SEO Demystified

Here are some Directory listings where you can go and submit you site address as a SEO pract.
Some of them are paid and some are free, depending upon the requirement even reports can be obtained. Here is the document containg the list
directory.doc

Search engine rankings are an important factor to consider when you have a website that needs more traffic. If your website doesn’t have a good position in the rankings then no-one will find it, so you need to make sure that your website is ranked highly enough to be seen. The other important quality to getting high traffic to your site is having a nice arsenal of links. The more links that you have to your site the more traffic you will get, but also, the more links to your site the more search engines like your site. Keeping a nice supply of links pointing at your site requires similar precautions and practices as getting high search engine listings.

Although no SEO company can guarantee a high ranking for your site, here are some tips for raising your search engine ranking. Using these tips will not get you to the top unless your site is the best out there, but they will at least put you into the positioning that you truly deserve. After all, the internet is basically a free market. You will naturally flow into the place that you deserve and many search engines try to insure that you do not rise above or fall below this position. This is why they are so strict, and this is why you must keep yourself on good terms with them.
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In today’s market, it’s crucial for every marketer to track keyword response rates. It’s simply the only way of tracking advertising results and knowing which of your keywords are working for you.

In the online marketing world, it’s just as important to track your ad results. Knowing the exact response rate to your advertisement lets you to figure out how well it performed, which can help increase your profits and lower your costs.

Don’t be afraid to change a poorly responding advertisement to try to make it work better. Pay attention to headlines, ad copy, graphics and layout, and then be sure to re-test the ad. You might also find that where your sites are running is the problem - try alternative systems. By the same token, you should test your keywords to make sure that they will work the way you want them to. They’re very similar to advertisements in that they either work brilliantly or not at all.
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Unethical search engine optimization techniques can be unlawful, unscrupulous, or just in bad taste. You’d be surprised how many people use these methods. A lot of what is now called unethical SEO used to be accepted, until people went overboard and it started to have a negative affect on the web as a whole.

Keyword stuffing is when your site consists of long lists of keywords and nothing else. Don’t do it. There are ways to put keywords and phrases on your site without running the risk of getting banned.

You may have seen ‘invisible text’ if you’ve been selecting the text on a page and found words that are the same color as the background. This text is often lists of keywords put there in the hope of fooling search engine spiders while hiding the words from visitors. This is considered unethical, and you shouldn’t do it.

A doorway page is a page that isn’t designed for real people to see - it’s purely for the search engines and spiders, in an attempt to trick them into indexing the website in a higher position. This is a big no-no and should be avoided.

Even though unethical SEO is tempting, and does work, you shouldn’t do it - not only is it annoying to users, but it’s likely to get you banned from the search engines sooner or later. You sites’ search engine rankings just aren’t worth the risk. Use efficient SEO techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like unethical SEO.

SEO is a set of techniques used in order to attract visitors or prospective customers to your website, and the goal of a search engine is to provide high quality content to the users of the Internet. These two objectives are not in opposition, if you do SEO the way it should be done.

   Google is not Democratic, thou the creators(Lary page and Sergy Brin) claim so. It is Internet’s Era and not Google’s, fine it may be strong but it is not neccesary that it should rule. How Google gained so much importance in this era?(FYI:Am talking about Google search Engine, not anyother product of Google)

Google Search Engine is #1, I am not denying this. But Does this stop with that? NO.We have given a lot more space and preference than what it deserves, everything on the net by one way doing something to impress Google. Do anyother bussiness does this to get placed in Telephone directory? What is the reason behind this? Who is the cause? Its the users, we made Google to rule us, We are so dependent on Google, so like a Halo Effect its growing and growing.

Google works on the assumption that by putting a link on your page to another site, you are casting a vote for that website. However, is this assumption a reasonable one to make? The short answer is…no. The primary, and perhaps most fundamental flaw in this is that people can put more than one link on their page. If some people have more votes than others, then surely this undermines the democratic fabric on which Google is said to be based. Furthermore, people often pay for links on high ranking sites - we call this advertising. Google reads every link on a page, it has no way of knowing whether it was paid for or not. Can a system where votes can easily be bought, ever be described as democratic, even in the loosest sense? (more…)

Hakia: how is it different from Google?

The first company is Hakia, which is a “meaning-based” search engine startup getting a bit of buzz. It is a venture-backed, multi-national team company headquartered in New York - and curiously has former US senator Bill Bradley as a board member. It launched its beta in early November this year, but already ranks around 33K on Alexa - which is impressive. They are scheduled to go live in 2007.

The user interface is similar to Google, but the engine prompts you to enter not just keywords - but a question, a phrase, or a sentence. My first question was: What is the population of China? (more…)

SEM (search engine marketing) is the process of promoting a business online to achieve higher visibility in the search engine listings. This can be achieved by using paid listings i.e. Google Adwords, which can be very expensive but the benefits are; it can be quick to get traffic and is useful for seasonal for short term campaigns.

SEO (search engine optimisation) means optimising the html and other content of a web page/site for relevant, targeted key phrases in order to attain higher natural listings than competing websites. SEO provides a cheaper long term solution for increased qualified traffic and generates customer enquiries that ultimately convert to sales.

This will be first post in this Blog, as a traditional way let me start with the History of Search Engine, How it evolved from Directories. Before that one must have clear knowledge about Search Engine and Directories.

Lets Start by Distinguishing between the Directories and Search Engines.

Search Engines :   ( like Google)

The main Characteristic of search engines is that they rely on spiders to crawl the web, index the pages as they go. Spiders are browser like programs they follow links from page to page and from site to site indexing everything they finds.

When you submit a web page to the search engine( About submission we will discuss later, lots of conflicts in that) all you really do is, you are telling the spider about the page.

But your page wont be indexed or added to database as soon as you submit it takes time for the SE( Search Engine) to make its robot crawl your page.

Directories:   (like dmoz.org)

Directories donot use spiders, rather they use real people or editors who visit and evaluate sites and then add them if your site satisfy their minimum requirement.

There is an important differnce:

A search engine can index thousands of pages per day, whereas a directory cannot.So why do we have directory if they cant compete? The answer is  Quality.

Editors rejects pages with Broken lins,typos,unclear navigations etc. It accepts only genuine content, no pragmatism.

Fine we will have a more close look at this soon.