Search Engine Optimization

Have you ever wondered how a search engine works? It must be fascinating figuring out how this search tool could direct you to several websites that are relevant to your keywords. Or, have you experienced instances where the link that supposedly contains your keywords is not exactly what you have in mind? You would probably think that there must be something wrong with the search engine that it generated irrelevant results.

How does a search engine work?
Two things figure greatly in making search engines work effectively and efficiently: the electronic search spider and the sitemap.

What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is basically a page or pages that serve/s as a directory by listing all the links to all documents and files found in a website. It is not merely a random listing of links, but organized in such a way that it gives the web user an idea of how all the information that can be found in the site fits into an outline or framework. It is like viewing the table of contents of a book, or viewing the concept map of the site’s content.

What is a spider?
In SEO language, spider is not an animal found in your closet. This electronic search spider is actually a bot which collects data and copies content to be stored in the search engine’s database when keywords are fed into the search dialogue box. The spider reads the content of the site and sends another bot to follow the links and copy the content contained in them.

What purpose does a sitemap serve?
A sitemap like any other map gives directions to a navigator. It primarily targets search engine spiders so that they are properly directed to your site and to the links where keywords entered in the search dialogue appears. As such, it is actually a useful tool in search engine optimization. A well organized site map would guide the spider to find the information it needs when keywords are entered during a search operation.

As an additional beneficial consequence, sitemaps have proven to be useful even to web users. Since a sitemap displays all the links to information found in a website, it helps the user to search for a particular topic in mind. Many users also use the sitemap to navigate between pages in a site.

What are the benefits of having a sitemap for my website?

1. No page would be left unturned
Going back to the purpose of sitemaps, having one would mean faster and easier tracking and crawling of spiders all over your site. As a result, search engines would surely get to the view all the pages of your site and not just the pages containing random keywords.

2. Easier navigation for site visitors
Once a web user has accessed your sitemap, they need not go back to the search engine page to look for what they need. If what they are looking for is in your site, then they would have an easier and faster way of locating it.

3. Potential advertising value
If it so happens that a relevant product or service company reaches your site, then it would be easier for them to see how best they can position themselves in the different pages of your site as a paid page advertisement.

4. Encourage greater traffic to your site
If your company website has a sitemap then potential buyers would have an easier time in accessing your latest products and services. Moreover, they would not miss out on any product that might be off future interest to them since the sitemap would display all information found the site.

How are sitemaps formatted?
There are at least three major types of sitemaps: indexed, full categorical, and restricted categorical. An indexed site map appears as an alphabetical listing or directory.

A full categorical map displays all links classified into categories; while a restricted categorical sitemap displays all links listed in a chosen category at a time. The full and restricted sitemaps are very similar except that the former displays all links in all categories all at once in a page, while the latter focuses only the links under the selected category for easier and less eye-straining viewing.

The most widely used format is the full categorical. Based on the results of a 1999 SURL study on sitemap designs, the full categorical format is most preferred by users since it is easier to search for topics within the site and it allows easier comparison between and among categories.

Some tips in setting up your sitemap

1. Link the sitemap only to your homepage.
This is to ensure that the spider starts searching from your homepage down to all the pages listed in your sitemap. In this way, no page would be left unvisited by the spider.

2. Do not go beyond 30 pages for a sitemap.
Large websites having 50 or more pages should not go beyond 30 since this adds more pages to the site, and might make search engines think that the sitemap is a link farm. Also, this prevents overcrowding of links which could be tiring to view.

3. Check all the links listed in your sitemap.
It can be discouraging when you click on a link only to find out that nothing is displayed. Test your sitemap; click all links in every page to make sure that all links are indeed linked to the right page.

4. Give keyword-rich titles to sitemap links.
Keyword-rich titles give your site more advantage in being searched properly under the right category. But be sure to have this sitemap link linked back to the sitemap (e.g. back to sitemap).

5. Provide a short description for the links in the sitemap.
Doing so would give readers a better idea of what to find in the link and save them time on surfing.

6. Be consistent in designing your sitemap with the other pages of the site. Employ a recurring design and the same HTML template for all pages to establish identity and build character to your website.

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We live in a sea of information. And information overload is an increasingly common complaint. Part of the complaint arises because we get hit with different headlines that point to the same content. So we waste time on things that have no added value. Bummer.

When you email your list or put up content on your site, and assuming you want to generate loyalty, it’s necessary that you have content others haven’t seen a dozen times elsewhere.

If this makes sense to you, here are some ideas you can use to EASILY generate fresh content with a minimal amount of time and effort.

First of all, think about a subject in which you are interested. Let’s say it’s horticulture. Now if you’re not aware of it, let me put you in the picture. Most people do web searches from Google’s home page and stop there. Not at all creative. Not at all digging for information from which to develop original content.

So let’s go exploring…

1 – Google has lots of tools besides just web searches. They let you check the news. (http://news.google.com) As of this writing, there are 1,680 news items listed by Google on the word horticulture. Bet you could easily do a summary of some of these articles and create your own content. But let’s not stop there.

2 – Google also has “groups.” (http://groups.google.com/) These are folks who like to discuss *your* subject. So now you can go even farther. Look up horticulture in their groups. Now this information is potentially gold. Why? Because you can see what it is about horticulture that lots of folks are interested in.

Think you might be able to do a little research and come up with a free or even a for-profit report that gives them what they want?

Check out Google’s other tools, too. You can even get research info from universities through Google. Start here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

3 – Next method: Do this search (keeping in the punctuation as written):
+horticulture +free +filetype:pdf

As of this writing, Google shows 196,000 hits for this query. What you get here are free downloads in pdf format about your subject.

Now you can’t simply copy and use it as your own information. You have to create your writing in your own words. But there’s no law that says you can’t summarize what you find in other people’s works. To make the point, you could even call your work something like: “Survey Report: Latest from the Horticulture Front!”

4 – Go to Alexa.com. Do a search on your subject, in this example, horticulture. It provides the exact same results as Google because it’s powered by Google. So why bother, right? Wrong. Because Alexa *does* provide value added information.

When you do the search, you don’t want to click the link that takes you to the listed site. Instead you want to follow the link that says “Site info.” When you do this, you’ll find a section called: “People who visit this page also visit.” This can be very valuable because it potentially shows *what the marketplace is interested in.* This can enable you to tailor your information product to what people want.

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Find your Keywords!
Keywords – the words that people will use to find your website. Choosing the right keyword and being consistent with it is vital to your websites success in the search engines.

There are many tools on the market to help you make the right keyword decision. Tools such as Wordtracker will highlight keyword opportunities. We are looking for popular keywords in terms of expected traffic delivery but have a low competition score from other competing sites. This score can be called KEI.

KEI or Keyword Effectiveness Index is a measure of performance. KEI is a ratio of business against competitiveness. The lower the KEI number the harder to get results in the search engine results pages.

As a general rule avoid any keyword with a KEI of under 0.1 as this will be very difficult to target and you could be wasting your efforts.

Go for longer, perhaps 3 word keyword phrases that carry good traffic. The benefits being that they are usually easier to target and provide better, more qualified traffic. Try to avoid broad, non specific terms.

Competitors to that keyword?
Find out how many backlinks your competitor sites have – there are many to choose from, just do a search for backlinks tool. They all give varying results but don’t get distracted by that, just find a tool and use that in all cases, this will ensure that the results you get are at least relative.

No1 competitor HTML
Have a good look at the top two or three websites HTML for that keyword. Have they done anything that you can improve upon? usually be looking closely at three different sites you can arrive at a best method to use for your site. Ensure that title, heading and other tags include your keywords – remember to be consistent as mentioned earlier.

Improve your HTML
Aim to write valid HTML code. The search engine robots prefer clean code and a valid site will usually guarantee that all of your site will get crawled. Always take the time to write original content too – avoid the copy / paste syndrome that plagues many sites. The search engines thrive on original content, make sure that they notice yours.

Search engines are always looking out for duplicate content and will choose not to display your pages for a given search if it thinks your site is not the originator.

Some HTML tips with SEO in mind:

Description tag – take the time to write an appropriate description tag for every page of your site. Google will display this in its results pages and a well written description here should lead to more searchers actually clicking your link and becoming a visitor.

Title tag – This is probably the most important piece of HTML. Always include your keywords here and write an accurate keyword rich title tag for every page of your site.

Keywords tag – It is good practice to put a list of related keywords into this tag although don’t overdo it and do not include any keywords that are not relevant to your web page.

Keep the code clean, use DIVs and not Tables where possible as this has many benefits and it means the ratio of content to code is greater. Try to use your keywords in heading tags throughout the pages.

Take the time to write original copy that uses the chosen keywords throughout. Write the text for a human to read though and not as though you’ve written it for a search engine. Over use (or spamming) of keywords will work against you always.

Try to get the good text content as near to the top of your code as possible. You could use CSS positioning to help with this.

Navigation – Use keyword rich absolute text links with a title where possible and not relative links.

Link to the domain name itself when linking back to the homepage and not /index.html. The search engines will then find the content in one place and not try to index two URL’s – a very common mistake.

To target several keywords, create several pages to do this using the above methods. You can’t expect one page to perform for everything.

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Nowadays people have a great desire to build a website which helps them to place their local business into a global arena. They might be little confused at website designing and this is quite natural and logical, because they don’t have any vast experience into website designing and that increasing their panic a lot.

Your first job starts from the groundwork calculations i.e. finding out about your targeted market and its audience. Realize the basic needs of your targeted market and accordingly comprehend the emotions of those audiences.

Most of the people make a common mistake of just searching appropriate keywords before building a website without realizing the market requirements i.e. What are your clients looking for? How to create their interest in your website? Why visitors will prefer your website?

These things should be calculated first because the success story of a high-rise building is hidden at its foundations. The research part to build a website is the backbone of its design and that design becomes the attraction for the visitors.

Don’t forget that the first impression of your visitor will be the last impression for your site and if you want to capture your visitor’s concentration into your website and try to keep them for long term then the designs should be fresh and unique as well as suiting the market which it belongs to.

To do a good research for building your money making website is really critical and time consuming matter and should include some extra research. It also helps to grasp the strong points of your competitors and incorporate and build up on the same giving your site superiority over others.

By visiting web designing forums you get the latest trends of website design, the latest tricks to control the visitors through your website, several ways to distribute the traffic of your website and you will able to receive an awareness regarding small business web design skills.

Now assemble those ideas into a single paper and try to imagine those features which you want to incorporate in your website. Now simply instruct your web designer to do that. There are several web designing companies who will try to sell their own remarkable templates. They might present to you their success list and try to encourage you to use from their templates.

However you should see if the template suits your ideas/requirements. I am sure that they will not have researched much because they don’t have much time to do that, they are just trying to produce the replica in a different manner of most popular web templates of that market area.

Remember that Search Engine Optimization will help you to promote your website at best search engines as well as SEO brings enormous traffic at your website. But to restrict them at your site for long time and to spread them at your important pages depends on entire features and the looks of your website.

The freshness of your site includes unique features, unique animations and unique contents, smartly placing important links at your content and total appearance of your website. The growth of any small business depends on this web designing. Thus you need to be careful while building the backbone of your business.

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All potential customers for your website. But they are also potential customers for the next guy. How do you get them to come to your site and see what you have to offer? For any internet business to succeed you MUST have traffic to your website. But how can you get traffic to your website without investing tons of money? It can be difficult to do on your own. However, www.monsterwebsitetraffic.com has compiled 34 of the best tools and traffic generating technology to help you with the essentials of getting your website noticed and have tons of traffic flowing to your website.

1. You must submit your website to the top search engines.
When people are searching for a service or product they want, the first thing they do is visit a search engine. You want your website to be accessible to all of the major search engines out there. The monsterwebsitetraffic.com system provides you with the tools to effortlessly have your website submitted to the top 40 search engines. Then submitted again every month.

2. Submitting articles to Ezines to promote your website.
Ezines are an excellent way to get the word out about your website. The monsterwebsitetraffic.com system makes it easy by formatting your ads to fit the character length requirements of any publisher.

3. Target your audience with keywords.
With this system you will be able to add keywords to your webpage that will get your page listed higher in the rankings of search engines. Search engine optimization is a crucial part of bringing traffic to your website. Targeting the appropriate visitors to your website through use of the keywords which you create will increase your conversion rate.

4. Bulk Mailing.
Not only will you be able to send your message to members of your email list with minimal effort but you will be able to ensure that your subscribers do not get duplicate mailings. Nothing is more impersonal than looking in your inbox and seeing the same exact message sent numerous times. You will also be able to send follow-up emails to an unlimited number of subscribers. You will even be provided with a book containing persuasive autoresponder messages to send to your subscribers that have been proven to work.

5. Spend more time servicing your customers than getting them.
The greatest benefit you will enjoy with the monsterwebsitetraffic.com system is your time. The fully automated software included with this system will free up the time you need to make your business successful while the customers are rolling in. You could offer the best product or service on the web but if you can not do it in a timely and accurate manner you will likely not succeed. Customer satisfaction is the most important aspect of any business. It is what will truly set you apart from the rest. So, let the monsterwebsite.com system attract customers so you can focus your time on keeping them.

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