Skyline Business School

Study and Analyze the SEO

SUBMITTED BY:-

Sandeep Kumar

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 PREFACE

In every professional course, the theoretical knowledge gained should be backed by some
practical experiences. This project is one of the essential and vital parts of the PGDM program of
Institute for “Skyline Business School.” This project helps to study about SEO and also provides
the opportunity to analyze a problem to come to definite conclusion about different aspects of
online marketing.

This project has given me an opportunity to have an exposure of the practical experiences of
corporate world. I am assigned with a project to study and analyze the SEO. The report includes
SEO factor, SEO’s Hats, Keyword and other vital part of SEO.

SANDEEP KUMAR
MBA – 2008 - 10

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 DECLARATION

I hereby declare that the project titled “Study and analyze the SEO” submitted by me in partial
fulfillment of the requirement of a summer project for the two year management course from
“Skyline Business School” Gurgaon is my original work and does not lead to a award of any
other degree , diploma , fellowship or other similar title or prizes. The project is a complete and
final work, and requires no alterations. The secondary information sourced is the original work
of respective authors whose copyrights are duly acknowledged. This project is only for private
circulation and is the property of SBS.

Regards,

Sandeep Kumar
MBA – 2nd year

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

As I set on the quest to complete this project, it remains my obligation to praise, extend and
glorify the individuals whom I will never forget all through our life.

I would like to thank Mr. Saurabh Badola for extending me extreme support for carrying out
the research and completing the project.

I would also like to thank company employees for their immense cooperation in acquiring the
data.

I am greatly indebted to my beloved guide Prof. V. Subramaniam, without whom this entire
project would be unthinkable. I thank him for being a great source of motivation and an
invaluable source of knowledge throughout my quest.

And last, our earnest thanks to Google and the World Wide Web, without which this report
would have no beginning, nor an end.

Regards,

Sandeep Kumar

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 Contents

• Executive Summary
………………………………………………………………………………………………. 7th
page

• Objectives
………………………………………………………………………………………………………
…….. 8th page

• Methods of
study………………………………………………………………………………………………
….. 8th page

• Company
profile………………………………………………………………………………………………
…….. 9th page

• Search engine optimization ………………………………………………….. 15th page

• SEO as a marketing strategy ………………………………………………… 17th page

• Why SEO …………………………………………………………………… 18th page

• How does SEO fit in the overall marketing plan…………………………… 19th page

• Factor of SEO………………………………………………………………... 23th page

• SEO’s Hats and Tactics..…………………………..........................................27th page

• SEO Tools………………………………………………………………………34th page

• SERPs.…………………………………………………………………………. 37th page

• Vital term for SEO…………………………………………………………….. 38th page

• Targeting keywords within your reach………………………………………… 42th page

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• What to do when keywords plateau in the SERPs…………………………….. 44th page

• Anchor text……………………………………………………………………… 51th page

• Three imperative search engine ranking factors ……………………………… 54th page

• Your website should rank as great as it looks ………………………………… 60th page

• How to increase link popularity……………………………………………… 61th page

• How SEO conduct online marketing for websites…………………………... 65th page

• SEO marketing analysis: How to gauge the competition……………………. 67th page

• How to improve your page SEO score……………………………………….. 70th page

• How search engines give page rank…………………………………………… 72th page

• General advice………………………………………………………………… 78th page

• SEO advantages………………………………………………………………. 83th page

• Case Study – 1 (ndtv.com)……………………………………………………. 84th page`

• Case Study – 2 ( sify.com) …………………………………………………… 90th page

• Case Study – 3 ( bollywood.com)………………………………………………96th page

• Bibliography………………………………………………………………….. 100th page

• Appendices…………………………………………………………………… 101th page

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 Executive Summery

The report on new media marketing aims at covering one of the most prominent components
of online marketing “SEO” which is being practiced by industries professionals. It delineates
each and every technique with appropriate examples which shed the right on the inside of
SEO. Important techniques which are mentioned here in Viz. SEO factors, SEO tools, Keywords
queries, SEO tactics, Optimization of website, and Image optimization.

The report takes up a case study on NDTV.com apropos to SEO. This report brings about the
rationales for considering SEO as an effective tool for increasing traffic on your website. This
case study shows the cleavages between the popularity of past and present NDTV.com’s
Business.

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 Objective

 To understand the mean and need of SEO.

 To understand basic technicality of SEO.

 To make a comparison of the site between with SEO and without SEO.

 To study of SEO techniques to bring about the NDTV.com presence before massive
populace.

 To analyze the various aspects of the NDTV.com in terms of upgrading of page ranking.

METHODS OF STUDY

Methodology used in the project is secondary method which is as follows:

 Understanding the method and significance of SEO in online marketing and its tools.

 Studying actual website “www.ndtv.com.”

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 Company Profile
OCTAN MEDIA PVT. LTD. (A Part of RICO Group)

About RICO:

 Leading Integrated Supplier of Automotive Components & Assemblies

• Ferrous & Aluminum
• Casting & Machining
• Dies & Moulds
• Design & Development
• OEM Supplier
• ISO-TS 16949
• ISO 14001
• OHSAS 18001
• 18001
 RICO Group Combined Turnover US $ 300 million

About Octan Media:

Octan Media Promoters: Rico Auto Industries Ltd

Key Stake Holders: Arvind Kapoor ,Arun Kapoor ,Rakesh Kapoor,Shivani Kapoor

Vision-To be Global Leader in providing services in the Online Medium.

Esteemed clients: Maruti Suzuki,Rico Auto ,Cyber Media,UMS

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 Organization Structure

Octan Media Network

Octanmen.com
Octanwomen.com
OctanDigital.com
octanTraveller.com
OctanSports.com
OctanEntertainment.com
Livebeijingupdates.com
Indianewsupdates.com

C
DE
Octan Media Services:

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DESIGNING
Web & Graphic - Design & Development
• Creative Concepts
• Content Services
Content Generation, Syndication
• Online Marketing
SEO, SEM, SMO
Viral Marketing
Email Marketing
Blogging
• Media Planning, Buying & Selling
• Hi- End Technology Products
MOSS Implementation
Virtualization (3D Modeling), Gaming

Website Designing & Development

Your website is your business identity. Octan Media provides you the following:

1) Static Websites
2) Dynamic Portals
3) Corporate Websites
4) Product Sites
5) Intranet Portals
6) Micro sites
7) Commerce Sites
8) Community Sites
9) Event Driven Sites
10) Gaming Portals
11) News Sites
12) Blogging Site

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Web Marketing Services

1.) Online Space Selling – Capitalize & Monetize online traffic.

Ensures:
• Constant Brand Visibility
• Maximizing Reach to TG
• Online Selling
• Sustained Customer engagement

2.) Press Release Marketing – News keeps you abreast with the updates and our press release
marketing solves this purpose by
• Writing
• Distribution
• Ensuring maximum visibility

3.) Email Marketing – Email is becoming a part of many people's daily routine and has become
the fastest way to contact your prospective consumer as it has
• Large Audience
• Immediate Act on Messages
• Short Response Cycle

4. ) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Your business is of no use, if you aren’t visible to
target audience, thus SEO keeps you up and running. Our SEO Services provide you
• Visibility on Search Engines
• Long Term Organic Traffic
• Better Visibility
• Relevant Leads
• Increased Business

5.) Social Media Optimization (SMO) – Our SMO Service ensures

• Branding
• Thematic Links
• Popularity through word of mouth
• Traffic from Social Networks

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6.) Pay Per Click (Google Network) – Have you ever thought your business depends upon
clicks and visitors. We offer you
• High degree of success
• More Impressions for ads,
• Relevant clicks
• Increased Sales

7.) Viral Marketing – OM Viral marketing service

• Spread message rapidly
• Heightened exposure
• Increase influence
• Add value
OM Viral Marketing Services Includes
• Viral Ad designing

• Viral advertising and marketing.

8.) Text Link Advertising – This Service provides

• Better Traffic Sharing
• Benefit in SEO
• Strategic Tie Ups

9.) Blogging – In today’s blog and ping game, why you are left behind? Our flagship blogging
service provides
• Corporate bloggers tools,
• Regular Updates
Ongoing support

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High End Technology Products

1) Virtualization
Octan Media provides a comprehensive Virtualization solution for your organization
Services offered
• Branding Strategy
• R&D
• Training
• Intra - Communication
• Development of 3D Architecture
• Infrastructure Development
• Media Planning in Virtual Life
Business benefits of transition to Second Life
 New Brand Channel
 Consumer Feedback
 Brand Engagement

2) Content Management
There are five basic participants in the web publishing:
• Content Editors (Decide what content to publish and where)
• Content Publishers (Publish the content on the web)
• Content Authors (Create the content for the web)
• Designers (Creates Images & Graphics)
• Moderators (Ensures quality, credibility & accuracy of content)
A wide range of content can be published:
• Simple pages for normal presentation
• Complex pages, with specific layout and presentation
• Dynamic information sourced from databases and will change on regular time intervals

Summary
Octan Media has proved its distinction in the field of
• Web Designing
• Creative – Conceptualization & Implementation
• Content Generation - Event Coverage, Interviews & Press Conferences
• Content Outsourcing
• Web Development
• Web Marketing – SEO, SEM, SMO, Email Marketing, Text Links
• Media Activities – Planning, Buying and Implementation
• High End Technologies: Virtualization, Content Management

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 Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

History

This method of optimizing websites was first started on the early 1990s, but the method used
then was susceptible to manipulations, and that is what happened. Websites started misusing the
SEO services which caused them to rank higher in search results, but they did not contain the
relevant data. Recent developments in the policies of major search engines like Google, Yahoo,
have ensured that only relevant websites are displayed during a search.
SEO entered India as a very late concept. Till the late 1998, government had a monopoly over
internet provision in India. It was only after the entry of private players that the usage of internet
and SEO gained speed in India. But now, what companies are faced with is a situation of decline
in demand and shortage of credit, due to the global recessionary scenario. A knee jerk reaction of
most companies is to cut back on their marketing expenditures to battle out these tough times,
and the first marketing expense they cut back on is the internet marketing.
This cutback on internet marketing has had a direct impact on the SEO services in India. But
even in this scenario, millions of users still visit the internet for information and research. What
has changed is the way they search. Research has shown that individuals are spending more time
on the internet to gather as much information as they can get before making a purchase decision.
People are now looking for alternate products or services which can provide them with similar
results, but at a lower price. So it has become imperative for SEO companies in India to keep a
track of substitutes that an individual can look for and try to include those keywords in the
content on their website.
Keeping the content on your website up to date is a must for internet marketing companies to
survive this situation and come back stronger and harder when the going gets better. This can be
achieved by using the services of numerous SEO companies in India. Past experiences have
shown that companies who maintain their marketing presence during bad times are the ones who
benefit in the long run, when the situation improves.

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Definition

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of making your website search engine friendly
and capable of ranking among natural or organic search engine results for your industry specific
keywords. As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what
people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding
to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing
activities of search engines.

SEO is equally important for any business requiring online presence, be it large or small, new or
old. SEO is an ongoing process which needs investment in time and a keen interest in search
pattern changes of the target audience.

SEO can help you reach a highly motivated target audience (proactive audience) through natural
search engine rankings. Proactive audience increases website conversion rate resulting in a
positive ROI. When your prospects search for your services online they are typing words into the
search engines, mostly Google. Combinations of the words they type are referred to as 'keyword
phrases'. There are some keyword phrases which are searched for more than others, usually
substantially more than others.

SEO is a longer term process that can take 6 or 12 months to achieve a top ranking for a very
valuable keyword phrase. This means that in the early stages of SEO you will need to invest in
your rankings for the long term. SEO is a fluid process with rankings now changing on a daily
basis. There are many different activities which can be implemented to achieve a top ranking, but
what was working yesterday may not work today. Equally, what works today may not work
tomorrow.

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 SEO As a marketing strategy

Eye tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a search results page from top to bottom and
left to right (for left to right languages), looking for a relevant result. Placement at or near
the top of the rankings therefore increases the number of searchers who will visit a site.
However, more search engine referrals does not guarantee more sales. SEO is not
necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing
strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator's goals.

A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic traffic to web pages, but it also may
involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality
web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search
engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site
owners to measure their successes, and improving a site's conversion rate.

SEO may generate a return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic
search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals.
Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine
traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors. It is considered
wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on
search engine traffic.

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 Why SEO?

With hundreds of new websites being launched on a daily basis, and thousands of new pages
being added to the old ones, the search engines’ indexes are growing exponentially. The only
way to succeed in today’s fiercely competitive online market is to optimize your website both for
your users and for the search engines themselves.

Early on in the SEO ‘golden age’, ranking for even competitive keyword phrases was relatively
easy if you knew what you were doing. Today, with all the competition and so many people who
dabble in SEO, even ‘long tail’ keyword phrases can be difficult to rank for unless you are really
on top of the game. Real SEO takes time, money and smarts - as well as a long term viewpoint.

SEO is about traffic; not just any traffic, but highly targeted traffic that will convert to sales on
your site. Rankings do boost visibility and can increase total traffic, but if it is not convertible it
does you no good in the long run.

Being one rank on Google (or Yahoo, or MSN) is not a business goal. Getting ‘X’ many orders
per month is a business goal. Being one rank can help you do that, but only if the rest of your
optimization efforts fall in line with the goal of conversion. You can do this by widening your
scope and realizing that SEO is so much more than ranking one on the SERPs. For A great SEO
you need great content, appropriately optimized and distributed evenly between your website and
various places on the net.

Make sure you optimize your site for users so they will stay and convert into customers.
Targeted traffic plus a well optimized site equals sales. You simply need to take advantage of
SEO techniques to ensure the best results in every area of your online business, and not just in
one or two select places!

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 How does SEO fit in the overall marketing plan?

According to recent surveys, consumers are expected to spend over $200 billion through the
Internet. More than 80% of spend would go to companies with websites that rank high in search
engines. It is also known that more than 70% of search engine users click on natural or organic
search engine results.
Since the aim of search engines is to provide the best quality websites to its users, consumers
prefer websites that rank well in SERPs. A high natural search engine ranking is like a vote of
trust which brings to you proactive traffic (hence higher sales) and no recurring pay per click
costs.
An optimal combination of search engine marketing services like SEO, PPC and Link Building
can bring down your investment costs and maximize your ROI.

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 INTERNET USAGE STATISTICS
The Internet Big Picture
World Internet Users and Population Stats

WORLD INTERNET USAGE AND POPULATION STATISTICS

Internet Users
Internet Penetration Users
Population Users Growth
World Regions Users (% %of
( 2008 Est.) Dec. 31, 2000-
Latest Data Population) Table
2000 2008
1,100.0
Africa 975,330,899 4,514,400 54,171,500 5.6 % 3.4 %
%
3,780,819,79
Asia 114,304,000 657,170,816 17.4 % 474.9 % 41.2 %
2
Europe 803,903,540 105,096,093 393,373,398 48.9 % 274.3 % 24.6 %
1,296.2
Middle East 196,767,614 3,284,800 45,861,346 23.3 % 2.9 %
%
North America 337,572,949 108,096,800 251,290,489 74.4 % 132.5 % 15.7 %
Latin
581,249,892 18,068,919 173,619,140 29.9 % 860.9 % 10.9 %
America/Caribbean
Oceania / Australia 34,384,384 7,620,480 20,783,419 60.4 % 172.7 % 1.3 %
6,710,029,07 1,596,270,10
WORLD TOTAL 360,985,492 23.8 % 342.2 % 100.0 %
0 8

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21
Number of user of search engines

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 Factor of SEO

It is broadly divided into two parts viz. On Page & Off Page

On Page

On-page optimization is mainly the most essential and difficult parts of SEO
optimization. This helps a website to search out their required search engine
ranking through their keywords. On-Page SEO is the process of placing your
selected keywords in the right places on your web pages. On-page SEO
involves changing page titles, headings, content, and URLs to improve
search engine rankings.

Any kind of search engine score of your website which helps you to increase
your page rank or the search engine ranking of your keywords will only
depend on the on-page optimization of your website. Mainly it is viewed that
the on-page factors of your index page sets the rankings of your keywords.

On-page optimization is usually forgotten these days, as we focusing more

and more of our time in getting inbound links with targeted anchor text. On-
page optimization, though, it is somewhat you can do quickly to give yourself
an additional boost in the SERPS.

There is a huge list of SEO Techniques for on-page optimization that is

considered in the search engine evaluation process. These factors
acknowledge but are not restricted to: words in the web page URL, title tag,

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Meta tags, headlines, sub headlines, keyword density, words at the starting
of the page, page content, words that are bold, words in the links, site
navigation, the Website structure of links and a number of other
considerations.

On-Page Optimization Tips:

A. URL Naming:

Preferably try to place your main targeted keyword as your domain name, if
not just include your keyword in the URL.

B. Title Tag:

Set Your Keywords in Title Tag, place in first words after that you can make
use of an additional words to attract the visitor

C. Meta Descriptions:

Not much search engines make use of the description tag, but it’s good to
set it well as backup. Put your keywords in the first starting of the meta
description, and make your meta description attract visitor to your website.

D. Meta Keywords:

Yes, several search engine do not count meta keywords any longer but few
search engines make use of the keywords tag, so use meta keywords it still
have value to rank your site in couple search engine

E. Use ALT Text to Image Optimization:

Crawlers are not capable to notice images. Accordingly Optimize this images
with appropriate contents using Alt tags which reflects your targeted
keywords.

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F. Static URL:

Keep in mind that all of your main pages must have short and static URL.

G. Use Headings:

Use the h1, h2, and h3 heading tags to define your important subject
sections, and put your keywords at least once in each heading style.

H. Validate the HTML:

Make use of the W3C HTML validator to validate the HTML of your page. A
small number of HTML faults will cause a web page not to rank well in the
SERPs.

I. Robot.txt:

With robots.txt file you can limit access of search engines to your website.
Make sure that robot.txt is essential at your website with appropriate crawler
notifications.

J. Sitemap XML:

Create your XML sitemap search engine using xml sitemap to crawl your
pages.

K. Keep Your Body Text Readable

Make use of your keywords in the body text however keep your body text
readable. Don’t drywall stuff drywall your drywall keywords drywall into your
drywall text until it is unreadable by humans.

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L. Internal Link

Build internal link between related posts.

M. Check Keyword Density

Make sure that your keywords density in your webpage, for optimizing your
keywords not less or more than 3% density

On-page search engine optimization is the opening step towards achieving

high-quality search engine rankings.

SEO using off Page Factors

Off-Page SEO includes all the things you do to promote your website outside the design of the
website itself. Getting more inbound links to your site, registering with directories relevant to
your industry, and getting more pages into the search engine indexes are all parts of Off-Page
SEO.

SEO also deals with off-page factors

Incoming Links: Page Rank is Google’s measure of the number and quality of the incoming
links to your website. Google is known to report only a small fraction of the back links that they
detect. Links from high ranking pages are more important.

Link Text: This is the hyperlinked text that links back to your website. Having key words in the
anchor text of incoming links is very important and is on par with optimized body text.

Directory Links: Getting links from Directories such as DMOZ (Open Directory), Yahoo, Look
Smart and other directories are helpful.

Other Linking Factors: Getting links too quickly is not good and is viewed as artificial link
acquisition. Slow and steady is better. Having older links is more important than newer links.
Getting links from “expert” site gives better results. Links from websites that have the same
theme or topic are important. Links from image maps or graphics are much less important.

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Site Age: Older and long established websites do better. New pages are indexed quickly. New
websites go through a penalty phase (Google Sandbox) where it is difficult to get ranked for
difficult phrases. The Sandbox penalty can last 18 months for highly competitive phrases.

Domain Name: This includes newer domains are not as important as older domains. Registering
domains for 5 years is much more important than 1 year.

Visitor Traffic: Google has patented these and can measure this through Google Tool Bars and
Google Analytics. The number of visitors, which pages are visited, how much time is spent on a
page and if a page has been bookmarked.

SEO’s Hat

There are three kinds of hats

1. White Hat

2. Black Hat

3. Gray Hat

White Hat SEO

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All the tips that comes under Google Web master Guidelines and that I have discussed in first
post about ON and OFF page Optimization are called White Hat SEO techniques.

White-Hat SEO Tactics:

Internal Linking:
By far one of the easiest ways to stop your website from ranking well on the search engines is to
make it difficult for search engines to find their way through it. Many sites use some form of
script to enable fancy drop-down navigation, etc. Many of these scripts cannot be crawled by the
search engines resulting in unindexed pages.
While many of these effects add visual appeal to a website, if you are using scripts or some other
form of navigation that will hinder the spider of your website it is important to add text links to
the bottom of at least your homepage linking to all you main internal pages including a sitemap
to your internal pages.
Reciprocal Linking:
Exchanging links with other webmasters is a good way of attaining additional incoming links to
your site. While the value of reciprocal links has declined a bit over the past year they certainly
still do have their place.
A very important note is that if you do plan on building reciprocal links it is important to make
sure that you do so intelligently. Random reciprocal link building in which you exchange links
with any and virtually all sites that you can will not help you over the long run. Link only to sites
that are related to yours and whose content your visitors will be interested in and preferably
which contain the keywords that you want to target. Building relevancy through association is
never a bad thing unless you're linking to bad neighborhoods.

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 If you are planning or currently do undertake reciprocal link building you know how time
consuming this process can be. A useful tool that can speed up the process is PRProwler.
Essentially this tool allows you to find related sites with high Page Rank, weeding out many of
the sites that would simply be a waste of time to even visit.

Writing For Others:

You know more about your business that those around you so why not let everyone know?
Whether it be in the form of articles, forum posts, or a spotlight piece on someone else's website,
creating content that other people will want to read and post on their sites is one of the best ways
to build links to your website that don't require a reciprocal link back.

Site Optimization
The manipulation of your content, wording, and site structure for the purpose of attaining high
search engine positioning is the backbone of SEO and the search engine positioning industry.
Everything from creating solid title and meta tags to tweaking the content to maximize its search
engine effectiveness is the key to any successful optimization effort.

It is of primary importance that the optimization of a website not detract from the message and
quality of content contained within the site. There's no point in driving traffic to a site that is so
poorly worded that it cannot possibly convey the desired message and which thus, cannot sell.
Site optimization must always take into account the maintenance of the salability and solid
message of the site while maximizing it's exposure on the search engines.

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Black Hat SEO:

What is Black Hat SEO?

It may be defined as the techniques that are used to get higher search engine rankings in an
unethical manner. So anything that the search engine forbids us from doing like doorway pages,
cloaking, and hidden text is Black Hat SEO.

Black hat SEO Techniques:

Hidden Text: Hidden text is textual content which your visitors can't see but still readable by
Search Engine. It can be done by making font color as same as background color or making font
color as same as background image.

Keyword Stuffing: It is a technique used to spam search engines by placing excessive or

irrelevant keywords in the meta keywords tag or throughout the content of the page. Because
search engines scan web pages for the words that are entered into search criteria by the user.

Landing Pages/Doorway Pages/Bridge Pages: It may be define as the fake pages that the user
will never see. Doorway pages are pages packed with keywords, and designed solely for the
search engines. It is an attempt to trick search engines into indexing the site higher.

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Cloaking: It is a technique in which the content presented to the search engines is different from
that present to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on IP address of the
user requesting the page. When a user is defined as search engine spider, a server side script
delivers a different version of web page. It is use to deceive the search engine. Actually what
happens it is a CGI script which reads the IP address of the requester against the IP address of
the SE spiders? If no match is found then requester is identified as human. The point is that
highly optimized web pages are served to SE while human visitors get a different web page from
the same URL.

Link Farming: The process of exchanging reciprocal links with websites in order to increase
Search Engine Rankings. This is done just to increase the number of sites that links to yours site,
but it is consider as SPAM. Because Google says we have to exchange links only with the site
that are having relevant theme as same as our site and a link page doesn't contain more than 50
links.

Page Hijacking: It is the form of spamming the index of search engine. Mostly web hosts do it,
when we forget to renew our domain name. It is achieved by creating a rough copy of a popular
website which shows content similar to the original website to a web crawler but redirects the
web surfers to the unrelated or malicious website. Link spammers monitor DNS records for
domains that will expire soon and buy them when they expire and replace the pages with the
links to their pages.

Automated Search Engine Submission Software: We don't have to use such software for the
promotion purpose. They don't work efficiently and sometime they caused for banning the
website. We don't have to rely on them.

Duplicate Content: To use the same content on different pages, Google consider it as spam and
if it detects large amount of duplicate content on different sub or main domains then Google can
impose “Duplicate Content Penalty” which results in losing rankings. So we should put different
meaningful content at our pages and on sub domains also.

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Content Solely For Search Engines: Don't publish any content that is meant for search engines
only. Content rich in keyword density not useful for human beings and it is easily detected by
Google and other search engines which results in penalties.

Frames: Though frames are not “Black Hat SEO” but frames should be avoided as they cause
huge problem with crawlers to index the site.

Email Spamming: Unwanted, unsolicited email, to send the emails to number of people not
directly related to SEO is called email spamming. So we should never implement such
techniques

Grey-Hat SEO

The following tactics fall in the grey area between legitimate tactics and search engine spam.
They include tactics such as cloaking, paid links, duplicate content and a number of others.
Unless you are on the correct side of this equation these tactics are not recommended.

Remember even if the search engines cannot detect these tactics when they are used as spam,
your competitors will undoubtedly be on the lookout and report your site to the engines in order
to eliminate you from the competition.

It is definitely worth noting that, while it may be tempting to enlist grey-hat and black-hat SEO
tactics in order to rank well, doing so stands a very good chance of getting your website
penalized. There are legitimate methods for ranking a website well on the search engines. It is
highly recommended that webmasters and SEO's put in the extra time and effort to properly rank
a website well, insuring that the site will not be penalized down the road or even banned from the
search engines entirely.

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics:

Cloaking:

There are times when cloaking is considered a legitimate tactic by users and search engines alike.
Basically, if there is a logical reason why you should be allowed to present different information

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to the search engines than the visitor, you are relatively safe. Even so, this tactic is very risky and
it is recommended that you contact each search engine, present your reasoning, and allow them
the opportunity to approve its use.

Paid Links:

The practice of purchasing link on websites solely for the increase in link-popularity that it can
mean has grown steadily over the last year-or-so with link auction sites such as Link Adage
making this practice easier.

When links are purchased as pure advertising the practice is considered legitimate, while the
practice of purchasing links only for the increase in link-popularity is considered an abuse and
efforts will be made to either discount the links or penalize the site.

Duplicate Content:

Due primarily to the increase in popularity of affiliate programs, duplicate content on the web
has become an increasingly significant problem for both search engines and search engine users
alike with the same or similar sites dominating the top positions in the search engine results
pages.

To address this problem many search engines have added filters that seek out pages with the
same or very similar content and eliminate the duplicate. Even at times when the duplicate
content is not detected by the search engines it is often reported by competitors and the site's
rankings penalized.

There are times when duplicate content is considered legitimate by both search engines and
visitors and that is on resource sites. A site that consists primarily as an index of articles on a
specific subject-matter will not be penalized by posting articles that occur elsewhere on the net,
though the weight it may be given as additional content will likely not be as high as a page of
unique content.

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Difference Between Black Hat and White Hat SEO:

 Black Hat SEO is meant for SE only. while white hat is meant for human
visitors.
 These techniques are hidden to human beings and white hat techniques are
visible to human beings.
 It is meant for short term results only. and this is meant for long term results.
 These methods are unethical ways of optimizing the site and these methods
are ethical ways according to SE norms.
 these may result in getting site banned and these always brings good search
engine rankings.
 SE are enemies for Black Hat SEO & here SE's are friends for White Hat SEO
techniques.

SEO’s Tools

It is boardly divided into four part which is shown below

SEOToolSet

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It is a Bruce Clay collection of indispensible advanced Search Engine Optimization tools. This
SEO tools product includes integrated research tools, a keyword density analyzer, search engine
ranking monitors, ranking report modules, link analysis, and more. Exceptionally robust and
feature rich, this is one of the best search engine marketing tool collections on the market. If you
intend to promote your own website, then you must try our SEO tools.

LinkMaps

It is a Bruce Clay search engine marketing tools product designed to identify pages from other
sites that link to your site and to facilitate having them indexed by the major search engines. This
is necessary if you are trying to increase Link Popularity as part of a SEO and search engine
placement strategy

PathMaps

It is a Bruce Clay SEO tools product designed to follow visitors through your site and provide
detailed path mapping of each separate visit. The ability to focus on just SEO results, just search
terms, only visitors that performed a specific action can be easily identified and their page
viewing history reviewed. Highly necessary if you are trying to increase Link Popularity as part
of a search engine ranking and placement strategy.

Dynamic Site Mapping

It is a Bruce Clay SEO software product designed to identify and spider popular pages in a
dynamic environment. It includes a robust feature list including a private "your site only"
dynamic content search engine as well as several spider reports that facilitate search engine
indexing for all crawler-based search engines.

Keyword Research Tool:

 Provides links to price estimate tools from Google AdWords. That Google AdWords tool
shows the necessary bid to rank one for 85% of queries, and roughly how much traffic you
could expect AdWords to send you based on that bid price and ad position.

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  Links to Google Trends, Google Suggest, Google Synonyms, Yahoo! Suggest, and Keyword
Discovery keyword research results.

 Links to various vertical databases like Topix.net and Google Blogsearch us to let you know
if people are talking about your topic and what types of resources they are referencing.

 Wordtracker is also a keyword suggestion tool. If you sign up for a Wordtracker account they
offer many additional keyword research features and tools that are lacking in our basic
keyword tool. Wordtracker offers a valuable subscription based keyword research service and
has a free keyword research guide. Wordtracker also sells lists of top search terms at various
price points and depth.

 Aaron Wall offers a free Google AdWords & Yahoo! Search Marketing Tips PDF and lists
many other free keyword research tools, and includes offers a few free keyword research
videos on that page.

 Dan Thies's SEO Research Labs offers professional keyword research services and this free
75 minute keyword research video.

Tool Limitations:

Tools can only provide helpful information and estimates. Don't let tools make your mind
up for you!

 Don't expect precise quantitative analysis from keyword tools.

 Use tools for qualitative and relative analysis.

 People tend to typically use language in similar patterns. If there are 14,000,000 search results for
and only 2,000,000 pages for the odds are car hire is a more common search term.

 Since we estimate Google, Yahoo!, and MSN traffic based on Wordtracker's keyword data, any
sampling error is amplified due to the difference in traffic.

Depending on your topic / vertical and your geographic location the search engines may have
vastly different search volumes. The tool can only possibly offer approximations. Exact search
volumes are hard to find due to vanity searches, click bots, rank checkers, and other forms of
automated traffic. Exceptionally valuable search terms may show far greater volume than they
actually have due to various competitive commercial forces inflating search volumes due to
automated search traffic.

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 SERPs

Your websites Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are determined by various SEO factors, on
page content (your body text, the title element etc…), anchor text of links to your web sites
pages, the search engines algorithms tweak of the day and of course the number of websites or
pages competing for that search phrase.

Determining your Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) Competition:

The first mistake in SEOs make is looking at total number of pages found for a given SERP and
from this limited information concluding the difficulty and number of competitors for that search
phrase. This method is inaccurate and should not be relied upon, for example the word home is
found on a lot of pages (1,780,000,000 pages!!), not because they are targeting SERPs related to
the word home, but because they use home as the anchor text of home page links.

Look at the SEO Home SERP, 5,360,000 pages found with a loose search for SEO Home, which
would suggest a difficult SERP with quite a lot of competition. But this loose search alone tells
us nothing about real competition for the SERP, what we need to know is of those millions of
pages how many are targeting or at least mentioning the exact phrase SEO Home, those are your
real competition.

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Exact and Loose Phrase Match Searches:

As you can appreciate an exact phrase match to a search engine is considered much more
important than finding the words separated, or a loose match. So two similar pages with the
above strings of text and no other mention of the words SEO and Home you would expect to find
the page with text number 1 way above the page with text number 2 for the SEO Home SERP.

When you perform the exact phrase match “SEO Home” it gives 13,900 pages. This tells us the
vast majority of 5,360,000 pages found for SEO Home are not interested in the SEO Home
SERP; only 13,900 pages are your true competition since they use the exact text on their page.

Vital terms for SEO

 SEO Keywords Guide

 Meta tag

 Anchor text

 Website Seasoning

SEO Keywords Guide

It has been a long time since I’ve wrote something about search engine optimizing and today we
will talk about keywords. Keywords play an important role in your search engine results and
therefore it’s important to learn everything about this vital part of your blog or website. So, when
and where to use keywords?

Keywords in the Title:

Using the right keywords in your title tag can produce the results you are looking for. If people
search on a relevant keyword your descriptive title tag will seduce people to click on your link. A
title is the first thing the searcher sees in a search result and if that title includes the keywords
they are looking for, they might click the link.

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But what is the right title format? You should always use the most important keyword(s) in your
title because that’s where people are looking for. For example, if you article is about web design
and colors, you could name your title “Effective Colors in Web design”. You have written an
interesting title, and you used the most important keywords.

HTML

<Title>Effective Colors In Web design<title>

Keywords in the Description:

A searcher will see a description in the search engine results right under the title, and it’s an
important factor that makes people click your link. You should also include you most important
keywords here as well, but make the description an explanation of your title. If people aren’t sure
your article is helpful for them, use the description to convince them.

Keywords in the description doesn’t help you rank better, it just gives more information about
your page to the search engine user.

What is a good description? Let’s go back to our example: “Effective Colors In Web design”.
We could use “With this article you will be provided excellent examples on how to use colors in
web design. Colors which are effective and awesome to see.” If our example article is about this
subject, it will give you an explanation of the title, right?

HTML

<meta name="description" content="With this article you will be provided excellent examples
on how to use colors in web design. Colors which are effective and awesome to see. " />

Specified Keywords:

You can specify the keywords you would like to have your article ranked on. The search engines
use that to determine what you page is about. The META keyword tag doesn’t work in Google,
but Yahoo! still uses this tag. It doesn’t do much, but everything can help.

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I recently learned you should use every keyword you add to this META tag only once, because a
search engine links every keyword to each other. Back to our example, the following META tags
do the same for your article, and the first one isn’t very good. The second one is better.

Wrong

<meta name="keywords" content="Effective color Web design, Effective color, color web
design, web design color, colors web design" />

Correct

<meta name="keywords" content="Effective, Color, Web design" />

Keywords in Content:

Usually this shouldn’t become a point a searcher will notice, but a search engine definitely does.
Keyword density is the ratio of keywords against the total number of words in your content.
Your content should have a maximum of 5% keywords on your whole article. Five percent is not
a low percentage: 1 on the 20 words should a keyword.

Anyway, you shouldn’t forget you are writing your content for your readers. Just don’t stuff your
article full of keywords if that makes the story uninteresting to read. You should use keywords
where they fit in and here’s another thing, if you use too many keywords you will be punished by
the search engines for keyword stuffing.

Keywords in Tags:

Search engines see the HTML of the content and they mark some words surrounded by tags as
more important than others. h1, h2, h3 tags will tell your visitors they are the title of an article,
the chapters or the sub-chapters. The search engine scans a page in the same way and therefore
those h1, h2 and h3 tags will be marked as more important. Read more about heading tags here.

But there are more-important tags. Strong and italic tags are more important than your normal
paragraphs, because they tell your visitors they are more important. Those words jump out of the

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paragraph because there is more weight on them. The search engine values those words in the
same way they are more important. Many other “special” tags are valued different by search
engines.

So, putting keywords in special tags will only value those words as more important, which is
great for you if it’s used correctly.

Keywords are important in Search Engine Optimizing:

You have learnt why keywords are important for your search engine results. The secret is to use
keywords in a responsible, yet effective way to use the search engines in your advantage. You
should do that if you find any more ways to use keywords, don’t hesitate to add a comment to the
conversation.

How to Use Keywords:

Here are suggestions on where and how to use your keywords on your web page you want
ranked for that keyword:

 Use it at least once in your Page Title or <title> tag, twice if you can use it in another
form, but don’t feel compelled to have it twice. Once is usually sufficient. Example:
<title>How to Use Keywords</title>

 Use it once in your Meta Description Tag. It can help convince users to click your search
results. (See more about this at my meta description post.) Example:

<meta name="description" content="Want to know how to best use keywords to optimize

your webpage? Click here to leanr and read other SEO Tips." />

 Use it at least once in your H1 <h1> Tag . This should be main heading or title of your
web page. On this blog post the H1 title is “How to Use Keywords”. The H1 tag should
different on each page, and not the web site name. Only use ONE H1 tag on any given
page.

 Use it in one of your subheads. Your subhead should be an H2 <h2> tag. H2 tags can
also, and should, hold secondary keywords, but including the main keyword is effective.

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 Most web pages would benefit from subheads from a user perspective as well as for
optimization help.

 Depending on the amount of body text on the page, you should try to include keywords
within the text at least 4 times. This comes with a BIG CAVEAT though. Only do this if
it makes sense and doesn’t appear spammy. Remember you are writing for human and
search engines. Spammy content can ruin all the efforts you made to get the user to the
page. Be sensible and read your content. If too many keywords are making it sound silly,
take them out. Avoid keyword stuffing.

 If you have images on the page, and it makes sense, you should add it to the alt <alt> tag.

 If you have images on the page, and it makes sense, you should add your keyword to the
image title. This isn’t something most people to but it is helpful, in my opinion and only
takes a few seconds. So your image tags should look like this:

<img src="image.jpg" alt="keyword phrase" title="keyword phrase" />.

Targeting keywords within your reach

There is something to be said about targeting terms and keywords that are within your reach. Not
that wishful thinking does not have its place, but before you embark on a yearlong keyword
conquest, make sure you understand what it takes to land a top 10 result for a competitive
keyword.

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Assessing Where You Are

For most, SEO comes down to budget and chronology. When you start pursuing a keyword
matters and just how you go about it all have an impact on the reaction the algorithm returns.
Although resources matter, never overlook the power of ingenuity and prowess in chipping away
at a competitive phrase.

What to Expect

If you have a new site, the likelihood of your content having the appropriate indicators may be
bleak however this should not discourage you from picking up some low hanging fruit along the
way.

Compare a Like to a Like, Measure Success in Relative Stages

Perspective is everything, how you measure the impact of your site is through relevant traffic and
sales conversion. Instead of comparing your website to the leading site in the industry instead use
another metric to categorize a successful SEO campaign.

For example, the ability to amass thousands of long-tail keywords or “phrases that have less
competition typically containing more than 3 words” is a great way to set the stage and groom
your sites profile for bigger and better targets for keywords.

Build a Natural Link Profile

The concept of managing link weight and creating a conducive link profile for your site, based
on how themed it is, how well the site architecture is built all play a part in the saga. However, in
this instance it is more about off page SEO than on page SEO factors.

Use a Wide Array of Keywords

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The idea here, to gain multiple rankings is to mix things up. Target keywords that are attainable,
but always keep your eye on the prize. Depending on how aggressive the competition is, how
Google and other search engines see your site, the link popularity your pages have and how
useful your content is, will determine just how fast you climb the ladder to the helm of a
keywords root.

Depending on the phrase, acquisition can occur within the time frame of a few days to several
months, the key here is to always keep producing more relevant content around a related theme
and pursuing each keyword as its own unique project until a suitable ranking is produced.
Managing multiple keywords obviously requires more resources to execute and track however
the results they produce and how they impact the bottom line should be apparent with data from
analytics.

With keywords, it boils down to time, energy and focus and the ability to take direction from the
signals search engines provide to fine tune your sites on page and off page factors to perfection.

What to Do When Keywords Plateau in the SERPs

Have you ever wondered why certain keywords rise faster than others? or what to do when
Keywords plateau in the search engine result pages?

After performing SEO on thousands of websites over the years, you are able to discern distinct
patterns that all affect why a keyword ranks and where.

For example if a website is older than 4 years old, it has gained a natural degree of trust. Sites
that have gained trust for example have certain privileges that younger websites do not.

44
Although these observations are based on personal trial and error, circumstances such as:

• Keyword discovery time

• The age, authority and link from the site providing the back link
• The amount of topical content on the target site
• If the page was static or dynamic
• How prominent the keywords are (a) within the site and (b) in relation to the page in
question

Topical relevance is a plus however, sometimes there is no way around waiting for certain
factors to age and rise above their algorithmic quarantine like repression in the SERPs.

I have seen phrases that had hundreds of thousands of competing pages acquire a ranking with
moderate effort and other keywords or phrases with ten thousand competing pages take months.

The point is, if a keyword plateaus then you can always look at some of the primary metrics used
for producing rankings to assess which action to take to remedy the situation.

For example, if you are able to get a keyword to appear from off the grid (not in the top 1000
pages) and have it scale 900+ positions then fizzle out and get stuck somewhere in the 30’s (on
the 4th page of search engines). Then it is time to review the timeline and conditions you utilized
to create the proper finesse to allow it to scale the last few pages and reach the top 10.

Performing things like:

• Determining how many inbound links are flowing to the page from internal links
• Determining how many inbound links are linking to the page
• Which percentage of the keywords leading to the page overlap with the target phrase
• If you need to refine the on page factors such as titles, meta data, increase the density of
the keyword, adjust the prominence, add bold or H1 tags
• Going back to older links and flowing fresh link weight to them to pass more link weight
to your pages

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So, we know that the ratio of links in to links out to a page and the site, the age of the site
providing the link, the age and authority of the aggregate sites and what amount of link juice they
pass, the on page factors, the amount of internal links and the quality of the content all have an
impact on the algorithm.

However sometimes, if you just let things take their course you will find that even the most
competitive keywords eventually give way and rise to the top if you are aware of the nurturing
process.

The takeaway here is (1) start with a stable platform that is easily crawled by search engine
spiders (2) get the on page factors as solid as possible from the onset, build each page to rank for
a specific range of 2-3 keywords and variations and (3) build links moderately over time to
acquire a keyword that is competitive.

What are Long Tail Keywords?

As we’ve discussed, the internet revolves around keywords and key phrases – the specific terms
users enter into search engines when they’re searching for content. Finding competitive
keywords to target on your site is as much a science as it an art, as you need to search for elusive
keywords that aren’t too competitive, but still have significant search volume. As the internet
becomes more and more competitive, smart web site owners are turning to long tail keywords to
generate traffic.

According to DoshDosh.com, the long tail refers to “a socio-statistical theory which suggests
that the collective sales of products in low demand can exceed that of popular products and
bestsellers.” In terms of keywords, this means that it’s easier to succeed using longer, less
competitive keyword phrases, like “how to establish a home-based vending business”, than it is
with more popular keywords, such as “lose weight” or “make money online.” By using long-tail
keywords, you’re shooting for the small fish in the pond, while the rest of the marketing
community is trolling for the record-breaking bass.

The idea of the long tail is summarized in the following graphic:

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So what does all this mean for you as a site owner? When you’re just getting started, it’s much
more difficult to get ranked for popular search terms, given the amount of resources the existing
sites have to maintain their rankings. However, it’s entirely within your reach to rank at the top
of the search engines for long tail keywords, using a combination of on-site and off-site search
engine optimization strategies.

If you rank high for lots of long-tail keywords then you will receive lots of free traffic from the
search engines.

META Tags
Tips & elements of Meta tags

When you start building your actual site, one important on-site technique you can implement is
the inclusion of meta tags in your web pages. Meta tags are special snippets of code that are
included before the body content of your site that contain information about your site’s name and
purpose. Other than the title tags, these tags aren’t visible to visitors on your site, but they
provide valuable information to the search engine robots that determine which search terms to
display your site for.

47
The most popular tags for SEO purposes are title, keyword and description tags, all of which
provide more information to the search engines about your site’s content and what search terms
its most relevant to.

Title Tag:

While this isn’t exactly a meta tag, it’s usually categorized as one because it occurs in the
“HEAD” area of your webpage. However you’d like to categorize it, this tag helps the search
engines scouring your site to figure out what the page is called and what should be displayed in
the search results. For search engine optimization purposes, it’s important to include your page’s
main target keyword or key phrase in the title so that search engines will know to display your
site when a user searches for that specific term.

Keyword Meta Tags:

Keyword meta tags are also important, as they let the search engines know which searches the
site is relevant to. A keyword tag is set up like the following example:

A good keyword tag includes between 3-10 keywords that are relevant to your page. Stuffing this
tag full of 50 keywords won’t help you rank for more keywords – if the search engines can’t
determine that the keyword is relevant to your content, they may penalize you with lower
amounts of traffic. Be sure that any keywords you choose to include in this tag are actually used
on the page.

Description Meta Tags:

Many sites also make use of description meta tags – although many SEO experts disagree about
whether they actually contribute to your site’s SEO. At the very least, description tags let you
control the paragraph of text that will be displayed below your site’s name in some of the search
results. Description meta tags is structured like this:

This meta tag controls what will be displayed in the search engine results when your site comes
up in the rankings. Natural search results usually display the page’s title and description.

48
So even if meta description tags don’t contribute to improving your site’s rankings, writing a
good description may help convince search engine visitors to click through to your site. You can
even use this description as an opportunity to pre-sell potential visitors on any products you’re
selling with persuasive, targeted language.

Heading Tags:

While not exactly classified as meta tags, in addition to these techniques, including your major
keywords and key phrases in headline titles is a great way to boost your search engine rankings.
Using heading tags on your pages is simple – instead of just including your text and adjusting the
size to make it larger, wraps it in a heading tag structured like this:

Your Title Here

There are six different heading sizes – h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6. The top heading of your page
should be wrapped in h1 tags and should include your page’s main keyword or key phrase.

Another good on-site SEO technique is to frequently update your site with fresh, new content.
The search engines love sites that are regularly updated. When you add new content be sure to let
the search engines know that you’ve updated with your site with XML-compliant sitemaps.

META Tags or what are officially referred to as Metadata Elements, are found within the section
of your web pages. META Tags are still relevant with some indexing search engines. You should
utilize your META Tags in accordance with the W3C - World Wide Web Consortium Metadata
Specifications and those of the search engines you are targeting.

The following is a partial list of metadata elements that may be used in the overall site
structuring, organization, and search engine marketing strategy.

1. TITLE Element - Page Titles:

Every html document must have a TITLE Element in the head section. Some refer to the <title>
element as a meta tag (title tag) when it is not.

<title>META Tags Tips - Metadata Elements</title>

To see an example of where the title element is placed in the html, view the source code of this
web page. Look at the very top of the page right after the opening <head> tag.

2. META Description Tag:

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Some search engines will index the META Description Tag found in the <head></head> section
of your web pages. These indexing search engines may present the content of your meta
description tag as the result of a search query.

<meta name="description" content="META Tags or what are officially referred to as Metadata

Elements are found within the <head></head> section of your web pages. The following is a
partial list of metadata elements that may be used in the overall site structuring, organization, and
search engine marketing strategy."

3. META Keywords Tag:

The META Keywords Tag is where you list keywords and keyword phrases that you've targeted
for that specific page. There have been numerous discussions at various search engine marketing
forums surrounding the use of the keywords tag and its effectiveness. The overall consensus is
that the tag has little to no relevance with the major search engines today.

<meta name="keywords" content="META Tags, Tips, Metadata Elements, META Description

Tag, META Keywords Tag, Language Tag, Link Relationship Tag, Title Element">

4. META Language Tag:

In HTML elements, the language attribute or META Language Tag specifies the natural
language. This document is mostly concerned with how to specify the primary language(s) (there
could be more than one) and the base language (there is only one) in HTML documents.

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">

5. META Link Relationship Tag:

It is helpful for search results to reference the beginning of the collection of documents in
addition to the page hit by the search. You may help search engines by using the link element
with rel="start" along with the title attribute. The META Link Relationship tag is part of the
metadata that appears within the <head></head> section of your web pages.

<link rel="start" href="/meta-tags/" title="META Tags Tips - Metadata Elements">

6. META Robots Tag:

The Robots META Tag is meant to provide users who cannot upload or control the/robots.txt file
at their websites, with a last chance to keep their content out of search engine indexes and
services.
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<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

7. META Revisit-After Tag :

The revisit-after META tag is not supported by any major search engines, it never was supported
and probably never will be. It was developed for, and supported by, Vancouver Webpages and
their local search engine searchBC.

<meta name="revisit-after" content="7 days">

Anchor text

Anchor text link title, link label is one of the most important factors you must understand in
order to earn good rankings from the search engines. Specifically, anchor text refers to the linked
text that’s displayed in place of a web address – the text you click on to be taken to a new web
page. Anchor text is structured as follows in a website:

SEO Gold

The HTML code for which is-

<a href=”http://www.seo-gold.com/”>SEO Gold</a>

Anchor Text Importance in Search Engine Optimization

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Google heavily weight it’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) towards the anchor text of
links to a page. This can be demonstrated by looking at extreme examples where a pages high
ranking can only be attributed to anchor text and no other SEO factors. Googlebombs are
probably the easiest examples to find and understand how anchor text affects SERPs.

How effective is Anchor Text?

Since 371 million pages are reported for the Computer SERP and 150 million pages for the
Computers SERP and these SERPs are highly commercial and competitive the reason these two
site rank highly for those SERPs is due to the power of anchor text. With hundreds of thousands
of pages linking to these two home pages with many using the anchor text Computer/Computers
it’s enough to rank highly with no on page optimization! Imagine where they would be with a
little on site optimization!

We have found through both experimentation and real sites that anchor text is almost always the
deciding factor for very hard SERPs. A site can do OK with good on site optimization, but poor
use of anchor text/few links. A site can do quite well with good use of anchor text/links, but poor
on site optimization. When you have a highly optimized site and good use of anchor text from
reasonable Page Rank pages there tends to be very good SERPs.

How to use Anchor Text Effectively?

Anchor text usage should reflect the content the link is linking to and ideally help the page it is
linked from as well. This means if you can link highly related pages together they will tend to do
much better in their respective SERPs.

Importance of Anchor Text

Too many webmasters think they can rank well in search engines just by buying a large number
of links to their web site. This is simply not true, because search engines also evaluate the anchor
text of the links. Getting a large number of links with the same non-optimized anchor text has
limited traffic potential compared to using anchor text effectively.

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The most common anchor text found in links to a web site is generally the name of the site. The
effect of such links to search engine ranking depends on the name of the site. If site name is well
optimized for keywords, such links may be good for search engine optimization. Often this is,
however, not the case, and links with other, more descriptive anchor texts would have a much
greater effect.

Adding Search Terms

No web site should target only one keyword, or key phrase in search engines. Having the site
rank well for multiple keywords may multiply the organic traffic. Anchor text in inbound links is
a good way to help search engine ranking for secondary keywords, which you will not want to
make more prominent on-site.

Particularly in Google, pages may rank quite well for anchor text keywords, even if the page did
not feature the term at all. An example of this are the Google bombs, where pages about George
Bush have ranked for “dumb motherfucker” and Microsoft at one time ranked for “more evil
than satan himself”. The same technique can be brought to SEO use too.

Anchor Text with Long Tail Keywords

If a page has a large number of inbound links with the same keyword as the anchor text, if will
rank high for the term. It is especially easy to use this technique with low competition search
terms, where there is no clear best page to show for the term yet. Long tail keywords - targeted
key phrases with multiple words - are just these kinds of keywords, as they have little
competition.

Researching long tail keywords relating to your web site content, and acquiring links with those
phrases as the anchor text can increase the number of terms your site can be found with. By
getting ranked for multiple such long tail keywords, a web site can get a large total number of
visitors for search engines. The best part of it is that it also works with new web sites, and sites
with relatively little back links.

Website Seasoning

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A great steak isn’t just thrown on the grill. It is seasoned, marinated and prepared, all of which
can take extra time. The same applies to websites. Time is a factor that does play in. Most
websites don’t just overtake the one position in Google and keep it right off the bat.

Google is searching for the best results to provide its users. This keeps users coming back and
allows Google to keep selling the Adwords which is their bread and butter. So when a new
website pops up, Google will consider it but will also look at how long the site has been up, how
much longer the domain has before expiration, how much content is on the site and how
frequently that content is updated. This is called seasoning… you must give it time to grow and it
will overtake the top rankings.

Imperative Search Engine Ranking Factors

Never discount the power of titles, links or content for procuring a high ranking search engine
position. More importantly, their numeric equivalents and ratios that impact search algorithms.

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For those unfamiliar with the fundamental building blocks of on page and off optimization, each
of the following components have a profound influence on how search engines view your pages.
Your site essentially has three critically competitive variables that you can alter to increase
your pages relative position. They are the allintext, allinanchor & allintitle ratios. Each
respectively when utilized properly can elevate your sites relevance in search engines.

If harnessed to their full potential any one or a combination of these delicate factors can
produce a high ranking, position. Just like a secret sauce, each engine’s algorithm (Google,
Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, Ask) have their own unique attributes in how they interpret and spawn
results based on such rudimentary ranking criteria. This is an overview of those ranking factors
and fundamentally covers how each function.

Those three components that one can use to create relevance are:

Allinanchor: A high concentration of links / either internal or external that saturate a particular
search term. Sites that are constructed with superior internal link architecture also fall into this
category. This is a primary ranking factor for meta based search engines, who rely on link
popularity for their objective assessments. Essentially, popularity equals “votes” from other sites
that endorse your pages by linking to you. The text phrases they use, contribute to augment your
relative position, based on the semantics of the keywords used.

Allintitle: Use of a repeated keyword in the context of the title (such as a company name,
keyword or brand).

Often you will see naming conventions that utilize a pipe and then by default use consistent
keywords either before or after the topic of the page. This is common with blogs but is a well
known SEO tactic based on siloing or theming information for logical categorization.

If used frequently enough from a content development point of view, one can acquire a high
ranking position from the consistent use of the prefix or consistent trailing keywords used. The
reason being, titles when indexed by search engines or RSS feeds become anchor text not to
mention as they mature each link gets stronger, so pages cement themselves by default if
constructed properly.

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With the advent of blogging or the use of content management systems, every time you publish
a page, you are building more allinanchor, allintext and allintitle correlations. Depending on if
you utilize them to their utmost potential, they can become dominant ranking factors as a
consequence.

This is speculated to be one reason why so many domains rank for their company name (or
keywords in the domain name), due to the high frequency of the words in the name being used
and displayed and linking back to your pages across the web. There are of course other factors
involved, but you get the gist.

Allintext: A high frequency of a particular keyword or series of keywords can contribute to

creating a higher more relevant result according to search engine algorithms. The exact formula
is only known by search engineers, but through multivariate testing SEO practitioners have
concluded that it is the proper balance of these three elements that contribute to acquiring a
higher more refined result from search engines as a result of mixing and balancing these
elements to produce the desired effect.

Depending on the mixture of each and what the search engines favor at the time, each of these
respective components can work for or against your relative position.

If your site has a high allinanchor relevance, such as Adobe Acrobat for the term Click Here,
this means that similar to the Google Bomb effect, a site owning a high frequency of a particular
term in the anchor text a.k.a. link will obtain a high ranking position for that term. Since Adobe
reader has the anchor text to download adobe acrobat they rank for the term amidst hundreds of
millions of search results in Google. This is an SEO dream for most. Other examples of this
ranking method are prominent in the top 10.

What you will note however, is that the term is nowhere to be found on the page it links to,
which is a testament to the fact that it is not always what is on your pages that matters. Most
importantly, you can rank for content that is sparsely located on a page but effective once
structured. Here is an example using our site where we rank for the term SEO Technology , yet it
is not on the page.

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Others use a content ranking strategy using the consistent application of branding / relevant
modifiers under the allintitle format to eventually chip away and establish their pages. If you
have a site that has several hundred or thousands of pages, this alone in conjunction with internal
links can send your pages skyrocketing into the upper echelon of a category, industry or niche if
you constantly use the same main keywords in your titles.

This is why naming your categories with keyword specific modifiers is a fundamental aspect of
optimization. Instead of random stuff as a category name, use a relevant key phrase from the
start, then the URL will have that term in it, every time you publish additional content under that
sub folder.

Last but not least, the allintext ranking strategy is more of a by product that can be used to
impact the others. Aside from scraper sites that harvest data from others and reconstruct it for the
sake of having high allintext combinations on the page. This component is better left alone as far
a ranking strategy and falls more under the category of keyword density. The easy way to rank,
have the terms on the page, exceed the requirement and your bound to trip a spam filter. It really
is about balance, relevance and incorporating all of the elements seamlessly.

The key is to create link worthy content, share and promote it accordingly, provide a healthy
influx of links, ensure that it is linked to internally to other relevant pages and above all else, tag
your content accordingly.

To get a better idea of how these variables affect your search engine rankings, here is a nifty
little tool called NicheWatch that can help bring these ratios into focus with solid examples of
pages that employ the percentages and their respective impact in search engines.

Page Primer: Analyzes your website and customizes recommendations specifically for your
pages. The tool also alerts you to bad practices that may cause search engine problems and it
provides key information on your site's link popularity.

Benefits

• Boost Your Ranking

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 • Learn Search Engine Secrets
• Avoid Pitfalls That Get You Banned

Page Primer gives you detailed, customized tips to boost your search engine ranking by
analyzing your page and providing personalized recommendations for your individual pages.

Some design techniques create problems with search engines. As part of its page
evaluation:

Page Primer checks for practices that could cause you problems with search engines and alerts
you to these practices before they get you in trouble.

Page Primer then provides you valuable information on your site's link popularity which is
growing in importance.

Search Engine Starter: It helps you reach that 85% of online users who use search engines to
find the right product. It submits your web page preferences to 28 popular engines of your
choice. As importantly, its automatic and periodic resubmissions keep you in the top 40. Net
Mechanic continuously updates and reviews its search engine database to make sure that you're
in the right place at the right time.

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Search Engine Starter website tools handle your search engine marketing needs quickly and
cost-effectively. Automatic submission to 28 popular engines of your choice, and periodic
resubmissions, requires just 5 minutes of your time - instead of the normal 8 hours it takes to
submit to 100 sites. Starter also updates its search engine database frequently to create spam-free
submission.

Search Engine Starter is offered as a part of the Search Engine Power Pack package or as a
stand-alone tool.

Search Engine Tracker: It helps you know where you stand. It automatically tracks your
ranking on top search engines to let you know if you're up, down or out. Rank matters - 75% of
users never go past page two of search engine lists and engines frequently drop listings.
Therefore you've got to rank, and stay, in the top 40 to drive traffic to your site. So, use tracker to
make sure that your rankings are on the rise.

Benefits:

Track your progress, Get Ahead of Competition & Move up in the rankings

Your Website Should Rank as great as it looks

What's the use of having a website, if no one can find it? Getting traffic is half the battle, keeping
visitors on your site requires an attractive web design which is why SEO Design Solutions is
proud to offer custom SEO Web Design.

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Achieving top 10 search engine positioning can be accomplished through applying SEO
Technology. As a technology SEO is based on rules, guidelines and principles. By applying
these principles systematically, produce viable shifts in rankings for your website through on site
on page adjustments & off page link building through search engine optimization.

What this means to you is, it is ethically managed your online presence through carefully crafted
articles, blogs, one-way links from directories and on-topic sites to hasten website authority and
subsequent rankings for your pages. Articles and links appearing strategically over time can
provide measurable results that synchronize your content with search engine queries.

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 How to Increase Website Link Popularity

You’ve spent the last few months optimizing your web site. You did your homework and learned
all about optimizing techniques for your web page. Your relevant keywords are prominently
placed in all the right places on your pages. Yet your site still isn't ranking the way you want.
What do you do?

It's time to improve you link popularity!

Why bother with link building? Link popularity and link quality are very important because
every major search engine now considers them as a part of their ranking algorithms. If you don't
have links, you won't rank well for competitive keywords.

If your page includes all the important on-the-page criteria and scores well with Page Primer, it's
time to focus on your links. Good inbound links can move your page up the ranking ladder and
act as new entry points to your site. But how does your site get those coveted inbound links we
hear so much about?

Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to improve your link quality and popularity, which will give
you a boost in the rankings. Here are some guidelines to help you set up your own linking
campaign:

1. Prepare your site first

Before you start your link building campaign, take time to get your site in shape. Make sure your
site looks professional, has good content and is easy to navigate. Validate your HTML code and
check your links with a tool like HTML Toolbox. If a potential linker goes to your site and finds
broken pages, they are not going to want to link to you.

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In addition, directories have gone on record saying they may exclude sites with broken links and
page errors. Directories want only professional looking sites in their databases, so do your
homework on your site before you start promoting it and your linking campaign will be more
effective.

2. Budget time for link building

Don't expect to grow your link popularity overnight. Budget time every week to work on link
building. If you force yourself to spend a couple hours a week on link building, it will become
part of your routine. Pick one day a week and set aside time as your "link building time." If you
don't make it a priority, it won't get done.

Link building is an incremental activity. Over time these one or two new links start adding up
until they are hundreds or even thousands of links.

3. Establish realistic link goals

Don't expect to see instant results. Link building is difficult, frustrating and time intensive.
Convincing another web site to link to you can be exasperating. If you get one good quality link
a month you're doing better than the majority of sites out there.

Patience and creativity are key to link building. Track your progress so you know who you've
asked already. It could be embarrassing to ask a site for a link if they've already given you one.

4. Develop internal management support

If you're link building in-house, build support from your company's internal management for
your link building. This usually means educating management about the benefits of link
building.

Link popularity is unique to the search engine industry - it's not taught in graduate schools. Sit
down with your management and explain the concept behind link building - don't assume they
understand it or have even heard of the term. In fact, most won't have a clue what you're talking
about.

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Explain link building in terms they will understand and in ways that will get their attention, such
as describing the relationship of link building and increased revenue. Talking about making more
money usually gets management's attention.

Why worry about management support? You will need it to provide the time and money you
need to get into search engines or directories.

5. Link popularity is all about quality

Be selective about the sites from which you request links. Search engines use sophisticated rules
when judging the importance of a link, and the popularity of the site linking to you is a key
criteria.

And don't even think of using a link farm! Link farms are sites that exist solely to link to other
web sites. Link farms are a blatant attempt to inflate your link popularity, and search engines
take a dim view of them. Google in particular has been known to ban sites found using a link
farm.

6. Develop a relationship with a site

Before you ask for the link, get to know the web site. Establish yourself as a real human first.
That way, when you ask for a link, it's harder for them to say no.

Impersonal broadcast emails asking for links are spam. Sure, it's easier, but it will only result in
making another company mad at you. Spam link requests do not work and waste everyone's
time. Don't do it!

7. Provide the linking code

Make it easy for other sites to link to you. Send the prospective linker the exact HTML code you
want in the link and suggest which page you want the link from. This ensures the right words are
used in the link and reduces the burden in setting up the link. Everybody on the Internet is
pressed for time and if you don't make it "drop-in simple" by giving them the exact HTML,
you've made their job too hard. Make it easy and your success rate will go up.

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8. Get directory listings

Jumpstart your link campaign by getting directory links first. This is especially important if you
have a new site or a site with no inbound links. A shortage of inbound links puts your site at a
severe disadvantage because link analysis is an important part of every search engine's ranking
algorithm.

9. Consider bartering for links

It's a good idea to have something to offer in return for a link. Many sites won't link to you
unless you link back to them or otherwise make it worth their while. Create a Resources or
Partner page that allows you to have a place from which you can easily link to them.

You might also offer to work a barter arrangement with them. If you have a popular site with
their target market, they might consider free advertisements in exchange for a link. If the link is
of great value to you, be prepared to give something back.

10. Link building alternatives

If time constraints keep you from link building, consider outsourcing your link popularity work.
Link building is undoubtedly the most time consuming part of search engine optimization. You
may find it is not cost effective to do it in house. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, it just
means you hire someone else to do it for you.

Outsourcing to a reputable link building firm ensures good links and could be a more efficient
model for you if you are already time limited.

One word of caution if you do chose to hire a company specializing in link building: make sure
any firm you hire follows good link building practices. Ask them to describe the process they use

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to request links Make sure they follow a personalized approach, and don't simply spam sites with
requests for links.

How SEO conducts online marketing for web sites

SEO first analyzes the current traffic of a web site and develops a strategy how this can be
improved if traffic is lacking or the wrong target group is reached.

Search engine optimization is not just to rank in search engines but mainly to achieve a good
click through rate from the targeted visitors. This means that your web site should come up in the
search results of the search engines with targeted keywords that are related to your content or
theme of your site.

SEO applies different kind of marketing strategies to create more quality traffic to a web site,
depending on the requirements the strategy is chosen, which fits best to achieve the goal.

For example: best is to create an informational web site with the effect that users will come back
and visit your site again. Also to offer variety, entertainment and action is one good way to go.
Users want to be engaged and informed.

Google AdWords is a tool, web site owners can use on the side but it is not recommended as the
main focus and only channel for online marketing. To manage a successful Google Adwords
campaign our team will create different landing pages, from which users will enter the web site,
after having clicked on the ad in Google's AdWords boxes. This will certainly help to measure
the success-rate of the advertisement campaign the client is running at Google.

Using Google Analytics as the only information of the campaigns effect can create a distorted
and incorrect picture of what really is taking place. The Urchin software, that is used by Google
for their Analytics program, is stripped of many features, the output is delayed and as in forums
of webmasters widely discussed full of flaws. Most well known draw-back is the slowing down
of the web site, because the JavaScript offered by Google is connecting each time to the Google
Server. Well, it is for free, so no claims can be made.

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The landing pages are monitored by SEO and traffic is measured with a professional analytics
tool and this will deliver either a positive or a negative result of the running campaign but the
result will be correct at least and this is most important. This provides our customers with real
control!

75% of users never go past the second page of search engine results. That means if your site isn't
ranked in the top 40 on a search engine, you may never get noticed! With Search Engine Tracker
you automatically track your rank in the search engines.

Track multiple search terms by entering up to 20 keywords or phrases, Search Engine Tracker
automatically checks your ranking on top search engines and directories such as Google, Yahoo,
and MSN. You automatically receive a page rank report mailed to you weekly.

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SEO Marketing Analysis: How to Gauge The Competition

Before you enter a competitive online market, you’ll need to understand who the major players
are, so you can
(a) fly under the radar and learn from the trail they left behind and
(b) look for patterns to formulate ranking strategies for SEO based on their site and their nearest
competitors.

Like any good SEO management campaign, it starts with strategic planning, but without
knowing what to look for when assessing the competition, then how can you possibly expect to
surpass them?

What are some of the most common criteria or typical areas SEO’s analyze when gauging how
competitive an industry or the players in it are?

The number of pages in the site: This can provide insight to the underlying relevance factors
based on themed information recurring semantic synonyms or what ranking strategies a website
employs.

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Age of domain: You can determine something present and future course, to some degree based
on where it has been. So having a blueprint that unravels the history of how competitors initiated
their relationship with search engines at your fingertips can provide a solid foundation to initiate
a structured investigation. Archive.org also known as The Wayback Machine is a logical starting
point to take a peek behind the scenes.

The Hosting Environment: Determining when the name was domain was registered, for how
long, who the site is registered to and what type of hosting environment can be gleaned from
using DomainTools.com. Let’s just call this a mandatory step in the evaluation process as one of
the core components that can lead to other useful discoveries.

Site Structure: One of the key facets of optimization is hinged on the site structure and how
optimized it is. Are there clearly defined naming conventions? are they employing keyword-rich
sub folders, information silos or using virtual theme with their internal links? (Like Wikipedia
employs anchor text like an index to other key pages).

Don’t know? Then take a look at their site map and get to know your way around. You can
derive a great deal based on internal links and site structure when combined with link mining to
assess how the competition distributes their internal link weight.

Internal Links: Are they deep linking to folders to strengthen each page in the folder? Employ a
link:domainname.com/foldername/ command for the folder in Yahoo Site Explorer if you do not
own custom SEO Tools. Another tip, look at how many pages are in a folder in Google by using
this advanced search command site:domainname.com/foldername/ and all of the contents of that
folder that are indexed are listed.

With a few pots of coffee, a spreadsheet to record your progress and an ambitious disposition,
you could essentially unearth your competitors authority link treasure trove with these simple
techniques (archive.org, sitemap analysis, link analysis, and index content in the folder) to
conduct further research.

Not only can it determine if potential linking opportunities are available for your content but you
can see how they structured their site.

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Number of inbound links and the anchor text in the links:

This obviously is a key factor to assess the link reputation of the site in question. Even though
the site could be about black widgets, if enough sites link to them with the anchor text brown
widgets, the target site will rank for that phrase as well.

Search Volume of Keywords:

Using keyword research or analytics software you can gather and populate competitive metrics
on search volume for anticipated keywords.

This alone is one of the most important factors to gauge the competition, just look at the keyword
concentration of their pages, the root phrase saturation ratios and the flow of their internal links
SEO Elite is not a bad tool for gleaning this data. It is just a simple tool to effectively measure
the respective ratios of data, look at the anchor text or linking patterns of the competition.

On Page / Off Page Ratios: Additionally there are ratios that provide an adequate snapshot such
as allinanchor, allintitle, allintext, allinurl relevance. Essentially these indicators help you
determine the degree of optimization and strength of (a) the use of the title tag (b) if the domain
name impacts rankings as a result of keywords present in the domain (c) how frequent the
keywords appear in the text (d) and how many keywords are pointed at the site via inbound links.

Social Media Engagement Traces: Are your competitors leveraging social media, press
releases or other unknown marketing channels? You can always use Google blog search and set
up alerts for their domain name or company name to keep tabs on their link velocity. Another
useful tool is social scan, which skims social media sites for URLs.

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 How to Improve your Pages SEO Score

SEO Tips to Improve Your SEO Score

Search engines are looking for signals, something that is so clear cut and obvious that it leaves
little room for error. Each character on your page in a website has a particular value, that value
has a weight which can be translated into a tangible ranking factor.

There are multiple ways to quantify these ranking factors and by using the search operators of
allinanchor, allintitle, allintext thresholds is one way, or by assessing the competition in that
space to see how solid their grasp of SEO is.

In a nutshell search engines like three things (1) structure (2) a coherent leader or primary focal
point (such as a landing page as a champion) and (3) links (both internal and external). Pages just
don’t rank themselves; they need help in crossing the tipping point of relevance.

To create topical areas within your website that have the ability to rank independently, you
should understand the value of deep links, relevant and focused titles and whether or not the page
is a supporting page or a primary landing page.

When you think about it, it’s quite simple, search engines reward unique content and if the only
unique thing on your pages is a slight variation of text, similar meta tags or a paragraph of
difference, in the eyes of that search engines, it’s virtually the same page.

Duplicate content across multiple pages in your own website is the fastest way to get on the
ignored list from search engines. Another thing to be careful of Linking out to other sites from

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places like the sidebar or footer which is a known area for paid links as well as not linking to
your own pages internally with relevant anchor text.

From the standpoint of a preliminary sweep, each page in your website should:

1) Be able to be reached from two clicks from the homepage. From one area of navigation, link
or graphic.

2) Have a text to code ratio that exceeds your template (typically 250-300 unique words will
suffice) meaning if you have the word on the page twice, it only counts as one word.

3) Have a unique purpose, description as well as summarizes what that page is about.

4) At least 3-5 links from other websites in order to cement co-occurrence and make that page a
candidate to groom for future ranking factors.

5) Use relevant anchor text to link contextually from all supporting pages to the preferred
landing page.

If you can manage to separate a pages context from similar pages in the site, this may require
you to rewrite the page, build some internal links or build deep links to that page. You can them
see which portions of the page acquire ranking factor first.

How Search Engines Give Page rank

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Today Search engines rand pages using the one page and off page factors. The quality modifiers
and topic modifiers are two important aspects which recognize by all search engines.

One page factors: One page factors are the content which on your first or Home page not just
what is visible they also detect which you hidden in html or css code. The search engine crawler
automatically finds all the pages. To see what the exactly search engine look for your page then
right click on your home page click on View>Source. You can see their Meta description and
Meta keyword. These two things which search engine detect while browse your page.

Off page factors: Off Page are primarily mandatory links and context connected with them.
Search engine always look for new site which provide good searchable content for people. They
treat you as individuals. Link treats as a vote from one page to another. The more votes you have
the better quality of your page. Anchor text used within link is the equation of vote. The text
around the link is most important thing to generate traffic on your webpage.

Your webpage quality is the main factors which keep your site on the top of the search page. It
means you have good content for readers and they like your site to visit again. The biggest
factors between the off page and on page are the search engine no longer trust to online
webmasters to rate your site for quality. There are lots of things like spam filters and penalties
are effect on your visitor.
Topic Modifiers help the search engine to decide how much rank given to your site as oppose to
how high or low. The on- page factors such as Title, keyword, content, heading and other on-
page factors. The all Factor have make in good balance work. It helps you to search engine
optimization efforts.

The Top 20 Search Engine Ranking Factors

1. Title Tag:

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Type your targeted keyword phrase in ANY search engine and notice how 9 of the top 10 sites
have that targeted phrase somewhere in their title tag. Learn from your competitors and
remember keyword density and prominence.

2. Heading Tag Structure:

H1, H2, H3, H4 and no more. Remember H1 is what the whole page is about and the other 'sub'
H's are explaining each section under that heading. A good way to look at this is to look at it in a
standard outline format.

3. META Description

The META description is there to describe the page. So describe the page. Remember your page
is about your targeted keywords. Make sure those keywords are scattered throughout the
description of each page. Also, sometimes the search engines will display your description under
your listings on the SERP's (Search Engine Results Page). Therefore make the description
captivating enough to make the visitors want to click on your website and not your competitor's.

4. Age of Site

Arguably, this is the deciding factor when picking between 2 sites with great stats. Search
engines trust websites that have been around for a long time. This is because if the site wasn't
valuable, it would not be on-line any longer. Even though this factor is a huge factor, it's only a
factor for old active domains. Old, yet active domains that have history of constant updates and
consistently acquiring links are the hardest sites to beat.

5. Total Pages Indexed:

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The total of pages indexed is very important because usually the more pages indexed the more
keywords you will be targeting. This is not always true, however considering this is USUALLY
true; this is definitely a factor in search engines' algorithms. The more pages you have, the more
chances your site has to get found. Furthermore every page linking within your site could build
strong internal page rank.

6. Anchor Text of internal Links:

It's important that the links within your site that leads visitors from one page to another describes
that page with the keyword it's targeting.

7. Total Back links:

YES, the amount of back links still matters. The more links you have, the better. BUT, it's the
more relevant links from the greatest variety of sites, the better. You need links from blogs,
forums, authority sites, educations sites, local area sites, industry sites, etc. They all must be
relevant to you. The more accurate the relativity, the more closer you are to being the most
relevant site to the searcher's query. The more (relevant) links, the merrier.

8. Anchor Text of Incoming Links:

Originally if someone linked to your site, that someone was a different person with a different
website giving you a link titling your company name. So if someone Googles your company
name, you'd be the first to show up because other sites said that's who you are. But, new potential
customers aren't looking for your web site. People are searching for your services. So you have
to find ways to get links describing the services you offer.

This way other sites are vouching that you are "men's clothing". The SERP's already know you're
Men's Ware House.

9. Average Time on Site:

One factor that helps Google determine if your site is a site that will give visitors a pleasant user
experience is to record how long visitors stay at your site. The longer you can keep a visitor on

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your site the more likely you are providing that user with an experience worth sticking around
for.

10. Bounce Rate:

Like Average Time on Site, Bounce Rate is a metric that measures the worth of your page. Do
visitors come to your site and click the back button more often than not? Normally if 80% of the
people visiting your site are clicking the back button, that site is not relevant to what they were
searching for.

11. Strength of Competition

To be honest, this really isn't a factor in its own. The strength of the competition is probably the
backbone of every factor. Ranking results are based on a comparative scale. Meaning the number
1 site is more relevant then the number 2 site based on ALL of these factors. Good ways to
measure the strength of the competition is analyze their Alexa Rank, Total Pages Indexed, Total
Backlinks and their Google Pagerank.

12. Total Character Coun

The more content you have, the better chance you have at satisfying your visitor's query. Google
looks for special keywords within your content to back up the keywords you are targeting.

If you are targeting men's clothing, Google looks for terms that will answer every visitor's query.
Like pants, shirts, prices, location, xl, discounts, customer service, socks, fitting room, fabric,
fashion, etc. Usually to cover all of the visitors' possible questions, you need to provide a lot of
unique and informative content.

13. Page Rank

(Ceterus Paribus) Yes, page rank still counts. Many "SEO's" will tell you that this doesn't matter.
But, the core of Google's algorithm is based on Page Rank.

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14. Keyword Placemen

Where amongst all of your content and web pages is your target keywords located? Keywords
should have prominent placement in paragraphs supporting their matching headings. Naturally
placing your keyword in rich related content the right amount of times is arguably the top
ranking factor.

15. Types of Media

Have you noticed videos on the SERP's ranking higher than you?

Or, have you ever ended up at a site through a picture?

Having a variety of media types shows that you are presenting your targeted keywords in various
forms, this is most likely pleasing a variety of visitors.

16. HTML Validation:

Content code ratio is a ranking factor. It must be easy for the bots to run through your site. Also
when spiders run through your site, it's necessary that you prevent any traps that could prevent
the spider from crawling your site completely and finding all of your content. Broken links are
also a big no, no. The bots hate getting led to nothing.

17. Navigation and Architecture:

How your site is built and themed is very important for spider indexing and visitor navigation.
The paths your visitors take are being recorded. So make sure the pages you want to rank well
are easy to find for the user. Having your targeted keywords categorized and your page structure
in a siloing format is best. Also add a site map to your website so the spiders could have a one
stop page to your whole domain.

18. Click-through-Rate on SERP:

Google wants to provide results the visitors want. And to help them determine what they want is
to record how many times out of a 1,000 impressions do people click through to your site. If your

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listing has the highest click through rate it must be because your title, description and or brand
are what the users was most likely looking for. This is why title tags and META descriptions are
2 of the other 20 factors in ranking well on the SERP's

19. Total Search Queries Conducted After Leaving Site:

If the user searches for that same term over and over again, they must not have found what they
were looking for. Your site should answer the visitors query by proving data to the engines that
proves that visitor don't need to look any further.

20. Percentage of Return Visits:

The higher percentage you have of returning visitors, the better. High return rate means people
who have visited your site before enjoyed their visit and found your site valuable. This factor is
used in helping Google help others find a site that the visitor may find interesting. So if your site
is relevant to the searcher's query and everyone that visits your site returns, Google will use this
as a measure of a relevant and interesting site, thus leading to search engine higher rankings.

General Advice

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 (1) 10 Simple steps to improve page rank

When talking about Pagerank for many the answer is simple, and gets many good links. The
truth is that this is very true but its implementation is often more difficult than it seems. This is
why I decided to make a small list of what they are five important tips for me on the outside of
the obvious that it is trying to get good links that can also help to improve the Pagerank.

1. Factor "Freshness":
Not only is it necessary to write unique and original content for achieving good results in
Google, after many tests warned that the higher was the frequency of updating my site visits that
were obtained. Page rank does not matter if I was getting low or if new links, visitors from
Google rose rapidly when able to maintain a good pace of updates. I then realized that the search
algorithm must surely be an important fact of the "freshness" of a site at the time of positioning
results, and so it was. The pages that are updated daily with the search for greater value than the
same month lead content, in many searches and it is likely that a site with less Page rank better
position than others with a couple for the simple fact of being updated This leads me to believe
that long-term increase ours.

2. Give the food in hand to Google boot with a simple index:

This is one of the things that Google does not understand, we say "Do not make your pages for
search engine but for the people you visit and then we are well positioned to ensure that we are
asking for a specific search engine that no surfer average would be able to read and understand,
the famous "Sitemap". The truth is that there is no need to make a complicated Sitemap
positioned well on Google or to achieve our internal pages indexed better. Just to make a simple
index your pages, a simple list showing a link to each of your pages and save it in a simple html
might be called "index" and linked from the home of your site. Not just following the first rule of
Google to create something useful for your visitors, but I really think it gives better results than
an authentic Sitemap. The truth however is that you make a Sitemap index or a normal html,
performance improves so to work.

3. Make good use of the label "title":

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It is usually a label that many left to give importance for some time, maybe that's out of the
design and is not so, or who knows that in recent years the trend to stop using meta tags
"description" and "keyboards" also seems to have brought the proper use of "title". The truth is
that this should not be so, this shows that Google gives great importance to this label, as well as
"h1" and "h2" tags and "strong" and "b" (although some are not agree which is better).
Experiment by changing the label "title" making it a special title for each page and making sure
the use of keywords, did not take long to notice large changes in traffic.

4. Nothing broken links:

Broken links are very common in distracted webmasters make changes here and there and then
forget to update the links. This problem not only makes you lose visitors, but it harms your
image for the Google PageRank. You know, done it and ensure that everything works fine.

5. Quality Hosting
This factor is also very important not only for users who can make you lose with little patience
but also because Google gives much value to the response time of your server, i.e. the speed at
which this responds to your requests, and a slow server poor quality is likely to limit your
growth.

Google Page rank is based on back links. Back links are Links pointing to your website from
another website. The more back links you have the higher your PR will be.

6 Join forums, forums are a great way to achieve links to your website.
In most forums you are allowed to have a signature and in your signature you can put a link to
your website. But another important note to look on is making sure the forum is somewhat
related to your website. You will still get credit if it's not, but if it's related to your website than
you will be accomplishing two tasks at once.
You will be advertising for your website (bringing in targeted traffic) You will also be building
your websites presence.

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Your websites presence is very important to your survival. The more people see, or hear about
your website the more credibility you will have and this increases your chances of having these
visitors come back and possibly become leads.

7 Submit to search engine directories:

Search engine directories are a good way to get a free link to your website. They also increase
your chances at being listed higher on popular search engines like Google, and overture.

Most search engine directories allow you to submit to their website for free. This will allow you
to increase your web presence by being listed on another search engine, and it will also be a free
link. Remember the more links you have the higher your PR will be.

8. Using ezine ads (or newsletters):

Creating an ezine will probably be the most beneficial step you can take to increasing your web
presence. When you create an ezine you will be able to keep visitors coming back to your
website for more by using signatures and giving special deals.

Ezine's will also allow you to increase your back links. By creating an ezine you can submit your
information about your ezine to an ezine directory. This directory will than link to your
website(thus giving you a free link).

9. Creating and publishing articles.

Articles are an easy source of generating new traffic. You can include your signature in your
article. This will bring in more traffic from article submission directories.

Your signature usually consists of 4 to 8 lines. Usually the first line would be the title of the
website that you are trying to advertise. The last line would be the link to the website and the
lines in between these would be a sales pitch to draw your viewers into your website.
10. Links from related websites.
Gaining links from related websites can be one of the most frustrating tasks you can attempt.

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(2) Tips to increase traffic by images:

An additional source of visitors you can generate by making sure that your pictures or optimize
your website better. We have already told us about ALT tags optimization in that post about
Google Image Search optimization. Now this is also the perfect way to attract extra traffic to
your website. More and more website forgets this way of optimizing it. Especially for websites,
this is the way of extra visitors to generate sales.

So Google Analytics in your top 20 keywords of your website and to optimize for the top 15-20
the alt tags of the pages most visited by the search for the keyword of the pages found. If
necessary add additional pictures to the page where your alt tags and keywords to optimize. Also
make sure that the filename is optimized, see for all tips on Google Image Search post.

You can do this for all pages do, but for pages where you already high on rant Google has the
most sense, since you'll also quickly vines high in Google Image Search results.

If its success I like to hear if you have extra traffic generate via Google.

(3) 10 tips for optimizing your page.

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1) Title Tag: Use Key Phrases on title, and put it as close to the beginning

2) H1 Tag: Use Key Phrases with H1, it provides more relevant and also as much as possible
with the other H tags

3) Content of the Body: Use the key phrase at least 3 times; you can use the key phrase more
times if you have lots of content (and if it makes sense, of course). You should aim for at least
350 words of content. But do not abuse, that can be seen as spam by search engines

4) Bold: Bold Use keywords to mark at least once

5) Alt Tag for Images: Use at least once in the alt tag of an image to add keywords

6) URL: Try to use key phrases or keywords in your url.

7) Meta Description: Use your key phrases or keywords at least once in the Meta description
tag

Meta Tags: Use keywords in your Meta tags to give context to search engines

9) Link anchor text: the anchor text of a link describes the page that link, so you can use any
keyword or key phrase in order to give relevance.

10) Domain Name: If possible, try to place keywords in your domain name.

SEO advantages

• Cheap source of regular, relevant traffic

• Results in a higher click through rate as compared to any other program

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 • No recurring pay per click costs

• Gives highest ROI in the long run as compared to any other online marketing vehicle

• Generates brand awareness and recognition

• Higher natural rankings builds trust among searchers

• Results in a higher website conversion rate

Case Study -1

www.ndtv.com
About NDTV:-

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NDTV’s tryst with television began way back in 1988, when it produced a news and current
affairs show ‘The World This Week’ for the Government-owned broadcaster Doordarshan.
The show proved to be immensely popular, and NDTV established its image as a credible
private news producer. It moved on to become the sole news content provider and producer
for India’s first 24-hour news channel, Star News.
The company’s biggest milestone was established in 2003, when it launched two 24-hour news
channels— NDTV 24x7 in English and NDTV India in Hindi—followed by a 24-hour
business news channel NDTV Profit in 2005, which became a leading business news
channel in a short period of time.

In 2007, the company broke new ground, formulating a strategy to build a global business.
NDTV Networks Plc, a subsidiary of NDTV was formed to seize opportunities in areas
‘beyond news’. The Company launched NDTV Imagine (for general entertainment),
NDTV Good Times under NDTV Lifestyle Company (for lifestyle content), NDTV
Convergence (triple play; to exploit the synergies between television, internet and mobile),
NDTV Labs (to develop media software and technology for captive use), NGEN Media
Services (outsourcing of media post-production services) as 50:50 joint venture with
Genpact and Emerging Markets BV that has helped launch channels in Indonesia,
Malaysia and the Middle East.

Strategy

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In the beginning, it was imperative for us to study and mark the important news offered by
NDTV along with due attention to the performance of the website for news being offered.
The optimization was important for the website as it gave the website a definite edge over other
competitors. The optimized tags along with quality content improved the websites ranking on the
SERP's for some very competitive keywords. Since the website was already developed and it
was highly product oriented website, a strategy matching the site's architecture was made and
executed.
To supplement the SEO efforts, link building was initiated for the website to further it's chances
against the competitors. A sustained and focused link building campaign over a period of time
has helped the website gain rankings for some targeted keywords in major search engines
including Google as indicated in the rankings report.

How popular is ndtv.com?

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Understand why we found ndtv.com on 53 keyword phrases in search engine results
(Google, Yahoo, and MSN). Insight into SEO and linking factors that positively and negatively
affect ndtv.com and how it ranks for important keywords compared to competing websites.

 Google Links: 1,120

 Yahoo Links: 184,000

 MSN Related: 282,000

 Google indexed pages: 467,000

 Subdomains: 21

On Page factors

Title: "NDTV News Top Stories"

Keywords: "NDTV, NDTV news, NDTV Profit, news, online news, breaking news, elections,
politics, India news, world news, business, Bollywood, cricket, IPL, specials, blogs, sports,
lifestyle, live TV, health, videos, diaspora, sci & tech, top headlines, Prannoy Roy, Barkha Dutt,
Vikram Chandra.

Domain Name: NDTV.COM

Alternate text: Missing

Site age: - 9 years 7 months old

Outgoing links:- SIEMENS, Airtel and XENOS

Clear Design:-

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Key-Phrases

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Key-Phrases Search Engine Page Rank
News 1 2
online news 1 2
breaking news 1 6
India news 1 2
world news 5 2
Elections 1 5
Cricket 2 8
IPL 1 2
Specials 6 7
Sports 7 5
live TV 3 9

Off Page factors

Back links:-

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Google Backlinks for ndtv.com:-
Indcondurban.co.za,Word.world-citizenship.org, Linkedin.com, Librarykypattom.wordpress.com

Yahoo Backlinks for ndtv.com:-

en.wikipedia.org, fugue.com, ndtvprofit.com, news.google.co.in, bhutannewsonline.com

Relative to ndtv.com:- Alexa.com, Naukri.com, Indianpad.com, Ndtvmovies.com,Fire.pppl.com

Relevancy:- 100 %

Traffic:-
Ndtv.com traffic rank in other countries:

• Australia - 3,208
• India - 77
• United Kingdom - 2,913
• United States - 4,538

Conclusion
After getting the SEO done the website ndtv.com has got a very good traffic of internet users,
which has maximized viewers. And now it is very easy to find this website on popular search
engines. The results of SERPs are very relevant to this website’s links if even an easier to easier
keyword is put.

Case Study - 2
www.sify.com

About Sify

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It is an India's pioneer & leader in Internet, Networking and e-Commerce services, and the first
Indian Internet company to be listed on the Nasdaq National Market in the US. they provide
integrated end-to-end solutions for both corporate & consumers, with a range of products and
services delivered over a common Internet backbone infrastructure.

Everything that Sify has done or achieved since they began commercial operations in April 1998
stems from our Purpose and Vision. A key aspect is Sify being an enabler and catalyst of the
Internet for positive change in India- a responsibility that we continue to carry.

Sify began by developing India's first TCP/IP network and offering multiple services on a
common backbone infrastructure for an integrated Internet, networking and E-commerce
business model.

Corporate Networking Services:

Sify pioneered corporate networking services in the country and helped revolutionize business
computing in India, with interconnectivity between multi-location offices, flexibility of
platforms; applications software and smooth transfer of data for corporate.

Consumer Services: Broadband connectivity for consumers

How popular is sify.com?

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Understand why we found sify.com on 26 keyword phrases in search engine results
(Google, Yahoo, MSN). Insight into SEO and linking factors that positively and negatively
affect sify.com and how it ranks for important keywords compared to competing websites.

 Google Links: 1,140

 Yahoo Links: 153,000
 MSN Related: 528,000
 Google indexed pages: 1,540,000
 Subdomains: 11

On page factors

Title: India News | Indian Business, Finance News | Sports: Cricket India | Bollywood, Tamil,
Telugu Movies | Astrology, Indian Recipes

Keywords:"India News, Indian Sports, Cricket, Cricket India, Tennis, Indian Movie News,
Video, Bollywood Videos, Indian Business, Finance News, India Recipe, Astrology, Indian
Finance, Indian Recipes, Indian Astrologers"

Domain name: sify.com

Site age: 8 years 9 months old

Outgoing links: makemytrip.com, indiaproperty.com and newspapers.co.in

Clear design:

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Key Phrase

Key-Phrases Search Engine Page Rank

India News 3 9
Indian Sports 3 4
Indian Movie News 1 4
Cricket India 3 5
Indian recipes 1 7
Indian astrology 1 9
Indian finace 1 7

Off Page factors

Back links:-

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Google Backlinks for sify.com:-
sifycorp.com, businesswireindia.com, takeitpersonally.blogspot.com, webspawner.com,
dir.samachar.com and sambharmafia.blogspot.com.

Yahoo Backlinks for sify.com:-

en.wikipedia.org, freedom-to-tinker.com, samachar.com, oldamericancentury.org, subsim.com
fordham.edu, obamamessiah.blogspot.com, crayon.net, gleez.com, novaspivack.typepad.com
whatdoesitmean.com, littleindia.com, wearcam.org, indiauncut.blogspot.com, news.google.co.in
superchefblog.com, topics.nytimes.com, sumanasa.com and sifymax.com.

Related to sify.com:-
alexa.com, quantcast.com, tamannaah.sifymax.com, support.sify.net reddit.com, siffy.com
news.prnewswire.com, and findarticles.com.

Relevancy: - 100%

Traffic:-
Sify.com traffic rank in other countries:

 China - 9,155
 India - 41
 United Kingdom - 4,506
 United States - 4,588

Conclusion

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After getting the SEO done the website sify.com has got a very good traffic of internet users,
which has maximized viewers. And now it is very easy to find this website on popular search
engines. The results of SERPs are very relevant to this website’s links if even an easier to easier
keyword is put.

Case Study -3

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Bollywood.com

How popular is bollywood.com?

Understand why we found bollywood.com on 33 keyword phrases in

search engine results (Google, Yahoo, MSN). Insight into SEO and
linking factors that positively and negatively affect bollywood.com and how it
ranks for important keywords compared to competing websites.

 Yahoo Links: 8,330

 Google indexed pages: 18,800
 Sub domains: 16

On Page factors
Title:-
Celebrity News | Bollywood.com: Entertainment news, movie, music and fashion reviews

Keywords:
"bollywood, hollywood, mp3, hit music, songs, bollywood stars, shahrukh khan, hollywood
movies, dvd, dvd movies, latest movies, bollywood sexy pictures, stars, indian stars, indian
movies, hindi hit songs, top ten, indian films, movie trailers, bollywood stars,indian film
industry, fashion, hindi songs, indian radio, film magazines, fashion tv, ftv, bhangra songs,
bollywood mp3,bollywood links, bollywood fun, actors pictures, actresses pictures, hindi actors,
message boards, veer zaara, dhoom"

Domain name: - bollywood.com

Site age: - 12 years 9 months old

Outgoing links:- idea, shriners hospitals for children, windowliveplanet.com, jeevansathi.com,

naukri.com, google.com.
Clear design:-

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Key phrases:

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Key-Phrases Search Engine Page Rank
Bollywood 1 3
Bollywood sexy picture 3 1

Off Page factors

Backlinks:

Yahoo Backlinks for bollywood.com:

en.wikipedia.org, podmasti.com, geocities.com, ukindia.com, theory.tifr.res.in
worldentertainmentzone.blogspot.com, bollywood.net, cinemaonweb.com,
mundobollywood.blogspot.com, totalastrology.50webs.com, hindimovie.org, examiner.com
modec.blogdrive.com, igecar.cl brahmanandsingh.com, nriol.com, bollymail.com,
mondoggi.com

Relevancy: 100%

Bollywood.com traffic rank in other countries:

 India - 4,015
 New Zealand - 9,138
 Pakistan -9,138
 South Africa - 22,868
 United Arab Emirates - 9,563
 United Kingdom - 146,114
 United States - 75,204

Conclusion
After getting the SEO done the website bollywood.com has got a very good traffic of internet
users, which has maximized viewers. And now it is very easy to find this website on popular

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search engines. The results of SERPs are very relevant to this website’s links if even an easier to
easier keyword is put.

Bibliography

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I did learn and implement in parallel, so here is the list of sources from which we have taken the

guidance.

Websites

 www.seodesignsolutions.com

 www.searchenginewatch.com

 www.alexa.com
 www.ndtv.com
 www.bollywood.com
 www.sify.com

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 Appendices

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become an essential weapon in the

arsenal of every online business. Unfortunately, for most business owners
and marketing managers (and even many webmasters), it's also somewhat
of an enigma. This is partly due to the fact that it's such a new and rapidly
changing field, and partly due to the fact that SEO practitioners tend to
speak in a language all of their own which, without translation, is virtually
impenetrable to the layperson. This glossary seeks to remedy that situation,
explaining specialist SEO terms in plain English...

• ALGORITHEM
A complex mathematical formula used by search engines to assess the
relevance and importance of websites and rank them accordingly in their
search results. These algorithms are kept tightly under wraps as they are
the key to the objectivity of search engines (i.e. the algorithm ensures
relevant results, and relevant results bring more users, which in turn brings
more advertising revenue).

• ARTICLE PR
The submitting of free reprint articles too many article submission sites and
article distribution lists in order to increase your website's search engine
ranking and Google Page Rank. (In this sense, the "PR" stands for Page
Rank.) Like traditional public relations, article PR also conveys a sense of
authority because your articles are widely published. And because you're
proving your expertise and freely dispensing knowledge, your readers will
trust you and will be more likely to remain loyal to you. (In this sense, the
"PR" stands for Public Relations.)

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• ARTICLE SUBMISSION SITES
Websites which act as repositories of free reprint articles. They are sites where authors can
submit their articles free of charge, and where webmasters can find articles to use on their
websites free of charge. Article submission sites generate revenue by selling advertising space on
their websites.

• BACKLINKS
A text link to your website from another website

• COPY
The words used on your website.

• COPYWRITER
A professional writer who specializes in the writing of advertising copy
(compelling, engaging words promoting a particular product or service).

• CRAWL
Google finds pages on the World Wide Web and records their details in its
index by sending out ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’. These spiders make their way
from page to page and site to site by following text links. To a spider, a text
link is like a door.

• DOMAIN NAME
The virtual address of your website (normally in the form
www.yourbusinessname.com). This is what people will type when they want
to visit your site. It is also what you will use as the address in any text links
back to your site.

• EZINES

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An electronic magazine. Most publishers of ezines are desperate for content
and gladly publish well written, helpful articles and give you full credit as
author, including a link to your website.

• FLASH
A technology used to create animated web pages (and page elements).

• FREE REPRINT ARTICLE

An article written by you and made freely available to other webmasters to
publish on their websites.

• GOOGLE
The search engine with the greatest coverage of the World Wide Web, and
which is responsible for most search engine-referred traffic. Of
approximately 11.5 billion pages on the World Wide Web, it is estimated
that Google has indexed around 8.8 billion. This is one reason why it takes
so long to increase your ranking!

• GOOGLE PAGE RANK

How Google scores a website’s importance. It gives all sites a mark out of
10. By downloading the Google Toolbar, you can view the PR of any site you
visit.

• GOOGLE TOOLBAR
A free tool you can download. It becomes part of your browser toolbar. It’s
most useful features are it’s Page Rank display (which allows you to view
the PR of any site you visit) and it’s AutoFill function (when you’re filling out
an online form, you can click AutoFill, and it enters all the standard

103
information automatically, including Name, Address, Zip code/Postcode,
Phone Number, Email Address, Business Name, Credit Card Number
(password protected), etc.) Once you’ve downloaded and installed the
toolbar, you may need to set up how you’d like it to look and work by
clicking Options (setup is very easy). NOTE: Google does record some
information (mostly regarding sites visited).

• HTML
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the coding language used to create
much of the information on the World Wide Web. Web browsers read the
HTML code and display the page that code describes.

• INTERNET
An interconnected network of computers around the world.

• JAVASCRIPT
A programming language used to create dynamic website pages (e.g.
interactivity).

• KEYWORD
A word which your customers search for and which you use frequently on
your site in order to be relevant to those searches. This use known as
targeting a keyword. Most websites actually target ‘keyword phrases’
because single keywords are too generic and it is very difficult to rank
highly for them.

• KEYWORD DENSITY
A measure of the frequency of your keyword in relation to the total word
count of the page. So if your page has 200 words, and your keyword phrase
appears 10 times, its density is 5%.

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• KEYWORD PHRASE
A phrase which your customers search for and which you use frequently on
your site in order to be relevant to those searches.

• LINK
A word or image on a web page which the reader can click to visit another
page. There are normally visual cues to indicate to the reader that the word
or image is a link.

• LINK PATH
Using text links to connect a series of page (i.e. page 1 connects to page 2,
page 2 connects to page 3, page 3 connects to page 4, and so on). Search
engine ‘spiders’ and ‘robots’ use text links to jump from page to page as
they gather information about it, so it’s a good idea to allow them traverse
your entire site via text links.

• LINK PARTNER
A webmaster that is willing to put a link to your website on their website.
Quite often link partners engage in reciprocal linking.

• LINK POPULARITY
The number of links to your website. Link popularity is the single most
important factor in a high search engine ranking. Webmasters use a
number of methods to increase their site's link popularity including article
PR, link exchange (link partners / reciprocal linking), link buying, and link
directories.

• LINK TEXT

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The part of a text link that is visible to the reader. When generating links to
your own site, they are most effective (in terms of ranking) if they include
your keyword.

• META TAG
A short note within the header of the HTML of your web page which
describes some aspect of that page. These Meta tags are read by the
search engines and used to help assess the relevance of a site to a
particular search.

• NATURAL SEARCH RESULTS

The ‘real’ search results. The results that most users are looking for and
which take up most of the window. For most searches, the search engine
displays a long list of links to sites with content which is related to the word
you searched for. These results are ranked according to how relevant and
important they are.

• RANK
Your position in the search results that display when someone searches for
a particular word at a search engine.

• RECIPROCAL LINK
A mutual agreement between two webmasters to exchange links (i.e. they
both add a link to the other’s website on their own website). Most search
engines (certainly Google) are sophisticated enough to detect reciprocal
linking and they don’t view it very favorably because it is clearly a
manufactured method of generating links. Websites with reciprocal links
risk being penalized.

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• ROBOTS.TXT FILE
A file which is used to inform the search engine spider which pages on a
site should not be indexed. This file sits in your site’s root directory on the
web server. (Alternatively, you can do a similar thing by placing tags in the
header section of your HTML for search engine robots/spiders to read.

• SANDBOX
Many SEO experts believe that Google ‘sandboxes’ new websites.
Whenever it detects a new website, it withholds its rightful ranking for a
period while it determines whether your site is a genuine, credible, long
term site. It does this to discourage the creation of SPAM websites (sites
which serve no useful purpose other than to boost the ranking of some
other site). Likewise, if Google detects a sudden increase (i.e. many
hundreds or thousands) in the number of links back to your site, it may
sandbox them for a period (or in fact penalize you by lowering your ranking
or blacklisting your site altogether).

• SEO
Search Engine Optimization. The art of making your website relevant and
important so that it ranks high in the search results for a particular word.

• SEO COPYWRITER
A ‘copywriter’ who is not only proficient at web copy, but also experienced
in writing copy which is optimized for search engines (and will therefore
help you achieve a better search engine ranking for your website).

• SEARCH ENGINE

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A search engine is an online tool which allows you to search for websites
which contain a particular word or phrase. The most well known search
engines are Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
• SITE MAP
A single page which contains a list of text links to every page in the site
(and every page contains a text link back to the site map). Think of your site
map as being at the center of a spider-web.

• SPAM
Generally refers to unwanted and unrequested email sent en-masse to
private email addresses. Also used to refer to websites which appear high in
search results without having any useful content. The creators of these sites
set them up simply to cash in on their high ranking by selling advertising
space, links to other sites, or by linking to other sites of their own and
thereby increasing the ranking of those sites. The search engines are
becoming increasingly sophisticated, and already have very efficient ways
to detect SPAM websites and penalize them.

• SPIDER
Google finds pages on the World Wide Web and records their details in its
index by sending out ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’. These spiders make their way
from page to page and site to site by following text links.

• SPONSERED LINKS
Paid advertising which displays next to the natural search results.
Customers can click on the ad to visit the advertiser’s website. This is how
the search engines make their money. Advertisers set their ads up to
display whenever someone searches for a word which is related to their
product or service. These ads look similar to the natural search results, but
are normally labeled “Sponsored Links”, and normally take up a smaller

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portion of the window. These ads work on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) basis (i.e.
the advertiser only pays when someone clicks on their ad).

• SUBMIT
You can submit your domain name to the search engines so that their
‘spiders’ or ‘robots’ will crawl your site. You can also submit articles to
‘article submission sites’ in order to have them published on the Internet.

• TEXT LINKS
A word on a web page which the reader can click to visit another page. Text
links are normally blue and underlined. Text links are what ‘spiders’ or
‘robots’ use to jump from page to page and website to website.

• URL
Uniform Resource Locator. The address of a particular page published on
the Internet. Normally in the form
http://www.yourbusinessname.com/AWebPage.htm.

• WEB COPYWRITER
A ‘copywriter’ who understands the unique requirements of writing for an
online medium.

• WEBMASTER
A person responsible for the management of a particular website.

• WORDCOUNT
The number of words on a particular web page.

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• World Wide Web (WWW)
The vast array of documents published on the Internet. It is estimated that
the World Wide Web now consists of approximately 11.5 billion pages.

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