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What is Search engine optimization?
Search engine optimization is the application of various strategies to increase the likelihood that your Web site will achieve top placement in the search results when someone searches on a keyword or phrase related to your product or service.
search engines provide a search facility for surfers. Somewhere on every search engine Web site are advertisements. It has been estimated that for every hundred searches conducted, one person will click on an advertisement and this is the source of search engine revenue. BILLIONS of searches are conducted monthly and income is enormous. Each search engine seeks to provide the best results for surfers. The greater the popularity of a search engine, the greater will be its income.
Why Does Search Engine Position Matter?
The following graphs shows that most searchers will click on the first few positions. If you are not in the top 30 positions for a keyword search, you can expect virtually no traffic!
http://www.Web siteoptimization.com/presentations/organic-seo-itzone.pdf
Search engine optimization - Obtaining High Ranking
- So how can you obtain high ranking for your Web site?
- You must consider on-page and off page optimization.
On-Page Search engine optimization
On-page optimization consists of improving the content and presentation of your pages including the tags that guide the web browsers as to how you want the page to be presented and the search engines as to what you consider to be the key content of the pages.
Undertake Keyword Research
Keyword research is the key to successful search engine optimization and the success of your Web site.
Key Elements Of Your Web site For Your Search engine optimization
The site should have:
- Valuable content (text) on every page.
Content is paramount.
- If you have good quality text, then this will be received positively by the search engines.
- Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
- Keywords: Think about the words users would type to find your pages (keywords), and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it. You should aim to optimize each web page around one or perhaps two keywords and if more than one then they should be closely related.
- Keyword density is the number of times the keyword is used as a percentage of the total number of words on the page. Use the keyword sparsely and search engines will mark you down. But if you use the keywords too frequently they regard it as spamming and again your page will suffer. A keyword density of 3-6% is probably safe.
- Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. search engine robots do not recognize text contained in images.
- Excellent coding. The quality of your coding, particularly HTML may influence ranking. Web authoring programs such as Frontpage or Dreamweaver perform excellently, but if Search engine optimization is critical, experience with coding is important.
- Pages that are optimized for only one or two keywords. The importance of KEYWORD RESEARCH cannot be overemphasised.
- Visually pleasing pages. First impressions are paramount. If your pages show that you are putting in effort, then surfers are more likely to be interested in your content. This improves "stickability" which is a major factor in achieving high rankings.
- Multiple pages. The highest ranked websites, such as Wikipedia, have millions of pages. If your website has just one page it is unlikely to receive significant ranking. Make your page one on a multi-level site.
- A navigation menu that is intuitive to use.
- Links that function. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
- Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
- Check for broken links and correct HTML. Some web authoring programs, such as Frontpage, provide these functions.
If you do not have this facility, I would recommend InSpyder
- A site map that points to the important parts of your site. InSpyder is excellent. Submit your sitemap to Google.
- A robots.txt file. Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines. This file tells crawlers which directories they can or cannot crawl. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the robots. This file is placed on the root directory of your site. The following can be found at the top of Google.com's robot.txt file (http://www.google.co.uk/robots.txt)
User-agent: * Allow: /searchhistory/ Disallow: /news?output=xhtml& Allow: /news?output=xhtml Disallow: /search Disallow: /groups Disallow: /images Disallow: /catalogs Disallow: /catalogues Disallow: /news
User-agent: * indicates that the information is for all robots.
Disallow: /news tells the robots not to index any page in the /news directory.
If you have 90,000 pages on your Web site then it is unlikely that a search engine will index them all. You may find that those that are critical are excluded in preference to insignificant pages.
Beware, however, of the abbreviations. The 350k page means 350 kilobytes. The 56 kb modem means 56 kilobits! There are 8 bits in a byte. 350 kilobytes is 350x8 kilobits = 2800 kilobits and at 56 kb the download time will be 50 seconds. In fact, there are additional factors, such as the number of files included on the page. Surprisingly, an analysis with a page analyzer calculated a download time of 82 seconds!!!
This may not be a problem if you are promoting your Web site in the USA where broadband uptake is already greater than 80%.
Other countries, including many in Eastern Europe, have relatively poor broadband usage. If you are achieving high rankings in some countries but not in others, slow download times could be a factor.
You have chosen a beautiful background graphic or colour for your pages and your images are crystal clear and produced by world renowned photographers. The effect is stunning. This is how your page looks to the visitor:
And this is how it looks to the search engine:
Search engines are blind. They cannot evaluate visual effects for themselves. In the early stages of search engine ranking, search engines have no idea whether your Web site is visually attractive or not. Only when your Web site starts to receive significant traffic from the search engine, can search engines learn whether your pages are attractive to surfers or not. Sites that are visually appealing will enhance their "stickability".
- Graphics should have an alt- tag preferably including the keywords. Make sure that your ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
- A theme that is clear to follow.
- Each page should have a page title with the main keyword(s) for the page included. Make sure that your TITLE tags are descriptive and accurate.
- Include keywords in META-description and META-keywords tags. META-keyword tags were initiated to provide webmasters with an opportunity to advise search engines as to the important content of the page. This tag has been abused by webmasters and it would seem that their value has diminished. Nevertheless, if you use them, do so wisely.
In an effort to increase ranking and traffic for your song contest Web site, you have included famous singers in your META keywords tag including “Abba” and “Barbara Striesand”. Neither is mentioned in the text and theoretically, you could be penalised for a form of spamming, although in practice this probably does not occur. Is there anything lost by including these names in your META keyword tags? Probably there is. It works like this. Each page receives from its inception search engine voting rights. The exact formula of ranking algorithms is a closely guarded secret, but let us assume that there are a hundred votes allocated to META keywords. If you have 50 keywords, each will receive two votes. Do you obtain ranking for including “Abba” when they are not mentioned in the text. A ranking checker will demonstrate a negative finding. (I use IBP 9). If we remove 40 of the 50 keywords, the ten that remain will now receive 10 votes each and this will enhance their ranking.
- Have links within your Web site to the main pages.
- Headings and their associated header tags should indicate the important sections of your page. Greatest significance should be given to <h1> tags. Include your keywords in these tags.
- The pages should be search engine robot friendly.
- An indication of geographical location : If you wish people to come to your site from anywhere around the world, this is not required.
If you have a keword such as "food supplement" then the competition is vast and obtaining top ranking will be extremely difficult. If you are promoting a food supplement, you will find that there are 6.8 million sites in competition on Google for this keyword. If you search for "food supplement Collier Row" then there are 91.2 thousand competitors and top ranking is more achievable. Furthermore, if surfers come to your site who are outside your catchment's area, they will use bandwidth on your web host's server and this will be an unnecessary expense. I would recommend indicating your geographical location on your front (index) page. One possibility would be "We deliver to Collier Row, Romford and Gant's Hill." There is no harm done including every local suburb. Obviously the same would pertain whatever your profession whether you are a computer engineer, marketer, accountant, lawyer (solicitor), optician, doctor, dentist, psychotherapist, shoe salesman, clock repair expert, estate agent, electrician, or wine merchant.
- Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
- Stickability. search engine ranking will
improve if search engines observe that surfers enjoy your site. They can
measure this by monitoring how long surfers stay with you. There are a
number of features that increase stickability:
- Interactivity preferably with feedback forms for your visitors.
- Provide a "site search" facility". Traditionally, this should be positioned at the top of your page(s) on the right side.
- Consider introducing an RSS feed on your web pages. This will provide your surfers with the opportunity to see the latest information on the subject of their interest. RSS Feeds change, usually daily, and effectively provide rich new content for your pages. This appears to have a positive effect on page ranking.
- A Guestbook
- A Message Board
- Chat Rooms
In most respects, once a surfer has clicked on a link on a search engine results page, the search engine is blind as to where the surfer goes next. Google seems to have found a way round this by offering a free Google Analytics program. Webmasters, using this program, place a code on each of the pages that they wish to analyse. From the webmaster point of view, Google is providing a phenomenally useful research tool. Of course, there must be a benefit from Google's point of view. With the code on your pages, Google can track where surfers go once they have left the search engine results page. How Google Analytics benefits Google must be a matter of conjecture. Remember, that they are trying to provide the best search option for surfers. It could be that if Google Analytics demonstrates that surfers referred to you are staying on your site are staying on your page or Web site, then this will positively effect your ranking. If, on the other hand, you are providing links to other sites and visitors leave your site and go to these, then Google would assume that your site is not in itself providing the required information and this could have a negative effect on your ranking.
- If you are promoting a keyword for your page, ranking will depend on competition. There are 1.7 million searches for "music" on Overture.com each month and more than a BILLION web pages on the Google database for this keyword. There are millions to be made by selling commodities such as CDs and competition is fierce. Google is currently the most popular of the search engines:
- If you choose a less popular topic such as “Schlager Party” success is more likely. Amazingly, there is still a lot of competition with 1.8 million Web sites that are related to this topic according to Google. However, nobody is searching for “Schlager Party" at the moment Overture.com but it is encouraging to be in pole position. If this music takes off, the Web sites with top ranking could do well.
- You include “music” and “song” in your META keywords. “Song” receives a few rankings but then there are only 12,000 searches each month for this keyword on Overture. You are not ranked anywhere for “music” and this is your sought after keyword that 3could generate vast amounts of traffic. So you want to know why your preferred keyword is not successful. One explanation could32 be that the competition is so much stronger. Sadly, you can do nothing about the competition. But you can resolve to give the competition something to think about. You look at your coding for “song” and “music”. Song appears many times in the text and in the major tags including the title, description and <h1> tags. Your index page must, of course, be dedicated to “Song Contest” as this is the nature of your Web site. But there is nothing to stop you from producing a page where the main targeted keyword is “music”. On this page you can include the keyword in the main tags and as many times as you like in the text. Take a look at the top ranking pages for “music” and see if you can find some further clues on how to obtain high ranking.
- Initially, the search engines can only rank your site according to their on-page and off-page findings. They are not particularly fussed as to whether your site is ranked 100, 1,000 or 1,000,000. It has been estimated that 7% of surfers will click on the first ranked site in the search page result compared to 0.35% for the Web site in position number 10. Few searchers delve beyond the first three or four pages of search results and page ten will not receive many visitors or "clicks" on advertisements.
- search engines are, however, more than interested in the Web sites at the top of their rankings. Here they can assess “stickability”. If a surfer clicks on a Web site and returns rapidly to the search engine seeking another site then the search engine assumes that the first Web site did not have the required information, or functioned poorly perhaps due to slow download time. The search engine will record this negatively. On the other hand, if a surfer goes to a site and does not return, returns after a significant time delay or comes back and starts a totally new search, then the search engine assumes that the web site provided the required information and records this positively. In essence, top ranked sites rise or fall according to assessment by surfers.
Monitoring Your Search engine optimization Campaign
You will need to monitor your Search engine optimization campaign to determine changes in your search engine ranking. If you have several targeted keywords and/or you wish to monitor response in several search engines you will need a program. IBP9 is commendable.
A word of warning. Be cautious in the use of these monitoring programs. I would suggest assessing progress no more frequently than ever 10-14 days at most. To quote from Google "Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google."
If you have a site that is already popular then making changes needs to be undertaken with particular care. Improvement to coding, such as META keywords, can have no adverse effect. If your site downloads slowly because of the number and size of images then you could be concerned that removing these may detract from the experience enjoyed by your regular visitors. On the other hand, it is possible that those who are aware of your site refrain from visiting regularly because they become frustrated waiting for a page to download. Remember the 8 second rule - 80 % of surfers will leave your site if the page does not download in 8 seconds. If your site is taking more than a minute to download at 56kps, you have a problem! One would assume that if your web page is 350K and a surfer is using a 56k modem, that the page would download in 7 seconds. There are web sites that will analyse your pages for you and include the download times. Examples are: Web siteoptimization.com.
Quality guidelines For Optimum Search engine optimization
These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behaviour, but the search engines may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known Web sites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, search engines approve of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.
'White Hat' and 'Black Hat' SEO Techniques
'White Hat SEO Techniques' are those that are acceptable to the search engines. 'Black Hat SEO Techniques' are those considered by the search engines to be cheating and may lead to a website being banned.
Quality guidelines - basic principles:
- Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
- Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a Web site that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
- Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
- Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources. Google specifically states "that it does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.
- Do not copy work from other websites. Pages that are duplicated from other domains, may cause difficulty for you.
- Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:
- Using white text on a white background
- Including text behind an image
- Using CSS to hide text
- Setting the font size to 0
If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from a search engine index, and will not appear in search results pages. When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that's not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?
- Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects. Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from a search engine index.
- Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users.
- Serving different content to search engines than to users.
- Provide alt text that describes images for visitors with screen readers or images turned off in their browsers.
Some examples of cloaking include:
If your site contains elements that aren't crawlable by search engines (such as Flash, Javascript, or images), you shouldn't provide cloaked content to search engines. Rather, you should consider visitors to your site who are unable to view these elements as well. For instance:
- Don't
load pages with irrelevant keywords. This is known as "stuffing"
Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google's search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
- Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with
substantially
duplicate content.
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:
- Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
- Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.
- Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
- Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. Doorway pages are pages specifically made for search engines. They contain many links - often several hundred - that are of little to no use to the visitor, and do not contain valuable content.
Search engines aim is to give their users the most valuable and relevant search results. They frown on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the ones they selected and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Sites making use of these practices may be removed from the a search engine index.
The quality of the pages can be checked with your authoring program and the links can be checked with programs such as DeepTrawl.
Following these guidelines will help search engines find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the a search engine index or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on a search engine or on any of it's partner sites.
Search engine optimization is not rocket science but it is science. There is much advice to be found on the Internet and in books. The author hopes you will find most of the information you require on this Web site. Be prepared to experiment but monitor the response to change by checking your search engine and Alexa ranking. The key to SEO is understanding the aspirations of surfers. In this respect, your Search engine optimization campaign will meet with the complete approval of the search engines.
Some of the traditional SEO formulaic elements that are frequently taught is to include putting the keyword phrase:
- in the domain name
- in the page URL
- in the Title tag
- in the Meta description tag
- in the Meta keyword tag
- in the image alt attributes
- in an H1 (or any H) tag
- as the first words on the page
- in bold and/or italics or a different colour
- multiple times in the first paragraph or twice on the page
- in the hyperlinks pointing to a page.
If you put the same keyword phrase in many of those spots, you run the risk of triggering a search engine spam filter. Apart from the search engines themselves, nobody knows which combinations of theses might trigger the filter. It is therefore advisable to do your SEO without any particular formula in mind. Every page should be unique
In Summary:
- You should fine tune your Web site to its optimum if it is to be successful.
- A well managed Web site will be a pleasure for your visitor.
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