Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Spamming is Not a Good SEO Technique

Perhaps very few things can illustrate competition as vividly as the Web. After all, how can one website compete with thousands of other websites just like it?

If the attention span of an average Internet user is as expansive as a search engine’s listing, then there’s nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, though, that is not the case. Very likely, a person conducting a search on the Internet will probably just browse through the top 3 to 5 SERPs (search engine results pages) and stop there. Website that get buried in the 10th page and onwards will probably not get too much attention if certain measures are not undertaken.

Those measures are what are called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Experts in this field perform certain procedures which may be seen a “website boot camp” to get your website into fighting form that will compete in the top rankings of a search engine.

However, as it is with almost everything else, some shortcuts exist that are able to “cheat” search engines into placing a particular website at a high ranking, despite the fact that it offers no real information. These sets of shortcuts are called “spamming”.

SEO spam (or spamdexing) is a set of techniques that manipulate a website for the purpose of creating an unrealistic boost in its rankings on SERPs. Here are just some examples of some SEO spam:

1. Cloaking
When a website presents a set of information to a search engine different from a set the user is seeing, then cloaking has been done. What usually happens is that the web page’s code is relevant to the user’s search keywords, but when the user visits that particular web page, he user sees a document that has little or nothing to do with his search.

2. Artificially networked sites
There is really nothing wrong with creating links between one site to another so long as the links are relevant and serve to connect useful information.

However, spammers who perform this technique set up several web sites and link them together even the sites contain no real and useful information. The purpose for doing so is simply to create the illusion of a highly referenced site because of its density of links. If this is the case, then it can be considered spamming.

3. Blog and Forum Spam
Online blogs and fora are a great source of information since it these formats are built to be updated within short intervals. This, in itself, what makes it a good reference for information, which is why search engines like to visit these sites and rank it well for the quality of information it holds.

However, spammers have taken advantage of this by flooding blogs and fora with irrelevant links to the websites they want to generate artificial ranking for. Not only are they cheating the search engine company by misleading a user to irrelevant information, they also interrupt the bloggers and the forum participants, which is downright rude.

4. Hidden text.
Similar to cloaking, hidden texts are meant to make search engines think that a page is about one thing, while it is actually about another. But it fools the search engine this way: the text that the search engine is able to reads is camouflaged by making the text font color the same as the background. What happens is that the user is unable to read what the search engine saw, and therefore may be looking at a document that is not related to the user’s search.

Other techniques are to create small, imperceptible links that a user can accidentally click on, thus generating more hits for a website even if the user had no intentions of visiting that site at all.

By this time, you probably already know why spamming is done. It is a shortcut used by some unscrupulous website owners to make their website rank high on SERPs. Folks who pose as SEO experts use these spamming techniques to get money for doing little to no work.

Now that you know who they are, and how they do it, here’s why you should have nothing to do with spamming and the people who condone them.

The whole point of the Internet was to create a wealth of information that everyone can access and add to. The whole idea was to be able to create a place where information can be created and shared with others so that it can foster understanding despite physical borders.

Other results of this information have led to the development e-commerce and online businesses, which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It still contributes to a community of information and sharing.

However, spamming is fundamentally profiting at someone else’s expense. A spammer profits by using other people to make his website rank higher than others without taking the necessary time and effort to make his website useful and relevant as what others have done.

It speaks poorly of website owners who see nothing but their own bottom lines in using the Internet. It is basically exploiting the trust and the willingness to share, which made the Internet such a promising venue for everyone.

Finally, it demeans honest SEO experts who take the time and effort to produce quality website and make it a point to follow the rules. Search Engine Marketing is helping to level the playing field so it can allow businesses of any to advertise right along side each other. And that is a commendable thing, which everyone should gladly support.

Search engines, on their part, are developing smarter technologies to detect spamming techniques in order to give users the best list of information from the Internet. Eventually, the spam methods mentioned above may be eliminated. But it is very likely other more sophisticated ones will come up. On your part, you can report spammers to these search engines when you encounter them. The more people like you who do this, the easier it will be to apprehend these cheaters and make it more difficult for spammers to do their thing.

Friday, December 23, 2011

How to SEO your Web Page

For a commercial web-page to prosper in a search engine string search and come out on top, the page has to essentially be “prepared” to be detected and well-received by the search engine algorithm.

Because of the high amount of browsers visiting search engines such as Google and Yahoo, a new form of process was developed to make full use of the pros and avoid the cons of the algorithms used by the search engine companies. This process of preparation is called Search engine optimization (SEO).

As the amount of information grows exponentially, search engines will play a more vital role in keeping order in the World Wide Web. This has encouraged increasing numbers of people with something to look for to rely on search engines more. It simply is now a fact that you can find information faster if you use a search engine.

Because of this companies looking to attract more traffic to their sites would pay for valuable ad space within search results sent by the search engines to browsers. Because browsers are more often than not set on getting information about something, placing an ad that totally dovetails with what they’re looking for makes it easy for the advertiser to make a sale.

What search engine optimizers do then, is to make every effort to make the site considered highly relevant and show up in the top ten listing of their respective search strings. The usual method of SEO is to improve content, and dynamically expand the site with even more relevant data.

Unfortunately, unscrupulous SEO’s have also devised ways to cheat the algorithms of search engine to keep themselves on top with low quality or even misleading content. Google, Yahoo and other search engines have fought back by using even more complex algorithms to filter the junk and garbage out of their engines.

To properly optimize a web page, please follow the following steps:
  1. Optimization should be part of the design. To properly optimize a web page, it should be considered as part of the design process. It should not be treated as an afterthought after the fact. This will lead to shoddy worksmanship and create unnecessary strain in the browser looking for relevant data.
  2. Each web page must be optimized. That is to say, each web page must be unique, with their own content, titles and tags.
  3. It’s not just the search engines. Don’t create a site specifically for search engines alone. Most people who start out this way create a site that is unwieldy and has bad grammar. Most browsers pass over unprofessional sites with poor copy.
  4. Keywords. Make sure you have a list of terms you want placed in the page. Also consider that the keywords relevant to page 1 stays in page 1 while page 2 keywords stay in page 2. This is to make sure each page is unique in its offering, avoiding redundancy. In terms to competitiveness, a linking campaign will probably create more traffic and better results than concentrating on keywords.
Place your keywords strategically in the following areas: Page title, Meta tags, Body, Headings, Images, Bullets, Links.

High quality website typically rank well in the search engines partly because more and more people recommend it to others via word of mouth, email, instant messenger, or even better, take the link and place it in their own website link sections.

Google considers pages with inbound links as a vote to the quality and relevance of that site, increasing its rank in the search engine hierarchy.

In addition to inbound links, search engines also send out spiders to assess the site for relevance against an algorithm. The spider basically goes to the site and analyzes all the text in the page, including markup items, the meta tags and the title.

Spiders can read the following items on a web page, thus making the item highly relevant to search engines: text, page titles, meta tags, meta descriptions, code, tables. Depending on further technological considerations, search engines may consider other languages like Javascript and such. Currently, the spiders will just consider them clutter.

Web page optimization values content more than graphical artistic impact. One must keep in mind when the end result needed is to increase presence in the advertiser’s chosen search engine string.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

On-Page Optimization Tips

Some of the key elements in their website can be found and accessed. "On-page optimization" Some areas of interest in web sites are:
  • Title of the page
  • URL
  • Meta Description 
  • Alt image attributes
  • Content
Before you do anything with on-page optimization (SEO or any other event), you must first select the right keywords for your page.

Page Title
The titles are very important for the optimization of the pages. The title appears in the top of the browser and search engines are often, as the title used in the search engines. The title is a good place for keywords. Creating direct ownership to the point and make sure all pages have unique titles. For example, a page on the PVC pipe plumbing in a site, the title "PVC pipe plumbing flights | Plumbing Supplies Joes" have (I had to use Joe the Plumber as an example, I could not help). Note that a keyword in the long run, many contain specific words. Be used with this search engine keyword phrase for that page, when people are looking for PVC pipes, cheap PVC pipe, plumbing, cheap, cheap, good plumbing, plumbing supply, etc.

URL
Often, when the sides with a view Content Management System (CMS), the URLs of pages just spilled a cup of soup of letters are laid out on the desk. Sometimes these URLs are dynamic and changing so every time you visit the page, so it's a big problem for the bots to index the pages properly. Unfortunately, the URL has nothing to do with targeted keywords, unless you want to apply po = J0ro57v. Many changes CMS can be added to the search engine URL. For example: www.joesplumbingsupplies.com / products / pvc_pipes is a URL, the search engine, because it is short, descriptive, and include relevant keywords.

Meta-Description
The meta-description appears in the page code. Make sure each page of your site has its own unique description tag of the target. The meta description is often used to describe the page with the search results after listing the title of the page. With a description of the target, the chances increase that people click on your ad. Can also be used to provide a telephone number or other call to action included.

Code structure
By structuring the body of the page, use the H1 and H2 tags. Search engines a high priority in the words on the labels H1 and H2. Get first place in Google is worth little if the content of your site is relevant or the content is confusing. Programmers sometimes forget that people read this and not just some random bot from Google. Where the design and programming of websites, still give priority to people entering the area by the robots of search engines. Be careful what content in flash down. Although Google can now see the text in your Flash files on the best keywords in the HTML code to get into the flash. Some sites use JavaScript extensively for the site structure and navigation. Since the robot always avoided by reading Java Script, confused with this form. Many coding geeks have debated whether the label bold or strong day for better SEO. According to Matt Cutts of Google rather than the same weight on both labels

Alt attributes
Many times when people optimize the placement of the website does not make use of the ALT attribute for images. To adequately describe the images on a Web site to search engines will see that even the images relevant to the keywords. They are also more likely to be displayed in the results when people search for images.

Content
The last point is one of the most important. You have content to sell their products or their product is the content that is important enough to have relevant content to each page. Make sure each page reads well and is understandable, because people do not buy the products of the search engine robots. It is good to other sites, provided they are relevant to link. Make sure, too many outbound links on each page of a site. Many people have the misconception that roll in building a website and then relax and the money!

Building a website is a task that never really worked. They should always be updated and changing information on their websites. If you want to return people to your site, you need to do something. By adding new content to a website, which also improve your chances of ranking well in Google. Regular updates allow your site indexed faster. Search engines see pages updated regularly updated, accurate and relevant.

On-site optimization, you should do first when determining your keywords. If you follow these simple instructions, you will find that you are much better ranking in search engines.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

A Brief History of Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the art and science of making web pages attractive to internet search engines. Some internet businesses consider search engine optimization to be the subset of Search Engine Marketing.

In the middle of the 1990s webmasters and search engine content providers started optimizing websites. At the time all the webmasters had to do was provide a URL to a search engine and a web crawler would be sent from the search engine. The web crawler would extract link from the web-page and use the information to index the page by down loading the page and then storing it on the search engines server. Once the page was stored on the search engines server a second program, called an indexer, extracted additional information from the web-page, and determines the weight of specific words. When this was complete the page was ranked.

It didn't take very long for people to understand the importance of being highly ranked.

In the beginning search engines used search algorithms that webmasters provided about the web pages. It didn't take webmasters very long to start abusing the system requiring search engines to develop a more sophisticated form of Search Engine Optimization. The search engines developed a system that considered several factors; domain name, text within the title, URL directories, term frequency, HTML tags, on page key word proximity, Alt attributes for images, on page keyword adjacency, text within NO-FRAMES tags, web content development, site-maps, and on page keyword sequence.

Google developed a new concept of evaluating internet web pages called Page Rank. Page Rank weighs a web page's quantity and quality based on the pages incoming links. This method of search engine optimization was so successful that Google quickly began to enjoy successful word of mouth and consistent praise.

To help discourage abuse by webmasters, several internet search engines, such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask.com, will not disclose the algorithms they use when ranking web pages.The signals used today in search engine optimization typically are; keywords in the title, link popularity, keywords in links pointing to the page, Page-rank (Google), Keywords that appear in the visible text, links from on page to the inner pages, and placing punch line at the top of the page.

For the most part registering a web-page/website on a search engine is a simple task. All Google requires is a link from a site already indexed and the web crawlers will visit the site and begin to spider its contents. Normally a few days after registering on the search engine the main search engine spiders will begin to index the website.

Some search engines will guarantee spidering and indexing for a small fee. These search engines do not guarantee specific ranking. Webmaster's who don't want web crawlers to index certain files and directories use a standard robots.txt file. This file is located in the root directory. Occasionally a web crawler will still crawl a page even if the webmaster has indicated he does not wish the page indexed.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

5 Ways To Improve Your Search Engine Optimization At Minimal Cost

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) does not need to cost you anything. If you have time and patience, you can optimize your web site for search engines at minimal cost. This article outlines some of the key SEO ways you can use that do not cost you anything.
  1. Write and submit a lot of articles.  Articles are very powerful in building links to your website. All the articles you write are saved and archived in article directories, creating many links to your website. The more articles you write the better because as your articles are published by other websites, your website URL in the author’s box will be on many websites. Writing articles need not cost you anything since you can write your own articles and then submit them to many article directories. 
  2. Create a web page on your website where you post your own articles. If you add new content on your website regularly, search engines will index your website, and your website ranking on these search engines will also increase. Make sure that you use your keywords and phrases in your web content as well as your articles.
  3. Have your own blog and blog regularly using your keywords and phrases. You can simply sign up for own blog and start to blog right way. Have a link to your website on your blog. Blogging and adding fresh content will make search engines crawl your blog. This process does not cost you anything. All you need is time to blog. 
  4. Have a link building strategy that will help you build many links to other related websites. This does not cost you anything. All you need to do is to contact webmasters you want to exchange links with. You can create one way links by articles submissions and forum participation among others.
  5. Be patient and follow these SEO steps consistently. Your website will not rank high on search engines overnight. You will need to consistently work hard at writing articles, blogging and exchanging links so that you can see an increase in your website popularity rank. Patience is the most important trait you will need if you want to succeed in SEO for your website.
Follow these tips and increase your website popularity and rank on search engines. The easier your website is to find on search engines, the more traffic you get.