Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

The three major elements of a search engines are: the spider, also called the crawler; the index or catalog; and the search engine which displays the results of your query in your browser.

The spider visits your web page, indexes it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is sometimes referred to as being “spidered” or “crawled.” The spider returns to the site every so often looking for changes.

The index is a giant database that contains a copy of every web page that the spider finds. When a web page is changed, then this database is updated with the new information.

Sometimes it takes a while for pages or changes to be added to the index. Therefore, a web page may have been “spidered” but not yet “indexed.” Until it is added to the index, it is not available to searches by the search engine.

Search engine software sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a query and ranks them in the order of what it believes is most relevant. Different search engines often produce very different results.

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.

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.

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.

Many of us webmasters don’t take time or just don’t think about setting up a custom 404 page but it seems that its much more important to setup your own custom 404 pages to avoid any missed affiliate sales, pages, or products or simply loosing your visitors to Google or someone else. It is also good Search engine Optimization practice to have your own custom 404 page

How would you like to be 1 on Google search results for keywords you want? What would that do for your business? And imagine if you don’t have to pay for it! This is biggest opportunity in 2008 for webmasters who have been doing Search Engine Optimizing (SEO), advertising or marketing them selfs to get to Number One spot on Google and Yahoo.

Header tags will tell the search engine what “words” are important in the context of your page. Using <h1>,<h2>,<h3>, etc.. tags is the best way to highlight important keywords. With that in mind consider using keywords relevant to the page’s content (theme) in your Header Tags. The best practice is to place your primary keyword in your <h1> tags and your secondary keyword into the <h2> tags.

You can think of an <h1> header tag as a title for whatever content you have on your page and you should have ONLY ONE (1) h1 tag on any page.

h2 and h3 header tags should be thought of as a sub headings for your page. You should place your 2nd most important keyword in the <h2> header tag. The <h2> tag should be placed somewhere towards the top half of your webpage, in any case below <h1> tag.
(Read more and see header tag examples in this article about Header tags.)

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.