Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

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.

Search engines come in two varieties, human-edited and spider indexed. The two major human-edited search engines (or directories as they are properly called) are the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) and Yahoo. Search engine optimization is lost on the human-edited directories. Because humans will write your title and description for your site when they place it in their directories, using both objective and subjective methods, you have no control in the SEO-world over how your website will rank in these directories.

In both DMOZ and Yahoo, you can suggest a title and description, but most often your words will be rewritten by an editor and placed in their directories according to criteria of which you will not be privy to knowing. One of the big differences between DMOZ and Yahoo is that DMOZ is free and Yahoo is a paid inclusion. With both search directories there is the possibility of not being included, but as stated before DMOZ is free and with Yahoo, if you are not included, no refund will be given.

The only types of search engine in which you have some control are the search engines, which use spiders (sometimes called robots) to read, index and rank your site. The robots (and this is plural because some search engines like Google have several) are basically software applications that travel the Internet by following links and finding websites to read and add to their databases. These robots will travel to your website if you submit your site directly to them (hand-submit) or indirectly submit (through another software submission service or application) or fail to submit (they will follow incoming links to your sites also).

Once the robot finds your site and indexes it, it will move along to other sites from your outbound links. When you site is indexed, then another process takes place and this is the process of determining your ranking for specific keyword or key-phrase searches performed upon the search engine. All of the major search engines that use robots to index websites also use complicated algorithms for determining the page rank of your site. The search engine algorithm software looks at the title and description of the website along with keyword density and prominence to name a few to see which keyword or phrase your site is optimized for (if any). Certain weight is given for each of these components and the page is ranked accordingly.

The advantages of the spider-driven search engines over the directories are that first, search engine robots will continue to index your site on a regular basis whereas the directories basically will stick with the same title and description for the life of the website. Second, a webmaster or SEO professional has control over the optimization process in relation to the search engines, whereas in the directories, optimization is mostly irrelevant. Third, the volume (and popularity) of people using the search engines far outweighs the volume using the search directories. This means that yes, the major search directories are important places to submit your website to, but the major search engines are an absolute necessity.

Guidelines for submitting to Directories

What is a Directory?

A categorized index of web sites that does not use robots is called a directory. All sites that are indexed are submitted manually. You need to submit your web site under a relevant category, after which an editor will review your site and then accept or reject your site according to its content.
Guidelines while submitting to Directories

* Good site design, fast loading pages, and informative content are very important issues.

* From the homepage of a directory take your time and find the appropriate category your site fits into. You can do a keyword search using your most important keywords or key phrases and note the category that lists these sites. That will probably be the best category for your site. You may also have multiple categories, in which case you must submit under all the suitable categories.

* Once you have found a suitable category, look out for a “Suggest a site” or an “Add URL” link. Click on this link to submit your site.

* Since Directories do not use robots, your best bet is to describe your site accurately as the final decision of adding your web site to a directory’s database rests with the editor who reviews your web site.

Top Directories

Yahoo Yahoo!

Yahoo is without a doubt the single most important index on the Internet. Make sure you follow the guidelines given above and Yahoo’s submit page instructions while submitting your site. The effort you put in now will reap huge benefits in the long run. Submit carefully!

Submit to Yahoo
Open Directory - DmozThe Open Directory - Dmoz

Lycos, AOL Search, AltaVista and HotBot feature Open Directory categories within their results pages. As ODP is now the directory listing source for many search engines, it is in the “big leagues” and is a must to submit to.

Read their instructions and submit

Web Design Directories

DesignDir.net - Web Design Directory

DesignDir.net is an industry leading web design and development directory. We bring together the best designers and their customers. URL: (http://www.designdir.net)

Submit to DesignDir.net

HotPlum.com

Top sites - Web templates, web & graphic design, flash, etc. top.hotplum.com
Business Directories
BusinessRanks.com

Complete directory of only business links. Submit to BusinessRanks.co

The top 4 search engines are as follows:

1. Google.com - The best of the best, what can we say about Google that others haven’t Read our detailed review of Google with tips on submission and ranking.
2. Yahoo.com - Yahoo is getting better and better! Their Yahoo Directory is also very popular.
3. MSN.com - Microsoft’s attempt to get a piece of the search engine pie. They are also catching up fast.
4. Teoma.com - A search engine to look out for. Their results do seem to vary considerably from the above.

In order to not be repetitive in our advice we recommend you read our article on Google Submission, Ranking and Tips. You should be able to do well on all the other search engines too, though ranking and time period for updations may vary.

google
site:domain.com
Yahoo and MSN:
linkdomain:domain.com

It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Therefore you should invest some energy into finding the best keywords. There are several SEO tools available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords. Tip: Don’t be deceived by organizations that require you to register first. The two most popular resources are WordTracker and Yahoo!. Because Yahoo! has a man-made database that truncates plurals, I prefer to use WordTracker (WT).

Below is a screenshot from WT that shows the results you’ll get when doing a query for “putter”. Notice that “golf putters” has the highest search volume with 100 searches in the last 24 hours, yet there are over 100,000 websites to compete against. Using the tool’s Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), you’ll be able to see that “custom putter” would have a better chance at higher ranking, since there are only 2,640 competing.

Here’s a key part of the top 10 SEO tips: When using any SEO tool for doing keyword research, start by keeping your searches ambiguous like we did in the example above for “putters”. The results will always return suggestions, sometimes surprising ones that you may not have thought of.

You can get less comprehensive results by using DigitalPoint’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. This SEO tool will give you a summary of information without the KEI. Personally, I like to know how many people are competing before I design a web page.

Looks like Microsoft doesn’t want Google to have all of the fun, so their new ready for prime-time search engine has been released. This new search engine can be seen at: http://beta.search.msn.com.

Their index is currently supported by 5 billion pages and is a algorithmic search engine built by Microsoft engineers. The functionality resembles the present Google and Yahoo search engines. They chose to make the interface clean and uncluttered much like Google.

MSN Search features a “Near Me” button which when clicked will present local results. By default it uses the searchers IP address to determine location. These settings can be manually changed.

In 2004 the search engines were ranked according to popularity and usage. the study polled 225,000 individuals in 26 countries. The users had real-time metrics installed on their computers that tracked the web sites that they visited. What was tracked were unique visits to the various search engines, not search activity. This poll was conducted over the period of 1 month.

The top 5 search engines used were:

* Google 39.4%

* Yahoo 30.4%

* MSN 29.6%

* AOL 15.5%

* Ask Jeeves 8.5%

In this coming year it will be interesting to see if MSN (Microsoft) will gain any ground on the top 2 Google and Yahoo. MSN is scheduled to launch their new search engine in the beginning of the year.

In the tests that we have conducted on MSN we have found their results to be more accurate than Google’s in a lot of cases. Let the search wars begin!

Some web sites in the latest Google update were removed from top positions on Google that had been there for years. Webmasters were trying to figure out what had happened and couldn’t figure it out. After further analysis of the web sites and the web servers that they were on it was determined that their firewall was blocking access to the robots.txt file which in turn was causing their site to be removed from the index.

The firewall software by SonicWALL Inc. doesn’t allow access to the robots.txt file because it considers it a security violation. In actuality I can understand why it does this since one normally puts files or directories in it’s robots.txt file that surfers should not be allowed access to. If your host is running software by SonicWALL Inc. they need to allow outside access to the robots.txt file so the search engines can have access to it. All 3 major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN need access to this file if it exists in order to spider a web site.

In an effort to boost its webmail usage or delay the exodus of free mail users from Yahoo to Google GMail, Yahoo has introduced the ymail.com email domain and reintroduced RocketMail.com.

Yahoo.com email addresses are currently used (or claimed) by over 260 million global users, and chances are, if you’re new to Yahoo Mail, your name is taken and you probably have to register some ridiculous email address, like LBakerFireUSA185302@yahoo.com

Now, Yahoo Mail users have a more vivid choice in registering their favorite email addresses or usernames. Ymail.com and Rocketmail.com will have the same features as Yahoo.com email addresses like unlimited storage, instant messaging integration and virus protection.

Rocketmail is a rather old email domain, and at one time was one of the most widely used webmail services which rivaled Hotmail. Yahoo acquired Rocketmail.com in 1997 and used its interface as the foundation of Yahoo Mail. After 1997, no new Rocketmail.com email addresses could be registered.

After the acquisition, Yahoo let Rocketmail users continue to use their email addresses, and up until today, those with Rocketmail.com email addresses were regarded as the original users of the Internet. I guess now that Yahoo is letting anyone register a Rocketmail.com email address, that distinction has been taken away.