Internet Marketing Services, Search Engine Optimization

Working of Crawler based Search Engines

2009-07-03T22:25:00.000-07:00

Search for anything using your favorite crawler-based search engine. Nearly instantly, the search engine will sort through the millions of pages it knows about and present you with ones that match your topic. The matches will even be ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first. Of course, the search engines don't always get it right. Non-relevant pages make it through, and sometimes it may take a little more digging to find what you are looking for. But, by and large, search engines do an amazing job.

Unfortunately, search engines don't have the ability to ask a few questions to focus your search. They also can't rely on judgment and past experience to rank web pages, in the way humans can.

So, how do crawler-based search engines go about determining relevancy, when confronted with hundreds of millions of web pages to sort through? They follow a set of rules, known as an algorithm. Exactly how a particular search engine's algorithm works is a closely-kept trade secret. However, all major search engines follow the general rules below.

Location, Location, Location...and Frequency
One of the the main rules in a ranking algorithm involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Call it the location/frequency method, for short.Pages with the search terms appearing in the HTML title tag are often assumed to be more relevant than others to the topic.Search engines will also check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning.

Frequency is the other major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages.

Spice in the Recipe
Now it's time to qualify the location/frequency method described above. All the major search engines follow it to some degree, in the same way cooks may follow a standard chili recipe. But cooks like to add their own secret ingredients. In the same way, search engines add spice to the location/frequency method. Nobody does it exactly the same, which is one reason why the same search on different search engines produces different results.
To begin with, some search engines index more web pages than others. Some search engines also index web pages more often than others. The result is that no search engine has the exact same collection of web pages to search through. That naturally produces differences, when comparing their results.
Search engines may also penalize pages or exclude them from the index, if they detect search engine "spamming." An example is when a word is repeated hundreds of times on a page, to increase the frequency and propel the page higher in the listings. Search engines watch for common spamming methods in a variety of ways, including following up on complaints from their users.

Off The Page Factors
Crawler-based search engines have plenty of experience now with webmasters who constantly rewrite their web pages in an attempt to gain better rankings. Some sophisticated webmasters may even go to great lengths to "reverse engineer" the location/frequency systems used by a particular search engine. Because of this, all major search engines now also make use of "off the page" ranking criteria.
Off the page factors are those that a webmasters cannot easily influence. Chief among these is link analysis. By analyzing how pages link to each other, a search engine can both determine what a page is about and whether that page is deemed to be "important" and thus deserving of a ranking boost. In addition, sophisticated techniques are used to screen out attempts by webmasters to build "artificial" links designed to boost their rankings.

Another off the page factor is click through measurement. In short, this means that a search engine may watch what results someone selects for a particular search, then eventually drop high-ranking pages that aren't attracting clicks, while promoting lower-ranking pages that do pull in visitors. As with link analysis, systems are used to compensate for artificial links generated by eager webmasters.

Comments and Queries are welcomed!

Working method of Search Engines- General

2009-07-02T22:13:00.000-07:00

The term "search engine" is often used generically to describe both crawler-based search engines and human-powered directories. These two types of search engines gather their listings in radically different ways.

Crawler-Based Search Engines
Crawler-based search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. They "crawl" or "spider" the web, then people search through what they have found. If you change your web pages, crawler-based search engines eventually find these changes, and that can affect how you are listed. Page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role.

Human-Powered Directories
A human-powered directory, such as the Open Directory, depends on humans for its listings. You submit a short description to the directory for your entire site, or editors write one for sites they review. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted.
Changing your web pages has no effect on your listing. Things that are useful for improving a listing with a search engine have nothing to do with improving a listing in a directory. The only exception is that a good site, with good content, might be more likely to get reviewed for free than a poor site.

The Parts Of A Crawler-Based Search Engine
Crawler-based search engines have three major elements. First is the spider, also called the crawler. The spider visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is what it means when someone refers to a site being "spidered" or "crawled." The spider returns to the site on a regular basis, such as every month or two, to look for changes.

Everything the spider finds goes into the second part of the search engine, the index. The index, sometimes called the catalog, is like a giant book containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a web page changes, then this book is updated with new information.Sometimes it can take a while for new pages or changes that the spider finds to be added to the index. Thus, a web page may have been "spidered" but not yet "indexed." Until it is indexed -- added to the index -- it is not available to those searching with the search engine. It may therefore happen that you could not find your site on search engine for the relevant keywords even though you have submitted it to search engine.

Search engine software is the third part of a search engine. This is the program that sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes is most relevant.

Major Search Engines: The Same, But Different
All crawler-based search engines have the basic parts described above, but there are differences in how these parts are tuned. That is why the same search on different search engines often produces different results. Information on this page has been drawn from the help pages of each search engine, along with knowledge gained from articles, reviews, books, independent research, tips from others and additional information received directly from the various search engines.

Check out the next post for more information on the working technique of Crawler based search engines.

Top SEO Mistakes

2008-07-29T03:28:00.000-07:00

1. No Targetted Keywords or Targetting the wrong keywords
Many SEOs do this bluder by selecting not so useful, non-relevant or even wrong keywords and key phrases for optimizing the website pages. They might choose keywords according to their mind that are descriptive of the website but the normal users may not search those terms. Choosing the right keywords can bring success or failure to your SEO campaign. Irrespective of your resources, you can't think on your own of all the useful keywords but a good keyword
suggestion tool will definitely help you find keywords that are useful for your website. Also region specific keywords play important role in bringing quality visitors to the website.

2. Ignoring the Title tag
Leaving the title tag empty or not using it properly is also a big mistake. Title tag is one of the most important place to have useful and relevant keywords of your website, it help you in optimization and the text in your title tag shows in the SERPs (search engine result pages) as your page title.

3. Concentrating only on Meta Tags
Many professionals think SEO is only about putting keywords in your meta description & keywords tags. They must know that meta tags does not have enough weightage on search engines. They can create meta description and keywords tag with useful keywords but should not expect much to rank well only because of these meta tags.

4. A Flash Website without a HTML Alternative
Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don't like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can't read Flash content and therefore can't index it.

5. JavaScript Menus
Using JavaScript for navigation within the website is not bad as long as you understand that search engine spiders can't read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. Hence if you have JavaScript menus you can't do without, you should create simple HTML and XML sitemap putting all the page links, so that all your pages will be crawlable to the search engine spiders.

6. Using only Images for Headings
Many programmers use images in place of text due to the thinking that an image looks better than simple text for headings and menus. Although images can make your website look more attractive & distinctive but in SEO terms images for headings and menus are a big mistake because H1, H2 header tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you don't want to have your text within H1, H2 header tags due to their visibility, you can modify them through a stylesheet.

7. Ignoring Keyword Rich URLs
Many SEOs underestimate the importance of a good URL. Dynamic page names are still very frequent in use and no keywords in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Although it is possible to rank high even without keywords in URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL of the domain and file names (inner pages, images, etc), result in an additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN & Yahoo! but Google also give weightage to them, hence it is very useful to use keywords in URLs.

8. Backlink Spamming
It is seen as a very common practice to acquire large number of backlinks for the website due to a delusion that more backlinks are always better and for which many SEOs try to get links with any hook n crook, they may resort to link farms, forums or newgroups spam etc., which can lead to getting their website banned. You need to have quality backlinks for your website only through ethical techniques.

9. Lack of Consistency and SEO Maintenance
SEO never been a one time process. People who believe that once they optimize a site, it is done forever are living in a wrong belief. If you want to permanently optimize your website, you have to keep on analysing your competition and changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines and update your website pages.

10. Lack of Keywords in the Page Content
If the content on the page does not have sufficient keywords then you must modify your content according to the requirement and place the useful and relevant keywords at the sensible place within the text. Also it is better to make the most useful keywords bold or highlight them.

Over-Optimization in SEO

2008-03-19T04:17:00.000-07:00

Every website need to be in top rankings on all the major search engines and to achieve high rankings SEO experts use various SEO techniques, mostly ethical or sometimes unethical. Using unethical SEO practices sometimes results in temporarily or permanently exclusion of websites from the index of major search engines like Google for using so called 'black hat' SEO techniques. The reaction of search engines is easy to understand with many unethical tricks and cheats that SEO experts use in their website optmization strategy, the relevancy of results is compromised to the point where search engines initiate to give completely irrelevant and manipulated search results. Or if search engines do not catch you red handed right away, your competitors might report you for your misdoings.

Keyword Density/Keyword Stuffing -
SEO experts try to push their websites to top positions through many ways that might results in questionable practices, like keyword stuffing which is considered an unethical practice because what you actually do is use the keyword in question throughout the text suspiciously often. Having in mind that the recommended keyword density is from 3 to 7%, anything above this, say 10% density starts to look very much like keyword stuffing and it is likely that will not get unnoticed by search engines. A text with 10% keyword density can hardly make sense, if read by a human. Some time ago Google implemented the so called “Florida Update” and essentially imposed a penalty for pages that are keyword-stuffed and over-optimized in general.

Generally, keyword density in the title, the headings, and the first paragraphs matters more. Needless to say that you should be especially careful not to stuff these areas. Try the Keyword Density Cloud tool to check if your keyword density is in the acceptable limits, especially in the above-mentioned places. If you have a high density percentage for a frequently used keyword, then consider replacing some of the occurrences of the keyword with synonyms. Also, generally words that are in bold and/or italic are considered important by search engines but if any occurrence of the target keywords is in bold and italic, this also looks unnatural and in the best case it will not push your page up.

Duplicate Content -
SEO has a basic rule that content is always the king. But it should be unique & relevant. In terms of Google, duplicate content means text that is the same as the text on a different page on the SAME site or on a sister-site, or on a site that is heavily linked to the site in question and it can be presumed that the two sites are related; i.e. when you copy and paste the same paragraphs from one page on your site to another, then you might expect to see your site's rank drop. Most SEO experts believe that syndicated content is not treated as duplicate content and there are many examples of this. If syndicated content were duplicate content, that the sites of news agencies would have been the first to drop out of search results. Still, it does not hurt to check from time if your site has duplicate content with another, at least because somebody might be illegally copying your content and you do not know. The Similar Page Checker tool will help you see if you have grounds to worry about duplicate content.

Doorway Pages and Hidden Text -
Another common keyword scam is doorway pages. Before Google introduced the PageRank algorithm, doorways were a common practice and there were times when they were not considered an illegal optimization. A doorway page is a page that is made especially for the search engines and that has no meaning for humans but is used to get high positions in search engines and to trick users to come to the site. Although keywords are still very important, today keywords alone have less effect in determining the position of a site in search results, so doorway pages do not get so much traffic to a site but if you use them, don't ask why Google punished you.
Like doorway pages is a scam called hidden text. This is text, which is invisible to humans e.g. the text color is the same as the page background but is included in the HTML source of the page, trying to fool search engines that the particular page is keyword-rich. Needless to say, both doorway pages and hidden text can hardly be qualified as optimization techniques, there are more manipulation than everything else.

Links Spam -
Links are another major SEO tool and like the other SEO tools it can be used or misused. While backlinks are certainly important, for Yahoo backlinks are important as quantity, while for Google it is more important what sites backlinks come from, getting tons of backlinks from a link farm or a blacklisted site is begging to be penalized. Also, if outbound links (links from your site to other sites) considerably outnumber your inbound links (links from other sites to your site), then you have put too much effort in creating useless links because this will not improve your ranking. You can use the Domain Stats Tool to see the number of backlinks (inbound links) to your site and the Site Link Analyzer to see how many outbound links you have.

Using keywords in links (the anchor text), domain names, folder and file names does boost your search engine rankings but again, the precise measure is the boundary between topping the search results and being kicked out of them. For instance, if you are optimizing for the keyword “cat”, which is a frequently chosen keyword and as with all popular keywords and phrases, competition is fierce, you might not see other alternative for reaching the top but getting a domain name like http://www.cat-cats-kittens-kitty.com, which no doubt is packed with keywords to the maximum but is first – difficult to remember, and second – if the contents does not correspond to the plenitude of cats in the domain name, you will never top the search
results.

Although file and folder names are less important than domain names, now and then you can include “cat” (and synonyms) in them and in the anchor text of the links। This counts well, provided that anchors are not artificially stuffed (for instance if you use “cat_cats_kitten” as anchor for internal site links this anchor certainly is stuffed). While you have no control over third sides that link to you and use anchors that you don't like, it is up to you to perform periodic checks what anchors do other sites use to link to you. A handy tool for this task is the Backlink Anchor Text Analysis, where you enter the URL and get a listing of the sites that link to you and the anchor text they use.

Finally to conclude, Google and the other search engines makes no difference if a site is intentionally over-optimized to cheat them or over-optimization is the result of good intentions, so no matter what your motives are, always try to keep to reasonable SEO practices and follow the search engine guidelines.

Guidelines to get Top Rankings for Affiliate Websites

2008-01-23T01:34:00.000-08:00

Some Guidelines to get top 10 rankings for affiliate websites:

1. Always write good quality & unique content for the home page that help your visitors and readers to solve their problems.

2. Perform through keyword research and analysis. Find out the top rankers on Google for your main keywords. Analyze their content and services. How they are doing to be on top on search engines? Are their website web 2.0 site or a web blog? How many बेक links & pages indexed do they have?

3. Again collect keywords from the competitors websites. Analyze their title, meta tags, placement of keywords in H1 header tags, alt texts, etc.

4. You can also visit about.com, spyfu.com or Wikipedia to check for topic of your website and collect some more keywords.

5. Create pages on the basis of keywords your indentified.

6. Try to get some quality one way links to your website that can be from directories, blogs, forums or article directories.

7. Write some useful and relevant articles by using the keywords you have colleted.

8. Create a blog (on blogspot or wordpress) to your site on a new directory, and write articles every day for a month or two as Google like updated web page with fresh content. Also Wordpress has an auto posting feature to post your blog.

9. Submit your blog post to Blog directories and major search engines including netscape.com.

10. Submit articles with links to all the pages of your site, not only the home page.

11. Create a human as well as XML sitemap with all the pages of your site.

12. Add a membership or forum to your site because Google like to see that people are coming back again and again to your website, and find it as a popular website.

13. Also try to get one way links from authority sites like ebay.com, facebook.com. 43things.com, work.com and other popular sites that Google like and admire.

14. Submit a Press Release with links to your site to renowned and popular PR sites, if possible.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any question, post them in this thread, I will try to help you getting better rankings.

You are welcome to ask me any question.

Thanks for reading.

Important Things To Follow To Become A Successful Webblogger

2007-10-17T00:56:00.000-07:00

A web log is a website where a user (a blog owner) post his/her entries in chronological order (commonly displayed in reverse chronological order). Blogs can be created and maintained ranging from different subjects, topics, commentary, news to personal interests like online diaries, photo albums, etc. A blog mainly combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic with the important ability for the readers to leave comments on the postings. Mainly the blogs are created as textual but some blooger focus also create blogs on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting).

Anybody can start and own a blog of his/her interest and post some relevant articles but the fact is very few people can successfully pull it off. Anybody who want to become a successful blogger, he/she need to know some important things:

1. Passion for the Topic
If you choose a topic you love, your passion will show through. If you choose a topic you don't know much about only because of the high paying keywords, that will be apparent as well.

2. Creative and Innovative
You're going to need to update your blog, at the very least, several times a week. A successful blogger is creative enough to come up with fresh, engaging content every time.

3. Good Idea
Not the same idea as everyone else. Not a copycat of someone else's blog. But your own unique, good idea. If you want to make it as a blogger, you have to have great content and a fresh idea.

4. Good Work Ethic
If you think blogging is just writing a quick five minute post and forgetting about it until next time, you couldn't be more wrong. You're going to spend hours on your blog designing it, writing it, promoting it and more. Most bloggers spend two to five hours on each blog every day.

5. Able to Work Alone
Most bloggers work alone. You have to be able to shut out all of the distractions of home or the coffee shop and concentrate on creating a good post.

6. Notebook
You're going to come up with ideas at the oddest times. What if you're not close to your computer? It's helpful to have a notebook or PDA handy so you can jot down ideas.

7. Thick Skin
You're going to be flamed, you're going to be trolled and people are going to pick your blog posts apart and call you names. You can let it get to you or you can develop a thick skin.

8. Thriving Social Network
It helps to have people to talk to, network with, and shoot ideas off of. This will not only help to eliminate the loneliness some probloggers experiences, but by interacting with others you're sure to come up with fresh new ideas.

9. Motivation
What keeps you motivated? Passion for your topic? Advertising revenue? The adoration of your public? Whatever it is, channel it and use it to keep you driven.

10. Longevity
Blogging isn't a fly by night operation. If you want to succeed, if you want your readers to trust your name, you'll want your blogs to last through the ages. The most successful blogs have been around for a few years. It's the people who cut bait and run after two months of blogging that fail.

11. Vision for Long Term
Do you have a plan? Where do you see your blog two years from now? Five years? Ten? A successful blogger has the ability to see into the future. I'm not saying you know exactly what you're going to blog about, but you'll need to think about how your blog is going to succeed for years to come.

12. The Ability to Work Odd Hours
Blogging isn't exactly a 9 to 5 gig. Ideas hit at any time. Many probloggers even work well into the night or the wake at the crack of dawn to fit blogging into a busy day.

13. Willingness to Learn New Things
As a blogger you want to continue to feed your readers new information. This means you'll have to set a portion of your day aside to read other blogs, books, magazines and websites in your niche.

14. Open Minded
Sometimes bloggers need to completely change their line of thinking. What might have worked a year ago, doesn't work now. Tools and techniques become obsolete. Keep an open mind, don't be afraid to admit defeat and always be on the lookout for new trends and ideas.

15. Teaching Ability
Blogging isn't about talking about yourself. It's about sharing what you know with someone else. Many bloggers are teachers, not story tellers. Though the ability to tell a story is also something a successful blogger must possess.

16. Patience
Patience always pays off and similarly blogging isn't instant gratification. It also takes time and patience to build up a successful blog. And if you wish to have instant pay out, stick with copywriting.

Importance of Inbound Links

2007-09-30T22:20:00.000-07:00

The perfect and quality inbound links are important to achieve high rankings on search engines. Inbound links are the most important factors for top rankings on major search engines. Its quite difficult for a website with less inbound links, to achieve top rankings for a highly competitive search term. Getting the right kind of quality inbound links is very important for a particular website. Its easy to get better rankings with 25-30 good inbound links than with 100 bad incoming links.

Some important factors that can make any link a good incoming link -

1. The inbound link should use any relevant keyword in the anchor text - if you wish to get high rankings for a particular search term then the links to your website should use the same search term. The anchor text used to link to your site influences the keywords or keyphrases for which the website will get high rankings.

2. The inbound link should come from a relevant website or a page - inbound links from relevant webpages are more useful than any other links from the unrelevant web pages. Although links from unrelated pages will not hurt the rankings of your website but search engines gives priority to the links coming from the most relevant websites.

3. The inbound link should direct to a relevant page on your site - to get links to your home page is better than to get links to the page that is most relevant to the chosen anchor text. If you are using a particular link text then the link should direct to a page relevant to the text. If the link text matches the content of the linked pages then it's more likely that your web page is really relevant to that term and you'll get high rankings for that search term.

4. Link from an authority site is also useful - Links from pages with high authority will increase the TrustRank of your website. Links from websites with high PageRank have a positive effect on the rankings of your own site.

5. There should not be a nofollow attribute in the inbound link - The nofollow attribute is used to tell the search engines not to follow a link. Links with the nofollow attribute can't help in achieving high search engine rankings. Check the HTML code of their link exchange partners to find out if they are using nofollow attribute to link to the website.

If the link building for the website is done on the basis of some simple factors, the website will definitely get the top rankings on major search engines.

Website EvaluationTips

2007-09-28T22:26:00.000-07:00

The article will provide you a brief description of:
1. Website evaluation issues,
2. Recommended changes to make the website search engine as well as user friendly, &
3. Get your website ready for search engine optimization process.

Simple concept - "Small changes make a BIG difference..."

Due to the ever changing nature of the algorithms, programming and indexing techniques used by the major search engines and directories, it is always suggested that the website should make the recommended changes to gain faster & better rankings generating higher page rank value for the website.

As we all know that most of the website traffic comes from search engines, thus the implementation of the proposed changes will make the website search engine friendly and help in generating more qualified and relevant traffic to the website through search engines.

Search Engine Compatibility Study

Search engine spiders/ crawlers / bots like standard static HTML pages. Such pages are easy to crawl through and get indexed in search engine database and hence help gain top rankings. They never like dynamic pages, database driven pages, flash pages, and websites with linking done through JavaScript etc.

This study reveals many serious search engine incompatibility features/ elements in the site which will hamper our SEO efforts:

SEO-Straight Issues

1. Server Side Details & Issues

Checkpoint 1: Hosting Details
Server Type (Apache or IIS) & IP Address

Checkpoint 2: IP Spam Blocklist
If the website is potentially on an IP shared with other spammers. Being on a spam block list can have a negative impact on your search engine rankings.

Solution:
The website must be placed onto a dedicated IP address or moving to a different server. The costs are minimal and can be set up through your ISP.

2. Duplicate Issues:

Checkpoint 1: Canonical URL
Major search engines like Google consider 'www' and 'non-www' version of domains as two independent websites and index them separately, thus creating a duplicate website problem.

Solution:
Scenario 1: IIS Solution - If your website is hosted on an IIS Server. In order to solve the canonical URL issue, creation a Google sitemap is recommended and fix it OR place a 301 Permanent Redirection from http://xyz.com/ to http://www.xyz.com/

Scenario 2: Apache Solutions - If your website is hosted on an Apache Server, we recommend placing a 301 Permanent Redirection using ".htaccess" file from
http://xyz.com/ to http://www.xyz.com/.

Checkpoint 2: "Home" & Logo Link
If the "Home" link and the link on the "website logo" on all website pages of http://www.xyz.com are linked to its respective index.html page.

For Example: http://www.xyz.com - The "Home" link and the link on the "website logo" linked to http://www.xyz.com/index.html.

Google consider both these types of URLs as duplicate pages and might penalize one or both of them for duplicate content.

Solution:
In order to solve this issue, we recommend changing the "Home" link and the link on the "website logo" as follows:
http://www.xyz.com/index.html to http://www.xyz.com

Checkpoint 3: Duplicate Domains
The presence of duplicate/ mirror website for your website, http://www.xyz.com. http://www.xyz.com and http://www.abc.com/ share the same content, style and design and thus is categorized as duplicate websites by search engines. Google has also already identified this issue and has placed all website pages of http://www.abc.com/ as "supplemental result".

Solution: We recommend following options to solve this issue:

Option 1: Drop/ Remove one of the above websites, preferably http://www.abc.com/.
Option 2: Re-design one of them to look different.
Option 3: Place a 301 Permanent Redirection from http://www.abc.com/ to http://www.xyz.com.

Checkpoint 4: Duplicate Pages
Presence of internal duplicate pages/URLs within the website. Search engines do not like duplicate pages and penalize the website when found to do so.

Google has already tagged many such duplicate page URLs as "supplementary results".

For Example:
http://www.xyz.com/index.html & http://www.xyz.com/Index.html
In the above example both pages have similar content and design with different filenames/ URLs thus creating a duplicate URL issue.

Solution: We recommend removing such duplicate pages from the website and placing a 301 Permanent redirection from the duplicate page (http://www.xyz.com/Index.html) to its actual page (http://www.xyz.com/index.html).

3. Search Engine Un-friendly URL's
Checkpoint 1(Scenario 1): Dynamic URLs (IIS)
Search engines do not like dynamic URLs mainly because of the presence of variables such as "?, +,=" which creates a continuous loop. Search engines avoid crawling through dynamic URLs for the fear of getting trapped in this loop.

Solution: URL Re-writing solution to re-write dynamic URLs into static URLs
installing 3rd party softwares, LinkFreeze OR ISAPI_Rewrite re-writing tools

Checkpoint 1(Scenario 2): Dynamic URLs (Apache)
Solution: Apache Mod-Rewrite re-writing module

Checkpoint 2: PHP Session ID
Solution: disabling the PHP Session IDs

Checkpoint 3: OsCommerce Session ID
Solution: OsCommerce Admin tools

4. Redirections:
Checkpoint 1: Domain Level Redirection
Domain level redirection is bad from search engine ranking perspective. This is the reason why your website is not even indexed in Google.
Solution: In order to solve this issue, we recommend removing the redirection ASAP.

Checkpoint 2: Cloaking
Cloaking, also known as stealth technique used to deliver one page to a search engine for indexing while serving an entirely different page to everyone else.
Solution: stop cloaking

5. Page Level Issues:
Checkpoint 1: Dead Pages
"supplemental results"
Solution: "301 Permanent redirection"

Checkpoint 2: Orphan Pages
If you have pages that aren't linked to from anywhere else on the website (called "orphan" pages) they won't get spidered by search engines or by anyone else for that matter. Such pages are tagged as "supplemental pages" by Google.
Solution: We recommend that either you completely delete these pages from the server or place a link to these pages from the sitemap page.

Checkpoint 3: Retrieval of Content
Retrieved from another website.
Solution: placing the content/ pages under the same domain/ server.

6. On Body Factors:
Checkpoint 1: Excessive use of JavaScript
makes the pages heavy and difficult to load
Solution: placing all JavaScript code on a file and calling it externally

Checkpoint 2: Heavy Use of CSS
makes the pages heavy and difficult to load
Solution: placing the CSS (Style) code on a file and calling it externally

Checkpoint 3: JavaScript Drop Down Menu
Search engines like plain HTML href tag
prevent spiders from crawling through the website pages.
Solution: including text links at the bottom of the entire page and also placing the pages on the sitemap page.

Checkpoint 4: JavaScript Pop-up
JavaScript popup function
Search engines like plain HTML href tag
disallow search engine robots from crawling and indexing website pages
Solution: directing a plain a href link for all such pages from sitemap page.

Checkpoint 5: JavaScript Mouse over Effects
prevents search engine spiders from crawling and indexing the website pages
Solution: placing the pages on the sitemap page

Checkpoint 6: Frameset
contains no visible content
search engines cannot index framed sites
Solution: placing simple text link at bottom navigation to all site pages.

Checkpoint 7: Use of Class in Href
hyperlinks, class="menu" is placed before the "A href" tag
difficult to link the pages in website
making it difficult for search engine spiders to crawl and index.
Solution: placing the 'a href' code on first and then the class="menu"

Checkpoint 8: W3C Coding Standards
W3C (World Wide Consortium/Internal Standards Organization) coding standards.
Solution: validate your HTML Code

7. Site Maps:
Checkpoint 1: Sitemap
Solution: creating Sitemap page and link it from bottom navigation on all website pages

Checkpoint 2: Google Sitemap
Google sitemap is a tool to allow Googlebot to spider and index all your website pages. It also allows learning about specific problems being faced in accessing the website and analyzing the website's performance.
Solution: creating a Google (XML) sitemap and submit the same to major search engines

8. Links Strategies:
Checkpoint 1: Excessive Outbound Links

Checkpoint 2: Bad Linking Strategy
Avoid artificial links, identical links, link farming. The more sites that link to your websites, the higher your ranking in the search engine results will be because the more links indicate a higher level of popularity among users of the Internet.
Solution: We recommend filing a reinclusion request to Google.

Checkpoint 3: Link Popularity
back links to a website, most important criteria for top rankings. Consider the current link popularity status on search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, AlltheWeb.

SEO or PPC - What To Do?

2007-07-31T03:38:00.000-07:00

Its always been a topic of discussion that what is better between SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click advertising). Most of the webmasters remain unsure during initial website promotion whether they should prmomot their website with SEO or PPC.

According to various studies and surveys the commercial websites work best if we use both SEO and PPC simultaneously and the exact mix depends on our objectives.

Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)

Advantages of PPC:

You get instant results. If you advertise your website on pay per click search engines, then you will get traffic now and not several months later.
PPC ads are perfect for time limited offers such as holiday sales.
You can stop PPC ads at any time.
PPC ads make it easy to test different keywords and landing pages.
PPC ads also work with websites that are not very well designed and wouldn't get good search engine rankings.
PPC ads allow you to bid on a large amount of keywords, including misspellings and other keyword variations that you cannot put on your web pages.

Disadvantages of PPC:

PPC advertising can become very expensive if you bid on the wrong keywords or if you don't calculate the maximum bid price correctly.
Click fraud can be a problem. Not all clickers are potential customers.
If you advertise your website with PPC ads then you should use a ROI tracking tool to make sure that you don't waste your money.

Search engine optimization (SEO):

Advantages of SEO:

Traffic through organic search engine results is almost free if the up-front work has been done.
After optimizing your website you can use your money for different things and the optimized site will still run.
A larger number of visitors and search result clickers is not a problem.
Search engine optimization delivers long term results that don't require permanent financial input.

Disadvantages of SEO:

SEO can be relatively time-consuming up-front.
SEO can require a redesign of your web pages to make your website search engine friendly. However, this usually also results in a better user experience.

Search engine optimization delivers lasting results and it costs considerably less in the long term. However, you must make sure that you optimize your website correctly, if your want to get high search engine rankings.

Pay per click advertising and search engine optimization both contribute to the success of your website. If you use both wisely, you can get many new visitors and customers without spending a fortune. See the recommended resources below for PPC and SEO software tips.

Thanks for reading...

Regards,

Akash Dwivedi

Importance of Search Engine Optimization

2007-07-11T05:19:00.000-07:00

Why is Search Engine Optimization Important?

Internet has provided useful and innovative ways to revolutionize our daily life by crawling into different dimensions of lives - business, communication, information dissemination, personal relationships. People have made a paradigm shift towards using the Internet to aid them in their daily activities.

People are continuously struggling to get noticed in the world of the Internet. Websites are growing like mushrooms everywhere, every time. How can one's website get past the millions of other websites and eventually be noticed by its target audience?

Search engine optimization aims to achieve the goal of getting more visitors to a website by helping it get higher rankings in the search engines. This simply means that search engine optimization's goal is to make a website appear on the first pages, if not the first page of a search done through the search engine.

There are two ways to be able to get noticed by search engines. One is through pay-per-click-advertisements. A good example of a pay-per-click system that is employed by search engines is the Google Adwords system. It has created a hype and has given Google around 5 billion dollars in terms of revenue per year. Webmasters can place their bids to be shown when a keyword is searched by a surfer. The highest bidders will get their sites to appear first when the search is being done.

The second way of GETTING high rankings from search engines is through organic searches. Search engines evaluate websites by using what they call "spiders." These programs scan the websites and collects information about them. They then collate the information and pass it on to the search engine. This area is primarily the main arena of search engine optimization. It utilizes a set of methods to be able to get search engines to list the website on high ranks.

Traffic
The main purpose of search engine optimization is to increase the traffic generated by a website. Websites are built to be seen by Internet surfers and search engines can help it achieve this goal. The power of the search engine should not be underestimated. It is one of the building blocks of the foundation of the Internet. A survey showed that 90% of all Internet users employ search engines to aid them in their Internet-related activities. Google, the dominant player in the search engine industry, generates 70% of all search-related Internet activity.

People and Search Engines are alike
Search engines behave like people. They like websites which contain substantive information about a certain topic. The best sites usually appear first in search engines because people like them as well as the search engines.

Search engine optimization does not only generate traffic, it helps maintain the traffic. The behavior of the search engine is indicative to the behavior of the people who visit the website. Search engine optimization leads to the optimization of a webpage or a website. It will lead to a website which is more organized and a website which contains substantive information.

The use of the Search Engine to be able to target one's target audience is one of the most effective Internet marketing strategies. It is not like other on-line marketing techniques (such as email marketing) which can lead to a lot of leakages in terms of targeting the right audience.

Search engines segment the market and connect the right people together. People search for topics which they are interested in and this is the main strength of search engines in connecting markets together.

Cost Effectiveness
One can do search engine optimization under the ASSUMPTION that he knows what he is doing. Search engine optimization is a full-time job and has a very long learning curve. This is why most people would resort to out-sourcing the job to experts who are good at what they do. One should be cautious, however, in hiring a search engine optimization company or consultant. Factors such as pricing and service should carefully be assessed before signing a deal. If done properly, search engine optimization is a very cost effective way of getting more people to know about one's products or to know about a certain issue or event that a website is disseminating.

SEO is very important for websites since it determines the position of the website in comparison with its competitors. It does not only generate traffic from the targeted audience but is also a cost-effective way of optimizing the website.

Social Bookmarking and its Advantages

2007-06-26T03:33:00.000-07:00

Social bookmarking is the best way for users to search, store, classify and share their Internet bookmarks. Interent savvy users generally store lists or urls of their useful internet resources on a social bookmarking system or network which can be accessible to all the users of that social network or website. It is the best way for users with similar interests can find the useful links by topic, category or tags. The social bookmarking network or system is the fastest and safest way of storing information from your web browser. Some other services specialized to a specific subject or format - xml or rss feeds, images, books, videos, shopping items, map locations, etc.

The social bookmarking system has some advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, i.e. search engine spiders or bots. All tag-based classification of Internet resources mainly done by human, who can only understand the content of the resource, whereas the automated software algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource which provides semantically classified tags, which are hard to find with contemporary search engines. As people bookmark resources which they find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. A system will 'rank' a resource based on its perceived utility. This is arguably a more useful metric for end users than other systems which rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.

The classification and ranking of the web resources is a continuous process, many social bookmarking services allow users to subscribe to web feeds based on tags, collection of tag terms which allows subscribers to become aware of new resources for a given topic, as they are noted, tagged, and classified by other users.

List of some renowned social bookmarking sites:
Bloglines
Blue Dot
Chipmark
del.icio.us
Digg
Diigo
Furl
GiveALink.org
Ma.gnolia
My Web
Netvouz
Netscape
Newsvine
Reddit
Simpy
SiteBar
StumbleUpon

Guidelines, Tips and Templates for Writing Effective Press Release

2007-06-13T23:27:00.000-07:00

Press Release Content Tips
Tips for Press Release Formatting
Press Release Template
Common Press Release Errors

The following information will assist you when writing a news release for distribution through the PRWeb press release network. A well crafted press release captures the attention of journalists and is optimized for distribution over the Internet, through e-mail and over PRWeb's specialized network feeds.

Note: Some of the information contained in this tip sheet are specific to the PRWeb press release network.

Pay Attention to the Content of Your Press Release

When we talk about content, we refer to the news story you are telling. Keep the following points in mind when writing your press release.

Is your news "newsworthy?" The purpose of a press release is to inform the world of your news item. Do not use your press release to try and make a sale. A good press release answers all of the "W" questions (who, what, where, when and why), providing the media with useful information about your organization, product, service or event. If your press release reads like an advertisement, rewrite it.

Start strong. Your headline and first paragraph should tell the story. The rest of your press release should provide the detail. You have a matter of seconds to grab your readers' attention. Do not blow it with a weak opening.

Write for the Media. On occasion, media outlets, especially online media, will pick up your press release and run it in their publications with little or no modification. More commonly, journalists will use your press release as a springboard for a larger feature story. In either case, try to develop a story as you would like to have it told. Even if your news is not reprinted verbatim, it may provide an acceptable amount of exposure.

Not everything is news. Your excitement about something does not necessarily mean that you have a newsworthy story. Think about your audience. Will someone else find your story interesting? Let's assume that you have just spent a lot of effort to launch a new online store. Announcing your company's opening is always an exciting time for any business, but the last thing the media wants to write about is another online store. This is old news and uninteresting. Instead, focus on the features of your online shopping experience, unique products and services. Answer the question, "Why should anyone care?" and make sure your announcement has some news values such as timeliness, uniqueness or something truly unusual. Avoid clichés such as "customers save money" or "great customer service." Focus on the aspects of your news item that truly set you apart from everyone else.

Does your press release illustrate? Use real life examples about how your company or organization solved a problem. Identify the problem and identify why your solution is the right solution. Give examples of how your service or product fulfills needs or satisfies desires. What benefits can be expected? Use real life examples to powerfully communicate the benefits of using your product or service.

If you are reporting on a corporate milestone, make sure that you attribute your success or failures to one or more events. If your company has experienced significant growth, tell the world what you did right. Show the cause and effect.

Stick to the facts. Tell the truth. Avoid fluff, embellishments and exaggerations. If you feel that your press release contains embellishments, perhaps it would be a good idea to set your press release aside until you have more exciting news to share. Journalists are naturally skeptical. If your story sounds too good to be true, you are probably hurting your own credibility. Even if it is true, you may want to tone it down a bit.

Pick an angle. Try to make your press release timely. Tie your news to current events or social issues if possible. Make sure that your story has a good news hook.

Use active, not passive, voice. Verbs in the active voice bring your press release to life. Rather than writing "entered into a partnership" use "partnered" instead. Do not be afraid to use strong verbs as well. For example, "The committee exhibited severe hostility over the incident." reads better if changed to "The committee was enraged over the incident." Writing in this manner, helps guarantee that your press release will be read.

Economics of words. Use only enough words to tell your story. Avoid using unnecessary adjectives, flowery language, or redundant expressions such as "added bonus" or "first time ever". If you can tell your story with fewer words, do it. Wordiness distracts from your story. Keep it concise. Make each word count.

Beware of jargon. While a limited amount of jargon will be required if your goal is to optimize your news release for online search engines, the best way to communicate your news is to speak plainly, using ordinary language. Jargon is language specific to certain professions or groups and is not appropriate for general readership. Avoid such terms as "capacity planning techniques" "extrapolate" and "prioritized evaluative procedures."

Avoid the hype. The exclamation point (!) is your enemy. There is no better way to destroy your credibility than to include a bunch of hype. If you must use an exclamation point, use one. Never do this!!!

Get Permission. Companies are very protective about their reputation. Be sure that you have written permission before including information or quotes from employees or affiliates of other companies or organizations. Any dispute resolution will favor the other company, meaning that your press release may get pulled.

About your company. Your press release should end with a short paragraph (company boilerplate) that describes your company, products, service and a short company history. If you are filing a joint press release, include a boilerplate for both companies.

Thanks for reading

Best Regards,

Akash

Useful Tips For Getting Top Rankings ...

2007-05-31T00:16:00.000-07:00

Reference URL: http://searchengineland.com/070530-115447.php

How do you get what you want on page one for your brand phrases? When facing negative content at the top of the SERPs, it’s a challenge many companies want to conquer very quickly. The good news is that it is doable; it’s just that not many people talk about how to do it.

If you have unfavorable content ranking for your brand, the best approach is to just get the favorable sites on the Internet to outrank the unfavorable site, pushing the unfavorable down to page two.

How do you do this? You merely need to give the favorable sites a nudge, by increasing their link popularity.

The prep work:

Your first step is to identify the favorable web pages that you would like to be on page one. In our last Brand-Aid article, What are Search Engines Saying About Your Brand?, I wrote about how to evaluate the SERPs for brand protection and identify potential sites to boost for your brand phrases. I recommend you select about 20 pages to help boost in the SERPs.

The second step is to review each potential web page for all of the factors you would consider for determining the likelihood of your own site to rank—page copy, page title, links, etc. Create your short list by weeding out those that have little potential for reaching the top 10 positions. Remember, you cannot optimize the page copy, so evaluate the page copy during this assessment.

The third step is to take your short list of favorable web pages to the public relations department for review. Public relations departments are somewhat picky in selecting what to highlight. I once found an article where a company was runner up for a very prestigious award; since the company was a runner-up, not the winner, the article was removed from the short-list. While it may seem cumbersome and add to the timeline, my recommendation is to incorporate PR from the beginning, because having them on your side will be an asset later.

Time for action: 13 tips for boosting favorable web pages to page one

Once you have the PR department’s blessing, you’re ready to proceed with building links. Here 13 ways for boosting favorable content to page one:

Review the “About” section of your website for opportunities to incorporate links within your existing content.
Look at your site’s customer service pages for linking opportunities. By using the right copy and design treatments you can highlight customer service accomplishments and awards, while helping to boost rankings of favorable sites—making it a win-win solution.
If your company has won several awards, create an awards page and link to favorable articles highlighting the awards you have won.
Be proactive with upcoming news articles by teaming up with your PR department to see if they have the chance to influence keyword phrasing in quotes and/or links in write-ups about your company. If possible, incorporate keywords and/or get links to the favorable pages that you are trying to boost. Be forewarned, while opportunities to influence the media exist, they are quite limited, so don’t put a lot of eggs in this basket.
If you have a recent article released about your company, or know of an upcoming favorable article, arrange to get home page real estate and a clean link to the article, even if it's at the bottom of the homepage, below the fold. This is a highly powerful link and will have a nice impact for boosting the article’s rankings.
Look for industry wikis that have followable links. Incorporate useful contributions, and include a link to pages that you are trying to boost. Wikis with followable links are getting rare, but they are out there, so dig around and see what you find.
Find blogs with followable links that talk about topics related to the pages you are trying to push to page one. Offer a strong contribution about how your company has an interesting approach, include a brief explanation and a link to the page you want to boost.
If it’s an interesting article, submit it to Digg, StumbleUpon, Netscape, Reddit and Delicious.
Seek out bloggers in your industry and ask them to write about your company and link to the article. You may need to offer some form of compensation for this one, so keep that in mind as you pursue.
Find websites that talk about your company and request articles about your company to be added as additional resources.
Many companies issue press releases for featured articles and awards, often these press releases contain links to the correlating web page. Work with your PR department to strategically write the links to contain keywords and get the press releases submitted to news search engines via wires such as PRWeb.
Leverage your partnership network. Many companies have partners who offer a page highlighting their partnerships. Look for those that offer individual pages that talk about each company, and inquire about opportunities to expand your description and link to third party articles or web pages that talk more about your products or services. Expect that most of the partners will decline, but even one or two links would make a nice addition to your efforts.
Leverage your closest affiliate relationships. Each company reacts to this one differently, but it’s worth a shot if you’re facing negative content that you want to make disappear quickly. If you have great relationships with affiliates, consider partnering with them to get links to the favorable web pages from a page on the affiliate’s website. Bear in mind that the affiliate wants to rank for your brand so it could be a challenge to get them to link your targeted pages, which means you may need to pay for this content to be added. While it may sound odd to pay your affiliate for these links, it could be worth the price to boost favorable sites to page one.

As you build links to favorable sites, be sure to log everything. You see, your biggest challenge is that you have no control over the site you are trying to boost, putting you at their mercy. Speaking from experience, keep great notes. For one client we finally got a great article to page one, and a month later the publication changed the URL structure and the old URL took users to a 404 error page, leaving us back at square one. The lesson learned was to keep very good notes so that you can go back and contact the sites that were kind enough to add links to sites with favorable content.

With this information you can form a strong plan of action to start to influence what the SERPs are saying about your brand.

Have more ideas? Leave a comment.

Reference URL: http://searchengineland.com/070530-115447.php

Thanks & Regards,
Akash

Introduction: Ethical SEO

2006-11-10T22:50:00.000-08:00

Hello Everybody,

I m Akash, working as an in-house SEO for a US based legal research firm, handling many websites on different themes along with a job search engine. My job profile is to promote the company websites through ethical search engine optimization techniques and to maintain their rankings for the competitive keywords on major search engines. I have an experience of around 2 years in the field of SEO and i am still learning new things each and every day of my professional career.

Thanks & Regards,
Akash