Internet and Technology

Of all the areas of Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization is the most misunderstood, and potentially the most important to your marketing efforts. There are millions upon millions of pages of web content out there — you can work hard, build a great site, and then be totally lost in the shuffle. SEO is important. It’s also a very complex process that requires patience, careful planning and a long-term approach.If you’re just getting started with:

Selecting an SEO firm

Trying to start a search engine campaign on your own

Reviewing your current SEO efforts

…read on. This article should provide you with a high-level review of the SEO process, dispel a few SEO myths, and help you understand legitimate optimization strategies.What is Search Engine Optimization?Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, defies easy definition. But here’s a short version:

Search Engine OptimizationUsing keyword analysis and other legitimate practices to gain the highest possible search engine and directory rankings, under a given key phrase, for a given URL.

Every SEO professional in the world just cringed, so I’ll break this definition down a bit and hopefully prevent a hail of angry e-mails:Keyword Analysis is the process of mining keyword search data to find the best balance between the keywords you need and the best potential search niche. More on this later.Search Engine means an automated search engine. ‘Search Engines’ include Google, AlltheWeb.com, Yahoo (powered by Google plus their own directory information), AOL Search, Ask Jeeves and MSN Search. A search engine obtains its results from ’spiders’ or ‘bots’ — small programs that come to your web site read it in much the same way you would: By reading the content on a page, and then moving from page to page via links. A directory, on the other hand, is built at least in part by human beings reading sites and other information and deciding where each site fits into the directory structure. Yahoo’s directory area and Open Directory are both examples of directories. Ranking is the numeric rank reflecting your position in the results list when someone performs a search on a particular set of keywords.Highest Possible means getting as close to number one as you can. Sometimes you just can’t get that number one spot. Maybe someone else has a 400-page web site solely dedicated to the key phrase for which you’re attempting to optimize. Or maybe they’re paying a fortune in advertising. That’s life, sometimes…

Key Phrase is the keyword or set of keywords someone types into the little ’search’ field in Google or Alta Vista or any other search engine. A URL is the address of one page on your site. Most search engines display keyword search results and provide a link directly to the page most relevant to those results, rather than your home page. It’s very, very important to keep that in mind when you build and optimize your site.Legitimate Practices is a pet peeve of mine. A true search engine optimization campaign will not use practices such as page or content cloaking, redirects, or lists of links (so-called ‘link farms’) but relies on good coding practices, well-written content, steady link popularity work and site features that will be every bit as valuable for site visitors as for search engine ranking. Anything less is a short-term fix that will likely reduce your rankings more often than increase them.So, the long version of the definition would be:

Search Engine OptimizationUsing keyword analysis, good coding practices, well-written copy, link popularity analysis and careful site organization to move a web page as close to the number one search results position as possible for a given key phrase, in both search engines and directories.

Hey, that’s not so bad after all. But how do you get started? First, you separate reality from myth…SEO Urban LegendsThere are quite a few SEO myths out there. Here are my favorites:The Keywords META Tag Matters. Mostly wrong. Only Inktomi pays any attention to the keywords meta tag. You should do something basic, but don’t bother putting in keywords that aren’t supported by your page content.Search Engines can read Flash, images and video. Sorry, and Ford isn’t selling a flying car yet, either. Search engines can read one thing: Text. Anything else, while perfectly legitimate as a design tool, will not help your ranking. And relying too heavily on Flash or images may reduce your site’s visibility. Google is one partial exception — they can read some links in Flash, but still have very limited ability to read Flash content.Mirroring my site in multiple locations will improve ranking. Actually, just the opposite. Duplication of content will generally have no effect or, worse, reduce your ranking in major search engines. Most search engines now have rules against this form of ’spam’ and may reduce your ranking or ban your site altogether.’Doorway’ pages improve ranking. Pages that have lots of keywords but then quickly redirect to the main site will not help you in major search engines, such as Google. And, if someone catches you and reports you to Google or the other search engine, you may be banned altogether. A ‘landing’ or ‘bridge’ page, though, that’s designed to be as useful for users as for search engines, and does not redirect the user, can help by providing keyword-rich content that’s genuinely worthwhile.

Firms promising to get me #1 rankings in 10,000 search engines for $99.95 can help. I alternate between tooth-grinding and hysterical laughter when I see these ads. First, there aren’t 10,000 search engines. Actually, there are probably 10-20 you should really worry about. Getting listed in the other thousand or so is largely a waste of time. Second, no one can guarantee any ranking in any search engine for a specific keyword. Period. And finally, the price is less than half the cost to get an express submission in a single directory (Yahoo). Chances are anyone trying to get you to spend the $99.95 is operating a ‘link farm’ where they list dozens, or hundreds, of sites. While they won’t hurt your ranking, they won’t help, either. To learn more about how to choose an SEO firm, check out Google’s article: http://www.google.com/intl/mr/webmasters/seo.html.Firms charging me more money and guaranteeing a #1 ranking on Google can help. This is the latest SEO scam. I can get you a number one ranking on Google, too, as long as I get to pick the keyword or can get you ranked under a fairly unique company name. But no one, and I mean no one can guarantee a #1 rank under a specific keyword. Even Google says so.Forget the myths — if an offer seems too good to be true, it is. The truth is that search engines are now almost savvy enough to read your pages like a human being would, so anything that will drive away a typical site visitor will also probably reduce your ranking. Things that will increase your search engine ranking include:

Well-written content

Good, clean HTML code

Useful, relevant TITLE tags

Useful, relevant DESCRIPTION tags

Relevant, appropriate links from other web sites

There are some basic steps that, well executed, will do more to increase your page rank than an ocean of snake oil.The SEO Campaign ProcessA typical SEO campaign starts with keyword analysis, and then emphasizes insuring your site doesn’t impede search engine bots and follows up with ongoing link and traffic analysis. If you like pretty pictures, here’s one:

 What’s a Bot?A ‘bot’ is a program used by a search engine to read the content of your site into a directory. I mentioned this briefly in ‘What is Search Engine Optimization?’ above. Keep up, now….

Step 1: Keyword Analysis. Ah, keywords. If you say the right word enough times on your site, you’ll get that coveted #1 spot, right? Wrong. Choosing the right keywords starts with you making a list of the keywords or phrases under which you’d like to be found, and typically ends up somewhere completely different. Typically, selecting the best keywords is a four-step process:

List the keywords and phrases under which you’d like to be found.

Find out whether anyone searches on those keywords, and whether they’re searching for relevant items.

Find out how many other sites are struggling for rankings under those keywords.

Pick keywords with the same meaning but a better search-to-competition ratio.

Maybe I want to rank #1 under ‘Search Engine Optimization’. Guess what? There are 686,000 other URLs in Google trying for that spot. Hmmm. But wait! Under ‘Seattle Search Engine Optimization’ there are only 19,000. So, I targeted that key phrase, instead. And guess what? We got a #3 ranking.Don’t forget about relevance, either. If you want a high ranking under ‘tires’, you’re going to have your work cut out for you. And in the end you’ll likely end up getting found for ‘bicycle tires’, ‘automobile tires’, ’spare tires’ and who knows what else. Is it worth it? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But you have to do your homework to find out.

Data Mining and KeywordsIf you’re doing a campaign for a large site, you may end up testing and comparing thousands of keywords and phrases. Having a good data-mining tool (even Excel will do) on hand is important when you’re doing keyword analysis. We use S-Plus, by Insightful Software. It’s saved our lives, and clicker fingers, several times.

There are several tools that help you research the number of searches and competitors for keywords. Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) is a good one — don’t depend on their results from Overture, though, unless you’re specifically preparing an Overture campaign. Metacrawler’s MetaSpy tool is worth a look, too. Ideally, look at results from a few different sources.Keyword analysis is the hardest part of a campaign, in number-crunching terms. It requires a lot of work and may not tell you what you want to hear. But in my experience it’s critical to a successful campaign.Step 2: Search Engine Readiness. Almost every web site we review has one or more problems that will prevent search engine bots from properly reading all content. Typical showstoppers include:

An all-Flash or all-images home page

A home page that automatically redirects to another page

Pop-up ads (does anyone really read these things?)

A site full of pages with fewer than 400 words on a page

Broken links

Navigation that is generated by JavaScript

No TITLE or DESCRIPTION tags

A major step in any SEO campaign is making sure that the site will present the friendliest profile to search engines. Happily, the investment in optimizing will also pay off in a faster, more universally compatible site.

Step 3. Content and Site Preparation. You’ve done your research: You know which keywords match your message, and your site’s HTML code is one big search engine welcome mat. Now it’s time to make sure that your site contains those keywords. This is where I most often see folks get confused — should you rewrite your web content to emphasize keywords? Yes, but with extreme caution. Should you make small, appropriate changes? Yes. Here are my guidelines for content preparation.

Don’t write for keywords (much). This almost always leads to stilted, hard-to-read prose. Writing keyword-rich content that really works for users is an art form. Be careful.

Do a little careful editing. If you use the word ‘car’ but ‘auto’ is the keyword you need, chances are you can do a few replacements without marring your carefully crafted copy.

Spend time on the titles and description tags. Make sure every page in your site has a unique, relevant TITLE and DESCRIPTION tag.

Never use an automatic page generator. Tools like WebPosition Gold offer to generate optimized pages for you. Don’t. They tend to hurt your ranking as much as help, and they generate ugly, ugly pages.

Write more stuff. More content is almost always better. If your site is just missing a specific keyword or phrase, but you think it’s important, then your potential customers probably do too. By adding a few more pages, or a white paper, or some other content focusing on those absent keywords, you’ll likely help visitors and improve your keyword ranking at the same time. And, the more text-rich your site is, the better the odds that you’ll catch longer, stranger but really important key phrases that you can’t anticipate.

Step 4. Link Analysis. Quite a few major search engines (Google, most importantly) weigh your ‘link popularity’ when ranking your site. A more accurate term, though, is ‘link analysis’, because these engines don’t just count up the number of links to your site. They look for links near and containing relevant text. So a page full of links, one of which happens to be yours, won’t help very much. But a link from a related site, near a short paragraph that contains relevant keywords, will probably give you a boost. Having keywords in the link itself is even better. A quick example:

http://www.portentinteractive.com doesn’t help much.For search engine optimization, visit http://www.portentinteractive.com is much better.For search engine optimization, visit Portent Interactive where ’search engine optimization’ is the link to Portent, is the absolute best case.

There are a few ways to build your link popularity:

Contact sites that relate to yours and request a link exchange. This works really well, but obviously takes a long time.

Syndicate your content. If you can provide an easy way for interested webmasters to link directly to relevant stories on your site, you provide an instant link popularity boost, and get your message out to boot.

Start an affiliate program. If you sell a product, consider setting up an affiliate sales program.

Google’s ‘One Site, One Vote’ RuleGoogle awards a lot less weight to a link to your site if that link is on a page with lots of other links. That’s why so-called ‘link farming’ doesn’t work. Ideally, you want a link to your site from a page that includes relevant content and not that many other outgoing links.Step 5. Submit your site. Many search engines, Google included, allow you to submit your site for free. Generally you can submit your home page and let the search engine crawl the rest of your site. Some directories and engines offer paid ‘express’ services, and some, like Teoma, require that you pay for URL submission. Which engines you choose depends on your budget and campaign.Step 6. Review, Revise, and Keep Going. Think you’re done? Wrong — search engine optimization is an ongoing project. At least once per month, review your rankings, site traffic reports and link popularity and tweak your site as necessary. The tools you need to measure results are:

Site traffic reports. Any web hosting company should provide you with a web site traffic report, and almost all of the reporting tools in use today provide a ‘referrals from search engines’ section. Take a look at this section for a good measure of campaign results.

Link counts. Use the link: command on Google (see above) to determine your link popularity.

Your keyword list. Search on the relevant search engines to see if your ranking has improved.

Your brain. You have to interpret what you see, and decide whether changes are warranted. There’s no hard and fast rule for this, and no magic formula. Sorry about that…

So now you’ll get instant results, right? Well, not quite…A Word About ExpectationsSearch engine optimization can take time. Even Google only refreshes its entire index once a month, so don’t expect instant results.If your first registration run doesn’t generate increased rankings within a month or two, don’t panic. Look at your site traffic and search on the keywords you chose. Make sure that the search engine you’re checking actually includes your site, too — most likely the bots just haven’t gotten around to ‘crawling’ your site.Still stumped? Find a professional. Sure, we cost money. But you may have missed something about your site that’s preventing a good keyword rank, and a second set of eyes can help. A Solid Marketing StrategyObviously, Search Engine Optimization is a big job. But nothing can send more traffic to your site, for lower per-click cost. If you follow the basic steps, and keep at it, you will definitely get results. What’s really, really important is to make sure you don’t award too much weight to one step (such as link popularity) at the expense of the others. A well-rounded campaign will provide solid, long-term results.

What about pay per click?Pay-per-click services, such as Overture and Google Adwords, are very different animals. If you’ve done your keyword analysis you’re halfway there, but there are other tasks. I’ve not talked about them in this article because, well, they need an article of their own. Check back soon…

Search Engine Optimization Demystified

In the second part of the series Search Engine Optimization Demystified – Part Two, we looked at how the search engines see your web site. We went through ranking, indexing and the rules to follow to get the best results for excellent natural search engine results.

In this, the third article in this series I will explain how search engines can be prevented from ever getting to your site and how they can be restricted from parts of your web site through bad web development practices. This results in poor search engine ranking and low natural search traffic levels.

We added this Meta tag to the code of his site: It does what it looks like it does; it instructs the search engine \”robots\” not to index this page or follow the links from it.

Now before you get paranoid – I have never seen this done maliciously, but if you have a robots meta tag on your site it should say: Since search engines assume this to be the default setting, it is not really necessary to have this tag on your site.

There are also meta tags that can tell the search engines what kind of content to expect on this web site. This may reduce traffic intentionally, for instance: < META NAME =\"AUDIENCE\" CONTENT=\"ADULT\">This tag is used by search engines to filter search results for people who set their search preferences to exclude explicit content.

You can see the META tags that have been used on your web site by looking at the source code of the site through your browser. For example, with Internet Explorer choose \”Source\” from the \”View\” menu. The meta tags will be in the top part of the file between the tags – if you hit the tag you\’ve gone too far.

The first page of the site is the most heavily weighted page by search engines. Weighting is done according to various factors, including the amount of relevant text on the page. Since the first page of a frame set is just a set of code instructions to the browser on how to find and use the files for the next page, what a frame set does is to \”demote\” all of the pages in a site to one level down in the page hierarchy. Search engines use the page hierarchy to determine the importance of the page within your web site. If your first page has no content on it, it will rank poorly, and if all other pages are secondary to the first page they will be ranked even lower.

A typical frame set page looks something like this in the code view:                   As you can see there is absolutely nothing in the way of actual words in the page that may be indexed by the search engines. You can understand now why utilizing a frame set would depress your search engine rankings.

In addition, search engines like to follow a nice set of hierarchical links in order to index the content of the site. While your menu with all of your links may be contained in frame1.html in the code view above, you are making the search engine go that extra step to find that menu. As we already mentioned, this is effectively how the frame set knocks everything down one level and makes the search engine jump through an extra hoop to get to your content. Search engines expect us as site owners to jump through extra hoops to appease them – they don\’t like it at all when the tables are turned and will rank your site accordingly.

Search engines cannot read images or text written on images. They cannot read text inside of Flash movies or understand voiceover commentary from a video. Pdfs are often encoded as jpeg images and cannot be read by search engines when saved in this format. Search engines can only read text contained in HTML and in meta tags (which are specifically written for search engines).

One common misuse of Flash is the \”Splash\” or \”Landing\” page. This is a page that is just a picture or movie with only an \”Enter Here\” link on it. Since search engines cannot read the content of an image or Flash movie, this page looks blank to them. If the \”Enter Here\” link is also coded inside the Flash movie the search engines cannot see the link and will not be able to get to any of the pages inside your site regardless of whether they employ Flash or HTML.

Some web sites are written entirely in Flash and are not accessible to search engines as is. There are a few ways around the Flash barrier, like creating an HTML version of the site with meta tags and using additional navigation links in HTML. But why place a barrier to search engines on your site in the first place? We recommend using Flash for decorative purposes. We recommend that it only be used in such a way that if it were removed, search engines would still have everything necessary to index the site correctly.

To test your site\’s accessibility to search engines check if you can copy and paste the text from the web browser to your text editor. If the text is written in HTML you will be able to do this. If you can\’t, it is likely that search engines will not be able to read this text. A site done entirely in Flash or with images is usually the result of a company web development effort driven primarily by graphic design personnel with little or no input from web development professionals. If you are developing a website for business rather than for a movie, an event, or an art exhibit, you are better off listening to the advice of web development professionals who are trained in SEO concepts for maximum ROI through better search engine placement.

Search engines cannot read text embedded in JavaScript or any other scripting language that requires the user to do something (like choose from a drop down list of options) to get to new content. Therefore, most of the drop-down type navigation bars you see at the top of web sites are actually barriers to search engines. Unless a search engine spider sees an actual coded link you will lose them. This is actually the most common barrier we will see on a website because inexperienced web design personnel are unaware of the fact that search engines cannot read scripted menus.

As an aside, javascript drop down menus are usually also less human user-friendly due to the fact that they difficult to manually operate, and they provide no navigational reference point since the drop down \’snaps back up\’ disappearing as soon as it is clicked. While there are again various methods to \”get around\” this obstacle, these are stop-gap measures that can and should be avoided.

By Candace Carter, Back2Front – The Web Site People. December 2009

www.back2front.ca

There are man things money can buy; such as the services of a good SEO agency. However there are some things which not only transcend the power of money but also dilute the impact of the services that have already been undertaken. These are the inherent constrains in a website that are overlooked at the time of developed as design agencies do not always keep in mind your search engine optimisation plans when developing a website. This results in unwarranted disputes and numerous delays always resulting in additional costs. These can be easily overcome if at the time of developed a few factors are kept in mind.

Typically there are 2 kinds of websites that we come across regularly. Static website that are developed in HTML and Dynamic website that are a lot more complex and use data bases and server side scripting languages to display results. Optimisation of static website is relatively straightforward where through the FTP most SEO can be implemented. The trouble comes with dynamic websites where often the facilities do not exist to make the basic changes.

As part of most search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies the following are a list of activities that are routinely carried out.

1. Meta tag optimisation

2. Addition of static content to dynamic pages

3. Optimisation of internal links

4. Conversion of dynamic URL’s to static URL’s

5. Modification of site maps

1. Meta tag optimisation

There are 3 key parts to Meta tags. These Meta title, Meta description and Meta keywords. In many websites these are dynamically generated based on certain pre-defined rules where the information is picked up from certain parts of a page. Although their relevance has been consistently debated there is no denying that having well optimised and relevant Meta tags are part of best practices and can also influence your click through ratios. The design agency should provide the facility where, depending your SEO strategy you should be able to easily overwrite the dynamic Meta tags making them as relevant as possible.

2. Addition of static content to dynamic pages

With a large number of e-commerce websites there are enough tools that provide cleaver facility to mange products, cross selling and other functionality. As most of these pages are dynamically generated many of these do not really exist. Hence most searches will result in either the home pages or top level pages appearing on search results which can loose a lot of your visitors. The website should have the provision where the products can be dynamically generated but at the same time have content that is static.

3. Optimisation of internal links

While most focus on developing backlinks from external websites, one of the most effective search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques is to effectively interlink pages within your website. If you see a Wikipedia page it is full of anchor texts that link to relevant content within the website. A website’s content management should have the functionality where content can be easily hyperlinked.

4. URL modification

Dynamic websites often have URL that have long query strings consisting on numerous characters that mean very little to user and even less to search engines. There are tools available that can be installed on the server such as mod_rewrite ISAPI-rewrite depending on the servers that you are using. These can dramatically alter the long complicated ulr’s into addresses that are meaningful giving a boost to your SEO rankings and user experience.

5. Modification of Sitemaps

Each successful website evolves overtime in its technology, products and marketing strategy. With the growth comes a colossal amount of information which at times gets lost in the website or otherwise looses a user. A site map is a blueprint of website which should allow the webmaster to dynamically keep it up to date with the growing demands of the website There are many website that maintain it diligently during the initial states only to overlook it when other things take priority.

By equipping your website with the functionality to make the above changes, you will be giving your SEO agency the best possible chances for collaborating with the web design agency and in implementing changes.

Search Engine Marketing for MSN and Yahoo!
Statistics released by comScore show that Yahoo! MSN and Ask Jeeves are definitely forces to reckon with. Each of them had over 40 million searches carried out on them last month, in the US alone:
Top US Search Engines in October 2005
Top US search engines in October 2005
Search engine Audience (thousands)
Google Web Search 75,281
Yahoo! Search 68,031
MSN Search 49,748
Ask Jeeves 43,705
AOL Search 36,092
Yahoo! Local Search 20,270
MySpace Search 8,083
Infospace Search 5,942
LookSmart 4,402
Lycos Network 5,249
Source: comScore Media Metrix
It is still worth it to optimise for MSN and Yahoo!
Google’s market leadership is definitely not a given fact. Yahoo! and MSN Search are hot on the heels of Google, and Microsoft seem to be hell-bent on dethroning Google. Taking that into consideration, and the fact that Yahoo! and MSN’s combined search total is well above that of Google it is a must for all webmasters to optimise their sites for the MSN and Yahoo! search engines too.
Note that search engine optimization for MSN and Yahoo! are significantly different processes and involve attention to different factors than when optimising for Google.
We provide 100% ethical search engine optimisation services. We have an open policy, where we will explain everything we do, and will not use any sneaky SEO practices that could risk getting your site banned.

So you are interested in advertising on Google, MSN and/or Yahoo but don’t know if there are any real differences. Take it from me, there are very big differences and being aware of them can save you a lot of money.Back-story

Recently, I was charged with the task of promoting a new piece of software that is geared towards the small business market. I felt this was a good opportunity to run a test to see which search engine is most effective to advertise on. What I found was some startling differences between Google Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search and MSN AdCenter and how effective each one was at promoting my product.Test Setup

Over two months run the same advertisements with the same keywords on Google Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search and MSN AdCenter to see how each of them performs. Though the daily budgets were the same, the cost per click had to vary in order to keep consistent with other bids for each search engine. The goal was to bid just enough to appear in an average search position of 2-3. Test in progress

While the test was taking place I noticed that Google had by far the most impressions to offer and had very little trouble filling my entire budget each day. Yahoo, though they said they didn’t have many impressions to offer for those keywords also maxed out my budget each day, sometimes even exceeding my daily maximum. MSN on the other hand never came close to filling my budget; sometimes it only drove a handful of people to the site over a week’s time.

Another thing I noticed is that the cost per click varied slightly for the same position in their results. Google was the most expensive at just over $3 dollars per click, Yahoo was $2.67 and MSN was $2.39. I realize that the costs are a bit arbitrary without the keywords but this article is for comparison’s sake and not specifics.The Conclusion

In the end the only thing that really matters is how many clicks were converted. For those of you new to the term “conversion”: A conversion is any signup, purchase or traceable action that you wish a user to perform. For us, a conversion meant a sign up.

After two months we had 60% of our signups from Google, 50% from MSN and a dismal 10% from Yahoo. The biggest surprise is that Google cost 50% of our total money spent, Yahoo cost 35% and MSN cost only 15% of our total budget. In the end MSN ended up being much cheaper per conversion and even though they didn’t send a ton of traffic to our site it seemed that they were well qualified people that they were sending.

Yahoo was the biggest disappointment, costing over 3x’s per conversion than Google and over 6x’s more than MSN. There can be a host of reasons this is so, one of the possibilities is that Yahoo’s users are not interested in the type of software we were promoting. Another possibility is that Yahoo’s ads get clicked on by their users at a much higher rate which also causes the quality of the leads to be lower.

In the end, running campaigns on the major three search engines can be a great help, but monitoring them can save you a lot of money in the long run. What works on one search engine many not work on another, and keeping an eye on it will help you determine this. Don’t be afraid to pull the plug if one is not working, sometimes you just need to go with what works and not force something that isn’t showing you results.

Search engines: What are they?

A search engine is one of the most important tool that helps you find information on the web. Search engines are giant sized automated cataloguing & retrieval systems. They typically have large databases of web pages & other information found on the net. Upon specific query by the users these databases are scanned & the matching results displayed.

The utility of search engines in web search lies in the fact that they are the repositories of large amounts of information which can be searched very conveniently using certain keywords. This natural language searching & many advanced features now available with search engines makes the recipe tantalizingly attractive. Hence it is no wonder that 78% of the users start their search process for any information via a search engine.

Before we go any further lets clarify the difference between a search engine & a web directory. Search engines as we have learnt are automated software based systems which aid the web search. Directories are generally human based indexes in which the web sites are visited & catalogued by human beings. In the directories the web sites are included in the categories & sub categories . These categories or taxonomies are specific to specific directories.

Users can search for relevant sites in a directory by either mining on the subject they are looking for or searching through keywords. The most famous commercial directory is Yahoo. There are hundreds of directories available. We will be discussing them later. A point to note here is that most of the SE have now started to mix their web results with some kind of directory results.

Though there is a category of SE which are not crawler based. They accept money to list your web site. These paid listings search engines will be dealt in greater detail in subsequent section.

For the moment, lets look at search engine internals a little more closely:

What goes into making a search engine

To have a birds eye view of search engine functionality will help the searcher evaluate the relative search engine merits amongst themselves as also compared with other search resources.

Search engines as we know them, to put simply, are divided into three parts:

Crawler

Index

Search software

Lets take them one by one.

Search Engine Crawler: A traditional database is populated using conventional data entry methods. Not so on the web. Search engines send a software called spider or crawler to the wild web. This spider will visit a web site once it hears of it (through other links pointing to the web site, cataloguing in some directory or direct submission to the SE) & will start to crawl around. Based on links in the site it will digest as much information as it has been programmed to receive about the web site. Thus crawlers are search engines inventory(index) suppliers.

Search Engine Index: Index or the catalogue is that huge book which contains a copy of all the web pages that have been spidered. This in other words is the database of the search engine. Once the site has been crawled it is added to the index of the search engine. This database is refreshed & updated as per the settings done by specific search engines on a regular basis.

Search Engine Ranking Software: This is the sauce which is mostly instrumental in different crawler based search engines serving different platters on being queried about the same recipe. In other words, this is the area where most of the search engines differ in the way they handle queries & display results. This portion of the SE deals with scanning the database (index) according to specific user queries & then ranking the matches found.

This brings us to the variety found in search engines.

Types of search engines:

Search engines come in various flavors. There is as much variety in search engines as one wants. From a searchers angle it makes sense to have a handle on the major search engines in multiple categories as one important aspect of doing a good search is to be aware of specific tools to be applied in specified conditions. To illustrate, a good medical search could be done using medhunt.com as compared to say altavista.com.

Broadly the categories that the major search engine could be divided into are:

General search engines

Specialty search engines

Meta search engines

Paid search engines

Search utilities

All of these search engines have a specific utility & specific application. Lets take some examples to demonstrate.

The almost eponymous General search engine is google.

In specialty search engines we have search engines specially for multimedia, medicine, blogs, law, industry ,scientific papers…

The meta search engines are which use two or three other general search engines to generate results & then customize the format in which they are presented. Some prime examples are mamma.com, myway.com, metacrawler.com etc.

This category of search engines are really growing as a category. Starting with overture.com they come in multiple varieties as well. While some accept paid inclusions like inktomi to PPC( pay per click) engines like overture, espotting etc.

Search utilities are specialized tools utilized for special applications. One example of such utility is lexibot which scavenges the deep web for information.

The following article presents the very latest information on Search Engine. If you have a particular interest in Search Engine, then this informative article is required reading.

Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor. If your URL shows up far down the results list, the chances of the consumer never finding you increase incrementally. Once you achieve a high search engine position, it is essential that you make sure you maintain the high ranking you have worked so hard to achieve.

This means you must come up with a strategy to monitor your search engines positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you let your stock portfolio be ruled by chance and market fluctuations, or would you keep close tabs on your stocks so you could buy and sell when the time is right? This is the way you must consider your search engines positions.

Be aware that at first, after you have launched your search engine campaign and done all the right things to increase your rankings, you will most likely see a continual upward climb. What you need to be on the lookout for is the moment that upward climb reaches a plateau. When this happens, your search engine position campaign moves into stage two, the monitoring and protecting stage.

In stage two, do not be concerned about the short-term
fluctuations in your positions. These are similar to the subtle rising and falling of stocks in a portfolio.
Short-term movement is an integral part of the whole
process. It’s the long-term changes that you must watch for and prepare to act on immediately.

Analyzing the long-term trends of search engines positions is imperative. The way in which search engines rank websites may change at the drop of hat. If you are unaware of these changes – many of which are subtle yet can be deadly to your ranking – your position may drop to the bottom of the list before you can get your bearings. To prevent this kind of precipitous drop, you must create a system to monitor your positions on a monthly basis. Devise a chart to keep tabs on your top ranking positions or your top pages, and make sure to watch “the market” closely.

Each search engine uses a formula to compute website
rankings. When a search engine changes this formula in any way, it may raise or lower your ranking. Some search engines use a number of different formulas, rotating them so that a formula doesn’t become overused or outdated. Depending on which formula is being applied, your search engine position may suddenly drop or rise in rank significantly. Therefore, you must check your positions frequently in order to catch when a search engine changes formulas and what effect it has on your positions.

You must also deal with your competition – a crucial factor you must always be vigilant about. Your competitor’s position may suddenly rise, automatically lowering your position. Or their position may drop, pushing your position higher. Each month, expect position changes due to the continual changes that are occurring in your competitor’s position, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy to compensate for decreased rankings. Monitoring these
fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website to increase your position in search results.

So far, we’ve uncovered some interesting facts about Search Engine. You may decide that the following information is even more interesting.

Of course, you must discern what the most popular search engines are in order for your monitoring efforts to be effective. Right now, there are ten popular search engines that direct most of Internet traffic to your sites. The challenge you face is that these top ten may change from month to month.

This means that your must not only monitor your search
engine positions, but you must also keep track of the
ranking popularity of the search engines you are
monitoring. Find out which search engines people use most frequently every month and be sure to live in the present! People are fickle about their favorite search engines, and it takes constant vigilance to follow their dalliances. The search engines they loved when you first launched your campaign may be old news in the next few months. You must adjust your list of engines according to the whims of the Internet users.

Another factor to monitor carefully is a sudden drop of
your positions in all search engines. This is not the same as monthly fluctuations – this is a neon red warning sign! It could mean a number of different things.

It all your search engine positions have plummeted, it may indicate that search engines spiders – those sneaky
programs that seek out your site and rank their positions – have found some type of problem with your website. If you have recently changed the code, for instance, the spider may become utterly confused and consequently drop your positions disastrously. If a spider creeps up on your website when it is down for adjustments or changes, you may actually disappear from a search engine index entirely. Or a search engine may drastically change its formula, and
suddenly all of your website come up as irrelevant. If that search engine is a current favorite, it may create a domino effect, causing all of your position to drop in all search engines.

Some search engines rely on the results from other search engines, and it is vital that you know which engines these are and keep track of all the engines they influence. The biggest problem here is that search engines will sometimes change affiliations, and this can create a major shift in the geography of the Internet. For example, recently Yahoo decided to display only results gleaned from Google. So you
must not only monitor your own positions, but you must keep abreast of seismic shifts in the landscape of the Internet as a whole.

Finally, pay attention to your keywords. Keywords are the foundation bricks of the entire search engine system, and they demand individual scrutiny in your monitoring efforts. If you have found that a number of your positions have plummeted, it may mean that a page of your website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders. Or the competition for that particular keyword or phrase has recently rocketed into outer space. In either case, you must act quickly and efficiently to regain lost ground.

Your search engine marketing campaign is an investment. It costs you time and money on a continual basis. Protect this investment as diligently as you would your financial portfolio. In the same way, track your positions from an objective perspective, and monitor your positions on a regular basis. Make sure your time and effort reap rewards by keeping your eye on the big picture – your long-term marketing campaign.

When word gets around about your command of Search Engine facts, others who need to know about Search Engine will start to actively seek you out.

Introduction

Search Engines have developed into the Internet’s most popular and powerful source of information, accounting for an estimated 80% of the Internet’s traffic (Heche, 2007, p. 1). As a result, website owners are realizing the power in such devises and are shifting marketing budgets into the optimization of their sites specifically for search engines. During the toddler years of search engine optimization (SEO), crafty developers took advantage of weak search engine algorithms to display their websites in top results, regardless of their site’s relevance. However, as more advanced Internet search engine technologies emerged to solve such exploits, new SEO methods were pursued (Boykin, 2007, p. 1). With the growth in search engine popularity and accuracy, and with newly emerging techniques used to target such engines, SEO has become a cut-throat competitive industry that is quickly being dominated in its utilization by big-business corporations (Murray, 2007, p. 1). Regardless of a company size and status, however, company webmasters with basic knowledge of HTML and blogging can establish top search engine rankings for websites that target niche markets with great efficiency by employing specific on-page and off-page SEO techniques.A Search Engine Primer

Search engines did not become popular overnight. In fact, it took half a decade for the general public to catch on to the power of them. Search engines have become a woven part of society only because of their brilliant architecture; systems with frameworks so complex, yet so simple in user utilization that a novice can operate it. Concisely, the modern search engine is an intricate tool formulated to minimize the discovery time of information by minimizing result digression and maximizing result accuracy based on hundreds of relative factors. The basic functionality of a search engine includes content discovery, indexing, querying, and ranking (Fishkin, 2007, p. 4).

Content discovery is often referred to as “Web crawling”. The analogy of the “Web” is an important concept to grasp, since its analogy will act as a backbone to understanding the search engine discovery process and the terminology involved. The internet can be generally referred to as the World Wide Web, or just Web for short, because the structure of the internet most resembles the structure of a spider web (Davis, 2005, p. 1). Each of the billions of pages of content are linked together in some way or another to create an incomprehensibly large network of connections. Consequently, search engines have called their automated programs that crawl this web “bots” or “spiders”. Modern crawlers revisit indexed sites on a regular basis to look for changes or revisions. Sites are normally updated by the crawler between a one or two months time. In estimation, search engines have only crawled about half of the Web’s content pages, accounting for between eight to ten billion pages (Fishkin, 2007, p. 4).

Every page that is crawled on the Web by a search engine is placed into a gigantic database called an index or sometimes a catalogue. Massive organization is applied to the index in a way that requests can sort through billions of pages and find relevant matches within just fractions of a second. Sometimes it can take a considerable amount of time for a search engine to actually index a site after crawling it. During this time, the site will not be available on index to those searching (Fishkin, 2007, p. 4).

Content querying is the provision of an interface or gateway connecting the human user and the results waiting inside the search engine database. The results vary in type from web pages to online published word processor documents, and are returned to the user based on the criteria they indicate. The method a user might use to indicate criterion varies based on the search engine. Search engines normally provide a blank text input field in which the user can type terms or phrases into then press a button to send the query to the search engine for processing. Many modern search engines incorporate exclusive input syntaxes that a user might learn to take full advantage of the search engine’s power. Natural language searches, however, allow a user to input full sentence-structured questions instead of requiring the user to learn query syntaxes (Sullivan, 2007, p. 1). An example of syntax is placing terms in quotations. Google, the most commonly used search engine of today, uses quotations to specify results that return exact matches to all the terms in the order they are listed in quotations. Google includes ten other operators used to better define a query and home in on the target results (Google Cheat Sheet, 2007, p. 1).

Ranking becomes a search engine’s most distinguishing process, as this will determine what and how information is displayed to the user. A commonality all search engines share by nature is the organization of pages by relevancy starting first with most relevant and ending with least. The higher a page’s rank is, the higher the site’s probable relevance will be as perceived by the engine. Every search engine uses its own unique method of determining how pages rank in relation to one another, and these are called algorithms. An algorithm is a mathematical formula that will take into consideration dozens of factors that have positive and negative effects on page rank. Think of it as a set of rules that a judge uses to determine which girl wins in a beauty pageant. The winner will always showcase more than just beauty alone, but instead, indicate a deeper purpose like the reputation, talents, and even life intentions. The many factors involved in judging contestants in a beauty pageant are very much like the factors used to rank a webpage (Sisson, 2006, p. 12).Brief History of the Search Engine

The earliest breeds of search engines were not actually search engines at all, but rather massive directories of content pages manually submitted by their authors. It was not until spiders and bots came to the scene that people began to see the power behind such tools (Wall, n.d., p. 8). Archie appeared in 1990 as the very first tool used to search pages of the Internet. It was named Archie to resemble the word “archive” without the “v”. Built by Alan Emtage, the program indexed directory listings from public FTP sites. An alternative tool emerged a year later called Gopher, which indexed solely text files instead of all computer files. Two other index systems called Veronica and Jughead searched the Gopher index servers and provided more targeted keyword search (Wall, n.d., p. 2). By 1993, a new generation of search engine emerged from a student at MIT: automated web crawling. Initially used for counting and measuring the size of the Web, the first web crawling bot on the Internet was named the World Wide Web Wanderer by its creator Matthew Gray. ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing of the Web) was introduced in the same year with the capability to collect page meta-data and allow page authors to submit their own content. Search engines and crawling technology wasn’t yet seen as having any true significance for society until further university experiments were done (Wall, n.d., p. 1).

As the Internet gained popularity and started appearing as a business opportunity to investors, college students began getting large funding opportunities. This boom in funding caused break-through developments such as relevancy-based indexing to occur. Corporations like Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Yahoo, and Google in turn met at the search engine scene, each bringing their own new innovations to the table. Altavista offered a brand new method of searching for the end-user known as natural language inquiry (Wall, n.d., p. 1). Ask Jeeves was quick to mimic this technique, but also focused on building its index from web communities. A few years later, Altervista was bought by Yahoo! for 235 million dollars, which was just one of that many small steps taken toward the multi-billion dollar establishment Yahoo! is today (Olsen, 2003, p. 1). Lycos contained the largest index of any search engine of its time with more than 60 million documents in 1996, but eventually evolved into the fifth most popular web portal in the world (Sherman, 2002, p. 1). Lycos abandoned its own search engine algorithm, and began powering its search feature by Ask in 2006, which is former Ask Jeeves (O’Reilly, 2006, p. 1).

Although Google entered the scene relatively late in 1998, it still managed to ultimately come out on top from its tough search engine competitors (Google Milestones, 2007, p. 1) Through collaboration, Larry Page and Sergey Brin babied their creation until receiving more than 25 million dollars in funding in just a year’s time from its initial launch (Google Milestones, 2007, p. 3). Google partnered with AOL and Yahoo! by early 2000, which also marked the release year of the renowned Google toolbar (Google Milestones, 2007, p. 4). In 2007, Colvin of CNN reported that “Google’s figure is $149 billion and rising fast, pushing the company past most of America’s biggest, most successful, most respected corporations” (Colvin, 2007, p. 1). It is clear that Google has conquered the search engine war, rendering it as the most valuable search engine webmasters can optimize for their websites. Google has practically set the standard for other search engines that have followed the leader’s footsteps. Because of this, Google-specific page ranking factors are currently the most significant for any SEO venture because of competing search engines’ inherent similarities (Ryan, 2006, p. 1).On-Page Search Engine Optimization

Jumping straight into SEO, it is imperative to understand that success relies heavily on the keywords that are chosen for the optimization venture. Because keyword terms can be found inside content, titles, headers, and images of a webpage, these are all considered on-page objects and therefore contribute to the optimization of the page itself. Keywords can be thought of as the foundation upon which SEO is built on, when if removed from the equation it leaves a broken structure. In relation to SEO, keywords are terms used to define the purpose of a webpage in its entirety (Fishkin, 2007, p. 9).

Commonly, there is confusion between metadata keywords and content keywords. metadata entries, which are code strings placed in the code heading of pages, are no longer used for relevancy because they were taken advantage of by having irrelevant keywords that attracted undeserved attention. For this metadata keywords are no longer used, while metadata descriptions are only used as snapshots for a few rare search engine directory page entries. Because of all this, metadata entries are very insignificant to SEO. In the world of keywords, content is king. When a search query is sent, the search engine will try to return with pages that match best to the inquiry keywords found within a page’s content (Sisson, 2006, p. 8). Since so much relies on keywords, it is common practice to conduct research to seek the right related keywords or keyword combinations that are optimizable for a given scenario. There are several free online tools available for keyword research, such as the tool suite found at http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools (Callen, 2005, p. 32)

Keywords that are too popular will actually have a negative impact on search rankings because of the overcoming competition. Instead of seeking popular solo keywords like “insurance” or “games”, it is much more effective to find a niche (Callen, 2005, p. 12). A niche homes in on the specific product, idea, or service that is attempting to be displayed in search results. When optimizing for a focused target audience, the competition is easier to outsource, and in turn will always promise high rankings when page optimization is established. Instead of seeking a single magic keyword, it is best to seek a keyword combination or a phrase that will best describe a niche specifically. Most people enter 2-5 word phrases into search queries, which ensures security with multi-keyword niches (Sisson, 2006, p. 13).

Some webmasters have tried repeating their keywords excessively on their pages to boost frequency. What these webmasters might not understand is that excessive keywording is like playing with fire, where if they get too close they will get burned. If a search engine notices an unusually excessive repetition of keywords, the engine will demote the site and may even ban it from its index completely. In contrast to this, search engines are now intelligently seeking common relationships between terms on the Web, so when keywords are used throughout a document with fluency and in good context, this can quickly benefit a site’s ranking (Fishkin, 2007, p. 9).

Keywords should be strategically placed on a webpage to maximize keyword frequency without running the risk of being seen as a keyword spammer by the search engine. If more than one keyword combination is being targeted by your site, it is important not to strand keywords together in an attempt to increase keyword relevance. In page content, header code tags will emphasize keywords for users as well as search engine spiders. Placing keywords naturally in the alt tags of content relating images will also boost page relevance, and return your site in image search results. Most importantly, naturally mentioning keywords in body paragraph text will increase keyword frequency. To reiterate however, it is important not to overuse keywords in body paragraphs, since some search engines might suspect a site with that sort of ‘keyword juicing’ as spam (Sisson, 2006, p. 13).

Linking is another imperative factor of page rankings which will be covered in greater detail in off-page techniques, but is also a part of on-page optimization. Internal linking generates a hierarchy of synonymous page rank based upon which pages are linked most. Many webmasters often do not realize they are making a mistake when chain-linking content more than two levels away from the homepage, or mesh linking. Mesh linking occurs when every page contains a link to every other page in the site, giving every page with equal importance. This means a contact or form page will rank just as high as the actual meat of the site. To solve this issue and direct the search engines’ focus towards pages of importance, a hierarchical linking system should be established. To create linking hierarchy, not all pages are cross linked, and important pages are linked to by the largest number of pages on the site (Sisson, 2006, p. 37).Off Page Search Engine Optimization

While on-page optimization provides a solid basis for a website being recognized by spiders, it is the links from other websites that determine the rank of the recognized page. Off-page search engine optimization is mostly concerned with this establishment of inbound links to the focus website. The process is known as link building, and is by far the most strenuous aspect of SEO. A site’s page rank is determined by both the quantity and quality of its incoming links. The quality of a link is the most weighted factor, which is based upon the page rank of the site making the link. If the linked site has relevance to the site being optimized, then this is a positive detail (Fishkin, 2007, p. 26). Relevancy is determined by comparing keywords in website titles, the anchor text of the link, and even its IP address. The IP address or number value that the domain name refers to may have less weighted effect on page ranking if it shares a common third octet (Sisson, 2006, p. 43). Sites that have very high page ranks are referred to as ‘authoritative’ and will almost automatically boost the page rank of a site it links to. Two forms of linking exist: two-way and one-way.

Two-way linking is also known as reciprocal linking because it is a mutual establishment between site owners. This method is essentially a link swap. Some webmasters carry the misconception that paying for well known link exchange services will guarantee site visits, but this is only true on a temporary degree (Sisson, 2006, p. 54). Also, link exchanges are considered manipulative and have a record of incurring removal of sites from search engine indexes.

One-way link building can sometimes be considered a science and art, since many techniques are nothing short of brilliant. One scheme often used to build massive amounts of inbound links is to produce a gadget or banner that appeals to other site owners, and encourages them to take a code snippet for the gadget or personalized banner and place it on their own site. An example of this method is evident at www.nerdtests.com. This site offers a free and fun online quiz that ranks the user’s nerdiness in percent relation to everyone else who took the quiz and awards an ‘official title’ banner code based on the outcome. These banners can be found floating all around the net in user signatures of online community forum boards or even on personal blogs and provides www.nerdtests.com with an endless link base (Spencer, 2007, p. 1).

The most common and reliable method of getting back-links is submitting articles to informative websites, which usually give authors an opportunity to link to their personal site. Social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Propeller all have recently become a hit sensation among frequent internet users. These bookmarking sites provide a portal to sites recommended by other users. If the content on a site is valuable or entertaining enough to people, social bookmarking sites may be the most effective approach to off-page optimization since they are based on popularity and massive viral tendencies (Hagen, 2007, p. 5).Method

As my primary research, I conducted an interview on October 25, 2007, consisting of ten focused questions about SEO with Bill Slawski. Bill is the President of SEO by the Sea and the Director of Internet Marketing for KeyRelevance Inc., and was directly referred to me by Rand Fishkin, one of the world’s most renowned and authoritative SEO experts. Bill is one of the founders and administrators of Cre8asite Forums, is an active correspondent for Search Engine Land, and writes a weekly column for their small business section. Mr. Slawski’s professional credentials substantiate the validity of his interview responses and provide access to exclusive insider industry knowledge. The interview was completed via electronic mail, in which Bill took full advantage of to respond with in-depth and intuitive answers complete with real-world examples.Results

As the first question of my interview, I asked Bill how he would define SEO to the average Internet user. Bill responded, “In simplest terms, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is applying knowledge of how search engines work to make sites easier to find on the web for the audiences that those pages were intended to attract. In more complicated terms, SEO is a matter of combining an application of marketing ideas and a knowledge of search engines to help bring the right people to a site so that they will change from visitor to consumer.” This description spells out the fundamental concepts of SEO. It is important to understand SEO, in essence, is limitless in ways of targeting consumer markets. While advertising schemes might be limited to the specific targets the advertising company provides based upon the small amount of information shared with them about your product, SEO delves into your niche and allows for much more targeting flexibility.

My second question for Bill was, “In what ways is SEO more effective or efficient than other online marketing methods?” He responded saying, “Search engine optimization means being aware of how search engines might collect information from the pages of a website, and making it easy for the search engines to index the content of those pages. In effect, it means enabling a search engine to become an index for the pages of a site. It can be less expensive than using the paid contextual ads that you see displayed with search results at a search engine, or the banner ads that show up on other websites that may point to the site advertised.” This cost efficiency is an important component of why business professionals are making the leap away from conventional pay per click advertising as their primary marketing strategy and making the switch to search engine optimization.

The third question pointed towards the public view on this experts own industry. My question was, “Do you think the power of SEO is relatively undermined, or in contrast, do you think it is overplayed as an online marketing method in the industry?” He responded with, “Search is one of the commonest activities that people get involved in when the go online, so making a website easy to be found in a search engine for people who might be looking for what that site has to offer is a good idea. It can make sense to include SEO as one part of a multiple part marketing effort, and to build a strong marketing plan that includes both online and offline parts. Unfortunately, there are differing skill sets amongst people who offer SEO services – some are just better than others.” While my question was meant to explore SEO’s public relation solely, Bill brought up an extremely important reiteration of SEO’s unknown power when combined with an ultimate market plan encompassing offline target markets as well as the ones who exist online. This also adds to the concept of ‘limitless’ SEO possibilities.

I asked for my next question, “Can any website benefit from SEO?” Bill explained, “SEO is only really important to sites that want to increase their visibility on the Web. A game clan site, where everyone who needs to know the address of the site already does has no need for SEO. But, if you hope to attract visitors to your pages, it doesn’t hurt to make them as search friendly as possible. And if you want to attract people to those pages who might be interested in the content of the pages, it doesn’t hurt to try to use words on the pages that those people might try to search with on a search engine, and to do it in a manner that makes it more likely that those words will be found earlier on in search results.” Drawn from his answer is a suggestion of widely conventional use for SEO. Unless meant specifically to be concealed from Internet users, any website seeking visitors can benefit largely from any amount of SEO. Since amateur implementation of SEO is key part of this paper, the next question was very distinctive in terms.

I asked, “Is it possible for webmasters to (with fundamental knowledge of HTML and blogging) implement SEO for themselves with relatively successful results for their small websites?” Unsurprisingly, my prediction was reinforced with his answer. Bill said, “Webmasters with a fundamental knowledge of HTML and blogging can achieve some success with being found on the web, but having a good knowledge of how search engines work can help a webmaster make better choices about how their site is set up for success with search engines.” I asked, “In general, what is the timeline of results returned by SEO?” Bill responded saying, “The amount of time that it may take to achieve results may vary by the site involved and how much work it might need, the competitiveness of the market it is within, and the demand for what the site offers. It’s almost impossible to guarantee success generally, and perhaps even harder to do it within a specified timeline.” While other sources have noted results can be seen in a matter of days in some cases, it seems there is no definitive amount of time that promises results to become evident. In that, the SEO marketing solution may not always suite for website owners seeking instant Web traffic.

This question focused on SEO as a long-term asset. I asked Bill, “Do you believe SEO may become obsolete in the future?” He explained, “I don’t see it becoming obsolete as much as I see it evolving. What we considered SEO in 1998 is different than what we consider it to be now. If you look at a set of search results in Google today, you may see videos, images, news, web pages, product searches, and other results that you wouldn’t have seen even a couple of years ago. The web is changing and search engines are changing, and helping people so that they understand some of these changes and how they might impact their web sites will probably continue to be a need to be filled in the future.” This provides a fairly straight answer indicating that SEO will only continue to progress with changes over time, rendering SEO as a very reasonable long-term asset for any website.

My final and most important question asked, “In what ways might SEO be viable for businesses with niches?” Bill responded saying, “Finding a niche where you can be competitive, and where there’s a demand from consumers can increase your likelihood of success. A small business can often take advantage of working within a niche that a larger business might find to be too much work for too little return. If the smaller business has considerably less overhead in terms of cost and time, they may be able to thrive in one of those niches. By focusing upon a specific market or audience that others aren’t, it may be possible to be found easier if people want to find the service or goods or information that you provide within that niche.” This is a fabulous reverberation of how specific keyword combinations and niches interact. Focusing on smaller markets can provide a better means of success on a smaller, yet more attainable scale.Discussion

Throughout the extent of my research, SEO had been discovered to be one of, if not the, most effective Internet marketing strategies available today. Statistics have shown that the largest magnitude of online users discover information and merchandise through the use of search engines. SEO channels that majority of Internet traffic directly into a marketable solution, idea, or product with the best cost and time efficiency. By employing on-page and off-page techniques, a webmaster with basic knowledge of HTML and blogging can supply a particular niche website with a top search engine result ranking respective to its niche search keywords. Keywords play an imperative role in the SEO venture by providing the base of the optimized structure. The keyword focus of a pre-optimized website is determined through intense research by identifying competition and analyzing keyword query frequencies using particular keyword research tools. After keywords are determined, on-page content structure and coding is the next priority, seeing as off-page link building logically requires a quality page to link to beforehand. Off-page techniques will utilize link building strategies to launch the rankings already established by on-page SEO past competition.

The product produced as a result from my intense research will enable any adventurous amateur with fundamental HTML and blogging familiarity to pursue SEO with relatively guaranteed success. My product, in the form of a website, guides the pursuer with simple and concise instructions. The website splits the SEO mission between on-page and off-page techniques which have been explained in earlier sections of this paper. Instead of discussing these techniques in non-applicable generality however, the website will demonstrate specific examples of each optimization practice with its own optimized features.To view my final product website, click here.

For references used in this paper, click here.

There is a lot of talk nowadays about Search Engine Optimization, but not so much about Organic Search Engine Optimization itself. So what exactly is Organic Search Engine Optimization?

Organic Search Engine Optimization is just like ordinary Search Engine Optimization in that it is the process of optimizing the design of your website so that search results using keywords in search engines will rank your website higher in the non-paid listings. Organic Search Engine Optimization (also called Natural Search Engine Optimization) however, also has a slight difference from ordinary Search Engine Optimization in certain aspects but the main focus is to work towards getting the best ranking in Natural or Organic search results (SERPs).

For instance, Organic Search Engine Optimization requires your SEO team to evaluate your website thoroughly to see how best to optimize your website’s potential. The SEO team will then try to identify any technical issues which can bar your site from being indexed properly during the Organic Search Engine Optimization process.

Organic Search Engine Optimization also requires detailed keyword analysis to be done so your Organic Search Engine Optimization team can produce a list of appropriate keywords and phrases that can be used for your website. Keyword analysis should require real information about the function, products and services offered at your website, stay aligned with your goals for marketing your website, and try to get the best Organic Search Engine Optimization impact on the search engines and end users. Some Organic Search Engine Optimization specialists will give you a list of target keywords and phrases that have been ranked as to how popularly use each is by Internet searchers.

It has been found that to get the best search engine rankings, Organic Search Engine Optimization should rely on effective and efficient organization of the website, with content selected by your Organic Search Engine Optimization team so that keywords and phrases will not look ridiculous when used in the website content. Organic SEO starts with selecting the right Title and Meta tags, creation of on-page text with emphasis on content and layout, and then followed by insertion of internal links of the various web pages of your website. If these are followed by your Organic Search Engine Optimization team, keyword relevance and correct page formatting will increase.

Organic Search Engine Optimization also requires manual submissions of your website to directories and search engines. This helps assure you – the client – that Organic Search Engine Optimization will meet the special demands, regulations, and legal requirements of every search engine that is contacted by your Organic Search Engine Optimization

team.

Your Organic Search Engine Optimization team must rely on ethical link building techniques, not only to safeguard the security of your search engine rankings but also to allow your website descriptions to be placed under the right directory categories. Ethical Organic Search Engine Optimization link building will also help your website use only the correct resource web sites.

Does Organic Search Engine Optimization end here? Actually, no, your Organic Search Engine Optimization team must constantly track search engine submissions so that they can tweak and amend your website if needed to provide the best results for you. Organic Search Engine Optimization also requires that the team document their monitoring activities so you yourself know what is happening all the time.

It would be helpful if your Organic SEO team can track the numbers of visitors your site generates, to make it more convenient for you. After all, you need to concentrate on running your organization and/or business so Organic Search Engine Optimization should be a separate endeavor that others should do for you.

Otherwise, why outsource this function?

Organic Search Engine Optimization aims to help you bring in more visitors than you were getting before, so that your potential sales will be maximized in the process. But you need to avoid illicit practices and favor Organic Search Engine Optimization more because:

1) illicit marketing practices do not reflect well on you or the SEO team you hired.

2) Organic Search Engine Optimization does work when used the right way.

3) Organic Search Engine Optimization does not harm the search engine you will submit your website to, so you have a favorable image with search engines in general, and

4) Organic Search Engine Optimization is part of the use of best practices that have

been accepted by most of the Internet world nowadays.

How then do you find an Organic Search Engine Optimization team that you can work with? One way is to look for SEO industry data about who are the best Organic SEO players currently operating online. Examine the background of the company, and pay close attention to who they cite as their satisfied clients. You might want to contact these clients yourself discreetly so you can inquire into their Organic Search Engine Optimization experience with that SEO player. Another way is to ask people you know who have used Organic Search Engine Optimization themselves. Sometimes, the best way to get proper service is through ordinary word-of-mouth advertising from people you trust.

Blog SEO is one of the most effective way to build automated traffic to your blog. You might have learn some basic SEO strategy, but have you heard that blog has a very different way that allows you to get your blog on the first page very quick and easy.
Most blogger will rush to build backlinks, but they will discover ranking is hard and struggling because they have forgotten to do some “On-Blog Optimization” that would help them to get to the first page few times quicker. These On-Blog Optimization are:
1. Use Domain Name That Contain Keywords
Domain name gives you a huge advantage to get to the first page on the search engines. I’ve seen websites that have only few links that rank higher than sites which have hundreds of backlinks. The difference is just these sites domain name contain their keywords. This makes the search engine thinks that the domain name is dedicated to show only contents about the keyword.
2. Does Your Blog Title Contain Keywords?
Type keywords in your blog title. When the blog title is your keywords, the h1 tag and title tag on your blog will become your keywords. Each page of your blog will link back to the main page of your blog with the keywords too. All of these gives you extra SEO benefits to your blog.
3. Does Your Tagline Contain Keywords?
Every Wordpress blog’s general setting, you’ll realize something below your blog title called ‘Tagline’ or description in other blog platform. Tagline is another important location to type your keywords. Make sure get it done.
4. Do You Miss Out Ping?
Ping is a important function of each wordpress blog will have. Everytime you publish a new article, your blog will ping itself to inform few websites you’ve created new information on your blog. Ping also helps to inform search engines you updated new information on your blog. Search engines like websites and blogs that update themselves frequently because they offer their users up-to-date and quality information. Search engine will usually rank your blog high if you ping often. Remember to import more ping services in your setting.
5. Are You Using Duplicated Contents?
Beware of duplicated content on your blog. Try not to reuse your own or others’ content on your blog. Reusing same content doesn’t help in ranking because search engines don’t index many pages that contain the same content because it might annoy their users and it might be a way to avoid spammers to increase their page by duplicating same contents.
6. Applying The Technique Of Keyword Density
Do you mention your keywords in your blog? Repeat your keywords often. Try to keep your density of keywords above 2% and below 7%. It means you got to have keyword you aim for 3 to 6 times in every 100 words you wrote. The more often you use the keywords in your post, the more the search engines thinking your blog is relevant to the keywords. Many people already aware of this method, this makes some internet marketer stuff keywords in their page. Google penalize page that overuse this method. Try to keep it below 7%.
7. Relevant Keywords
Since many people discover the keyword density method, Search engines have created a different algorithm that can judge websites’ content by the amount of relevant keywords. If you are using Wordtracker or Google Keyword Tool, these tool is able to give you many other keywords that are related to the keywords you aim for. Use some of them in your articles too. For example, you’ll see “pimple” and “blackhead” as related keywords when you search for acne.
8. Speed Blogging
If you post a new articleon your blog 3 times a day on your blog or more, Google think that your blog have the latest news about a topic and always provide fresh contents. As a result, you’ll rank easier. If you have a new blog, start posting once every 3 days and increase your post to once a day after 1 month. If your blog has been there for certain period, it’s up to you.
9. Page Volume
Another tip many Black Hat SEO trick users know is increasing the vloume of webpages. However, we try to do it in a white hat approach by posting more new articles. The more pages your blog has, the more content rich and informational the search engines think your blog is. As a result, your blog will be ranked higher.
10. Is Your Page Long Enough?
Publish posts have contain more than 250 words to get your page indexed quicker and stay in Google longer. As I mentioned, there’re many spammers who use the technique of increasing blog page quantity to manipulate search results. They might simply use a few words to publish a page. Search engines have ways to calculate the words to ensure it doesn’t happen.
11. What Sites Are You Linking To?
Do you know that your blog will get lower ranking if you link to a spam site or bad site? It is the same the other way round. If you link to a high authority site, your blog will have a higher ranking too. I haven’t did any experiment to prove it yet but I am a strong believer of this concept.
12. Interlinking
Is your blog posts linking to each other? Interlinking is a tip many internet marketers apply to increase Blog SEO traffic from keywords you don’t aim for. Although backlinks from the same site is not as good as backlinks from other websites, they are useful in ranking too especially you are able to have it done automatically with blogs. Use “Similar Post” plugin and create links to your popular posts at your sidebar.
13. Change Title Tags On Each Of Your Posts
Another tip to get more search engine traffic from untargeted keywords, it’s crucial to have the title tags of each of your blog post start with the post title first. You can use a free plugin called “All In One SEO Pack Plugin” that will do this automatically.
14. Create SEO Friendly URLs
The url of each of your blog post will not contain any keywords which people would search in the search engines in it by defaul. It might be something such as http://your-blog.com/?p=123. To make each of your blog posts more seo friendly, it is important to change your blog’s url to keywords. You can go to the blog’s settings and customize the permalink into “/%category%/%postname%”. This permalink structure will turn change the url of your post into urls that have the words in your post title.
15. Does Your Blog Has A Map?
Having a sitemap on your blog will definitely help you to rank faster because robot bots from Google could only crawl certain amounts of links. If your blog has a good sitemap that allows the bots to crawl your blog easily, more pages will get indexed and continue to get a lot of traffic from the search engine. But creating your own sitemap requires
Alex Liu is a full time blogger who specialize in Blog SEO to increase blog traffic. He shares tips and strategies to get traffic to blog at his blog-http://blogtrafficgeek.com