Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is defined as (in my own words):

“The process of finding out the best keywords for a web site and by the use of optimizing the web site along with other off-page work making that web site attain a higher position in the search engine result pages (SERPs) for those selected words.”

Although the exact calculations used by the search engines are kept secret, there is lot of knowledge and observations in this field from thousands of webmasters worldwide.

It could be said to be a branch of online marketing. In general terms you can say that it means to make a web site more visible and make it look important in the eyes of search engines.

Not being familiar with SEO and not applying it compared to actually doing the right things can make a huge difference in terms of visitors to your web site.

One of the things I’m constantly amazed at is how many web publishers miss one of the easiest ways to maximize their positioning in Search Engines by simply including the keywords that they’d like to be found for in their post titles.

I spend a lot of time looking at online articles written on blogs, newspapers and websites and some days it seems that every second or third one has a title that is either cryptic, clever or cute at the expense of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

To put it bluntly - when it comes to blog SEO I believe that your page and post titles are incredibly important. Google in particularly seems to value the words in your title incredibly highly.

Whilst I too feel the temptation to be clever with my post titles from time to time (and sometimes give into it) - I know that if I don’t get traffic from search engines then a fairly significant part of my income will disappear.

So if you’re writing about a new ‘Pink Widget’ have a think about the words that a potential reader will use to search for in Google to find the information you’re presenting. How would you search the net for information on ‘Pink Widgets’?

Without a doubt we’d all include ‘pink widget’ in the search we did. We might refine it by including a third word like ‘price’, ‘review’, ‘advice’, ‘problems’ etc (which may be worthwhile words to include either in the title or body of content) but the best words to include in the title are ‘pink widgets’ - if you don’t you’ve got virtually no chance of being found for that search term unless no one else is writing about them.

Keep in mind that research shows that people search the web a lot for names of products and people and that they are often quite specific their searches. If you’re writing about something specific make your title reflect this.

Of course it’s worth saying that it’s not as simple as just stuffing your titles with keywords - for one they need to make sense (no one will click on a link in Google if its a collection of unrelated words), secondly if you put too many words in your title you run the risk of decreasing their power and confusing the search engines and thirdly you’ll disillusion your regular readers if you mess with stuffing titles with too many words.

You can use the asterisk (*) character to indicate a wildcard search. This is useful when you are trying to match a term that may or may not be plural or might use one of several verb tenses. For example chemi* will find results containing words that begin with ‘chemi’ (e.g. chemical, chemistry, chemist). You must have at least four non-wildcard characters in a word before you introduce a wildcard. This is not necessary for plurals because a search on cat will also return results containing the word cats, and a search on cats will return results containing the word cat.

Some search engines support two wildcards. The asterisk (*) is used to replace multiple characters and the percent (%) symbol is used to replace only one character. For example psych*ist will find all results which contain words that begin and end with ‘psych’ and ‘ist’ (e.g. psychologist, psychiatrist), and gene%logy will return sites containing words beginning with ‘gene’ and ending with ‘logy,’ separated by a single letter (e.g. genealogy and geneology) which is useful for commonly misspelled words. You can also use multiple wildcards within a single word.

Use the minus sign (-) before a word or the word NOT to require that it not be found in the search results. For example, giants -baseball (include a space between the first word and the - symbol) or giants NOT baseball lists sites containing “giants” but not “baseball.” Some engines like AND NOT (two words) or ANDNOT (one word) better than just NOT.

You can type the plus sign (+) or the word AND before a word to require that it be found in all of the search results. For example, giants +baseball (include a space between the first word and the + symbol) or giants AND baseball returns all listings that contain “baseball” and “giants” but not necessarily together.

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.

Excite used to be the best-known general-purpose search engine site on the Web that relies on concept-based searching.  It is now effectively extinct.

Unlike keyword search systems, concept-based search systems try to determine what you mean, not just what you say.  In the best circumstances, a concept-based search returns hits on documents that are “about” the subject/theme you’re exploring, even if the words in the document don’t precisely match the words you enter into the query.

How did this method work?  There are various methods of building clustering systems, some of which are highly complex, relying on sophisticated linguistic and artificial intelligence theory that we won’t even attempt to go into here.  Excite used to a numerical approach.  Excite’s software determines meaning by calculating the frequency with which certain important words appear.  When several words or phrases that are tagged to signal a particular concept appear close to each other in a text, the search engine concludes, by statistical analysis, that the piece is “about” a certain subject.

For example, the word heart, when used in the medical/health context, would be likely to appear with such words as coronary, artery, lung, stroke, cholesterol, pump, blood, attack, and arteriosclerosis.  If the word heart appears in a document with others words such as flowers, candy, love, passion, and valentine, a very different context is established, and a concept-oriented search engine returns hits on the subject of romance.

1 Searching in a Range

So, you are searching for Sexy Singles between the age of 18 and 25 or looking for a cake which weighs between 100 and 200 pounds? Google has a way which lets you specify the range you want to find results in.

The trick is to use “..”double dotsbetween the range. For example, Cake 100..200 pound or Sexy Singles 18..25 years.

I don’t really want to give the exact query I used to test this trickI am sure some of you are reading it from workbut don’t forget to specify the unit. Google is smart but not “THAT” smart.

2 Synonym Search

Want to search for the term and its synonyms at the same time? Google makes it easier for you than you having to search every synonym individually.

The easy way that Google offers is just to add the “~” sign in front of your search term and voila!

For example if you want to search for funny pictures and its synonyms then just search for ~funny ~pictures and Google will return the results for funny picture, funny image, stupid pictures, comic image etc. Get the idea?

3 Remove Some Words

If you want to omit certain words from the search results then you can simply add the “-” sign in front of your search term.

Lets say that you search for Clinton on Google, you will get results for Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and even Monika Lewinsky. But if you don’t want search results for Hillary, just add - Hillary and you will see results only for Bill Clinton and Monika Lewinsky.

4 Let Google Define It

You can add “define:” in front of a word and Google will find its definitions from around the Internet. Just try searching for define:css and you will see what I mean.

5 Spelling Uncertainty? Let Google Handle it.

If you are uncertain about the spelling of a word you are searching just add the “?” sign in front of it and it will show you results for all possible word combinations. If you search sun?day, you will get results about sun earth day and the word sun-day too!

6 Get Stock Updates.

Add “stocks:” operator in front of the STOCK TICKER and Google will link to a page showing stock information for those symbols. For instance, [stocks: goog yhoo] will show information about Google and Yahoo.

Know More Google Tricks? Add em below.