SEO Techniques provide an insight to the world of SEO & SEM for newbies. Learn ethical SEO techniques that will help you to improve your search engine ranking. A complete guide on SEO tips and techniques for beginners and experts.
Google has recently updated the way it calculates PageRank. Because of this PR update many directories and content sites receiving deep penalties for brokering links, or having a large portion of their PR value derived from these types of programs.
I wanted to take a moment to share with you some interesting information I have found including what you can do if your site was negatively affected by this latest update.
In short, this latest update was designed to target the link selling industry. According to Google engineer Matt Cutts in an interview with WebProNews, "sites that sell links can lose their ability to pass PageRank."
The changes are not a huge surprise, but the ripple effect has had a major effect on an industry that some would argue Google helped create the linking economy. We know that purchasing links for the purpose of artificially inflating PageRank was against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. In this latest update you will find two major effects: The first was the update to the PageRank algorithm that affected the link sellers. Essentially demoting these sites and negating their ability to pass PageRank. The second wave happened several days later when Google updated PageRank for all the sites in their index. The new, lower PageRank values were used in this new calculation, and many sites that did not engage in link brokering were negatively affected.
Cutts says, "a lot of sites in the search and SEO space were a little more affected by this update than some other niches, just because maybe two or three hops upstream from a given site maybe that site isn't flowing page rank as much anymore." In fact, even the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org) was lowered from a PR9 to a PR8 As they say, a rising tide lifts all ships. In this case, the effect was to essentially lower the water level. Most sites that experienced a one point drop in PageRank over the last couple weeks will not see a dramatic change in their search traffic from Google because the update will affect their competition about as much as themselves.
But no one wants to have a lower PageRank, so what can you do about it? As with all updates, you can use the seo techniques to your advantage by responding before your competition does.
First, make sure your site is listed on the directories that Google has decided are still worth using. Not all directories were punished. In fact, some gained PR in this latest update. Secondly, you should diversify your interests. As I often say, you should look at directory listings as the FIRST step in a linking program, but not the only step. Some directories are highly regarded, but in the end, they are all the same type of site. One thing that has become clear from this latest update is that Google is now looking at SEO-oriented sites as both a source of some great information on valuable websites, and also as a possible source of spam that they need to careful about.
That is why it is so important to work with the right database of directories.
With the increased cost and competition for PPC advertising many people are turning their wheels for new marketing methods that are less expensive. One that has been around for many years is marketing through articles. Article marketing has been the back bone of the internet for decades. The Internet has always been content based. When your looking for information, put some keywords into the search bar and bam you have content.
Article marketing has taken on so much over the years. You'll sometimes find good content and other times find complete garbage. The difference between the two is how the good content will get around and stick. There are thousands of different seo techniques that successful Internet Marketers use. However when the basics, and methods are applied correctly, you will usually find a level of success. Many marketers will spend a great deal of there time creating good quality content. The quality content will lead to success.
The first and most important concept you'll ever need to remember "Content Is King!" Always remember those three words and you'll have 1/2 of your plan in place. The next thing you need to know are some of the basic things to get you started. Now article marketing, if done correctly, can drive lots of traffic to your site for free. Just remember some of the do's and don'ts, as we will discuss in this post.
Don't try to create articles and add affiliate or sales page links. Create an article with good content, interesting enough to drive the reading to a blog or a web website with more information on the topic. This is the friendly approach and you will get a lot more trusting visitors rather than weary ones.
Find a niche that interests you, where you can enjoy what you're writing about. Research the niche and make sure that it is not too competitive. Do some keyword research and see just how much competition is out there. From there decide on a website and begin writing your article. Many people will create blogs to post their articles to. Once you have a blog created and an article posted you can place links in your article to your blog and send it to ezines and article directories.
Write articles around your niche. Choose a keyword phrases to write your article around. Do not over stuff your article with the keywords for which you are aiming for. Your keywords should reflect a targeted search for words that you have already researched. Make it interesting provide good information that will keep them reading and make other sites want to use your article.
Submit your articles to as many ezines and article directories as you can. Post the article to your blog and start getting your traffic. Many websites are looking for content and may use your article. If they use your article they are required to keep your links imbedded in the article.
Now you will have links back to your site along with some possible traffic if the site is a good one. Writing articles clearly gives you a free, zero capital method to increasing your website traffic. So, start writing articles today!
Black hat PPC is rarely discussed in the Search Engine industry, especially not as much as black hat SEO Techniques, but we should be aware of black hat pay-per-click methods as it's possible your competitors could be applying them. In this post you will get to know how you can duplicate a competitor’s ad text to replace their ad by outbidding them.
Pay-per-click is a competitive process simply by design. And that is the reason why the people choose to use dirty tactics rather than having to pay the higher bid prices which is also have some biggest risks. Black hat PPC mostly consists of using flaws and weaknesses in systems such as Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter to your advantage.
Non-Compliant Ads One such flaw is the lack of pre-moderation on the AdWords system, allowing changes that meet a set of automated rules to go live instantly 24/7. Unfortunately, the human side to moderation doesn’t seem to work 24/7, giving a time period in which non-compliant ads can be published.
One of many reasons affiliates use this technique is that it allows them to show a different display URL to the actual click-through URL on the ad. This means that over the weekend, their affilaiteredirect.com site can now appear to be amazon.com/music - resulting in a substantially increased CTR from the brand recognition.
You can use this trick in many different ways, as long as it doesn’t hit an automated rule such as trademark infringement. Bringing this to an in-house scenario, you may want to outbid your competitors on their brand terms or use ad copy that a human editor would normally decline. The key to doing this is to test what times and days an editor declines non-compliant copy, plus re-instating the original ad before the end of your blind-spot timeframe. (Some bid management tools can do this for you.)
Same Search Term Multiple Ads A big restriction on most PPC networks is the inability to have multiple ads from one company displayed for the same search term. You may want to do this in order to advertise multiple products or to flood the ad space and push your competitors off the first page of the search results.
Getting around this restriction is a little trickier, as a new PPC account will be needed for each additional advert you wish to display. This could be achieved by creating a number of phantom companies with a unique bank account, credit card, and address, or you could get a little help from your friends. In either case, it’s often a good idea to use pre-paid credit cards so your phantom company or helpful friend never gets into debt. You’re then ready to start bidding, although be careful not to leave any footprints that associate the accounts to one another.
It’s best to use the first trick I mentioned so you can link directly through to your main site out-of-hours without fear of getting caught. You can also flood the search results for your competitors’ non-trademarked brand terms so they don’t have a single brand name PPC listing.
Its best not to be too evil toward your competitors though, as someone will eventually find out, and you may get reported to Google. Your best line of defense when this happens is to use your existing affiliate program (or create a fake one) and blames it all on a maverick affiliate of yours. (Remember to use different affiliate IDs for each ad’s click-through URL.)
Copying Competitor Ads A final example of playing dirty is to copy a competitor’s ad (title, copy, and display URL), and run it on your account with a different click-through URL. As Google AdWords doesn’t allow duplicate ads, you can wipe your competitor from the paid search listings simply by using the same display URL. As long as you bid more than the competitor’s maximum bid, your campaign should replace theirs.
The user will be expecting to land on your competitor’s site when clicking through, so it’s best to create a landing page mentioning the competitor, perhaps in the form of a damning review, e.g., “Product A has been proven to be inferior to Product B...” If doing this on a large scale, try to do it on weekends; once again, so it’s harder for your competitor to monitor and analyze.
Remember, all these examples could risk your PPC account and should therefore be used with caution.
Linkbaiting (link baiting, linkbait, link bait etc) is a term that has increasingly being used around the blogosphere.
What is Link Baiting?
A lot could said about it. So I’ll make just a few basic points to keep things simple.
The term linkbaiting is a one that seems to have surfaced over the past 12 or so months and that is used by webmasters to describe a variety of practices - all of which seek to generate incoming links to a website or blog from other sites.
It is actually a difficult term to be definative about as it covers a lot of different practices ranging from running awards or competitions, through to writing attacking posts on high profile bloggers in the hope of them biting back and linking to you, through to providing other bloggers or site owners with tools (with embedded links back to your own site) that they can put on their blogs (we’ll run through more linkbaiting techniques in one of my next posts in this series).
In reality the term ‘linkbaiting’ is a new term for something that webmasters have been doing for many years. From my earliest days of blogging four years ago I know I saw people doing lots of things to get links (even though the term was never used).
How Does Linkbait Work?
A successful linkbait operates in four basic stages:
Stage 1: Linkbait Launch
The content is released, shared with prominent bloggers, and submitted to portals like Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit and Netscape.
Stage 2: The Long Tail of Links
If the content gains traction and visibility at widely-read sites, medium and smaller outlets and personal blogs will likely point to it, and RSS feeds of the link and content will spread across the Web.
Stage 3: Residual Traffic and Attention
Even after the initial buzz from your successful linkbait campaign dies down, your site’s traffic may stay on a slight increase due to a “linkbait bump” that keeps users circling back to your site.
Stage 4: Search Engine Rankings
The massive influx of links will cause a direct boost of the link popularity of the content piece, as well as an overall boost in global site popularity—and search engines tend to reward links with rankings.
7 Tips for Linkbait Success
Find Appropriate Linkbait Portals
Identify those news outlets, blogs or social media sites that you’re seeking to get a link from. In the areas of technology, Digg, TechCrunch and Slashdot are great candidates. For humor or offbeat news, Fark and Reddit may make better choices. Depending on your content, sites like the popular blog Boing Boing, Yahoo!’s Site of the Day or Netscape may make good choices.
Understand Your Audience
Normally, you’re building content targeted to your site’s visitors—people who want your products, services or content. But for linkbait, you need to also appeal to an entirely different audience—one that can help your site achieve mass appeal in the niche that you select. I advise reviewing the coverage you see for other links in your area; using del.icio.us tags and blog archives can help with this process.
Brainstorm Effectively
You want to find ideas that are so compelling, they blow you away. Imagine pitching your idea to a writer at the New York Times; would he or she be likely to write about it? If so, you’ve got a gem.
Build Beautiful Bait
The user experience, graphic design and usability of the content you build need to have the look and feel of success. A professional layout and tasteful headlines, graphics and embedded content will go a long way toward selling your audience on your content’s worthiness.
Create a Reputation
Linkbait is difficult to launch the first few times if no one on the Web has heard of your brand. Once you’ve spent some time in the blogosphere and social media space, you may find that a lot of your content goes viral without any effort on your part. Thus, creating a reputation is an important part of making linkbait successful. If you need some help, try leveraging industry contacts that have pull with prominent bloggers and respected profiles at social sites.
Grab Their Attention
Writing the headlines and initial descriptions to submit to the social sites, emailing bloggers and appearing in search results is a critical part of linkbait. Many readers will see your headline, and in the early phase it’s critical that they follow your link and help to spread your message.
Don’t Be Manipulative—and DON’T SPAM
You might have to try linkbaiting several times before you get good at the process; in the meantime, make sure that you don’t burn bridges by spamming bloggers with email requests to cover your piece, or repeatedly tagging your own content at the social media sites from the same IP addresses.
Having top search engine listings is important for any company. A good search engine ranking results in many visitors and sales! SEM (search engine marketing) can provide an effective method of driving highly targeted visitors to your web site.
The following is a simple guide to search engine marketing. Although it is meant for beginners, it can also be very useful for more advanced search engine marketers as a reference source.
Keywords & Search Terms
The first step is to learn about the search terms that your target audience is using when using search engines. These search terms are the keywords and keyphrases that will be used to market your web site.
Keywords are the specific words that internet users type in the search engine fields to find the information they need. If your website contains these exact keywords, in their proper density level, you’d have a great chance of appearing in a good position on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Whether you’re selling your own products, or promoting your affiliate links, or inviting people to subscribe to a membership program you have developed, you would need a website to carry out your marketing approach, and you will need visitors to come to your website to experience the success that its potentials promise. And the key to generating a lot of visitors for your website lies in the selection of the correct keywords.
Keywords take on a more important role when it comes to online endeavors enrolled with Pay Per Click (PPC) programs. Keywords would attract the ads that the PPC programs can assign, and once your visitors would click on such ads, you will earn a specified amount. There are some ads that pay a measly $0.05 per click. But there are also some ads that pay as much as $50.00 per click. How can you secure for yourself the latter option? Well, you must be able to determine the most profitable keywords beforehand.
Finding profitable keywords isn’t really difficult, for as long as you know what you’re doing. There are three ways by which you could accomplish this.
1. Go to http://www.adsensearena.com . This is, by far, the easiest as well as the most cost-efficient approach. The said website has long been a secret of people in the know. No one knows how the website came about. No one even knows who maintains its pages. But everyone agree that the information it contains are pretty much accurate, save for some entries which are a little bit dated. The website http://www.adsensearena.com contains a comprehensive list of keywords together with their corresponding Cost Per Click (CPC). Simply do a manual search and look for the keywords that command a high CPC. Then build a content website based on what you will discover.
2. Create an AdWords account. AdWords is Google’s service for PPC advertisers. Creating an account won’t cost a single cent, but it would give you access to a control panel where you could view the bidding for certain keywords. All you have to do is to find keywords that command very high bids. This would give you an idea about how much the CPC of those keywords could be. Interested with this approach? Visit http://adwords.google.com today.
3.A number of online marketers offer keyword lists of the hottest topics today. These are subjects that have little competition, and which can be profitably exploited for your AdSense PPC campaigns. Often, these lists come with reports detailing the expected CPC of each of the keywords in the said lists. The online marketers who distribute the same would require a fee, of course, but if you have made content sites the engine of your online enterprise, these keyword lists could prove valuable for your endeavors.
There are three basic components to a successful PPC campaign. These are your website’s page impressions, or the number of unique visitors who get to load up your pages; your website’s Click Through Rate (CTR), or the number of visitors who get to click on the ads displayed on your website; and your ads’ CPC. The right keywords would attract ads with high CPC, and you’ll be able to solve 1/3 of the equation. The other 2/3? This is where marketing strategies would come in.
SEO is a trade that exists solely on the internet, and even then it is comprised almost entirely of the hot air of so-called "expert opinion." Plenty of it blowing around these days as search maintains position as one of the most important marketplaces in the modern business world. Many DIY webmasters will end up searching for blog entries, articles, informational web sites, etc to help get them up to speed. The problem is that in most cases certain key terms are flung around like household names while the people doing the flinging are way out of touch with the average web browser. What some of us don't realize is that not everyone knows even the basics of SEO.
This list of definitions which serves as a great companion for your initial SEO reading. Read alone it will get you up to speed on some key terminology that you'll need to know to intelligently engage the ever-changing world of SEO.
1. Algorithms
A search algorithm is, in short, the incredibly complex mathematical formula that a search engine uses to "rank" web sites for keywords. Based on a huge number of variables and calculations, algorithms are among the most closely-guarded secrets on the internet. Why? Imagine if they were leaked - suddenly the less-than-honest would have a very specific guideline to follow in climbing to the top of search results in a less-than-organic way, ruining the quality of Google's search results and their entire competitive advantage with it.
2. Crawlers
Googlebot, for example, is a search engine crawler. Googlebot periodically traverses the web in record time, indexing content, links - everything contained in page source code - and storing it in Google's search index. Then, when a user visits Google and enters a search phrase, the index, filtered by the algorithm, is what the user gets. Please note: there is some delay in this process since the results you're getting are from the index and not the live web.
3. Directories
When webmasters realized just how much power inbound links have in determining search rankings they quickly set out to do two things: 1) get inbound links and 2) set up web sites where other webmasters could achieve inbound links (meaning big traffic revenues for the site). Hence the directory farms you'll find today. Link building has been a priority on the list of any SEO-savvy webmaster for years, and as a result "quick fix" directories that allow streamlined listing submissions get a ton of traffic. However, Google and the other major search engines are on to this tactic, and the word among SEO "experts" is that the benefits of listing your site at directories are diminished if not gone.
4. Frames
Frames are a way of laying out a website with multiple documents in one browser window. Essentially, there is one main document which contains the frameset tag - this document specifies the dimensions/placement of the frames and also the documents that will "populate" those frames. From an SEO standpoint the use of frames for your layout is not recommended. Since frames do not use links in the same way, and since links may point to one frame from another, they may cause serious problems for crawlers. Additionally, there are almost no uses for frames that can't either be 1) duplicated with other methods or 2) thrown away without much fuss. If your site was built with frames and you're thinking you don't want to rebuild - it might be tough luck if you're interested in optimizing for search. Consider it a learning experience - build yourself a CSS-based layout.
5. Gateway Pages
Also "doorway pages." Although there isn't a real consensus about what these pages are, their function is always cited as their definition. In other words, these pages are created to "rank well in search engines" by playing to the algorithms. Often viewed as "spammy," "gray hat" or even "black hat." However, any page written with search in mind, and geared towards search, can be construed to be a "gateway page." The difference between a page well-optimized for search and a "gateway page?" No clear lines there, but quality of content is probably the determining factor.
6. HTML
HTML stands for Hyper-Text Mark-up Language, and it is the core building block that has made the web the greatest modern tool for business, social, informational, political and any other causes. Search engines look exclusively at a web page's HTML code to determine its relevance. Therefore, it's a good idea to pay attention to HTML and familiarize yourself with proper tagging techniques if you're hoping to get a good handle on SEO.
7. Link Popularity
Inbound links are probably the most important optimization point for web pages. Number, quality, trust - these are all factors that affect the value of an inbound link. Going back to the HTML root of search, link popularity (in terms of quantity) measures how many pages point to your site using anchor text .
8. Link Building
In short, the process of gaining links at other web sites pointing in to pages on your own.
9. Link Baiting
The process of generating high-quality content on your pages that users will appreciate and link to voluntarily.
10. Meta Tags
Meta tags are found at the top of a page's source code. They are used to specify certain things that might not be found in the page content. They also allow webmasters to put up certain "flags" that search engine crawlers can react to. There are many Meta tags available for use, and many of them can help with SEO to a great extent and for a variety of purposes. However, Meta tags are no longer used in the way they originally were - as a place to stuff keywords to drive your site up in rankings. Some webmasters out there are still doing this, but they are decidedly behind the times and unaware of the impending, or already cast-down, penalties.
11. Search Engines
If you don't know what a search engine is congratulations on finally making it out from under that rock. Search engines are essentially programs that scan an existing index of the web based on a query of search terms, or keywords, that a user enters. However, the word more commonly refers to companies as a whole - Google, for example, controls a search engine, while Googlebot is the crawler that gathers content for its index, but most users and webmasters think of a search engine as the whole package.
12. Search Engine Marketing
Most often this refers to Pay-Per-Click marketing in which an advertiser bids on chosen keywords and writes several ads to be displayed should their bid achieve placement. These ads are displayed in the "sponsored" section of search engine result pages (SERPS). However, in some circles this term is used to refer to any action taken to gain rankings both paid and organic.
13. Search Engine Optimization
This one is open to interpretation. It is quite often used to encapsulate a huge amount of different tactics. On-site optimization, off-site optimization (link building, etc) and many other techniques all feasibly fall under the SEO blanket. However, there is an obvious difference between optimizing a page's code to be clean and search friendly and writing link bait that will be popular and get linked to.
14. Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
The pages resulting from a search engine query run by a user. Webmasters review these pages to determine where their pages are ranking for certain search terms.
15. Spamming
Basically, any unnatural effort to bring a page higher in search results. What constitutes spam is open to some interpretation, but the only interpretation you need to worry about is that of the major search engines. If Google, for example, considers a technique "spammy" you'd be wise to cease at once.
16. Submission
For SEO this has traditionally meant submitting a web site to search engines so they'll know about and crawl it. SEO firms offered submission services as a big selling point to bring in clients. However, for a long time now submitting your site to search engines hasn't done jack. They're all much smarter now - just focus on gaining quality inbound links and your site will be indexed in no time.
1. Domain & File Names: Choose your site domain name that contains words from your primary keyword phrase. Your domain name should also be easy to spell and easy to remember. You keyword phrase also should in many cases go in your file name.
2. Keyword Phrases: Use keywords that are being searched for. You can check your keyword phrases with either the Search Term Suggestion Tool or the Overture Keyword Popularity Tool to find out how often they are being searched. You can also look at Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions for suggestions for different keyword phrases. - Add keyword synonyms to your content. - Put the keyword phrases in the Title tag . - Insert the keyword phrases in a h1 tag at the beginning of your page. Keyword synonyms should be put in your h2 & h3 tags. The h1, h2, h3 tags are used for titles and subtitles in articles. Make sure you use your keyword phrases from the page you are linking to, in your anchor text on the site map.
3. Keyword Density: Keyword density is a very important part of search engine optimization. Keyword density is the percent that your keyword or keyword phrase are of your web page text. You may want to look that your competition to see what keyword density they are using. To high a keyword density will be considered search engine spam and can get you blacklisted. Your keywords should be toward the top of your page and your keyword phrase be in either every paragraph or every second paragraph depending on your paragraph length.
4. Bad Techniques: Bad search engine optimization techniques can get you blacklisted from a search engine. Some techniques that are considered spam are cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, identical pages, doorway pages, refresh tags, link farms, filling comment tags with keyword phrases only, keyword phrases in the author tag, keyword density to high, mirror pages and mirror sites.While these techniques might work to give you a higher ranking for short time in the long run they will hurt you. Google has a good article on Google information for webmasters that is very imformative if you are considering Getting a SEO Company to so work on your website.
5. Title & Meta Description Tag: Construction of your title tag is one of the most important things you need to do. Each page should have a different title with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. When search engine results are displayed the title is the first thing people see. Below the title is a description which will be either be taken from your meta name description content=”Description phrase” or from the first sentence on at page. You description should also have 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning as so should your first sentence. You should have a different title, description and first sentence on each page. You many also what to try shorter titles with only one keyword or keyword phrase as this will raise you keyword relevance. Also you can consider putting your domain name at the very end of the title.
6. Meta Keywords Tag: The meta keywords tag is not as relevant as it used to be and some say Google doesn’t ever look at it anymore, but put it in anyway. This tag should be different for each page.
7. Author & Robots Tags: The Author Tag should contain the name of the company that owns the site. This tag will help you get a top position for your company’s name. Use a generic Robots Tag on all pages that you want indexed. This instructs the robots to crawl the page. The following is the generic robots tag.
8. Quality Content: Quality content will bring people back and as people always want to tell others about a good thing it will get you forward links from other sites. Your content should be written with your keyword phrases in mind.
9. Quantity Content: The more the better. Just remember your content will need to be both quantity and quality.
10. Changing Content: You can do this by hand or with a script. For example you can have a php script that draws five paragraphs from a pool of twenty paragraphs when the content is different each time the php page is accessed.
11. Avoid Dynamic URLs: Are you pages via php, asp, or cf? Some search engines may have a problem indexing them. Create static pages whenever possible. Avoid symbols in your URLs like the “?” that you will often find in php, asp or cf pages. Static pages are the best.
12. Frames: Many search engines can’t follow frame links. Make sure you provide an alternative method for the search engines to enter and index your site.
13. Site Map: A good menu system is really a site map. A well constructed menu system that is on each page and contains a link to very page on the website is all you need.
14. Site Themes: All of the top 3 search engines look for site themes or a common topic when they crawl a website. If your site is about one specific topic you will rank better than if you have more than one theme or topic on your site. By using similar keyword phrases in each page the search engines will detect a theme this will be to your advantage.
15. Site Design: You may think, what does site design have to with search engine optimization. Well if your website has a bad color scheme that is hard to read, is not organized, is a cheesy looking site, then all your site optimization has been a waste of time. Make your site attractive to the viewer, make things easy to find, have you graphic header and menu bar the same place on each page. These things will keep your visitors on the site and bring them back. A well optimized site with a high search engine results position that is ugly and is hard find information on, will not keep the visitors your optimization has brought to the site. Use W3C Link Checker to make sure all your page links are good. If you have broken links on your site this can effect the ranking you are given. Put a proper doctype on each page. If you don’t have a proper doctype on each page Internet Exployer will go into quirks mode and display it different. Use The W3C Markup Validate Service to verify that your pages are Validate HTML or XHTML code. The W3C validation will verify that your HTML or XHTML is not broken. This validation show you any broken code that could cause your webpages from displaying properly in all the different browsers and browser versions.
16. Separate Content & Presentation: Put all your presentation code into Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS). This separates the presentation from the content and makes your html files up to 50% smaller. It is reported that the search engine bots prefer this and the more content you have compared to presentation in your file, the better you get rated.
17. Robots.txt File: While this file is not really required it should be included so that the search engine bots don’t get 404 errors when they look for it. Just include the following 2 lines and drop it in the root. User-agent: * Disallow:
SEO Techniques SEO is the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. SEO consists of many techniques, that you apply to your website to help influence the search engines to not only rank your site with a higher ranking, but more importantly to rank the keywords you have carefully chosen that are relevant to your site. This is a technique used to maximize a site's exposure in different search engines. SEO techniques are classified into two broad categories:
1. Black Hat SEO Techniques
2. White Hat SEO Techniques
Black Hat SEO Techniques
Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics: - Breaks search engine rules and regulations
- Creates a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site
- Unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.
Top 5 Black Hat SEO Techniques
1. Hidden Content The basic principle of Hidden content is that within the code for the site there will be content stuffed with keywords, this content will not be visible to the end user of the site. One way of doing this is by using comment tags. Comment tags look like this; The real purpose of comment tags is for developers to add in useful reminders within their code explaining what that piece of code does. Here’s an example of the comment tag being used correctly, Another popular way of hiding content is the use of the "noscript" tag. The "noscript" tag should be used to inform a user that a script is being used but their browser either doesn’t support the script language used or they have that function turned off. Here’s an example of the "noscript" tag being used correctly,
Here’s an example of the "noscript" tag being used as a black hat SEO technique again in a bid to promote a hypothetical page but this time targeting car hire, Other HMTL tags misused in similar ways include the "noframes" tag and hidden inputs in forms. Content can also be hidden from the end user by using CSS, excessively small text and coloured text on the same coloured background. All of these techniques are frowned upon by search engines and if detected can mean your website will be penalised or even banned. To the untrained eye it can be very difficult to spot the use of some of these techniques.
2. Meta Keyword Stuffing There are two Meta tags that are generally used to inform search engines of the content on the page. They reside between the "head" tag of a page and when used incorrectly they can alert a search engine that a site is using spam techniques in an attempt to improve its ranking. Meta DescriptionThe meta description should be used to describe the content of your page honestly and concisely and be 1 or 2 sentences, 3 at most.
3. Meta Keywords Meta Keywords should be a short list of words that inform of the main focus of the page. Meta keywords have been so misused in the past that there are few if any search engines that take any heed of them.Here’s an example of the meta keywords being used in the correct manner.
4. Doorway or Gateway Pages Doorway or Gateway pages are pages designed for search engines and not for the end user. They are basically fake pages that are stuffed with content and highly optimised for 1 or 2 keywords that link to a target or landing page. The end user never sees these pages because they are automatically redirected to the target page. Off-the-shelf SEO software often encourages the use of gateway pages as do SEO firms that don’t know what they’re talking about. Search engine spiders are being enhanced continually to detect these pages and will get ignored or worse still, flag your site up as being spam and ban you all together.
5. Link Farming In the real world if you were to build your house in a bad neighbour hood then your house would be affected by its surroundings. The same is true of the virtual world. Link farms or free for all (FFA) pages have no other purposes than to list links of unrelated websites. They won’t provide you with any traffic and you run the risk of having your site banned for participating. Don’t participate in link farming.
White Hat SEO Techniques A SEO tactic, technique or method is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.
Top 5 White Hat SEO Techniques
1. Quality Content
When we first started looking at SEO as a separate entity to website build there was one phrase that we would continually hear, “content is King”, and it’s true. There is nothing more valuable you can do to optimise your site for search engines than offer unique well written content. A search engines aim is to serve up what it believes to be the most appropriate website for any given search to the end user.
Imagine we are the end user and we are searching for a portable air conditioner for hire. We go to our favourite search engine and search for the phrase “portable air conditioner hire”. In this imaginary scenario let’s assume there are only 2 websites that target that phrase, Website 1 Website 1 consists of a single page with 3 paragraphs of text. The text tells us that the company does portable air conditioning hire and give us a phone number to call. Website 2 Website 2 contains 30 plus pages all focusing on various portable air conditioning units that we can hire, costs and technical explanations of how portable air conditioning units work. Which website do you think the search engine is likely to offer to the user first? It’s a rather obvious example but it illustrates the importance of good content so your priority should be good quality content.
2. Use Structural (Semantic) Mark Up and Separate Content from Presentation Semantically structuring your mark up helps search engines understand the content of your webpage which is of course a good thing. Making proper use of heading elements is essential because search engines give more weight to the content within the heading elements.
Using CSS to separate the design elements from the content makes for much leaner code and makes it easier for search engines to find what they’re looking for, which is content. Remember content is king!
3. Titles and Meta Data Providing pages with proper titles and meta data is essential. As discussed in the top 5 black hat SEO techniques section the meta description and meta keywords elements have been so misused in the past that Search Engines now regard them as less important, it’s still important to use them and use them properly. Titles however still carry a lot of weight and when we think of semantic mark up it is obvious why. The title of anything is a declaration as to what the content might be, so make sure your page titles are a true representation of the content of the page.
4. Keyword Research and Effective Keyword Use Create your website with keywords and key phrases in mind. Research keywords and key phrases you think people might use to find your site. Single words are not always the most effective target, try multi-word phrases that are much more specific to your product/service and you’ll be targeting end users that are much more likely to want what you are offering.
Use the keywords and key phrases you’ve identified effectively throughout your website. Assign each page 2-3 of the keywords you’ve identified and use the keywords throughout all the important elements of the page. Those are, Title
Meta Description
Meta Keywords
Heading Elements "h1" "h2" "h3"
Text
Alt Tag
Title Tag
Links
5. Quality Inbound Links Having inbound links to your website can be likened to having a vote for the good but there are good links and bad links so therefore votes for the good and votes that are bad. Good links are links from other web pages that are regarded highly by the search engines and are contextually relevant to the content of your page. Bad links are links from web pages that aren’t regarded highly or potentially banned by search engines and have no relevance to the content of your page.
For example; Imagine we have a website that sells telephones. Link A: Link on the homepage of the British Telecoms website. = Good Link B: Link on John Smiths Beer and Ale appreciation links page = Bad The amount of quality inbound links to your site therefore have some relevance on how high up the search engine your site is placed. When sourcing links you should be thinking of quality over quantity and deep linking to pages within your website not just the home page.
In order to achieve the benefits of search engine optimization, an effective SEO strategy is necessary. One of the biggest SEO strategies is link popularity, keyword research and website marketing.
Doing the proper research and finding the correct keyword combination will bring the top rankings in the search engines and a traffic that is targeted to your site, and the added benefit is that it is free traffic. As you heard many time before Content is King, your content should be structured to include the keywords that are relevant to your site, and your website needs to be SEO optimized so the search engines can spider it with ease. All the other pages on your site should revolve around a central theme and all be related in some way.
When visitors come to your website the text on the home page should explain and reflect the theme of your site and all of the other pages should relate to it. Search engine optimization or SEO is the hottest way to drive targeted traffic to your website. Your investment in the future of your website will be worth while. The reason you need to optimize your site is to get rankings in the search engines, by concentrating on search phrases and by promoting these keywords you will begin to build our rankings in the search engines.
Billions of sites are updated daily and they all need to be crawled on a daily basis. You can purchase high PR links and shorten the waiting period of getting your site in the Search Engine Result Pages. Check you site for broken links, not having links that work will have a negative effect on your sites ranking if the links stay broken for a period of time.
High quality articles are quickly snapped up and published prolifically. Every time you write an article and you get it published you receive another link pointing back to your site which will in turn increase your link popularity. Traffic is generated to your website from your signature box.
This article can be freely published on a website as long as. With this wonderful innovation in web writing, each article will surely be given ample attention in terms of engine optimization and accessibility. The natural listing depends on the optimization techniques employed on and off the web site. A single article can be reprinted hundreds of times, and each time is another link back to your site. Ensure that each web page of yours would focus on a particular keyword or key phrase. If there is an article in that page, make sure that the article will only discuss and include one keyword or key phrase from the list you have made.
Getting more traffic is pointless if your site isn't an efficient sales machine. Since there are only a "handful" of search engines that everyone uses (the major ones), this is where we place our best promotional efforts. If you encourage them to link to your site, join your newsletter, read your articles, and so on, then the traffic will increase your search engine popularity. If you only sell product, then that is what you get money for products. Traffic is a must if any online business is to succeed.
Google has made sensational changes in its algorithm, which are visible since July 5th(last Thursday). This dramatic shift has brought many sites at the top rankings and many at the bottom. The update seems to have revolved around three main areas: domain age, backlinks and PageRank.
Domain Age
Google has emphasized on age of the domain in this update. The age of the domain can be considered as a factor to determine the genuineness and reliability of the company or the website. This will definitely affect some newly introduced informative and innovative sites which may get spanked like what happened during the last update.
Backlinks
Google will give more importance to the number of links are more imperative than the relevancy of links. Websites with large, irrelevant reciprocal link directories are outranking sites with fewer but more focused link. Non-reciprocal linking will loose the benefit over the reciprocal linking in the latest update.In the current scenario, developing a reasonable sized website with a large reciprocal link directory relevant or irrelevant should be sufficient to fetch high rankings, although this method should not stand on.
PageRank
You will see a major alteration in the PageRank, because there might not be any PageRank now onwards. PageRank will be replaced with TrustRank, but you will not see a green bar displaying the TrustRank. TrustRank is a new technique to semi-automatically separate reputable, good pages from spam.
Conclusion
Domain age, back links, and page rank are the significant areas where adjustments are made that has led to sudden changes in the rankings, but you may again observe a shift back to last week's results over the weekend or may be before. After this, algorithms will be modified to resolve the issues that have been experienced during the launch of recent update. Do not get excited if your site has jumped from page rank 4 to 2, also don't panic if your site has seen a sudden downfall because actual implementation is still awaited. More adjustments to this algorithm are necessary and, if you've used solid SEO practices and been consistent and varied in your link building tactics keep at it and your rankings will return.
Google PageRank PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. PageRank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.
Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Google looks not only at the sheer volume of votes; among 100 other aspects it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. However, these aspects don’t count, when PageRank is calculated. Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. How Does PageRank Work? PageRank is only one of numerous methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. PageRank is based on incoming links, but not just on the number of them - relevance and quality are important (in terms of the PageRank of sites, which link to a given site). Not all links weight the same when it comes to PR. If you had a web page with a PR8 and had 1 link on it, the site linked to would get a fair amount of PR value. But, if you had 100 links on that page, each individual link would only get a fraction of the value. Bad incoming links don’t have impact on Page Rank. Ranking popularity considers site age, backlink relevancy and backlink duration. PageRank doesn’t. Content is not taken into account when PageRank is calculated. PageRank does not rank web sites as a whole, but is determined for each page individually. Each inbound link is important to the overall total. Except banned sites, which don’t count. PageRank values don’t range from 0 to 10. PageRank is a floating-point number. Each Page Rank level is progressively harder to reach.
No one knows for sure how PageRank is currently calculated by Google. PageRank is believed to be calculated on a logarithmic scale.PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn)). “That’s the equation that calculates a page’s PageRank. In the equation ‘t1 - tn’ are pages linking to page A, ‘C’ is the number of outbound links that a page has and ‘d’ is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.”
Google calculates pages PRs permanently, but we see the update once every few months (Google Toolbar).
Not all links weight the same when it comes to PR. If you had a web page with a PR8 and had 1 link on it, the site linked to would get a fair amount of PR value. But, if you had 100 links on that page, each individual link would only get a fraction of the value. Bad incoming links don’t have impact on Page Rank. Ranking popularity considers site age, backlink relevancy and backlink duration. PageRank doesn’t. Content is not taken into account when PageRank is calculated. PageRank does not rank web sites as a whole, but is determined for each page individually. Each inbound link is important to the overall total. Except banned sites, which don’t count. PageRank values don’t range from 0 to 10. PageRank is a floating-point number. Each Page Rank level is progressively harder to reach.
Factors affect Google PageRank: 1. Efficient internal onsite linking has an impact on PageRank. 2. Related high ranked web-sites count stronger. But: “a page with high PageRank may actually pass you less if it has more links, because it’s spread too thin.” 3. Links from and to high quality related sites have an impact on Page Rank. 4. Multiple votes to one link from the same page cost as much as a single vote. 5. Each inbound link is important to the overall total. Except banned sites. 6. Adding new pages can decrease Page Rank. 7. Links from and to high quality related sites are important. 8. Incoming Links from popular sites are important.
Factors don't affect Google PageRank: 1. Frequent content updates don’t improve Page Rank automatically. Content is not part of the PR calculation. 2. High Page Rank doesn’t mean high search ranking. 3. DMOZ and Yahoo! Listings don’t improve Page Rank automatically. 4. .edu and .gov-sites don’t improve Page Rank automatically. 5. Sub-directories don’t necessarily have a lower Page Rank than root-directories. 6. Wikipedia links don’t improve PageRank automatically (update: but pages which extract information from Wikipedia might improve PageRank). 7. Links marked with nofollow-attribute don’t contribute to Google PageRank.
A Search Engine is a software that helps to find information stored in the Internet collecting data about every web site and every web page within a web page that it can. It often asks for a query, meeting specific criteria and retrieved a list of information matching your search query. This type of software has a lot of different names like a bot, a robot, a crawler or a spider. It takes all this collected data and stores it in a huge database. When you do a search on a "search engine" you are actually searching its database and not the actual Internet.
Directory
A directory is a Search Engine in which we can make categorical search. In other words, A directory is really a categorical directory. There are two types of directories. Simple Directory: It allows you to submit your site under a particular category and simply adds your site to the directory under the category you have chosen. This type of directory is also called a FFA (Free for All) Directory. This type of directories use a software verification before adding your site to the list to make sure it's not a duplicate and to make sure your site actually exists. A Monitored Directory: These directories are more particular about what gets listed in their directory as these are monitored by human beings. If your site meets all their submission guidelines, then they accept your listing and your site will be listed in the directory.
Directory Submission has replaced the Search Engine Submission
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique to maximize a site's exposure to different Search Engine. There is no doubt that search engine optimization (SEO) is very important to the overall success for a website. It involves many techniques that can improve the search engine rankings and directory submission is one of them. In fact, directory submission has replaced the search engine submission process in recent times due to its known effectiveness.
One of the main benefits that directory submission has to offer is the fact that your website will be more likely to be seen. We all know that most of the visitors are coming to your site through search engine. But, if your site is not present in the top position of the Search Engine Result Page, then how the traffic to your site will improve! Directories, on the other hand, almost always have some sort of purpose or theme.
Directory submission is one of the easy method of getting links for free. Directory listings can be valuable weapons in the SEO battle to improve your search engine rankings. It's very important to get a large number of backlinks pointing to your site in order for the search engines like Google to rank your site high in their listings. So Directory Submission is the best way to increase your link popularity.
Overall, it is important to realize that your search engine ranking can be increased through the use of directory submission. If you want to ensure that anyone can easily find your website with a specific topic, then you can use directory submission for that. Since this Internet marketing strategy is known to be very effective, you will be likely to get the results that you are hoping for.
I am a Search Engine Optimizer(SEO). This is my first blog. There are many changes happening in this Search Engine World and we should be aware of all these changes. We should always keep updated ourself with the Search Engine Optimization Techniques.
The motive of creating this blog is to share my knowledge in Search Engine Optimization.
This is a blog for those who are interested in SEO & SEM. This blog will provide you with basic seo techniques.So, keep reading.
