topical communities"; sites on the same subject that often interlink with one another, referencing documents and providing unique data on a particular topic. Sites in these communities provide more value when they link to a site/page on a relevant subject rather than a site that is largely irrelevant to their topic.

Text Directly Surrounding the Link - Search engines have been noted to weight the text directly surrounding a link with greater important and relevant than the other text on the page. Thus, a link from inside an on-topic paragraph may carry greater weight than a link in the sidebar or footer.

Subject Matter of the Linking Page - The topical relationship between the subject of a given page and the sites/pages linked to on it may also factor into the value a search engine assigns to that link. Thus, it will be more valuable to have links from pages that are related to the site/page's subject matter than those that have little to do with the topic.

These are only a few of the many factors search engines measure and weigh when evaluating links. For a more complete list, see SEOmoz's search engine ranking factors article.

Link metrics are in place so that search engines can find information to trust. In the academic world, greater citation meant greater importance, but in a commercial environment, manipulation and conflicting interests interfere with the purity of citation-based measurements. Thus, on the modern WWW, the source, style, and context of those citations is vital to ensuring high quality results.

The Anatomy of a HyperLink

A standard hyperlink in HTML code looks like this:

SEOmoz
SEOmoz

In this example, the code simply indicates that the text "SEOmoz" (called the "anchor text" of the link) should be hyperlinked to the page http://www.seomoz.org. A search engine would interpret this code as a message that the page carrying this code believed the page http://www.seomoz.org to be relevant to the text on the page and particularly relevant to the term "SEOmoz".

A more complex piece of HTML code for a link may include additional attributes such as:

SEOmoz
SEOmoz

In this example, new elements such as the link title and rel attribute may influence how a search engine views the link, despite its appearance on the page remaining unchanged. The title attribute may serve as an additional piece of information, telling the search engine that http://www.seomoz.org, in addition to being related to the term "SEOmoz", is also relevant to the phrase "Rand's Site". The rel attribute, originally designed to describe the relationship between the linked-to page and the linking page, has, with the recent emergence of the "nofollow" descriptive, become more complex.

"Nofollow" is a tag designed specifically for search engines. When ascribed to a link in the rel attribute, it tells the engine's ranking system that the link should not be considered an editorially approved "vote" for the linked-to page. Currently, 3 major search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, & Google) all support "nofollow". AskJeeves, due to its unique ranking system, does not support nofollow, and ignores its presence in link code. For more information about how this works, visit Danny Sullivan's description of nofollow's inception on the SEW blog.

Some links may be assigned to images, rather than text:

This example shows an image named "rand.jpg" linking to the page - http://www.seomoz.org/randfish.php. The alt attribute, designed originally to display in place of images that were slow to load or on voice-based browsers for the blind, reads "Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz" (in many browsers, you can see the alt text by hovering the mouse over the images). Search engines can use the information in an image-based link, including the name of the image and the alt attribute to interpret what the linked-to page is about.

Other types of links may also be used on the web, many of which pass no ranking or spidering value due to their use of re-direct, Javascript, or other technologies. A link that does not have the classic text format, be it image or text, should be generally considered not to pass link value via the search engines (although in rare instances, engines may attempt to follow these more complex style links).

SEOmoz

In this example, the redirect used scrambles the URL by writing it backwards, but unscrambles it later with a script and sends the visitor to the site. It can be assumed that this passes no search engine link value.

SEOmoz

This sample shows the very simple piece of Javascript code that calls a function referenced in the document to pull up a specified page. Creative uses of Javascript like this can also be assumed to pass no link value to a search engine.

It's important to understand that, based on a link's anatomy, search engines can (or cannot) interpret and use the data therein. Whereas the right sort of links can provide great value, the wrong sort will be virtually useless (for search ranking purposes). More detailed information on links is available at this resource - anatomy and deployment of links.

Keywords and Queries

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 of semantics (the science of language) to construct intelligent matching for queries. An example might be a search for loan providers that also returned results that did not contain that specific phrase, but instead had the term lenders.

The engines collect data based on the frequency of use of terms and the co-occurrence of words and phrases throughout the web. If certain terms or phrases are often found together on pages or sites, search engines can construct intelligent theories about their relationships. Mining semantic data through the incredible corpus that is the Internet has given search engines some of the most accurate data about word ontologies and the connections between words ever assembled artificially. This immense knowledge of language and its usage gives them the ability to determine which pages in a site are topically related, what the topic of a page or site is, how the link structure of the web divides into topical communties, and much, much more.

Search engines' growing artificial intelligence on the subject of language means that queries will increasingly return more intelligent, evolved results. This heavy investment in the field of natural language processing (NLP) will help to achieve greater understanding of the meaning and intent behind their users' queries. Over the long term, users can expect the results of this work to produce increased relevancy in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and more accurate guesses from the engines as to the intent of a user's queries.

Sorting the Wheat from the Chaff

In the classic world of Information Retrieval, when no commercial interests existed in the databases, very simplistic algorithms could be used to return high quality results. On the world wide web, however, the opposite is true. Commercial interests in the SERPs are a constant issue for modern search engines. With every new focus on quality control and growth in relevance metrics, there are thousands of individuals (many in the field of SEO) dedicated to manipulating these metrics in order to control the SERPs, typically by aiming to list their sites/pages first.

The worst kind of results are what the industry refers to as "search spam" - pages and sites with little real value that contain primarily re-directs to other pages, lists of links, scraped (copied) content, etc. These pages are so irrelevant and useless that search engines are highly focused on removing them from the index. Naturally, the monetary incentives are similar to email spam - although few visit and fewer click on the links (which are what provide the spam publisher with revenue), the sheer quantity is the decisive factor in producing income.

Other "spam" results range from sites that are of low quality or affiliate status that search engines would prefer not to list, to high quality sites and businesses that are using the link structure of the web to manipulate the results in their favor. Search engines are focused on clearing out all types of manipulation and hope to eventually achieve fully relevant and organic algorithms to determine ranking order. So-called "search engine spammers" engage in a constant battle against these tactics, seeking new loopholes and methods for manipulation, resulting in a never-ending struggle.

This guide is NOT about how to manipulate the search engines to achieve rankings, but rather how to create a website that search engines and users will be happy to have ranking permanently in the top positions, thanks to its relevance, quality, and user friendliness.

Paid Placement and Secondary Sources in the Results

The search engine results pages contain not only listings of documents found to be relevant to the user's query, but other content, including paid advertisements and secondary source results. Google, for example, serves up ads from its well-known AdWords program (which currently fuels more than 99% of Google's revenues), as well as secondary content from its local search, product search (called Froogle), and image search results.

Below is a screenshot of Google's search engine results page. Hover on any of the areas of the image to reveal the source of the content:

The sites/pages ranking in the "organic" search results receive the lion's share of searcher eyeballs and clicks - between 60-70%, depending on factors such as the prominence of ads, relevance of secondary content, etc. The practice of optimization for the paid search results is called SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, while optimizing to rank in the secondary results requires unique, advanced methods of targeting specific searches in arenas such as local search, product search, image search, and others. While all of these practices are a valuable part of any online marketing campaign, they are beyond the scope of this guide. Our sole focus remains on the "organic" results, although links at the bottom of this paper can help direct you to resources on other subjects.

What is SEO?

2007-12-29T19:59:00.000-08:00

SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines. Firms that practice SEO can vary; some have a highly specialized focus, while others take a more broad and general approach. Optimizing a web site for search engines can require looking at so many unique elements that many practitioners of SEO (SEOs) consider themselves to be in the broad field of website optimization (since so many of those elements intertwine).

This guide is designed to describe all areas of SEO - from discovery of the terms and phrases that will generate traffic, to making a site search engine friendly, to building the links and marketing the unique value of the site/organization's offerings.

Why does my company/organization/website need SEO?

The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines - Yahoo!, MSN, Google & AskJeeves (although AOL gets nearly 10% of searches, their engine is powered by Google's results). If your site cannot be found by search engines or your content cannot be put into their databases, you miss out on the incredible opportunities available to websites provided via search - people who want what you have visiting your site. Whether your site provides content, services, products, or information, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all Internet users.

Search queries, the words that users type into the search box which contain terms and phrases best suited to your site, carry extraordinary value. Experience has shown that search engine traffic can make (or break) an organization's success. Targeted visitors to a website can provide publicity, revenue, and exposure like no other. Investing in SEO, whether through time or finances, can have an exceptional rate of return.

Why can't the search engines figure out my site without SEO help?

Search engines are always working towards improving their technology to crawl the web more deeply and return increasingly relevant results to users. However, there is and will always be a limit to how search engines can operate. Whereas the right moves can net you thousands of visitors and attention, the wrong moves can hide or bury your site deep in the search results where visibility is minimal. In addition to making content available to search engines, SEO can also help boost rankings so that content that has been found will be placed where searchers will more readily see it. The online environment is becoming increasingly competitive, and those companies who perform SEO will have a decided advantage in visitors and customers.

How much of this article do I need to read?

If you are serious about improving search traffic and are unfamiliar with SEO, I recommend reading this guide front-to-back. There's a printable MS Word version for those who'd prefer, and dozens of linked-to resources on other sites and pages that are worthy of your attention. Although this guide is long, I've attempted to remain faithful to Mr. Strunk's famous quote:

"A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts."

Every section and topic in this report is critical to understanding the best known and most effective practices of search engine optimization.

Using Content That Works (CTW) to create traffic.

2007-11-16T17:57:00.000-08:00

Content, content, content. That's all I hear...probably because that's what I am always saying. Content! I think people don't fully understand me when I tell them let their content do the work work for them. Usually, it's the other way around. People write content to post on their blog, for
creating a page to put adsense on and to write articles. These are all very good ways for you to use your content. What you need to do is create not just content but Content That Works (CTW). This is something I created to help me keep my writing goals in mind.

CTW is content that either creates a buzz or is used to start a conversation, so to speak. It's content that gets people involved in what you are writing It could be positive, negative or neutral. It's a way of thinking. How many times have you written an article just so you can submit it for backlinks? I think just about everyone involved with SEO has at one time or another. But how many of those articles gave people something to really talk about? Not too many, I would assume. The same goes for messageboards, blog posts and other places where you can use CTW.

We all know content spam is bad. But that doesn't mean you can't give people on a blog a reason to see your site. Who is the most popular person blogging in your field? I bet he receives a lot of hits. You can steal some of those hits and gain more readers for yourself. The key is to have knowledge of the topic and give people a reason to leave and see your site. It could be an article you wrote or a podcast you made related to the topic. If your opinion differs from other bloggers and you can back it up, people will flock to your blog or site out of pure curiousity.

Articles are the best way to use CTW. I know we all have written some not so terrific articles. Why was that? Were you pressed for time, short on ideas or perhaps you just didn't care? The more you care about what you are writing about, the better your article will be. What was the message? Their was a message, right? How attuned are you to what people in the industry you are writing for want to read? I wrote an article about how to spam Google and get away with it. It really had nothing to do with spam. The title alone, however, generated a lot of buzz. That article is one of the the most posted articles I have written to date. It not only created a buzz, but it created traffic. People on message boards discussed it. Some agreed with it, others hated it. The bottom line is, it served its purpose by creating buzz.

Do you frequent messageboard? Are your posts with CTW in mind? Anywhere you can write something that other's see is a place where you can potentially gain a new visitor, sale, listener or notoriety for yourself. All if these things are important. I know, we all want backlinks. We want high rankings and we want to brag that we are on the top of Google for our keyphrase. That's fine. But, with every algorhythm change their is a risk of your methods not working quite as well as they use to. Or, maybe you get banned, or overrun by your competition. Whatever the case may be, as long as you use CTW with everything you write, Google and all those other search engines can never take that away.

Biggest mistakes with do it yourself SEO

2007-11-16T17:54:00.000-08:00

I read and evaluate hundreds of websites a month. Some sites I read for information, some are my own, some are blogs, messageboards and so on. The rest are from people who request a free SEO site evaluation from my company. Some are from large corporations and others are from mid-sized companies, but almost 50% of the evaluations requested are from do-it-yourselfer's.

There is so much information available on SEO and SEM. Everywhere you turn there is another article on SEO. One thing I often notice is many people suffer from information overload. They try to read everything they can find and in many situations, they try everything they read. Some of that information is either outdated or ineffective. Some of these self SEO'ers simply don't use what they read effectively. I have taken some of the most common mistakes and listed will explain them for you here. Hopefully, this will help you correct any problems on your site.

Keyword research: Many people have no idea that it's even necessary. I have seen website owners attempt to optimize for key terms that do not even exist. One gentleman created a new product that no one has even heard of. The only marketing he was doing was SEO and some PPC. You can't optimize for the product name only when no one has ever heard of your product. If no one has heard of it, how will they search for it? They won't. The research needs to be done to determine what keyphrases people would type to find what your product is offering or related to.

Bad web design: This one really gets to me. This is one I see more than any other. People hiring a web design firm or DIYing it before fully understanding what SEO is. The way most strictly online businesses begin is by someone deciding that they want to create a website online. Then they have one built. Then they learn about how to promote it and how search engines are used. The problem there is, if their site is not SEO friendly (meaning clean urls, not in frames, not 100% Flash and other search engine indexing problems), it will hurt their ability to rank well. Many people don't find this out until after they have their site built. This can cost a new website owner a lot of money. Educated yourself. Do not rely on the web designer to tell you about SEO and what you need to know to have a SEO friendly site. Many web designers are just designers. They have no interest in what is SEO friendly or not. Do all your research before you have a site built and find a web design that can provide what you need for your site and the search engines.

Hidden text: This one still amazes me. That method hasn't worked since Ebert sat next to Siskel. Why do people still try these old methods? They read old articles, blog entrys or messageboards. They think doing things unnaturally will help them in the natural listings. If you don' know this yet, you do now. It doesn't work.

Repeating words too often: This one gets overlooked a lot. Let's say for example you sold tickets. Now let's say your menu is all HTML (links). Your menu may read something like this; Hockey tickets, Boxing tickets, Wrestling tickets and so on. Now if you have fifty events and you have tickets after every one, you could run into a lot of problems. Especially if you wanted to come up on the search engines on any phrase with the words tickets in it. There are a lot of other factors that would need to be considered as well, such as the length of content on the page, off site SEO, etc. If this was a typical site, it would hurt your rankings in the SERP's.

This is just a small portion of problems I see. Hopefully, you can learn to avoid common SEO mistakes. Unless you are SEO savvy, it's almost always better to hire a professional if you can afford to. I know that isn't always possible. Also, try to get your information and tips from reliable sources. It will save you a lot of back tracking.

Using your blog to get one way links

2007-11-16T17:50:00.000-08:00

Blogs are a great tool. They allow you to add new, fresh content to your site. They are also a great way to build readership. Think about all the blogs you read. I'm sure that if you're reading this, you're also likely subscribed to a few or at least check them on a daily to weekly basis. Why? Is it because it is entertaining, informative or both? Blogs have been given a bad name because of splogs. Darren Rowse has a terrffic blog (http://www.problogger.net.) where he posts daily with tips for bloggers. Darren has discussed the "Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers", which consist of tips from highly successful bloggers who tell you what they do and make suggesstions as to what you should do.

So, how does all this help you get one way backlinks. Preferrably, you want people to link to you naturally. The best way to do that is to give them something worth linking to. Let's say I was an MS Office guru. My blog might be about relatively unknown tips and tricks on how to use MS office or for creating calenders and spreadsheets. Many people who work with MS office would be interested in that. They may like the tips so much that they list it on their blog or site.
What makes a good blog? Information? Yes! Consistency? Absolutely! However a great blog has to have its own style and flare. A blog that invites its readers to participate in the post is a golden rule. That's almost a guaranteed way to ensure that people will be coming back for more.

If you want to get traffic to your blog, one of the best ways is to leave comments on other blogs. Keep in mind, however, that it has to be done in a smart way. People can always tell when something is spam, so avoid being so obvious. Limit your posts to those blogs that are at least somewhat related to your blog. If a blog is about automobiles and you try to plug your aquarium business, you'll do more harm than good. Go to blogs that are related and take part in the discussion. The more informative and intellectual your comments are, the better chance your post will stay around long enough to be read. That is how you can start to build your readership. If you can convince people what you have to say is worth reading, they will come and read it.

Regardless of what you do to get people to your blog, the proof is always in the pudding. If you can't keep them coming back, all the advertising and work you put into creating traffic will mean nothing.

Getting backlinks the shady way

2007-11-16T17:48:00.000-08:00

Some people would do anything to get high ranking at Google. Including filing a lawsuit against Google itself.

Moral questions aside, I think it's a good pragmatic strategy to sue a search engine like Google, Yahoo! or MSN, provided you:

1) Can afford it
2) Have at least half a chance of taking seriously by the courts
3) Are thick-skinned enough to tolerate the resulting moral outrage
4) Have the nerve to face the possibility that a giant company might slash back at you and slash back at hard

How to Achieve Top Search Engine Rankings

2007-08-01T20:55:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Rankings. Everyone wants to be number one, and there are

millions of web sites out there. So how do you become number one and
stay there consistently?

Consistently is the key word here. Sure, you may apply the newest, best
trick in the book today, but when someone else comes out with a better
one tomorrow, you will be scrambling to get to the top again. One of the
keys is to be well-rounded. There are many books and philosophies about
web rankings that are floating around. Some people say article marketing
is the way to go, others link building, others say you have to maximize
your web pages for the search engines.

You have to get all your keywords right and your titles and description.
But what happens when another web site does you one better in that area?
Now you drop in rank. Therefore, it is more important that you do a good
job in all the areas than to be the very best in one area. And it is OK
to be number 8 or number 3 in rank, also. If you are in the very top
spot and you are clicked simply because the top spot gets more clicks,
are you really going to get more sales just because you are number one?

Your product and site have to be relevant to the consumer, not just the
search engine. Another key is to focus on very specific keywords. You
can do an awesome job in every area of search engine optimization, but
if you go too thin here, you will not make it to number one in any of
your keywords. Focus on one, or at the most, two keywords. Build your
site around those keywords. Be everything you can be to someone who keys
in those keywords. Or better yet, one keyword. Would you rather have one
keyword that has a number one placement, or 8 keywords with a number 40
placement each?. It would be better to have one keyword for which your
site is on the first page of results than twenty that are all over the
place. Build yourself a web site that has a strong keyword density-for
one or two keywords. Put those keywords in your title and description
and keyword lists.

You must have incoming links. You must have quality incoming links. You
must build incoming links one link at a time. Links are very important,
but you cannot cheat in this area. You must build them one by one. Some
of the favorite methods of link building is to write articles, like this
one, and submit them to article directories, and to be included in link
directories. Stay away from link farms, large link exchanges, or
anything of the sort. The major search engines want to see you build a
steady supply of links over time. What do you think a search engine will
do for you when you go from 0 links to 3000 in one day? That won't get
you to number one, and certainly won't keep you there, when you are put
in the sandbox for six months. These keys to search engine optimization
are just a beginning. You need traffic, you need click-thrus in the
search engine results. You need visitors to stay at your site for more
than a few seconds when they click in. How do you get that? Build real
content. Build it for people, not machines--while following the first
three keys. Do that, and I believe that in three to six months you will
have each web site you set up with this strategy, in the top ten for
your keyword.

Now that you understand why search engine rankings are so important you
might wonder how to achieve these rankings. The algorithms used by
search engines can be rather complex and include a number of different
factors. Some of the common factors in the equation include keyword
density, META tags, titles, inbound links, website traffic and content.

Keyword density refers to the number of times a particular keyword is
used in the content of your website. The theory behind this concept is
that websites that use a particular keyword often are likely to be
relevant to that keyword; however, overuse of that keyword may result in
penalties if the search engine thinks the keywords are not being used
appropriately.

META tags are pieces of HTML code which some search engines use in
evaluating the content of a website. Placing keywords in these tags can
be beneficial in some search engines. However, care should be taken to
avoid placing irrelevant keywords in these tags as this may result in
your website being penalized.

Some search engines to rank websites also use inbound links. Inbound
links refers to links on other websites which point to your website. In
evaluating the worth of these inbound links, some search engines
consider the rank of the website providing the link to your website.
This means you should try to gain links from websites with higher
rankings than your own to ensure that you receive the most benefit from
these links.

Finally, the content on your website is extremely important and will
do a great deal to improve your search engine rankings. Try to provide
quality useful information on your site. Try to avoid filling your pages
with flashy graphics; search engines are far more interested in unique
content. This will help to ensure that your website is not only valuable
to your visitors but also considered valuable to search engines.

Is your Websites Fully Crawlable By The Search Engines ?

2007-08-01T20:54:00.001-07:00

Making sure that your websites are fully crawlable is a key component
for any search strategy, especially if you want your sites to rank well
for multiple related keyword phrases or different products.

One of the ways that you can insure that a search engine spider crawls
your site deeply is to provide it a road map of your site. This road
map, called a "site map" is a very simple page (from a design
standpoint) that only serves one purpose from a search engine optimizers
point of view, to get those interior pages into a search engine's index.

A brief history of site maps . . .Before site maps were recognized by
the search engine optimization community as a tool for good search
results, it was used by fortune 1000 companies to help visitors to their
site find out where a particular service or product was located. For
example: If you want to do some sort of business with your bank online,
you might find that their home page doesn't quite get you to the exact
location on their site that you want. After all, a typical bank might
offer car loans, student loans, home loans, credit cards, investment
accounts, mutual funds, etc. If per chance you arrived at this banking
site on a page other than the home page, you might get a little turned
around from a site navigation standpoint.

So, site maps were created. What is a site map? A site map is a page
that contains a basic HTML link to every page on that web site. Every
page, not just your main topics but every page. Site maps do not need to
be fancy (in fact, it's better if they are not), they just need to
contain a logical order and links to all of your pages.

How does this benefit us? Three ways . . .First, a site map gives your
customers an easy navigation system to every page in your web site. Now,
don't confuse the use of a site map as a replacement for logical
navigation on your regular pages. You want to make sure that your site
can be navigated simply and easily from any page on your site. However,
some folks (a very small percentage) prefer to see the entire site's
structure on one page and choose their destination from it. Second, a
site map is a fantastic way to get a search engine spider to see and
crawl every single page in your site. When optimizing different pages in
your web site for different keywords, a Site map is a perfect solution
for ensuring that a spider can get to every one of those optimized
pages. Third, and this is big: A Site Map provides an opportunity to
send link reputation to a particular page.

Now, link reputation is a discussion that's beyond the scope of this
article, but it is perhaps one of the most important factors in off Page
search engine optimization. You want the links on your Site Map Page to
Say the right thing about the pages that they are linking to. It's like
a vote. So, make sure that your site map is voting correctly for all of
your interior pages. Fourth, site maps are also an additional way to
distribute Google Page Rank. If your site map is just one link off of
the first page, it can pass a significant amount of Google page rank
deep into your web site. This helps create a site structure where just
about every internal page has the same chance of ranking as well as your
home page. Finally, site maps allow you to use dynamic linking
strategies to control where page rank does and does not go throughout
your site. For example, a common mistake is to have a normal link to
your privacy policy on every page of your site. In actuality, giving
your privacy policy page the same page rank as every other page of the
site is a big waste of whatever page rank you have available. So use a
good site map and you will reap the rewards.

The No. 1 SEO Tip

2007-08-01T20:51:00.002-07:00

Learn how this single SEO secret can get you on the first page of Google.

Let me start by asking you a question: What's the number-one business killer on the internet? The answer is obvious, but many people miss it. The answer is: not being found on the first page of Google.
I refer to Google often, since the search engine accounts for approximately 50 percent of search traffic. In February 2007, Google sites garnered 47.5 percent of the U.S. search market, with Yahoo! coming in second place at a distant 28.1 percent, according to comScore. Preparing your SEO strategy around Google makes your plan work for other search engines, as well.
Write AwaySo what's the number-one tip for search engine ranking? Articles. With articles, even a brand new domain--some call this the "Google sandbox hell"--can get updated into the search index quickly. Many sites are spidered or crawled, but not indexed, a major problem for new sites.

Let's first take a look at recent content strategies you can use to write stronger articles. If you're not familiar with the next wave in quality content scoring and relevancy for search engines, you need to understand a little bit about search engine technology.
Google contains more than 100 algorithms that make it the world's most popular search engine. One of those is PageRank, a complex voting system I'll cover in a future article. Another important secret, which has been around for a while, but not utilized by most webmasters, is latent semantic indexing.
"Context" is the new buzzword for SEO in 2007. While you should still write good, natural, user-friendly and relevant web copy, using some simple LSI techniques can elevate your search engine ranking.
When using LSI, engines try to determine what the content or page is about without specifically matching the search term text. It looks at the document collection as a whole and examines which other documents contain some of those same words. In simple terms, this means that as you write and link to and from other pages and sites, search engines using LSI will look at words and phrases that are contextually related and try to figure out what you're writing about. So, if you're writing about bait, poles, lures and tackle, you're probably addressing fishing.
If you want to be ranked higher in the search engines, you should write content and link profiles that have supportive text and anchor text (links) using this "theme" approach. To find related keywords and phrases, use a keyword research tool, like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. First type in your key terms into the Google search engine and pick the first site that comes up. Then go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, click the "Site-Related Keywords" tab and paste the URL there. Study the results and use groups of related keywords with links on your page to develop strong on-page factors.
Distributing Your ArticleWriting an article that is topically related to your business and then submitting it to article directories like ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com and buzzle.com will pay off big.
Imagine the effect of getting a link from the Los Angeles or New York Times. There isn't a sure-fire formula for achieving this, but providing quality articles and adding your link in the resources box of the article will allow search engines to find and index you faster. If the content is interesting and newsworthy, the journalists may start calling.
Yes, this could be a lot of work. But one option is to find a service that can distribute your articles for little or no cost. I like isnare.com; for a few dollars you can get your own distribution credits. Once approved, they'll submit your article to hundreds of directories. Watch your server logs for traffic and spider bots; you'll see domains and search engine referrers very quickly.
Continue these efforts by writing press releases using similar distribution mechanisms. I use services like prweb.com and marketwire.com. SEO firms have developed a complete marketplace for the SEO compliancy of press releases. They clearly understand the power of submitting and distributing content and press releases. If you don't know how to write a press release, hire somebody to help you. You can go to sites like elance.com and guru.com to have something written for $50.
If you haven't pursued these simple tactics for your SEO strategies, you've been missing out on important traffic and business. There are a number of resources for traffic acquisition and how-to-books on building an internet presence. Outside of articles, press releases, SEO and pay-per-click, there are social networks, blogs, paid links, affiliate marketing, paid advertising, viral marketing, co-registration and banner ads--certainly enough to keep you busy for a while.
Jon Rognerud is a recognized authority on the subject of search engine optimization and has spent more than 15 years developing websites and marketing solutions at companies like Overture and Yahoo!. His website, www.microsaw.com, provides a wealth of informative articles, resources and complimentary e-mail courses on everything you'll ever need to know about SEO and search marketing.

5 Tips To Automated Free Traffic

2007-08-01T20:51:00.001-07:00

Most people turn to the net to look for the information or solution to the query or problem that they may have. It is also true that when these people search for their information and/or solution to their inquiry, the natural search listings always take predominance. The visitors coming to your site through these organic search results are always highly targeted and are more likely to convert... and this is free traffic.

One, therefore, needs to pay great attention to SEO so that your site achieves good ranking in the natural search listings and you get free traffic to your site through the organic search results.

Now, there are so many things to look at while working on SEO for your site. If you start doing these manually, it becomes a chore, is extremely tedious and takes an immense amount of time. Hence the need to automate this free traffic SEO. The key ingredient to getting continuous and free traffic to your site can be succinctly put in the following words: "Automated Free Traffic SEO Generators". Let me now give you the tips on this.

1. First and foremost, you need to know what your competitors are doing. This means doing a lot of research on the kind of keywords they are using, their meta tags, linking, headlines, keyword optimization, page rank, and the like. If we try to do these manually, it shall take ages to collect such data and then to sift through them, but an automated free traffic SEO software does all these and much more with just a click of the button.

2. Link Popularity Check - One important issue that affects any site's listing in the natural search results is the link popularity. This means, the larger the number of sites linking to your website, the better shall be your ranking. If you get a good automated free traffic generator software, it not only does the analysis but also imparts the knowledge and the tools to achieve huge link backs.

3. Create Doorway Pages. Doorway pages are search engine designed pages created with "keywords" which are relative to the content on your site. A well designed doorway page outperforms any other webpage and is an absolute must to get your site going with the search engines, hence due attention should be paid on the creation of these.

4. The most important and exhaustive exercise with regard to SEO, relates to keywords. What are the keywords that are being searched the most? What kind of keywords are the competitors using? Which keywords should you optimize your webpages for and what is the keyword density of these webpages? These are the absolute crucial elements to attend to if one wishes to zoom up to the top few in search engine listings. Again, it is a cumbersome task and can only be managed with an automated free traffic SEO generating software.

5. Submit your site to as many places as you possibly can. The more places the site is submitted to, the larger shall be the number of back links and greater the chances that your site shall show up in natural search results. Again, this is a wonderful way to getting many one way links fast and a great method which I use to drive traffic to my website. My particular program submits to over 700,000 sites!

Now time for the super - tip. All of these strategies that I have expounded can be automated with the use of an automated free traffic SEO generator software. But the choice of the program is vital as many just do not measure up to the desired standard.

How to Write Good for Search Engine Marketing

2007-08-01T20:38:00.000-07:00

If you do not recognize the obvious grammatical error in the title, you MUST read this article; I wrote it specifically for you!

If you only have five seconds to spare, just remember the three C’s of optimized copy: be concise, correct and credible.

In 2003, Kathy Kiely published an article in USA Today discussing the impact of bloggers on presidential campaigns. Despite the subject matter, Kathy’s points still apply today, “Many bloggers are not professional journalists. Few have editors. Most make no pretense of objectivity.” I believe many search engine and social media marketers fall into the same category and as a result our industry, clients, their customers and the search engine results suffer.

The Bottom Line

People either do not like or do not have the time to read poorly written content. Therefore, whether you are writing an optimized web page, linkbait, blog entry or press release, it is essential that you write with concise language, correct grammar and credibility. Besides increasing readership, you will make the search engines very happy.

Let me take a moment to state that my mother was an English teacher. Growing up under her watchful eye I rebelled by misusing commas and tenses. Despite being grammatically challenged I managed to become a competent writer, which I attribute to being opinionated and following these simple rules:

Be concise: answer what, where, and when early in the content. Well-written titles and opening lines that stick to the facts have a stronger response rate from both humans and search engines.

Be correct: use correct grammar and spelling. If there is only one thing I want you to remember from this article it is that you should read your content out loud, preferably from a printed document. I am a huge environmentalist, but the mistakes spell check does not catch are easily heard and seen when you remove yourself from the computer. As for grammar, try to use familiar words in short, declarative sentences.

Be credible: get the facts straight. Wikipedia is NOT a reliable source for unbiased information. Neither are most blogs that quickly turn news into a bad game of telephone. If you are writing about a subject, go straight to the source. In the age of backlink nepotism, many search engine marketers are losing sight of how to write as the authority. This is not high school, do your own homework or fall into an ever-growing sea of noise. Or worse yet, get removed from feed subscriptions!

Do these points sound like common sense? They should, they are the basic pillars of journalism. I have left out some of the biggies: humor, creativity, newsworthiness, etc. For a nice summary read Michael Gray’s post, Top 12 Ways To Win Friends & Write Magnetic Headlines, at Search Engine Land.

Fortunately, when it comes to search engine optimization, marketers have free license to bend those rules for the sake of keyword integration. Flora Fair, an accomplished journalist turned optimized copywriter states, “Though journalistic and SEO writing are similar, one key difference is the challenge of integrating keyword phrases for searchability. You sometimes have to bend the strict rules of grammar applied to journalism and make the copy sound as natural as possible. But whether you’re writing for the news or for the Web, the ultimate goal is to tell a compelling story that conveys information. Including optimized keywords adds another factor to the process.”

Marketers can also bend the rules for the sake of creativity or branding, but I will never forget my mother’s caution, “you must understand the rules before you can break them.”

10 SEO Tips For Wordpress Blogs

2007-08-01T20:36:00.000-07:00

I’m starting the SEO Training section with some SEO tips for blogs to increase your traffic, specifically self-hosted Wordpress blogs. Whatever the purpose, I’m sure that you’d want others to know about your blog, especially after spending so much time and effort writing - I know I would.

Before we begin, some of you may ask why you should even bother listening to a blogger with barely 2 weeks of experience with Wordpress - good question!

The answer is that I always consider the marketing aspect when embarking on any online projects. Since I’m not technically-trained and can’t create fancy websites, I need to rely on my marketing skills to have an edge over my competition.

For example, I took over a forum in November last year and without a clue about how the IPB forum software works. But I managed to grow my community of less than 2,000 members to almost 9,000 members in 5 months - a 350% growth! The Vista Forums is one of the biggest unofficial Windows Vista forum today, receiving close to 7,000 visitors/day and ranks #1 on Google for “windows vista forum” and “vista forum”.

Now that we have gotten that out of the way, here are my SEO recommendations for Wordpress blogs:

1) Put Your Post In Only 1 Category

Make it easier for the search engines to find your posts by putting them into only 1 category.

2) Make Use Of The “Read More” Feature

Make use of the “More” tag - leave the first paragraph on the mainpage and the rest of the content on the post page. This helps prevent duplicated content and keeps you off Google’s Supplemental Index.

3) Related Posts

There’s a Wordpress plugin called “Contextual Related Posts” that automatically displays 5 of your previous related posts below the comment box. It’s an old (2005) plugin that works by simply activating it in your Wordpress Dashboard. With related posts you get more inner links, exposure for older posts and stickiness on your blog.

4) Create Attractive Titles

Getting more exposure is not enough but you need to get people to want to click on your link. Think of a creative title that can get potential readers interested, e.g. “How to cheat Ping.sg” (see image above).

5) Customize Your Permalinks

Wordpress creates boring URLs for your posts by default, e.g.

www.larrylim.net/seo-online-marketing/?p=5

You can customize the permalinks to embed your title (with keywords) into the URL, e.g.

www.larrylim.net/seo-online-marketing/chief-marketing-officer-2007/5/

Simply set your preference in your Wordpress Dashboard and add some commands into the .htaccess file.

6) Have Different Meta Titles

There’s a Wordpress plugin called “SEO Title Tag” that lets you set different meta titles for every post, including the static pages and categories. A meta title is the title that appears in your browser header when viewing a page and it’s also the title for your pages in search engine results. Unfortunately, this plugin is still in beta and was showing MySQL errors for my Wordpress version 2.1.2.

Update: I’ve managed to find a solution to the problem here.Â

7) Create Description And Keyword Meta Tags

You can also set your meta description and keyword tags for all your posts, static pages and category pages using a Wordpress plugin called “Add-Meta-Tags“. These meta tags are used by search engines when ranking your blog pages in search results. By default, the first full sentence is automatically used as your meta description, while the category is used for your meta keywords. There’s an option to set them manually by using custom fields in Wordpress when writing a post.

8) Create Technorati Tags For Each Post

There’s a Wordpress plugin called “Bunny’s Technorati Tags” that lets you manually insert tags for your posts. This helps increase your presence and gain more exposure at the Technorati blog search engine. While we’re at that, you should probably add “Action Buttons” to your posts - those cute little buttons you see on other blogs. It provides your readers a convenient way of adding your posts to social networking sites like Digg.com and Del.icio.us. I’d advise using a maximum of 5 buttons because any more than that may confuse your readers and create an ugly clutter.

9) Generate A Sitemap

Next, make sure to generate an XML sitemap so that the search engines know which pages to crawl - you can use a Wordpress plugin called “Google Sitemaps” to do this automatically. Then inform Google and Yahoo about the location of your sitemap.

10) Use A Pinging Service

Blog pinging services like Pingoat help you ping or notify a number of blog agregators and blog search engines, e.g. Technorati and Syndic8, whenever you update your blog. This helps increase your blog’s presence on the Internet and creates more avenues for visitors to find you.

Note that all the SEO recommendations above are specific to the Wordpress blog and do not include general SEO strategies like keyword analysis and linkbuilding - we’ll keep that for future lessons. ;)

If you appreciate my effort, feel free to:

- add me to your Technorati favourites using the button on the left.

- blog about this article.

- add me to your blogroll if you’re a blogger.

- join my community at MyBlogLog.

SEO for WordPress - The Complete Guide

2007-08-01T20:30:00.002-07:00

Quick Facts

1. There are 55 million blogs out there, if you don’t stand out you will
have no chance.

2. The first second of a visitors attention is the most crucial.

3. Your main traffic should come to articles and posts inside your blog, not the
home page.

4. Search engine rankings relies heavily upon the quality and quantity of links
to your blog when they determine the ranking.

5. The best way to get links is by natural recommendations from other bloggers
or web site owners.

Section 1: Optimize Your Blog

Usually the WordPress themes are well designed and structured already but
there are a number of things you really should do to improve it for better
optimization for search engines.

Using the best URLs

To enable the permalinks is easy and you have probably already done that,
just go to Options -> Permalinks in the admin panel. But what format is the
best to choose? The structure /%postname%/ - nothing else. This is best because
your URLs to your articles should never change. And if you have it like
this it does not matter if you change the category of the article or republish
it with a new date, it will always be the same URL (more about that later). And
if you happen to have two posts with the same title it is not a problem as
WordPress will automatically add “-2″ in the end.

Have you been using the wrong format? Well, if your blog is not totally new
you should not change. It is not vital and for the next time
you make a blog you know how to make it right.

Handling URL Canonization

Every WordPress blog has an issue in which there are 4 different URLs for the
same post and this has to be fixed to prevent dilution. Follow my guide on how
to fix it here.

Title Tags

The title tag is the most important HTML-tag in terms of SEO.

Here are different versions you should use inside the
located in theme/header.php

Optimum ranking:

For branding purposes:

The best title tag solution for advanced users

Either install and properly use the SEO
Title Tag plugin or do the following:

1. Download and install this
plugin.

2. Replace with the context in header.php on
single.php, page.php and category.php.

3. Work out the best titles for the different versions and use the plugin to
create different versions of category.php and single.php with their own versions
of title tags. For example if your category with ID 5 is “SEO News” you
could have the following title tag in single-cat-5.php:

SEO News: <?php { wp_title('') ;} ?>

In category.php you could have:

<?php { wp_title('') ;} ?>  Your Name

Headings

Headings are defined by HTML with H1 (largest) to H6 (smallest). You need to
use them in your articles when you write. Your article title should be in a main
heading (H1), sub headings with H2 and small headings with H3.

Make sure that in theme/single.php this code is
wrapped in H1 so that it looks like:

If your theme designer already used a specific CSS design for the heading
tags you can do like this:

1. Open up theme/single.php and add

to
the top after and

to the bottom before
.

2. Add then add for example the following lines of CSS to your CSS file:


.singleheadings h1 {font-size:XXpx;font-family:XX}
.singleheadings h2 {font-size:XXpx;font-family:XX}
.singleheadings h3 {font-size:XXpx;font-family:XX}

You can change your quicktags by for example using this
file instead (also add H2 to the file) so that you easily can insert heading
tags when you write.

Navigation

Most of the link power is coming to the home page of your blog and gets
distributed evenly among the rest of the links on that page. So in additional to
having a good navigation structure for your visitors also do the following:

Have links to the most important articles and pages from your home page.
That can easily be achieved by making a category with your best articles and
using the WP
Category Post plugin to make a list of them on the index.php file.
Install the Related
Posts plugin and have your articles link to similar articles.
Also link yourself to previous articles you have written.
Place the attribute rel=”nofollow” on links that are totally useless
for search engines such as to RSS feeds for the blog and comment links. In
case you want to remove the nofollow on the comment links make sure you
check the author links before approval as it is important that you don’t
link to bad sites from your blog.
You should not have hundreds of external links on the home page, if you
have that I recommend that you place them on a separate page.

Site Map

A Site Map is where your visitors go to navigate and find specific articles
and posts on your blog. It is also a place for search engines to find links to
all your pages on your blog.

Use my
article on how to make an automatic WordPresss Site Map and add one for your
blog. I prefer that you make the first version in the guide.

What about a Google Sitemap?

It is not needed. There is no reason for a WordPress blog with a proper
navigation structure to submit a Google Sitemap other than for information
purposes. A Google Sitemap does not improve your ranking, only crawling, and
that is not a problem.

Design

Everyone has different tastes about design but here are points to think about
when you design your blog:

Keep the design simple, very simple.
Have the body text big with big and clear headings.
For some reason blogs are not liked in the big social network sites (like
digg, reddit etc) so make your theme unique and try to make it look like a
site and not a blog.
Make sure nothing steals attention from your text.
The text width should not be longer than one and a half alphabet, even
shorter.
When a visitor reaches an article on your blog, the text should be seen
instantly. Have the text as far up as possible. A visitor should not have to
scroll to reach the content.
If you are not making decent money with ads I suggest you to erase all ads
you have on the blog.

References to follow:

Web
2.0 how-to design style guide

What About the Meta Tags?

There are various WP plugins out there for this but to be honest and frank I
can tell you that they are not worth the effort. The meta keywords tag are not
used anymore (or extremely little) in the ranking calculation and while the meta
description tag can show up in the SERPs
I consider the snippet of text the visitor gets being better.

CSS Positioning

It has been said that by providing the important content first in the source
code it will make a positive difference in your search engine ranking. I am not
sure if this is true, but it won’t hurt to do it. For example on this blog the
navigation on the left is in the bottom of the code.

Section 2: How to Craft Your Articles

You should read the entire section of Authoring
High Quality Content by Mr. Fishkin but I give you here a very quick summary
as it relates to this article.

First the most important quote:

One Great Page is Worth a Thousand Good Pages

While hundreds or dozens of on-topic pages that cover sections of an
industry are valuable to a website’s growth, it is actually far better to
invest a significant amount of time and energy producing a few
articles/resources of truly exceptional quality. To create documents that
become “industry standard” on the web and are pointed to time after time
as the “source” for further investigations, claims, documents, etc. is to
truly succeed in the rankings battle. The value of “owning” this traffic
and link source far outweighs a myriad of articles that are rarely read or
linked to.

Write articles or posts that serves as a stand alone document. This means
there is everything valuable collected on that page on that specific topic. For
example a stand alone document on “SEO for WordPress” should have everything
on that page and the reader should not need any other articles on that topic.

Better 1 great article that you revise 10 times than 10 smaller ok articles.

To do this you can also rewrite and republish your old articles with the
current time to show up again as the latest article.

Include links to more reading if applicable

Withing or at the end of your article you should link to other sources so
that the reader can read more if he is interested. You can also use this as
sources if you got your writing materials from other places.

Headlines

You should write the kind of headlines to your articles that:

Contains important keyword combinations or phrase for ranking
Describes with great interest what the article is about
Makes the reader want to read it and clicks on it in the SERPs
And is short and to the point

Section 3: Increase User Interaction

Use polls from for example Poll Daddy.
Increase the commenting field for longer user comments and better
interaction. This also provides more unique content to your articles.
Install the Subscribe
to Comments plugin.
Actually do reply to your commenters and answer their questions.
If you revise an article based on a comment, do link and give credit to
the commenter.

Section 4: Get Links

The art of writing the kind of content that get natural links is called
link baiting. See my article on that with a list of ideas here.
Post your link baits on the major social network sites such as digg,
reddit and the others.
Install my Link
to Me Textbox WordPess Plugin which provides an automatic HTML box of
code for easy linking to you.
Regularly link and reference other bloggers in your field in your posts to
get attention from them. You loose nothing of it and many of them will
return the favor and link to you. Also comment on their blogs to make them
discover your blog.
Read and follow my Link
Building Guide

SEO for Yahoo and MSN

2007-08-01T20:30:00.001-07:00

Between them Yahoo and MSN account for around 20% of all UK internet searches. Tackling Yahoo and MSN search engine optimisation requires a different technique to Google.

Yahoo's Optimisation Factors
Yahoo Optimisation or Yahoo SEO is about improving your website's "organic" ranking for key search terms on Yahoo. Yahoo is more "on page" driven than either MSN or Google, the two other major search engines. By "on page", we mean that when Yahoo produces its results it relies on information it collects about a site from sources on the target website.
1. Meta Tag Title
This is easily the most important meta tag. Very few sites with weak meta tag titles appear in the top rankings of Yahoo. My recommended approach is an interlocking phrase of 5 or 6 words adding up to no more than 60 characters including spaces.
2. Meta Tag Description
The meta tag description is less important than the title for ranking purposes. however, the tag normally shows up in the results pages so it is seen and may be acted upon by potential website visitors.
3. Meta Tag Keywords
These have little direct role in search engine ranking. Where they are useful is as a device for testing on page alignment. See below.
4. Page or Site Content
The content or subject of a site is very important to Yahoo and MSN. Content for this purpose means words in general and headings in particular. It is important that this content has been highlighted in the meta tags title and description.
5. On page Alignment
On page alignment of the meta tags and content are a key component of success with Yahoo rankings. The meta tags on their own will not work. Simply Clicks can carry out a quick and simple test to provide the information to improve rankings.
Yahoo's Off Page Optimisation Factors
Yahoo, like all other search engines measure the number and nature of inbound links (or IBLs) into a site from other websites. It appears, however, that Yahoo places a lesser emphasis on these links than other major engines. The most important off page factor appears to be inclusion in the Yahoo directory. However this costs $299.
Simply Clicks is a Yahoo and MSN optimisation specialist. If you would like further information about Simply Clicks' Google optimisation services please e-mail using the link on the right.
Simply Clicks has been involved in over 30 SEO projects for a number of multinational and UK based companies. If you have a specific SEO need or would like further information about Simply Clicks search engine optimisation services, please e-mail your requirements.

The 10 Top SEO Tips

2007-08-01T20:28:00.000-07:00

Site map. A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. 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.

Not anchor text. Don’t overdo the anchor text. You don’t want all your inbound links looking the same, because that looks like automation - something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, “Gumbo Pudding Pop” occasionally, “Get gumbo pudding pops” as well, “Gumbo-flavored pudding pops” some other times, etc.

Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site.

Become a foreigner. Canada and the UK have many directories for websites of companies based in those countries. Can you get a business address in one of those countries?

Newsletters. Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. The links stay live often for many years in their archives.

Multiple domains. If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Why not a site dedicated to gumbo pudding pops?

First come, first served. If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won’t follow additional links to the same page. You can see this in action at the link to the home page on this

Article exchanges. You’ve heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else’s article on the history of pudding pops with a link back to their site. They publish your article on the top ten pudding pop flavors in Viet Nam, with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links. (More on high quality links in other tips.)

Titles for links. Links can get titles, too. Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.

Be bold. Use the tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.

Search Engine Optimization - Advice and Tactic

2007-08-01T20:12:00.000-07:00

Unique content is King. Search engines love new, unique and updated content. If you produce new content at a rate of just one reasonably sized page per day and tied in with the other advice throughout the site, I can almost guarantee you will get good listings. Remember though, write for the visitors but cater for the search engines. If your field of expertise fits into a niche in the market, all the better for you but you must get unique content all you will fall behind. Page Structure. Search engine bots can sometimes get confused with poorly coded html, javascript and other web languages. If the bot has to wait too long or cannot decipher the web language then it will just abandon your site and move on to the next, even if it manages to get through the code it usually leads to poor search engine indexing of your website. You should also keep to widely used file extensions like .htm, .html, .php, .asp for your pages. Loading Speed. The loading speed of your website should be kept to a minimum, if it takes long than 5 seconds on 256kb+ connections then you lose visitors - both real and search engine bots. There are a variety of reasons why pages can load slowly, it may either be your web server, poorly coded server side code like php or client side code like javascript which can slow or even stop your page from loading. Visitor Navigation. This is more an aesthetic feature of your website focused at real visitors but you need to have some sort of standard navigation that is the same throughout your whole site. People can be put off and leave your website if they find it difficult to browse easily, search engine bots may also miss links if they can only be found deep within your site. Try to make as many internal links as possible available on each page. Site Hierarchy. Site hierachy can be great for adding keyword density to your web site. An example of site hierachy working effectively would be this page, seo-advice.php. The full link contains SEO twice - www.seoassistance.com/seo-advice.php which is very beneficial in the way search engines determine your sites relevance to a particular subject. Use your domain, folders and file names to your advantage. Avoid Blackhat SEO. Blackhat SEO is a vast topic that commands little respect from real webmasters as it means using underhand methods to gain search engine rankings, although the site is usually banned quickly. Blackhat SEO includes using link farms, search engine spamming, hidden or disguised text, fake meta tag data, using duplicate content and using doorway pages. I would recommend you stay away from tactics like this as you will end up losing out in the long run. Targeted Linkswaps. Link swaps are great but you must make them work for you. It does little good for you when your going for top search engine positions when your link swaps are untargeted. You should choose some specific keywords for both the link text and the link title text then make sure before you link swap that the other webmaster adds those specific keywords with the link. About the author:Article by www.SEOAssistance.comSearch Engine Optimization Advice & Tactics, www.SEOAssistance.com

Top 5 most common mistakes with do-it-yourself SEO

2007-08-01T20:10:00.000-07:00

I look at a lot of sites on a daily basis. There are a lot of common problems I see on sites. Some people may have tags set-up improperly or use tags that have no real purpose. I have compiled a list of the 5 top do-it-yourself SEO errors. It's safe to say that many do-it-yourselfers may have at least one of these errors on their sites. These should help you omit these often costly mistakes and pull you up in the ranks.

1) Keyword tag – A keyword tag is for keywords, but not for any keywords. You can’t just stuff this tag with keywords that your entire site is related to. The tags should reflect keywords only on that particular page; not the entire site and not every keyword you think your site might be searched on. Also, you should have no more then 20 words in the tag. You should not repeat any word more than 3 times. If you sell tickets, for example, don't write: Broadway tickets, circus tickets, hockey tickets, boxing tickets and so on. Do use Broadway, circus, hockey, boxing, tickets and so on.

2) Abstract tag – It is sometimes used as a replacement for or combined with a description tag. However, more and more people are using these to stuff keywords. Search engines like Google are interested in what is on the page. More specifically, what visitors can view. In my opinion, the abstract tag has no place on a site.

3) Description Tag – The whole point behind this tag is to describe what the “page” is about. Keywords related to the page should be implemented as well. The limit on words should be 20 – 25. I see many website owners stuffing this tag with keywords, or having a description that is entirely too lengthy. Stay within these guidelines and you will be fine.

4) Title tag – This, to me, is the most important tag. This is the first tag the search engine reads. It tells the search engine what the” page” is about. Don't put your web address here. Do not add your company name in the beginning of this tag either. It should not exceed 60 characters.

5) Content- If you notice, I have been commenting on relevancy to the “page”, not your overall site. Each page has it’s own keywords. Tag the title tag, description and keyword tags. All of these keywords should be the same. Add them to your content as well. Now your page should be fairly well optimized.Why do sites fall short? Simple, content is not optimized. Search engines are, for the most part, pretty basic. You type in a search term and it retrieves sites containing those terms while also taking a few other factors into account. So, if your site doesn’t have these terms, how will you be found? You won’t. Over do it with keywords and you will experience the same result, but for different reasons. Sometimes reading everything about SEO can be bad. Trying too many tricks, tips or methods is like too many cooks spoiling the soup. In the end they can do more bad than good. These are very basic rules that should be followed by all. In, doubt? Always consult or hire an SEO professional.

5 Steps to Get Top 10 Website Search Engine Rank

2007-08-01T20:07:00.000-07:00

1. Step One: Select right keyword for web SEO Optimization.You must choose your keywords carefully. This is the most important step of the SEO. Wrong or ineffective keywords mean invalid keyword optimization. You should find popular keywords and phrases related to your business, then know search popularity and competition number of every keywords. The keywords with more popularity and less competition will be your targeted keyword phrases. Resources:Best Promotion Keywords - http://www.websitepromotionsoft.com/bestpromotionkeyword.html Overture - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ Google - https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox

2. Step Two: Optimize your website ranking factors.Once you have finished keyword analysis and selected specified keywords, you should optimize your web site to improve search engine position. The important ranking factors including website title tags, description tags, meta keyword tags, heading text, link url, link text, image alt, comment and web page body text. Every keyword frequency, weight, size, prominence and proximity all affect the ranking. You should optimize all these factors carefully. The top 10 ranking website content and ranking factors will give your more help.Resources:Web Optimization Angel - http://www.websitepromotionsoft.com/weboptimizationangel.html WebPositionGold - http://www.webposition.com/d2.pl?r=TBI-55EC&FN=download.htm

3. Step Three: Submit url to search engines directories. After search engine optimization page design, Submiting all your web sites to Google, Yahoo, MSN, DMOZ and the other major engines. Manual free submit url is recommend. At http://www.websitepromotionsoft.com/submit-url-free.html you can find top 588 search engine list with homepage, submit url address, alexa rank, google page rank, google inbound links and google including site pages. Resources:search engine PageRank order list - http://www.websitepromotionsoft.com/search-engine-list-page-rank.html

4 .Step Four: Link Exchange and Manager.Link popularity is the total number of websites that link to your web site, and is an extremely important method of improving your site's relevancy and position as many engines are using this information as a ranking criterion. Both the quantity and quality of link popularity is important. The best links are "relevant" links from web pages related to your keyword or topic. Resources:External Link Promotion - http://www.websitepromotionsoft.com/external-link-promotion.html

5. Step Five: Monitoring and ReOptimizing.Often checking your website search engine position of your targeted keywords, if not satisfied with optimization ranking results, you should do more SEO to achieve higher search engines ranking position. Resources:Agent Web Ranking - http://www.softwarekey.com/products/info.asp?A=31147

About the author:David Wang: SEO Expert with 6 year experience in search engine optimization website promotion. See more seo optimization tool from

The Basics of SEO - Some FAQs

2007-08-01T20:06:00.001-07:00

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a foreign field to a lot of people. Rarely does a day go by when I don't get asked a few questions on the subject. So I've decided to post this FAQ article in the hopes that it will help people understand the basics, and make them a little more comfortable with the whole domain.
Q: Why are search engines important to me?
A: 85% of all website traffic is driven by search engines. The only online activity more popular than search is email. 79.2% of US users don't go to page 2 of search results. 42% of users click on the no.1 result. For the under-40 age-group, the Internet will become the most used media in the next 2-3 years.
Q: How do search engines decide on their rankings?
A: IMPORTANT: You cannot pay a search engine in return for a high ranking in the natural results. You can only get a high ranking if your content is seen as relevant by the search engines. Search engines identify relevant content for their search results by sending out กฅspidersกฆ or กฅrobotsกฆ which กฅcrawlกฆ (analyze) your site and กฅindexกฆ (record) its details. Complex algorithms are then employed to determine whether your site is useful and should be included in the search engineกฆs search results.
Q: Can't I just pay for a high ranking?
A: No. The biggest concern for search engine companies like Google and Yahoo is finding content that will bring them more traffic (and thus more advertising revenue). In other words, their results must be relevant. Relevant results makes for a good search engine; irrelevant results makes for a short-lived search engine. Most search engines these days return two types of results whenever you click Search: „X Natural/Organic กV The กฅrealกฆ search results. The results that most users are looking for and which take up most of the window. For most searches, the search engine displays a long list of links to sites with content which is related to the word you searched for. These results are ranked according to how relevant and important they are. „X Paid กV Pure advertising. This is how the search engines make their money. Advertisers pay the search engines to display their ad whenever someone searches for a word which is related to their product or service. These ads look similar to the natural search results, but are normally labeled กงSponsored Linksกจ, and normally take up a smaller portion of the window.
Q: How do I get a high ranking?
A: There are four main steps: Step 1 - Use the right words on your websiteStep 2 - Get lots of relevant sites to link to yoursStep 3 - Use the right words in those linksStep 4 - Have lots of content on your site & add more regularly
Q: What is search engine optimization (SEO)?
A: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of creating a website which is search engine-friendly. This means: „X using the right words in your copy „X using the right words in your HTML code „X structuring your site properly „X designing your site properlyFor more information on these 4 elements, download our free 'SEO Secrets' eBook from divinewrite.com/seosecrets.htm. Many people use SEO to also describe the other ingredient in a high ranking, 'Link Popularity'.
Q: What is link popularity?
A: Think of the search engines as a big election. All the websites in the world are candidates. The links to your website are votes. The more votes (links) a candidate (website) has, the more important it is, and the higher its ranking. Link popularity is all about how many links you have, and how you can get more. Links to your site tell the search engines how important your site is. They assume that if itกฆs important enough for a lot of other sites to link to, itกฆs important enough for them to display at the top of the rankings. Links are the single most important factor in ranking. Generally speaking, the more links you have to your site from other sites, the better your ranking.
Q: Are some links better than others?
A: Yes! The ideal kind of links are those that: „X come from relevant sites (sites which use the same keywords); „X come from important sites (have a high ranking); „X include your keyword as part of the visible link text; „X include varying link text (not the same link text each time); and „X come from a page that links to few other sites. When a search engine sees a link which satisfies most or all of these conditions, it says, กงHey, this site must be credible and important, because others in the same industry are pointing to it.กจ
Q: How do I get lots of links back to my site?
A: There are many possible ways to generate links. Some are dubious (like auto-generation software, and sites set up by webmasters simply to host links to their other sites) and I won't be discussing them here. Others, like those discussed below, are legitimate.„X Add your site to DMOZ & Yahoo Directories (and other free directories) „X Check where your competitorsกฆ links are coming from „X Article PR - Write and submit articles for Internet publication „X Swap links „X Partner websites „X Pay for linksFor more information on these methods, download our free 'SEO Secrets' eBook from divinewrite.com/seosecrets.htm.
Q: What do you think is the best way to get lots of links?
A: Article PR. Write helpful articles and let other webmasters publish them for free in exchange for a link in the byline. With article PR, you don't have to pay for the link, you determine the content of the page containing the link, you determine the link text, and the link is more or less permanent. A single article can be reprinted hundreds of times, and each time is another link back to your site!For more information, read divinewrite.com/seoarticles.htm or visit ArticlePR.com.
Q: How do I write a good article PR piece?
A: See divinewrite.com/seoarticles.htm.Q: How do I get a high ranking using free reprint content? A: See divinewrite.com/Top_Ranking_Free.htm.
Q: How long does it take to get a high search engine ranking?
A: A long time! Itกฆs impossible to say how much time youกฆll need to spend generating links, but you can be sure itกฆll be a while no matter which method of link generation you use. You just have to keep at it until you have achieved a high ranking. Even then, youกฆll still need to dedicate some ongoing time to the task, otherwise your ranking will drop.
Q: What is the Google Sandbox, and is it real?
A: The Google Sandbox theory suggest that whenever Google detects a new website, it withholds its rightful ranking for a period while it determines whether your site is a genuine, credible, long term site. It does this to discourage the creation of SPAM websites (sites which serve no useful purpose other than to boost the ranking of some other site). There is a lot of anecdotal evidence supporting the theory, but there is also a lot discounting it. No one has categorically proven its existence.
Q: What is the Google Dampening Link Filter, and is it real?
A: The Google Dampening Link Filter theory suggests that if Google detects a sudden increase (i.e. many hundreds or thousands) in the number of links back to your site, it may sandbox them for a period (or in fact penalize you by lowering your ranking or blacklisting your site altogether). There is a lot of anecdotal evidence supporting the theory, but there is also a lot discounting it. No one has categorically proven its existence. Q: What SEO companies should I be wary of? A: Be wary of SEO companies that promise or guarantee results in a given timeframe, especially if they won't expand on their methods for generating links back to your site.
Q: What tools can you recommend?
A: There are many very useful tools to help with your SEO. The following are just selection. All tools are free unless otherwise indicated.
„X Backlink checker - http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/
„X Backlinks by IP address - http://www.webuildpages.com/cclass/index.php
„X Link Popularity Tool - http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/
„X Number of links required to rank - http://www.iblcheck.com/
„X Google Alert - http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en
„X Google Sitemaps - http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps
„X Google Sitemap Generator - http://johannesmueller.com/gs/
„X Google Toolbar - http://toolbar.google.com/
„X Indexed Pages - http://www.webuildpages.com/cache/cachetoolpublic.pl
„X Keyword Analysis (Nichebot) - http://www.nichebot.com/
„X Keyword Analysis (Overture) - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
„X Keyword Analysis (WordTracker - Paid) - http://www.wordtracker.com/
„X Keyword Difficulty - http://www.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty-tool.php
„X Keyword Identifier - http://www.googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php
„X Keyword Density Measurement (Simple) - http://www.live-keyword-analysis.com/
„X Keyword Density Measurement (Complex) - http://www.gorank.com/analyze.php
„X Plagiarized Copy Search - http://www.copyscape.com/
„X Traffic Rank - http://www.alexa.com/
„X Search Engine Rank - http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/
„X SEO Report - http://www.urltrends.com/
„X Top 10 sites for a keyword by no of backlinks and age - http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/whoischeck-bykeys.pl
„X Top 10 sites for a keyword - http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/
„X Spider Simulator - http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/
Q: I'm confused about all the terms used in SEO, can you help?
A: See divinewrite.com/seo_glossary.htm.
Q: What is keyword analysis?
A: The first thing you need to do when you begin chasing a good search engine ranking is decide which words you want to rank well for. This is called performing a keyword analysis. Keyword analysis involves a bit of research and a good knowledge of your business and the benefits you offer your customers. For more information, download our free 'SEO Secrets' eBook from divinewrite.com/seosecrets.htm.
Q: Do I need to submit my site to the search engines?
A: Theoretically, no. But I wouldn't risk not doing it - especially as it's free. As soon as you register your domain name, submit it to Google! Even if you havenกฆt built your site, or thought about your content, submit your domain name to Google. In fact, even if you havenกฆt fully articulated your business plan and marketing plan, submit your domain name to Google. For more information, download our free 'SEO Secrets' eBook from divinewrite.com/seosecrets.htm. Q: Should I submit my site to the search engines more than once?
A: No need. Although some of the search engines allow you to do this, there's really no need.
Q: What are directories and should I submit my site to them?
A: Directories are websites (or web pages) which simply list lots of website and give a quick description of the website. Some are free and some require you to pay for a listing. Free directories are useful because you get a free link. However, the links aren't worth that much. Paid directories can be good if they're relevant, but they can cost a lot in the long term, so choose wisely. One essential directories for any website is the DMOZ Open Directory Project.

The Secret Benefit Of Search Engine Optimisation: Increased Usability

2007-08-01T20:03:00.000-07:00

A higher search ranking is what many website owners dream of. What they don't realise is that by optimising their site for the search engines, if done correctly, they can also optimise it for their site visitors.
Ultimately this means more people finding your website and increased sales and lead generation. But are search engine optimisation and usability compatible? Aren't there trade-offs that need to be made between giving search engines what they want and giving people what they want? Read on and find out (although I'm sure you can guess the answer!)...
1. Keyword research carried out
Before you even begin building your website, you should carry out keyword research to identify which keyword phrases your site should target. Using publicly available tools such as Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com/), you can discover which keywords are searched for the most frequently and then specifically target those phrases.
Doing keyword research is also crucial for your site's usability. By using the same keywords in your website that web users are searching for in search engines, you'll literally be speaking the same language as your site visitors.
For example, you might decide to target the phrase, "sell toys", as your website does in fact sell toys. Keyword research would undoubtedly show you that web users are actually searching for, “buy toys” (think about it - have you ever searched using the word, “sell”, when you want to buy something?). By placing the phrase, “buy toys” on to the pages on your website, you'll be using the same words as your site visitors and they'll be able to find what they're looking for more easily.
2. 200 word minimum per page
Quite simply, search engines love content - the more content there is on a page the easier it is for search engines to work out what the page is actually about. Search engines may struggle to work out the point of a web page with less than 200 words, ultimately penalising that page in the search rankings.
In terms of usability, it's also good to avoid pages with very little content. A page with less than 200 words is unlikely to contain a large amount of information, so site visitors will undoubtedly need to click elsewhere to find more detailed information. Don't be afraid to put a reasonably large amount of information on to a page. Web users generally don't mind scrolling down anymore, and provided the page provides mechanisms to aid scanning (such as employing sub-headings - see point 6 below) it shouldn't be too difficult for site visitors to locate the information that they're after.
3. 100kb maximum HMTL size
If 200 words is the minimum page content size, then 100kb is the maximum, at least in terms of HMTL file size. Anything more than this and search engines may give up on the page as it's simply too big for them.
A 100kb HMTL file will take 20 seconds to download on a 56k dial up modem, used by three in four UK web users as of March 2004 (source: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/intc0504.pdf). Add on the time it takes for all the other parts of the page to download, such as images and JavaScript files, and you're looking at a highly un-user-friendly download time!
4. CSS used for layout
The website of Juicy Studios (http://www.juicystudio.com/) saw a six-fold increase in site visitors after switching from a table-based layout to a CSS layout. Search prefer CSS-based sites and are likely to score them higher in the search rankings because:
The code is cleaner and therefore more accessible to search engines
Important content can be placed at the top of the HTML document
There is a greater density of content compared to coding
Using CSS for layout is also highly advantageous for usability, as it leads to significantly faster download times.
5. Meaningful page title
If you know anything about search engine optimisation you'll know that search engines place more importance on the page title than any other attribute on the page. If the title adequately describes the content of that page then search engines will be able to more accurately guess what that page is about.
A meaningful page title also helps site visitors work out where they are, both within the site and the web as a whole. The page title is the first thing that loads up, often quite a few seconds before the content, so a descriptive, keyword-rich page title can be a real aid to help users orientate themselves.
6. Headings and sub-headings used
Search engines assume that the text contained in heading tags is more important than the rest of the document text, as headings (in theory at least) summarise the content immediately below them.
Headings are also incredibly useful for your human site visitors, as they greatly aid scanning. Generally speaking, we don't read on the web, we scan, looking for the information that we're after. By breaking up page sections with sub-headings that effectively describe the content beneath them, scanning becomes significantly easier.
Do be sure not to abuse heading tags though. The more text you have contained in heading tags within the page, the less importance search engines assign to them.
7. Opening paragraph describes page content
We've already established that search engines love content, but they especially love the first 25 words or so on each page. By providing an opening paragraph that adequately describes the content of the rest of the page (or the site if it's the homepage), you should be able to include your important keyword phrases in this crucial area.
As web users, whenever we arrive at a web page the first thing we need to know is whether this page has the information that we're after. A great way to find this out is to scan through the first paragraph, which, if it sufficiently describes the page content, should help us out.
8. Descriptive link text
Search engines place a lot of importance on link text. They assume that link text will be descriptive of its destination and as such examine link text for all links pointing to any page. If all the links pointing to a page about widgets say 'click here', search engines can't gain any information about that page without visiting it. If on the other hand, all the links say, 'widgets' then search engines can easily guess what that page is about.
One of the best examples of this in action is for the search term, 'miserable failure'. So many people have linked to George Bush's bio using this phrase as the link text, that now when miserable failure is searched for in Google, George Bush's bio appears top of the search rankings!
As web users, we don't generally read web pages word-for-word - we scan them looking for the information that we're after. When you scan through text you can't take any meaning from the word 'click here'. Link text that effectively describes its destination is far easier to scan and you can understand the destination of the link without having to read its surrounding words.
9. Frames avoided
Frames are quite an old-school technique, and although aren't as commonplace as they once were, do still rear up their ugly head from time to time. Using frames is one of the worst possible things you could do for your search engine ranking, as most search engines can't follow links between frames.
Even if a search engine does index your pages and web users find you through a search engine, they'll be taken to one of the pages within the frame. This page will probably be a content page with no navigation (navigation is normally contained in a separate frame) and therefore no way to navigate to any other page on the site!
Frames are also disadvantageous for usability as they can cause problems with the back button, printing, history and bookmarking. Put simply, say no to frames!
10. Quality content provided
This may seem like a strange characteristic of a search engine optimised website, but it's actually crucial. Search engines, in addition to looking at page content, look at the number of links pointing in to web pages. The more inbound links a website has, all other things being equal, the higher in the search rankings it will appear.
By providing creative, unique and regularly updated content on your website, webmasters will want to link to you as doing so will add value to their site visitors. You will also be adding value to your site visitors.
Conclusion
Optimising your website for both search engines and people needn't be a trade-off. With this much overlap between the two areas, you should easily be able to have a website that web users can find in the search engines, and when they do find it, they can find what they're looking for quickly and efficiently.

How To Use Articles To Improve Your Search Engine Optimization Campaign

2007-08-01T19:53:00.000-07:00

There are many ways to improve one's search engine optimization campaign. Out of the myriad of the ways, article marketing is perhaps one of the best ways. It has a compounding factor that works even when you are not at the computer. And one article can bring in many backlinks for your website.
What is article marketing? Article marketing is simply writing articles about information related to your website and submitting them to various article directories around the web. By adding links back to your website in the resource box, you can add valuable backlinks to your website. You'd also want to make your articles 'keyword-rich', so readers can more easily find them and search engines can pick them up more easily.
Articles also make good 'pre-sell' tools for your website. Readers reading your article are looking for specific information, and you provide them with more information by asking them to click through to your link to find out more. Articles generally act as good 'teasers' for more deeper information that you can provide to your readers. Be sure to provide good information in your article, and your readers will feel compelled to visit your site.
However, that's not where the good stuff ends! Ezine owners will also grab your articles and publish them to their newsletter. This gives you even more backlinks without any additional work.
As you can see, submitting articles is a great no-cost way to get free, quality backlinks and generate lots of traffic to your website. If you haven't started article marketing, start doing so today!

How does Google Rank Pages?

2007-08-01T19:40:00.000-07:00

Google has dramatically changed the way they rank pages in the last few years. What worked once upon a time does not seem to work now. What worked before? PageRank and keyword rich incoming links. Webmasters just swapped keyword-rich links, bought high PageRank keyword-rich links etc. Optimized sites could dominate the results, but Google wants genuine sites that have natural incoming links (votes).

In my opinion, Google has introduced new ranking scores that operate mostly on whole sites (domains) and lowered the weight of some of the older page-based scores. Some sites get high rankings for almost anything (amazon). I have noticed that the rankings to all my pages within a site jump/fall uniformly. Basically these new scores tell Google how reputable/trusted/quality is a whole site and these factors influence the rankings of all pages of a site.
When your site (not page) gets a higher overall domain score, you get more traffic/rankings to all your pages and vice versa. These new domain based scores are connected with the infamous SandBox effect. To me, a sandboxed site is a site with a low general domain score.

How did Google change the weight of the older factors (PageRank, anchor text)?
1. Google de-emphasized the weight of anchor text keywords. Why? Because that makes it harder to rank internal pages. Webmasters tend to link more to sites than to internal pages. Giving too much weight on the anchor text of links pushes up the rankings of home pages. Webmasters countered this over-emphasis of anchor text with two strategies:

textual keyword-rich internal navigationbuying / swapping keyword-rich links that pointed to internal pages
In Google's eyes, when a site has thousands of natural incoming links to the home page and internal pages, this site must be of very high-quality and even the internal pages with zero incoming links deserve to rank high. That can be achieved by lowering the weight of anchor text and introducing domain based quality scores. I also think that Google spreads the anchor text value of links to all related pages on a site. What does it mean? If you have 3 pages about widgets, an external link to one of the widget pages with anchor text "widgets" may also help the other two widget pages.

2. Google in my opinion has changed the way they calculate PageRank. I believe the toolbar PageRank does not reflect the real way they calculate PageRank at all.
Consider this fact: when you get a high PageRank with site-wide incoming links, your rankings don't get the same boost, as when you get the very same high PageRank with links from a lot of unique domains. The toolbar PageRank is useless.
Link popularity is still important, but we don't know what modified version of calculating PageRank Google uses.
What are the major new domain based factors that Google introduced?
Google seems to be going in the direction of their "Information Retrieval Based On Historical Data" and follow-up patent(s).
Domain Age
That has become too obvious. Newer sites are less trusted than older sites. This is a factor you cannot control.
Freshness/Staleness
Google factors in how fresh or stale your site is.
Your site is considered fresh when:You have recently updated it (changed content or added new pages). The site acquired new incoming links recently. Most of the sites that link to the site are fresh (recently updated, got linked to).
Your site becomes stale (outdated) when:You have not updated it recently. You have no new incoming links. The sites that link to you have not been updated and linked to.
Content Updates/Changes
Have you updated your site recently? If all your competitors constantly update their sites but you don't, your rankings may go down.
User Behavior
Your pages get ranked high for some keywords. Do the searchers actually click on your pages? If they don't it may get your rankings lowered. When searchers frequently click on your ranked pages that is a good thing in the eyes of Google.
Query Based (In my opinion, Content is King factors)
Every time one of your pages gets ranked high (top 30) for some keywords that tells Google that you have good content. Before you get ranked high for competitive keywords, you need to get ranked high for non-competitive ones. When you have a lot of unique content, there is no way your pages will not get ranked high for at least some non-competitive keywords. The more content you have the more times you get pages ranked high for non-competitive keywords, which helps in the future rankings of more competitive keyphrases.
Google may influence the rankings of certain queries, by looking into the rankings of their related keyphrases. When you rank high for some keyphrases this helps ranking high for related queries. Content is King. Don't over-optimize but use a variety of related words. That helps better in the long-term.
User Maintained Data, Traffic etc.
Do your visitors bookmark your site? Do they stay long at your site? Do they come back?
Focus on the visitors and Google will find it out and boost your rankings.
Linkage of Independent Peers
How many unique domains link to your site? The more usually the better unless the links grow too fast.
Anti-Spam Factors
Google tries to detect when you do aggressive link building. Again, don't overdo it. Focus on content. Over-optimizing content also does not help too much because it lowers your chances to rank well for related/synonymous keyphrases.
In a nutshell, how do I get top Google rankings?
1. Add new content frequently (at least once a week).
2. Write long in-depth content instead of short pages. Longer pages will always outperform shorter ones.
3. Don't over-optimize. Think about making your navigation readable, your text readable and include more keywords only if you think it is appropriate to your users. Write naturally and include related terms, synonyms etc.
4. Don't be over-aggressive with link building.
5. Link out to other good sites/pages in your articles.
6. Cross-reference your content by putting links within your content to other pages on your site.
7. Use long descriptive anchor text. Keyword density in content/links is a myth.
8. Publish unique content. Forget about duplicate content. It does not work on Google.
9. Have some patience. Let your site age and don't stop working on any factor (content, links).
10. It is better to lay off link building than adding fresh unique high-quality content.
11. Content is King.
When you do all of these above, you will get a very high domain based score and you will easily outrank the over-optimized competition.

Importance of Sitemaps

2007-08-01T19:39:00.001-07:00

There are many SEO tips and tricks that help in optimizing a site but one of those, the importance of which is sometimes underestimated is sitemaps. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site - i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them, etc. Sitemaps make navigating your site easier and having an updated sitemap on your site is good both for your users and for search engines. Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines. While in robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your site map you tell search engines where you'd like them to go.

Sitemaps are not a novelty. They have always been part of best Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they become even more important. However, it is necessary to make a clarification that if you are interested in sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view, you can't go on with the conventional sitemap only (though currently Yahoo! and MSN still keep to the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.
One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer is obvious - one is for humans, the other is for spiders (for now mainly Googlebot but it is reasonable to expect that other crawlers will join the club shortly). In that relation it is necessary to clarify that having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content. In 'Introduction to Sitemaps', Google explicitly states that using a sitemap will never lead to penalty for your site.
Why Use a Sitemap
Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don't have a sitemap.
Also, when you have a sitemap and submit it to the search engines, you rely less on external links that will bring search engines to your site. Sitemaps can even help with messy internal links - for instance if you by accident have broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other way (though there is no doubt that it is much better to fix your errors than rely on a sitemap).
If your site is new, or if you have a significant number of new (or recently updated pages), then using a sitemap can be vital to your success. Although you can still go without a sitemap, it is likely that soon sitemaps will become the standard way of submitting a site to search engines. Though it is certain that spiders will continue to index the Web and sitemaps will not make the standard crawling procedures obsolete, it is logical to say that the importance of sitemaps will continue to increase.
Sitemaps also help in classifying your site content, though search engines are by no means obliged to classify a page as belonging to a particular category or as matching a particular keyword only because you have told them so.
Having in mind that the sitemap programs of major search engines (and especially Google) are still in beta, using a sitemap might not generate huge advantages right away but as search engines improve their sitemap indexing algorithms, it is expected that more and more sites will be indexed fast via sitemaps.
Generating and Submitting the Sitemap
The steps you need to perform in order to have a sitemap for your site are simple. First, you need to generate it, then you upload it to your site, and finally you notify Google about it.
Depending on your technical skills, there are two ways to generate a sitemap - to download and install a sitemap generator or to use an online sitemap generation tool. The first is more difficult but you have more control over the output. You can download the Google sitemap generator from here. After you download the package, follow the installation and configuration instructions in it. This generator is a Python script, so your Web server must have Python 2.2 or later installed, in order to run it.
The second way to generate a sitemap is easier. There are many free online tools that can do the job for you. For instance, have a look at this collection of Third-party Sitemap tools. Although Google says explicitly that it has neither tested, nor verified them, this list will be useful because it includes links to online generators, downloadable sitemap generators, sitemap plugins for popular content-management systems, etc., so you will be able to find exactly what you need.
After you have created the sitemap, you need to upload it to your site (if it is not already there) and notify Google about its existence. Notifying Google includes adding the site to your Google Sitemaps account, so if you do not have an account with Google, it is high time to open one. Another detail that is useful to know in advance is that in order to add the sitemap to your account, you need to verify that you are the legitimate owner of the site.
Currently Yahoo! and MSN do not support sitemaps, or at least not in the XML format, used by Google. Yahoo! allows webmasters to submit “a text file with a list of URLs” (which can actually be a stripped-down version of a site map), while MSN does not offer even that but there are rumors that it is indexing sitemaps when they are available onsite. Most likely this situation will change in the near future and both Yahoo! and MSN will catch with Google because user-submitted site maps are just a too powerful SEO tool and cannot be ignored.

How to get more clicks/traffic out of your top search engine rankings?

2007-08-01T19:37:00.000-07:00

If you already have top 10 rankings for your most important keywords this article will teach you how to get more clicks (better CTR) out of your organic rankings. If you have run AdWords or other PPC campaigns you have probably noticed how very small changes in the ad text can lead to massive changes in the ad's CTR (click-through rate).

Naturally, it stands to reason that changes in organic search engine results' descriptions can lead to different CTRs. When search engines list results, they show keyword rich text snippets taken from the page text, meta description tags or DMOZ/Yahoo directory listings. These keyword rich snippets are shown together with the titles of your pages.

Search for your keywords on Google and notice what text descriptions does Google show for your top ranked pages. Think about it - can you improve the link description so that more surfers click on your link? Most often, you can.

There are two issues here - which description will lead to the highest CTR and how to make Google show exactly this optimal text snippet. Let's tackle these two problems one by one.

How to write a link description that improves the CTR?
First rule here is that the description must contain your keywords. This is important because surfers like to see the keywords in the description and if the description lacks the keywords, Google may not show it at all (remember, Google chooses to show link descriptions that have the keywords it them).

The link description will have more clicks when it offers benefits and when there is a call to action (example: download something free). The best way to test it is to run an AdWords campaign. I use text that has proven to offer the highest CTR on my AdWords campaigns.
You can also use common sense. Write down a couple of text descriptions and try them for a period of time (either on AdWords or on your pages). I prefer AdWords because I can test different texts simultaneously.

How to make Google show your preferred link description?
Write the keyword rich link description in your meta description tag. Most often when Google finds the keywords in the meta description tag, it shows the text in the tag as a link description. That works on the premise that the meta description tag will provide a better human edited description than text snippets taken out from the page text (often text snippets lead to low CTR descriptions).

Your meta description tag must use a short well written keyword rich description that targets the most important/competitive/highest conversion keywords.
If the page targets many keywords then you will use the meta description tag for the most important keywords and edit the page text for your less important keywords until it produces a better description. In this case, you will need to edit the text around the targeted keywords.

Testing the idea
On one of my top ranked pages, I plugged a meta description from my AdWords campaign and I immediately saw better CTR (19% higher than before). On another page I got a 50% boost because the link description shown previously by Google was screaming "buy this stuff" and now the description looks like an interesting article title (actually it is a sales letter disguised as an article). Surely numbers will vary from page to page and from one link description to another.
All in all I think it is in many cases easier to increase your organic listings' CTR than to move up in the rankings for competitive keywords.
One last tip for your page titles - use a title of the type "list of your keywords - yoursite.com", not "yoursite.com - list of your keywords". The first title type has a higher CTR.

Site Navigation and Search Engine Optimization

2007-08-01T19:35:00.000-07:00

Optimizing site navigation for high rankings is easy and very powerful. Follow the recommendations in this article and you will improve your search engine positions.

No Graphical Menus, Please!
Graphical menus may look good, but they prevent you from exploiting one of the most important factors - anchor text. Search engines cannot recognize text on images. However, they give a lot of weight to anchor text (the text of your links). Use simple text links for navigation.

Put your keywords in the anchor text of all your navigational links.
Let's say that you optimize your main page for the phrase "keyword1 keyword2". You certainly have no benefit of links such as "products", "information", "articles", "about" etc. Use longer navigational links with the anchor text "keyword1 keyword2 products", "keyword1 keyword2 articles" etc. etc. Put a maximal number of instances of your key phrases in your navigational links. Anchor hits help both the page the link it is placed on, and the page it points to. To accommodate the longer links, you may need to redesign your whole site. Do it. It's worth it.

Use good and descriptive anchor title tags
Your navigational links should look like this: keyword rich anchor text. The anchor title tags are given a tiny amount of weight, but it is better to have it, than not.

Divert PageRank to your most important pages
To do it, follow these two rules:
1. Link to your most important pages from every page of your site using appropriate anchor text
2. PageRank is divided among all links on a page. Remove all unimportant links from every page and you will concentrate your PageRank power into your important pages. For example, you may not need a link to your Contacts page from every other page. For every page, think about which unimportant links you can remove without making your site strange and unusable, and do remove them.

Quick Search Engine Optimization Check List

2007-08-01T19:32:00.000-07:00

This article provides a list of quick do-it-yourself search engine optimization tips.

1. Capitalize
Google keeps capitalization information and capitalized keywords are given slightly more weight. Go over all page elements and capitalize the keywords, wherever applicable. Capitalize your titles, alt image tags, anchor title tags, anchor texts etc.

2. Write your Alt Image Tags
Don't leave an image without an alt image tag. Use your keywords in the alt image tags. Capitalize. Check your site all over for images without alt tags.

3. Write your Anchor Title Tags
All your links should use anchor title tags with keyword rich descriptions. Links should be written as: keyword rich anchor text

4. Use simple Text Navigation
Search engines don't recognize text on images. Use keyword rich text links for navigation.

5. Rewrite your Anchor Texts?
On page links with your keywords increase the relevancy of the page the links are placed on. If you have a page about colon cancer, use links such as "Colon Cancer Info", "About Colon Cancer", "Colon Cancer Articles".

6. Bold your Keywords
Wherever applicable, bold your keywords. Bolded on page text carries more weight. Note: bolded links don't help.

7. Rework your Title?
If you page targets a short keyword phrase, use two instances of your keywords in your page title. That will help a lot.
8. Use more Keyword Phrases
Think about including more keyword phrases throughout your page. Use direct phrases, because they carry a lot more weight. Example: use "Search Engine Optimization" instead of "Search Engine …some words.. Optimization".

Static Versus Dynamic URLs

2007-08-01T19:29:00.000-07:00

Based on the previous section, you might have gotten the impression that the algorithms of search engines try to humiliate every designer effort to make a site gorgeous. Well, it has been explained why search engines do not like image, movies, applets and other extras. Now, you might think that search engines are far too cheeky to dislike dynamic URLs either. Honestly, users are also not in love with URLs like http://domain.com/product.php?cid=1&pid=5 because such URLs do not tell much about the contents of the page.

There are a couple of good reasons why static URLs score better than dynamic URLs. First, dynamic URLs are not always there – i.e. the page is generated on request after the user performs some kind of action (fills a form and submits it or performs a search using the site's search engine). In a sense, such pages are nonexistent for search engines, because they index the Web by crawling it, not by filling in forms.

Second, even if a dynamic page has already been generated by a previous user request and is stored on the server, search engines might just skip it if it has too many question marks and other special symbols in it. Once upon a time search engines did not index dynamic pages at all, while today they do index them but generally slower than they index static pages.

The idea is not to revert to static HTML only. Database-driven sites are great but it will be much better if you serve your pages to the search engines and users in a format they can easily handle. One of the solutions of the dynamic URLs problem is called URL rewriting. There are special tools (different for different platforms and servers) that rewrite URLs in a friendlier format, so they appear in the browser like normal HTML pages.

Google Webmaster Central To Solve Canonical Issues

2007-08-01T19:28:00.000-07:00

The rebranded Google Webmaster Central (formerly Google Sitemaps) is set to finally resolve Google’s canonical issues. For some time Google has had problems with the www.domain.com/.. and domain.com/.. versions of site URLs (detecting if they are one and the same site, distributing linking popularity properly). Many websites have incoming links pointing to both the www.domain.com and domain.com URL versions. The problem was exacerbated when the internal linking structure uses relative URLs (links like /article.htm opposed to links like www.domain.com/article.htm).Recently Google added a new feature in their Webmaster Tools section (former Google Sitemaps), where every webmaster could set a preference for www. or non-www. URLs on every validated domain. Instead of guessing, you simply tell Google to use the www. or non-www. URL versions for every site of yours. This helps properly aggregating PageRank and showing the proper URLs within the SERPs.In addition, Google offers a variety of other goodies like giving you crawling stats, problems, penalization info, reinclusion requests for penalized sites etc. I’ve been using these features for some time and they are getting better and better and are a must for every webmaster.It is interesting to know what kind of stats does Google keep for every site in its index. Judging from their Webmaster Tools section, Google keeps ranking information (for which keywords does your site rank and at what positions). As I have written numerous times, ranking for as many keywords as possible (even non-competitive) gives you a ranking boost for more competitive ones (content is king).Another great stat that Google shows is the most common words used within content on your sites and in the anchor text of links pointing to your site. I have noticed that Google has associated the anchor text keywords of some of my sites with words that do NOT appear in the anchor text, but words close to the links. So, yes, Google looks at text around links and probably uses it for scoring purposes.The keywords associated with your content and links do not appear for all sites. I’ve noticed that when I added my sites using the www.domain.com version as the URL name of the site, I didn’t get these stats. When I set a domain preference for the www.domain.com versions, Google added the domain.com versions to the list of my sites and now shows these keyword associations when I click on the non-www. versions. I think that’s a glitch, but anyway, Google shows these vital stats when you have your sites added as non-www. domains.I highly recommend the Google’s Webmaster Central Tools to all webmasters, especially the domain preference feature.

Content Is King

2007-08-01T19:26:00.000-07:00

If you are new to SEO, it might be a surprise for you that text is one of the driving forces to higher rankings. But it is a fact. Search engines (and your readers) love fresh content and providing them with regularly updated, relevant content is a recipe for success. Generally, when a site is frequently updated, this increases the probability that the spider will revisit the site sooner. You can't take for sure that if you update your site daily, the spider will visit it even once a week but if you do not update your contents regularly, this will certainly drop you to from the top of search results.

For company sites that are not focused on writing but on manufacturing constantly adding text can be a problem because generally company sites are not reading rooms or online magazines that update their content daily, weekly or monthly but even for company sites there are reasonable solutions. No matter what your business is, one is for sure – it is always relevant to include a news section on your site – it can be company news or RSS feeds but this will keep the ball rolling.

1. Topical Themes or How to Frequently Add Content to Your Site
If you are doing the SEO for an online magazine, you can consider yourself lucky – fresh content is coming all the time and you just need to occasionally arrange a heading or two or a couple of paragraphs to make the site SEO-friendly. But even if you are doing a SEO for an ordinary company site, it is not all that bad - there are ways to constantly get fresh content that fits into the topic of the site.

One of the intricacies of optimizing a company site is that it has to be serious. Also, if your content smells like advertising and has no practical value for your visitors, this content is not that valuable. For instance, if you are a trade company, you can have promotional texts about your products. But have in mind that these texts must be informational, not just sales hype. And if you have a lot of products to sell, or frequently get new products, or make periodical promotions of particular products and product groups – you can post all this to your site and you will have fresh, topical content.

Also, depending on what your business is about, you can include different kinds of self-updating information like lists of hot new products, featured products, discounted items, even online calculators or order trackers. Unlike promotional pages, this might neither bring you many new visitors, nor improve your ratings but is more than nothing.

One more potential traffic trigger for company sites are news sections. Here you can include news about past and coming events, post reports about various activities, announce new undertakings, etc. Some companies even go further – their CEO keeps a blog, where he or she writes in a more informal style about what is going in the company, in the industry as a whole, or in the world in general. These blogs do attract readers, especially if the information is true, rather than the official story.

An alternative way to get fresh free content are RSS feeds. RSS feeds are gaining more and more popularity and with a little bit of searching, you can get free syndicated content for almost any topic you can think of.

2. Bold and Italic Text
When you have lots of text, the next question is how to make the important items stand out from the crowd – for both humans and search engines. While search engines (and their spiders – the programs that crawl the Web and index pages) cannot read text the way humans do, they do have ways of getting the meaning of a piece of text. Headings are one possibility, bold and italic are another way to emphasize a word or a couple of words that are important. Search engines read the and text and get the idea that what is in bold and/or italic is more important than the rest of the text. But do not use bold and italic too much – this will spoil the effect, rather than make the whole page a search engine favorite.

3. Duplicate Content
When you get new content, there is one important issue – is this content original? Because if it is not, i.e. it is stolen from another site, this will get you into trouble. But even if it is not illegal, i.e. you obtained it for free from an article feed, have in mind that you might not be only one on the Web, who has this particular stuff. If you have the rights to do it, you can change the text a little, so it is not an exact copy of another page and cannot be labeled “duplicate content” by search engines. If you don't manage to escape the duplicate content filter that search engines have imposed recently in their attempts to filter stolen, scrapped, or simply copied contents, your pages could be removed from search results!

Duplicate content became an issue when tricky webmasters started making multiple copies of the same page (under a different name) in order to fool search engines that they have more content than they actually do. As a result of this malpractice, search engines responded with a duplicate content filter that removes suspicious pages. Unfortunately, this filter sometimes removes quite legitimate pages, like product descriptions given from a manufacturer to all its resellers, which must be kept exactly the same.

You see, duplicate content can be a serious problem. But it is not an obstacle that cannot be overcome. First, you need to periodically check the Web for pages that are similar to yours. You can use http://copyscape.com. If you identify pages that are similar to yours (and it is not you who have illegitimately copied them), you could notify the webmaster of the respective site(s) to remove them. Also, you could change a little the text on your site, hoping that this way you will avoid the duplicate content penalty. Even with product descriptions, you can add commentary or opinion on the same page and this could be a way out.

Try the Similar Page Checker to check the similarity between two URLs.

Increase Traffic with Promoting Your Site

2007-08-01T18:33:00.000-07:00

The main purpose of SEO is to make your site visible to search engines, thus leading to higher rankings in search results pages, which in turn brings more traffic to your site. And having more visitors (and above all buyers) is ultimately the goal in sites promotion. For truth's sake, SEO is only one alternative to promote your site and increase traffic – there are many other online and offline ways to do accomplish the goal of getting high traffic and reaching your target audience. We are not going to explore them in this tutorial but just keep in mind that search engines are not the only way to get visitors to your site, although they seem to be a preferable choice and a relatively easy way to do it.

1. Submitting Your Site to Search Directories, forums and special sites
After you have finished optimizing your new site, time comes to submit it to search engines. Generally, with search engines you don't have to do anything special in order to get your site included in their indices – they will come and find you. Well, it cannot be said exactly when they will visit your site for the first time and at what intervals they will visit it later but there is hardly anything that you can to do invite them. Sure, you can go to their Submit a Site pages in submit the URL of your new site but by doing this do not expect that they will hop to you right away. What is more, even if you submit your URL, most search engines reserve the right to judge whether to crawl your site or not. Anyway, here are the URLs for submitting pages in the three major search engines: Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

In addition to search engines, you may also want to have your site included in search directories as well. Although search directories also list sites that are relevant to a given topic, they are different from search engines in several aspects. First, search directories are usually maintained by humans and the sites in them are reviewed for relevancy after they have been submitted. Second, search directories do not use crawlers to get URLs, so you need to go to them and submit your site but once you do this, you can stay there forever and no more efforts on your side are necessary. Some of the most popular search directories are DMOZ and Yahoo! (the directory, not the search engine itself) and here are the URLs of their submissions pages: DMOZ and Yahoo!.

Sometimes posting a link to your site in the right forums or special sites can do miracles in terms of traffic. You need to find the forums and sites that are leaders in the fields of interest to you but generally even a simple search in Google or the other major search engines will retrieve their names. For instance, if you are a hardware freak, type “hardware forums” in the search box and in a second you will have a list of sites that are favorites to other hardware freaks. Then you need to check the sites one by one because some of them might not allow posting links to commercial sites. Posting into forums is more time-consuming than submitting to search engines but it could also be pretty rewarding.

2. Specialized Search Engines
Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are not the only search engines on Earth, nor even the only general-purpose ones. There are many other general-purpose and specialized search engines and some of them can be really helpful for reaching your target audience. You just can't imagine for how many niches specialized search engines exist – from law, to radiostations, to educational one! Some of them are actually huge sites that gather Webwide resources on a particular topic but almost all of them have sections for submitting links to external sites of interest. So, after you find the specialized search engines in your niche, go to their site and submit your URL – this could prove more trafficworthy than striving to get to the top of Google.

3. Paid Ads and Submissions
We have already mentioned some other alternatives to search engines – forums, specialized sites and search engines, search directories – but if you need to make sure that your site will be noticed, you can always resort to paid ads and submissions. Yes, paid listings are a fast and guaranteed way to appear in search results and most of the major search engines accept payment to put your URL in the Paid Links section for keywords of interest to you but you also must have in mind that users generally do not trust paid links as much as they do with the normal ones – in a sense it looks like you are bribing the search engine to place you where you can't get on your own, so think twice about the pros and cons of paying to get listed.

How to Build Backlinks

2007-08-01T18:27:00.000-07:00

It is out of question that quality backlinks are crucial to SEO success. More, the question is how to get them. While with on-page content optimization it seems easier because everything is up to you to do and decide, with backlinks it looks like you have to rely on others to work for your success. Well, this is partially true because while backlinks are links that start on another site and point to yours, you can discuss with the Web master of the other site details like the anchor text, for example. Yes, it is not the same as administering your own sites – i.e. you do not have total control over backlinks – but still there are many aspects that can be negotiated.

Getting Backlinks the Natural Way
The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better. But in practice it is not exactly like this. Or at least you cannot always rely on the fact that your contents is good and people will link to you. Yes, if your content is good and relevant you can get a lot of quality backlinks, including from sites with similar topic as yours (and these are the most valuable kind of backlinks, especially if the anchor text contains your keywords) but what you get without efforts could be less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you will have to resort to other ways of acquiring quality backlinks as described next.

Ways to Build Backlinks
Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome and the time you spend building them is not wasted. Among the acceptable ways of building quality backlinks are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories. The unacceptable ways include inter-linking (linking from one site to another site, which is owned by the same owner or exists mainly for the purpose to be a link farm), linking to spam sites or sites that host any kind of illegal content, purchasing links in bulk, linking to link farms, etc.
The first step in building backlinks is to find the places from which you can get quality backlinks. A valuable assistant in this process is the Backlink Builder tool. When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of sites where you can post an article, message, posting, or simply a backlink to your site. After you have the list of potential backlink partners, it is up to you to visit each of the sites and post your content with the backlink to your site in it.
You might wonder why sites as those, listed by the Backlink Builder tool provide such a precious asset as backlinks for free. The answer is simple – they need content for their site. When you post an article, or submit a link to your site, you do not get paid for this. You provide them for free with something they need – content – and in return they also provide you for free with something you need – quality backlinks. It is a free trade, as long as the sites you post your content or links are respected and you don't post fake links or content.

Getting Listed in Directories
If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ and Yahoo is a must – not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

Forums and Article Directories
Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.
While forum postings can be short and do not require much effort, submitting articles to directories can be more time-consuming because generally articles are longer than posts and need careful thinking while writing them. But it is also worth and it is not so difficult to do.

Content Exchange and Affiliate Programs
Content exchange and affiliate programs are similar to the previous method of getting quality backlinks. For instance, you can offer to interested sites RSS feeds for free. When the other site publishes your RSS feed, you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.
Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers) and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

News Announcements and Press Releases
Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites (for instance, here is a list of some of them) that publish for free or for a fee news announcements and press releases. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many, many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Backlink Building Practices to Avoid
One of the practices that is to be avoided is link exchange. There are many programs, which offer to barter links. The principle is simple – you put a link to a site, they put a backlink to your site. There are a couple of important things to consider with link exchange programs. First, take care about the ratio between outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links are times your inbound, this is bad. Second (and more important) is the risk that your link exchange partners are link farms. If this is the case, you could even be banned from search engines, so it is too risky to indulge in link exchange programs.
Linking to suspicious places is something else that you must avoid. While it is true that search engines do not punish you if you have backlinks from such places because it is supposed that you have no control over what bad guys link to, if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. For more details about bad neighbors, check the Bad Neighborhood article. Also, beware of getting tons of links in a short period of time because this still looks artificial and suspicious.

Links is Another Important SEO Item

2007-08-01T18:24:00.000-07:00

1. Why Links Are Important
Probably the word that associates best with Web is “links”. That is what hypertext is all about – you link to pages you like and get linked by pages that like your site. Actually, the Web is woven out of interconnected pages and spiders follow the links, when indexing the Web. If not many sites link to you, then it might take ages for search engines to find your site and even if they find you, it is unlikely that you will have high rankings because the quality and quantity of links is part of the algorithms of search engines for calculating relevancy.

2. Inbound and Outbound Links
Put in layman's terms, there are two types of links that are important for SEO – inbound and outbound links. Outbound links are links that start from your site and lead to another one, while inbound links, or backlinks, come from an external site to yours, e.g. if a.com links to mydomain.com, the link from a.com is an inbound link for mydomain.com.

Backlinks are very important because they are supposed to be a measure of the popularity of your site among the Web audience. It is necessary to say that not all backlinks are equal. There are good and bad backlinks. Good backlinks are from reputable places - preferably from sites with a similar theme. These links do boost search engine ranking. Bad backlinks come from suspicious places – like link farms – and are something to be avoided. Well, if you are backlinked without your knowledge and consent, maybe you should drop the Webmaster a line, asking him or her to remove the backlink.

If you are not heavily backlinked, don't worry - buying links is an established practice and if you are serious about getting to the top, you may need to consider it. But before doing this, you should consider some free alternatives. For instance, some of the good places where you can get quality backlinks are Web directories like http://dmoz.org or http://dir.yahoo.com.

First, look for suitable sites to backlink to you using the Backlinks Builder below. After you identify potential backlinks, it's time to contact the Web master of the site and to start negotiating terms. Sometimes you can agree to a barter deal – i.e. a link exchange – they will put on their site N links to your site and you will put on your site N links to their site - but have in mind that this is a bad, risky deal and you should always try to avoid it.

Internal links (i.e. links from one page to another page on the same site) are also important but not as much as backlinks. In this connection it is necessary to say, that using images for links might be prettier but it is a SEO killer. Instead of having buttons for links, use simple text links. Since search engines spider the text on a page, they can't see all the designer miracles, like gradient buttons or flash animations, so when possible, either avoid using them, or provide a meaningful textual description in the tag, as described next.

3. Anchor text
Anchor text is the most important item in a backlink. While it does matter where a link comes from (i.e. a reputable place or a link farm), what matters more is the actual text the link starts from. Put simply, anchor text is the word(s) that you click on to open the hyperlink – e.g. if we have the best search engine, than “the best search engine” is the anchor text for the hyperlink to google.com. You see that you might have a backlink from a valuable site but if the anchor text is something like “an example of a complete failure”, you will hardly be happy with it.
When you check your backlinks, always check what their anchor text is and if there is a keyword in it. It is a great SEO boost to have a lot of backlinks from quality sites and the anchor text to include our keywords. Check the anchor text of inbound backlinks is with the Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer tool below. Besides the anchor text itself, the text around it is also important.

4. Link Practices That Are To Be Avoided
Similar to keyword stuffing, purchasing links in bulk is a practice to be avoided. It gets suspicious if you bartered 1000 links with another site in a day or two. What is more, search engines keep track of link farms (sites that sell links in bulk) and since bought links are a way to manipulate search results, this practice gets punished by search engines. So avoid dealing with link farms because it can cause more harm than do good. Also, outbound links from your site to known Web spammers or “bad guys” are also to be avoided.
As mentioned, link exchange is not a clean deal. Even if it boosts your ranking, it can have many other negative aspects in the long run. First, you do not know if the other party will keep their promise – i.e. they might remove some of the links to you. Second, they might change the context the link appears into. Third, it is really suspicious if you seem to be “married” to another site and 50% or more of your inbound and outbound links are from/to this direction.
When links are concerned, one aspect to have in mind is the ratio between inbound and outbound links. Generally speaking, if your outbound links are ten times your inbound links, this is bad but it also varies on a case by case basis. If you have a site that links to news sources or has RSS feeds, then having many outbound links is the inevitable price of fresh content.

What is Robots.txt

2007-08-01T18:20:00.000-07:00

Robots.txt

It is great when search engines frequently visit your site and index your content but often there are cases when indexing parts of your online content is not what you want. For instance, if you have two versions of a page (one for viewing in the browser and one for printing), you'd rather have the printing version excluded from crawling, otherwise you risk being imposed a duplicate content penalty. Also, if you happen to have sensitive data on your site that you do not want the world to see, you will also prefer that search engines do not index these pages (although in this case the only sure way for not indexing sensitive data is to keep it offline on a separate machine). Additionally, if you want to save some bandwidth by excluding images, stylesheets and javascript from indexing, you also need a way to tell spiders to keep away from these items.

One way to tell search engines which files and folders on your Web site to avoid is with the use of the Robots metatag. But since not all search engines read metatags, the Robots matatag can simply go unnoticed. A better way to inform search engines about your will is to use a robots.txt file.

What Is Robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a text (not html) file you put on your site to tell search robots which pages you would like them not to visit. Robots.txt is by no means mandatory for search engines but generally search engines obey what they are asked not to do. It is important to clarify that robots.txt is not a way from preventing search engines from crawling your site (i.e. it is not a firewall, or a kind of password protection) and the fact that you put a robots.txt file is something like putting a note “Please, do not enter” on an unlocked door – e.g. you cannot prevent thieves from coming in but the good guys will not open to door and enter. That is why we say that if you have really sen sitive data, it is too naïve to rely on robots.txt to protect it from being indexed and displayed in search results.

The location of robots.txt is very important. It must be in the main directory because otherwise user agents (search engines) will not be able to find it – they do not search the whole site for a file named robots.txt. Instead, they look first in the main directory (i.e. http://mydomain.com/robots.txt) and if they don't find it there, they simply assume that this site does not have a robots.txt file and therefore they index everything they find along the way. So, if you don't put robots.txt in the right place, do not be surprised that search engines index your whole site.

The concept and structure of robots.txt has been developed more than a decade ago and if you are interested to learn more about it, visit http://www.robotstxt.org/ or you can go straight to the Standard for Robot Exclusion because in this article we will deal only with the most important aspects of a robots.txt file. Next we will continue with the structure a robots.txt file.

Structure of a Robots.txt File

The structure of a robots.txt is pretty simple (and barely flexible) – it is an endless list of user agents and disallowed files and directories. Basically, the syntax is as follows:

User-agent:

Disallow:

“User-agent” are search engines' crawlers and disallow: lists the files and directories to be excluded from indexing. In addition to “user-agent:” and “disallow:” entries, you can include comment lines – just put the # sign at the beginning of the line:

# All user agents are disallowed to see the /temp directory.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

The Traps of a Robots.txt File

When you start making complicated files – i.e. you decide to allow different user agents access to different directories – problems can start, if you do not pay special attention to the traps of a robots.txt file. Common mistakes include typos and contradicting directives. Typos are misspelled user-agents, directories, missing colons after User-agent and Disallow, etc. Typos can be tricky to find but in some cases validation tools help.

The more serious problem is with logical errors. For instance:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /temp/

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

The above example is from a robots.txt that allows all agents to access everything on the site except the /temp directory. Up to here it is fine but later on there is another record that specifies more restrictive terms for Googlebot. When Googlebot starts reading robots.txt, it will see that all user agents (including Googlebot itself) are allowed to all folders except /temp/. This is enough for Googlebot to know, so it will not read the file to the end and will index everything except /temp/ - including /images/ and /cgi-bin/, which you think you have told it not to touch. You see, the structure of a robots.txt file is simple but still serious mistakes can be made easily.

Tools to Generate and Validate a Robots.txt File

Having in mind the simple syntax of a robots.txt file, you can always read it to see if everything is OK but it is much easier to use a validator, like this one: http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml. These tools report about common mistakes like missing slashes or colons, which if not detected compromise your efforts. For instance, if you have typed:

User agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

this is wrong because there is no slash between “user” and “agent” and the syntax is incorrect.

In those cases, when you have a complex robots.txt file – i.e. you give different instructions to different user agents or you have a long list of directories and subdirectories to exclude, writing the file manually can be a real pain. But do not worry – there are tools that will generate the file for you. What is more, there are visual tools that allow to point and select which files and folders are to be excluded. But even if you do not feel like buying a graphical tool for robots.txt generation, there are online tools to assist you. For instance, the Server-Side Robots Generator offers a dropdown list of user agents and a text box for you to list the files you don't want indexed. Honestly, it is not much of a help, unless you want to set specific rules for different search engines because in any case it is up to you to type the list of directories but is more than nothing.

Metatags

2007-08-01T18:17:00.001-07:00

A couple of years ago tags were the primary tool for search engine optimization and there was a direct correlation between what you wrote there and your position in search results. However, algorithms got better and today the importance of metadata is decreasing day by day, especially with Google. But still some search engines show metadata (under the clickable link in search results), so users can read what you have written and if they think it is relevant, they might go to your site. Also, some of the specialized search engines still use the metatags when ranking your site.
The meta Description tag is are one more way for you to write a description of your site, thus pointing search engines to what themes and topics your Web site is relevant to. It does not hurt to include at least a brief description, so don't skip it. For instance, for the dog adoption site, the meta Description tag could be something like this:
A potential use of the meta Keywords tags is to include a list of keywords that you think are relevant to your pages. The major search engines will not take this into account but still it is a chance for you to emphasize your target keywords. You may consider including alternative spellings (or even common misspellings of your keywords) in the meta Keywords tag. For instance, if I were to write the meta keywords tag for the dog adoption site, I would do it like that: . It is a small boost to search engine top ranking but why miss the chance?
The meta Robots tag deserves more attention. In this tag you specify the pages that you do NOT want crawled and indexed. It happens that on your site you have contents that you need to keep there but you don't want it indexed. Listing this pages in the meta Robots tag is one way to exclude them (the other way is by using a robots.txt file and generally this is the better way to do it) from being indexed.

Keywords – the Most Important Item in SEO

2007-08-01T18:11:00.000-07:00

Keywords are the most important SEO item for every search engine – actually they are what search strings are matched against. So you see that it is very important that you optimize your site for the right keywords. This seems easy at first but when you get into more detail, it might be a bit confusing to correctly determine the keywords. But with a little research and thinking the problem of selecting the right keywords to optimize for can be solved.

1. Choosing the Right Keywords to Optimize For
It seems that the time when you could easily top the results for a one-word search string is centuries ago. Now, when the Web is so densely populated with sites, it is next to impossible to achieve constant top ratings for a one-word search string. Achieving constant top ratings for two-word or three-word search strings is a more realistic goal. If you examine closely the dynamics of search results for popular one-word keywords, you might notice that it is so easy one week to be in the first ten results and the next one– to have fallen out of the first 30 results because the competition for popular one-word keywords is so fierce and other sites have replaced you.
Of course, you can include one-word strings in your keywords list but if they are not backed up by more expressions, do not dream of high ratings. For instance, if you have a site about dogs, “dog” is a mandatory keyword but if you do not optimize for more words, like “dog owners”, “dog breeds”, “dog food”, or even “canine”, success is unlikely, especially for such a popular keyword. The examples given here are by no means the ultimate truth about how to optimize a dog site but they are good enough to show that you need to think broad when choosing the keywords.
Generally, when you start optimization, the first thing you need to consider is the keywords that describe the content of your site best and that are most likely to be used by users to find you. Ideally, you know your users well and can guess correctly what search strings they are likely to use to search for you. One issue to consider is synonyms. Very often users will use a different word for the same thing. For instance, in the example with the dog site, “canine” is a synonym and it is for sure that there will be users who will use it, so it does not hurt to include it now and then on your pages. But do not rush to optimize for every synonym you can think of – search engines themselves have algorithms that include synonyms in the keyword match, especially for languages like English.

Instead, think of more keywords that are likely to be used to describe your site. Thinking thematically is especially good because search engines tend to rate a page higher if it belongs to a site the theme of which fits into the keyword string. In this aspect it is important that your site is concentrated around a particular theme – i.e. dogs. It might be difficult to think of all the relevant keywords on your own but that is why tools are for. For instance, the Website Keyword Suggestions Tool below can help you to see how search engines determine the theme of your web site and what keywords fit into this theme. You can also try Google's Keyword Tool to get more suggestions about which keywords are hot and which are not.

When choosing the keywords to optimize for, you need to consider not only their relevancy to your site and the expected monthly number of searches for these particular keywords. Very often narrow searches are more valuable because the users that come to your site are those that are really interested in your product. If we go on with the dog example, you might discover that the “adopt a dog” keyphrase brings you more visitors because you have a special section on your site where you give advice on what to look for when adopting a dog. This page is not of interest of current dog owners but to potential dog owners only, who might be not so many in number but are your target audience and the overall effect of attracting this niche can be better than attracting everybody who is interested in dogs in general. So, when you look at the numbers of search hits per month, consider the unique hits that fit into the theme of your site.

2. Keyword Density
After you have chosen the keywords that describe your site and are supposedly of interest to your users, the next step is to make your site keyword-rich and to have good keyword density for your target keywords. Keyword density is a common measure of how relevant a page is. Generally, the idea is that the higher the keyword density, the more relevant to the search string a page is. The recommended density is 3-7% for the major 2 or 3 keywords and 1-2% for minor keywords. Try the Keyword Density Checker below to determine the keyword density of your website.

Although there are no strict rules, try optimizing for a reasonable number of keywords – 5 or 10 is OK. If you attempt to optimize for a list of 300, you will soon see that it is just not possible to have a good keyword density for more than a few keywords, without making the text sound artificial and stuffed with keywords. And what is worse, there are severe penalties (including ban from the search engine) for keyword stuffing because this is considered an unethical practice that tries to manipulate search results.

3. Keywords in Special Places
Keywords are very important not only as quantity but as quality as well – i.e. if you have more keywords in the page title, the headings, the first paragraphs – this counts more that if you have many keywords at the bottom of the page. The reason is that the URL (and especially the domain name), file names and directory names, the page title, the headings for the separate sections are more important than ordinary text on the page and therefore, all equal, if you have the same keyword density as your competitors but you have keywords in the URL, this will boost your ranking incredibly, especially with Yahoo!.

a. Keywords in URLs and File Names
The domain name and the whole URL of a site tell a lot about it. The presumption is that if your site is about dogs, you will have “dog”, “dogs”, or “puppy” as part of your domain name. For instance, if your site is mainly about adopting dogs, it is much better to name your dog site “dog-adopt.net” than “animal-care.org”, for example, because in the first case you have two major keywords in the URL, while in the second one you have no more than one potential minor keyword.
When hunting for keyword rich domain names, don't get greedy. While from a SEO point of view it is better to have 5 keywords in the URL, just imagine how long and difficult to memorize the URL will be. So you need to strike a balance between the keywords in the URL and site usability, which says that more than 3 words in the URL is a way too much. Probably you will not be able to come on your own with tons of good suggestions. Additionally, even if you manage to think of a couple of good domain names, they might be already taken. In such cases tools like the Tool below can come very handy.
File names and directory names are also important. Often search engines will give preference to pages that have a keyword in the file name. For instance http://mydomain.com/dog-adopt.html is not as good as http://dog-adopt.net/dog-adopt.html but is certainly better than http://mydomain.com/animal-care.html. The advantage of keywords in file names over keywords in URLs is that they are easier to change, if you decide to move to another niche, for example.

b. Keywords in Page Titles
The page title is another special place because the contents of the , or even longer.

c. Keywords in Headings
Normally headings separate paragraphs into related subtopics and from a literary point of view, it may be pointless to have a heading after every other paragraph but from SEO point of view it is extremely good to have as many headings on a page as possible, especially if they have the keywords in them.
There are no technical length limits for the contents of the

,

, ... tags but common sense says that too long headings are bad for page readability. So, like with URLs, you need to be wise with the length of headings. Another issue you need to consider is how the heading will be displayed. If it is Heading 1 (

), generally this means larger font size and in this case it is recommendable to have less than 7-8 words in the heading, otherwise it might spread on 2 or 3 lines, which is not good and if you can avoid it – do it.

Introduction – What Is SEO

2007-08-01T18:00:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often considered the more technical part of Web marketing. This is true because SEO does help in the promotion of sites and at the same time it requires some technical knowledge – at least familiarity with basic HTML. SEO is sometimes also called SEO copyrighting because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines deal with text. Generally, SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine-friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.
One of the basic truths in SEO is that even if you do all the things that are necessary to do, this does not automatically guarantee you top ratings but if you neglect basic rules, this certainly will not go unnoticed. Also, if you set realistic goals – i.e to get into the top 30 results in Google for a particular keyword, rather than be the number one for 10 keywords in 5 search engines, you will feel happier and more satisfied with your results.
Although SEO helps to increase the traffic to one's site, SEO is not advertising. Of course, you can be included in paid search results for given keywords but basically the idea behind the SEO techniques is to get top placement because your site is relevant to a particular search term, not because you pay.
SEO can be a 30-minute job or a permanent activity. Sometimes it is enough to do some generic SEO in order to get high in search engines – for instance, if you are a leader for rare keywords, then you do not have a lot to do in order to get decent placement. But in most cases, if you really want to be at the top, you need to pay special attention to SEO and devote significant amounts of time and effort to it. Even if you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work and which items are most important in SEO.

1. How Search Engines Work

The first basic truth you need to learn about SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren't. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.
First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by e piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified. Sometimes crawlers will not visit your site for a month or two, so during this time your SEO efforts will not be rewarded. But there is nothing you can do about it, so just keep quiet.
What you can do is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you'd better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. - in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.

After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings.
When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one pages (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search string.
There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you'd like to be at the top.
The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.

2. Differences Between the Major Search Engines
Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. For different search engines different factors are important. There were times, when SEO experts joked that the algorithms of Yahoo! are intentionally made just the opposite of those of Google. While this might have a grain of truth, it is a matter a fact that the major search engines like different stuff and if you plan to conquer more than one of them, you need to optimize carefully.
There are many examples of the differences between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and MSN, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are very, very important. Also, for Google sites are like wine – the older, the better, while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time till your site gets mature to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!.