Search Engine Optimization

Searh Engine Optimization (SEO) plays an very important role in promoting your site. Basically, SEO is a process in making current commerical search engine, like Google, to understand more about your portal's web page, so people can easily to look for your site based on their search query.

Currently, there are a few scopes that you HAVE to play attention to, making your page more much visible to search engine, driving more traffic to your site and utilmately monetize your traffic.

The following articles give you some hints that we have experienced in the past few year in doing some successful portal so far. And there are some rumors around the Internet that you may do or don't do, some are real, but some may cause you to be blocked from Google or future Yahoo! forever. You know they keep a blacklist for those who violates their rules.

Your first step - Choosing Right Keywords!

Choosing a keyword is a critcal part of your web site. Starting from the angle of a surfer, what you search is to key in a "serch query" or more specific a "search phase" into the search engine, like Google or Yahoo!. And what the search engine understands your site is through all the content in your site during they crawl your site. So from this aspect, you see that what makes magic here is the "wording" you use in your site, and we may call this the "keyword" or technically "lexicon". So when you start your web site, you may have to brainstorm what keywords you are going to use. First, collecting all the phase that people use to describe your web site's subject or market. How the users or customers' common term to descibe this market or area. For example, if you are doing PC games web site, then MMO, PRG, RTS etc are all important keywords that you should think of. Second, checking with some keyword researching tools. These are the tools that knows the exact behavior what people use when doing search query. Overture is a good start. Third, selecting the keywords to describe your site and try to measure your site's performance with different keywords. Sure, this is a very critical part and i will show you how in the coming articles. Forth, we would provide you some key points when you are going through this process. 1. Don't be too general about your keywords, otherwise your site falls into a BIG pools of document of the same sorts, so you are hard to rank high among the others. 2. Use a specifc term. For example, you never go into a restaurant and tell the waiter that "i would like to have food and drink". You should specify what you are going to order, food? steak? done? with sauce?, or a drink? coffee? mocha? hot? with cholocate topping?. deep into the keyword one level by one level. For more is coming, where is the keywords used in your web site?

Using your Keywords

After you have done your keywords research, where do i use them? To understand this, the first thing you need to know if what the search engine is going to look for in your web site. Typically, like googleblog, a crawler, it crawls over your site and look for some important information from it. First, of course, it is your content of your site. The crawler from the search engine is going to analysze all the wording in your web site a form a list associated with it. But where do i put them? are they in the right position? Many people have asked me the same question from time to time. The answer is obvious, you have to put your keywords to the place where a reader found it is important, like headline, first paragraph and so. It is just a junior english writing lesson, isn't it? Technically, you have to highlight it using some html tag, like hr, h1.... and so. Another place to put your keyword in the meta tag of the page. we suggest you write a brief summary of your content about that page. However, don't be too long, as crawler reads only the first hundred or less character from it. More alt attribute is used for describing some other tags, like image. So using alt is a good practice in writing your content. Finally, but not the last, it is your link and anchor link in your content. Your page link should have meaning to the search engine. You have to aviod to use some number and meaningless stuff. For example, you can refer to this page's link. For next, i will tell you how to measure your keyword performance in the searching world!

Things don't do with your Keywords!

Now you know what the keywords are and what to do with them. But here i list out somethings that you should not do for your web site in regarding to keywords, otherwise you have taken your own risk from being banned from the search engine company. As some of the mysteries of search engine are unveiled, some people try to expliot the search engine logic to rank their page high by using some techniques, like Keyword stuffing. So my suggestion would be use the keywords when you need is far ok for search engine to seek you anyway.

What is Keyword Stuffing?

Keyword Stuffing is a technique for search engine optimization (SEO). The basic idea is to repeat some unnecessary keywords in your page in the meta tag and other place elsewhere in your page. But repeating too much may signal the search engine that your page is exploiting with unnecessary keywords in the content. Another way to do so is to use CSS to display a bunch of keywords out of your visible area in the browser. The noscript of javascript is also a place to hide. There are actually lots of place to think of. Because of this, some search engines may raise a red high if they detect this kind of violation, some search engines even do not use this technique for ranking anymore.

Next - Increasing Your Publicity in Directories & Search Engines

After you have made up your mind in choosing different keywords for your site, the next step you are going to do is increase the publicity of your sites, that is being listed or indexed by some major search engines and directories. Basically, there are a few way to do so. An easy going way is to submit your site to some well known directory, like Yahoo!. What is a driectory? Yahoo! is a searchable directory of web pages that are reviewed, selected and categorized by humans, obviously, Yahoo! is moving from directory to a real search engine. Then What is a search engine? A search engine is just a robot of crawlling web page, rather than reviewed, selected and categorized by humans only, surely i am sure that Google has some human efforts behind it. No matter what they are, being listed is what you need for the first spot of light! If you choose some big directory web sites, like Yahoo!, you can pay them to get a "yes/no" answer whether your site is indexed or not. Another good source for being indexed is the Open Directory Project (ODP). Getting in ODP, i would like to say it is a great success of your beginning of your web site. Or you can try to use Google Sitemap, it is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. Click here for more information about Google Sitemap. Also here are some other well known directories and search engine, that you may be interested in Altavista A9 AOL Clusty Gigablast Google Lycos MSN Teoma Wisenut Yahoo!

What is Google Sitemaps?

Tell you information of what I digested, it is much better quoting from the source. "Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. With Google Sitemaps you can automatically keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages to help improve your coverage in the Google crawl." With Google Sitemaps you get: 1. Better crawl coverage and fresher search results to help people find more of your web pages. 2. A smarter crawl because you can tell us when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes. 3. New! Detailed reports to learn more about how Google directs traffic to your site and how the Googlebot sees your pages. And the most important is, it is free of charge!

What is Open Directory Project?

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. Here are some quote from their web The Republic of the Web -------------------------------------- The web continues to grow at staggering rates. Automated search engines are increasingly unable to turn up useful results to search queries. The small paid editorial staffs at commercial directory sites can't keep up with submissions, and the quality and comprehensiveness of their directories has suffered. Link rot is setting in and they can't keep pace with the growth of the Internet. Instead of fighting the explosive growth of the Internet, the Open Directory provides the means for the Internet to organize itself. As the Internet grows, so do the number of net-citizens. These citizens can each organize a small portion of the web and present it back to the rest of the population, culling out the bad and useless and keeping only the best content. The Definitive Catalog of the Web -------------------------------------- The Open Directory follows in the footsteps of some of the most important editor/contributor projects of the 20th century. Just as the Oxford English Dictionary became the definitive word on words through the efforts of a volunteers, the Open Directory follows in its footsteps to become the definitive catalog of the Web. The Open Directory was founded in the spirit of the Open Source movement, and is the only major directory that is 100% free. There is not, nor will there ever be, a cost to submit a site to the directory, and/or to use the directory's data. The Open Directory data is made available for free to anyone who agrees to comply with our free use license. The Internet Brain -------------------------------------- The Open Directory is the most widely distributed data base of Web content classified by humans. Its editorial standards body of net-citizens provide the collective brain behind resource discovery on the Web. The Open Directory powers the core directory services for the Web's largest and most popular search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit, and hundreds of others.

Getting Back Links to your site

When you have submitted your sites to different major search engines and directories, you have just finished the first step of promoting your sites. The most important things you are going to do is to get some relevant back link to your sites. What is relevant back link? It is the sites that are of the same scopes of your sites. This kind of sites will bring your sites the traffic from your target audience. For example, if you are the online shopping of mobile phones, e-magazine talking about mobile phones are the target you are going to find, but how? obviously, getting a back link is very difficult for some new content sites, so what makes people link to your site is what quality or service that your site provides. Sometimes, you can find some strategic partners over the Internet, they provide the content, you provide the services. And this is what the business world going on. So far, you are still not sure why backlink important? The reason is simple, it is the PageRank calculation does matter from the Google search result. According to the PageRank calculation, the PR is based on the number of back links to your site, when people link to your site, it is equivalent to people vote your site, so your PR is going to be high. To my experience, if you want to get more back links, you should 1. provides a quality services or contents in your site. 2. fill the business gap in your market segment, if many people are doing the similar sites, why link to you? 3. start forming partnership with those are of the similar scale. Bless you have your site promotion successful!!!

Linking Pages together - Links Farm

With the general idea of how PageRanks are calculated, some webmasters form a group of web pages linking together to form a link farm to boost up the PR of its page. As these kinds of link farm are generated by automatic programs without actual content in it. Most search engines regards these kind of link farms as a spamindexing to them. Once spot out, you are going to be banned agains. However, there is no clear definition to tell whether your sites is a link farm or not. You encourage your user to exchange links with you. According to some search engines' guildlines, such as Google, they recommend that webmasters request relevant links to their sites (conduct a link campaign), but avoid participating in link farms, otherwise, a site that participates in a link farm may have its search rankings penalized or even the removal of the whole domain to be indexed.

Things MUST not do for SEO!

When you are doing SEO for your own web site, you find lots of tricky around different blogs or forums. And here we summarize some of them and would like to suggest you to avoid, otherwise you would risk yourself from being banned from some major search engines and directories, like Yahoo! and Google. Here are them:

Double Identities - Cloaking

Cloaking is a general SEO technique in which it presents the content to users and search engines differently. This is done by delivery different content based on the IP adresses or the user agent in the HTTP header, for example, Google crawler presents as googlebot when it crawls your site. So some webmasters create two versions of page, one is for the enduser and one is for the search engines. but some search engines, like Google, regards this kind of technique as dirty trick to cheat their search engine for high ranking. For this reason some search engines threaten to ban sites using cloaking.

Doorway Page & Spamindexing

Another technique to avoid is called "doorway page". Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing, that is to spam the index of the search engine by sending the search engine with spamming keywords, but serving the endusers with different page. This technique is combined with the use of cloaking method we mentioned above. Some webmasters use some basic technique like meta refresh, javascript, even some coding (PHP, Perl etc.) redirection to serve the doorway page before sending the real page. And the most used doorway page are those pages with high rank in the search results, so they want to cheat the search engine that their content are of high rank. But some doorway pages are easily to be spotted out as the search engine regards the content as duplicated and removed from the index.

More on Spamindexing

Here are more technique on spamindexing, NEVER try to use it as they are already spotted out by most search engines, like Google, for filtering. 1. Hidden or invisible text - some webmasters generate some hidden text by using the background color with the text. 2. Keyword stuffing - repeating keywords in the content unnecessarily. 3. Meta tag stuffing - similar to keyword stuffing, just repeating the keywords in the meta tag and some keywords are unrelated to the content. 4. Doorway page - serving different pages to endusers and search engines.

SEO for Google

In this section, we collect some SEO stuff in regarding to Google search engine for optimization, let see whether you have do it on your page.

What FreshRank is about for Google?

In July 2005, there is a patent filed in the US Trademark Office from Monika Henzinger, that states that she has found a way to determine how fresh of your document, that is your web page. Some search engines are using the last-modified-since in the HTTP header for determining the freshness of the web page, however, this method has an obvious abuse with modification of HTTP header. With these abuse, what Google do is really looking into the modified content of your page, even though it is still a secret of how score it gives to a page in which it is more fresh than the others, obviously, it counts if your site is a forum, otherwise it does not count it is a historial reference only. Anyway. freshrank is still a secret so far!!!

Google Spider - Googlebots

When you have you pages ready and after you have submitted your site to Google, how Google is going to collect data from your sites? Yup! Let me introduce to you Google spider - Googlebots A Googlebot is a search bot, used by Google. It fetches all the web pages from your sites and build the search index for the Google search engine. If you don't want Googlebot to crawl some of your page, you can set up a robots.txt under your root domain of the site. There are two versions of Googlebot - deepbot and freshbot. Deepbot, same as the name, it is a deep crawler, it tries to download all the pages from you by following all the links in your pages, it completes this process monthly. Another bot, freshbot, it crawls the updated web pages, it only visits the page that changes frequently. Some rumors suspect that freshbot is the one in which collect the Freshness of the page. Typically, Freshbot would visit a daily newspaper's website every day and a weekly ezine would get crawled once every 7 days. But Google does not announce the specification of its crawlers so far.

What is Onsite Advertiser Sign-up?

Onsite Advertiser Sign-up is an extension of Google site targeting that makes it easier for advertisers to bid on your site. For simplicity, Onsite Advertiser Sign-up is a program to promote your site to Advertiser through AdWords, making more advertiser to sell ads in your site. When you use Onsite Advertiser Sign-up, your ad units will display an "Advertise on this site" link that takes advertisers to an informational landing page with details about your site and the Google AdWords advertising program. Advertisers who sign up through this page will be guided to create an ad targeted specifically to your site, and only your site. When more advertisers create and target ads to your site, you'll benefit from the competition as it drives your potential earnings up.