Posts Tagged ‘rankings’

The Essence of Article Development and Article Submission

Friday, September 26th, 2008

Content - The internet is stuffed with content. Short literary pieces, long novels, lovely poems, extravagant marketing lines, or simple classified ads – the internet revolves around content. It is one of the more popular, if not the most important, factors in web search technology.

Content plays a vital role in the filing or classifying of different websites according to their different categories. Keywords, existing within a particular content, are some of the driving forces behind Search Engine Optimization and other web technologies implemented by major Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. It is real for many websites that the quality of their page content can affect their search engine rankings as well as audience traffic.

A website with quality and catchy content tends to get more attention online.

Many people online are seeking for quality information from various sources. If your website or article provides the right details that many users need, chances are your website or article would be visited often and would get very good rankings online. However if you have a poorly written article or page content, then users would most likely shun away from your website and just forget about it.

Article Submission is the strategy of sending out articles to article directories so that they can be viewed and shared with other websites online. Article Submission is only an effective strategy if the article or content being promoted is also worth reading. If an article is catchy or well-written then chances are, many websites would love re-posting your article on their web pages. And this is where real action begins.

In the world of SEO or Search Engine Optimization and Online marketing, content that is promoted on other websites tend to benefit the source or the one who wrote the content.

In Search Engine Optimization, if your articles contain various links that point to your website, and if many people re-posted your article with the links on their websites, then you’ve hit a very good goal. For these inbound links coming from your articles on other people’s websites contribute to your page’s SEO score. And the higher your score, the better your rank in the Search Engines.

Article Submission is really effective if you submit quality content to multiple article directories. If you submit quality articles to a hundred article directories everyday, then you’ve created plenty of opportunities for people to have access or to read your article. This does not only help with your marketing, but can also improve your website ranking.

However, it should be duly noted, that your article should be placed under the proper category when submitting it. There are often penalties given to those websites which post or re-post articles which are not categorically related. So it’s best to shun away from that practice.

Another thing to remember when doing article development and article submission is to emphasize on the keywords which relate to your website. Having sufficient and high-quality keywords can impact your article status on various search engines and directories. The more optimized your keyword is, the better the classification and ranking on the search engines.

So remember that creating content or articles online, helps your website. Submitting those articles to various article directories can also greatly affect your website rankings on the Search Engines.

Search engine optimization-The Way Backlinks Are Counted

Friday, July 18th, 2008

Similar to the history of your site, the history of the links to your site have gained importance. As was noted in Google’s patent application #20050071741 titled, “Information retrieval based on historical data,” links, like sites, gain weight over time. This point was further clarified in the latest update as sites with longstanding links gained strength while sites with many new links did not see significant ground gained. The “sandbox” on links is functioning in fractions in that after a period of time a link will gain part of it’s weight, after a bit longer, it will gain more, etc. (the exact length of time is of course a closely guarded secret by Google and likely changes as their algorithm does). This means your link building today won’t create any substantial effect on your Google rankings until months down the road.

Additionally, the relevancy of links to your site is still important however Google’s ability to determine relevancy appears to have improved. Pages no longer have to containing the exact keyword phrases to be relevant but rather have to be from related industries. For example, a link to an SEO site from a web design site would be considered relevant even though the keywords on the page are not specifically related to SEO.

Natural links have gained weight over unnatural links. Links that are contained within content areas of a page will be weighted more strongly that links that appear alone or in a directory-style (like reciprocal links pages) as they are considered more natural. When you are having links built to your site try to get them placed within the content (within the description portion of your reciprocal link for example). Also, in link building you will want to insure you’re varying the terms of your anchor text. Creating hundreds of links with identical anchor text will quickly be detected as a link building effort (i.e. not natural) and thus will carry little weight. Different anchor text for your links will appear more natural and thus will have a more positive impact on your rankings.

Search engine optimization-Add new content all the time

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Sites that have new content added on a regular basis are seen as more reliable than sites that rarely do. This also helps you to increase the amount of relevant content on your site, which also improves your rankings.

Seo-Check your keywords

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Once you think you have found the right keywords and you’ve written your text so that these keywords appear all over the page, it’s time to check out how your site is doing. At googlerankings.com you can check your position in Google for the keywords you have chosen. Top of the ranks? Great! Not even close to it? Don’t worry, here are some tips to improve your rankings.

Seo:Create Robots.txt file

Monday, July 14th, 2008

The robots.txt file will instruct search engine robots what pages and/or folders on your blog or website should be or should NOT be crawled and indexed. Most Content Management Software (Wordpress, Joomla, etc.) will have files and folders that are not relevant for search engines (like images or admin files) and you really don’t want them to crawl them because there is no relevant content on them so creating a simple robots.txt file can actually improve your website crawlability and therefore rankings and organic traffic.

Seo:Choosing A Hosting Company

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Choosing the right hosting company is a must in achieving top search engine rankings for several reasons. First, you want to choose a reputable company that has 99.7% uptime or better so that when the search engine spiders and robots make it to your website, your website will be up and operating. If you hosting company tends to have a considerable amount of downtime, then these spiders and robots may just visit your website when it is down and not come back to it for weeks or months.

This is a huge price to pay for being cheap! In this case, being cheap will cost you more money. It is better to choose a hosting company will give you, say 100mb of disc space for your site (most websites come nowhere near to this size and if they do, they are either a major mega website or they have not been optimized for size or speed properly) and the most bandwidth you can get - 30 or 40 gigs, for instance.

If you go with a cheaper hosting site you may get only 10mb of disc space for your site and 1gig bandwidth. The problem with this scenario is that if you go over the disc space or bandwidth limitations, your hosting company will most likely charge you lots more dough. Sometimes a cheaper hosting company will shut your site down if immediate payment is not made. Once again the search engine spider or robot may just pass your by. So it is better to buy more than you need and not have to worry about limitations.

It is also generally a better idea to purchase your domain name at a different place than you have host your website. Some web hosts will do both, but the problem is if you wish to change hosts some website hosts will charge you a hefty transfer fee for you domain name and may take more time than desirable for the transfer. Having your domain name hosted separately gives you more flexibility.

Free hosts can cost you when it comes to search engine rankings. If you have a company like geocities host your website, most likely your website is called www.geocities.com/yoursite.html or some variation. This is not optimal for two reasons. First, if you exceed your bandwidth for the month, this host will shut down your website and put a fancy little splash screen in place of your website stating you have exceeded your bandwidth.

So, if you website is popular, which most likely is your goal, you will spend more time with your website down to customers and search engine spiders and robots. Second, search engine spiders and robots generally give more weight to your homepage than to your subordinate pages. In this case, your homepage is actually geocities.com and your main page is a subordinate page to this homepage. Most search engines will give your subordinate homepage less weight than someone else’s homepage at yoursite.com.

Search Engine Optimization

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

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.

SEO:Relevancy Rankings

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Most of the search engines return results with confidence or relevancy rankings.  In other words, they list the hits according to how closely they think the results match the query.  However, these lists often leave users shaking their heads on confusion, since, to the user, the results may seem completely irrelevant.

Why does this happen?  Basically it’s because search engine technology has not yet reached the point where humans and computers understand each other well enough to communicate clearly.

Most search engines use search term frequency as a primary way of determining whether a document is relevant.  If you’re researching diabetes and the word “diabetes” appears multiple times in a Web document, it’s reasonable to assume that the document will contain useful information.  Therefore, a document that repeats the word “diabetes” over and over is likely to turn up near the top of your list.

If your keyword is a common one, or if it has multiple other meanings, you could end up with a lot of irrelevant hits.  And if your keyword is a subject about which you desire information, you don’t need to see it repeated over and over–it’s the information about that word that you’re interested in, not the word itself.

Some search engines consider both the frequency and the positioning of keywords to determine relevancy, reasoning that if the keywords appear early in the document, or in the headers, this increases the likelihood that the document is on target.  For example, one method is to rank hits according to how many times your keywords appear and in which fields they appear (i.e., in headers, titles or plain text).  Another method is to determine which documents are most frequently linked to other documents on the Web.  The reasoning here is that if other folks consider certain pages important, you should, too.

If you use the advanced query form on AltaVista, you can assign relevance weights to your query terms before conducting a search.  Although this takes some practice, it essentially allows you to have a stronger say in what results you will get back.

As far as the user is concerned, relevancy ranking is critical, and becomes more so as the sheer volume of information on the Web grows.  Most of us don’t have the time to sift through scores of hits to determine which hyperlinks we should actually explore. The more clearly relevant the results are, the more we’re likely to value the search engine.

New SEO Term Spibalance

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

I’ve been doing SEO for a very long time now so I thought of helping webmasters with a very common issue. The problem is that most webmasters see their site jumping in and out of the index. Today you check and your website is in the index. Next day you wake up in the morning and guess what, your website is no longer there. So why does this happen?

You are not giving spiders what they want.

A similar thing happens when sometimes you are ranked on page three for a keyword, then you go back to page nine, then again to page three and so forth. Your rankings sort of play around, you never know where your website really ranks.

In both cases above, one very common thing is happening which I refer to as spibalance.

Just like a balance calculates which side has the largest weight so do spiders. The balance in our case has your website on one side and what spiders require in order to index your website on the other side. When you give them enough of what they need the side with your website on goes down. In other words you get indexed.

If you do not give spiders what they want, the balance will remain neutral and you do not get indexed. So what is that they want to index your website?

It is backlinks.

Now at first you start getting backlinks bit by bit, so the balance starts moving from side to side, sometimes you hit the target and you get indexed. But then again you get de indexed until you have completely out weighed the spiders requirements to index you. Think of the requirements as lots of backlinks located on the other side of the balance.

This same thing does apply to your rankings as well.

But instead of just backlinks, there are other factors that you need to give spiders in order to get the rankings and keep your position. Then improving as well your rankings. In this case the requirements to improve your rankings may increase as well, depends on what your competitors are doing. If you are going to outrank them, you need to get more links then they are getting. Aim to do better then what they are doing because on the balance spiders requirements most often are exactly what the websites that are in the number one position have.

This means the number of links, the quality, the anchor text they use and so forth.

To get indexed for example you do not need to worry about what anchor text to use.

However understand the concept, give the spiders what they want and remember when this happens it is because you are on a spibalance. You learn how many backlinks is enough by experience. Usually doing article submission to a hundred websites is enough. Directory submission is less powerful so you may want to do more submissions than just a hundred, probably a thousand.

Article submission can be done using software. This should be done on regular basis, because it is not just good to get indexed but also to improve your rankings.

This is easy, the bottom line is the more backlinks you get the better. Then it depends on you and the amount of work you can do.

Organic SEO

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term associated with web pages and their rankings. It is a technique incorporated into web pages to improve their rankings in the major search engines. An effective SEO technique when implemented can list a web page earlier or higher in search engine listings, thus increasing the traffic to your web page with users who are searching with a specific keyword, phrase or topic. Various algorithms are implemented to catch the attention of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Live Search. One such optimization technique is the organic SEO.

SEO professionals use different optimization techniques with web pages such as text optimization, image optimization, flash optimization and geographic optimization. Flash optimization works around recoding HTML codes in flash to get pages with majority flash content to be search engine friendly. This is one of the latest optimization techniques in SEO. Earlier it was difficult for search engines to read and index pages with flash content. Geographic optimization is aimed to include web pages in search listings for users who are searching for services in a particular county, city or state.

SEO services can be implemented either as a stand-alone service or as part of online marketing. The strategy often involves adding specific keywords and meta-tags to pages. SEO professionals can embed these tags within HTML codes in such a way that they will be indexed by crawler programs used by search engines to list pages.

Two major approaches in web page optimization are the white hat SEO (Organic SEO) and black hat SEO. The white hat SEO implements algorithms in an ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ manner according to the ethical standards in coding. These algorithms are designed to maintain the higher search rankings and will be effective for a long period. On the contrary, the black hat SEO employs fake techniques aimed at getting an immediate ranking, but the rankings will be temporary and will have a shorter life span.

A good SEO consultant team can review and recommend modifications to be made in existing design and content. They can also design and implement pages from scratch, with search engine optimization techniques incorporated. Quality copywriting services along with unique design, easy navigation aids and marketing services are all part of effective SEO.

All major search engines are supporting organic SEO methods implemented in web pages. The majority of web pages being listed in major search results are those which have implemented effective SEO services. A small investment in effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques will eventually make your web page more conspicuous and operate in a highly competitive and profitable manner with great returns guaranteed.