If you are a new webmaster you may have heard of SEO, but really weren't sure what it was or how it can help your site. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is important for helping get your site to rank higher on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.
Why would one want higher rankings? To optain more organic traffic. Organic traffic is defined as 'free' traffic. In other words, when a surfer lands on your site, it didn't cost you anything in hard cash for them to get there, as opposed to Pay Per Click (PPC) traffic. Organic traffic can include direct traffic, where a surfer enters your URL into their address bar and lands on your site, and Search Engine (SE) traffic. There are a number of factors that can influence your rank in the search engines. I'm going to step you through some of the basics today.
1. How do the search engines find my site in the first place?
First, you will need to give the search engines a reason to look for you. Either submit your website to them through their online webform, or work with other sites that rank well to get Inbound Links (IBL) to your site. Make sure the site that is linking to you is related to your type of site in some way. This is called relevancy. If the site is not relevant, it will not help you nearly as much as one that is. Most SE's regard relevancy of links as more important than sheer numbers; however, any free Inbound Link is generally a good thing.
There are a few cases where certain inbound links may not be desirable. One type of link that is not considered desirable would be a link that originates from a 'Link Farm'. Link Farms are classified as a repository of links with no central theme, developed for the sole purpose of trying to increase SERPs ranking. Sometimes this can be difficult to determine, so don't worry about it too much. If you concentrate on trying to get quality Inbound Links, then you have nothing to worry about.
Once the search engine is aware of your sites existance, it will send an agent to check out your site. Search engines employee programs called 'bots' or 'spiders' to 'crawl' websites. These simple programs will visit your site and try to follow all the links within that site. The spider will look at meta tags, links, and your site's content and report that information back to the search engine. The search engine then uses an algorithm to determine how your site will be indexed and where.
2. What are meta tags?
Meta tags are HTML tags that describe certain aspects of your website. Metas can be used to describe the keywords for your theme, a description of your website, who the author is, and the character encoding your site uses, among other things.
The two metas that this article is concerned with are the 'description' and 'keywords' tags. There is some debate in the SEO field as to how important meta tags are. Regardless of whether one SEO believes that they are worthless and another is a stout believer in meta tags is irrelevant to this articel. It is still important that you know what they are and how they are used. While some of the 'big boys' may ignore your meta tags, a lot of the smaller Search Engines and Directories still use them.
The first meta tag is the 'description', and it is just that - a description of your site written in plain English. As a rule of thumb, it's a good idea to keep your description under 250 characters. Descriptions that are too long will not be displayed fully by the SEs, so keep it short and sweet (KISS). A sample description for this article could be: "An article about basic Search Engine Optimization". See? Short and sweet.
The keywords tags describes the keywords of your website. Keywords are single or multiple words (phrases) that also describe your site. For those of you into social bookmarking, think of them as 'Tags'. For example, the keywords for this article could be: search engine optimization, SEO, SERPs, webmaster, and basic.
3. Links, backlinks and reciprocal linking
Links can be inbound or outbound. When you link out to another site, you are telling the world that you think that other site is related to yours and that you believe it is important. If your website is about cooking, but you have a lot of links to webmaster resources, you may be hurting your potential ranking in the search engines, because, webmaster links have no relevancy to cooking. This is not to say you can not link to your friend's website if theirs is unrelated to yours. You can. You just want to be sure that the majority of your outbound links are relevant to your site.
Also, you want more inbound links than outbound, ideally. In the beginning that is difficult, as people don't know about your site, and more importantly do not know if your site is a quality that they would want to associate theirs with. This is where reciprocal linking can be a very good thing.
Reciprocal linking is where you link to another related site, and they link back to you. While this does not have the impact that one way backlinks (inbound) do, it is still a good strategy to get your site noticed. Go to related sites, even sites you may consider as competitors, and find their "Links" or "Resources" page. On that page, many sites will tell you how to exchange links with them. If they do not have any information on link exchanging, just send them an email. A good strategy to get them to link to you, is to link to them first. That way when you send your email requesting a backlink, you can say "Hey, check out my site, I've already linked to you. Please return the favor."
4. Submitting to directories and search engines
There are literally thousands of search engines and directories out there. Many are aimed at very specific niches, whereas others just want to be the next Google. Regardless, these are opportunities to get your site more backlinks without having to provide a reciprocal link in most cases.
First, don't bother submitting your site to Google using the form they have. It's pointless. Google will find your site when it's ready. A sure way to get Google interested in your site is to get a backlink from a very well respected website. Notice, I didn't say high ranking, although the two generally go hand in hand. Google uses Page Rank, otherwise known as PR, to help determine how important a site is. Page Rank is a scale of 1 - 10. You can use many different tools to determine what Page Rank a page is, but the easiest is Google's toolbar. You can download it at http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar. With Google's toolbar, you can instantly tell what a site's Page Rank is. At the time of this writing, http://www.ThosmonCon.com, has a PR of 4.
So, back to my point, get a site with a high Page Rank, 6 or higher, to link to your site. Google will find that link when it crawls the other site, and that will lead to Google crawling, and indexing your site much faster than if you submit your site directly to Google.
Another suggestion is to upload a sitemap to Google. A sitemap is a simple XML document that describes your site to Google. Once you upload a sitemap, Google will generally crawl your website within one week. You can find Google's Sitemaps page here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
Many other search engines actually don't bother with getting their own results, they just scrape Google's. So, when you get indexed on Google, that will filter down (eventually) to many other sites. A site that is definitely worthwhile submitting to is: DMOZ.org. DMOZ, or the Open Directory Project, is the oldest and most respected 'human edited' directory, and is the basis for many other directories. In fact if you go to http://dir.google.com (Google Directory), you will find that it is just a mirror of DMOZ. No kidding, Google gets its listings for the Google Directory from somewhere else. So, if Google trusts them, it can be a big boost to get your site listed on DMOZ. The problem you will run into: because DMOZ is human edited, all submissions are looked at by...wait for it...humans. So, it could be anywhere from 5 minutes to many years before you get a listing in DMOZ. This is one of the most annoying processes for a SEO professional, but also the one of the biggest reasons DMOZ commands so much respect.
Here are some additional directory and search engines listings I have found that you may find useful:
http://submit.isedn.org/ - this will submit your site to 40 directories with one click
http://searchwarp.com/AddURL.asp - personal favorite of mine, when you submit here, they will crawl your site immediately and index you within one hour on 3 different sites.
Last, I don't recommend paying for inclusion to any site other than Yahoo! directory, and you should only consider this cost if you are confident that you have a quality site, and said site is going to make you money. The submission cost is a non-refundable $299 (at the time of this writing) and does not guarantee acceptance. If you have a quality site and it is accepted, this can help in many ways, including Google taking more notice in your site. The reason Google likes sites listed in Yahoo!s directory is this: the site owner was willing to spend almost $300 to be included in a directory, and they were accepted by the #1 site on the internet (site statistic is according to Alexa.com).
5. In conclusion
This article just barely scratches the surface of SEO, but hopefully has clarified some of the mystery of what SEO is and what it can do for you. Remember, try to get as many Inbound Links as possible. Don't be afraid to ask for them. Reciprocal links are a good way to get noticed. Last, have fun with it. In future articles I will expand on some of these topics even further. Feel free to comment or ask questions at http://thomsoncon.com.
Search Engine Optimization Agency
Crawler-Based Search Engines
Crawler-Based search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. They “crawl” or “spider” the web, then people search through what they have found.
If you change your web pages, crawler-based search engines eventually find these changes, and that can affect how you are listed. Page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role.
Human-Powered Directories
A human-powered directory, such as the Open Directory, depends on humans for its listings. You submit a short description to the directory for your entire site, or editors write one for sites they review. A search looks for matches only in the description submitted.
Changing your web pages has no effect on your listing. Things that are useful for improving a listing with a search engine have nothing to do with improving a listing in a directory. The only exception is that a good site, with good content, might be more likely to get reviewed for free than a poor site.
The Parts of a Crawler-Based Search Engine
Crawler-based search engines have three major elements. First is the spider, also call the crawler. The spider visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is what it means when someone refers to a site being “spidered” or “crawled”. The spider returns to the site on a regular basis, such as every month or two, to look for changes.
Everything the spider finds goes into the second part of the search engine, the index. The index, sometimes called the catalog, is like a giant book containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a web page changes, then this book is updated with new information.
Sometimes it can take a while for new pages or changes that the spider finds to be added to the index. Thus a web page may have been “spidered” but not yet “indexed”. Until it is indexed – added to the index – it is not available to those searching with the search engine.
Search engine software is the third part of a search engine. This is the program that sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes is most relevant.
Major Search Engines: The same, but different
All crawler-based search engines have the basic parts described above, but there are differences in how these parts are tuned. That is why the same search on different search engines often produces different results.
Now lets look more about how crawler-based search engine rank the listings that they gather.
How Search Engines Rank Web Pages
Search for anything using your favorite crawler-based search engine. Nearly instantly, the search engine will sort through the millions of pages it knows about and present you with ones that much your topic. The matches will even be ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.
Of course, the search engines don't always get it right. Non-relevant pages make it through, and sometimes it may take a little more digging to find what you are looking for. But, by and large, search engines do an amazing job.
As WebCrawler founder Brian Pinkerton puts it, “Imagine walking up to a librarian and saying” ‘travel'. They are going to look at you with a blank face”.
Ok- a librarian's not really going to stare at you with a vacant expression. Instead, they are going to ask you question to better understand what you are looking for.
Unfortunately, search engines don't have the ability to ask a few questions to focus search, as librarians can. They also can't rely on judgment and past experience to rank web pages, in the way humans can.
So, how do crawler-based search engines go about determining relevancy, when confronted with hundreds of millions of web pages to sort through? They follow a set of rules, known as an algorithm. Exactly how a particular search engine's algorithm works is a closely kept trade secret. However, all major search engines follow the general rules below.
Location, Location, Location… and Frequency
One of the main rules in a ranking algorithm involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Call it the location/frequency method, for short.
Remember the librarian mentioned above? They need to find books to match your request of “travel”, so it makes sense that they first look at books with travel in the title. Search engines operate the same way. Pages with the search terms appearing in the HTML title tag are often assumed to be more relevant than others to the topic.
Search engines will also check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant tot the topic will mention those words right from the beginning.
Frequency is the other major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages.
Spice in the Recipe
Now it's time to qualify the location/frequency method described above. All the major search engines follow it to some degree, in the same way cooks may follow a standard chili recipe. But cooks like to add their own secret ingredients. In the same way, search engines and spice to the location/frequency method. Nobody does it exactly the same, which is one reason why the same search on different search engines produces different result.
To begin with, some search engines index more web pages than others. Some search engines also index web pages more often than others. The result is that no search engine has the exact same collection of web pages to search through. That naturally produces differences, when comparing their results.
Search engines may also penalize pages or exclude them from the index, if they detect search engine “spamming”. An example is when a word is repeated hundreds of time on a page, to increase the frequency and propel the page higher in the listings. Search engines watch for common spamming methods in a variety of ways, including following up on complaints from their users.
Off the page factors
Crawler-based search engines have plenty of experience now with webmasters who constantly rewrite their web pages in an attempt to gain better rankings. Some sophisticated webmasters may even go to great lengths to “reverse engineer” the location/frequency systems used by a particular search engine. Because of this, all major search engines now also make use of “off the page” ranking criteria.
Off the page factors are those that a webmasters cannot easily influence. Chief among these is link analysis. By analyzing how pages link to each other, a search engine can both determine what a page is about and whether that page is deemed to be “important” and thus deserving of a ranking boost. In addition, sophisticated techniques are used to screen out attempts by webmasters to build “artifical” links designed to boost their rankings.
Another off the page factor is click through measurement. In short, this means that a search engine may watch what result someone selects for a particular search, then eventually drop high-ranking pages that aren't attracting clicks, while promoting lower-ranking pages that do pull in visitors. As with link analysis, systems are used to compensate for artificial links generated by eager webmasters.
Search Engine Ranking Tips
A query on a crawler-based search engine often turns up thousands or even millions of matching web pages. In many cases, only the 10 most “relevant” matches are displayed on the first page.
Naturally, anyone who runs a website wants to be in the “top ten” results. This is because most users will find a result they like in the top ten. Being listed 11 or beyond means that many people may miss your web site.
The tips below will help you come closer to this goal, both for the keywords you think are important and for phrases you may not even be anticipating.
For example, say you have a page devoted to stamp collecting. Anytime someone types, “stamp collecting”, you want your page to be in the top ten results. Then those are your target keywords for that page.
Each page in you web site will have different target keywords that reflect the page's content. For example, say you have another page about the history of stamps. Then “stamp history” might be your keywords for that page.
Your target keywords should always be at least two or more words long. Usually, too many sites will be relevant for a single word, such as “stamps”. This competition means your odds of success are lower. Don't waste your time fighting the odds. Pick phrases of two or more words, and you will have a better shot at success.
Both Michael Thomson & Mike Stripe are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Michael Thomson has sinced written about articles on various topics from Computers and The Internet, The Internet and Interior Design. Has extensive experience in the area of eCommerce. He has worked for an Alexa Top 100 site analyzing client websites and assisting them implement online payment processing into their sites. Currently, the author is a professional in Search Engine Optimi. Michael Thomson's top article generates over 4400 views. to your Favourites.
Mike Stripe has sinced written about articles on various topics from Search Engine Marketing. . Mike Stripe's top article generates over 4400 views. to your Favourites.
