SEO tutorials: How Search Engine Works

I think this will be the best thing to start with, before going deep into the concepts of SEO, first one must understand how a search engine works?

How Search Engines Work.

Many people wonder how search engines really work. Although the details are complex, this article aims to give you some insight into the process without getting too technical. Read on…

Most search engines have three parts: a crawler, an index, and a search interface. Let’s look at each part individually, to get a better understanding of them. Each part has its own role to play in the process, with all the parts working together to make searches possible.

The Crawler.

Also known as a ‘spider’ or ‘bot’, this part of the search engine wanders the web, following links and picking up information for its database. Crawlers do most of their work at times of the day when search engines are less busy, but they typically visit frequently updated pages more often. This is something to keep in mind when you’re working on your pages. As you may want to perform updates locally and update them when they have been finished rather than updating bits and pieces and hoping that the search engine runs into the correct version.

Also, crawlers ignore some things: your site’s code, for example. Your site’s title and text – your ‘content’ – is the most important thing to a crawler. The fastest way to raise your site’s search engine ranking for specific key words is to implement them into your title and your content.

The Index.

Once the crawler has collected all that text, it is then stored and indexed. This allows people searching for keywords and phrases to get results relating to what they were searching for – their search results. Most sites will incorporate rating systems such as Google Page Ranks or Alexa rankings in positioning your site. These ratings are used to attempt to ensure that sites that are important receive more traffic than unimportant sites.

To see this in action, go to a search engine and type in a word. You’ll see some text on the page saying something like “results 1-10 of 345,000”. This means that the search engine’s index contains 345,000 pages it believes are related to the word you typed. If you wanted to, you could look through all these pages to find the information you’re looking for.

In order to understand rating systems more thoroughly consider your own site. When you place links on your site you generally due so in order to increase your users understanding of the content of your site. If every site in a particular field links to a particular site, this site is probably very important to that field and should, therefore, be listed highly in the lists of search engine results. Thus the basic ideology of Google Page Ranks.

SEO tutorials: Ins and outs

I would like bring up artilces in sequence, right now I am going through a program with Chris Taylor and Anam cara, I want to share few tips and techniques here. The materials are copy righted, and violating is unlawful. This shouldnt be used for commercial purpose.

Vita SEO factors

This is for people who are novice to SEO,Things which are consider as major factors determining the SE rankings are ( order of highest importance)

1. Key words (Key Factor)
2. Meta Tags
3. Incoming links
4. URL pattern
5. Design

What is Unethical SEO?

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.

Is Google Democratic?

   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?

Google LSI

Getting traffic from organic search (free search engine listings) takes time, knowledge, and skill.

Just when you think you got it down, Wham! A new algorithm change and its back to square one.

This is the cycle that many online business people face. This is also the reason that the SEO business is growing at a phenomenal rate. The bottom line is there is only two ways to get traffic. They are to pay for it, or to pay for it!

No that is not a miss print. One way or another you will be paying to bring traffic to your website, either through the time you invest to do your own search engine optimization, or by paying someone else to do it for you.

The latest shakeup in the world of optimizing a website for better rankings is LSI.

LSI this of course is an acronym for Latent Semantic Indexing.

Yes it does sound a bit scary but take heart LSI may be the best thing to happen to search engine optimization for the average webmaster so far.

HAKIA beta

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?

Fat Finger SEO

Simply put, not everyone is a typist and we sometimes mis-spell a word or URL as we enter the text into the browser or search box.

There are many who think that going after these people is a waste of time since almost all search engines recognize gramatical errors and make suggestions to the user. But sometimes there are various spellings of a word, and you need to optimize for all of them.

A great example of this are the variant uses of the following word:

• Wheel Chair
• Wheelchair
• wheel-chair

Which one is correct? According to Google “WheelChair” is the suggested term. But in the search results, “Wheel Chair” has 76,300,000 million results, “Wheelchair” has 61,500,000 results, and “Wheel-chair” has 50,700,000 results.

But to the user, any one of those spellings could be correct, and as long as they ultimately find what they are looking for, why should they care which way it gets spelled?

In today’s SEO game, you need to optimize for all three spellings if you truly want to own that keyword/phrase. The best way to achieve this is to make sure that you have all the variants of the word in your page copy, meta tags, page title and every place that you can insert those spellings without producing a spammy, keyword stuffed page.

While you will always need to fight the battle of user-friendly design versus search engine readability, in the end, it’s about your users, and they are the ones who will purchase your product or service.

Seo Dont’s

There are several things, considered “spamming”, that you can do to try to get your page listed higher on a search engine results page. Basically, you should never try to trick a search engine in any way, or you risk being blacklisted by them. Since the majority of your traffic will come from search engines the risk far outweighs the benefits in the long run.Dont do the following things

Do not:

• Do anything to trick the search engines into listing your site better. If what you are doing is not listed as one of our search engine tips the search engines will likely view it as spam and penalize you.

• List keywords anywhere except in your keywords meta tag. By “list” I mean something like –  keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, keyword 4, etc. There are very few legitimate reasons that a list of keywords would actually appear on a web page or within the page’s HTML code and the search engines know this. While you may have a legitimate reason for doing this ,its  recommend avoiding it so that you do not risk being penalized by the search engines.

• Use the same color text on your page as the page’s background color. This has often been used to keyword stuff a web page. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

• Use multiple instances of the same tag. For example, using more than one title tag. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

• Submit identical pages. For example, do not duplicate a page of your site,  give the copies different file names, and submit each one. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

• Submit the same page to any engine more than once within 24hrs.

• Use any keywords in your keywords meta tag that do not directly relate to the content of your page.

SEM Vs SEO

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.