Posts Tagged ‘factors’

Search engine optimization-The History Of Your Web Pages

Friday, July 18th, 2008

The history of your website and in fact, the individual pages within it are playing an increasingly important role in your site’s ability to rank well. The longer your site has been online the better your chances of ranking highly. Further, the longer a specific internal page has been live the better it will rank for additional phrases.

What this means to you is that you will have to take into account the length of time your domain has been around when you set your expectations regarding which phrases you should be ranking for. In the beginning of a promotion you will not want to target an intensely competitive phrase with hopes of attaining it on Google; rather you will want to select less competitive secondary phrases that contain the primary phrase (”seo services” vs. “guaranteed seo services” for example) and optimize for that. What you will accomplish is rankings on Google for at least a relevant phrase while at the same time building links with relevancy for your primary phrase which you will rank well for once your website has gained history.

The less competitive the phrase, the more weight the other factors will have on your ability to rank highly. History is only one factor among many. For highly competitive phrases where you are competing with sites that have history and have also addressed the other factors noted below you will find it extremely difficult to outrank them, however for less competitive phrases the other factors will hold more weight in that the other sites will likely not be optimized as strongly for them and thus, your site stands a much better chance of beating them out.

Search Engine Optimization for Graphic Designers

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Here is a quick look into a few of the most important factors that influence how your studio’s website ranks in Google search results. With a few strategic changes, and an awareness about how Google’s search algorithms work, you can make a big impact on how Google-friendly your website becomes.

Search engine optimization-Page Rank

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Search engine ranking algorithms are closely guarded secrets, for at least two reasons: search engine companies want to protect their methods from their competitors, and they also want to make it difficult for web site owners to manipulate their rankings.

That said, a specific page’s relevance ranking for a specific query currently depends on three factors:

* Its relevance to the words and concepts in the query
* Its overall link popularity
* Whether or not it is being penalized for excessive search engine optimization (SEO).

Examples of SEO abuse would be a lot of sites linked to each other in a circular scam, or excessive and highly ungrammatical stuffing with keywords.

Factor 2 was innovated by Google with PageRank.  Essentially, the more incoming links your page has, the better.  But it is more complicated than that:  indeed, PageRank is a tricky concept because it is circular, as follows:   Every page on the Internet has a minimum PageRank score just for existing.  85%  (at least, that’s the best known estimate, based on an early paper) of this PageRank is passed along to the pages that page links to, divided more or less equally along its outgoing links.   A page’s PageRank is the sum of the minimum value plus all the PageRank passed to it via incoming links.

Although this is circular, mathematical algorithms exist for calculating it iteratively.

In one final complication, what I just said applies to “raw PageRank.”   Google actually reports PageRank scores of 0 to 10 that are believed to be based on the logarithm of raw PageRank (they’re reported as whole numbers).   And the base of that logarithm is believed to be approximately 6.

Anyhow, there are about 30 sites on the Web of PageRank10, including Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Intel, and NASA.  IBM, AOL, and CNN, by way of contrast, were only at PageRank 9 as of early in 2004.

Further refinements in link popularity rankings are under development.  Notably, link popularity can be made specific to a subject or category; i.e., pages can have different PageRanks for health vs. sports vs. computers vs. whatever.  Supposedly, AskJeeves/Teoma already works that way.

It is believed that Inktomi, Altavista, et al. use link popularity in their ranking algorithms, but to a much lesser extent than Google.  Yahoo, owner of Inktomi, Altavista, Alltheweb, is rolling out a new search engine, which reportedly includes a feature called Web Rank.  More on how that works soon.

Build A Website - 5 Factors You Must Consider

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

I have seen and heard crazy things…ah! But how to build a website! In my endeavor and quest for success I have heard people ask weird questions and I have seen those professing to be internet gurus give astounding answers.

I know of a fellow who posted a question on yahoo answers. This particular question kept me staring at my monitor screen lost of words. This fellow had bought a domain name and registered it with one of the leading domain name registrar. His question was simple yet to those familiar with the art of online business, the question leaves a lot to be desired.

My friend was seeking advice on what to do with his domain name. He had no plans or ideas on what to do with it! Think of lack of planning and we don’ t need to go further than this example.

To avoid being on the same predicament, here are 5 factors to consider as you ponder on your next move. Before you build a website, think about the following:
Type of web site.

Identify the type of web site you will be building. Are you going to build a website whose primary purpose is to sell hard good or e-goods? Would your site be composed of affiliate links or are you going to sell your own service or product? Is your web site going to be primarily informative in nature with google ad sense and other form of advertisement or is it going to be purely visual with little or no content.

Identifying the type of web site you are going to create will make the next step easy to identify.
Niche based.

Gone are the days when all a web master needed to do was to stuff their web site with links leading to all type of product and services. In the current internet world you can not succeed in building a web site designed in the form of a shopping mall with all kinds of goods and services.

The internet is increasingly and exponentially becoming a specialized super highway. Only those web sites that are able to distinguish them selves as authorities in a given area are poised to reap the benefits of online business.

Start out by identifying a profitable niche that you will enjoy writing about, identify an area that you already have experience on, have passion or will be comfortable learning about.

Only build a website in an area or niche that you believe in.
Research you market.

It’s not just enough to develop and build a website based on your strength and weakness. Care should be taken to do a little bit more research about the potential and profitability of that given field.

There are great tools out there on the net that would enable you to come up with a profitable niche, those tools will also enhance your research by shading light as to the exact phrases that your potential visitors would under normal circumstances type into the search engines in their quest for information.
Domain name and hosting.

Care should be taken while choosing the domain name and hosting company for your online business. A search in any of the leading search engines for the phrase “how to choose a domain name” or “web hosting” would return tones of articles that have been written advising us on the do and don’ t do as far as choosing a domain name or host provider is concerned.

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Quality Content.

Have you ever typed the exact phrase of a given keyword while searching for information on any of the leading search engines only to end up frustrated with the displayed results after trying several times? Search engines and human traffic thirst for information, great quality information.

One sure ways to win the search engines wars and in the process please your targeted customers is to create quality content. A site owner who remains focused and persistent in doing just start will in the long run reap the benefit of having their pages rank up high if not at the top of the search query results.

Image Rank Factors

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

While most are conscious about ranking well in SERPs many overlook the need to optimise for image search. Image search should NOT be overlooked since it can bring in considerable amount of traffic. As an example, in my personal blog it’s really funny how the search term “Mila Jovovich” gives me the most search traffic and how a vast majority of that traffic comes from image search. Note too that I only posted about Mila Jovovich a couple of times. Goes to show that you just don’t know what will really bring you lots of traffic.

To make sure you don’t miss out on the traffic image search can bring (if you post images on your blog!) here are the factors you should take note of:

1. text surrounding the image - Note that the distance of the text from the image also counts so it makes sense to place the image as near as possible to the related text.

2. text of pages linking to the picture

3. the number of websites containing the same or similar image - This helps determine relevancy of image to the search term

4. size of image - Usually the image with higher resolution ranks better. Note though that users can filter search results by file size. The reasoning behind this may be more for the viewing pleasure since a higher resolution image looks better.

5. Remember though that loading your page with lots of high resolution images may bog down your site causing it to have a longer loading time. Make sure you do not sacrifice usability and accessibility!

6. link relationships between images - Images that are linked together and have related associated text will help determine relevancy

7. frequency of image’s appearance in website - This pertains to logos and other recurring images. It helps determine importance and relevance of image to the website topic.

8. face and name detection - The more faces on an image the higher it is usually ranked. On the other hand if a specific name is queried then a single face with the person searched for will rank better.

What is PageRank?

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

# “PageRank is [only] one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance.” [PageRank Explained Correctly]

# “Google uses many factors in ranking. Of these, the PageRank algorithm might be the best known. PageRank evaluates two things: how many links there are to a web page from other pages, and the quality of the linking sites. With PageRank, five or six high-quality links from websites such as www.cnn.com and www.nytimes.com would be valued much more highly than twice as many links from less reputable or established sites.” [Google Librarian Central]

# “PageRank has only ever been an approximation of the quality of a web page and has never had anything to do with the measuring of the topical relevance of a web page. Topical relevance is measured with link context and on-page factors such as keyword density, title tag, and everything else.”