search engine optimization – things to do

PAGERANK: WHAT IS IT AND HOW IS IT ASSIGNED?

It is a known fact that Google assigns every single website page a Google Page rank, which is based on a complicated mathematical algorithm. Pages are ranked on a scale with zero as the lowest and ten as the highest. Interlinking of websites external as well as inter holds value so far as Page Rank is concerned.

If the site X links to the site Y, the latter gets credited with a percentage of Site X’s Page Rank which kind of gets passed cover to it. The Site X loses nothing so far as Page Rank is concerned unless and until the link is to a bad neighborhood or a banned area.

An example to understand the situation better. Site X had a Page Rank of 5, there were only 2 outbound links to Site X. One of the outbound Links was intended to brand new Site Y. Brand new Site Y had 4 outgoing links, with NO other Incoming Links, apart from the one from Site X. Google awarded Site Y a Page Rank of 5.

From this example in real life, it is evident that fewer outbound links on a per page basis means a higher Page Rank.

If Site X in the above example had a huge amount of outgoing links on the page, in that case the percentage of Page Rank passed would have been smaller and the New Site Y would have received a lower rank than the equal rank that was passed.

Things to avoid

While engaging in reciprocal linking, make sure you check the amount of outbound links that not only the page has but the overall site as well. Search engines such as Google doesn’t like pornography sites, gambling sites and Link Farms that have thousands of links on them. Unless that is your business, don’t link to any of those types of sites.

You can lose Page Rank and Search Engine Results if you link to sites that are considered Bad Neighborhoods or are Banned. Be alert and make sure you check before linking. Though sometimes you may not be “punished”, you wont be gaining any benefits and the loss in PR of your site is not at all worth it.

Be aware of which sites the outbound links are linking your site to. Check your outbound links from time to time, ensuring that they are:

1) Still an active website
2) Still a resource for the reason you linked to them in the first place
3) They have not changed formats or the theme and continue to be a quality site.

Page Rank improves over time. Though not very often, Google does update the Page Rank, once in say every four to eight months. So link exchange with like-themed sites or quality sites is the best possible SEO strategy.
SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING: PLAYING THE GAME

Search engines are faster than you can think. It changes within a blink of an eye. Yes, try writing a book on search engine optimization and it will be outdated even before it gets printedthats just to give you an idea as to how fast the rules of the game called search engine marketing changes. So in this high acceleration of change, how do you stay tuned?

The hardest part of search engine marketing is to crack the Google algorithm. All the discussions, debates and research on content optimization, keyword selection, title creation, link exchange and more are all too familiar among the website owners now. And it does seem at times that the search engines elude you and your understanding because the moment you think you caught up with them, you find you are in the same abyss of yesterday, trying to grope the right way out.

The clever search engines keep moving forwards and with some very real reasons, beyond the otherwise sadistic ones. In a way, these come down to two simple yet mutually conflicting factors

Competition: online businesses are growing everyday, by the minute.

Expectation: Web-users, today, visit websites with lofty expectations. As it is the search engines that drive them to visit sites, they expect the sites referred thus, to be extremely relevant to their searches.

In a nutshell, it can be safely said that since the online competition is high with so many websites trying to outdo one another and make their mark in the online arena, the search engines are somehow compelled to change their algorithms from time to time to serve its users better with more comprehensively. They, however, do not intend to make things hard for website owners or optimizers; they only change algorithms to provide more accurate and more helpful search results to the users, so that they get the best information even in this highly competitive online business market.

Evidently then, you can see that the search engines are overtly user-centric. And this does give webmasters and search engine marketers the most obvious clue as to what to do to get ahead in the game and stay there too. While it is of course important to keep track of the changing algorithms, you also need to focus on the users, your potential customers, analyze their needs and think of ways to fulfill those through your website. Compared to links and algorithms, you got to concentrate more on user-needs because that is one surefire way to take your search engine marketing at its helm.

Donning this coveted marketing label, there are five things that you need to consider now:

Working with other sites: Much in keeping with the coffee-shop-in-the-bookstore concept, you can fill up the void in another website to benefit both ends. It is quite smart to work with other websites and set up individual businesses in each others business space with one symbiotic approach.

Deep links: It is always essential to take the visitors exactly to what they have been searching for. Using deep links comes in handy here. Therefore, keep deep links for both your organic and paid listings, so that viewers do not have to hunt for what they actually need.

Publicity pieces: Well-written publicity pieces like articles and press releases allow you to accommodate the important and top search words for your website. But you must also make the piece a good, helpful, informative and interesting read, if you want it to be an effective marketing tool.

Directories: While choosing business directories, you must go for those having the best custom. Instead of just another plain link, you should be in the look-out for good referrals.

Anchor links: Anchor texts are links and information that you give out to other websites. Now, getting links is not the supreme objective, it is more important to draw the custom that gives more profit. So you may also spare a thought about using anchor texts that pertain to your users needs or to the topics in the page visited.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION: THINGS TO DO

When people search for something online, they type the keyword or key phrase in the popular search engines, which give them an extensive list of sites relevant to that search. Now to make your website visible in the first set of search results, it needs to have a good page rank. Search engine optimization is the means to this end, the branch of activity which aims at enhancing this rank of a website with some structured strategies. Most owners of sites invest a fortune and valuable time in creating a web presence, but sadly, they fail to consider the more important aspect that is, how the website will come to the notice of web-users.

Long back it was just a matter of some time to launch a site design it, fill it up with nice content and submit it into some directories it was as simple as that! And search engines would also give good ranking to that website for the keywords featuring in the body-text of the webpage.

And since the number of websites present then were not even half as much of what is there now and since the techniques of optimizing a site in search engines were not as improved, keywords could be repeated along with other otherwise refutable maneuvers like creating many domains with the same content. And this too ensured those sites a good position in the popular search engines.

But things have come a long way from that now. There has been a dramatic change in the search engine marketing scenario. Today, just ordinary designing, content and submission wont help; the website owner needs to do his homework study the various types of relevant keywords typed in search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN and then fashion his/her website accordingly so that the website ranks well enough to be viewed by the majority of people. And because today people tend to look for everything online and keep searching for the right goods and services till they find it, the search engine optimization is a big challenge, although with some amount of risk involved.

Now web presence is something very important here. If you are stepping into the online scene, your website needs to have a web presence. If not, you have a disfavor. The search engines, particularly Google, do not prefer giving high ranks to new domains. Position improves with time, as the website becomes old.

So obviously, websites which are older in time and already have a secured web presence, stand a better chance of getting higher ranks in the search engine. Listed below are some of the key factors for achieving the top positions in search engines.

Clean Codes: All search engines prefer a neatly coded website. When a webpage is designed in MS Word, it generates untidy html code. This is not a good thing. Also, website owners need to be careful about the WYSIWYG editors. Some use proprietary tags in the html and thus become uncongenial to the search engines.

Content: No saying would suffice for the stupendous importance of proper content that helps a website to score high in the search engines. Content is the backbone for any site. Search engines often look for relevant keywords or phrases in the body text of a webpage to identify those with the searched words/phrases. If found, your website is considered relevant for those keywords and you can expect a pretty good rank.

Tags: Yet another very vital aspect in html coding is the tagthe title tags and meta-description tags. To give your website a decent search engine position, these tags must contain the relevant keywords which you think users will look for.

Linking: Simply put, linking means other websites linking to your website. Now how would that help, you ask? This is good for your website precisely because the search engines consider each related link on your site as a given vote. The logic is easy if site X links to site Y, it obviously follows that site Y is of some value or worthy of it. These links can either come from important directories like Yahoo! or Dmoz, or from other related websites. For instance, if your website promotes clothes, a link from a fashion houses website would be relevant and count as a good vote in search engine parameters. However, exchanging links with questionable sites like link farms is not appreciated. Link farms are considered worthless in the sense that these are directories that just collect links without any valuable content in them. So whenever you add links to your website, ensure that those links have your targeted keywords in their anchor text. Post articles or mention elaborately about your product and services is and then include links to your site. There are many important sites which post articles and appreciate sites with good content. So you may also popularize your website by putting up online press releases there. However, it takes a lot of effort, patience, time, skill and money to achieve the desired position in search engines for particular keywords. But when the results start showing, you will know that it is worth the wait.