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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.

The optimal keyword density doesn’t appear to have changed but rather appears to have declined in value altogether. Sites with low keyword densities are starting to appear more often for phrases based more on their links than their content and also overall site relevancy.

While the importance of a specific keyword density on a page has declined, this has been countered by an increasing importance of relevancy throughout the site. Google is opting to assign relevancy based more on the overall content of the site rather than a single page. General directories will be showing up less and less in exchange for topic-specific directories. Additionally, sites with a central theme carried throughout the majority of pages will tend to rank over sites with a specific page or even section on a topic.

Internal links are carrying a solid weight in attaching relevancy to specific internal pages. Properly worded internal links, preferably built into the content of your site (see note on natural links above) will add weight to those internal pages and increase the likelihood of those pages ranking for specific secondary phrases.

Press releases have short lived usefulness in terms of news search because after a few weeks or a month, they get displaced by new news. It depends on how they are distributed and published. If there’s a goal to rank well on competitor names, there are other things you can do that will be more effective. I don’t think ranking for competitor names is a productive strategy as ranking well for things that are meaningful for your audience.

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).

The Google Search Quality Team is keeping its promise to explain more about how they conduct their work. As usual and expected, it’s fantastically vague, but since a chunk of our readers at any given time are new to search, it’s worth going over.

Writing on the Official Google blog, Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow on the Core Ranking Team, defines Google ranking:

“Google ranking is a collection of algorithms used to find the most relevant documents for a user query. We do this for hundreds of millions of queries a day, from a collection of billions and billions of pages. These algorithms are run for every query entered into most of Google’s search services. While our web search is the most used Google search service and the most widely known, the same ranking algorithms are also used - with some modifications - for other Google search services, including Images, News, YouTube, Maps, Product Search, Book Search, and more.”

Then he gave three philosophies that the Core Ranking Team follows:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

Singhal says that the team strives for simplicity in their architecture, something that Twitter has been struggling with lately. Obviously, with all the queries conducted and the massive amount of content to be indexed, it coud be easy to piece together a very complex architecture (similar to Google’s woes with their ad products). With approximately 10 ranking updates per week, Singhal says the team takes simplicity in architecture into consideration in every single update.

Singhal also emphasized philosophy #3 - that Google does not hand edit results.

“You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us.”

2007 will be remembered by most webmasters and SEO’s as the year that Google publicly started the paid link crackdown.

2008 will be the year that this crackdown really starts to have an effect on the sites that consumers see when they perform searches on Google.

Google is getting better and better at detecting paid links. They have removed the ability for thousands of sites to pass PageRank and even reduced the ability of some sites to rank for their own names. 2008 will see every site that continues to publicly sell links receive harsh penalties in both search engine rankings and PR passing ability.

The knock on effect of this will be that sites who relied on paid links will gradually slip further and further down the rankings and be replaced by sites that spent 2007 carrying out aggressive viral marketing to build natural links. As these natural links start to age and gain trust and the top ranking sites lose links by the thousand we will see rankings change dramatically.

Most high quality sites will have been attracting links from mainstream media sites in 2007 so we won’t see many big names missing from the rankings, the knock on effect being that consumers will be remain happy with Google.

I also see the reliance on domain trust being turned back up a notch in 2008 as Google gets better at assigning trust to domains. Previously the fact trust was based on link age meant that newer sites struggled slightly and Google was forced to introduce the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm to improve results for topical searches. With paid links removed from the mix Google can assign trust based on links gained over the past year with a much greater confidence than ever before resulting in higher quality results and happier webmasters. A win win situation.

In 2007 we saw sites that regularly publish news and blog posts being granted almost instant spidering and extremely quick indexing. Trusted domains could get rankings for fresh keywords within an hour of publishing a new article. Google struggles to update it’s search results in real time and in 2008 I see the search results for breaking news queries almost mirroring the results seen in Google News.

The current reliance on domain trust is very good at removing spam but isn’t always very good at giving relevant results. Is Wikipedia always a useful result to have? Google thinks so, even if the article is useless. During 2008 I expect Google to increase the integration of toolbar and social bookmark data as well as link data on a page by basis to decide whether individual articles on sites like Wikipedia and mainstream news websites are worthy of good rankings. An article on the BBC would normally outrank a Daily Mail article thanks to internal links and domain trust but if the Daily Mail article has links from thousands of high quality blogs and 50,000 social bookmarks Google should be able to tell that this article is a more popular and useful result.

These occur when a search engine treats www.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.com, and yourdomain.com/index.html as different web sites. When Google does this, it flags the different copies as duplicate content, and penalizes them. If yourdomain.com is not penalized and all other sites link to your web site using www.yourdomain.com, then the version left in the index will have no ranking. These are basic issues that other major search engines, such as Yahoo and MSN, have no problem dealing with. Google’s reputation as the world’s greatest search engine (self-ranked as a ten on a scale of one to ten) is hindered by its inability to resolve basic indexing issues.

What to watch out for with some SEO companies

First of all, when you are choosing a search engine optimization company you want to find one that has a website with up-to-date information. If you are on a website and see a company stating that Yahoo charges $199 per year to index your site, this is old information. Yahoo now charges $299 per year. If the SEO website you are on states Alltheweb.com or Altavista.com have a basic free submit service, this is out-of-date information. These two search engines have gone over to the “dark side” and have joined Overture in the pay-per-click business model.

Of all of the websites on the Internet that should display the latest information, the SEO companies should be at the top of this list. This is our game. Old information on any website is bad news (except for archived information that is).

Some search engine optimization companies will guarantee that you see significant results within 15 days for a new website. This is an unrealistic statement that no reputable SEO company would make. Most significant results from search engine optimization and submission will occur in months, not days. Some search engines like Google and MSN may index your site within 30 days, but if you have a new site, your search engine placement will be in a sort of “holding tank” for a while and may be buried in the search engine database for another 30-60 days. Sure, your site may be listed, in short order but it will take additional time to gain prominence in the search engine rankings.

Also, some search engine optimization companies will guarantee newbies high-ranking results on low-traffic keywords that have little competition in the search engines. If you are an SEO company who is not concerned about your customer, this approach makes sense. There are fewer high-traffic keywords than low-traffic keywords and the high-traffic keywords generally have much more competition.

There is an SEO scam on the Internet that consumers need to be aware of called the “I’ll host your optimized pages” scam. In the “I’ll host your optimized pages” scam you do not have control of your own web pages and basically pay ransom to the host company on an ongoing basis. Once you miss a payment your web pages may disappear or the optimization you had previous paid for will be wiped clean.

Have you been unfortunate enough to receive the SEO spam scam? This is the email scam that starts out, “I’ve noticed you are not listed on some search engines.” You may have gotten this email even though you are listed number 1 on all of the major search engines. First, any reputable SEO company will not spam you to gain business. The first quest of any SEO company is to try to get to the top of the search engines, not send out spam. Second, this email is not specific to you or your company. Like all spam, the spammers send out thousands of emails hoping a small percentage pay off for big profits. Many of the reputable SEO sites now have ethics statements on their sites. Ethical website optimization includes no cloaking, no deceptive practices and no spamming.

This list is not comprehensive so it is a good idea to ask your SEO company questions upfront and that you receive answers to your satisfaction before you jump onboard. Also, if you have had any bad experiences with some SEO companies not covered here, please send us an email so that we may include what to watch out for in this section and warn other consumers.

A link campaign is another way to increase your site ranking. One of the things a that a search engine calculates is how many sites in their database are linked to the site that is being optimized. Keep in mind that even though the quantity of sites linked to the site being optimized is important, the quality is probably more important.

If the sites that are linked to the site being optimized are banned by search engines or have negative content, they can actually harm your ranking severely. A good rule of thumb is to avoid controvesial sites such as adult links, gambling, and prescription drugs (unless your site is related), and or sites that are notorious for spamming.

When deciding whether or not to trade links with a particular site, try to find sites that have information relevant to yours. Considerably less “weight” in relevance is given to inbound links from sites that are not related to your site. So, in short, links from quality sites are a must.

Finding quality sites is tedious and risky. Everything from finding high PR sites to getting spam complaints makes this an error-prone task. But, it is necessary, so we scavenged the Internet for the solution.

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.