Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

Search engines are internet venues where BILLIONS of people congregate to search for information. The most prominent search engine giants are Google and Yahoo. The kind of traffic these dot-com companies receive per hour is phenomenal.

So naturally, companies would gravitate towards placing their links and sites in an attempt to garner more visits to their web sites.

In order to maximize ranking and PLACEMENT, companies have used tools such as search engine optimization or SEO. Search engine optimization is the method or process of improving a web site’s ranking in a search engine listing.

Legitimate search engine optimization practices focus on the improvement of a page’s ranking in the search engine list by improving site content, usability and using legitimate methos of promotion through web phenomena such as viral marketing.

Search engines all use complex algorithms in keeping their relevancy in the web and to keep illegal and abusive search engine optimization methods from prospering. However, “black hat” SEO users will always be around so it is expected that search engine giant such as Google and Yahoo will continue to make more complex algorithms to filter the garbage out.

Search engines display different kinds of listings on a result page. The more common ones are adverts, paid inclusion, and organic listings. Of all these listings, SEO concerns itself foremost with organic listings for a variety of keywords. This can increase the quality and quantity or visitors to a desired web site.

This is where things start to get complicated.
Search engines are trickier than they look!  You’ll discover this the first time you enter a query on C++, the programming language.  At least of the Web search engines will essentially say, “Huh?”

C++ is not a word.  It’s a letter followed by two characters that might, depending on the index, be regarded merely as punctuation.  Many text search engines have trouble handling input of this type.  Many don’t deal too well with numbers, either.  So much for “007,” “R2D2,”or “Catch-22.”

Important Note:  This problem is no longer as bad as it used to be.  I’m now finding relevant hits for C++ on a majority of search engines sites.

Here’s another example of a text string search engines hate:  To be or not to be.  Just about anyone who finished junior high school will be able to tell you where the phrase comes from and (possibly!) what it means.  But some search engines choke because all the words in the phrase are stop words–i.e., unimportant words too short and too common to be considered relevant strings on which to search.   However, if you enclose the query in quotation marks, forcing the search engine to find the words, “to be or not to be” in that precise order, most search engines can  recognize the phrase as a famous quotation from Hamlet.

Let’s take a less obvious example.  Suppose you’re a fan of murder mysteries and you want to search the Web for the home pages of all your favorite authors in that genre.  If you simply enter the words “mystery” and “writer,” most search engines will return hyperlinks to all Web documents that contain the word “mystery” or the word, “writer.”  This will probably include hundreds–or even thousands–of URLs, most of which will have no relevance to your search. If you enter the words as a phrase, however, you stand a better chance of getting some good hits.

However, as search technology advances, this is not as much of a problem as it was a couple of years ago. Many search engines will now automatically apply the “adjacency” operator when responding to a two-word query. This means that they will indeed look for documents in which your two words appear next to each other.

If you understand how search engines organize information and run queries, you can maximize your chances of getting hits on URLs that matter.

Most search engines handle words and simple phrases.  In its simplest form, text search looks for pages with lots of occurrences of each of the words in a query, stopwords aside.  The more common a word is on a page, compared with its frequency in the overall language, the more likely that page will appear among the search results.  Hitting all the words in a query is a lot better than missing some.

Search engines also make some efforts to “understand” what is meant by the query words.  For example, most search engines now offer optional spelling correction.  And increasingly they search not just on the words and phrases actually entered, but the also use stemming to search for alternate forms of the words (e.g., speak, speaker, speaking, spoke).  Teoma-based engines are also offering refinement by category, ala the now-defunct Northern Light.  However, Excite-like concept search has otherwise not made a comeback yet, since the concept categories are too unstable.

When ranking results, search engines give special weight to keywords that appear:

* High up on the page
* In headings
* In BOLDFACE (at least in Inktomi)
* In the URL
* In the title (important)
* In the description
* In the ALT tags for graphics.
* In the generic keywords metatags (only for Inktomi, and only a little bit even for them)
* In the link text for inbound links.

More weight is put on the factors that the site owner would find it awkward to fake, such as inbound link text, page title (which shows up on the SERP — Search Engine Results Page), and description.

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.

First, Google News is not the major player for news releases, it’s Yahoo News that has the greater market share of news search. In some cases it does make sense to have two variations of a news release. One version is distributed via a news wire service and another version is posted to the client’s online newsroom. Content related to the release can be created for pitching, or a social media news release might be appropriate as well as alternative information formats for social news.

There are a lot of applications for variations of the same message as far as a news release. As far as there being a conflict between what’s appropriate for journalists and what’s meaningful for news search engines, you have to focus on the audience not on the mechanism for distribution. Don’t compromise your message just for search engines.

It’s a strategic decision. The keyword insight that comes from keyword analysis that you might do with a SEO campaign, where you can tap in to tools that monitor what people are searching on can be very useful in optimizing news related content.

The result of the keyword research is to create a glossary of phrases with metrics like popularity, relevance and competitiveness. You can then leverage the glossary across corporate communications. Try to get any digital asset that’s created whether its press releases, web pages, product pages or announcements to use phrases from the glossary. Get people responsible for creating the content to use the glossaries and find out what variations of phrases are in demand so that they’re using language that’s both relevant and popular.

Often times, people like to be creative in PR and direct marketing and that does not always bode well for search. Copywriters or content producers try to be clever or ironic or funny and those ways of communicating are not as meaningful to a machine or an algorithm as being literal in your word usage. That is a practical application of search for media relations. You optimize content according to what people are looking for.

Let’s say you’re conducting media relations for a client for an interview and the company web site and press releases are already optimized for certain keywords. You can coach the client to use those keywords in the interview. What happens a lot of times is that when that interview goes to print or even online, people remember the topics of the article but not necessarily the names of the companies involved. They’ll go to Google and search for those topics and when the company web site is properly optimized, it ranks highly for search phrases gleaned from the article.

People are looking for information, they use a variety of types of search such as Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask as the predominant channels. There’s also news search , blog search and search within social media sites. Any time something can be searched on, that’s an optimization opportunity. Increasing awareness comes from making it easier for people to find you when they’re looking for information.

Google simply puts a 30 days block upon sites that use trivial keyword tricks (hidden text/div or text in the same color as a background), so don’t bother trying this kind of stuff. Detecting and catching a robot with javascript or IP cloacing or using linkfarms to boost your Pagerank are considered even more illegal. They could get you put out of the ranking for good.

Just remember that a robot will be optimized over and over to be able to judge webpages the way a human does. In the end, if you make sure your site is clean and accessible and your content is good and relevant, websurfers will find you and bytes will flow.

Of course this article only covers the rough basics of search engine optimization. If you feel like I have missed out on something, or you’ve got an excellent hint to share, please feel free to post them in the forum! The diagnostics guide from GoogleRankings.com is a great resource for more information (there’s a list of issues at the left side).

First, make sure your site, especially your homepage, is frequently updated. Google seems to like frequently changing websites, this might be why weblogs tend to score very well at Google.

Second, make sure to have a lot of incoming and outgoing links (especially to and from big, relevant, high-quality websites). If something can be a link, make it a link! By doing so, Google will rank you pages higher as others who are not that embedded. This link relevancy system is called Google Pagerank. You can check out your pagerank at pagerank.net. Pagerank works on a scale from 1 to 10. If you have a rank of 1 or 2, you’re likely to be way down the search results. If you have a higher rank, your site will appear at the top of the search results, even if there are a lot of competitors for your specific keywords or business.

Third, make sure your site is clean and correctly formatted, preferably in web standards / xhtml. Avoid certain technologies the Google robot doesn’t understand. Don’t use a frameset for your website. Robots may skip frames or only index the upper one (refering will be a mess anyway). Avoid javascript or Flash menus, only a.href links are followed by a robot. Additionally, all javascript and comments are skipped by search robots.

For the same reason, full-flash websites should be avoided if search accessibility is important (actually, if ANY accessibility is important). If you do feel the strong need to use Flash, all you can do is to make sure you have a keyword descriptive URL and page title.

Here’s tutorial on how you can use frames on your website for search engine optimization benefits when you need to hide something from Search engines but you still want your visitors to see it.

Never thought that I could use frames on a webpage as an SEO tactic. I probably would have never even tried it but my recent project has shown me that it is not just possible but it is a good option in certain situations. I had one of those exceptional situations recently so I decided to share.