Click here for Search Engine Optimization Secrets |
SEO Secrets |
Click here for Search Engine Optimization Secrets |
SEO Secrets |
Search Engine Optimization – SEO: Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings. The term also refers to an industry of SEO consultants that carry out optimization projects on behalf of client sites.
SEO began in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Many site owners quickly learned to appreciate the value of a new listing in a search engine, as they observed sharp spikes in traffic to their sites.
Site owners soon began submitting their site URLs to the search engines on a regular basis, and began modifying their site to accommodate the needs of search engine spiders, the software programs sent out to explore the Web. Special features such as Meta tags became a common feature of sites that sought out high-ranking listings in search engine result pages (the so-called "SERPs").
In India also Consultant firms arose to serve the needs of these site owners, and attempted to develop an understanding of the search engines' internal logic or algorithms. The goal was to develop a set of practices for search engine friendly copywriting, site coding and search engine submission that would ensure maximum exposure for a website.
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As the industry developed, search engines quickly became wary of unscrupulous SEO firms that attempted to generate traffic for their customers at any cost (the most common problem being search results' decreasing relevance). One frequent practice, called keyword spamming, involved the insertion of random text at the bottom of a webpage, colored to match the background of the page. The inserted text usually included words that were frequently searched (such as sex), with the goal of getting rankings, and thus access to large streams of traffic. The search engines responded with a continuous series of countermeasures, designed to filter out the "noise" generated by these artificial techniques. In turn, several SEO firms developed ever-more-subtle techniques to influence rankings.
In the early 2000s, search engines and SEO firms attempted to establish an unofficial truce. There are several tiers of SEO firms, and the most reputable companies employ content-based optimizations which meet with the search engines' (reluctant) approval. These techniques include improvements to site navigation and copywriting, designed to make websites more intelligible to search engine algorithms.
Search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid inclusion, search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community.
Paid inclusion is a fee-based model for submitting website listings to search engines. Historically, search engines have allowed webmasters, as well as SEOs and the general public, to freely submit sites for search engine marketing consideration. However, a pattern of abuse began to develop among less-reputable SEO firms, who flooded the engines with non-stop submissions of pages. Analysis of these submissions strained the search engines' capacity, necessitating the creation of artificial limits, including fees.
The fee structure is used by search engines as a filter against superfluous submissions, and also as a revenue generator. Typically, the fee covers an annual subscription for one webpage, which will automatically be cataloged on a regular basis. Search engines still offer free submit forms, but make no promises as to the timeliness of the cataloging process through this channel.
Google has a particularly ethical way of handling paid placement. Their main results are uninfluenced by payments, but paid "AdWords" drive small, visually distinct text-only ads, so the user is able to tell which matches were the results of a payment. Google also uses various methods to prevent paid placement of truly irrelevant content.
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To obtain maximum search engine visibility, it is essential to understand how the target audience is searching for actual information on a web site. When the target audience uses a search engine to find products and services, they type a set of words or phrases into the search box. This set of words is commonly called targeted keywords or phrases.
For the target audience to find a site on the search engines, the page must contain keyword phrases that match the phrases the target audience is typing into search queries.
When a search engine spider analyzes a web page, it determines keyword relevancy based on an algorithm, which is a formula that calculates how web pages are ranked. The most important text for a search engine is the most important text for the target audience - the text your target audience is going to read when they arrive at your web site.
At its worst, SEO becomes spam indexing, the promotion of irrelevant, chiefly commercial, pages through taking advantage of the search algorithms. Indeed, many search engine administrators say that any form of search engine optimization used to improve a website's page rank is spam indexing. However, over time a widespread consensus has developed in the industry as to what are and are not acceptable means of boosting one's search engine placement and resultant traffic by web designing services.
Arguably, the most ethical method is to have worthwhile content on one's Web site, to which many other Web sites will voluntarily link. There are also few who would question the ethics of informing other relevant sites around the web of one's own content and asking for links, although as relevance diminishes this becomes a more dubious practice.
Equally, virtually no one would question the ethics of choosing the vocabulary of your site (and especially of your page titles) to emphasize words that you know are often searched for by people in your market. Again, the ethics of this becomes shadier if the words in question are not relevant.
It is certainly ethical (in fact it is highly recommended) to add a "site map" page to your site, linked either from the home page or from every page on your site. Such a page guarantees that once a spider has found your site, it will be able to traverse and index the entire site.
Link spam — Occasionally a problem for some search engines such as Google, which can be fooled into assigning higher relevance to a site based on thousands of inbound links that weren't properly "earned" by the site. Google's sensitivity to linking makes it susceptible to webmasters who solicit or place links randomly on other sites, placing a desired keyword into the hyperlinked text of the inbound link. Commonly called "Googlebombing", it can be a prank (type "miserable failure" into Google to demonstrate), or a deliberate attempt to influence ranking for commercial gain.
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Mirror sites - An alternate Web site or datacenter that contains the same information as the original. Mirror sites are set up for backup and disaster recovery as well as to balance the traffic load for numerous download requests on the Web. Such "download mirrors" are often placed in different locations throughout the Internet.
Doorway pages - These web pages that are created to rank high in search engine results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page. They are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names.
Cloaking - Any of several means to serve up a different page to the search-engine spider than will be seen by human users — is one of the most controversial methods of website designing with search engine optimization. To wit, cloaking can be an illegitimate attempt to mislead search engines regarding the content on a particular Web site. On the other hand, it can be used to provide human users with more or less equivalent content that a search engine would not be able to process or parse. Another ethical use of cloaking is providing accessibility to Web sites for blind people and people with other disabilities. A good benchmark on whether a given act of cloaking is ethical is precisely whether it enhances accessibility.
Googleating - Googleating pronounced Google-ating describes the increasing practice of constructing a website primarily for the purpose of appearing high in the search engine Google. With the importance of a high Google ranking becoming more apparent, the majority of experienced SEOs (search engine optimizers) know the many tactics used to manipulate the Google algorithm.
Keyword stuffing - Keyword stuffing is considered to be a unethical Search engine optimization (SEO) technique. Keyword stuffing is when you load a Web page up with keywords in the Meta tags or on the Web page's content. The common techniques today for keyword stuffing are repeating the same word over and over again in the Meta tags, which is why many search engines don't look at the Meta tags anymore and also on the page with text that's the same color as the background, also known as invisible or hidden text.
These are all widely acknowledged as being spam, or "black hat".
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The mission of topranker.in is to demonstrate techniques to increase traffic to your web site. You will find that offsite Optimization is now more important as onsite optimization. We will not make judgments as to what is ethical or proper. It's up to you to pick and choose your tactics. Review the information on this site, find what your are comfortable with, and go for it. The competition is tough and you need to be tougher and smarter than your competitors.
Increased usability
A higher search ranking is what many website owners dream of. What they don't realize is that by optimizing their site for the search engines, if done correctly, they can also optimize it for their site visitors.
Ultimately this means more people finding your website and increased sales and lead generation. But are search engine optimization and usability compatible? Aren’t there trades-offs that need to be made between giving search engines what they want and giving people what they want? We are using the following detailed technical research frequently?
1. Keyword Research
Before you even begin building your website, you should carry out keyword research to identify which keyword phrases your site should target. Doing keyword research is also crucial for your site's usability. By using the same keywords in your website that web users are searching for in search engines, you'll literally be speaking the same language as your site visitors.
2. Content Management
Quite simply, search engines love content - the more content there is on a web page the easier it is for search engines to work out what the page is actually about. Search engines may struggle to work out the point of a web page with proper content management with less than 200 words, ultimately penalizing that page in the search rankings.
3. HTML Size Management
If 200 words is the minimum page content size, then 100kb is the maximum, at least in terms of HTML file size. Anything more than this and search engines may give up on the page as it's simply too big for them. Add on the time it takes for all the other parts of the page to download, such as images and JavaScript files, and you're looking at a highly un-user-friendly download time!
4. CSS Layout
There is heavy increase in site visitors after switching from a table-based layout to a CSS layout. Search engines prefer CSS-based sites and are likely to score them higher in the search rankings because:
The code is cleaner and therefore more accessible to search engines
Important content can be placed at the top of the HTML document
There is a greater density of content compared to coding
Using CSS for layout is also highly advantageous for usability, as it leads to significantly faster download times.
5. Relevant Title
Search engines place more importance on the page title than any other attribute on the page. If the title adequately describes the content of that page then search engines will be able to more accurately guess what that page is about.
A meaningful page title also helps site visitor’s work out where they are, both within the site and the web as a whole. The page title is the first thing that loads up, often quite a few seconds before the content, so a descriptive, keyword-rich page title can be a real aid to help users orientate themselves.
6. Headings and Sub-Headings used
Search engines assume that the text contained in heading tags is more important than the rest of the document text, as headings (in theory at least) summarize the content immediately below them. Search engines assign the most importance to <h1>, then <h2>, and so on.
Headings are also incredibly useful for your human site visitors, as they greatly aid scanning. Generally speaking, we don't read on the web, we scan, looking for the information that we're after. By breaking up page sections with sub-headings that effectively describe the content beneath them, scanning becomes significantly easier.
Do be sure not to abuse heading tags though. The more text you have contained in heading tags within the page, the less importance search engines assign to them.
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7. Opening Paragraph Describes Page Content
We've already established that search engines love content, but they especially love the first 25 words or so on each page. By providing an opening paragraph that adequately describes the content of the rest of the page (or the site if it's the homepage), you should be able to include your important keyword phrases in this crucial area.
As web users, whenever we arrive at a web page the first thing we need to know is whether this page has the information that we're after. A great way to find this out is to scan through the first paragraph, which, if it sufficiently describes the web page content, should help us out.
8. Descriptive Link Text
Search engines place a lot of importance on link text. They assume that link text will be descriptive of its destination and as such examine link text for all links pointing to any page. If all the links pointing to a page about widgets say ‘click here’, search engines can't gain any information about that page without visiting it. If on the other hand, all the links say, ‘widgets’ then search engines can easily guess what that page is about.
One of the best examples of this in action is for the search term, ‘miserable failure’. So many people have linked to George Bush's bio using this phrase as the link text, that now when miserable failure is searched for in Google, George Bush's bio appears top of the search rankings!
This is some text, lots and lots of lovely text. Now, here's a sentence with a link in it. To read more about our widgets please click here. Following this, there is more text, lots and lots of lovely text. And one more sentence, containing yet more text to illustrate this point.
This is some text, lots and lots of lovely text. Now, here's a sentence with a link in it. Please read about our widgets whilst visiting our website. Following this, there is more text, lots and lots of lovely text. And one more sentence, containing yet more text to illustrate this point.
The first paragraph isn't so good as when you scan through it, you can't take any meaning from the word ‘click here’. The second paragraph, with its link text that effectively describes its destination, is far easier to scan and you can understand the destination of the link without having to read its surrounding words.
9. Frames Avoided
Frames are quite an old-school technique, and although aren't as commonplace as they once were, do still rear up their ugly head from time to time. Using frames is one of the worst possible things you could do for your search engine ranking, as most search engines can't follow links between frames.
Even if a search engine does index your pages and web users find you through a search engine, they'll be taken to one of the pages within the frame. This page will probably be a content page with no navigation (navigation is normally contained in a separate frame) and therefore no way to navigate to any other page on the site!
Frames are also disadvantageous for usability as they can cause problems with the back button, printing, history and book marking. Put simply, say no to frames!
10. Quality Content Provided
This may seem like a strange characteristic of a search engine optimized website, but it's actually crucial. Search engines, in addition to looking at page content, look at the number of links pointing in to web pages. The more inbound links a website has, all other things being equal, the higher in the search rankings it will appear.
By providing creative, unique and regularly updated content on your website, webmasters will want to link to you as doing so will add value to their site visitors. You will also be adding value to your site visitors.
Conclusion
Optimizing your website for both search engines and people needn't be a trade-off. With this much overlap between the two areas, you should easily be able to have a website that web users can find in the search engines, and when they do find it, they can find what they're looking for quickly and efficiently.
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