Google

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

How Search Engines Work

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

Search engines are designed to quickly and efficiently search and retrieve stored information. Once the search engine has retrieved the information, they then rank the results in order of importance, using their own ranking criteria.

Most search engines consist of three major components. They are:

  • The Spider
  • The Index
  • The Ranking System

The Spider
Search engines send out electronic robots (bots for short) sometimes called spiders, to relentlessly search the Internet, gathering information. The spider is the lifeblood of the search engine.

When a search engine’s spider finds a new website, it crawls all over the site and records the information on that website’s pages and returns this information to the search engine. This process is referred to as spidering or crawling a website.

You can also ask the search engine to spider (list) your site by submitting your domain name to them. If you have a website and you have access to your logs (statistics of who visits your website) you can actually track the constant movement of spiders through your site. They will show up in your logs with names like googlebot (a Google spider) or Scooter (Altavista).

The Index
Everything the spider finds, goes into the second part of the search engine, the index or catalogue. This is simply a very large database, accessible through the internet. Everything the spider finds is stored in the search engine’s index.

The Ranking System or Algorithm
The final and trickiest part of the search engine, is the system they use to rank their listings. This is done by a complex series of formulae know as an "algorithm". This is the formula the search engine uses to rank webpages in order of relevance (as they judge it) to a specific search.

Each search engine has its own algorithm for indexing and ranking webpages, which explains why you can do the exact same search on two different search engines and get completely different results.

Exactly how the algorithm work, is always a closely guarded secret of the search engine concerned however, most of them tend to follow a similar pattern, however, some are more complex and refined than others.

There may be questions regarding how differently each search engine functions. However, one basic thing that you need to know is that there are differences in the manner various search engines function but at the end of the day they all perform three fundamental tasks:

1. Searching the Internet based on the search query entered by the user.

2. Maintaining an index of all the information that gathers from various pages.

3. Permit users to search for words available in that index.




Posted by at 17 comments:
Labels: ,

Friday, July 24, 2009

Getting Started with Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) defined as the skill to create inspiring and engaging content that is optimized for search engines

In this post, we’ll be exploring various ways to increase the ranking of your content through search engines and how to make it appeal to your readers at the same time. Like the saying goes, you should be creating content for your readers and not Google (the search engines).

Getting Started

If you’ve never thought about SEO before, now is your time to get started. The first step is to rethink abut each post you publish. More blogs are already ready for some of the topics that will be discussed as the themes that you use are using proper titles. Secondly, CSS coding is used rather than HTML to form the theme layout, so this is better for SEO.

Should you have hundreds of posts already published, it probably isn’t a good idea to go through each and perform the tasks, but from this point forward, it would be a good idea to do so.

Post Titles

A large portion of getting your site optimized for search engines is having titles that are able to draw in visitors and give you a higher ranking for the keywords found in the title or the post. Ideally, the title should tell something about the content within the post. For example, while a title might be attractive and make readers want to click on it, it probably won’t do as well within search engines because you aren’t targeting the right keywords.

If you are given access to configuring the slug URL (making it more “pretty,” not using numbers or other sequences), the ability to edit the permalink, or the meta tags/keywords for the post, you should add keywords related to the post or that may increase the flow of visitors to your site.

Meta Tags

Within the coding of your site, there will be an area to place meta tags, which are essentially the top keywords that should point to your site. For example, a blog that writes about blog tips could contain words such as blogging tips, blogging basics, writing, or any other words that relate to the content. It appears that this method is being used less and less, due to the fact that most blog platforms support the emphasis of categories and tags, however it never hurts to add these words into your header.

Heading Tags

Posts that are greater than approximately four hundred words should be divided into various sections for readability. Despite the fact that this adds time compared to using shortcuts for the bold, emphasis, and other tags, it can be extremely worthwhile in the long-term.

headingYou should use heading tags wisely. Don’t place too much emphasis on what shouldn’t be ranked highly in search engines. For example, a common mistake is placing unnecessary content such as the post date or any other content under the H1 tag. There are some criticisms of what title the H1 and H2 tags should use. Theoretically, much like a pyramid, your site’s title should be in a H1 tag on the main page (making it easier for searchers to find your main page) and other titles on the index page should be placed within H2 tags.

On single post pages, the post title should be placed in a H1 tag (unless you prefer to keep your post title in this tag) and any additional content, such as a listing of post titles, should be contained within H2 tags. Sub-titles should use H3 (or H2 tags depending on your preference) and any further sub-content should proceed with H4 and beyond.

Furthermore, consistency is key. Having one post rank highly and others rank on much lower because you haven’t committed to a single set of rules won’t do you any good if you are trying to “outrank” other blogs with the same content.

Bold Text

When you bold a word, it is meant to stand out against other content. To search engines, this signifies text that should be given more importance than text that isn’t. It should be reserved to words within your content, rather than headings and separated words.

Italic Text

Some believe that using italic text for keywords helps, although it might start becoming obvious to your readers should you overdo this – it becomes apparent to your readers quite quickly that you are trying to write for search engines.

Page Validation

Having your site’s coding conform to W3C Standards can help increase your chance of having higher-ranking pages, as your blog will be more accessible and without errors, which search engines view negatively. This is an advanced step and doesn’t need to be done by all blogs, although it certainly should be kept in mind.

Posted by at 11 comments:
Labels: , ,

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Biggest Mistakes with do it Yourself SEO

Search engine optimization has become very essential now-a-days for keeping popularity of your site. However, it is very important to have that done in a proper way. Here are some common mistakes people make while doing SEO:

Keyword research

Many people have no idea that it’s even necessary. You can’t optimize for the product name only when no one has ever heard of that product. If no one has heard of it, how will they search for it? They won’t. The research needs to be done to determine what keyphrases people would type to find what your product is offering or related to.

Bad web design

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

Hidden text

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

Repeating words too often

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

This is just a small portion of problems. Unless you are SEO savvy, it’s almost always better to hire a professional if you can afford to. Also, try to get your information and tips from reliable sources. It saves a lot of back tracking.

Posted by at 1 comment:

6 Easy Tips for Onpage Search Engine Optimization (SEO)


Primarily On-Page SEO is the most important than any other means of optimization. The processes are very simple but important while designing and content to pages. From my personal experience I have managed to come up 6 ways to optimize web pages easily.

1. Keywords positioning

I always try to use Google’s Keyword Tool, Google Trend, Overture Keyword Tool to search what other people are searching related to my content. Then write my content using those keywords. Some people just try to over populate keywords. I believe 6%-10% keywords in content in enough for search engines to find your website from thousands of website around the world.


2. Title Tags

Title tag is very important. Title should not be too long. For Google, 70 characters are enough for SERP. Keywords should be place in a natural way. Repetitions look is odd to see when web pages come on SERP. Descriptive titles have maximum clickthoughs.

3. Internal Linking

Internal linking is very important. The more links are spread, the more Page Rank is distributed between the pages. Spiders are very frequents to different pages and can dig very deep.

4. Meta Description Tags

Meta description is another important for on-page SEO. Google only consider 155 characters from Meta description. So it’s important to write a unique Meta description within 155 characters using keywords.

5. Use Images and ALT tags

Images make articles and pages attractive to visitors. More over images are also indexed different search engines. Using relevant keywords in the image alt tags help in SERP.

6. Sitemap submission

Sitemap help visitors to navigate between pages and also helps search engine bot to index very easily. I personally submit sitemap to Google Sitemap, Live Webmaster and Yahoo! Site Explorer regularly. To generate XML sitemap, I use XML Sitemaps or VIGOS Gsitemap. For Wordpress websites, I use Google XML Sitemaps plugin
Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Manual Search Engine Submission List

Importance of Search Engine Submission :

Search Engines are a primary source of traffic for any website. They use spiders to index your site, which in turn let’s people search for it, and there are millions of people doing searches at any time of the day. If people doing searches stumble across something they find interested linking to your site, then you just got a visitor and maybe potential client and revenue.

Manually go to each search engines website, and either type “submit link” or “submit url” and it should bring up part of the website where you can submit your link to have a spider crawl and begin indexing.

As you may or may not know, search engine companies such as Google, Yahoo or MSN advise manual website submissions to be indexed by them. Sure, automatic submissions to dozens of search engines for free is nice, but I’ve noticed in the long run you would be much better off doing it all manually, it’s definitely worth it.

As an example I will use Google for this. If you goto Google’s website, http://www.google.com/, and do a search for “submit url” or “submit link”, Google will return a submission page like this:

http://www.google.com/addurl/


This here is a list, with respective URL submission pages attached, of free search engines. Now take note that some of these are in different languages, and may not be searched, but every little bit of exposure helps.

Posted by at 1 comment:
Labels: , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)