Blogging How To Optimize For The Search Engines

Blogging How To Optimize For The Search Engines

Many clients ask me how to drive more traffic to their blogs. By now you have probably heard that blogs are an excellent resource to get leads as well as clients for your business. The best way to do that is by creating search engine friendly blog posts that get indexed in search engines. When people search for information on topics you discuss in your blog it appears on the search engine result pages. Potential customers then are able to read what you have to say and get on your mailing list.

So now it all boils down to techniques that help you effectively optimize your blog for search engines. Here are tips and ideas to do just that:

- Create A Keyword Rich Header For Your Blog. The header repeats on all pages on the blog. By making sure that your header contains targeted keywords, you are able to get more of your blog pages indexed in search engines.

- Treat Each Blog Post As A Separate, Optimizable Page. Use the process of search engine optimization on each blog post. This means that you need to create an optimized title for each post, find targeted keywords for each post and weave the keywords into your post’s text.

- Make Sure That Each Blog Post’s File Name Are Descriptive. Different blogging software behaves differently, but some will call your blog posts 2.html, 3.html, 4.html, etc. As you can see, that is not very descriptive and not particularly helpful to either people or search engines. When you create a post called “How Coaching Helps Business Owners”, calling it “how-coaching-helps-business-owners.html” is a much better title than “5.html”

Make sure that your blogging software creates descriptive file names for your blog posts; it is better both for human readers and search engine spiders.

- Get Links Pointing To Your Blog.  Quality links to your blog means more blog visitors and higher search engine rankings. Current search engine algorithms value links to your blog, which means that having links pointing to your blog will improve your blog’s search engine rankings.

- Get Your Blog Listed in Blog Directories. Blog directories are a great source of getting unidirectional links to your blog. Since blog directory links many times are unidirectional (they link to you, but you don’t link back to them), they are great for boosting your search engine rankings. Having many unidirectional links pointing to your web site will improve your search engine rankings.

A blog is an excellent marketing tool, but your blog will not attract more leads and clients for your business if you don’t use search engine optimization techniques to optimize your blog and attract targeted search engine traffic to it.

Technorati Tags: blogging, engines, optimize, Search

Getting Your Site Indexed by the Major Search Engines

Part I

This is the first article in a six part series on how you can get indexed in the most important search engines on the internet. These search engines include Google, Yahoo, MSN, Exactseek, and Alexa. These sites cover over 80 percent of the searches done on the internet, so it’s well worth the effort to prepare your site correctly, and submit it to these search engines.

Before you do any kind of promotion on the internet, you need to make sure that your site is properly prepared for the search engines. The reason is that the search engines will be the main way that others find you on the internet.

If you haven’t optimized your site for the search engines, now is the time to do it.

There are two tools that you can use, that are absolutely free, to optimize your website. Keep in mind that your main focus should be on optimizing individual pages for various keyword terms on your topic.

Good Keywords – http://www.goodkeywords.com – This tool will tell you what others are searching for, as well as how often the search terms are searched for in a month. Windows.

Web CEO – http://www.webceo.com – This software suite will not only help you optimize your pages for the search engines, but it will help you find link partners, as well as keyword terms, and you can use it to submit to other lesser known search engines. Windows and MAC.

It is beyond the scope of this article to teach you how to optimize your site for the search engines. Web CEO contains step by step documentation that will teach you everything you need to know about search engine optimization.

What’s important here is that you find out specifically what keywords and keyword phrases searchers are looking for when searching. If you optimize your site for the wrong keyword search terms, either no one will find you, or you will have so much competition, you won’t be able to get your site to rank very high.

Most searchers won’t go beyond the first three pages of results. Rank below this, and you’ll have a tough time being found.

Another important point to remember is that each of the main search engines is different. You can optimize your site for Google, which is the most important search engine right now, but you can optimize your site for indexing in all of the major search engines if you do it right.

Avoid techniques like keyword stuffing, redirect pages that are unrelated to your site, and junk pages. Multiple domains pointing to the same site or a mirror site are a definite no no.

Although there is some debate these days about using other writers’ articles because of the duplicate content rule, remember that all of the major search engines are full of duplicate content.

Using articles written by other authors is a great way to provide value to your site visitors, but you will want to write a few of your own articles. By writing your own articles, you can optimize them for your keyword terms, something you can’t do with other writers’ articles.

When you write your articles, convert them to HTML and then use Web CEO to optimize them for your keyword terms. Make sure you focus on no more than two to three terms per page, or you will have problems optimizing your page. You want your articles to make sense, and you want them to provide value to your readers.

Finally, once you’ve optimized your site, you’ll want to make sure that you submit them to the major search engines. Although there is some debate these days over whether or not this is necessary, the major search engines aren’t perfect, and they don’t always update properly.

Once you’ve submitted your sites, you can move on to the next steps in your internet marketing campaign. Resubmit only when you’ve made major changes to your sites.

Search engine optimization and submission is a long term marketing strategy. Good ranking, as well as good coverage of your site won’t happen overnight. It will happen though if you stick to good search engine optimization techniques to improve your site’s ranking.

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Technorati Tags: engines, Getting, Indexed, Major, Search, Site

10 Effective Seo Design Tips To Impress Both Website Visitors And Search Engines

If you are professional with your search engine optimization efforts and keep your customer in mind before you start considering “what the search engines will think” you will reap a lot more than what you sow. Chances are, if your visitors like your website, there is a very good likelihood that the search engines will like it too.

With this in mind the following 10 tips focus on how to develop your website with your visitors in mind whilst also conducting effective search engine optimization activities.

1. Pick appropriate keyword phrases

This is the single most important thing to do when it comes to optimizing your website for search engines. The words and phrases that your potential customers type into the major search engines are the keywords your site should be using within the specific areas of your webpage (see below; Optimizing your Page Titles and Optimizing your Content). There are a number of useful keyword research tools available on the web such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery (both offer trial versions).

However, if you want to find out accurate figures of how many people are searching for your targeted keywords per week/month/year run a Google Adwords and/or Overture campaign and you will get extremely accurate figures of search engine traffic whilst (hopefully) generating income that will pay for your research.

2. Optimize every page on your website

Optimizing each webpage is overlooked by so many websites and can be the difference between competing for a highly competitive keyword phrase such as “Irish Hotels” on your home page and competing for a much less competitive keyword phrase such as “Hotels in County Galway” on another relevant landing page. After that they can check out the rest of your website that is all about “Irish Hotels”.

3. Optimizing your Page Titles

All of the major search engines have 100′s of different algorithms that compute where your webpage should be listed for different keyword searches. Putting your keywords within the title description tag of your pages is one of the most important SEO techniques and will help your website climb through the rankings and allow your visitors to remember exactly what your page is all about when they save it to their “favorites”.

4. Optimizing your Page Content

It is sometimes very difficult to write content for your website. Not only do you need to put the information you want the visitor to see in front of them in an easy-to-read style, you also have to keep in mind the keywords your page is targeting so that you can rank better within search engines.

One of the best pieces of advice I have come across is to write for your visitors and include the keywords as much as makes sense. Read what you have written out loud to yourself and a few others. If it sounds stupid… lather, rinse, and repeat.

5. Create an inbound linking strategy

Submitting your site to website and article directories is a very beneficial way to drive targeted traffic to your website.

Links within these sites not only brings visitors to your website, but search engine “spiders” are easily able find your website and index your pages within their results. If your site doesn’t have a link pointing to it on the World Wide Web the search engines will never find it and you will never see any traffic from Google or the other big ones.

6. Descriptively labeling your links and images (aka the anchor text)

This technique is both common sense and good practice. Telling your visitors what the link that they are going to click on allows them to know exactly what they are going to be directed to. Saying “click here” is not enough to help them understand what they’re going to find once they click through. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. When writing your anchor text and alt attributes you can almost always describe the page you’re pointing to by using its main keyword phrase which is a major factor that search engines take into account when it comes to ranking your web pages.

7. Make sure your site is spider-friendly

Your website may look fantastic. You and your web designer may be talented graphic designers who can make Flash and JavaScript dazzle your visitors with a show that would put Michael Flatley and his River Dance to shame. However, if your website contains Flash and Javascript it’s important to know that search engine spiders have difficulty reading this code (or appreciate the effort you put into the design). The way around this is to provide navigation alternatives such as static links and a site map to allow the spiders crawl deep within your website and index the web pages within their results. Overuse of Flash, JavaScript, and images can also lead to your web pages being very slow to download. If these file types are used sparingly your visitors and search engines will appreciate your efforts a lot more.

8. Create Fresh Content

When you are optimizing your website properly you will see a trend. If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it.

Blogs and forums are effective and easy ways of adding new information to your site on a regular basis. However, if your only purpose of setting up a blog or a forum is for better search engine rankings then there really is no point in doing it. Only add a forum if it contributes something beneficial to your website and if you have the traffic to make it interactive enough for visitors to return to it. And, only add a blog if you have something of interest to say on a regular basis. Once you have your blog and/or forum up-and-running you should optimize them with the same professionalism you do with any other page on your website.

9. Do not think that you can trick Search Engines

As noted before, “If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it”.

If you try to trick the search engines by hiding keyword phrases, joining link farms, or any other sneaky practice your sites will be removed from the search engines and it will take you a long time to get back in (and you will also have to spend more time cleaning up your website before they will accept you).

10. Offer something unique

If your website offers something that is unique and interesting to your target market and it is properly optimized (by applying all of the techniques listed above) you will not only rank well within the major search engines, you will also get the added benefit of people linking to your website in forums, blogs, and through other websites which will send your site more visitors and create more inbound links which will help it rank higher.

Remember it’s human visitors that you are trying to impress, not search engine robots.

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Technorati Tags: Both, Design, Effective, engines, Impress, Search, Tips, Visitors, website

URL Submission to Search Engines

Getting indexed in the Internet search engine is very important
if you want everybody to know the existence of your web site.
Imagine, the Internet is like the earth, and you web site is
like a shop on earth. Unfortunately, unlike the real world, your
shop is not visible; nobody’s shop is visible. It is only
visible after we enter the shop. So how would anybody know about
your shop? In order to let everybody knows the existence of your
invisible shop, you have to tell eveybody about your shop’s
address.

In the early of 1996, I have developed a homepage, which I
dedicated to a kind of music I really like. The homepage is
hosted on Geocities(home of the longest URLs’ homepage
repository) free hosting service at that time. It is almost
impossible for anybody to visit my site by accident because of
the long URL. I tried to let everybody know the existence of my
homepage, send emails, sign guestbooks, join forums, but I
forgot( or I did not know that we have to submit our URL to) the
search engines. The homepage got very few visitors, until I gave
up and just let it be. And now, for your information, the
homepage still exist, but I have already forgot the password. I
do not know how many visitors it got per day now because the web
counter service is also missing.

However, submit your web site’s URL to the search engine is not
enough to start getting visitor. It will take about two month
for your site to be indexed in the search engine. You also need
other plan or strategy to promote your web site. This article is
only about getting indexed in the search engine. Here is some
links to add your web site’s URL to the Internet search engine
or public directory.

Dmoz.org, The Open Directory Project To be indexed in this
directory is the priority. It is the key to be indexed and to
get a high rank in other search engines. There are thousands of
search engines available in the Internet today. Many of them
such as Google, Altavista, Yahoo and Netscape get the listing
from dmoz.org.

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive
human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and
maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. The
Open Directory was founded in the spirit of the Open Source
movement, and is the only major directory that is 100% free.
There is not, nor will there ever be, a cost to submit a site to
the directory, and/or to use the directory’s data.

Here is the link to submit your web site’s URL to dmoz.org :

http://dmoz.org/add.html

Google.com I personally think, Google is the best search engine.
Every day I use google.com to search any information from the
Internet. You could find the information from website,
newsgroup, images and directory in one search. Although other
search engine have the same feature, but Google’s website is so
simple. Another advantage is Google also feed about 80 other
search engines. 60% of my previous website’s visitors came from
Google. Here is the link to submit your web site’s URL to Google
: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Yahoo.com – Altavista.com, AllTheWeb.com The second search
engine I like most is Yahoo. Actually, Yahoo is a directory
based search engine. Altavista and AllTheweb’s search index also
powered by Yahoo. So, if your web site is indexed in Yahoo, your
web site will also got indexed in Altavista, AllTheWeb and other
search engines feed by Yahoo. Here is the link to submit your
web site’s URL to Yahoo (require registration) :

http://rds.yahoo.com/search/submit/free/*-http://submit.search.ya

hoo.com/free/request

Submission to over 100,000, 500,000 search engines and
directories. My advice is to not using them. It might be
useless, unless you want your email box to get spammed. If your
site is indexed by big search engines, most probably those
smaller search engine will get your URL as well.

In the beginning of this article, I had mentioned about the
music homepage I built. The homepage now is indexed in every
search engine available although I never submit it to any search
engine. The key is to be linked by other sites. I may write an
article about this later

Related Search Engine Articles

Technorati Tags: engines, Search, submission

Search Engines Or Website Visitors – Who On A Priority?

I see everything dark in a daytime. It is not a defect of my eyes but a situation created after I use sunglasses. I am creating the situation of making everything dark and how foolish I am to blame my eyes. Same common problem is being faced by many web masters in the world on Web Promotion. They want search engines to bring lots of traffic to their websites but fail to satisfy search engines to rank their websites higher because to satisfy search engines they use many dirty tricks which pushes their website in dark which becomes invisible for search engines so search engines cannot know about the information it contains even though it is may be valuable.

So, be careful while choosing the correct path to make your site visited by all. Ignore dirty tricks that are made for search engines only. These tricks are favorable temporarily but ultimately drags a website towards its demise. You may be making the job of search engines very easy by customizing your website and making it search engine friendly, not for getting listed but to get rejected with good reasons. Search engines are always devoted toward the satisfaction of their users so they don’t want their user to encounter with the website that isn’t made for them.

For getting listed and having high ranks in a major search engines your website must have a good content that can claim the satisfaction of your visitors. A good navigation can also help your website to get higher ranks because it helps your visitors to find each and every pages of your website easily. And the most important point for your website’s higher ranking is, a clear intention to serve your website visitors with good response to their problems and queries they have. This will satisfy your website viewers and creates a positive impression towards you. And the ultimate gift of this satisfaction of your website browser is your success in career as a web master.

Revolutionizing the concept of search engines is the most important demand of the Internet. Search engines are encouraging websites to be search engine friendly but they are not being able to judge properly the real quality of the website. Hence, search engines must look at the website through the eyes of a website visitor before listing and determining a rank for it. This will help them to identify the quality of the website and the fame it may gain in near future. Supporting the web masters in having correct concept about search engines and teaching ways to co-ordinate with search engines is the duty of search engines. So, it is better for them to guide the one who is in need of it.

If possible, the search engines must provide detail report about rejection or acceptance of a website. If this happens, many web masters will know how to rectify their web pages to make it users and search engines friendly.

Related Search Engine Articles

Technorati Tags: engines, priority, Search, Visitors, website

The Ten Important Steps for Optimizing your Website for Search Engines

“The Ten important Steps for optimizing your website for search engines:

In these ten steps we will know ten basics and important steps to optimizing a website to perform better on major search engines. If you will follow these steps correctly your website search engine position website will be surly improve depending on you industry competition.

Step 1 – Keyword Selection

Step 2 – Creating optimized Content

Step 3 – Site Structure

Step 4 – Internal Linking

Step 5 Submissions

Step 6 Link Popularity Building

Step 7 – Title and Meta tags

Step 8 Monitoring

Step 9 social bookmarking

Step 10 Testing

Step 1 – Keyword Selection

Selecting Keyword is the single most important factor in the entire search engine optimization (optimisation) process. Choosing the right and relevant keywords will not only help you in getting good search engine position and targeted traffic but it will also increase you return on investment (ROI).

Example: If you are a company based in UK providing search engine optimization (optimisation) (SEO) services. The first keyword in your mind would be definitely

Keyword Competition

SEO : 73,000,000

Search engine optimization : 63,600,000

Seo Company : 26,800,000

It is possible to get good ranking on these keywords but it will take lot of time and money instead you can target “”Seo Company Uk” and “Search engine optimization company Uk’ this way you are targeting two keyword at a time with less competition that means more chance of targeted traffic and good Search engine positions.

Keyword selection and research tools

The Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool

Site: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Word Tracker

Site: http://www.wordtracker.com/

Step 2 – Creating optimized Content

There has been lot of changes in the search engine algorithms but there is no change in the importance given to quality content. In this step we will focus on how to create optimized and unique content for high search engine positioning using the keywords we have selected in the first step.

Unique and well written content will both grab your visitor’s attention and at the same time, make them want what you have to offer. So write in keeping mind what your audience are looking for and targeted keywords.

First ask yourself some questions:

What services you offer

Do you provide the services your visitors are looking for

Do some research

Provide as much as possible information on the subject. Provide useful and unique information about your industry / subject area it can entice your visitors to visit your website in future. It has found that most of the online visitors search for information about their interests.

Content Optimization

Four important factors for optimizing content

1. Heading Tags – (H1 to H6)

2. Special Text – (bold etc.)

3. Inline Text Links – (Anchor text and alt tags for images )

4. Keyword Density – (number of occurrences of your targeted keywords in a page)

Heading Tags

By default text in these tags appear too large than standard text in a browser. We can customize it by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Tip: Do not use the same tag more then once on a page.

Special Text

It can be used in bold, colored, “”In quotes”" or (in brackets). Using special text will help draw the attention to important information and also add weight to your keywords.

Inline Text Links

Example: We provide seo services and web hosting.

You add a link to related page on your site to these bold words. it gives the reader a way to find the information you are referring to.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is the no. of occurrences of targeted keyword in the content of the page. You should not spam the targeted keyword in your content; recommended keyword density is between 4% to 10%.

Step 3 – Site Structure

You must structure your website to attract the visitor as well as the search engine spiders. The site structure will help spiders read your site. Keep the code as clean as possible so search engine spider can get to your content, where you want them to be.

Use CSS to cut down code extra code like for font style, tables, images etc…

Things to remember while planning site structure

Keep URL Short and close to Root of the site

While creating folder and files use keyword

Eg: for a page in web hosting packs www.domainname.com/web-hosting/website-hosting.html

Use Hyphens (-) while splitting name in to 2 instead of underscore (_) as shown in above example.

Step 4 – Internal Linking

Internal linking means linking to your pages within the website by way of sitemap, navigation bar, footer, header etc. The sitemap should be linked on all pages of your website to get spidered by search engines from anywhere. You should also include Google sitemap on your site to get indexed easily by Google. It adds relevancy to the linked page which directly helps in getting high rank for the linked page

Using text based links with anchor text, footer navigation and use inline text link will improve Your Internal Linking Structure. So spider can crawl it easily add relevancy to the linked page. The closer a page is in clicks from your homepage. The higher the value the page rank is assigned.

Step 5 Submissions

Where to submit:

o Search engines

o Web directories

Major search engines to submit

Google.com | yahoo.com | Msn.com

Major web directories to submit

1. Yahoo (paid)

2. Dmoz.org (most important)

http://www.about.com/

http://www.incrawler.com/

http://www.jayde.com/

3. http://www.wowdirectory.com/

Step 6 Link Popularity Building

There are 2 ways of building Link popularity

o Reciprocal link building (2 way link building)

o Non-reciprocal link building (1 way link building)

Reciprocal link building

There are some basic rules to follow when exchanging links:

Relevancy is more important

Check and make sure the reciprocal link aren’t being blocked and pages are indexed

Link pages with more than 50 links aren’t worth exchanging with

Non-reciprocal link building

It can be in form of paid link, directory listings, social bookmarking, article publishing ,blogs and press releases

Step 7 – Title and Meta tags

Once you have planned and completed the site structure and content integration. Its turn for Title Meta and Description. Unique and optimized title and Meta tags are really helpful in achieving higher search engine positions

Title:

this tag represents information of page this can be in browsers header bar

Meta keywords:

This include the targeted keywords for that particular page

Meta description:

The Meta description shows on the SERPS (search engine results page). It is used in describing the products / services you offer to your customers, you can describe specific pages within your website that shows in the search results page.

You can describe your pages the way you want them to be seen by your visitors in the SERPS (search engine results pages)

Next is alt tags, Alt tags is a white hat SEO practice used very commonly by search engine optimizers

An example of alt tag:

Step 8 Monitoring

There are three basic things in the monitoring process. They are:

Monitoring your search engine positions:

You can go through the searches manually, you can use software like IBP to check your rankings or you can use online. There can find many related Seo tools listed here http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html

Monitoring Back Links

Schedule weekly checks of how many backlinks you have and are your link partners still linking to you

Monitoring Changes in the Search Environment

The last thing you will have to monitor is for changes with the search engines themselves.

Visiting forums and subscribing to newsletters to keep yourself updated about search engines algorithm changes

Step 9 social bookmarking

The social bookmarking is used by many people to bookmark their pages and websites. Using the social bookmarking visitors can bookmark the sites listed in the social networking websites. The popularity of the websites in the social bookmarking world gauged by most favorites websites among the visitors. The most bookmarked website obviously will get more traffic than others and it can also help improving your search engine ranking in major search engines.

How does it work?

In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Webpage Urls, which they find useful. Often, these lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some social bookmarking systems allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

Most bookmarking websites allows to enter multiple tags for your web pages in order to be searched by the visitors that helps social bookmarking visitors to get relevant and accurate search results for their keywords.

Advantages

1. Social bookmarking helps in promoting your website users market your site.

2. It indirectly helps by building a brand.

3. Generates targeted traffic.

Some important social bookmarking sites

Dig.com | Blink |Del.icio.us |Digg |Furl |Google |Simpy |Spurl |Y! MyWeb

Step 10 – Testing

You have created a great design and added SEO elements to your site. Now its time to see if all that hard work done has achieved the main goal of reaching the visitor and to convert them to a customer.

o Check for broken links :

o Other script errors

o Ease in navigating site

o visual appeal of the site

o placement of content

o are you able to find what u are looking for

You have created a great design and added SEO elements to your site. Now you should test your website for errors (i.e. 404 not found error, script errors etc.).

Check for broken links :

Other script errors

Ease in navigating site

Visual appeal of the site

Placement of content

Are your visitors able to find what they are looking for?

“

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Technorati Tags: engines, Important, Optimizing, Search, Steps, website

Search Engines Can’t Be Controlled

Search engines are one of those things in life that can’t be controlled. Life is full of things that can’t be controlled. We can’t control who we’re related to, or whether or not the sun will shine and we certainly can’t control how other people on the road drive. A search engines’survival depends on the quality of their searches. They’re not about to try and make you happy even if you think you deserve it if mking you happy affects the quality of their results. If their search results aren’t good their bottom line will be affected and in the end their long term survival. Search engines can’t be controlled they are the controllers.

Search engine marketing professionals do not own search engines. They can tell you, and they do tell you, that you will achieve a no.1 ranking on a given search engine. The bottom line is there is no way they can make that happen. Search engines can’t be controlled.

Telling your search engine marketing people that you want to be no.1 in Yahoo will not guarantee you such a result. Your search engine marketing people can help you increase the chances of ranking higher but that is far from a guarantee. YOur search engine consultant doesn’t control the search engine so they can’t guarantee your ranking. If you don’t control the medium you can’t control the result. It’s as simple as that. Unfortunately, some people do learn to control search engines through less than ethical means. Cheating and trickery will, in the end, be caught by search engines and will, in the end, get one banned for life from using them. The end result will be a return to the 9 to 5 routine. It’s best just to accept that search engines can’t be controlled.

Ranking algorithms of search engines are closely guarded secrets. If everyone knew the secret there would be no point in having them. The aim of search engines is not to give a top ranking to a site that was able to beat the system, but rather to give a top ranking to the site that best matches the search query of an individual visitor. Search engines can’t be controlled. Good quality content will, however,bring you one step closer to achieving the ranking you’re looking for from a search engine. The value of real search engine marketing can be controlled … by you.

Related Search Engine Articles

Technorati Tags: Can't, Controlled, engines, Search

Specialized Search Engines: Better Search Results?. Better Business Returns

Though the Internet provides a huge resource of useful data, finding the right information sometimes becomes as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack. Manual information retrieval by browsing a vast number of websites over the Internet is a cumbersome process and primarily due to this reason, the search engines find an immediate favor among the users by being able to algorithmically retrieve the right information for the users. Out of the enormous number of web sites in the World Wide Web—the premier search engines attracts the maximum traffic. This is primarily due to their ability to organize quality and informative web pages in a presentable format that is searchable through a common user interface.

Search engines; today have become a platform for online business. Ranking at the top of the search results has become a priority for every organization that wants to make their online presence felt in their respective domains. This has lured a lot of business people to design low quality and spam driven websites to gain search engine traffic. Over the past few years, a rapid rise in the number of spam dominated and irrelevant websites, deliberately tampered to rank well for popular keyword searches, has given the search engines a torrid time in filtering them out of their search results. The majority of search engines are able to return good results for broader keywords, but despite repeated algorithmic updates and up gradations to streamline their search results, they often fall short of delivering the optimum for more specialized keywords.

This is where the need for a specialized search engine comes into picture. These specialized search engines cater to niche market segments and return remarkably better results as compared to the generic search engines. Unlike the generic search engines, specialized search engines have to deal with limited amount of data that is specifically related to their subject. This entitles them to organize the data in a better way and present it in a user-friendlier format as compared to the generic search engines.

Medicine search engines are a very good example of specialty search engines. The immense growth in the pharmaceutical industry has given rise to an increasing number of websites dealing in wide range of drugs over the Internet. A patient wishing to buy a drug online is not required to browse through a huge list of websites representing various drug companies. Medicine search engines have made life a lot easier for them by offering customized result sets in return of a keyword query. These result sets display a comparative list of the requested drug offered by various pharmacies with discounts, prices and relevant customer feedback. Users can easily compare and then order the drug through these pharmacies. In other words medicine search engines serve as a common gateway to the various quality drugstores, that are otherwise present all over the Internet but are difficult to identify, often suppressed by low quality spam driven pharmacy websites that often find their way to the top in the generic search engines.

In the coming years specialized search engines will take giant leaps towards improving search experience. These are just initial years, when search engines designed to fulfill the medical needs of people have already started making a mark in the pharmaceutical sector, but over a period of time, the other sectors will also find specific search engines, solely catering to their industry and showcasing their products that will further facilitate in an improved user experience and better business for the companies.

Technorati Tags: Better, business, engines, Results, returns, Search, Specialized

The Eight Things You Must Do To Optimize Your Site For Search Engines – Missed By Over 98.4%

Search engines are better at spidering than you. Of course, you need a professional looking site, easy to navigate, appropriate content and size. Many webmasters and sites are great at displaying graphics (flash) and visually appealing sections on their sites. However, the search engines really don’t care much about that. If you can give the spiders what they want, they not only will eat it up fast, but you will provide content-rich, relevant data to their index (database). As time, content, size and relevancy increase, you will rise up in the search engine results pages. Properly applied search engine optimization techniques and online marketing principles will help you.

The 3 most important search engines to optimize for are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. (Ed Note: Google owns over 50% of the market today, and is growing fast every day. This includes their exposure via partners like Ask, Earthlink, DogPile, etc). For you to get elevated and relevant rankings you must get into the search engine indexes, and we recommend you start with Google. You should get spidered by Google in less than 3 weeks if applied correctly, but a long term approach to SEO work is needed. You can expect to see your listing within 2-4 months for some pages, and as much time as 2 years for certain keywords/phrases within those.

I invite you to take a look at the starter list below. These are steps you can start today and it is fairly easy and impactful.

Number 1: Learn the SEO concepts.
SEO tries to ensure that your web pages appear at the top of the search engines for target keyword requests. It increases brand awareness, qualified traffic and revenue. Fact: Only 1/2 of the people visiting look at the sponsored (paid) ads (PPC) and only 20% of those actually click. However, 4 out of 5 total clicks – apply their mouse on natural search results. Therefore SEO done right can really elevate your business visibility and revenue. Additionally, the top 5 sites returned from any search are where the action is. Your goal? You should be in the top 10 (Search Engines Results Pages (SERPS)) for your selected keywords.

Number 2: Research the competition.
I am sure you do this no matter what business you are in – whether online or not (brick and mortar). If not, this is one of the big steps missed by online businesses. There are techniques on how to do this effectively, quickly and with high quality results.

Number 3: Linking Strategies and Relevancy.
One of the most important things you can do is to build out your relevant linking neighborhoods. There are a number of great tools you can use to automate this, but we have found that via email and the phone (we are amazed by how many do not use the phone)—you will establish a closer relationship with your virtual partners, and even though you may only spend an hour a day building link partners, it is well spent. Typically, only 1-2 will exchange links with you out of 8 companies called. However, let us say you get one quality link per day through the year. That is over 300 quality links that will help your relevancy, build your business and get your PR(Page Rank) level moved up.

Number 4: Proper HTML and Site Building.
There are many articles written on this topic. If you are not HTML-savvy, it can be a challenge. However, it is not hard to learn, and many tools are available. Just search for free website design tools. Other SEO tools can analyze your content, HTML syntax and appropriate application of tags like TITLE, H1, META tags, BODY content and more. You must also make notes of server-side issues, including IP numbers that may have belonged to (and still do) block listed ranges.

Number 5: Meet The Search Engines.
Make sure you read the webmasters guidelines on all the search engines, especially Google, Yahoo and MSN. They actually are very helpful, and they want you to do well, contrary to what you believe or have heard. Also, keep in mind, there are robotic search engines, algorithmic based search engines and AI-type search engines – different styles of writing. Additionally, you must include listings in the directories, like DMOZ (free, but takes weeks to get listed), Yahoo (free, months – or paid, immediate). Lastly, you must study and learn the PPC (pay-per-click) strategies, learn how to write ads, copy writing for (cash) landing pages, and implement a solid back-end sales process. If you have never used the AdSense programs, you may be missing out on significant income, but many do it incorrectly. We have seen adsense programs go from .00/day to over ,000/month.

Number 6: Use a proven methodology.
None of the SEO “white hat” (opposite: “black hat” – unethical) strategies are rocket-scientists-qualified only. The key areas to keep working on are: a) keyword research, b) competitive analysis, c) analyze your own site(s), d) submit your site(s), e) monitor rankings, f) Reporting, g) link development and h) dynamic site mapping. This approach works, and used by many of the professional SEO companies in the industry.

Number 7: Learn how to use the SEO tools.
Metaphor: For many home-owners, the worst thing that can happen when approaching any project, large or small – is not having your tool belt attached. Even worse, if there are tools missing from that belt after spending 15 minutes retrieving the ladder, lining it up just right, then scaling it just to get to the top of the roof—you not only feel aggravated, but plain stupid.

Being affiliated with some of the guru-type tools & specialists in the industry is nice, but most people are not. Therefore, free tools are a good place to start (search for seo tools and seo email courses). These will help you get to work immediately, and you don not have to come down off the roof to get them.

Number 8: Relevancy, Relevancy, Relevancy. Why be “search relevant”?
The objective here is to make the search engines “see”. You must always ensure that you insert unique relevant content such that the page becomes more worthy of a high ranking in the search engines. You must also make sure you adhere to Style Guide Requirements. The ultimate objective is not to make an inferior page appear superior, but to actually make it superior. Yes, you must be relevant – for any site – be it a commerce/shopping type site, to an information page about Da Vincis life (and, if you have something to sell, that is great). Do not try any uncommon tricks, especially not for the search engines. You will regret it. There are too many sad stories of revenues and business lost from “black hat” strategies (cloaking, spamdexing, link farms). They appear to work for a little while, and suddenly you are gone from the listings and not easily turned around. Be relevant and ethical. It may take a little longer, but you will win out in the end.

Technorati Tags: 98.4%, Eight, engines, Missed, Must, optimize, Over, Search, Site, Things

Search Engines vs. SEO Spam: Statistical Methods

High placement in a search engine is critical for the success of any online business. Pages appearing higher in the search engine results to queries relevant to a site’s business will get higher targeted traffic. To get this kind of competitive advantage Internet companies employ various SEO techniques in order to optimize certain factors used by search engines to rank results.

In the best case SEO specialists create relevant well-structured keyword rich pages, which not only please the eyes of a search engine crawler but also have value to the human visitor. Unfortunately it takes months for this strategic approach to produce feasible results, and many search engine optimizers use so-called “black-hat” SEO.

‘Black Hat’ SEO and Search Engine Spam

The oldest and simplest “black SEO” strategy is adding a variety of popular keywords into web pages to make them rank high for popular queries. This behavior is easily detected since generally such pages include unrelated keywords that lack topical focus. With the introduction of the term vector analysis search engine became immune to this sort of manipulation. However “black-hat’ SEO went one step further creating the so-called “doorway’ pages – tightly focused pages consisting of a bunch of keywords relevant to a single topic. In terms of keyword density such pages are able to rank high in search results but never seen by human visitors as they are redirected to the page intended to receive the traffic.

Another trend is the abusing the link popularity based ranking algorithms, such as PageRank with the help of dynamically-generated pages. Such pages receive the minimum guaranteed PageRank and the small endorsements from thousands of these pages are able to produce a sizeable PageRank for the target page. Search engines constantly improve their algorithms trying to minimize the effect of “black-hat”‘ SEO techniques, but SEOs also persistently respond with new more sophisticated and technically advanced tricks so that this process bears a resemblance to an arms race.

“Black-hat” SEO is responsible for the immense amount of search engine spam-pages and links created solely to mislead search engines and boost rankings for client web sites. To weed out the web spam search engines can use statistical methods that allow computing distributions for a variety of page properties. The outlier values in these distributions can be associated with web spam. The ability to identify web spam is extremely valuable to search engine not just because it allows excluding spam pages from their indices but also using them to train more sophisticated machine learning algorithms capable to battle web spam with higher precision.

Using Statistics to Detect Search Engine Spam

An example of an application of statistical methods to detect web spam is presented in the paper “Spam, Damn Spam and Statistics” by Dennis Fetterly, Mark Manasse and Marc Najork from Microsoft. They used two sets of pages downloaded from the Internet. The first set was crawled repeatedly from November 2002 to February 2003 and consisted from 150 million URLs. For each page the researches recorded HTTP status, time of download, document length, number of non-markup words, and a vector indicating the changes in page content between downloads. A sample of this set (751 pages) was inspected manually and 61 spam pages were discovered, or 8.1% of the set with a confidence interval of 1.95% at 95% confidence.

Another set was crawled between July and September 2002 and comprises 429 million pages and 38 million HTTP redirects. For this set the following properties were recorded: URL, URLs of outgoing links; for the HTTP redirects – the source and the target URL. 535 pages were manually inspected and 37 of them were identified as spam (6.9%).

The research concentrates on studying the following properties of web pages:
– URL properties, including length and percentage of non-alphabetical characters (dashes, digits, dots etc.).
– Host name resolutions.
– Linkage properties.
– Content properties.
– Content evolution properties.
– Clustering properties.

URL Properties

Search engine optimizers often use numerous automatically generated pages to massively distribute their low PageRank to a single target page. Since the pages are machine generated we can expect their URLs to look differently from those created by humans. The assumptions are that these URLs are longer and include more non-alphabetical characters such as dashes, slashes or digits. When searching for spam pages we should consider the host component only, not the entire URL down to the page name.

The manual inspection of the 100 longest hostnames had revealed that 80 of them belong to adult site and 11 refer to the financial and credit related sites. Therefore in order to produce a spam identification rule the length property has to be combined with the percentage of non-alphabetical characters. In the given set 0.173% of URLs are at least 45 characters long and contain at least 6 dots, 5 dashes or 10 digits-and the vast majority of these pages appear to be spam. By changing the threshold values we can change the number of pages flagged as spam and the number of false positives.

Host Name Resolutions

One can notice that Google, given a query q, tends to rank a page higher if the host component of the page’s URL contains keywords from q. To utilize this search engine optimizers stuff pages with URLs containing popular keywords and keyphrases and set up DNS servers to resolve these URLs to a single IP. Generally SEOs generate a large number of host names to rank for a wide variety of popular queries.

This behavior can also be relatively easy detected by observing the number of host name resolutions to a single IP. In our set 1,864,807 IP addresses are mapped to only one host name, and 599,632 IPs-to 2 host names. There are also some extreme cases with hundreds of thousands host names mapped to a single IP, and the record-breaking IP referred by 8,967,154 host names.

To flag pages as spam a threshold of 10,000 name resolutions was chosen. About 3.46% of the pages in the Set 2 are served from IP addresses referred by 10,000 and more host names and the manual inspection of this sample proved that with very few exceptions they were spam. Lower threshold (1,000 name resolutions or 7.08% pages in the set) produces an unacceptable amount of false positives.

Linkage Properties

The Web consisting of interlinked pages has a structure of a graph. Therefore in graph terminology the number of outgoing links of a page can be referred to as the out-degree, while the in-degree equals to the number link pointing to a page. By analyzing out- and in-degrees values it is also possible to detect spam pages which would represent the outliers in the corresponding distributions.

In our set for example there are 158,290 pages with out-degree 1301, while according to the overall trend only 1,700 such pages are expected. Overall 0.05% of pages in the Set 2 have out-degrees at least three times more than suggested by the Zipfian distribution, and according to the manual inspection of a cross section, almost all of them are spam.

Similarly the distribution for in-degrees is calculated. For example 369,457 pages have the in-degree of 1001, while according to the trend only 2,000 such pages are expected. Overall, 0.19% of pages in the Set 2 have in-degrees at least three times more common than the Zipfian distribution would suggest, and the majority of them are spam.

Content Properties

Despite the recent measures taken by search engines to diminish the effect of keyword stuffing, this technique is still used by some SEOs who generate pages filled with meaningless keywords to promote their AdSense pages. Quite often such pages are based on a single template and even have the same number of words which makes them especially easy to detect using statistical methods.

For Set 1 the number of non-markup words in each page was recorded, so we can draw the variance of word count in pages downloaded from a given host name. The variance is plotted on the x-axis and the word count is shown on the y-axis, both axes are drawn on a logarithmic scale. Points in the left side of the graph marked with blue represent cases where at list 10 pages from a given host have the same word count. There are 944 such hosts (0.21% of the pages in Set 1). A random sample of 200 these pages was examined manually: 35% were spam, 3.5% contained no text and 41.5% were soft errors (a page with a message indicating that the resource is not currently available, despite the HTTP status code 200 “OK”).

Content Evolution

The natural evolution of the content in the Web is slow. In a period of a week 65% of all pages will not change at all, while only 0.8% will change completely. In contrast many spam SEO web pages generated in response to an HTTP request independent of the requested URL will change completely of every download. Therefore by looking into extreme cases of content mutation we search engines are able to detect web spam.

The outliers represent IPs serving the pages that change completely every week. Set 1 contains 367 such servers with 1,409,353 pages (97.2%). The manual examination of a sample of 106 pages showed that 103 (97.2%) were spam, 2 were soft errors and 1 adult pages counted as a false positive.

Clustering Properties

Automatically generated spam pages tend to look very similar. In fact, as already said above, most of them are based on the same model and have only minor differences (like inserting varying keywords into a template). Pages with such properties can be detected by applying clustering analysis to our samples.

To form clusters of similar pages the ‘shingling’ algorithm described by Broder et al. [2] will be used. Figure 7 shows the distribution of the cluster sizes on near duplicate pages in Set 1. The horizontal axis shows the size of the cluster (the number of pages in the near-equivalence class), and the vertical axis shows how many such clusters Set 1 contains.

The outliers can be put into two groups. The first group did not contain any spam pages, pages in this group are more related to the duplicated content issue. In the same time the second group is populated predominantly by spam documents. 15 of 20 largest clusters were spam containing 2,080,112 pages (1.38% of all pages in Set 1)

To Sum Up

The methods described above are the examples of a fairly simple statistical approach to spam detection. The real life algorithms are much more sophisticated and are based on machine learning technologies which allow search engine to detect and battle spam with a relatively high efficiency at an acceptable rate of false positives. Applying the spam detection techniques enables search engine to produce more relevant results and ensures a more fair competition based on the quality of web resources and not on technical tricks.

References:

1. Dennis Fetterly, Mark Manasse, Marc Najork. “Spam, Damn Spam, and Statistics: Using statistical analysis to locate spam web pages” (2004). Microsoft Research.

2. A. Broder, S. Glassman, M. Manasse, and G. Zweig. “Syntactic Clustering of the Web”. In 6th International World Wide Web Conference, April 1997.

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Technorati Tags: engines, Methods, Search, spam, Statistical