Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

Search engines come in two varieties, human-edited and spider indexed. The two major human-edited search engines (or directories as they are properly called) are the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) and Yahoo. Search engine optimization is lost on the human-edited directories. Because humans will write your title and description for your site when they place it in their directories, using both objective and subjective methods, you have no control in the SEO-world over how your website will rank in these directories.

In both DMOZ and Yahoo, you can suggest a title and description, but most often your words will be rewritten by an editor and placed in their directories according to criteria of which you will not be privy to knowing. One of the big differences between DMOZ and Yahoo is that DMOZ is free and Yahoo is a paid inclusion. With both search directories there is the possibility of not being included, but as stated before DMOZ is free and with Yahoo, if you are not included, no refund will be given.

The only types of search engine in which you have some control are the search engines, which use spiders (sometimes called robots) to read, index and rank your site. The robots (and this is plural because some search engines like Google have several) are basically software applications that travel the Internet by following links and finding websites to read and add to their databases. These robots will travel to your website if you submit your site directly to them (hand-submit) or indirectly submit (through another software submission service or application) or fail to submit (they will follow incoming links to your sites also).

Once the robot finds your site and indexes it, it will move along to other sites from your outbound links. When you site is indexed, then another process takes place and this is the process of determining your ranking for specific keyword or key-phrase searches performed upon the search engine. All of the major search engines that use robots to index websites also use complicated algorithms for determining the page rank of your site. The search engine algorithm software looks at the title and description of the website along with keyword density and prominence to name a few to see which keyword or phrase your site is optimized for (if any). Certain weight is given for each of these components and the page is ranked accordingly.

The advantages of the spider-driven search engines over the directories are that first, search engine robots will continue to index your site on a regular basis whereas the directories basically will stick with the same title and description for the life of the website. Second, a webmaster or SEO professional has control over the optimization process in relation to the search engines, whereas in the directories, optimization is mostly irrelevant. Third, the volume (and popularity) of people using the search engines far outweighs the volume using the search directories. This means that yes, the major search directories are important places to submit your website to, but the major search engines are an absolute necessity.

Web site traffic is the number one imperative of 99-percent of the marketers on the Internet. How does one go about gaining more web site traffic? That is putting the cart before the horse. The first thing a person needs to do is measure current web site traffic before embarking on gaining more traffic. The second step is to use some or all of the methods listed below to gain more web site traffic and the third step is to measure current hits once again in order to calculate the success of the traffic-building campaign.

Measuring Web Site Traffic

You may know where you want to go, but how do you get there if you don’t know where you’re starting from? By measuring current web site traffic, you’ll establish a baseline of how many hits you’re currently receiving and where they’re coming from.

If someone else is hosting your site, most likely they’ll have a traffic analysis package that you can access through the control panel. Packages such as Webalizer or AW Stats are common. Even if one of these web site traffic analysis applications is not offered by your host, most likely you’ll still have access to the log files and can download these to a PC and use an application such as Funny Web Analyzer to give out the necessary stats.

If these web site traffic analysis packages are not available or understandable, you may wish to turn to an outside vendor who will give you a little Java code to put on the pages in order to give the necessary stats. Vendors like web-stats.com or freestats.com are a couple of places to start.

Once you have an idea of how many visitors per day you’re receiving and where they’re coming from it is time to start using some methods to gain web site traffic.

Gaining Web Site Traffic

The best method with the highest return on investment of gaining web site traffic is to perform search engine optimization (SEO) on a web site. Traffic from the natural search engines such as Google is free and for some online businesses, this accounts for 80-percent of their sales. Spending a couple of thousand dollars on search engine optimization may seem like a lot of money. But if your site has, say, 10 pages in the top rankings of the search engines (SE’s), do you think the resulting traffic will make this money back? If the answer is no, then you may not wish to do SEO. But if the answer is yes, which is most often the case, then you’ll not only recoup the investment but most likely gain thousands of dollars more in sales on your site. Isn’t this what you’re going for in the first place?

Since SEO is a slow, long-term plan for gaining web site traffic, typically taking months for the rankings to kick in, many web site owners choose to use a pay-per-click campaign to gain traffic in the short term. Pay-per-click programs such as Google AdWords and Yahoo / Overture Site Match are a way to see immediate results by placing a web site in the Sponsored Listings section of the SE’s search results page. Traffic from these campaigns can also help you judge the viability of the keywords you’ve chosen for the SEO campaign. When doing pay-per-click (PPC) you basically bid on a keyword or key-phrase. The more you pay, the higher you appear in the Sponsored Listings and the more traffic the web site will receive. The downside of pay-per-click, though is that you keep paying and paying and paying for the traffic. Soon you’ill spend way more on PPC than on the optimization services.

Press releases (PR’s) are another great way to generate web site traffic. In the recent Search Engine Strategies seminars it was pointed out that the major search engine news feeds actually scan online press releases to see what they are about and rank them accordingly. So, just when you thought you could get away with writing standard press releases, now you would do well to write optimized press releases. The major SE’s scan these press releases like they do an html page, looking for keywords in order to categorize and rank the release. If you have a timely story or happening about your site, write and submit an optimized press release on a place such as PRWeb.com and see your traffic grow. Or if you don’t wish to do your own, there is a new business called SEO-PR who will do this for you.

There are many other methods in gaining web site traffic - too many to fully cover here. But to name a few, it is worth check out: article writing, opt-in email advertising, newsletter advertising (your own and others), give-aways, contests and promotions and banner advertisement.

A good idea once you gain traffic is to employ a website monitoring service such as that from Webmetrics to monitor your site for downtime. Too much downtime may mean the robots are unable to spider your site and will adversely affect your rankings.

Search engine optimization is not an end all and be all for everyone when it comes to generating more web site traffic. Many different and varied online marketing practices should be employed. When employing these other practices, though, don’t neglect SEO because you can be sure your competition isn’t neglecting it.

Domain names figure into the ranking with some search engines. If you do not already have a domain name picked, then from an optimization standpoint it is a good idea to pick a domain name that says what your business is and has your main keyword as part of your domain name.

For instance, if you sell automobile tires online, from a keyword standpoint, you would want to purchase a domain name such as shellytires.com or shelly-tires.com instead of just shelly.com. The “tires” portion of you domain name, with all things being equal with your competition, will help you achieve a higher search engine ranking with some search engines.

If you do a Google search for a certain keyword or keyword phrase you will see your keyword/s highlighted if the different websites in the search results. If you have a keyword or keyword phrase in your URL, then this too will be highlighted which leads one to believe that Google gives some weight to keywords in the domain names.

If you already have a domain name that you are using that tells what your business is about but has no keywords in it, then don’t despair since this is only a minor consideration with most search engines in their ranking algorithms. But if you have a choice of building a website from the ground up, then choosing a domain name with your main keyword embedded, may give you a slight edge in the search engine ranking wars.

Search engine optimization has been a hot topic for a last couple of years. With changing algorithms, search engines and directories swapping technologies and services and a general growth (or sense of survival), much has changed in search engine optimization technique. In the early days, spamming your own website with endless strings of keywords with the same color as the background is gone.

Search engine optimization then evolved into a dependence solely upon the content of the metatags regardless of what the rest of the rest of the site was about. Spamming the title and description tags with huge strings of keywords was enough to get top placement in many search engines (SE’s).

Now, however, search engine optimization has come to a place of making the metatag content match the text on the rest of the web page. Throw in link popularity and relevancy and you now have the contemporary formula for top rankings.

In contemporary search engine optimization technique, the title tag is probably the most important metatag on the website. The website’s primary keyword / keyphrase needs to be in the title tag. The description tag and other hidden metatags also are beneficial when they are keyword rich.

Search engine optimization, now also features the creation of keyword-rich and hopefully content rich text for the body of the web page. The keyword-rich text is for the SE’s and the content is for the visitors. Both audiences must be kept in mind when writing this text.

The last element in search engine optimization is the creation of incoming links that are relevant to the main subject of the website. One way to accomplish receiving incoming links is to trade links with another site (reciprocal linking). Another way is to pay another relevant website a monthly advertising fee in order to display a text or graphical link to your site.

Search engine optimization is something that can be accomplished through education, through an SEO company or through software that will create keyword-rich pages semi-automatically.

The educational part of search engine optimization can be attained by reading everything on the Internet focused on this subject. Going with a search engine optimization company will work for others who don’t have the time or inclination to self-educate or who want to get started right away. Software will work for others, though it is generally not as effective as the other two methods since search engine optimization is as much an art as it is a science.

Choosing the correct domain name for a business is vital to its success on the Internet. If your business is called “Intoweb Design” and your core product is “web design”, the domain name “intoweb.co.za” could work. However a better domain name would be the core business product, “blog.tryangled.com”. The reason being search engines read keyword rich domains and rank the domain higher if it contains a main keyword.

For the purpose of these tips a search engine is something like google. It scans the web for sites to include in its index. It will follow links and find new sites all on its own. A directory (such as Yahoo or DMOZ) includes sites one at a time, with a human being looking at each site.

You can learn a lot about different types of search engines at Search Engine Watch.

# Put your keyword/key phrase in the title tag of your page. It can be the only thing there, or you can make a complete sentence out of it. The title is also what appears in your bookmarks list. So a good title will help people remember you when they bookmark your site.

# Google doesn’t care what you put in the description tag, but other engines do. Put in a sentence which tells the viewer why the heck they should visit your site. What’s in it for them?

# Google doesn’t care about what’s in your keywords tag, but the other engines might. Put in a few words and phrases appropriate to your page. Include common mis-spellings.

# Your primary keyword/phrase should appear in the headline at the top of your page.

# Skip the graphics and banners. Write a page that’s cool and interesting and is appropriate to your keywords. So if your keyword is cell phones write a cool, informative page about cell phones.

# Skip the java, javascript, heavy graphics, etc.

# Links to your page, either from your other pages or from other sites, should contain your keyword.

# Any graphics should have keywords in the alt tag. This will help describe the image.

# Links from your page should also contain your keywords.

# Don’t use your keywords too many times on a page. How do you tell? If your page starts to read badly, then you’ve used your keyword too many times. Links to your page count for far more than how many times your keywords appear.

Excite used to be the best-known general-purpose search engine site on the Web that relies on concept-based searching.  It is now effectively extinct.

Unlike keyword search systems, concept-based search systems try to determine what you mean, not just what you say.  In the best circumstances, a concept-based search returns hits on documents that are “about” the subject/theme you’re exploring, even if the words in the document don’t precisely match the words you enter into the query.

How did this method work?  There are various methods of building clustering systems, some of which are highly complex, relying on sophisticated linguistic and artificial intelligence theory that we won’t even attempt to go into here.  Excite used to a numerical approach.  Excite’s software determines meaning by calculating the frequency with which certain important words appear.  When several words or phrases that are tagged to signal a particular concept appear close to each other in a text, the search engine concludes, by statistical analysis, that the piece is “about” a certain subject.

For example, the word heart, when used in the medical/health context, would be likely to appear with such words as coronary, artery, lung, stroke, cholesterol, pump, blood, attack, and arteriosclerosis.  If the word heart appears in a document with others words such as flowers, candy, love, passion, and valentine, a very different context is established, and a concept-oriented search engine returns hits on the subject of romance.

Keyword searches have a tough time distinguishing between words that are spelled the same way, but mean something different (i.e. hard cider, a hard stone, a hard exam, and the hard drive on your computer). This often results in hits that are completely irrelevant to your query. Some search engines also have trouble with so-called stemming — i.e., if you enter the word “big,” should they return a hit on the word, “bigger?” What about singular and plural words? What about verb tenses that differ from the word you entered by only an “s,” or an “ed”?

Search engines also cannot return hits on keywords that mean the same, but are not actually entered in your query. A query on heart disease would not return a document that used the word “cardiac” instead of “heart.”

This is the most common form of text search on the Web.  Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords.

What is a keyword, exactly?  It can simply be any word on a webpage.  For example, I used the word “simply” in the previous sentence, making it one of the keywords for this particular webpage in some search engine’s index.   However, since the word “simply” has nothing to do with the subject of this webpage (i.e., how search engines work), it is not a very useful keyword.   Useful keywords and key phrases for this page would be “search,” “search engines,” “search engine methods,” “how search engines work,” “ranking” “relevancy,” “search engine tutorials,” etc.  Those keywords would actually tell a user something about the subject and content of this page.

Unless the author of the Web document specifies the keywords for her document (this is possible by using meta tags), it’s up to the search engine to determine them.  Essentially, this means that search engines pull out and index words that appear to be significant.  Since since engines are software programs, not rational human beings, they work according to rules established by their creators for what words are usually important in a broad range of documents.  The title of a page, for example, usually gives useful information about the subject of the page (if it doesn’t, it should!).  Words that are mentioned towards the beginning of a document (think of the “topic sentence” in a high school essay, where you lay out the subject you intend to discuss) are given more weight by most search engines.   The same goes for words that are repeated several times throughout the document.

Some search engines index every word on every page. Others index only part of the document.

Full-text indexing systems generally pick up every word in the text except commonly occurring stop words such as “a,” “an,” “the,” “is,” “and,” “or,” and “www.”  Some of the search engines discriminate upper case from lower case; others store all words without reference to capitalization.

SELECT cats.id as cat_id, GROUP_CONCAT(keyword ORDER BY keyword DESC SEPARATOR ‘,’) as keywords FROM YOURPREFIX_categories cats, YOURPREFIX_keywords kws WHERE cats.id = kws.cat_id GROUP BY cats.id