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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.

What is Link Popularity?

Link popularity literally means the popularity of links to your site on other web sites. The more popular your site is - especially with well ranked sites, the higher will your site be ranked. For this reason we prefer to call link popularity as link quality. Most search engines decide the popularity of your individual site pages so you need to build up links to all your major pages. Thus page ranking will vary for your site pages and keywords.

Search Engine Optimization

To optimize your site for search engines, your pages should have relevant content with all related keywords appearing as valid reading matter. If your site doesn’t have quality content or you have just repeated your keywords without any sense, your page rank will be affected or worse you could be black listed by the search engines.

Use your primary and secondary keywords in the anchor text of links when linking to other blog posts or to other pages of your blog. Keyword in links have more importance than simple text.

* Quality Content - There are all kinds of link generating systems out there but in my opinion the best way to get links to your blog is to write quality content that people will want to read. You can solicit links with others or sign up for different link building programs or even buy text links on other sites but the cheapest and probably safest approach is to build inbound links in a natural organic way as others link to your quality content.
* Notify Relevant Bloggers of your content - Whilst I don’t advocate spamming other bloggers and asking for links - I would recommend that if you write a quality post on a topic that you know will interest another blogger that it might be worth shooting them a short and polite email letting them know of your post. Don’t be offended if they don’t link up, but you might just find that they do and that in addition to the direct traffic that the link generates that it helps build your own page rank in the search engines (more on letting other bloggers know of your posts here).
* Directories - Another way to generating inbound links is to submit your links to directories. I know of webmasters who swear by the benefits of such a strategy - the first thing that they do when starting a new site is to do the rounds of directories - submitting links to key pages with appropriate keywords in the links. There are loads of directories out there - many of which offer a free submission. Ari Paparo has compiled a list of blog directories that you might want to start with.
* Inter-link your Blogs - Increasingly bloggers are starting or joining blog networks to enjoy the benefits of multiple sites and writers working together. One of the advantages of networks of sites is that they usually link to one another. In doing so you have complete control over how your sites are linked to from multiple domains. It is worth noting that you should be careful with this approach - if all your sites are hosted on the one server many think that Search Engines will work out what you’re doing and the impact will be lessened.
* Buy Links - Many professional web masters have a budget to purchase links from other highly ranked and and relevant sites. I won’t go into this too much here but you might like to read more about it in my recent post On Buying Text Links. update: I’d encourage anyone wanting to buy links to think very carefully about this. Google have been cracking down on sites that use this practice. They can’t catch everyone but some have been caught and seem to have been penalized for doing it.
* Swap Links - Similarly many bloggers swap links with other bloggers. Sometimes this happens pretty naturally (you see someone linking to you so you link back) but in many cases the links are strategic ones and formally arranged between site owners. I get daily requests for such reciprocal links (I rarely act on them). Whilst there is some benefit in such link swapping I would again advise caution here as many SEO experts believe that the search engines have methods for tracking such strategies and devaluing the links. Some try to get around this by doing indirect or triangulated links. ie instead of site A and B doign a direct swap they involve other sites. So A links to C in exchange for D (also owned by C) linking to B (also owned by A) - makes your head hurt doesn’t it!?! There are also a variety of systems around that say they’ll take care of such interlinking for you - I know many who use Digital Point’s Free C0-Op Advertising system. Personally I tend to avoid such schemes and have a policy of linking to sites I think are valuable to my readers. If they link back then so be it.

Keyword in links have more importance than simple text.

Use your primary and secondary keywords in the anchor text of links when linking to other blog posts or to other pages on your main site.

Link keywords where they naturally appear in the body text, but again, don’t overdo it, or you’ll end up with spammy looking pages.

Reading Google’s patent filing it appears that they rely heavily on web site links and anchor text in their algorithm. The items below were some of the items the patent said they look for:

* Tracking of the appearance and disappearance of links over specific times
* Tracking of growth rates of links in other web sits
* Tracking of anchor text and dates established and how they change over time
* Older established links get a higher rating than newer less established links
* Fresh pages might be considered more important
* New web sites don’t normally have a lot of links, but if they come from established web sites they will be tolerated
* Older pages that don’t change very often but have incoming links growth over time can be considered fresh
* Burst link growth may indicate spamming of the index
* Anchor text should vary and not be the same from all incoming sources
* Web site link growth should be consistent and slow

It’s a well known fact that the on page contents of a web page are important to search engines. One thing that is most often over-looked however is building inbound link campaigns. According to Google, Yahoo and MSN inbound links are the single most important factor to a web sites success in ranking well and staying there.

When you optimize your web site pages you want to optimize them for keywords or keyphrases that are relevant to your industry. By doing this you are telling the search engines what keywords or keyphrases are relevant to your business.

If the keywords or keyphrases that you use are not that competitive odds are that you will get good rankings for these keywords or keyphrases. If your keywords or keyphrases are more sought after then in order to rank well you need to have inbound links coming into your web site from other web sites with those keywords or keyphrases.

The web site with the best inbound links will get the best rankings.

The way you structure the links on your website can affect your Google rankings. As we had discussed previously consider a link to your site as a vote for your site. So, based on this if you have the most links coming into your homepage then that page has a higher vote count. The higher the vote count then the higher you will come up in the search engines for that phrase. Based on this the things that you can do to increase that vote count are as follows: Make links within your site absolute, not relative, so use the full url, use the key phrases in your links that point to relative information, use a nofollow tag for links that are not important, less links on a page give the links that you do have more power, reduce 404 not found errors on your website.

The homepage of Google China now links to a special map showing china eartquake information. Translating the homepage text results in: “New! Google launched an emergency situation in the earthquake map, view the latest situation in earthquake relief”.

There are plenty of things you can do and should do to optimise your feeds aside from just clicking on a couple of Feedburner “activate” buttons. Some of the things you can do are actually the same things you do to optimise any normal web page including:

* Using keywords - Use keywords in your channel and feed item titles, anchor text for both internal and external links (be considerate of other people’s SEO efforts!), channel description, and blog posts.
* Make sure links are working properly - Use full path when linking to ensure that the links are rendered properly.
* Use H1 and H2 tags - The use of heading tags for channel and feed titles are important in order to emphasise the importance of the titles. However, if you do not insert key terms in the title then you’ll simply be emphasising words you are not optimising for.

Other things you can do to SEO for your feeds that are “feed specific” include:

* submitting your feeds to appropriate directories
* offering feeds for different categories - This is especially important if you cover a wide variety of topics. If your site/blog is very specialised you might not need to do this. Note that this is useful not only to subscribers who do not wish to be deluged by blog entries they are not interested in but also to syndicators who are only interested in specific topics.
* subscribe to your feed - This isn’t a tip to boost the number of subscribers but is important in order for you to always see exactly what your subscribers see when they view your feeds.
* use MyYahoo and MyMSN - To get your feeds indexed faster and crawled more frequently by the two search engines add your RSS feed on your MyYahoo and MyMSN pages. According to Yahoo if you do this your feed will be indexed approximately within 48 hours! You might as well try this on iGoogle although I don’t know how fast this tactic will get your feed indexed by Google. To add your feed to iGoogle click on Add Stuff, click on Add feed or gadget (at the bottom left sidebar), then paste your feed URL on the box.