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Wordtracker has come out with a free keyword suggestion tool. This tool uses the most used paid-for keyword data to list out the keyword frequencies and related keyword suggestions. With Overture’s inventory being overwhelmed, this tool comes at a nice time.
Why not give it a try - freekeywords.wordtracker.com
Written by SEO Tipster on January 31st, 2007 with no comments.
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The most important thing you can do for your business and your website is develop relevant keywords that are not too competitive yet generate targeted traffic to your website.It’s called keyword optimization. Why is it important?
Because Keywords and keyword phrases do a couple of things for you:
- With the right keywords, you will attract the viewers most interested in the items or services on your site.
- You will rank higher in the search engines for your chosen keywords, saving you thousands of dollars in advertising.
It all starts, however, with the best keywords that pertain to your product or services.
When selecting keywords you should select 1 perhaps 2 of the most relevant keywords for each page of your site. I suggest using no more than two keywords per page, preferably one.
Why?
Because search engines strive to deliver the most relevant pages for the search term entered. The more focused your page is for the search term, the more relevant the search engines will find your page. The more keywords you use, the less focused your page becomes.
How do you find keywords that your target audience will use?
- Think like your readers. Take yourself outside your site for a minute and think about how you would find the products or services you are selling.
- Use Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ Type in your most basic keyword and it will show you the variations of the search term and also the count of how many times that term was entered in the search engine.
- Think of phrases as opposed to one single word. If you sell clay pots, think of keywords such as painted clay pots, or clay flower pots, large clay pots, buy clay pots. Use descriptive words when brainstorming phrases.
- Ask your relatives, kids and friends what they would type in to find your products. You would be amazed at the great ideas that can be generated. For example, I asked a teenager once what he would type in to find shoes online and he said ‘nice kicks’. As of this writing, Overture’s keyword selector tool showed a count of 12130. Hmmm, never would have thought of it on my own.
- Use a thesaurus or Webster’s dictionary to find similar words to your chosen keywords. Consider all forms of the word. For example, for the term supply there is supply, supplies, supplier, supplying. Thinking of all forms of the word help a great deal in brainstorming keyword ideas.
- If you have a website already, place a search engine on your site. This would be a search engine that you put on your site that searches only your site such as http://www.freefind.com/. This will help you collect data on what keywords users are using. Once you’ve collected a good list of search terms you can use this to help you determine the best keywords.
Along this same line, you can also use your website server logs to gather information on the keywords used to find your site.
Once you’ve made a list of the best keywords and keyword phrases, you will need to determine which ones are the best.
Your challenge is to find keywords that have a high usage count but appear on the least amount of competing web pages.
Wordtracker.com is an excellent tool for helping you achieve this. Wordtracker’s ‘Keyword Effectiveness Index’ (KEI) will provide you with the number of times a keyword is used along with the number of competing web pages. The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition. This means a better chance for you in getting to the top of the search engines.
Finding the best keywords and keyword phrases is an important part of your marketing mix. Find the correct keywords and build your content around them.
Elizabeth McGee strives to help webmasters and business owners find trusted marketing tools while also offering tips, stragegies and information for online marketing. Sign up for her FREE newsletter by visiting her site at: http://www.pro-marketing-online.com
Written by SEO Tipster on January 31st, 2007 with no comments.
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1. What is PageRank?
Here is what Google says:
” PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”
In other words, PageRank is simply a mechanical algorithm by Google that attempts to evaluate the importance of your website larged based on the amount and quality of backlinks your website have. For the more intellectual crowds out there, check out The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.
2. How do I check the PR of a webpage?
If you use Internet Explorer, download and install the Google Toolbar. There will be a green ind icator on the toolbar that tells the PR of a particular page. Hovering your mouse over the ind icator will give you a numeric value of the PR. In addition, there are numerous tools out there that will check the PR of a page without the toolbar (do a search on Google). If you use Mozilla Firefox, you can install the PageRank Checker extention.
3. Why do I want a higher PR?
It used to be believed that a higher PR value will give you a higher position in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). However, this is no longer the case. As any experienced webmaster, and even Google themselves, would tell you, there are hundreds of factors that determine where your page is displayed in the results.
Google states that they do not recommend webmasters exchange links to increase their PR. They see it as trying to “game” their search engine. Lastly, many people believe that a higher PR causes Googlebot to crawl through a page more often.
4. Is it a good idea to buy links for a higher PR?
Websites with higher PR (6, 7, 
often make money by selling links to sites with lower PR. As Google states, if they are aware that sites are selling PR instead of just advertising space (how they can differ the two I can’t say or if, ind eed, they can), both the buyer and seller may be penalized. The penalty may take the form of a lower position in SERPs and/or a downgrade of PR. Thus, we recommend that you do not buy links simply for a higher PR.
5. But I still would like to improve the PR of my site. What should I do?
First of all, sites don’t have PR, pages do. (hence the name PageRank) Therefore, it is possible for an internal page to have a higher PR than the homepage. In order to get PR, the only way is to get links to it. Incoming backlink from a page with a higher PR is more valuable than incoming a backlink from a page with a lower PR. In addition, the PageRank that a link “gives” is spread out between the number of links on the page. For example, a backlink from a PR4 page with only two links on the page can be more valuable than a backlink from a PR7 page with fifty links on the page.
6. How many links would I need to get my homepage to PR7?
The answer to this question varies greatly between different sites. Sometimes a couple links from other PR7 or PR8 pages will do. On the other hand, you may need hundreds of backlinks from PR3 or PR4 pages.
7. I’ve acquired many backlinks to my site. Why isn’t my PR improving?
There are many reasons why you may not be seeing the results. First of all, if you see PR5 for a page, the real PR may be PR5.0000 to PR5.9999. You have no way of knowing the exact PR of your site. Thus, you are simply not seeing the results. Secondly, Google might have done a PR algorithm update. Lastly, the PR of the pages that are giving you incoming backlinks might have changes, thus changing your PR as well.
8. How often do PR change?
Results may vary (a week to six months).
9. Why is my PR in the Google Directory different than my toolbar PR?
Google uses a different scale for measuring PageRank in the Google Directory.
10. Why is it so much harder to go from PR6 to PR7 than from PR5 to PR6?
Google Pa geRank value goes up logarithmically. (i.e. going from PR9 to PR10 may look like the same as going from PR1 to PR2, but is actually 1000 times more difficult). The exact logarithmic scale is unknown, but there has been speculation that it may be around 5. (i.e. going from PR2 to PR3 is 5 times more difficult than going from PR1 to PR2)
11. I just lost all my PR!
Don’t panic just yet! Check to see if your PR is white-barred or grey-barred (white or grey in the PR ind icator). If it is white barred, then your PR will probably come back. However, if your PR is greyed, then it means that Google saw your site as having used unethical SEO techniques (e.g. selling/buying PR, keyword stuffing). Also, Google sees http://example.com/abc.htm and http://www.example.com/abc.htm as two different pages. In this case, the PR of the page is spread between these two UR Ls.
12. If PR is virtually useless, then why is it so expensive to “buy”?
Over the years there have been many misconceptions about PR. Sites with higher PR claim that PR is valuable so that they can make more money selling links. Gradually, the misconceptions quietly built up.
13. What’s up with the PageRank formula I see on the Net?
You may have seen a formula to determine PR. I cannot say that the formula is untrue, but it’s the implementation of the formula that is in question. Just remember, the Internet is NOT all about PageRank!
Tony Zhu is the owner of an online business resource website, InaWhim.com, the largest free resource center for the new and experienced home business owner. At InaWhim.com, you will find massive listings of paid survey companies, products with free resell rights, exclusive quality articles, friendly community, and much more. Everything FREE!
Written by SEO Tipster on January 30th, 2007 with no comments.
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Search engine optimization refers to the technique of making your web pages search engine friendly so that search engines are more easy to understand and analyze your website. Consequently, your site has a better chance to gain high search engine ranking.However, please be reminded that high search engine ranking is not your only objective, and your objective should be website traffic and conversion. The following advice helps you to achieve the objectives.
1. Make Sure Your Site Will Not Be Penalized
Webmasters realize the importance of attaining top search engine rankings. Hence, they perform many search engine optimization activities on their sites. However, improper implementation of search engine optimization can get your site heavily penalized by search engines. To avoid your website being penalized, webmasters must not commit to the following practices:
- Use of hidden texts or hidden links on web pages.
- Use of cloaking
- Excessive automated queries to search engines like Google Web pages loaded with irrelevant words
- Keyword stuffing
- Multiple pages, sub-domains, domains with substantially duplicate content
2. Select Correct Keyword Phrases
Correct keyword phrases allow you to drive targeted visitors to your website. Therefore, this step determines whether your search engine optimization effort can improve business result or not.
Do not restrict yourself and be open minded in this area. You may think that most of the search is coming from 1 word keyword. However, it is wrong. Most people uses 2-5 words keyword phrases because they are more descriptive and yield precise results from search engines.
In addition, think creatively and perform linguistics research can help you generate useful keyword phrases.
3. Optimize Title and Meta Tags
According to Internet Marketing Articles, One of the important steps in search engine optimization is to optimize Title tag in your web page. Pages with the keywords appearing in the title tag are often assumed to be more relevant to the search query than others. Remember, title tag is the most important location of a web page after the main content of the body tag. Almost all search engines give importance to this tag.
Some search engines also give importance to the presence of the keyword in the meta description and keyword tag. Currently, it does not applicable to Google though.
4. Optimize Website Content
All search engines place emphasis on your body text content. The main content of your web page should contain the keyword a considerable number of times to make the search engine spiders feel that the content is relevant to the search query. The first two paragraphs are extremely important in search engine optimization.
To prevent your site from being regarded as “over optimization”, you should not stuff keywords heavily in your body content. We suggest that you should present the keywords in a natural way. Apart from this, your website copy should have at least 200-250 words.
5. Ensure Clean Coding
To allow search engines to index and analyze your website correctly, you must check correctness of HTML coding manually. Webmasters may build webpages from WYSIWYG HTML editors such as Microsoft Frontpage 2003, but these HTML editors may leave some duplicated or unnecessary tags in your copy especially when you edit the pages very often during web design phase.
In addition, search engines are not good at understanding Java Applet and Flash. If you have Flash or Java applet navigation menu, make sure to duplicate somewhere and include HTML links as well.
Please also check whether your website has broken links. They may stop search engine spiders to crawl other web pages in your website, it may result in loss of hundreds or thousands website traffic per month, and waste your search engine optimization effort.
6. Link Building
In case you have a little bit knowledge about search engine optimization, you likely know that link popularity is very important to attaining high search engine ranking in major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc..
Yes, search engines use link analysis to determine search engine rankings. The phiolosophy is that if an inbound link points to your site, your site must have some value. Therefore, the inbound link is regarded as a “positive vote” to your website. The more inbound link you have, the higher is your link popularity. This can boost your search engine ranking.
However, quality of links (link reputation) is also important. If you can get an inbound link from a high popularity website, your site will get more benefit.
There are many methods to perform link building including seeking one-way link, reciprocal links, 3-way links, etc. Because link popularity and link reputation are of great importance to search engine positions, many search engine optimizers spend most of their time in link building.
7. Optimize Dynamic Website Content
Search engines are not good at understanding dynamically generated web pages. Therefore, I suggest you should change your dynamic URL to static URL. If it is not possible, you should consider using some advanced search engine optimization techniques such as Mod-Rewrite to optimize website.
Another simpler way is to create a sitemap and list all dynamic URLs on it. This can help a bit.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization is very important to search engine marketing. When it is done properly, it helps you attract many targeted visitors to your website, and can improve your business results.
Written by Jimsun Lui from Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Ltd., a company offers Search engine optimization and search engine positioning service, and is developing PHP Shopping Cart Software, visit http://www.agogdigital.com to learn more.
Written by SEO Tipster on January 29th, 2007 with no comments.
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With Google delivering so much traffic, it is only normal to be eager to submit your page and have it indexed as soon as possible. However, submitting your page is not your only option, and it’s not the best one. If this sounds strange keep reading.Talking about its indexing process, Google says:
“We add thousands of new sites to our index each time we crawl the Web, but if you like, you may submit your URL as well. Submission is not necessary and does not guarantee inclusion in our index. Given the large number of sites submitting URLs, it’s likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through the URL submission form.”
We can therefore draw two conclusions:
The Google folks have also made it clear that Google gives a page more importance when it is found through an automatic crawl. This can be easily verified when we consider how Google’s PageRank system works: when page A links to page B, part of page A’s PageRank trickles down to page B, increasing page B’s PageRank (and, therefore, its importance). A manually submitted page will not enjoy this benefit.
Now that you know that manual submission is neither necessary nor the best way to go, what can you do to make Google find your pages?
The best way, at least in my personal experience, is to write an article on your area of expertise and submit it to popular article syndication sites like http://www.marketing-seek.com or http://www.ideamarketers.com . These sites will post your article, so that online publishers can use them for free in exchange for including your resource box at the end of the article. A resource box (a.k.a. bylines) is a small paragraph about yourself, written by you, which contains a link to your homepage.
In very little time, your article will show up in websites and ezines across the web. It will then be just a matter of time (usually days) before Google crawls those pages and finds your links. If you followed good web design practices and have included a link to a site map in your homepage, Google will follow it as soon as it finds your homepage, and all your pages will be indexed. It’s as simple as that.
The most popular articles you can write are those that list a collection of tips related to your area of expertise. One of my most succesful articles is called “50 Surefire Web Design Tips”, and it is nothing but a checklist of guidelines to follow when designing a website.
Another good way to help Google find your pages is to exchange links with other sites. Google will crawl those sites, find the links to your page, and add it to the index.
Finally, remember to optimize your pages before you try to get them listed, so that you have a better chance of ranking high in the search engine results pages (SERPs). After all, what good would it do to get your pages listed if nobody can find them?
About The Author
Mario Sanchez is a Miami based freelance writer who focuses on web design and Internet marketing topics. He publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ), a growing collection of web design and Internet marketing articles, tips and resources. You can freely reprint his weekly articles in your website, ezine, or ebook.
Written by SEO Tipster on January 28th, 2007 with no comments.
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If you are the owner of a new website, trying to get a decent ranking from the mighty google, you will no doubt answer with a resounding, NO! Recent findings indicate that Google’s algorithm has an ageing filter, which put in simple terms, makes it harder for a new webmaster to get high ranking in the SERP’s, in the short term at least. So does this mean google favours established sites over new ones?Broad keywords appear nigh on impossible to get top 50 rankings for, and Google’s first page seems like an unattainable dream. Even for obscure and untargeted keywords, its like you are banging your head against the proverbial brick wall, being ranked 26th out of 45. Ring any bells?
But before you give Google a verbal bashing, stop and think to yourself, why is Google there? What is its business all about? Who does Google strive to please? If you think it is webmasters, think again! The search engine business is all about the searcher. The engine’s whole way of thinking is geared to what searchers want and trying to give it to them, something that Google has been very successful at doing. Chances are, you use Google yourself when searching the net?
Follow it logically and the ageing delay is a good thing for the searcher, which makes it a good thing for the engine. Searchers are usually looking for either up to date information, or a reliable supplier for the product or service they are interested in spending their hard earned money on.
Weather webmasters like it or not, most people trust a company that has been trading for a long period of time, over a company that has just set up in business. It may be true that just because you have been trading for 5 years, does not make you any less likely to go out of business, but most peoples perception follows that way of thinking.
Over the years, webmasters and the seo community have tried to “cheat” the engine’s ranking systems. As each technique was tried and tested, and used for the benefit of the select few who could afford the fees, the engines moved the goalposts. Long gone are the days when you could place a few keywords in your meta-tags and know you’ll be on the first page for those keywords, which is a good thing. If you have been using search engines for a few years, you will remember the days when no matter what you searched for, some porn site would be presented as a “relevant” search result.
So what can the owners of a new site do? Simply put, nothing! Google says “act as if we are not here.” So continue to optimise your site, fill it with quality content, make sure you have a good internal and external linking structure in place, get the keyword density right etc. Chances are, while you wait for Google to decide you have been around long enough to go in the mix with the rest, you will enjoy high rankings on the other major engines. Get things right and once you emerge from “Googles ageing delay pit of obscurity” you should be well placed to rank highly on Google too. Unless they move the goalposts again that is.
About the Author.
Paul Spiers is the owner of http://www.nomorelinks.com, a brand new service designed to help webmasters get 1 way links to thier sites, and avoid the pitfalls of reciprocal linking.
Written by SEO Tipster on January 28th, 2007 with no comments.
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The makers of the world renowned search engine, Google, have taken things a step further to increase their user loyalty, grow their user base and at the same time reward websites for helping them promote their search engine. What a beautiful deal.Google now offers WebSearch? allowing AdSense members to take the earning potential of their sites to an even higher level. Is it all about the money? For most I bet the answer will be “YES”, however, those who would say no can say so with confidence.
Google delivers the best search results on the web today. Don’t be surprised if the majority of your website users use it to search the web. They pride themselves on highly relevant search results with a clean and effective interface. They offer various filters to fine tune their results to allowing you to eliminate any unwanted sites from being displayed.
They have started a highly successful symbiotic relationship between Google and websites that many webmasters will be taking advantage of as soon as they hear the news. It is said time and time again how Google AdSense has transformed websites not geared towards earning income, into solid income producing businesses. Now with WebSearch? it gets even better.
So what exactly is WebSearch??
It’s using Google’s SiteSearch or Google’s Web Search and displaying AdSense ads in the results and you earn income every time someone clicks on the ads. Lots of sites already use these features together or independently and them being able to monetize this is a sure plus. You are also able to customize your results page to some extent which includes full color customization as well as the ability to include your logo.
So how do I get it?
Well if you haven’t already done so you will need to create and AdSense account at Google AdSense and follow the steps.
If you already have an AdSense account then log in and click on Search Settings and you should be able to figure it out from there. They also offer reporting information which can also be filtered by channel and includes clicks, the number of queries and clickthrough rate.
The verdict
If you answer yes to any of the following questions then there’s a good chance that Google’s WebSearch is for you:
1. Do you want to give your users a reason to stay on your site longer?
2. Have you ever wanted to offer web search from your site?
3. Do you want to be able to offer a site search feature to your users?
And last but not least
4. Do you want to increase the earning potential of your website? More popularly stated as? Do you want to make more money?
I’m not a betting man but id put my money on you answering yes to at least one of these.
Happy Google WebSearch?ing 
About The Author
Alec Duncan is the founder of LilEngine.com a Search Engine Optimization resource site. Visit Li’l Engine for search engine optimization tools and strategies and also check out Developer Tutorials for web development techniques and strategies.
Written by SEO Tipster on January 28th, 2007 with no comments.
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This is another one of the controversial questions in many of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) forums, yet it is very easy to answer for any particular search engine. While popular belief seems to be that pages should be very short (less than 10K) to rank well with the leading search engine, this article conclusively answers that question? with a completely different answer.The methodology is really quite simple for this question. I gathered the results of the queries naturally performed last month by myself and three associates using Yahoo and Google. I then visited each page and wrote down the size of the body section of the page. Those sizes were then tabulated for the top 20 rankings and converted into a normalized “ranking correlation”.
The resulting number shows each group of body section sizes normalizing into a number between ?100 and +100 showing the likelihood of being ranked higher/lower. A value of +100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper order to show that pages of the studied size ALWAYS rank HIGHER than pages of another size. A value of ?100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper order to show that pages of the studied size ALWAYS rank LOWER than pages of another size. Numbers in between show the varying likelihood of rankings proportionally between ?100 and +100.
That is the number you see on the Y-axis. On the X-axis, we have groups of page sizes varying from 0 to >100K bytes. Here are the graphs for Yahoo and Google:
http://www.searchenginegeek.com/graphs/dey02.gif
http://www.searchenginegeek.com/graphs/deg02.gif
(Note to Webmasters: Feel free to hot link to the above graphs or even copy them to your own site. Also feel free to delete this note.)
There is an obvious correlation on Google, which shows that body sections of a size between 50K and 60K generally rank much higher than shorter or longer bodies. The Yahoo graph is a bit more erratic, but also shows a nice peak at 60-70K (and another one at 20-30K). This goes against the popular belief that states that shorter pages rank highest. The popular belief is shown to be completely inaccurate with this study.
Notes:
1. For the purposes of this test, the actual body section size in bytes was used. The page was saved to disk and then everything before the body tag and after the end body tag were deleted. The resulting size of the file as reported by the operating system was used. Graphics and any other external references were completely ignored.
2. Over 1,000 queries and over 10,000 sites were examined for this study.
3. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords. I merely took a random sampling of the queries performed by myself and three associated during the prior month.
Conclusion:
Pages with a body section size between 50K and 70K rank best on the two leading search engines!
This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from this study whether the leading search engine purposefully entertains this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant from the factor we studied, but the end result is that this search engine does, in fact, rank pages between 50K and 60K higher than pages of other sizes.
Copyright 2004 Jon Ricerca
About The Author
Jon Ricerca is the lead researcher and author of the Search Engine Ranking Factor reports at Search Engine Geek. For more information, please visit: http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
Written by SEO Tipster on January 28th, 2007 with no comments.
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When most people want to find something on the web, they use a search engine. Millions of searches are conducted every day on search engines such as: google.com, yahoo.com, msn.com and many others. Some people are looking for your website. So how do you capture people searching for what your site has to offer? Through techniques called search engine marketing (SEM).This tutorial is foundational information for anyone looking to implement search engine marketing. This tutorial will also help you understand how the search engines work, what SEM is, and how it can help you get traffic.
What is a Search Engine?All search engines start with a “search box”, which issometimes the main focus of the site, e.g. google.com, dmoz.org, altavista.com; sometimes the “search box” is just one feature of a portal site, e.g. yahoo.com, msn.com, netscape.com. Just type in your search phrase and click the “search” button, and the search engine will return a listing of search engine result pages (SERPs). To generate SERPs the search engine compared your search phrase with information it has about various web sites and pages in its database and ranks them based on a “relevance” algorithm.
Search Engine ClassesTargeted audience, number of visitors, quality of search and professionalism is what determines a search engine’s class. Each search engine typically target specific audiences based on interest and location. World-class search engines look very professional, include virtually the entire web in their database, and return highly relevant search results quickly.
Most of us are familiar with the major general search engines; google.com, yahoo.com, msn.com. A general search engine includes all types of websites and as such are targeting a general audience. There are also the lesser known 2nd tier general search engines; zeal.com,ask.com,whatyouseek.com. The primary difference is that 2nd tier engines are lesser known and generate significantly less traffic.
There are also several non-general or targeted search engines that limit the types of websites they include in their database. Targeted search engines typically limit by location or by industry / content type or both. Most large metro areas will have local search engines that list local businesses and other sites of interest to people in that area. Some are general and some are industry specific, such as specificallylisting restaurants or art galleries.
Many other targeted search engines list sites from any location but only if they contain specific types of content. Most webmasters are familiar with webmaster tools search engines such as; webmasterworld.com, hotscripts.com, flashkit.com and more. There are niche SEs for practically any industry and interest.
Search Engine ModelsThere are two fundamentally different types of search engine back ends: site directories and spidering search engines. Site directory databases are built by a person manually inputting data about websites. Most directories include a site’s url, title, and description in their database. Some directories include more information, such as keywords, owner’s name, visitor rankings and so on. Some directories will allow you to control your website’s information yourself others rely on editors that write the information to conform to the directory standards.
It is important to note that most directories include directory listings as an alterative to the search box for finding websites. A directory listing uses hierarchal groupings from general to specific to categorize a site.
Spidering search engines take a very different approach. They automate the updating of information in their database by using robots to continually read web pages. A search engine robot/spider/crawler acts much like a web browser, except that instead of a human looking at the web pages, the robot parses the page and adds the page’s content it’s database.
Many of the larger search engines will have both a directory and spidering search engine, e.g. yahoo.com, google.com, and allow visitors to select which they want to search. Note that many search engines do not have their own search technology and are contracting services from elsewhere. For example, Google’s spider SE is their own, but their directory is and Open Directory; additionally aol.com and netscape.com both use Google’s spider SE for their results.
There are a few other search engine models of interest. There are some search engines that combine results from other engines such as dogpile.com and mamma.com. There are also search engines that add extra information to searches such as Amazon’s alexa.com, which uses Google’s backend but adds data from its search bar regarding tracking traffic to the site.
Getting InOne of the most important things to understand about the SE database models is how to get into their database and keep your listing updated. With a search directory, a submission needs to be done to provide the directory all the information needed for the listing. It is generally recommended that this be done by hand, either by you or a person familiar with directory submissions. There are many submission tools available that advertise they automate the submission process. This may be fine for smaller directories but for the major directories, manual submissions are worth the time.
Not all search directories are free; many charge a one-time or annual fee for review. Many of the free search directories have little quality control. For free directories you may have to submit your site several times before being accepted.
There are three different methods for getting into spidering search engines; free site submission, paid inclusion and links from other sites. Virtually all spidering SEs offer a free site submission. For most, you simply enter your url into a form and submit. Paid inclusion is normally not difficult, except for the credit card payment. For free site submission there is no quality control. The SE may send a spider to your site in the next few weeks, months or never. Typically with paid inclusion you will get a guarantee that the page you submitted will be included within a short amount of time. The other standard way to get included is to have links to your website from other web pages that are already in the SEs database. The SE spiders are always crawling the web and will eventually follow those links to find your site.
Once you are in a search engine database, you might change your site and need the search engine to update their database. Each directory handles this differently; generally each database will have a form for you to submit a change request. Spidering search engines will eventually find the change and add your updates automatically.
Getting High RankingsGetting into a search engine database is only the first step. Without other factors you will not rank in the top positions, a prerequisite for quality traffic. So how do you get top positions? You can pay for placement with sponsored links that is covered in the next section. To place well in the free, organic SERPs, you will need to perform search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization is one of the most complicated aspects of web development. Each search engine uses a different algorithm, using hundreds of factors, that they are constantly changing, and they carefully guard their algorithm as trade secrets. Thus no one outside of the search engines employ knows with 100% certainty the perfect way to optimize a site. However, many individuals called search engine optimizers have studied the art and derived set of techniques that have a track record for success.
In general, there are two areas to focus on for top rankings; on-page factors and linking. On-page factors mean placing your target keywords in the content of your site in the right places. The structure of and technologies used on your website also play a role in on-page factors. Linking, refers to how other website’s link to yours and how your site links internally.
Search Engine’s Marketing OfferingsSearch engines in the early days of the web were focused solely on serving the visiting searcher. They worked to capture as much of the web as possible in their database and provide fast, relevant searches. Many early website owners learned to reverse engineer the relevancy algorithms and to make their sites “search engine friendly” to get top rankings. They were the first search engine optimizers, manipulating the search engine’s natural or organic SERPs as a means of generating free web traffic.
Often times these optimized sites compromised the integrity of the SERPs and lowered the quality for the searcher. Search engines fought, and continue to fight, to maintain the quality of their results. Eventually, the search engines embraced the fact that they are an important means for marketing websites. Today most search engines offer an array of tools to balance website’s owners need to market while maintaining quality for the searcher.
You can generally break search engine marketing tools into free and for-pay. Realize these classifications are from the search engine’s point of view. Effort and expense is required to setup and maintain any search engine marketing campaign.
Organic rankings are still one of the most important ways to drive quality traffic. Search engines now seek to reward ethical, high-quality websites with top rankings and remove inappropriate “spam” websites. While organic rankings can produce continual free traffic, it takes time from an experienced individual to achieve optimum results. Additionally, organic placement offers no guarantees, it generally takes months to get listed and can be unpredictable once listed.
Some search engines offer services that add more control to your organic campaign. Most of these services will list / update your site faster or will guarantee that all essential content is listed. For integrity reasons, no major search engine offers higher organic rankings for a fee.
If you need top rankings quickly, pay-per-positioning (PPP) is the most popular way to go. PPP rankings appear in normal organic SERPs but are usually designated as “sponsored listings”. PPP listings use a bidding process to rank sites. If you are the top bidder, e.g. willing to pay the most per click on a given phrase, you will have top placement. The 2nd highest bidder is two; the next is 3 and so on. While most PPP works using this model, some search engines offer modifications such as Google’s AdWords where bid price and click-through rates are both factors for positioning.
Search Engines have many other marketing tools, such as search specific banner ads; listings on affiliate sites and more.
Getting StartedThe majority of websites have sub-optimal search engine marketing. Most sites have no effective search engine marketing and are continually missing out on valuable leads. Many other websites are too aggressive, wasting money on low value traffic or harming the functionality of their site due to over optimization. Too many sites are even paying money and receiving no results because they have trusted unethical or inexperienced search engine optimizers.
All SEM campaigns should start with a strategic evaluation of SEM opportunities based on return on investment (ROI). You need to assess how much each lead is worth for each keyword phrase and determine which SEM tools will achieve the best ROI for the phrase.
You also have to decide how much you want to do in-house vs. retaining an expert. A qualified expert will typically produce better results faster, but the high expenses may destroy the ROI. Often it is best to work with an expert as a team, the expert to develop the strategy and internal staff to perform implementation and ongoing management.
Tom McCracken is the Director of LevelTen Design, a Dallas based e-media agency. He has over 14 years of experience in software engineering and marketing. He has developed solutions to improve custom service and communications for some of the worlds largest companies. With an education in chemical engineering and economics from Johns Hopkins University, his background includes; web and software development, human factors engineering, project management, business strategy, marketing strategy, and electronic design.
Written by SEO Tipster on January 11th, 2007 with no comments.
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When search engines first appeared, they were simple affairs consisting of a relatively basic database containing small amounts of information about websites. The search engine database allowed web-surfers to search for specific words or phrases. The search engine would then provide a list of hyperlinks to websites containing those words or phrases in several Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). The basic concepts of a search engine are still the same, but much has changed since those innocent days.The Birth of Search Engine Optimisation
Once search engines were on the scene, it wasn’t long before website owners started to manipulate their websites in order to take advantage of them. The impetus behind this was the higher a website places in the SERPS, then the more visitors it gets and the more money it can generate for the business it represents.
To start with the techniques used to ‘encourage’ search engines to place websites higher in the SERPS were fairly innocuous: More thought was given to crucial elements of a website such as Title Tags, meta-keywords and keyword density. These elements of a website were considered important because the contents of them were used by the search engines to catalogue and categorise the entire website.
As the use of search engines increased and more and more website traffic was generated by the SERPS, it became increasingly important to ensure that your website was optimised as well as possible in order to maximise its rankings within the SERPS. The practise of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) was born.
The Outbreak of War
As with most things that involve commercial or financial gains, the practises of Search Engine Optimisation soon took a sinister turn. The importance of optimising a website so that it ranked highly in the SERPS meant that some people began using dubious techniques to trick the search engines. There are many of these dubious ’spamming’ techniques such as:
The search engines soon caught on to these spam practises and they weren’t happy. The main aim of a search engine is to make money usually through advertising. In order to do this it needs to get huge numbers of people to use its search engine services. The only way to encourage people to continue to use these services is if the SERPS provide links to useful, relevant sites. It is therefore within a search engines interests to ensure that the results within its SERPS are as accurate as possible. The spamming of search engines forced them to improve the algorithms they use to determine where in the SERPS a particular site would rank. These new algorithms included calculations to defend against the spam SEO practises and in some cases websites practising certain spam SEO techniques were black-listed and excluded completely from the SERPS.
Of course, the dubious practitioners of spam SEO techniques soon came up with new ways to trick the system, and so the war between spam SEO practitioners and the search engines began.
The increased complexity of search engine algorithms also meant that the legitimate side of Search Engine Optimisation became more complex and SEO became a growing industry in itself.
Google and Link Popularity
As the world of search engines grew and increased in complexity, Google established itself as the big player and became the most widely used search engine. Getting good rankings within the Google SERPS became increasingly important leading SEO experts to spend much time and effort trying to decipher the fundamental points of the Google algorithm.
The most fundamental addition to the Google algorithm was that of Link Popularity and Page Rank. Simply put, this is a measure of the number of sites that link to a website. The idea being that if lots of sites link to a particular web-page then the content on that page must be useful and relevant to those sites from which the links come. Once this part of the Google algorithm was known, much of the emphasis of promoting a website shifted towards the acquisition of Inbound Links (IBL).
As before, the SEO spammers found their own ways to manipulate the SERPS by creating large networks of mini-sites to increase the number of IBL to another website. The growth of large web-directories, web-rings, huge links pages and link-exchange websites are also often aimed at allowing webmasters to increase the number of IBL to their sites.
Google, and the other search engines fought back, their algorithms become more complex and so the war continues.
How to Win the War
You may by now be wondering how it is possible to compete with the SEO spam practitioners who manipulate SERPS in dubious ways to get their sites well-ranked, whilst avoiding spam practises yourself and keeping up with the latest changes to the search engine algorithms. Well, the answer is surprisingly easy and not only will it give you long-lasting results, and rankings in the SERPS that your site deserves, but it will also benefit the real human visitors to your website. The answer is to give the search engines what they want ? Good, relevant, up to date content.
That’s it, it is as simple as that, Content is King.
Admittedly your website will still need a small amount of legitimate SEO, the most important of which are:
With these in place and good quality relevant content updated regularly then the most important weapon in your arsenal for gaining good SERPS Rankings, Inbound Links, should start coming automatically. I can’t stress it enough, good quality relevant content is king!. Once you have this content on your website, other webmasters will want to link to it and your network of IBLs will increase and continue to increase.
There are lots of other ways to generate IBLs to your website, but many are time consuming and even though they may drive visitors to your website, if there is no substance when they get there all the time and effort invested will have been in vain. Instead of wasting time generating IBLs from obscure websites and trying out the latest SEO spam techniques, spend your time writing new content for your website. Not only will it lead to an increase in your SERPS rankings, but when real visitors do come calling they will find useful, relevant content and are much more likely to use the goods, services and facilities your website offers.
Good quality, regularly updated content is good for your website, good for your search engine rankings, good for your visitors and good for you business.
Alan Cole runs Pixelwave Website Design, a one-person web design studio. His aim is to provide cost effective website design production and maintenance by offering professional web solutions that stand out from the crowd.
Pixelwave Design specialise in conformable, search engine friendly and accessible websites.
Written by SEO Tipster on January 10th, 2007 with no comments.
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