Posts Tagged ‘Engines’

Why Search Engines Love Blogs – and so Should You!

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

Question this question of any SEO expert and they will tell you “fresh content” and “backlinks”, other than Google took over Blogger. The last one is the favorite as no one can argue with that.

Search engines like fresh content as it is valuable for their users, and links show that other sites or blogs (and not just your own website) reckon that the information on your website is useful to their readers.

A blog can be an individual’s viewpoint, a life journal, a school girl’s diary, a poet’s space, an artist’s expression, or just about sharing your moments with family and acquaintances. One can share information, pictures and even videos with no previous knowledge of designing and programming.

Companies use blogs to promote their newest harvest, introduce new air force, announce upcoming events, share event pictures and videos, announce special offers/discounts, run opinion polls, introduce new team members, special announcements, build loyalty, and invite their customers to leave comments and give testimonials.

Bloggers believe that blogs are being taken more seriously as information sources. One in five bloggers don’t reckon that newspapers will survive the next ten years. Half believe that blogs will be a primary source for news and entertainment in the next five years.

Bloggers are most open to receiving marketing messages from other blogs. Even non-blog web content is more influential among this group than habitual media sources for brand information.

Home businesses and young entrepreneurs use blogs to increase awareness and attract traffic to their online business, new ventures, and daring expeditions into the unknown.

Professionals use blogs to brand themselves, make awareness and credibility, make cash (yes that’s possible), and share their knowledge and experiences.

Housewives use blogs to share cooking tips and recipes, their children’s growing moments, travel log of the last trip, and shopping expeditions.

We SEO experts use blogs for achieving higher rankings for specific keywords. Unbelievable, and yet in many instances my blog link appears higher on search engines results page than pages that I optimize personally for the same keyword.

Getting started with blogging is relatively simple. You can sign up with blogger.com or other such blogging platforms.

If you don’t own a domain name for your blog, no worries, you can start with a free subdomain with Blogger.

Lets look into some appealing statistics on blogs.

The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here to stay!

comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008) – Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US – Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million – Total internet audience 188.9 million

eMarketer (May 2008) – 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users) – 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)

Universal McCann (Development 2008) – 184 million WW have started a blog | 26.4 US – 346 million WW read blogs | 60.3 US – 77% of committed Internet users read blogs

Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 Report is now available. For a detailed report go to technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/

The report states that Brands make up a major part of bloggers’ online conversations. More than four in five bloggers post product or brand reviews, and blog about brands they like or despise. Even day-to-day experiences with customer care or in a retail store are fodder for blog posts. Companies are by now reaching out to bloggers: one-third of bloggers have been approached to be brand advocates. (ref Technorati 2008 Report)

But wait, that’s not all. The report also states that Blogs are an increasingly attractive platform for advertisers. The majority of bloggers we surveyed have advertising on their blogs. Marketers realize that bloggers are making high feature content and attracting growing, loyal audiences. So there is potential for profit from blogging. (ref Technorati 2008 Report)

Well you are convinced, and you start writing periodically, uploading photographs and videos and have mutual your blog link with many acquaintances, but a few months down a nagging worry start to hit you (this is for those who don’t footstep their readers using tracking software’s like Google Analytics) that you are writing for “you” alone and your mum who thinks “my son is the best”.

While there is nothing incorrect with writing, just for the pleasure of writing, I am sure you all want to reach out and touch a name else with all your hard work. The real challenge is to get your target audience to read your blog whether its family, acquaintances, colleagues, or readers around the world who would be interested in what you are writing about.

Trust me even acquaintances will betray you if what you write does not make them want to come back, so pay close attention to the questions not more than and answer them as honestly as you can.

-What would make your blog special to your audience? -Why would they want to bookmark your blog? -Why would they want to link to it and tell others? -What is my ultimate goal for this blog?

While the first 3 questions require you to dig down deep inside your minds and hearts, the last question is most critical. What do you ultimately want out all the hard work, late nights and coffee cups invested into your blog?

Well, whether your blog is for the purpose of sharing knowledge, gaining credibility, increasing visibility and rankings, building customer loyalty, sharing information, making cash, or assisting our fellow men in the journey of life, the bottom line remains search engines like blogs, and so should you.

So keep writing!

http://www.seo-optimization-experts.com/seoblog.html

How to Make Websites that Search Engines Love

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

There is no black magic or knowledge of rocket science required to building websites that are simple for search engines to navigate round and give you the best possible ranking.
Get the nitty-gritty right and you will be ahead of the vast majority of websites produced.
Originally there was SGML (Standard General Markup Language). This was the standard to which all information was showed on the Internet. It is still the basis to which HTML and XML adhere. The Algorithms that Search Engine Spiders use to analyze sites are designed to recognize this standard and very small has changed! It is therefore imperative that you design your WebPages with this in mind. If you use it, not only will you produce WebPages that Search engines will like but will vastly improve the chances of your site being ranked highly for your desired keywords and phrases.
TEXT FORMATING TAGS
OK here are the three most vital tags used for formatting your text:
[H1] the Main Bearing Tag, tells the SE the pages main topic
[H2] a Second Bearing and slightly smaller (e.g. subheading)
[p] paragraph and the body of text and content
A typical layout of your HTML code, and therefore your text, should look like this.
[HTML]
[HEAD]///////I’ll clarify what need to go in this bit later on //////// [/HEAD]
[BODY]
[H2]Title of Your Page Early with you Keyword Phrase[/H2]
[H3]Subtitle Including Some other Keywords/Phrase[/H3]
[p] Lots of useful information with the odd keyword thrown in but excellent useful information is what really makes a site successful, after all, Content is King – I’m now early to waffle on. [/p][H3]Next Subtitle Including Some other Keywords/Phrase[/H3]
[p] Lots ore useful information with the odd keyword thrown in but excellent useful information is what really makes a site successful after all Content is King – and again I seem to be waffling on. [/p]
[/BODY]
[/HTML]
There are other basic HTML tags that you can use of course but these three are so obvious that it makes it an absolute breeze for Search Engines to look at your web page and instantly know what your site is all about and how to rank its content. OK, there is one slight problem though. If you used these tags as they are on your pages and in particular the text on them isn’t going to look that excellent on the eye and certainly won’t win any design awards. This is where Custom Style Sheets come into play in a major way.
ALT TAGS
These provide the Search Engine Robots with a description for any images you have on your page. They look as follows:
[img src="" alt="blue beach ball " width="50" height="50" /]
Place in excellent descriptive key words here without going over board i.e. no spamming the same words in every images alt tag 3 times each.
META TAGS – TITLE, DESCRIPTION AND ROBOTS
The Meta Tags and Title go in the Head section of your HTML and let Search Engines know what was vital on a Webpage and so how to rank its importance. They can also tell the Search Engine what language it is written in and other files it needs to take into account. Typically it will look a touch like this:
[HEADER]
[TITLE]Greek Holidays Idyllic and Very Low-cost[/TITLE]
[META name="description" content="Very Low-cost Prices for Idyllic Greek Holidays and Vacations in Greece"]
[META name="keywords" content="budget low-cost greek holidays vacations europe Greece sunshine"]
[/HEADER]
The Title Meta Tag is extremely vital and is usually used by the SE’s most importantly Google. Make it between 5-10 words and place your best Keyword/Phrase at the beginning e.g. ‘Greek Holidays’.
The Description Meta Tag should be less than 150 characters in order to suit all Search Engines. Anything more than this will simply be missed out with some SE’s. The “description” is what most SE’s use to describe your site when listed in its results. Make sure it is ENTICING for potential customers. It should include at least 5 of your best keywords but DO NOT simply repeat all of them in your “description”.
The Keywords Meta Tag should be a string of keywords and 2-or-3 word phrases that people surfing the net might use to find pages like yours. It is a very common opinion amongst many experts that the “keywords” Meta Tag is used very small if at all by SE’s these days. This is very right but since some SE’s do still use them to some degree DO NOT repeat your keywords more than 3 times in either your “keywords” Meta Tag or your “description” Meta Tag. Some SE’s will consider this as ‘Keyword Spamming’ and your site could be seriously penalised.
The Robots Meta Tag is a simple education that goes in between the [HEAD] and [/HEAD] tags of your web page and tells any visiting Search Engine Robots whether than can index that page (INDEX, NO INDEX) or follow the links leaving that page (FOLLOW, NO FOLLOW). There are in the end 4 variations of these instructions:
1. [META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW"]
2. [META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW"]
3. [META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,NOFOLLOW"]
4. [META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"]
The simplest way of using the tags is to use example 1. above on every page of your website that you want the search engine seeing and then place example 4. above on every page that you do not wish the Search Engine to see yet alone index for the world to see.
ROBOTS.TXT FILE
The Robots.txt file is really the first thing Search Engine Robots will see when they stay your site. With the use of a Robots.txt file we can tell Search Engines what areas of your site are out of bounds. There are also many other uses for the Robots.txt file but I won’t talk about it here.
Using a text editor (notepad, BBedit etc) make a new file and name it, yes you guessed it: robots.txt. Place in it the following syntax:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /pictures/
Disallow: style.css
This syntax tells Search Engine that it may not look in to the folders “cgi-bin” or “pictures” (these could really be any directories you name). Save the file, upload it to the root of your website i.e. yourdomain.com/robots.txt and that’s it.
The SEO benefit to you is not so much to give you a higher ranking but to make your site more Search Engine friendly… Reckon Kudos!
SITE LAYOUT – THEMED BASED WEBSITES – THE ULTIMATE SEO TECHNIQUE
Establishing a theme for your site and the contents’ structure can produce a dramatic increase in your sites ranking amongst Search Engines. All of the huge search engines use a ‘Themed’ based algorithm in their ranking criterion. This is in the end elemental for them in order to return the most relevant results when a user enters certain ‘keywords/phrases’ into their search engine. In the end a Search Engine will spider every single page on your site and index it as one. It is therefore imperative to concentrate your sites content on the around the main theme and not to diversify too much.
SITE STRUCTURE
The structure of your site, i.e. how your content is categorized and linked together, is meant to support and strengthen the overall theme of your site. Let me clarify how you achieve this.
There are 4 main types of pages you need to be concerned with:
* Index
* Sitemap – (a.k.a. Table of Contents)
* Hallway Pages
* Doorway/Content Pages
View your site as a Shopping Complex. The theme is “Shopping”. It has an entrance (Index page). At the entrance there is a map showing you the different areas, stores, and the stores contents (Sitemap). From the entrance there are 3 possible hallways you may walk down one for “Sports”, one for “Home”, and one for “Toys”. Each has its own description of what specific shops you’ll find (Hallway Pages). As you walk down the Hallways you’ll pass the doorway to each shop on which is a very detailed explanation of what is inside the store (Doorway Pages). I’ll clarify these pages in closer detail.
Index Page – Most Search Engine Optimization experts agree that your websites’ initial page of entry (index.htm default.htm etc) will never be the definitive page that Search Engines will rank highly. Make sure it looks excellent, introduces your visitors to your site, and lets them know what they can expect to find deeper within it. E.G. If your site was about Holidays in Spain, all you want to say here is “Come to Greece for your Holidays its fantastic!”
Sitemap – A single page that is linked only off your Index page and links to every single page on your site. It should be laid out like a Table of Contents but with one or two keyword specific sentences for each and every link. This should be linked off your main page but DO NOT call/name the text in the link as “Sitemap”. It’s evenly thought that Search Engines will penalize this. Instead simple call it “Table of Contents”.
Hallway Page – This is in the end the first page of each Sub Category. It should give a brief summary/paragraph of each specific topic within that Sub Category. E.G. Staying with the Spanish Holidays theme Hallway1 would deal with “Accommodation” and Hallway2 “Excursions”. A rule of thumb would be to focus these pages on keyword phrases containing 1-3 words.
Doorway Page – This is an individual page that is only concerned with a specific Topic of that Sub Category as mentioned in the Hallway Page. These pages are full of very specific topic related content. They will also be keyword/phrase rich focusing on 3-4 keyword phrases. E.G. Following the Hallway Page of Accommodation, Doorway1 could be “Hotel Rooms” and Doorway2 “Apartment Flats”.
How to Link your Pages
All between should be done vertically right through the site. The only exception to this rule is the Sitemap (which links to every page). Doorway Pages should be linked to the Hallway Pages above them and the Hallway Pages in turn should be linked to the Index Page.
Permanently use the Hyperlink Title tag. Its a further fantastic excuse to drop a few more keywords to describe the page you are leading the Search Engine Spider too.
Similar to the Alt Tag the Titale tag is placed within the syntax of the hyperlink and looks like this:
Title=”some useful keywords to describe the link”
LINK POPULARITY
Arguably the most vital factor in getting a high search engine ranking. This has in the end been Google’s small baby that most of the other Search Engines have also begun to adopt. OK the concept is simple: If Search Engines can see that other sites are between to you, then they reckon that you’re standard. The more other sites link to you, the more standard you look. The more standard you look, the higher ranking the SE will give you.
Not all links are copy though. If the sites between to you are about the same topic e.g. “Holidays in Greece” then Google is going see these as highly relevant links. Further more, the larger the site that links to you, or the greater its Page Rank, the more weight Google will give to these links and so your Search Engine Positioning will benefit greater.
SEARCH ENGINE SITEMAP
Not to be confused with the habitual Site Map or Contents page, this page is designed specifically for the Search Engines and not for visitors to your site. Similar to the Robots.txt file, this file does not so much give your site higher rankings as it does make your site more simple to navigate for a Search Engine. Search Engine Sitemaps do require some basic knowledge of xml if you wish to build one by hand but do not dread, there are many tools available online to help you build involuntarily. If you are new to Google Sitemaps I would recommend reading their overview: google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview.
SUMMARY
If you can make a website that provides a clear understanding of the theme of its content with an simple to follow navigational system, you will have accomplished the fundamental basics of your onsite Search Engine Optimisation.

How To Submit Your Blogger Blog To Search Engines

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

After making my blogs, I wanted to submit them to the major search engines in the same way as I did with my websites. I wanted to do a complete submission rather than just submit a URL that would have an unkown time for indexing, being added to the search engine directory.After submitting my blog, it then had to be verified. This could be done either by inserting a meta tag generated by the search engine webmaster or uploading a generated HTML page to the root directory of the blog. For my websites this was simple to do as I could just FTP to my site or modify my home page. For my blog it was a different topic since I really had no access other than posting, so I thought.Figuring I was not the only one with this problem, I surfed the net to see if anyone else was in a similar spot. What I was able to irrevocably determine was that on Blogger, I really could modify my template, which in fact was my home page. By figuring out how to do this, I could add the verification meta tag required.How submit your blog to Google:Go to: https://www.google.com/financial statement/ManageAccountYou first need to make an account if you do not have one. You then select “Webmaster Tools” to add your website. Use menu on the left of the page. Click on the “Add a site…” button and then penetrate the URL of your blog which should be a touch like:yourblogname.blogspot.comNow click on the “Take up again” button, and you will be shown what is called a Meta tag. This is shown in the “Verification method” drop down box. If it isn’t, select it.You will see a touch similar to not more than:The total condemn above is your complete meta tag that you need to add to your blog template.Now go to your blog and sign-in. You should end up at your Dashboard.Click on “Layout” and then “Edit HTML” on top of the page. You should now see your home page template.You will notice at the top that you have the option to download your template previous to you modify it. It is strongly suggested that you do this just in case a touch goes incorrect.Go to the HTML code and find the tag . Using your keyboard make a blank line just not more than this tag. Now go back to the webmaster page and copy the verification Meta tag completely.Go back to your template HTML code and paste the verification Meta tag in the blank line you had produced. Click on “Save Template” and you are finished.Irrevocably, go back to the webmaster page and click on the “Verify” button. If all went well, your site should get verified.To Submit your blog to Yahoo:Go to: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit You first need to make a Yahoo ID if you do not have one. You can then add your website.As was described for Google submission, you will also need to add a Yahoo certification Meta tag to your blog template. Choose the option “By count a Meta tag to my home page”. As previous to you will need to copy and paste it.I found one problem with the Yahoo verification Mega tag when I tried to add it to my template. The Yahoo Meta tag was enclosed with the brackets <, >. To be properly saved in the template the meta tag must be enclosed with the brackets <, /> in order to work properly. The end bracket was not preceeded with the / as required.As previous to, sign-in to your blog, click “Layout” and then “Edit HTML”. Download your template previous to you modify it.Locate the tag . Using your keyboard, create a blank line below this tag. If you had added the Google verification Meta tag, create the blank line below the Google tag. Copy and paste the Yahoo verification Meta tag in this blank line. Do not forget to add the “/” to the end of the Meta tag bracket so that it becomes />. Save your template and now you are finished.On your webmaster page click on the “Ready to Authenticate” button. If all goes well, your blog should get authenticated.By submitting your blogs to Google and Yahoo, you can keep checking your financial statement and see when your blog does get indexed. For other search engines, you can follow the same steps as desribed for Google and Yahoo.Other Meta TagsAfter my submissions to Google and Yahoo, I got to thinking about other Meta tags I could add to my blog template (home page) to help it get better noticed by the search engines. The following appear to be the most suggested Meta tags that should be used in your template:- Description META Tag- Keywords META TagWhen you make these Meta tags, insert them after any Verification or Certification meta tags you may have added previously.For help on count website security, you can stay:http://www.websiteprotection.net/

How Search Engines Work | SEO Traffic Spider

Monday, January 4th, 2010

One of the facts about search engines is that they utilize software programs known as bots or spiders that crawl the web and build their database. These spiders are sent to view and index pages which are later processed and retrieved from the database. If ranking on top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) is crucial for you, then it is vital you know the basics of making a search engine friendly website.Not more than it is clarified in detail as to how a search engine works.CrawlingFirstly, search engines crawl the web to gather information and build their database. This is done by an automated software called a search engine crawler or spider or a bot. These spiders crawl through a site and look at the content (mainly text) to know what the site is about and then start collecting, parsing and storing the data so that it can be easily be retrieved from its database.But, since there are over billion pages on the web, it is practically impossible for a spider to revisit a site on a daily basis only to see if a new page has been added or an existing page has gone through any modification. Many times the spider may not stay your website for a month or more also, therefore, the right impression of SEO efforts cannot be known immediately.It is also excellent to know that search engines are mainly text driven and are oblivious to images, sounds, flash movies, javascript, frames, directories, and similar material. Therefore having lots of these on your website may not be very helpful from the SEO point of view as these will not be crawled and indexed for further processing.Search Engine IndexingOnce a page is crawled, the next step involves indexing the content. This process entails finding those words that can best describe the webpage content and then assigning the webpage to specific keywords. The indexed page is then stored in the huge database for retrieval later. At times, the search engine may not be able to correctly identify the meaning of the page and in such a case optimization of the page can help it classify it rightly and achieve a better ranking for you.ProcessingThis is done when a user enters a search query – in simple terms, the search engine analyses the information it has indexed in relation to the search question for. Since there will be millions of pages containing the same search term, the search engine calculates the relevance of each page in its database to the search query.The relevancy of a page is calculated based on various algorithms. These algorithms assign different weights for general aspects like Meta Tags, Keyword Density, and Links. But, one basic truth that you need to know is that all major search engines evenly exchange their algorithms and if you want to take up again to appear on the top of the search results, you need to keep your pages up to date. Also, it would be a wise choice to reckon about SEO to rank on the top and also gain an edge over your competitors.RetrievingThis is the last step in the process where the search engine retrieves the results, that is, it throws up all the relevant results previous to the user. The uses can see a vast pool of information related to their search query.There may be questions regarding how differently each search engine functions. But, one basic thing that you need to know is that there are differences in the manner various search engines function but at the end of the day they all perform three fundamental tasks: * Searching the Internet based on the search query entered by the user. * Maintaining an index of all the information that gather from various pages. * Permit users to search for words available in that index.

Using Robots.txt to Control Search Engines

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Robots.txt is a text file you place on your site to tell search robots which pages you would like them not to stay. Robots.txt implements the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which allows you as a web manager, to define what parts of your site are off-limits to search engine crawlers. For example, Web managers can disallow access to .cgi, confidential, temporary directories and other areas with pages they do not want accessed or indexed. 

The robots.txt file is made up of two parts, the User-agent and the Disallow. The User-agent specifies which robots to allow or disallow and the Disallow specifies which directories robots can or cannot crawl. The robots.txt is a gentleman’s agreement and some crawlers, such as Google, may ignore the robots.txt file that disallows all crawling.

The structure of a robots.txt is pretty simple. This example allows all robots to stay all files:

User-agent: *Disallow:

Example of a recommended robots.txt files blocking crawling of the scripts and images directories:

User-agent: * Disallow: /scripts/

Disallow: /images/

If you have a particular robot in mind, such as the Google image search robot, which collects images on your site for the Google Image search engine, you may include lines like the following: 

User-agent: Googlebot-Image

Disallow: /

This means that the Google image search robot, should not try to access any file in the root directory and all its subdirectories.

You can make the robots.txt file manually, using any text editor. It should be an ASCII-encoded text file, not an HTML file and the filename should be lowercase. Include the robots.txt file in your server’s root directory. This is standard web management practice. It must be in the main directory because otherwise user agents (search engines) will not be able to find it – they do not search the total site for a file named robots.txt. Instead, they look first in the main directory and if they don’t find it there, they simply assume that this site does not have a robots.txt file and therefore they index everything they find along the way.

 

All search engines, or at least all the vital ones, now look for a robots.txt file as soon their spiders your web site. So, even if you currently do not need to exclude the spiders from any part of your site, having a robots.txt file is still a excellent thought, it can act as a sort of invitation into your site.

 

7 Things You Need To Do To Optimize Your Blog For The Search Engines

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Optimizing your blog for the search engines is crucial and very vital! There are so many different blogs out there on the net that you’ll quickly sink to the bottom if you don’t optimize. Follow these seven tips not more than and you’ll be well on your way to high rankings.

#1 – Make the Right Permalink Structure

The permalinks Wordpress uses by default are not search engine friendly. You can make this simple exchange by inserting %postname% instead of the default that is by now there. This will successfully make URL’s that include your post name which should include your targeted keywords.

#2 – Install All in One SEO Plugin

This is a must-have plugin which allows you to specify a title, description, and the keywords for the search engines. It can really help you boost up and reach the top of the listings, whereas the standard WP installation can fall fleeting.

#3 – Install Related Posts Plugin

Search engines like it when they get content pages that are interlinked. It also works very well for the search engines. It will involuntarily include links to other posts that are similar. Very convenient!

#4 – Research your Keywords

When people search, they search by keyword. It is vital that you know what these keywords are if you want to rank at the top of the search engines. Your posts should be centered around these keywords.

#5 – Include Your Keywords in the Title

In the title of your blog you need to include your main keyword. Also, include your main keyword and select others in the titles of your posts and sprinkle right through your pages.

#6 – Make Your Blog Simple to Navigate

Simple navigation is elemental for your guests and the search engines as it makes it simpler for the guests. That means including your blog’s categories, recent posts (to make sure they get indexed) and pages. Simple navigation is also part of choosing a excellent design.

#7 – Expand the Ping List

When you make a new blog post Wordpress will “ping” the blog search engines. This alerts them that content on your site has changed and ready for guests to view. This can help you get indexed quick so you can start making cash even quicker. Do a Google search to find an expanded ping list you can include in your wp-admin so you make sure you get as many of these sites to update you as possible.

Using these seven plugins will make your job of ranking highly in the search engines simpler than ever. If you’re new to blogging with Wordpress then these terms may seem incredibly weird to you right now. As you study them and go over them a couple times, place them into action and it will start to feel like second nature!