It’s a very common misconception that when a user enters a query into any search engine, the engine interrogates the Web to find pages that match the query. That is NOT how it works at all! The search engine searches its own copy of the Web. Every search engine actually creates its own copy of the Internet. This copy is called an index. The size of a search engine’s index varies from search engine to search engine, but it is always smaller than the Web as a whole. For example, as of August 2003, it is currently estimated that the Web presently consists of approximately 3.4 Billion pages, whereas the largest search engine index is currently about 600 million pages.

The search engine builds a list of pages to add to its index using a special piece of software known as a crawler or spider. The spider crawls across the Web, adding pages it visits to the list of pages to its index. The spider is capable of reading a Web page and finding links to other pages to visit. In this fashion, the spider can often travel across the Web finding new or updated pages to add or update to its index.

Some time after a page has been “spidered” (visited by a crawler), the search engine’s software effectively adds a copy of new or altered pages to the search engine’s index. When a user enters a query into a search engine, the search’s engine software searches its index to find the pages matching the search query. It then sorts those pages into ranking order. Each search engine uses its own “secret technology” to find and rank pages, but most base their technology on the frequency and location of the search term on the page.

This, as briefly as it sounds, is how search engines actually work. With that minimal knowledge and a little thought, you can reach the following conclusions:

An engine may not have a copy of every page on your site
If it does have it, that copy may not be up to date
An engine can have a copy of a page that no longer exists on your site

Also, remember that in order for a page on your site to be listed in response to a user query, words in that query must match words in the search engine’s copy of the page. The professional image of your company or your brand could be, to a certain degree, damaged if you don’t take these facts into consideration. What we mean by this is, if the search engine looks for a page that still happens to be on its index but is no longer available on your web site, it will generate what is called an HTTP error 404, wich means the page the engine and thus the user are looking for at your site does not exist. This fully underscores the importance of updating your web site at regular intervals and making certain there are no pages missing or any broken links.

Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales

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1. Optimizing Dynamic Web Pages For Search Engines
2. Search Engine Robots – How They Work, What They Do (Part I)
3. Search Engine Robots – How They Work, What They Do (Part II)

The search engine optimization industry is thriving consistently by capitalizing on ever-increasing desire of the web site owners to wrest the lion’s share of the traffic-pie from their rivals. Fierce competition for popularity is the lifeline of the SEO industry.

The honesty and integrity in promise and service are two key factors the SEO firms or experts are always trying to maintain. But there are also some unethical SEO firms who make lofty promises to hoodwink the clients of search engine optimization services. Eventually they fall well short of fulfilling their promises. But in the mean time, they make quick bucks and put other honest and ethical SEO firms under scanner.

These fraudulent SEO firms float some false promises that, in turn, give birth to some general misconceptions. These misconceptions are too deep-rooted to be wiped out from clients’ psychology. As a responsible SEO service provider, it is our duty to allay those grossly misleading notions on SEO services. These are the bottlenecks that we have tried to remove in the ensuing discussion to make life easier for ourselves and the SEO industry as a whole. We sincerely hope it will be an eye-opener for SEO clients so that they can ward off the evils of SEO industry.

Commitment Assured Not the Results
Clients often seek guarantee from SEO firms as a proof of its credentials before assigning the job. But in reality no SEO firm, practicing ethical search engine optimization norms, can confirm you a top-notch position in the search engine rankings. Because we can’t influence the search engine ranking process.

The search engine results and index are the exclusive properties of the search engines. What an honest SEO firm does is that it makes your web site compatible for winning the top positions in search engine rankings.

We guarantee you our expertise, our dedicated effort and our vast experience in SEO to churn out the best. The rest is controlled by the search engines.

Guarantee is an alluring bait that the fly-by-night SEO firms dangle before you to win your confidence. Beware of them!

Popularity of the Search Engine Matters Not The Numbers
Some search engine submission and optimization firms play with the numbers to woo the clients’ psyche. They promise you plum rankings in more than thousand search engines. This is extremely ludicrous. They tend to distract you from the reality. The reality says that 95% of the traffic is controlled by 15-20 search engines.

So, top search engine ranks in few quality search engines are much more desirable and useful than futile rankings in countless mediocre search engines. So before going ahead with your SEO firm, we request you to make sure that your web site would be submitted to the major search engines, not to run-of-the-mill ones.

The lists of search engines that the crooked SEO firms flaunt to substantiate their baseless claims include innumerable FFA pages and link farms. These pages can hardly win any traffic for you. Not only that, your web site may bear the brunt of your hasty decision. Hiring the service of such dubious SEO firms can have adverse effects on your web site’s popularity and credibility.

Let’s Face It: SEO IS Not Cheap
Some SEO firms offer their services at a much cheaper rate. Some SEO firms confuse people by flashing misleading statements like ‘Guaranteed Top 10 Rankings at $300 or Your Money Back.’ Don’t fall prey to its face value.

If you delve into the search engine optimization process, you will soon discover $300 is too meager to tide over the cost. A successful search engine submission and placement project is painstaking, laborious and a costly affair. It requires the creative expertise of efficient copywriters, technical know-how of web designers and versatility of search engine optimization experts who supervise the nitty-gritty of search engine optimization.

They try to improve the link popularity of your web site and manage other key aspects of search engine optimization in a bid to win top rankings in search engine-results for your web site on a long-term basis. So, they do not come cheap.

It’s absolutely impossible to take up a search engine optimization assignment at less than $1000. Those who are promising you SEO service at cheaper rate are simply trying to take you for a ride.

Money-back guarantee is another bluff. Because search engine ranking of your web site among top ten positions can’t be predicted beforehand. The SEO firms don’t have any clout on the ranking algorithms of the search engines. It’s a no-entry zone for SEO firms. An ethical SEO firm can guarantee you its best effort and nothing else.

Genuine SEO firms always play safe when the time comes to submit the clients’ web site to the search engines. They always abide by the rules laid down by the search engines. Legitimate SEO firms use zero-spam methodologies. They take every precautionary measure to promote your web site in a secured manner.

Search Engine Optimization – Not an Overnight Game
By now you certainly have come across bold claims by some SEO firms, for example, “Guaranteed top placements within 48 hours”. These worthless SEO firms are making a mockery of SEO process. They are too desperate to deceive the clients.

In any given circumstance, no SEO firm can deliver results in the search engines in such a short time-span. In fact, search engine optimization is a time-consuming process. Overnight success is next to impossible.

Instant or immediate top-notch listing facility is only available with pay-per-click search engines (e.g. Overture). The moment a web visitor clicks on your web site, you have to pay the pay-per-click search engine. The fallacy of the system is that the moment you stop paying your web site lose the ranks. This is not at all a viable solution for your web site’s popularity.

So, it is simply absurd to commit the accomplishment an SEO assignment within four weeks let alone the 48-hour time span. A genuine SEO firm needs at least four to five months to fulfill its commitments to its clients.

There are so many behind-the-scene activities needed to be done to produce the best result. Every search engine updates its index after a certain period of time. This may vary between 30-60 days. To keep pace with the search engine-ranking algorithm, the web sites also have to make necessary chopping and changing to maintain stability in the ranking. So within a brief period, search engine optimization is unattainable.

A genuine search engine optimization campaign is not an overnight job. It will take time, research, specialized skills and ethical and balanced methodologies.

Looks Important But SEO Indispensable
Some web site owners don’t like the way their web sites’ appearances are edited and contents are altered by SEO firms. They always fear that SEO firms will deface the pleasant appearances of their web sites. Some unscrupulous SEO firms take advantage of this inhibition. They promise better ranking without meddling with the existing web pages.

This is one more blatant lie. For a true search engine optimization, one has to work on the main existing web pages of a web site. In the recent past, doorway pages, page redirection/cloaking, hidden text and links, participation in link farms were in use to secure better search engine ranking without flirting with web pages.

But improved algorithm of search engines can now detect these ploys. Those sites using these improper methods can be banned from the search engine listings. So, play safe and gain more!

Authorized Software for Authentic Rankings
You may have come across some software that promise automated search engine optimization and submission process to relieve you from the entire tedious task. We request you to steer clear of those pranksters. Otherwise, you could be labeled as spammer.

SEO firms may choose to use software for the purpose of researching keywords, monitoring search engine ranks, analyzing traffic, link checking, reciprocal link management, search engine submission etc. But search engines do not like automated submission.

Monitoring of the search engine positions is vital to every SEO campaign and it is nearly impossible to do that manually as it can be very time-consuming. There are some rank checking and monitoring software that are quiet safe if used at certain intervals. But, there are some that use the search engine resources heavily and eventually slow down their functioning. When you choose an SEO firm, ask them about the software they use for rank monitoring and make sure they are safe.

Ethical search engine optimization saves your web site from the risks of getting penalized by the search engines. Honest search engine optimization involves massive amount of labor. It is time-consuming and therefore expensive, but it pays off in the long run.

Author:
Search Engine Ethics

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Generally, a dynamic web page is a template that displays distinct information in response to queries made by visitors. A major part of the page content comes from the database connected to the web site. Visitors find dynamically generated web pages very impressive, as they get instant access to the data they want. Also, these sites are easy to update. If there is a new product or some modifications to the price, the web master just has to edit the database, instead of editing hundreds of individual static web pages.

Usually, dynamic web pages are created using technologies like CGI, ASP, Cold Fusion etc. As we just mentioned, it does great from a user standpoint, but from a search engine stand, it can be difficult.

The Problems With The Dynamic Pages
The problem is that these dynamic web pages don’t actually exist until a visitor injects values in the variables. The search engine spiders do not select variables and insert values in them. That query can either be typed into a search form by the visitor, is already be coded into a link on the home page. This makes the link a pre-defined search of the site’s catalogue. Dynamic scripts often need certain information before they can return the page content e.g. cookie data, session id or a query string are common requirements.

But a search engine spider doesn’t know to use your search function, or what questions to ask. Spiders usually stop indexing a dynamic site, simply because they can’t answer the question.

Apart from this, the urls of these dynamically generated pages contain question marks (?) and also percentage signs (%) within them. The other symbols that are often used in the url of these pages include &, %, + and $. These urls are called “query string”. However, most spiders can not read any character that is beyond the question mark (?) symbol in a dynamic url. A sample url:

http://www.americanbooks.com/cgi-bin/items.cgi?name=naturaldiet

Most of the spiders will not read beyond the ? symbol in this url. The ? sign acts as a stop symbol for them. So, they will retrieve an url which looks like this:

http://www.americanbooks.com/cgi-bin/items.cgi

As this is not an actual page, nothing gets indexed. So if your web site or parts of it are dynamically generated, you have to implement certain changes in order to make your content easily accessible to the spiders.

Some search engines also avoid indexing urls of the static pages, which seems to be within the cgi-bin, such as:

http://www.americanbooks.com/cgi-bin/items.html

http://www.americanbooks.com/cgi/items.html

Why Do Search Engines Not Read Beyond ‘?’ Symbol
The spiders prefer not to read within the cgi-bin directory, or the characters of url which contain a ‘?’ symbol, as there is a chance that the spider can get into a situation where cgi supplies an ‘infinite’ number of urls. The spider will then keep crawling those pages and fall into an infinite loop, from which it will not be able to come out. These are called spider traps. The database programs may also create a similar situation for the spider.

So, in order to avoid possible traps, the spiders do not read the characters of an url beyond ? symbol.

Getting a spider trapped inside your server is bad not just for the spider, but repeated requests for pages can crash the server.
But a search engine spider doesn’t know to use your search function, or what questions to ask. Spiders usually stop indexing a dynamic site, simply because they can’t answer the question.

Apart from this, the urls of these dynamically generated pages contain question marks (?) and also percentage signs (%) within them. The other symbols that are often used in the url of these pages include &, %, + and $. These urls are called “query string”. However, most spiders can not read any character that is beyond the question mark (?) symbol in a dynamic url. A sample url:

http://www.americanbooks.com/cgi-bin/items.cgi?name=naturaldiet

Most of the spiders will not read beyond the ? symbol in this url. The ? sign acts as a stop symbol for them. So, they will retrieve an url which looks like this:

http://www.americanbooks.com/cgi-bin/items.cgi

As this is not an actual page, nothing gets indexed. So if your web site or parts of it are dynamically generated, you have to implement certain changes in order to make your content easily accessible to the spiders.

Some search engines also avoid indexing urls of the static pages, which seems to be within the cgi-bin, such as:

http://www.americanbooks.com/cgi-bin/items.html

http://www.americanbooks.com/cgi/items.html

Dynamic Page Optimization Solutions

http://www.americanbooks.com/cgi-bin/items.cgi?name=naturaldiet

The above url says that americanbooks.com has got some content on natural diets. But this content can not be indexed in the search engines, as the spiders can not read them. If a competitor of americanbooks.com has a static page on natural diet, he can then get it listed in the search engines. He will then get all the traffic which has been searching with the keyword “natural diet”. And, despite the fact that americanbooks has got similar or more useful content, it cannot get listed in the search engine result. It will then lose the sales to it’s competitors.

So if he can change the urls of his dynamic pages, so that the urls can get rid of the ?,= and similar symbols, and look like a static url, he can promote the sales of his company.

Solutions For Dynamic Pages
CGI/ Perl

If you have used CGI or Perl in your web site, the solution is a script that picks up all the characters before the query string and the balance of the characters are equaled to a variable. This variable can then be used in your url.

Path_Info (or Script_Name) is a variable in a dynamic application that contains the complete URL address and includes the query string information. So, the script will extract characters before the query string from the path_info variable and substitute the balance of the characters to a variable.

However, the major search engines have no problems indexing pages that are built in part with SSI content. This makes no difference if the pages end in the .shtml extension that some people use. However, there may be a problem if the pages use the cgi-bin path in their URLs.

ASP

What will you do if you have used ASP?

Active server pages are used within Microsoft-based web servers. The web pages, which use ASP usually have a .asp extension. It is arguably the most widely used scripting style for large Internet sites. Most of the major search engines will index these pages if you avoid using the ? symbol.

Exception digital enterprise solutions has created a solution for this, called xqasp, an add-on application that allows the “?” within URL’s to be converted to “/” by the web server. Further information on the usage and implementation of this product is available at:

http://www.xde.net/products/product_xqasp.htm

This is a little costly option, priced at around $250, but it is worth the last cent that you pay for it.

Some low cost solutions are:

ASPSpiderBait

http://www.webanalyst.com.au/Products/ASPSpiderBait.htm

A shareware product that enables dynamic content in sites using Active Server Pages to be included in the major search engine indexes by converting the PATH_INFO part of an HTTP header.

PortalPageFilter

http://www.alphasierrapapa.com/products/portalpagefilter/

It removes the ? symbols from ASP services. But it can be a barrier to some search engine spiders.

Cold Fusion

If you have used Coldfusion in your website, you’ll need to reconfigure it on your server. The web pages developed using Cold Fusion usually end with .cfm extensions. Normally, the database will use a ? symbol to retrieve pages. There are workarounds to this that will make your pages accessible. Reconfigure your Cold Fusion setup to replace the “?” in a query string with a ‘/’ and pass the value to the URL. The browser interprets that as a static URL page.

Instead of http://www.americanbooks.com/items.cfm?item_id=11667, you get a string like this: http://www.americanbooks.com/items.cfm/11667.

So when the search engine spider comes to index the page, it will not encounter the “?”, and go ahead and index the complete dynamic page.

Apache Server

Apache is a popular web server software. It has a rewrite module that enables you to turn URL’s containing query strings into URL’s that search engines can index. This module, called mod_rewrite, isn’t installed with Apache software by default, so you should check with your web hosting company and see if it’s available for your server.

It takes an url which initially looked like this:

http://www.americanbooks.com/items.htm?cat=natural_diet,

and makes it available in this format:

http://www.americanbooks.com/natural_diet/index.htm

Further information on this module is available at:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html

Directly submit dynamic pages through paid inclusion programs

Directly submitting specific dynamic web pages to AltaVista increases the chances of getting picked up by that search engine. If you submit your dynamic pages to AltaVista or Inktomi via their paid inclusion programs, it definitely ensures they will get in.

File Extensions

These days it does not matter to the search engines how your files end. Even if your pages don’t end in .html or .htm, they’ll probably still get indexed if you’ve manage the ? symbol. However, Northern Light is more flexible and can index any page with .html, .htm, .shtml, .stm, .asp, .phtml, .cfm, .php3, .php, .jsp, .jhtml, .asc, .text, and .txt extensions. But it will not index pages ending in .cgi. It will inform you if any other extensions are invalid during the submission steps.

Finale
Ask yourself, if you really need to generate dynamic web pages. Often, the database is used as a page creation tool. You can use it to create static pages, especially for sections of your site that do not change frequently. Also, consider creating mirror static web pages of your dynamic content, so that the search engines can spider them.

Most engines did not used to index dynamically generated pages even some months ago, and this is still true. That is because a dynamically generated page can cause the spider to get trapped in an infinite loop, from which it can not come out. But now, situations are changing slowly. The first search engine to index dynamic web pages is Google. It began indexing dynamic pages ( including the question mark) during the end of 2000. You can also submit a dynamically generated page to HotBot and some others.

In these search engines, the search engines will not follow links from a dynamically generated page to ensure that their spiders do not get stuck in a loop. So the advice is to spend a little bit of your time on your dynamically generated pages and make sure each of them get indexed by the search engines. It will be a great investment of your time – and it will also result in more traffic for your web site.

Author:
Search Engine Ethics

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Related posts:

1. Optimizing Dynamic Sites
2. Optimizing Pages with JavaScript and Style Sheets for Search Engines
3. Dynamic URLs In The Eyes Of A Search Engine

The search engines have incorporated popularity factors into their ranking algorithm in order to create better relevancy formulae. This does not mean that the on-the-page factors or the importance of content can be ignored. If there are two sites with equally optimized meta tags and attractive content, the site having more link popularity will attain a higher search engine position.

The main point is that on-the-page optimization will no longer get you top rankings by itself, unless it is enhanced with high-end link popularity.

The objective of the search engines is to serve those web sites which are recommended by many other web sites. Ranking the relevant web sites according to their popularity neutralizes the effects of search engine spams and manipulation of the on-the-page factors. Search engines like Google were able to provide outstanding search experiences for surfers by incorporating popularity factors into their ranking algorithm.

Link popularity of a web site is the total number of web sites linking to it. The search engine must index the web page that your link appears on. In the recent past, people believed that just the “Number” of sites pointing to your site determines the link popularity. The more sites linking to your site, the higher your ranking will be. This is just the first half of the popularity story.

Link analysis is closely related to link popularity, but with a twist. Link analysis (or link popularity analysis) is the number and quality of the inbound links that point to your site. It is beyond the number of links. Here, it is not the number of links that matter, but the quality of these links that is important.

The search engine software and the programmers who create them are not dumb. They are aware that many web masters create artificial links with the hope of boosting their ranks in the search engines. Because of this, search engines make use of link analysis rather than link popularity.

Analyzing and evaluating the number as well as the quality of links is actually link analysis. In this article, we’ll look more closely at the other factors influencing link popularity (apart from the numbers of links) and how link analysis works.

How Search Engines Use Link Analysis
Search engines use link analysis in their ranking algorithm, as it is very difficult to get quality links for a site if it is not worth it. In a link analysis system, only the most relevant and popular sites will attain a high search engine position. Link analysis is a very useful and foolproof way to determine which pages are good for particular keyphrases. It is a mathematical way to determine if others in your industry think that your site is important.

Link Popularity vs. Link Analysis Quantity vs. Quality Of The Links
In a link analysis system it is easy to filter out the spammers who set up several free sites and then make them link to their main web site. These days, search engines do not give importance to links from free web sites in their link popularity scores. They combine link popularity with link analysis and use it to assign a weighted link popularity score.

All links on the Internet are not of equal importance, as the crawlers analyze the quality of the web sites. In a pure link analysis system, it is important to get links from popular web sites which are related to the keywords you want to be found for. Getting only a few links from popular sites will be more useful than getting several links from unpopular web sites.

The other factors in a link analysis system are the context of the links, authority of the web sites, the number of outbound links from a web site, and the similarity in themes between the linking sites.

If you want to attain high search engine ranks in the search engines that use link analysis in their ranking algorithm, you have to be associated with reputed web sites. You also have to make sure those sites have keywords related to yours. It’s also important to use targeted keywords throughout your site, and have relevant explanatory text around your keywords and links.

How To Measure Link Popularity
Link popularity is determined and analyzed by each search engine in its own way. AltaVista may calculate a high link popularity for your site, whereas Google may calculate a low popularity for your site. This is because each search engine uses the popularity information in different ways, and it will depend on their specific algorithms.

Visit the homepage of the specific search engine and type the formulae we have mentioned in the search box and click on search. Notice that we have eliminated http://www. in the urls. While measuring link popularity, substitute your own web site name in the domain name. Do not forget to include the .com, .net or .org in the domain names.

Altavista & Infoseek

link:domainname

This will return the total number of sites linking to your domain.

As the web pages of a site sometimes link to each other, in this result, the web pages of noname.com itself which are linked to its index file will also be included. To eliminate the web pages of the same domain, the syntax is,

link:domainname -url:domainname

To find out the link popularity of a particular web page, type

link:domainname/filename.htm

Directhit

There is no way to determine the link popularity of a web site in Direct Hit.

Google

link:domainname.com

It will return the number of web sites linking to the site noname.com. But there is no command to eliminate the web pages, which are linking to its own domain.

Hotbot and other Inktomi powered search engines like AOL, iWon and MSN

linkdomain:domainname

It returns the total number of web sites linking to the domain.

linkdomain:domainname -domain:domainname

It returns the total number of web sites linking to the domain after eliminating the links from the same domain.

Fast

link.all:domainname

Returns the web pages linking to your domain.

Link Building Strategies (and what they are worth)
The most difficult and time-consuming aspect of search engine optimization is building link popularity.

The days of link farms and bulk link exchange programs are over. If you implement those strategies today, you take the risk of getting kicked out of the search engines’ index. At present, the search engine robots want links from authoritative and popular sites, or links from sites that share the same theme as your site. Wondering how many quality links do you need for your site? One more than your competition.

Search engines do not give importance to links from free web sites or artificial links in their link analysis system, so there are no easy ways to build link popularity. You have to work hard to establish yourself in the eyes of the search engines.

The secret behind the success of a web site in a pure link analysis system is content. Before you start your link building program, be sure that you have a content rich site. If your site is not one, make it. Add articles that will be of interest to the visitors of your site. This needs a lot of effort and time. If you are too busy, hire a professional copywriter to do it for you. However, doing it on your own will save you a lot of money. Do not do marketing for your web site in the articles, instead deliver useful information. Remember, in the long run the content of your site is your biggest asset.

Supposing that you have a content rich site, we describe a list of legitimate ways you can build link popularity for your site.

=> The oldest and best way of increasing link popularity is to ask for a link. In this process, you directly contact the owner of a site via email or other means asking for a link to your site. In your email you may briefly explain why you think the link will benefit their visitors. You would generally offer to link back to them in exchange for this courtesy.

Later in this article, we have discussed in detail the basics, how tos, do’s and don’ts of requesting a link.

=> People generally link to those web sites that offer unique and useful information. So, start developing more content if your site is lacking it and become a content provider. Write articles and tutorials about subjects related to the keywords for which you want to be ranked and give the visitors a reason to link to your site. By offering useful information from your site you increase the chances of getting links.

=> A sure fire way to increase link popularity is to have a high quality newsletter or article section on your site. People will want to link to you to provide their visitors useful information.

=> Submit your web site in the appropriate categories of the major search directories, like Yahoo, ODP etc. Do not forget to optimize your title and description with your important keywords. Also submit to Netscape Open directory.

=> Search for “submit a link” AND “your most important keyword.” You will get a list of sites that have link pages related to your keyword. Post links to them.

=> Submit your site to the thousands of specialty search engines and directories where your site may be relevant and might get into.

=> Submit to as many as themed directories as possible.

=> Another way of getting a link from the top sites is to post an article in their ezine or content library section. Include a link to your site link and an attractive description in the signature of your article. This gives the site owner something that constitutes real value to the content of their web site. You also reach the audience of that web site in a way that is something more than a link request.

=> Write articles that are related to the keywords you want to be searched for and market those articles to online content providers. Do not forget to include your signature and a link to your site along with a optimized title and description of your site.

=> Start an awards program. This is one of the most successful ways to boost link popularity. The award is an image file that links back to your site and recognizes the site as the winner of your award program. This gives a strong incentive to the site that wins. The benefit is that another recognized site recognizes this site as a quality site.

=> Participate in many award programs which are conducted on others site. If you win, the award site will link to your site as a bonus. And you get to place that award on the site which in turn will increase your credibility.

=> Offer a small discount if a client agrees to link to your site from his site. This is probably not the most effective method but every small link helps.

=> Create a discussion board. Ask sites, which are related to the same keyphrase, to link to it.

=> Sometimes write a testimonial of a web site. Ask the site owner to post it in their site in exchange for a link to your site. But remember to write a testimonial to a worthy site only.

=> Ask for testimonials from other web sites. Remind him that you will also place a link to their site under their testimonial if they’re willing to reciprocate.

=> Remind every web site that is related to you to link to your site. They can be the partners, resellers, etc.

=> Submit your site to all online industry and general business directories, yellow pages, white pages that you can find.

=> Submit your site to an appropriate category of About.com. The quality links within About.com will help to boost your link popularity.

=> You can submit links to your newsletter to online directories that is reserved exclusively for newsletters.

=> Most of the time, your direct competitors will not link to you. In such cases, brainstorm fields that are related to keywords but are not your competition. If yours is a shoe company, exchange links with associations connected with leather industry. You may earn a link from related publications or news sites.

=> A very effective way to earn good links is to authorize content from your site in exchange for a link back to you.

=> If you can, offer something for free, probably a useful script or a software program, or a downloadable report, and ask for a link back to your site. This works because you’re giving something useful, and it is likely that they will reciprocate.

=> Make it easy for people to link back to your site. Make the html code that will create the link available to the visitors, so that they can copy and insert into their own web pages.

Dont’s Of Link Building Strategies
There are certain things that the search engines considers to be spam, so be cautious not to use those methods even by mistake. Whatever your intentions, if the search engines find you using spam, they may penalize you.

Don’t participate in link popularity farms or programs that send out e-mails soliciting people to swap links. They call it link spamming.

Do not make the mistake of placing a link on your own site for the sole purpose of trading links.

Do not approach the low quality web sites to link to you, as it will harm your site instead of increasing link popularity. It is advisable to link to high quality sites.

Maintain distance from the sites that are treated as “bad neighborhoods” by the search engines. Do not submit to Free for All sites.

Never send out an automated e-mail to many sites asking for a link. Make your e-mails personalized.

Do not entertain web sites that have their reciprocal link page so deeply buried in the site that a visitor will have difficulty finding it. If you humans face problems finding the links page, so will the spiders.

Inbound & Outbounds Links
When a web site links to your site, that link is an “inbound link” for your site. When you link to another web site, it is your “outbound link”.

The search engines that use link analysis in their ranking algorithm make use of inbound links only. It is not a matter of concern for them whom you are linking to. They do not take into account the outbound links while deciding how your page should rank.

However, Inktomi helps a page with outbound links rank very slightly better, compared to pages without outbound links. Google gives lesser importance to the links from a site with many outbound links than those links from a site with a few outbound links.

Imagine two sites Site A and Site B which are of equal importance before the search engines. Site A links to 2 web sites and Site B links to 200 web sites. In that case getting a link from Site A is of more importance than a link from Site B.

Here’s another way to think of it. If a property is divided into two shares, each person the share will receive a greater amount of wealth than if it was divided into two hundred shares.

For this reason a link from the FFA pages or link farms are of no importance. You’re having to share whatever importance the page has (and it probably has very little) with many hundreds or sometimes thousands of people.

The Common Theme
Let’s say that John’s Shoe Shop web site has a link to Marie’s Bakery web site. This will not help John’s link popularity for the keyword “shoe shops”. But if John’s web site could get a link from a news portal related to footwear fashion, that could have helped a lot.

However, if both John’s Shoe Shop web site and Marie’s Bakery web site are both located in the same city, and people are searching for shoe shops in that city, may have just gone up a little because of the common thread between the sites – their city. It probably won’t help for those people simply searching for shoe shops, but may help if they’re searching specifically for shoe shops in that city.

A higher quality link for John, however, would be one from a shoe manufacturer that lists shoe shops that can be found on the Internet. That is exactly the kind of link that the search engines would credit toward link analysis. The key is in having that common theme between the linking and linked sites.

Link Context
The context of a link is given importance in link analysis systems. The text around or on the links is the context of the links. In a link analysis system, the context of the links are examined to decide the relevance of the page which is linked.

If a link says “great shop for shoes” and points to John’s shoe shop web site, then the usage of link context would understand that John’s web site is relevant to the keyword “shoe shops”.

Example 1:

Consider a web page on the news portal related to footwear fashion that has a paragraph which says,

These are great shops for buying shoes of latest fashion:

John’s shoe shop
Abc shoe store

Notice how the terms shoes and shops appears near the links to the sites listed. Because of this, both the sites will be treated relevant for the words “shoe shops”.

Example 2:

Another web page from a manufacturer of shoes reads:

This is a great shop for quality shoes.

Here, the link leads to John’s shoe shop. The text of the alt tag of the link contains the words shop and shoes, so John’s site will be treated as relevant for those words.

Link Quality And Authority
Search engines give a page more points in the link analysis system depending upon the number of pages linking to it. Suppose there are two pages. One page has got two inbound links and the other page has got ten inbound links. The second page will be deemed to be more important as it has got more inbound links than the former one. The second page is sometimes described as the “authority” page as more pages are pointing to it.

Also, as the second page is more authoritative, it is able to transmit that importance along its outbound links. An outbound link from the second page will be deemed more important than an outbound link from the first page. However, please remember this will happen only when both the pages have equal number of outbound links, as an increased number of outbound links will lead to their importance getting divided.

Each search engine has got its own way to measure link quality. The main points remain the same. All links are not equal. A few links from important web pages is of more use than links from hundreds of low quality web sites. If a web master is using link spamming, he is taking the risk of getting banned from the search engine’s indexes any moment.

Final Analysis Of The Links
Link analysis makes use of both link quality and context. Please remember that though all major search engines make use of link popularity in their ranking algorithm, they do not depend on it entirely. They still use on-the-page factors in their algorithm. So, to achieve a high ranking, you have to optimize your web pages for the keywords related to your business as well as has to build a high link analysis score.

Content Is Again The King
The most interesting thing is that if your site is well written and provides a lot of useful information, you won’t have to ask for links at all. If yours is a content rich site, other sites will link to yours of their own wish.

How To Find Those Good Links
How will you find good web pages that share similar context and that are deemed as high quality pages?

Who knows better than anyone else what the search engines consider to be important pages, than the search engines themselves. Use them.

Visit any major search engine and search for the most important keywords, for which you want to be found for. The sites listed in the first two or three pages are the web sites which the search engines themselves feel to be the most relevant to the keywords, and the most popular ones too. Also, as these pages are top ranked, then they receive many visitors. So, if you can make them link to you, you not only increase your popularity but also get the chance of drawing some of the visitors that they receive, into your site.

Now contact the site owners of those sites and request them to link to you.

Where To Place Your Links
Every page you come across in the attempt to build link popularity, may not have an appropriate place to place link to your site.

If they do not have, you have to make out something out of the existing sections. You have to visit the homepage of those sites and follow the links from it in order to find the place where you will request the site owner to place your link. Sections which say “Resources”, “Links”, “Related links” etc. are good places to place your link.

It would have been more useful for you to get linked from the original page since, that’s the place most visitors from the search engines will come to. That page would have provided you more link importance than these other pages. But these pages also have got some degree of importance as the search engines makes use of internal linkage.

Suppose you are an SEO company. You visit another web site which is also in some way related to SEO. You find that in their related links page, there is no section in which you can put a link to your homepage (assuming that your homepage is stuffed with your service/product information or is a marketing copy of your services). They have separate sections on popular SEO newsletters, message boards, a section on useful articles. In such a situation, if you have a newsletter, you can request a link from that section to your newsletter page. Or, you could request a link from the articles section to your article page. Though you could not manage to request a link to your homepage, but a link to your internal pages also might help.

Your goal should be to build links to one particular web page. But it’s still useful to get links to any part of your site. These might help draw visitors, also you might find that some internal pages of your site start to rank well for certain terms.

How To Request A Link
After you have figured out the appropriate place the next thing you have to find out the contact information of the person who handles link requests.

How do you find the contact information of that person? Sometimes, it is provided in the sections where links can be placed. If unavailable, check out the ‘contact us’ or the ‘about us’ page. Now you have the contact information of the people associated with this web site. Your should send your link request to the most appropriate person. If there is only one email address, you do not have any other way but to use that. But if the contact information of more than one person is available, e.g. an email address for their editorial staff, their technical staff and their advertising staff, then for a link request, it is the editorial staff you should contact. Emailing the technical staff might cause your link request to be ignored.

Make the process of linking to you as easy as possible for them. Within your email, provide the code for linking so that he can just cut and paste the code into his web page. Also provide a title and description for your web site along with the url. Do not forget to optimize the description with your most important keywords to help influence link context factor. Mostly they will take it the way you have given them, if you do not use marketing statements within your description.

Provide them the exact url of their site where you would want your site to be linked. Remember that the site owner will only link to you if he feels it will benefit his site and the site’s visitors. Provide the exact reason for which your site should be there. This will save them time and make it easier for them to decide about your request. If you have a reciprocal links page, add a link to their site and tell them that you’ve added their site details in your web site. If you have not created a reciprocal link page yet, create one now!

In case you have made a request and your first attempt to get a link is unsuccessful, you need to follow up at least once more. Wait for sometime before you followup, such as three or four weeks. The follow up should be very polite. Ask again whether a link request will be considered and provide them with the information you had provided earlier. However, be sure that the follow-up doesn’t turn into annoyance. Keep your follow up requests spaced well apart. Also, be sure to note the dates of when you send messages.

A Few More Words Of Concern
The search engines run link analysis on per url basis. Each url of your site has got its own popularity score in a link analysis system. This makes it important to build links to only one page, as much as possible. This way you can use all your inbound links to build that page into an authority. When we say link analysis is on a per url basis, we means exact urls. Each exact url will have its own link popularity.

Sometimes, the same page can be reached via more than one url. e.g. the homepage of Search Engine Optimization Ethics can be reached via the following urls:

http://searchengineethics.com/

http://www.searchengineethics.com

http://searchengineethics.com/index.htm

http://www.searchengineethics.com/index.htm

Though all these four urls finally take you to the same page, i.e. the homepage, but they will be deemed as four completely different pages in link analysis systems.

Assuming that there are four web site who have agreed to link to us. Each of them links to one of the different urls, instead of linking to any one of the urls. Then all the urls have a link popularity value of 1. When any of these url are competing with our competitors who have more link popularity than one, we will lose before them. Instead, if we had concentrated on just one of the urls, say http://www.searchengineethics.com, our link popularity would have increased four times.

However, you do not have much control over which pages will people link to. They can link to any part of it. The only thing you can do about it is to use any one of these urls in your link requests.

Reciprocal Linking
If you want to get something, many times you also have to give something in return. If you are going to ask for links, you have to give links. So, if you do not have a reciprocal links page yet, create one. You can name it as ‘related links’, ‘resources’ etc. However, if you link to quality sites of your related keywords, you might actually turn your links page into a destination.

Another advantage of having a reciprocal links page is that, assuming that you have already told the contact web master that their site has been added to your own links page, there is a good chance they might feel guilty if they do not link back. This will make the web master take your request more seriously.

Link Spamming
Link spamming is the technique of artificially increasing the link popularity of a web site in order to influence its ranking in the search engines.

As soon as the search engines include a new system in their ranking algorithm in order produce the most relevant and high quality content and eliminate the low quality web pages, energetic webmasters try to invent tricks to spam those algorithm. But the search engines which use link analysis systems have proven fairly resilient to these attacks. Some common techniques used by the web masters are described below.

Posting messages to various message boards and guest books is a very common practice that a web master implements. They visit hundreds of them and post messages with links to their sites. But search engines are easily able to detect this sort of spam.

Though the definition of link popularity says that it is the number of web sites linking to a web site that is important, yet it is not the number or quality of link that matters. Quality of the links means the context of the links as well the quality of the linking sites. However, it is very difficult to artificially get quality links.

Another common method by which spammers try to influence the link popularity of web sites is by joining link farms. A link farm is a network of web pages, which are heavily cross-linked with each other. These web pages may be present in one or more than one domain or in more than one server. In order to influence the link popularity, when a web site joins such link farms, it gets a link from each of these pages and in turn it also has to link back to each of those pages. But search engines can detect the link farms as well as the web sites participating in the link farms very easily. If you plan to participate in a link farm, remember you are inviting chances of getting banned from the search engine index.

Disadvantages Of The Link Analysis System
In a pure link analysis system, new sites will find it very difficult to rank well in the search results. This will happen even if it has the deepest and highest quality content than any of its competitors. The only links it can be assured of are the ones it pays for or the ones in the major directories e.g. Yahoo!, LookSmart, NBCi, Inktomi or ODP. The rest it has to make happen. This proves why links are both a weak metric to use as an indicator of quality of a page and why they prejudice against new sites.

Another disadvantage of the link analysis system is that most search engines index only web pages in the top two levels of your site, as the search engine spiders have difficulty reading deep level web pages.

Author:
Search Engine Ethics

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Related posts:

1. How to Design a Site for Link Popularity
2. Building your Site’s Link Popularity
3. Measuring Link Popularity

When a human actually uses a search engine to find a specific product or service, the search engine looks at its index of the Web and displays a list of results. That list of results is in order of direct relevancy, with the most relevant results first. A properly optimized web site with relevant keywords and keyphrases will receive highly targeted traffic from serious prospective buyers.

Content relevancy is the search engine’s measure of how well a particular Web page accurately matches a searching question. For example, a query for car insurance would list pages that were on the topic of car insurance above pages that were just about insurance, generally, or cars, generally, because the pages about car insurance would be much more relevant.

Some search engines quote relevancy as a percentage but many don’t quote it at all. Each search engine uses a different algorithm to calculate relevancy. Most use a combination of on-the-page and off-the-page factors. Examples of on-the-page factors are whether the keywords (the words searched for) appear in the page title or meta tags, and how early and often the keywords appear in the body copy of the page.

Examples of off-the-page factors are the number and quality of other Web pages that link to the page, otherwise known as inbound links, or whether somebody has paid to have the page included in the search engine’s index (PTBL or Pay to be Listed).

For any website to produce consistent and relevant search results, there are two important factors that need to be implemented:

>> It needs to be optimized on the right keywords and key phrases
>> It needs the right amount of keyword density or keyword occurrence

Let’s use one good practical example of content relevancy here. Let’s assume that we have a website offering quality home furnishings and decoration accessories. If a visitor is searching for quality bathroom accessories, he or she would type in the search box of any of the major search engine the words: ‘quality bathroom accessories’ and would normally expect to get this relevant information from the search engines. Usually, the first five to ten results are the most relevant in most of the search engines results pages (SERP’s).

For any website to be listed among those first ten results requires that the site be optimized with the relevant information in mind, in other words: ‘quality bathroom accessories’. If that site had those important and relevant keywords and key phrases on one of its pages and was optimized using them, ideally, it should normally be appearing within those first ten results.

But we also need another important ingredient to be really effective and that is called keyword density or keyword occurrence. How can a company or individual improve keyword density to achieve better rankings in the major search engines? There are a few techniques you can choose that were carefully researched by experts in the SEO business. Here are two very popular techniques in effectively using keyword density:

* Try to write sentences that use your important keywords and key phrases. If you or somebody else in your organization is a good writer, you may have to modify or abandon some of the old habits you previously used in writing documents! For example, we have seen many good writers having an actual aversion to repeating a particular word more than twice, choosing instead to use alternative terms that mean the same thing. Although this makes for a more pleasant reading, it will not help you get your site listed with a relevant, top ranking in search engine results for that particular keyword.

* When creating a new page or editing an existing page, always utilize the right keywords and key phrases for your industry with the results from WordTracker’s huge database of keywords and key phrases. Serious SEO begins with serious tools. Optimizing a web site for the wrong keywords will only bring you off-topic traffic visitors that have no need for your products or services. This would be ‘irrelevant’ traffic. For example, a web searcher looking for car accessories might type “auto parts” or “car equipment” or “after-sales automobile equipment”, etc. Make certain that your web site would cover similar search terms to maximize your visibility in the search engines for your particular products and services, especially if you happen to sell these products.

Conclusion
Content relevancy can literally ‘make or break’ the ROI of any website, large or small. Make certain you are always using the best techniques we have shown you here, along with the right techniques in keyword density or keyword occurrence and we can guarantee your website’s rankings will improve by a large factor and so will your ROI. We strongly suggest you bookmark our website by clicking here.

Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales

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Related posts:

1. Importance Of Keyword Density In SEO
2. How Do Search Engines Like Google Measure Relevance and Popularity of Content?
3. Optimizing Your Web Site For Content

However, most cost a significant amount. Many businesses may not have the financial resources to go ahead in such a program. The much less expensive and better way to do it is with a good, serious and professional Web site positioning and optimization service available from specialized SEO firms such as Rank for $ales.com

For a lot less money than any PTBL offering, a professional SEO program can bring you a lot higher ROI (Return on Investment). That means a fairly smaller investment could significantly raise your targeted site traffic by anywhere from 45% to 85% or sometimes even higher. Furthermore, remember that we are talking about targeted traffic here. First, there is a big difference between targeted traffic coming from major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, DMOZ or Alta-Vista, and so-called “general, clickable traffic” from casual searchers that clicked on a PTBL link mostly out of curiosity.

If you still think that SEO experts and the optimization programs we run are still too expensive, think for a minute the large amount of dollars being spent daily by large multi-national corporations on TV advertising, radio ’spots’ and newspapers. Just a thirty second spot on a large TV sports special such as the Superbowl can easily run in the tens of millions of dollars.

The irony is, do you really think it is quality, trageted traffic? When people go on Google or Yahoo, they have a clear idea of what it is they are looking for. They want to find it fast, without any hassles. And they are looking for quality search results. The only way your web site will be on top of SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) is to have it professionally optimized by an expert team that truly understands SEO.

The old adage that ‘Time is Money’ also holds true in professional SEO. When all is considered, an investment with a professional SEO firm might be the best solution to many if not the majority of companies and businesses. If it were all so easy, everybody would be SEO’s and the world would probably run out of websites to optimize!

Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales

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Related posts:

1. Why is Quality Search Engine Optimization so Expensive?
2. Pay Per Click Search Engine Advertising: Smart Campaign Management Tips
3. The Myth of “Guaranteed #1 Ranking” in Search Engine Marketing

In the past, it was enough to tweak some of your meta tags and certain on-the-page factors to attain top search engine ranks. Today, search engine optimization is not that simple. It is not enough to simply modify meta tags and submit your site to the search engines. When optimizing a web site, there are thousands of factors to keep in mind.

The foremost criteria for a web site to be able to attain and retain top search engine ranks for a long period of time is to have a great Content. If your site is not a quality-content rich site, add content to it to make it one. One of the final and crucial steps of search engine optimization campaign is the proper submission of your web site to the major search engines.

The in-between steps are purely search engine optimization. These steps are critical to obtain first-page ranks, and most sites unknowingly ignore these steps, but without these, you are destined to be a search engine failure.

Remember – there are no search engine optimization secrets – just optimization methodologies to follow. In order to beat your competitors and obtain first page ranks in the search engine results for your most desired keywords you have to follow certain steps.

How The Search Engines Work
The term “search engine” is commonly used to specify both the search engine crawlers as well as the human powered search directories.

The crawler based search engines, such as Google or Altavista, use software programs (called robots, crawlers or spiders) to create their index. These software programs crawl the world wide web to accumulate information about new or modified sites. When people search, they actually search in the search engine indexes.

The human edited search directories, such as Yahoo, ODP or Looksmart, depend on humans for including web sites into it. They maintain a hierarchical structure of directories and sub-directories called categories or sub-categories. Web sites are submitted into their related categories.

However, there are some search engines which use mixed results, sometimes using human edited directories while at other times uses index created by crawler, in the results page. These are sometimes termed as hybrid search engines. Yahoo presents mixed results to its surfers. It will give preference to any one type of listings over another depending on the search query. Yahoo prefers to provide the human-powered results for popular key terms. It presents the crawler-based results (powered by Google) for the search terms which are cryptic or less popular.

Understanding how the search engines rank web pages

When a surfer conducts a search in a search engine, the search engine software scans through the entire search engine index and returns a list of web pages, which it feels are relevant to the search query. It even ranks the web pages in descending order of relevance and popularity. This happens in a fraction of a second. Each search engine has got its own algorithm of ranking the web pages. (click here to read about link popularity analysis. It is one of the most important and time consuming steps of search engine optimization.)

The algorithms that the search engines use to determine the relevancy of a page, when confronted with hundreds of millions of web pages to sort through, is a closely kept trade secret. In spite of the difference in their algorithms, they still follow a set of common rules. We will discuss the common factors in this section of the article.

One of the main on-the-page factors, which determines the relevance of a web page to a search query, is called the location-frequency factor.

Location means the different parts of the web page where the keyword is present. Frequency is the number of times the keyword was mentioned in the web page. The search engines evaluate the locations as well as the frequency of the keywords to analyze the relevance of the page. The web pages with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages.

So, what are these special locations of a web page that are important in search engine optimization?

Making Navigation Easy For The Crawler
Try to read the web pages from the standpoint of a search engine spider. It cannot read images, frames, javascripts or nested tables. All it does is crawl the world wide web and collect information about web sites. When it comes across a new web page, it puts it in the index. It then follows the links within that web page to find other pages within that site.

If you want to get a high rank high in the search engine listings, all you have to do is make the job of the spider easier.

Sometimes, web masters, in order to give their web site a pleasant appearance, place text in the form of graphics. Often you will come across a site on the Internet that has got nothing but a big image on it’s homepage. The visitors can go to the other pages of the web site. This might not have created any difficulty for the human visitors.

But a search engine cannot read images and therefore cannot enter the site. Often web masters use only image map links in their web pages. A search engine spider that can’t follow these links will not be able to read the other pages of the site. We highly recommend that you avoid image map links and use text links whenever possible.

If you still want to use image map links, solve the odds against it by adding text links at the bottom of the page. The spider will be encouraged to find other pages on your web site using these text links.

Add a sitemap page to your site and name it site-map.html. It will link to every page of your web site textually and submit this page to the search engines. It will help the search engines locate pages within your web site.

Be sure to internally link the pages of your site with each other in order to help the spider find your complete site. Make all your pages link to your homepage.

Titles, Meta descriptions, Meta keywords, Headings, Alt tags, Anchor texts, First two paragraphs
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.

The next most important location which all search engines give importance to is the body tag. 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.

The headings of the web pages are also deemed as important locations by some search engines. The other important locations are – the text in the alt tags of the images and the anchor tags of the hyperlinks.

Almost all the major search engines follow the above-mentioned location frequency algorithm to some extent. No two search engines do it the same way. Some search engines index more web pages than others. No search engine has the exact collection of web pages to search through. This is the reason why the same search conducted on different search engines produces different results.

In the early days of the search engines, meta tags were assumed to be the secret to propel a web site to the top of the search engine results. But now, all search engines do not read meta tags. So meta tags can be part of the ranking algorithm, but they are no more the dominating factor for deciding relevance.

However, sometimes the search engines may also penalize web pages or ban them from their index, if they detect spamming. Search engine spamming is the practice of using unethical tricks to rank high in the search engine results, and thereby manipulating the search engine to produce irrelevant or low quality results. Some common examples of search engine spamming are unnecessary repetition of keyword, hiding text by using font color same as the background color of the web page, etc.

The programmers who created the search engine software are aware that many web masters make use of spam techniques in order to get their low-quality web sites ranked high in the search engine results. Spammers sometimes go to the extent of creating their web pages by reverse engineering the location-frequency algorithm.

In order to prevent spam, almost all search engines use certain off-the-page factors in their ranking algorithm. These are the factors that are not easy to influence, but are important in search engine optimization.

The majors among them are link analysis and click-through measurement. In a link analysis system, only the most relevant and popular sites will attain a high search engine position. Link analysis is a very useful and foolproof way to determine which pages are good for particular key phrases. It is a mathematical way to determine if other web sites related to your industry think that your site is important.

Link analysis is the analysis of the number and quality of the incoming links that are pointing to your site. It is beyond the number of links. Here, it is not the number of links that matters, but the quality of those links that are important.

Click through or click popularity is the number of times your web site gets a click when it is displayed in the results of the search engines. It also depends on how much time the visitors, coming to your site from the search results, spends on your web site.

These days, many crawler-based search engines as well as human edited directories seem to use the concept of click popularity within their ranking algorithm. The objective behind the concept of click-through measurement is to determine which web sites satisfies the queries of the surfers.

Search Engine Optimization Budget – Pay-For-Inclusion Charges
We, at Search Engine Optimization Ethics, suggest that any web master, who wants to launch a new commercial web site or promote the existing web site, should set aside a certain search engine submission budget for online promotion of his business.

When an entrepreneur wants to start an offline business, he sets aside certain essential expenditures for the business, like registration of his business, trade license, professional tax certificate, etc. These expenses are the startup cost of an offline business. Similarly, for an online business, there are some startup costs, like the domain registration and web hosting charges.

In the recent past, this was enough. But nowadays, people have realized that search engine visibility is the life blood for any online business, and it is a wise decision that any site owner should establish a search engine optimization budget.

However, we would like to remind that free search engine submission is still possible and many web masters still depend on them entirely and many of them get through too. The paid programs that are offered will just accelerate the indexing process and will almost certainly start generating more traffic from the search engines.

The most essential: Yahoo
The ‘must’ search engine submission cost you should consider is submission to the Yahoo! directory. They charge an annual fee of $299 for inclusion. This easily pays for itself in traffic for most people.

Remember that this fee does not guarantee inclusion, it just guarantees that your site will be reviewed by a Yahoo! editor within seven days and you will also get a reply of acceptance or rejection. In case you are rejected, you will be given the reason for rejection and a one-month time period for a re-appeal. As a matter of fact, most sites using the paid inclusion program, get through if they follow the editorial guidelines.

Again, you can get listed for free if you are a non-commercial site, but it sometimes needs months.

Crawler submission budget

Usually, web masters interested in getting their sites listed in the major search engines, want to get visible quickly. If you can afford a little more money, you may consider the paid submission programs of some of the major crawlers, like Inktomi, Altavista and Alltheweb. These paid inclusion programs will help you get included in their respective index within a few days. These programs commit inclusion in their index for a year (Altavista’s express inclusion is for a term of six months), but be aware that they do not assure the rankings.

Inktomi charges
1st url: $39/year,
For each additional url: $25/year

AltaVista charges (for a six month basis)
1st url: $39,
From the 2nd to 10th url: $24 per url,
from the 11th to 100th url: $19 per url, and
from the 101st url to the 500th url: $12 per url.

Alltheweb charges
For 1st url: $35/year (Annual membership – $20, Annual cost: $15)
From 2nd url onwards – $15/year

Alltheweb offers another paid inclusion program, Insite Select Pro. This is mainly for the larger sites. The price for 1st to 250th url is US$189 per month, and for 251 to 500 pages $279 per month. If you have more than 500 pages, you may contact Alltheweb for a custom quote. (More information is available at http://insite.lycos.com/searchservices/pro_overview.asp.)

Putting It All Together
Let us add up all the essential expenditure.

Essential Search Engine Optimization Budget
Yahoo $299
Inktomi $39
Altavista $39
Alltheweb $30
Total $407

This is the ideal amount you would budget, to show up in the major search engines within a short period of time. At the very least, it is highly recommended to set aside a budget, enough to submit to Yahoo.

Design For The Search Engines From The Beginning
More than 85% of the Internet population finds new web sites through the search engines. Still, most web masters do not take into account the search engines when they are creating their web sites. Their web sites are not able to seize the traffic from the search engine that they might receive without much effort.

In this section, we notify you of certain design strategies that may prove to be a roadblock on the path to search engine optimization success. Imagine the situation, when you spend several weeks to design a web site. When it is ready, you plan to optimize it for the search engines. The search engine optimization consultant tells you that you have used a methodology that prevents the search engine spiders to read your web site. In that situation, you might have to re-design the entire web site again to make it visible for the spiders.

We believe prevention is better than cure. In this section, we warn you of certain design constructs that you should avoid.

But what if you have a web site which already has used one of these constructs? Do not panic. There are solutions. We will cover those as and when required.

But, if you are in the process of creating or plan to create a web site, take our tips.

Many web sites make use of dynamically generated web pages using Perl, ASP or Cold fusion in their web sites. These technologies do great from a user standpoint, but from a search engine stand it can be difficult. The problem is that these technologies often use urls that has a ? symbol within them. It prevents the spiders from crawling the web pages.

So, if you manage to get rid of the ? from your web site address and make it look like a static url, you will do tremendous promotion to the sales of your company.

Frames can be another roadblock. If you are creating a web site, stay away from frames from the very beginning. If you have already used them, getting rid of them is the best idea. Sometimes frames can make the web site easily navigable. But they create significant problems for the search engine spiders.

In the past, when web masters used to design their web sites, they usually checked out how it would look like when seen from the popular browsers, and made sure that they looked impressive to all popular browsers. As the search engines are gaining more importance for online businesses, clever web masters will keep the search engines in their minds while designing their pages.

Planning Your Search Engine Optimization Strategy
In this section, we will guide you on how to plan search engine optimization for your web site. We will not recommend you ways to trick the search engines to attain top ranks in its results. In fact, there are no search engine secrets. But a number of small changes in your web site and submission methodologies can produce big results.

Research & Analysis Of The Scope Of Promotion
The foremost step in optimizing a web site is to study the nature and scope of the business. A lot of brainstorming is involved. This step gives you an insight into the scope and aspects of promotion of your web site. It later becomes useful in the different stages of search engine optimization strategy.

Brainstorm a little and think about the web sites that are not in competition with you directly. However, their businesses are in some way related to yours. This becomes very useful while link building, and to some extent, in the process of keyword research too.

Suppose you have a shoe shop. Your direct competitors are the other shoe shop or company owners, who might be a little reluctant to link to you. But a shoe manufacturer company might not be that reluctant to link. If you brainstorm a little more, you may feel that links from web sites which discuss the latest trends in footwear, may also benefit your web site.

Assume you have a web hosting business and want to boost the link popularity factor. Links from other web hosting companies will definitely be useful. But getting links from the competitors is always difficult, though it is not impossible. Instead of getting confined to just the other web hosting companies and keep on trying without much success, you may request links from domain registration companies, web site designing companies and probably also from search engine optimization companies. The chances are that they will link to you more easily.

In both the above examples, you have seen that with a little thought you can discover more areas of requesting links for your web site. The insight that you get from this step not only helps you to identify greater scope in link popularity, but also in keyword researching and content building.

Let us consider the first example. If the web master feels that keywords related to the latest trends in footwear are very popular and the competition is also not very tough, and it will be easy and beneficial to get ranked for those keywords, then he might chose some popular keywords related to the latest trends in footwear and develop a new section that will relate to the keyword. This new section will contain information-rich web pages for those keywords. When these pages get ranked in the search engines, visitors will come to the other parts of his web site, like homepage etc., following the links from within those pages.

Let us consider the other example. If the web master feels that keywords related to domain registration are very popular and the competition is also less severe as compared to web hosting, then he might chose some popular keywords related to domain registration and develop a few information-rich pages on domain registration. This section will afterwards draw traffic to other parts of the web site.

Creating, Improving And Adding Good Content To Your Web Site
Content is king – This is an unanimous and ever-lasting truth in the search engine optimization and placement industry. The “long-term” success or failure of a web site in the search engines depends on the content of the web site to a great extent.

Therefore, if you do not have enough high quality textual content in your web site related to the keywords, start developing it right now. Writing articles that are related to your industry can be a fantastic way to increase your content. The underlying intention is to make the search engine spiders feel that your web site content is very much related to and close to the keyword you have chosen. This will make it easier to get links from other web sites.

It is very time consuming and requires a lot of effort and skill to develop the content of your site. If you do not have that much time to spend, hire a professional copywriter to do it for you. Great content is a must.

Make sure that there are no grammatical mistakes in your web pages. Proof-read the entire content of your web site for spelling mistakes or typos before you start promoting it. Misspelling or other textual mistakes create a bad impression on the visitors.

Optimizing The Page Content
Relevant and optimized content is the foundation of success in search engines, and is the most important factor that you should focus on. Relevant content strengthens the keywords used in the title and meta tags. Optimized content is the placement of keywords within the main content to ensure the best keyword density.

Position your target keywords to appear in the important locations. The heading tags are important. Include the keywords in the heading tag. Try to write them in such a way that the keywords are placed closer to the beginning of the tag.

Some say that text with a larger font size or that are made will carry more weight than text in the normal font size of the page. Similarly, text with a smaller font size than the regular font will get lesser weight from the search engine spiders.

It is believed that the first words of an html tag are of more importance to the search engine than the words that come later. Some spiders may not index the whole page, so it’s useful to have the code of your important body content as close to the top of the page as possible.

The first two paragraphs are extremely important when search engine spiders look at the content of your web page. It is believed that the search engines prefer pages where keywords appear near the top of the page. Include them in the first two paras of your web page. However the entire content is important.

The bottom line is to ensure a proper keyword density while keeping the copy as attractive as possible to the human visitors.

However, placement of the body content near the top becomes a factor if you have a lot of javascript in the head section, or if you are using a table structure. The codes of the table or javascript pushes the real textual content downwards.

If you want to optimize javascript, put all the javascript code in an external .js file and call that file from within your html file.

Some people in the SEO industry believe that search engine spiders are not able to read the text in the tables. Tables can push your textual content further down, making keywords less relevant because they appear lower. This is because tables will break apart when search engine spiders read them. For example, visualize a two-column table, where the first column has links, while the second column has the main text.

Figure 1. – Humans will see the page this way. Apple
Banana
Pineapple
Fruits are extremely nutritious and contains many essential vitamins. Let fruits constitute the major part of your diet.

Figure 2 – Spiders will see the page this way.
Apple
Banana
Pineapple

Fruits are extremely nutritious and contains many essential vitamins. Let fruits constitute the major part of your diet.

See how the keyword-rich main content has moved downwards. But we have never found tables to be an obstacle for high search engine rankings, provided if you have great content, optimized meta tags and a good link popularity score. However, there are a few things to remember while using tables.

Remember the spider reads the table left to right and top to bottom. So the text in the first column of the first row will carry more importance than any other cell. Try to keep your navigational links or the most important content in the first cell/column of a table. Use textual navigation links in your first column instead of graphical buttons.

Another suggestion is to place some great headlines by using the header tags at the very top of your page, outside the table. These will first be read by the engines.

Keep the structure of the table as simple as possible. Nested tables sometimes create problems. A nested table is a table inside another table. There’s one main rule when it comes to nesting – do not go too deep.

Another important location where you should place your keywords are the text within the anchor tag and the alt tag of the images. Search engines read and lay emphasis on the text within the links, so use them to impress the search engine spiders. Try to use textual links wherever possible, since spiders cannot read images.

Place your keywords in the alt tag of your text. Do not just write a series of keyword, but make proper grammatical sentences.

Some believe that spiders assign more importance to the last few sentences of a web page, since they are probably looking for conclusion information. Include your important keywords atleast once in the last three sentences.

Identifying Your Competition
We have mentioned earlier in this article that the objective is to beat your competitors and obtain first page ranks in the search engine results. Identifying them and reviewing their optimization strategies from time to time helps you throughout the search engine optimization process.

For this, you need to have an idea who are your competitors. Reviewing their sites and promotion techniques from time to time will give you many new ideas and tips of search engine optimization. These might help you in your online business.

How do you identify your competitors? Use the search engines. Search with the keywords that you expect surfers to use to locate your web site. The web sites that are ranked in the top positions are the competitors whom you have to beat to reach the top.

Picking The Target Keywords
Choosing the appropriate keywords for your web site is a very important step of your search engine optimization process. The keywords you pick in this step are repeated throughout the entire process.

So, what are the target keywords? Obviously they will vary site to site. The first step is to brainstorm and make a list of the terms which your probable customers will be searching with when they search for a product like yours.

Imagine you have a travel agency which operates in Australia, called John Travels. Apply your thought processes to make a list of keywords, which those net surfers who are interested in travelling to Australia will be searching with. Please ignore any one-word keyword that comes to your mind e.g. travel. Some examples of one-word keywords are

travel
tour
australia

The one-word keywords should be avoided as they are hyper-competitive. Instead of wasting your effort with the one-word keyword, it is suggested that you concentrate on those keywords which are easily manageable. It is wise to use the two or three word keywords. Example of three-word keywords are:

travel to Australia
tourism in Australia

So, after going deep into the minds of your probable customers, you come up with a list of keywords which they might be searching with.

travel australia
travel agencies australia
tourism australia

Now you have the initial list of keywords. We will also out other details to make the final list.

You still need to be sure about your choices. You also need to check out how popular are the keywords that you have chosen. Otherwise, you may come up with keywords which are unpopular, probably only one surfer has searched for that particular keyword in the last five years. The idea is to come up with keywords which are relevant to your business as well as are popular among the net surfers.

Another thing that you have to consider is the number of competitors for those keywords. The best keywords are those with high popularity and fewer number of competitors. It takes a lot of time, skill and study to find those keywords. This step is one of the initial stages of search engine optimization. If you start it after the design is complete and content has been written. It will be too late.

Fortunately there are services available on the Internet from proprietary databases that let you access the search history of the net surfers. Each of these services are able to provide you with some definite numbers that interpret the effectiveness of the keyword. The balance between the popularity and number of web sites that compete for a particular keyword eventually decides the effectiveness of a keyword. Sometimes, it is a very subjective thing to decide upon the keywords.

You can check out the list of keyword research tools from the Open directory database, at the following url:

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Authoring/Online_Tools/

Keywords/

How does this help? This helps when you are trying to build links to your web site. Sometimes, you do not know whom to request a link. Suppose you search with your most desired keyword in a search engine and come across a few sites whose link popularity scores are very high. Find out how they have scored so high in the link analysis system. Ypu can then implement these ideas in your site and improve your ranks.

How do you know which site are linking to your competitors’ sites? Again, use the search engines. Analyze how and why they are linking to your competitors. You can also incorporate those strategies.

Sometimes you will find that your competitors have a number of informative articles. These are allowed to be republished in their web sites for free if they agree to put a link to their web site with the articles. At other times, you may find that the newsletter of your competitor is the main attraction, and others who do not have a newsletter section love to link to them.

This way you can take ideas from your competition. However, be sure that if they are doing something which can be termed as spam, do not implement it even by mistake. Forget about that competition right then, as sooner or later the search engines will detect them and they will be penalized.

Some of the most popular and free keyword research tools

WordTracker Keyword Research and Popularity Tool

http://www.wordtracker.com

Compiled database of keywords that people search for. Tells how often people search for the term and how many competing sites use that same term on a search engine. Helps measure keyword effectiveness.

Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions

https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox

7Search Keyword Suggestion Tool

http://www.7search.com/scripts/advertiser/sample_get.asp

This tool generates keyword popularity by the number of times that a keyword was searched in the 7Search database the previous month. It also displays related terms and their popularity.

Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Displays how many times a certain keyword was searched for in a given month. Shows all related searches for the entered keyword.

The best keyword research tool as of today is Wordtracker. Let us discuss a little how this tool works.

Step 1: Pick the first keyword from your initial list and test it at Wordtracker. First, it will return a list of keywords that contain the key phrase, which you have entered, either partially or totally.

Spep 2. Clicking on the first keyword from the list will generate the keywords related to them and which are popular as well. Now you have to use your own ideas to choose those keywords which are appropriate for your business. Take a piece of paper, label it as “Final List”, and note down the appropriate keywords.

Step 3. Repeat step 2 for all the keywords.

Step 4. Repeat the steps 1-3 for all the keywords in your initial list.

Now you have the list of keywords that are extremely popular among the net surfers. But a little editing of this list is still required. Check out the number of competitors for those keywords in the search engines. Instead of visiting all the search engines and checking the number of competitors, you may choose one search engine and treat it as the standard one. Let us choose Google as the standard.

Visit Google and search with each keyword from your list, and check the number of competitors for those keywords. If you feel that the number of competitors are TOO high for a keyword for you to beat your competitors and you have other moderately competitive keywords on your list, you may decide to exclude that from the list.

These finally make your final list of keywords where each keyword is extremely relevant to your web site. They are remarkably popular and you are confident that you will be able to beat your competitors.

How To Use Your Title Tag And Meta Tags
Title tag is the most important tag in search engine optimization after the real visible content of the web pag. All search engines make use of the text in this tag in their ranking algorithm.

Let us see how we create a title tag that is able to generate results. Our target is to create a keyword-rich title which will also entice the surfers to click on your web site’s link. Remember to use only those keywords that are in the visible textual content of your page.

When you start creating the title tag of your web pages, first revisit the final list of your keywords. You will then have some idea of the words that you are going to use.

Have a look at this title:

JOHN TRAVELS

How does it look? The forecolor that has been used here is the general forecolor used by the search engine for links. To make it look distinct, the site owner has used all uppercase characters. However, this has only made it more difficult to read.

If your services are centered within a particular locality, state or country, you should try to focus on targeted traffic based on location. The travel agency is in Australia and offers travel packages to the global market within Australia only.

With that in mind, let’s try to figure out what the web surfers who are interested in travelling to Australia would type in the search box:

travel Australia
travel agencies Australia
tourism Australia

Our objective should be to combine all the keywords in order to create an attractive phrase. Remember that the title tag is the first impression that your visitors have of your web site, so the marketing attitude should be the dominating factor. Let us see how many keywords we could combine without hurting the attractiveness of the words.

Australian travel agency – John travels

I think we should be happy with this title though we could not include the last keyword as we had to keep it attractive. We started with the word Australia, and this increases our chances to getting highly ranked when a search query is Australia specific.

Sometimes, web masters spend a lot of time and effort editing the meta tags more than it is needed. Meta tags are important but are definitely not a dominant factor for your web site’s high ranking. However, you can use their potential to the maximum if you re-establish the visible textual content of your web page.

Simply inserting a keyword in your meta tags does not imply that you will attain high search engine positions for that keyword. The meta tags can just be used to add more support to the actual text of the web page.

It is highly recommended that you add meta description and keyword tags to the html code of your web pages. Some search engines read them and will probably boost a web site slightly which contains them.

They exist in the head section of a html page, between the and tags. If you have any javascript on your page, it is advised to place the meta tags before them. The search engines give more importance to the text which appear higher on the pages.

Remember, meta tags are mainly a design tool for helping web pages with very little textual content to be better acknowledged by the search engines.

The meta description tag is a snippet of html code, which is usually placed after the title tag and before the meta keyword tag. The syntax of meta description tag is:

This meta tag fulfills two objectives. The text placed within this tag is given some weight with most search engines, and can help a page to rank slightly higher in the search results.

The search engines will often use the first few lines of the visible text that appears on the web page as the description of the site that appears on the search results pages, if no meta description tag is used. But if description tag is used it takes the text of this tag and uses it as the description of the site that appears on search results page. It lets you control the description of your site in the search engine results.

It should definitely use the important keywords for the page and should be written in such a way that it will tempt the surfers to click on the link to your web site. It should be thought of as a marketing tool, apart from a search engine optimization tool.

Suppose you have a web page without the meta description tag. The title of the page says “John’s Shoe Shop”, the first visible text on the web page is a

tag that says “Welcome to John’s shoe shop!” and some navigational links after that. The link of this web page will look like this in the search results:

John’s Shoe Shop
Welcome to John’s shoe shop!

This link is repulsive. Let us see how we can make the listing of this web page attractive.

Let us suppose that this page is about sports shoes, fancy shoes for ladies and kids, footwear fashion, etc. You can re-write the description tag.

Now your web site link will look something like this in search engine results:

John’s Shoe Shop
Every kind of footwear – sports shoes, fancy shoes at reasonable rates. All shoes match with the latest footwear fashion.

Most search engine index contain approximately 200 characters of the meta description tag. Do not repeat words in this tag. You may use various forms of words in this tag, like using plural or singular forms of words, or using a different tense etc. Try to write it as an actual sentence, instead of making it a series of keywords. Limit this tag to one good descriptive sentence. If you are using two sentences, make sure that they are short.

However, going over the limit does not mean that your tag will be discarded. However, the search engine will not use the extra text beyond the limits. Stick to the minimum to be on the safer side.

The first words of any tag are given more weight than later ones. So put the important keywords first. Try to use the same keywords first that you will use in the title tag.

In the early days of search engine optimization, the meta keyword tag was a great tool for the search engines to use to help them determine how to rank sites in their search results. But soon people started to abuse this tag by stuffing it with keywords, sometimes even with irrelevant ones (if they were popular words on the Net). This brought untargeted visitors. Finally, it was neither good for the search engines, net surfers, nor the web sites.

Over time, search engines started to withdraw the importance they had given to this tag. The main content became the dominating on-the-page factor. But as there is no harm in placing the most important keywords in this tag, you may do it. The syntax of meta keywords tag is:

Optimizing a web site for the search engines is a cumulative effort. You should use everything available to you that the spiders might give some importance, and so you should use the meta keyword tag.

Link Popularity Building
The search engines incorporated popularity factors into their ranking algorithm in order to create better relevancy formulae. This does not mean that the on-the-page factors or the importance of the main content can be ignored. If there are two sites with equally optimized meta tags and attractive content, the site having more link popularity will win the search engine optimization game.

Therefore, if you want to succeed in the search engine ranking battle, on-the-page optimization will no longer help unless it is enhanced with high-end link popularity.

The link popularity of a web site is the total number of web sites linking to it. Link analysis is closely related to link popularity, but with a twist. Link analysis is the number and quality of the inbound links point to your site. Here, it is not the number of links that matters, but the quality of those links that is important.

In a link analysis system, it is easy to filter out the spammers who set up several free sites and then make them link to their main web site. Nowadays, search engines do not give importance to links from free web sites in their link popularity scores. They combine link popularity with link analysis and use it to assign a weighted link popularity score. Presently, many major search engines make use of link analysis in their ranking algorithm.

So, in order to rank well in the search engines, start building links to your site. How do you do that? This is the most difficult and time-consuming aspect of search engine optimization.

However, the oldest and best way of increasing link popularity is to ask for a link. In this process, you directly contact the owner of a site via email or other means, asking for a link to your site. In your email you may briefly explain why you think the link will benefit their visitors. You would generally offer to link back to them in exchange for this courtesy.

Author:
Search Engine Ethics

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]]> http://www.lilengine.com/grow/search-engine-optimization-plan-your-own-strategy-152/feed/ 0 http://www.lilengine.com/grow/website-submission-yahoo-submitting-tips-150/ http://www.lilengine.com/grow/website-submission-yahoo-submitting-tips-150/#comments Sat, 16 Aug 2003 20:39:03 +0000 admin http://www.lilengine.com/?p=150 Getting listed on Yahoo should be without doubt the most important mission on any Internet marketers mind.

Yahoo is the biggest of all the search engines, well actually that’s not true, you see Yahoo is not technically a search ENGINE it is a human compiled directory of websites and does not have a spider bot going to sites and indexing them. But for the sake of this article when I say search engines I am referring to all ’search sites’.

Did you know that recent estimates show that Yahoo is currently capturing an amazing 40% of all search engine traffic online? Do you know what this means? That means that almost 1 out of every 2 people that do searches on the Internet use Yahoo, everyone on the Internet has done searches some time or another.

Nothing in the world should be clearer to anyone with a website whose just after reading the above figures – you need your site listed in Yahoo. A.S.A.P.

Yahoo Submitting Tips – RECAP
If your site is not listed in the YAHOO INDEX, (note – being listed under webpages does not mean you are listed in Yahoo, it in fact means you are listed with Google because Yahoo gets webpage results from google) you are losing lots of potential customers to competitors that are listed in Yahoo. And with the amount of visitors Yahoo can send you even with an average listing this could amount to hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars worth of lost profit.

Now you know how important it is, lets get on to the good stuff, the main body of this Yahoo submitting tips article – how to submit to Yahoo.

Well first you have to determine the scope of your site. Is your site commercial or non-commercial? Commercial sites that want to be listed by Yahoo now must use “Business Express” when submitting. This used to cost $199, however the price has risen to $299 a year.

“Business Express” what is it? Good question and one that many people ask, well it’s basically the same as free submit except that with business express your site is guaranteed to be reviewed within a week’s time. However please be aware that it does not guarantee that your site will be accepted and added to the Yahoo index. If your site is rejected Yahoo will allow you to appeal for free within a certain time scale (usually 30 days) of being informed of your rejection. Also Yahoo staff usually includes in your rejection the reason you have been rejected; you should examine these reasons fix any problems and resubmit after a week or so.

If your site is a non-commercial site, you will still be able to submit for free, but a review could take as long as 8 weeks or might never happen at all.

Before you submit make sure your site is 100% ready, under construction pages need not apply to Yahoo because they are not going to get in. Your site should be aesthetically pleasing to the reviewer, be quick loading and of course should have lots of content.

OK lets get started. How does Yahoo return results? Well search results on Yahoo are determined by words that appear within these four areas:
1) Category,
2) title,
3) description, and
4) URL.
These sites are then sorted by relevance using an automated algorithm.

I will now go through these four different factors and how to optimize you submittal for each one
First up category selection, many people don’t realize this but when someone searches for a term(s) on Yahoo its algorithm searches through the category name also, for example visit www.yahoo.com and you will see the results for a search done on ‘Internet marketing articles’. You will see under each listing that these words are highlighted if they are in the name of the category, the top listing has the most occurrences of these words between its title, description, URL and words in the category its in.

You should remember this when submitting to your category, when trying to establish what category you are going to submit to you should do a search for one or two of your keywords and see what categories come up. But which of these categories do you submit to?

Since most referrals to sites from Yahoo come from the search results and not from people visiting certain categories, it is wise and best (in most occasions) to submit to a very specific category with lots of keywords in the category name. To see this strategy in practice revisit the results page for ‘Internet marketing articles’ on Yahoo.com notice that the top ranked site is in a category with lots of keywords, these are: Internet, Business, Advertising and Web, these combined with various keywords in the title, description and URL combine to give this site a pretty good chance at ranking well on a few good keywords and phrases. Therefore category names are just like having more titles and descriptions. Note – if you are a regional operation try to pick a category with the name of your state or province in it. This will help you get targeted visitors from Yahoo.

I said in most occasions a little higher up the page, well here’s why it’s not the best policy in all occasions. Imagine if your business name or official website name began with an A or any other alphabetically high character and someone goes into a general high – level category and there you are listed in the top few, you could receive lots of traffic from your category listing like this.

Basically what I’m saying here is that if the title you are submitting (i.e.. Your official business or website name) is alphabetically very high. Then you’d want to compromise between a lower level very specific keyword rich category and an upper level more general category in the hope that you’d receive more visitors because you would be listed high on the page due to your alphabetically high title.

Personally I’d try to get into the most general category possible on all occasions and rely on the keywords in my title, URL, and description to get a good ranking in search results.

As for the title Yahoo insists that you use your official business or website name when applying to them, if you submit some keyword rich title they wont even look twice at your application. You should take this into account when choosing a domain name/official website name.

I did – AKA Marketing – ‘A’ is useful in getting listed high in general categories as discussed earlier, because AKA is an abbreviation I can ‘get away’ with having AKA all caps which again helps with the category strategy. Also it includes a good keyword – Marketing and they can’t accuse me of applying to them with a keyword rich title, can they?

Yahoo favors short titles, this stems from the fact that the shorter the title is the less likely they will be to edit it. Which means less work for them. However if you follow the above guidelines and indeed Yahoo’s own onsite guidelines chances are you wont get edited down.

The description part I think is the tricky part. The Web site description posted with your URL is a big factor in how your site will rank once it’s listed in the directory.

You have to submit a description which has your main keywords in it, and make it sound very appealing to potential visitors at the same time, however you can’t have anything that resembles hype and bragging, for example – number 1 site on the net for… The best on the web for . . . . .

Again Yahoo will either edit it to something that doesn’t benefit you at all or just move on to the next application (most likely). If they do edit it you can bet your keywords won’t appear in the final listing, for these reasons it is important to get it right first time.

The description should be concise and based on facts, most importantly it should include your most important keywords whenever possible. Do not exaggerate what is located on your site. Remember a real person reviews your site and in the end; your site will not get listed, simple as that.

The length of the description should be about 10 – 15 words. Note however on the Yahoo submittal form, they say 25 is the maximum, never go near this number, they are sure to edit it, a mess with your keywords. Refer to Yahoo’s own words “Please be brief”.

Yahoo Submitting Tips – SIDENOTE

Sometimes people email me asking this question ”does my title and description that I submit to Yahoo have to be the same as the Meta description tag and title tag on my site”. Simple answer, NO!

We have already discussed most of the issues regarding domain name choice and Yahoo above, however there are others, most notable the whole 63 character thing, this allows for very long keyword rich domain names, if you decide to pursue this strategy, don’t go mad and use up nearly all 63 characters because Yahoo reviewers wont like it, however do use long domain names to your advantage. Get ones with your main key phrase in it, and have these words separated by hyphens (-) because Yahoo’s algorithm like hyphens it may give you a rankings boost. Also remember to try for alphabetically high domains, which are plausible and make sense. If you can that is.

Some experts question the merit of keyword rich domains as a way of gaining an advantage over other sites in Yahoo, however I have seen this strategy in action and it does give advantage, most of the time it’s only a slight advantage but we’re talking about Yahoo here, a small advantage can mean a lot more visitors. To see why I believe in keyword rich domains, go to Yahoo.com and enter in ”linking strategies”. WHAT SITE COMES UP! . That was a very good example wasn’t it

Other tips for Yahoo is to have an about us page on your main page – Yahoo likes to know who it’s dealing with. On this page describe what you do honestly and also post the physical address of your business/building your website is run from.

Yahoo Submitting Tips – IMPORTANT
Don’t under any circumstances Spam Yahoo, it they notice your submitting your site more than every 2 or 3 months they will just forget about you and more on.

Well that’s it – I hope you enjoyed reading this Yahoo submitting tips articles as much as I enjoyed reading it. Good luck in your quest for Yahoo success

Author:
David Callan of AkaMarketing.com

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]]> http://www.lilengine.com/grow/website-submission-yahoo-submitting-tips-150/feed/ 2 http://www.lilengine.com/grow/pay-per-click-search-engine-guide-148/ http://www.lilengine.com/grow/pay-per-click-search-engine-guide-148/#comments Sat, 16 Aug 2003 20:39:03 +0000 admin http://www.lilengine.com/?p=148 What Are Pay Per Click Search Engines?
Pay per click search engines (also called pay-for-performance, paid listings among other names) are engines which allow site owners to determine their sites ranking in that particular search engines results by bidding on keywords. Usually the first 3-5 search results are used by a network of partner search sites. The result for the site owner or webmaster is a lot more highly targeted traffic and a lot more sales.

So the underlying idea to pay per click search engines is that you find keywords related to your website and then you bid (how much you are willing to pay for each visitor that visits your site through the search results) and buy high positions on your chosen engine. The more times a word or phrase has been searched for the higher you will have to bid to get high rankings. The only limitation is that your site must be at least vaguely relevant to the keyword you want to bid on. These engines allow you to skip all the search engine optimization stuff and simply pay for visitors.

Pay Per Click Benefits
Only pay for visitors, unlike banner advertising where you have to pay each time someone sees your ad, on pay-per-click engines you only have to pay when someone clicks on your listing. So you are getting guaranteed visits.

Pay-per-click engines provide highly targeted cheap visitors. Often you can buy a good ranking on a decent keyword for as little as 1 cent or 2 cents per click. Overture has of late installed $.05 as the minimum bid however. Popular search terms can cost much more on the big pay per click search engines most notable overture.com and findwhat.com. Even still PPC engines are one of the most cost effective way of driving targeted people to your site.
Hopefully you will agree now that using pay-per-click engines is a great way to increase traffic and profit. OK lets talk about how to use overture.com, findwhat.com and other PPC’s to make to most of your money.

Relevant terms are the ones that will bring you the highest quality traffic. Basically this means only bid on terms that are directly related to your site. For example if AKAMARKETING.COM decides to use overture or any of the other PPC search engines in the future, it would be bidding for terms such as “Internet marketing articles” and “website promotion articles” because they are the main focus of the site. Imagine if you bid for terms that were not really directly related to your website, the people that come from these terms are not likely to buy or sign up, but you still have to pay for them, it’s like giving the PPC’s free money so ALWAYS STAY RELEVANT.

Bid On Many Low-Cost Relevant Terms
The cost of a top position with overture or any of the other big PPC’s depends upon the keyword you are bidding on and how many people search for it. If you have to bid on a popular word such as ‘Internet marketing’ be prepared to pay around $2 – $4 for a decent position. But what if you went for “Internet marketing articles” it costs less than a quarter of the price, it will produce far less visits of course, but is much more cost effective. Imagine doing this on a wide scale basis, securing lots of low-cost positions, the combined traffic from these positions will add up to the level produced by a popular keyword – but at a fraction of the cost.

It used to be a good idea to bid on all relevant terms (if you could), however some of the big PPC’s now require a $.05 minimum bid. This means some terms will not be worth it, terms that are worth it will contain several words and are highly targeted, meaning that the searcher who clicks through is really interested in your page and more likely to buy/sign up.

Most pay-per-click search engines allow you to link directly to the relevant page of your site. This means that you are giving the searcher exactly what he or she is looking for. This way you are more likely to make a sale as the visitor is in the right mind-frame to buy and will not get lost or give up before finding the page that he or she is looking for.

If you have read the articles on search engine optimization you will have learnt that it is more likely visitors will click through if their search term is in the title and description of your listing this is because it appears to be exactly what they were searching for. So always try to include the exact search term in your title or description. Furthermore make your title and description as descriptive as possible. This has a few benefits.

Searchers are much more likely to click on a link if they know where it’s going.
It saves you money because the people that click through are really interested in your page because your title and description is very ‘descriptive’. If your title was not descriptive they would click through and investigate, if you didn’t have what they wanted they would leave and you have just lost money.

Remember with pay per click search engines you are only paying for actual visitors and not views of your listing, so being listed in the top 1-3 positions, is not always the best strategy because the quality of people who click on top listings might not be of the highest standard. This is because a lot of searchers seem to click on a high listing without actually reading it, again if you didn’t have what they wanted they would leave and you have just lost money. Whereas if someone clicked through on a site ranked 19th after scanning through all the descriptions briefly they would be a much higher quality visitor because they have hunted down exactly what they wanted and are genuinely interested in that site. These people are the visitors you want as they are much more likely to buy your product or sign up to your newsletter.

Bidding on a top 3 position is a good strategy however on less popular words and phrases as this means they will show up on partner sites. (Overture.com partners with Yahoo and MSN among others) These words are far cheaper than more searched for general words and have a better visitor to sale ratio. A PPC search engines partner sites will help get the search count up on these words.

Get Specific
Get specific – generally the more words a keyphrase you bid on has the more likely a visitor will become a customer. Once again you only pay for clicks not views so you don’t lose money if no one clicks and if they do the chances are good that they’ll buy from you. It’s very hard to lose money on really specific keyphrases.

Well that’s it. I hope you can use this information to make you a bit of money, by the way OVERTURE.COM and FINDWHAT.COM are the pay-per-click engines I recommend the most.

Author:
David Callan of AkaMarketing.com

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]]> http://www.lilengine.com/grow/pay-per-click-search-engine-guide-148/feed/ 1 http://www.lilengine.com/grow/are-you-sabotaging-your-sites-visibility-147/ http://www.lilengine.com/grow/are-you-sabotaging-your-sites-visibility-147/#comments Fri, 15 Aug 2003 20:39:03 +0000 admin http://www.lilengine.com/?p=147 A recent study of New Zealand’s Top 100 Companies by us here at Web Rank Ltd has revealed that every single one of New Zealand’s leading companies have web sites that sabotage their ability to be found by Internet users.

How did this happen? The study reveals that each site belonging to the Top 100 contains design elements that in some way negatively impact their compatibility with and visibility in search engines. As a result, many of New Zealand’s leading companies are not found listed in the search results of the most popular U.S. and New Zealand search engines, impacting their potential online revenue.

Most Internet users rely on search engines to find product and service providers. Unless they know the exact website address or search by the company or brand name, they will try to find what they are looking for by using keywords that describe a product or service’s features, benefits or attributes. By ignoring the most important method used by people browsing the Internet, these companies are sacrificing an enormous opportunity to attract more traffic to their sites.

Websites are often a very large expense for these companies, ranging from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars. To invest such a massive amount of time, money and effort into an online presence and not ensuring it can be found is like constructing a storefront without any doors. After all, what is the point of paying so much money for a web site that will never be found?

Does your web site contain any of the same self- defeating elements? Let’s take a look:

~ 25 percent of the Top 100 New Zealand Companies could not be found for their chosen search terms in either U.S. or New Zealand search engines. Are you targeting the most appropriate search terms for your site?

~ 62 percent of the Top 100 New Zealand Companies fail to utilise their site TITLE tags effectively. Are you including keywords in your web page TITLE tags instead of just your company name?

~ 13 percent of New Zealand’s Top 100 Companies are using techniques that could get them penalised on search engines for “spamming”. Are you avoiding techniques considered as “spam” by the search engines?

~ The majority (59 percent) of New Zealand’s Top 100 Companies use little or no body text on their home page. Are you using plenty of text on your pages for search engines to index?

~ 42 percent of the web sites belonging to New Zealand’s Top 100 Companies are inaccessible to the visually impaired. Are you using ALT IMG attributes for your graphics and image files?

~ 5 percent of the Top 100 New Zealand Companies are not listed in any of the most popular U.S. or New Zealand search engines examined. Have you submitted your site to the major international and local search engines and directories?

~ 63 percent of New Zealand’s Top 100 Companies do not include a META Description Tag on their home page and 70 percent of the Top 100 New Zealand Companies do not include a META Keywords Tag on their home page. Have you included relevant META Tags in your site’s HTML code?

~ 78 percent of the Top 100 New Zealand Companies do not use target search terms within their home page text. Do you?

Addressing all these elements will ensure your web site has the best chance possible of being visible in search engines and easily found by your target audience.

Author Bio:
Article by Kalena Jordan, CEO of Web Rank. Kalena was one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australasia and is well known and respected in her field. For more of her articles on search engine ranking and online marketing, please visit High Search Engine Ranking.

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