SEOTops

Right from the beginning of search engine optimization, you might have heard the relevance of anchor text in page ranking. Recently Yahoo obtained the patent that describes the relevance of this anchor text. The patent is relatively old and dates back to 2002, but it has some relevant information on using of anchor text. This patent describes the method adopted by search engines in using the anchor text for indexing.  

This clearly explains the information on how pages will be ranked by search engines for anchor texts which are not directly present in their content, but rather are present in the links which refer to these pages. The process used is a simple breaking up of the anchor text into tokens after they are collected from various pages pointing to the same page through links.  

Then these tokens are given weights which are evaluated and the page which has the highest threshold weight will be considered for indexing by the search engine. The weight calculation is done by some simple formulas which determine the frequency of the token in the anchor text of the link pointing to the page. This also determines the frequency of the token in the search engine index.

Search engine optimization is the key element which draws traffic to any website hosted in internet. Hence it is mandatory that you should be clear about how to highlight and how to discard portions of your website to get redirection from search engines.  

When you put a page on the website, you must know how to ignore those parts which you don’t want an indexing from the search engine. This includes information which is not unique to the particular site including site navigation, notification of copyrights and site links.  

For this, you can include a no recall tag in the HTML. This is done by using a < div class = “robots=noindex”> tag around the pages such as advertisement. When search engine gets a word for query which is present in this tagged section, it will not recall it as a result for the query. At the same time, if the same word is present in any other section of the same page and is not included in the no-recall tag, the search engine will direct query result to it. The elements which have the no-recall tag will be considered for relevancy analysis and spam test by the search engine using its various evaluation methods.

People are increasingly depending on websites for the promotion of their websites and products. In these circumstances, they will have to spend too much time and effort on attracting customers to the websites. This is possible only through an effective implementation of SEO tools and techniques. This is why SEO tips and updates are becoming highly popular among the readers of blogs and other data sources in internet.

The latest update from Google, the giant Search engine in internet is the introduction of flash technology. They are using Adobe’s flash player technology in this performance enhancement. Textual content is being indexed with the help of SWF files in Google. This uses gadgets and buttons as well as menus. They have lot of websites that use Flash algorithms also.

The entire text content of the Flash websites will be visible to the people who are interacting with the Flash file. Google will generate a snippet for your website. You will be able to use the flash files of your website, provided your website has flash content. If you don’t want the less informative content to be exposed to the viewers, you can effectively allow Google to ignore them. You can prefer to avoid the messages such as loading and copyrighting by replacing them inside an image. Customers will not be able to read such texts.

It turns out that choosing a potential vice presidential candidate is no big deal, thanks to Google! Republican presidential hopeful John McCain jokingly remarked that the incredibly popular search engine has made his job of scouting for vice presidential hopefuls much easier.

“You know, basically its a Google!!”, he announced amidst raucous laughter at a fund-raising luncheon when asked to comment on how his selection process was going. He also commented that he found the reach of the Internet today to be remarkable.

Vice-presidential hopefuls go through an excruciatingly rigorous screening process to determine how much help they might offer to a presidential candidate to clinch the White House and to make sure that they have no hidden skeletons that might be damaging down the campaign route. McCain, who is a senator from Arizona, clinched the republican ticket earlier this year. He said he still had some time left to decide on Number Two.

Yahoo has finally gathered all the anti-trust information required to make a decision on giving the nod on an ad outsourcing deal with Google, but it has just begun to explore that very issue for a possible scaled-down agreement with Microsoft, according to sources. This means that any deal requiring Yahoo to turn over its search related business completely to Microsoft is not imminent.

February 1, 2008 was the date when Microsoft attacked Yahoo with an unsolicited bid for a full buyout at $31 a share. This led Yahoo to review various anti-trust ramifications connected with the issue. In mid-may, Microsoft withdrew its offer and came back three weeks ago with an announcement that it was restarting talks – this time around, the discussions were about a partial transaction and not a full outright purchase.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft will try to save time by using some of the existing anti-trust material gathered when the full takeover was on the table, but this won’t guarantee a speedier review process by the federal regulators. Representatives from both Yahoo and Microsoft declined to comment on the issue.

Search Engine Results Position or SERP in short has become too vulnerable in the recent past and any constant observer can notice the changes very easily. SERP has never been completely predictable even in the past, but off late it has created a lot flurry and hence is turning things topsy-turvy. While trying to scrutinize the major contributors in Google ranking one finds the major contributors in SERP are Link building, Keyword density, Internal Linking, back links and image links. There are some other factors as well, though NOT that significant enough as it may be noted that one has to play the optimum balance between all these factors.

If a site has a good amount of back links, which is basically anchor based, but internal linking is significantly less, then the chances of scoring high rank comes down. Likewise, if keyword density comes down below 1%, then perhaps search engine does not bother much about your pages.

Our common perception is that if a website has got a reasonable number of links it has a fair chance of holding the higher rung. Having studied some sites, which rank higher based on keyword specific search depending upon keyword density, we maintain it as per the standard rule of 1%, wherein other sites also has a similar keyword density.

On proper scrutinizing, we have found that the other side has got much more image links with proper ALT tags than us. Do search engines give more priority to the image links! It is also worthy mentioned that a proper internal linking within the site have also found to be highly effective in SERP. So, if your web pages have got a balanced and structured internal links, distributed evenly over the pages, search engines value them even more. At times, they are given almost equivalent weightage of back links.

We all know search engine algorithm are never revealed and the challenge lies in breaking the secret and mostly by trial and error, but the vulnerability shown by search engines in the recent past in case of SERP has beaten all past experience.

Cluttered websites have got a more repelling impact just as complete disarray results in hayware. If the web page portrays too much information and that too presented in a cluttered way it becomes highly irritating to the visitor, as they become more confused than convinced. An effective website always focuses on neatness revealing systematically organized content and images to create a positive vibration in the visitor’s mind. It is not only the content and images, a website demands a clean piece of code and script also.

Presentation of content can be nicely done using several tags like h1, h2, h3 and different user defined styles. Images have to be embedded with the meaningful ALT tag. Title tags become highly useful in many cases. Please take note that even w3c insists on usage of the ALT tag vividly. If you want to use flash movies or animated gif files, they should also follow the basic nomenclature rules. In case of Flash, it is better to convert to the html version, so that the crawler can read them easily. Remember Search Engine crawlers and spiders also emphasize on tags like h1, h2, <strong> etc just like a normal visitor. Never be in the habit of stuffing keywords unnecessarily, which again draws the attention of the crawlers. You can simply take the example of a separate style sheet file, which not only enables you to reuse the code by repetition of definition of each style in every page, it also helps the web page to look clean.

Most of the web pages demand some kind of scripting to be embedded. It may be a mouse rollover script or color changing script to highlight some of your important texts or messages. Whatever the reason may be it is preferable to segregate the script in separate files. An example may be a java script may be stored in a .Js file and only the embedding can be done in the original web page. If the codes are properly commented it not only helps the developers to debug, it also helps the crawlers and spiders. Use the concept of objects and classes as much as possible, which reduces the size of the web page drastically.

We must mention that get out of the habit of camouflaging keywords in your content or tags. Keyword research had never been easier before. You have got plenty of tools like Wordtracker, Google/ Yahoo Keyword Research tools etc. So, you can easily find out the most used keywords, but never try to clutter them in your web page. Change the content accordingly as genuine and fresh content always cuts ice in the reader’s mind, which is at the threshold of every seo technique.

So, go ahead, start cleansing your WebPages right away and wait for the next updates from the search engine crawlers.

It may be quite obvious but most people know for a fact that computers and search engines can’t really “see” visual images. Unlike humans, search engines are not advanced enough to interpret each and every object within images and this causes numerous problems for both Internet companies as well as day-to-day search users. When you tap into Google (or other lesser-known search engines for that matter), the search engine locates images using a text-based process. What happens is that the particular engine starts searching for text surrounding the image, such as captions and phrases within the links. The weakness in this searching process is that the results returned are not optimal, because the engine cannot recognize what’s in the image and instead churns out results while heavily relying on text to evaluate the content.

With Google announcing that they will be unveiling a new algorithm to eradicate frustration and difficulties pertaining to image searching, searching and collecting relevant visual content will no longer be tedious. This new technology has been formulated with the aim evaluate all the images on the Internet and rank them in order of importance whenever a search query is done. During a recent web conference held in Beijing, China, Google boasted that they are the first search engine to gain the ability to do away with conventional methods of examining images and their content to determine their relevance to a submitted query. They added that this technology works by recognizing a graphic-based pattern in a series of images. Then, using that visual benchmark, Google will then assess the relative importance within an image and comparing it to the rest.

Sounds confusing? Don’t be. Say if you were to search for “Nike”, Google’s brand spanking new engine will recognize the iconic swoosh instantly and groups a set of similar images and rate highly those that contain the logo prominently, instead of depending on the image captions alone. Nifty isn’t it?

Not since PageRank, one of the best search-based algorithms to surface since the year 1997, did other similarly significant tools pop up. Incidentally, PageRank was created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page who are, surprise surprise, Google’s very own founding fathers. Now with the advent of this new image-search engine christened “PageRank for Image Product Search”, you can bet your shares in Google that a new web revolution is set to take the world by storm.

Internet is flooded with eye catching advertisements like “Guaranteed Ranking in 48 hours”, “Become No.1 in 15 days” and many more, which lures the traffic and the concerned web developers, who have been continuously engaged in promoting websites in various search engines. The obvious question that comes up is about the authenticity and moreover about the long-term impact.

This is an established fact that search engine crawlers never disclose their algorithms and on top of it they change their algorithm very frequently. So, there is hardly any chance of analyzing the parameters and contribution of each parameter towards ranking. Most of the SEO consultants rely on the basic philosophy and apply them in getting their website a higher rung. Internet and newsletters have made most of the people aware about the fundamental principles of SEO like more inbound links, keywords, Meta and ALT Tags, etc. Then how do they achieve the goal? What we have analyzed is they try to give a sudden boost by incrementing the inbound links drastically and stuffing of keywords, which have been constantly in demand while searching in various search engines. A continuous presence on the Internet for a reasonable period earns them the acquaintance with various people, who allows the links on a priority basis due to a mutual beneficial relationship, which safeguards interests of both of them in various ways.

Most of the search engines including Google prefer hits on the website from versatile geographical areas. Technology marvels have made it possible to trace not only the zone but also the particular computer. Sophisticated Crawlers record those IPs and the efficient process of search engine algorithm with such attention to details gives the website a good rank. The wide network of Webmasters and SEO consultants are used to achieve the desired effect.

Now what the common website owners should do? First of all, he should surely apply all the basic guidelines of SEO while developing the website and then try to get a certain number of inbound links, which will enhance the chance of converging traffic from different resources to his own website. It can be compared with the fundamental marketing philosophy, the more, the visibility, the higher is the chance of sales. Now where to place the links to make them most effective? In the realm of Internet people are more accustomed with the jargon, relevant sites, which means a link from a site with similar theme or correlated products is most effective to draw traffic to your website. We really don’t know how much crawlers give value to such relevant links, but the common human behavior always tends to visit such parallel sites, which become coefficient of the other in any term. Like, a teen-ager, who is looking for a higher education may be equally interested in education loan. So, a link of education loan provider becomes absolute relevant in the websites of education institutes.

The cherished tradition of link building still continues, whether to draw the attention of search engine crawlers or the visitors. So, why to avoid it?

This information is going to be interesting for those who are trying to define the basic SEO terms. I am going to focus on those terms that you meet in the SEO business every now and then. So, the top 7 terms list looks like this:

1. Anchor Text - is the specific text for a hyperlink.

2. Inbound links are links that point to your site. The number of links represents the link popularity of your website. The more, the better.

3. The Link popularity is one of the most important thing when it comes to SEO. Link popularity means the amount of links that point to your site. The link popularity will raise your site in the eyes of the search engines depending on the quality and quantity of the links.

4. Keyword is the quintessential piece of information of the context. They’re important for both sides – to the site owners and the search engine users. The former need them to get identified properly by the search engine spiders, the latter use them to find the information.

5. Spiders (crawlers) are the programs that follow the links and send the data to the search engine database for the further analysis.

6. META tags are specific HTML tags used at the top of the page. The Main purpose of having them, is to provide the additional information on the web page for the spiders to read it. The most important tag is the Keywords tag along with the Description tag.

7. PageRank. Google’s own evaluation rating system for ranking pages. Any page can be rated 1-10 depending on its importance, 10 being the highest

Remember, there are tons of more complicated and specific terms that SEO people operate but now, you are familiar with the basics of seo terminology which are important to know for beginners and experts