Steve Mitchell asked:


Continuing on from Part 1, here’s Part 2 of ‘3 Ways To Improve Search Engine Rankings’. I follow a straightforward 3-Stage Approach to getting ranked high in the search engines. Here, in Part 2, is my second Stage…

Stage 2. Get Your Website Seen:

If you goal is to get high up the search engine rankings (and it should be!) then you need to get the search services to ’see you’. This sounds an obvious statement but few people really think it through that much. In a nutshell, and avoiding all the techie jargon, search engines really want to find you, or more specifically your website. When someone types in a ’search query’ they are looking for some information. If your website is relevant to what the person searching is looking for (we’ll talk about this later), then the search engines really want to link your website to the searcher, which they do with the search results the search engine reveals.

The key then, knowing the search engines really want to find your website, is to set up your website in such a way as to make it be easily found by the search engines. The way you do this is to adopt some basic, but very important ‘optimisation’ tricks on your website – what is termed ‘on-page optimisation’.

The interesting thing is, even though it’s really important to do what I’m about to share with you, the on-page optimisation’ methods only really are about 15% of what contributes towards your search results ranking. The 85% of where you figure in search results is dependant on the ‘off-page optimisation’ which I’ll cover in stage 3. Even though ‘on page optimisation’ only makes up for 15% towards how you get ranked, it is still crucial to carry out these basic but key steps:

a) Ensure your keyword(s) appear in your pages ‘Title tag’ of the header code of your website (if you’re not sure what this is, ask someone to show you who does know – it’s that important). This is vital because it is one of the key things that search engines are looking for – matching the words the searcher types into their search (the keywords) with the title of a website, which in turn should be relevant to the search query. You can take this a stage further by adding in a description in the ‘meta description tag’ again incorporating your keywords, and then the ‘meta keywords tag’ which simply includes all your keywords, comma separated.

The search engines don’t put so much relevancy these days on the description or keyword tags, but they’re worth doing either way, but it’s vital you include your keywords in the Title tag.

b) Make the webpage you are pointing the keyword towards relevant to that keyword. In other words don’t have a keyword like ‘dog training tips’ and then have a webpage all about horses, cats, dogs and loads of other animals with little specific relevancy to dogs or dog training – make sure the webpage is relevant to your keyword.

c) Build into your website a simple Sitemap. Understand that the way search engines search the web is they look for (crawl) words and phrases in all the code of your website – they don’t understand pretty pictures, graphics, flash animations, etc – all they want to find is words and phrases relevant to want the searcher is looking for. So make it easy for the search engines to look over your website looking for those vital words and phrases. One way to do this and make it easier for the search engines to find the info they want is by incorporating a simply site map within your website. Again, if this doesn’t make sense to you, ask your webmaster about it.

Improve Search Engine Ranking asked:


Improve Search Engine Ranking – Do You Think You Can Do It All By Yourself? Improve Search Engine Ranking to Increase Website Visits

In order to improve search engine rankings of your website you will need to pay close attention to both in-page and off-page points. In this brief post, we will go over frequently disregarded points when seeking top search engine placement.

Commonly, an optimization procedure consists of these steps: the optimizer brainstorms keywords that he would want to utilize for the site and does some research to find your competition\’s keywords. Then, those keywords are fused to form brief expressions (one- to five-word phrases) and investigated to find how many searches have been done recently for for each one of those expressions.

So, let\’s concentrate on the first phases of this strategy and how you may begin an affordable seo to improve search engine ranking.

After finding a tendency for some words or a peculiar combination that has little rivalry you may append such a combination to your web page, be it in URLs , meta tags, headers, the titles or content. Once optimized, you are ready to submit the page to search engines and directories.

Obviously, only about ten sites will reach the first page of most engines. If you can improve search engine ranking to such an extent that a link to your site eventually appears in the beginning page of Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask for a special combination of words, you will consequently increase the number of visits. Virtually all users do discover through those search engines the info they were looking for.

Start by selecting a keyword around which you would like to improve search engine ranking for a page. Keywords are terms you´d expect people will explore when searching for info about the category of products, services or topics related to your business organization.

Now, check synonyms and associated words. Introduce those words into a search engine query box and observe who your competitors are; do not confuse your Internet contenders with the street competitors. Your Internet competitors are the web sites that the engine is ranking high and they are your central trigger to improve search engine ranking.

There are, probably, some usable keywords, and there will be many keywords you better waste not your time with. For instance, if the keyword you are testing yields more than 1000 web sites you don\’t waste time. It will be excessively hard to improve search engine ranking for such a term. Visit the sites of your competition and check if you can find other interesting synonyms.

Afterwards, combine your strongest options to form short expressions of around 2 to 4 words. Once again, research those combinations until you find some reasonable odds to improve search engine ranking. Combinations which returned around 200 to 700 sites will be comfortable to work with.

It is now that the off-page optimization stage commences. This stage phase is the most lengthy contribution of web marketing and also the most high-priority to improve search engine ranking; it involves hyperlink-making and authority building up. But we better leave this topic for another article about how to improve search engine ranking

www.Mr-Seo.com/ImproveSearchEngineRanking.html

M Munir Bhatti asked:


Well, this is not enough to have an attractive website to show company products/services on internet to get business nationally or internationally. If company products or services are not advertised then definitely there will be no awareness of its existence in the market. Same is the case with online websites. There are many ways to advertise a website for its awareness in the market. One of the most common ways, which is increasing rapidly, is the Search Engine Optimization as a part of Search Engine Marketing. When we need to get information of foreign universities, national or international job opportunities, worldwide news, latest technology products, customers from all over the world and many more; we turn towards Search Engines like Google.com or Yahoo.com etc. Search Engine is a tool for searching information on the internet by giving topic as keyword(s) which returns the relevant websites.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the amount and quality of traffic to a website by making its contents Search Engine friendly. In Search Engine Optimization a website is prepared and altered to make it as compatible as possible with Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN and it also focuses the contents to the keywords and key phrases desired by the customers. It is preferred to get optimization of a website during its construction because structure of the website is to be designed according to the rules and regulations of search engines but it can also be optimized after publishing a website on internet. Many website designing and development companies in Pakistan are offering Search Engine Optimization service during construction of website and even after designing and publishing of a website. These companies can be easily found through Search Engines by putting any keyword like “Search Engine Optimization in Pakistan” or “SEO experts in Pakistan”.

Many small and large entrepreneurs are focusing on online services like online shopping, fashion boutiques, hotels & accommodation, event management, real estate, travel agencies, outsourcing and different unique services. Entrepreneurs get developed their company website but forget to invest on its Search Engine Optimization. They either don’t know about it or they are unaware of its importance. From now on, job of SEO experts starts to follow rules and regulations of famous Search Engines to make available optimized website against keywords by the visitors in a search engine. Although there may be thousands of competitors of a particular website with its products or services but only those websites will be seen in Search Engines’ top results which will be properly optimized. Many Search Engines maintain database of new & old websites automatically and many store information manually but it depends on the algorithm of the Search Engine that how do they operate.

Search Engines work by following this specific order i.e. Web crawling, Indexing and Searching. Web crawling is the process in which a crawler (also known as Spider- a program that browses websites automatically) visits all available links of a website to store information of its webpages. Search Engines’ crawlers continuously crawl websites after specific time to get its up-to-date information to make it available on the keywords by the search engine users. Normally Google takes 20 days and Yahoo takes 30 days to revisit a website for its latest information. Indexing collects and stores data of websites for its fast and accurate information retrieval. Search Engines usually extract information of the website from its title, description, heading, special fields (meta-data) and file names. When a keyword or keyphrase is entered in a search engine to search information then the keyword is checked against the search engine’s index of all the web pages it has analyzed. The best URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) are then returned as hits and ranked in order with the best results at the top as process of Searching.

While optimizing a website, two important aspects of Search Engines should never be forgotten: Robots.txt and Sitemap. Robot.txt is being used to prevent access of web spiders to different parts of the website for its publicity. So spiders will leave those webpages which will be mentioned in the Robots.txt at the root directory of uploaded website on the internet. Sitemap is used to inform Search Engines about available webpages on a website for its crawling. Sitemap also facilitates to mention webpage’s importance and date of last modification so that Search Engines can crawl it easily to get latest information available on the website.

Many of SEO Experts play tricks with Search Engine to come into top ranking which is known as Black-hat or Spamdexing but famous Search Engines do not follow one algorithm to rank websites. People should avoid such tricks because if a website is found doing such activities then it is very difficult to get good ranking in famous Search Engines and more importantly a website can loose the trust of visitors if they are not able to find their required information on the website.

Search Engine Optimization plays a vital role to increase traffic of relevant visits to the company website that in turn, increases the visits of potential customers as well. This helps to attain major objective of the website i.e., online business. If you are planning to build a new website, you must optimize your website according to SEO rules and regulations during its construction. If your company already has a website then it must be optimized to get good ranking in Search Engines and more customers from all over the world.

[Article by M. Munir Bhatti]

Dave Davies asked:


For some unfortunate souls SEO is simply the learning of tricks and techniques that, according to their understanding, should propel their site into the top rankings on the major search engines. This understanding of the way SEO works can be effective for a time however it contains one basic flaw … the rules change. Search engines are in a constant state of evolution in order to keep up with the SEO’s in much the same way that Norton, McAfee, AVG or any of the other anti-virus software companies are constantly trying to keep up with the virus writers.

Basing your entire websites future on one simple set of rules (read: tricks) about how the search engines will rank your site contains an additional flaw, there are more factors being considered than any SEO is aware of and can confirm. That’s right, I will freely admit that there are factors at work that I may not be aware of and even those that I am aware of I cannot with 100% accuracy give you the exact weight they are given in the overall algorithm. Even if I could, the algorithm would change a few weeks later and what’s more, hold your hats for this one; there is more than one search engine.

So if we cannot base our optimization on a set of hard-and-fast rules what can we do? The key my friends, is not to understand the tricks but rather what they accomplish. Reflecting back on my high school math teach Mr. Barry Nicholl I recall a silly story that had a great impact. One weekend he had the entire class watch Dumbo The Flying Elephant (there was actually going to be a question about it on our test). Why? The lesson we were to get from it is that formulas (like tricks) are the feather in the story. They are unnecessary and yet we hold on to them in the false belief that it is the feather that works and not the logic. Indeed, the tricks and techniques are not what works but rather the logic they follow and that is their shortcoming.

And So What Is Necessary?

To rank a website highly and keep it ranking over time one must optimize it with one primary understanding, that a search engine is a living thing. Obviously this is not to say that search engines have brains, I will leave those tales to Orson Scott Card and other science fiction writers, however their very nature results in a lifelike being with far more storage capacity.

If we consider for a moment how a search engine functions; it goes out into the world, follows the road signs and paths to get where it’s going, and collects all of the information in its path. From this point, the information is sent back to a group of servers where algorithms are applied in order to determine the importance of specific documents. How are these algorithms generated? They are created by human beings who have a great deal of experience in understanding the fundamentals of the Internet and the documents it contains and who also have the capacity to learn from their mistakes, and update the algorithms accordingly. Essentially we have an entity that collects data, stores it, and then sorts through it to determine what’s important which it’s happy to share with others and what’s unimportant which it keeps tucked away.

So Let’s Break It Down …

To gain a true understanding of what a search engine is, it’s simple enough to compare it to the human anatomy as, though not breathing, it contains many of the same core functions required for life. And these are:

The Lungs & Other Vital Organs – The lungs of a search engine and indeed the vast majority of vital organs are contained within the datacenters in which they are housed. Be it in the form of power, Internet connectivity, etc. As with the human body, we do not generally consider these important in defining who we are, however we’re certainly grateful to have them and need them all to function properly.

The Arms & Legs – Think of the links from the engine itself as the arms and legs. These are the vehicles by which we get where we need to go and retrieve what needs to be accessed. While we don’t commonly think of these as functions when we’re considering SEO these are the purpose of the entire thing. Much as the human body is designed primarily to keep you mobile and able to access other things, so too is the entire search engine designed primarily to access the outside world.

The Eyes – The eyes of the search engine are the spiders (AKA robots or crawlers). These are the 1s and 0s that the search engines send out over the Internet to retrieve documents. In the case of all the major search engines the spiders crawl from one page to another following the links, as you would look down various paths along your way. Fortunately for the spiders they are traveling mainly over fiber optic connections and so their ability to travel at light speed enables them to visit all the paths they come across whereas we as mere humans have to be a bit more selective.

The Brain – The brain of a search engine, like the human brain, is the most complex of its functions and components. The brain must have instinct, must know, and must learn in order to function properly. A search engine (and by search engine we mean the natural listings of the major engines) must also include these critical three components in order to survive.



The Instinct – The instinct of a search engines is defined in it’s core functions, that is the crawling of sites and either the inability to read specific types of data, or the programmed response to ignore files meeting a specific criteria. Even the programmed responses become automated by the engines and thus fall under the category of instinct much the same as the westernized human instinct to jump from a large spider is learned. An infant would probably watch the spider or even eat it meaning this is not an automatic human reaction.

The instinct of a search engines is important to understand however once one understands what can and cannot be read and how the spiders will crawl a site this will become instinct for you too and can then safely be stored in the “autopilot” part of your brain.

The Knowing – Search engines know by crawling. What they know goes far beyond what is commonly perceived by most users, webmasters and SEOs. While the vast storehouse we call the Internet provides billions upon billions of pages of data for the search engines to know they also pick up more than that. Search engines know a number of different methods for storing data, presenting data, prioritizing data and of course, way of tricking the engines themselves.

While the search engine spiders are crawling the web they are grabbing the stores of data that exist and sending it back to the datacenters, where that information is processed through existing algorithms and sp@m filters where it will attain a ranking based on the engine’s current understanding of the way the Internet and the documents contained within it work.

Similar to the way we process an article from a newspaper based on our current understanding of the world, the search engines process and rank documents based on what they understand to be true in the way documents are organized on the Internet.

The Learning – Once it is understood that search engines rank documents based on a specific understanding of the way the Internet functions, it then follows that in order to insure that new document types and technologies are able to be read and that the algorithm be changed as new understandings of the functionality of the Internet are uncovered a search engine must have the ability to “learn”.

Aside from a search engine needing the ability to properly spider documents stored in newer technologies, search engines must also have the ability to detect and accurately penalize sp@m and as well as accurately rank websites based on new understandings of the way documents are organized and links arranged. Examples of areas where search engines must learn in an ongoing basis include but are most certainly not limited to:

Understanding the relevancy of the content between sites where a link is found Attaining the ability to view the content on documents contained within new technologies such as database types, Flash, etc. Understanding the various methods used to hide text, links, etc. in order to penalize sites engaging in these tactics Learning from current results and any shortcoming in them, what tweaks to current algorithms or what additional considerations must be taken into account to improve the relevancy of the results in the future.

The learning of a search engine generally comes from the uber-geeks hired by and the users of the search engines. Once a factor is taken into account and programmed into the algorithm it them moves into the “knowing” category until the next round of updates.



How This Helps in SEO

This is the point at which you may be asking yourself, “This is all well-and-good but exactly how does this help ME?” An understanding of how search engines function, how they learn, and how they live is one of the most important understandings you can have in optimizing a website. This understanding will insure that you don’t simply apply random tricks in hopes that you’ve listened to the right person in the forums that day but rather that you consider what is the search engine trying to do and does this tactic fit with the long term goals of the engine.

For a while keyword density sp@mming was all the rage among the less ethical SEOs as was building networks of websites to link together in order to boost link popularity. Neither of these tactics work today and why? They do not fit with the long-term goals of the search engine. Search engines, like humans, want to survive. If the results they provide are poor then the engine will die a slow but steady death and so they evolve.

When considering any tactic you must consider, does this fit with the long-term goals of the engine? Does this tactic in general serve to provide better results for the largest number of searches? If the answer is yes then the tactic is sound.

For example, the overall relevancy of your website (i.e. does the majority of your content focus on a single subject) has become more important over the past year or so. Does this help the searcher? The searcher will find more content on the subject they have searched on larger sites with larger amounts of related content and thus this shift does help the searcher overall. A tactic that includes the addition of more content to your site is thus a solid one as it helps build the overall relevancy of your website and gives the visitor more and updated information at their disposal once they get there.

Another example would be in link building. Reciprocal links are becoming less relevant and reciprocal-links between unrelated sites are virtually irrelevant. If you are engaging in reciprocal link building insure that the sites you link to are related to your site’s content. As a search engine I would want to know that a site in my results also provided links to other related sites thus increasing the chance that the searcher was going to find the information that they are looking for one way or another without having to switch to a different search engine.

In Short

In short, think ahead. Understand that search engines are organic beings that will continue to evolve. Help feed them when they visit your site and they will return often and reward your efforts. Use unethical tactics and you may hold a good position for a while but in the end, if you do not use tactics that provide for good overall results, you will not hold your position for long. They will learn.

search rankpros asked:


Long gone are the days when a company could simply build a website and expect it to perform well. This is especially true in the world of e-commerce and on-line sales, where competition can be fierce. In modern times every website launched will need to take advantage of the services offered by a search engine optimisation(SEO) firm to ensure its ultimate success. However what about those business owners who are not able to afford the services of an SEO professional at first? Surely there are some basic steps that can be taken to ensure that a website is optimized for search engines? Below we will present some basic search engine optimization tips for the layman.

Domain name and URL – Always make sure that your domain name is indicative of the services you offer. Quite simply an online camera store using the domain name wesellstuff.com would do far less well than one which employed the domain name camerasforsale.com if both were the same age and had the same amount of promotion and SEO performed on them. In a similar fashion it is important that the page URLs within the site structure are relevant. Using the camera shop as an example again http://www.camerasforsale.com/discount_slr_cameras.htm would be far better than http://www.camerasforsale.com/cams?123.

META data – All page titles, META descriptions and META tags should be 100% relevant to the pages. Page titles are especially important and fall a close second behind the domain name and URL structure in being the most effective SEO techniques to use. When it comes to the META keywords do not be tempted to stuff this string with too many keywords. Keep the list of key phrases short and always remember that the most weight is given to the key phrases at the left hand end of the string, with the weight diminishing moving to the right.

Content is king – Make sure that your website content is refreshed regularly. Regular and new content is the best way to keep the search engines coming back to index your site, as well as ensuring that the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN see your website as not being stagnant, hence more likely to be returned higher in the search engine ranking position. Fresh content is also a great way to gain new visitors and hopefully a good selection of organic backlinks over time.

Start link building – One of the main tasks performed by a search engine organization company is the building of backlinks. These links directly affect how popular the major search engines deem your site to be. This in turn affects the likelihood of your site being returned high in search engine results.

So there we have it, three very simple tips designed to give the SEO layman a few ideas upon how best to tackle top level SEO for any website. Although these tips only scratch the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the techniques employed by a professional search engine optimisation firm, they are among the most successful techniques employed.