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Showing posts with label search engine optimization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label search engine optimization. Show all posts

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.




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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.

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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.

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Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Welcome to Krishaweb’s introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), optimizing design, and how to maximize your websites search engine positioning for the major search engines.

When it comes to running an effective website that ranks well on the search engine results pages (SERPs), there are three major factors that can influence the number of search engine referrals (incoming searches) you get. This applies to all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Live).

Content Is King

The most important thing is the content on your page regardless of how much time you put into Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) for your website without the content people are searching for you will find very little return on your efforts.

Involved with the preparation of your content is analyzing the keyword(s) for your given industry. Just putting Keywords in the keywords meta tag will get you no where without those Keywords existing in your content. This is known as Keyword Density, basically the more often you’re keywords the more relevant your content is for the searcher in the eyes of a search engine. Keep in mind an ideal density is around 3.5% per word in you phrase.

When writing your Search Engine Optimized content don’t forget about the end user. If you can’t get your keyword densities bang on, then don’t worry about it. I prefer to have a lower density but higher quality content for the end user, than having spammy content and a lower conversion rate. The end goal is still to convert your visitors to your products, services, or whatever your goal may be. Users, unlike search engines, are not interested in Keyword Density so beware of keyword spam.

And a final note on Content for this introduction is that it is advisable to constantly update your content. The longer your content goes without updates, the staler the content gets, and the lower your search engine positioning will drop. However with enough Link Building this can be negated.

Link Building Your Way Too Success

Link building is easily the second most important factor in SEO, and in some cases the most. Building links into your website is the only way as a webmaster that you can affect the authority of your website, and the value your existing content may have in the eyes of the search engines.

To conceptualize link building think of your website as if it was a person. The more popular a person is the more authoritative what they have to say is to their target audience. The big difference being that our target audience is Google, and the other major search engines, and having quality links on other sites equates to your websites “popularity”.

Now keep in mind when you start your link building that nearly no two links are exactly the same. When Google calculates the value of a link it looks at several important things to figure out just how much strength to give you. Here are just a few:

  1. How much strength did the page with the link have
  2. Number of external links on a page
  3. Anchor text used for the link
  4. Is a rel=nofollow tag used
  5. How long has that link been there

Now keep in mind all of these factors above are irrelevant if Google hasn’t cached the page with the link, if Google hasn’t found it then it is worth nothing. The stronger the strength of the page your link is on the more strength you will get in return. The more outgoing links there are on a page the more that strength will be divided between all the linked sites.

A link with a rel=”nofollow” attribute is virtually useless to your website other then increasing your overall link count to give your competitors a scare. You will mainly find NoFollow attributes for Blog Comments, Website Advertisers / Sponsors, Paid Links, or links to competitors (I use them on my resume for past work experience).

When a link is built very few search engines will give you the full strength of that link right away. This is done to maintain the quality of the SERPs if everyone could just go out build 1000s of links then rank there would be no quality to the search engines. Instead they slowly give you more strength as these links age up until around the 6 month period.

Lastly you will constantly see something called Google Pagerank. Pagerank is an arbitrary Google measurement assigned to a website / page to denote that pages strength. Now some people consider this measurement to be the end all be all, but in truth it means very little other than an indicator of you sites health. If you have a PageRank on your homepage as well as pagerank on most of your internal pages your off to a good start. Also keep in mind that pagerank only updates every 3 – 6 months, and ultimately the proof is in the search engine results not some number in the toolbar.

* It’s important to note that when I’m referring to PageRank above I’m referring to the visual PageRank displayed in the little green bar, not the actual PageRank that Google uses internally to calculate the value of a page.

Optimize Your Website Navigation Structure & Design

I purposely left site structure to last as it can be the quickest way for you to royally mess up your website rankings. The worst case with bad structure is that no part of your website will be cached and you will see no visitors. I’ve seen a lot of sites with a lot of issues causing no search engines to crawl these sites. Some of the worst yet simple structural issues that can affect your search engine crawler visibility that I’ve seen are:

  1. Automatically redirecting all visitors that come to your site to another page.
  2. Using HTTPS only
  3. Pure Javascript based navigation

On other sites I have seen Google only cached the index page, which may have an assigned Pagerank without spidering the rest of the website. The things to remember when mapping out the structure of your website are:

  1. At all costs avoid having dynamic URLs (ie index.php?PageId=1), a dynamic URL is a URL that contains HTTP GET variables. Search engines don’t tend to spider these sites well. And to users they don’t have any relevant information to their Queries. Try to use Page keys that contain your keywords, if you need to use Dynamic scripts to build your website (i.e. through a Content Management System), use Apache Mod Rewrites to build a static in appearance website (Notice how all URLs on my personal web design & development site appear to be directories). If you have to use Dynamic URLs keep your number of variables at no more than 2.
  2. If possible try to use the Keywords you are targeting for your industry in your URL or Files / Directories. This helps increase your Keyword Density, as well as providing users clicking through on Google information relevant to their query in your file names.
  3. Don’t constantly change your website structure. Pagerank takes time naturally to develop, and Google holds new sites back in a Sandbox. By renaming a page you can often kiss your pre-existing search engine positioning away on renamed pages until their rank is redeveloped.
  4. When designing a new site try to avoid having filenames with extensions in the URL (ie Products.asp), this can limit your options in the future if you change programming languages (ie ASP to PHP), as well as the platform your website can be hosted on (ie Windows vs Linux Hosting).
  5. When implementing a new structure or new site, create a Google sitemap, and register it with Google to let Google know what to index.
  6. Whenever possible attached CSS and Javascript as external files.

Once you have decided on a website structure, or you have a pre-existing structure, the best way to score higher search engine positions is to have minimalist coding in the HTML to maximize your Content to Markup Ratio. The best way to minimize the amount of HTML code required is to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Cascading Style Sheets allow you to pull the design out of your HTML pages and place them into a separate file. Not only does this remove a lot of HTML if you were using Tables for layout, it makes maintenance a lot simpler as all your design changes are made in one place.

When I moved my website from table based layout to Cascading Style Sheets I managed to reduce my markup code by around 60%! If you have a very large site this can be even more beneficial as some search engines limit the amount of hard drive space they will allocate to caching your website, as well as raise the position of your content higher up in your document.

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