SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

By, Rajeev

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search,[1] news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.

1. Web Search Engines2. Selection based Search3. Metasearch Engines4. Desktop Search5. Web Portals

1. Google2. Yahoo3. Bing or MSN

What is a Web Spider?

It is a program or automated script that browses through the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. The process of browsing through the pages is called web crawling or web spidering.

Google Search Engine

Google Spider

Googlebot

Deepbot

Freshbot

OR

The deepbot is a spider that tries to follow every link on your webpage. It brings the information back to the Google indexers to analyze and index.

The freshbot is a spider that crawls through the web looking for new content, and may visit your website frequently.

1. White Hat

2. Blach Hat

3. Gray Hat

Step 1

Initial Site Analysis Competition Analysis

Keyword Research

Density Analysis and Placement

Title & Meta Tags development

Site Structure Analysis URL renaming/re-writing

Content Development Check

White Hat SEO

Step 2

Brief Keyword Competition Review

H1, H2, H3 Tags

Anchor Text

Existing Web Content Optimization

HTML Validation Creation of XML / HTML / ROR / Text

Sitemaps

Submitting sites to Google and Yahoo

Webmasters

Canonical / 404 Implementation

White Hat SEO

The process of search engine optimization (SEO) begins with the initial analysis of the website to get an absolute and broad evaluation of your website’s current position. The main purpose of initial analysis for SEO process is to initiate effective SEO campaign to get a successful online presence for business enhancements.

During the SEO process in initial analysis we will get a image of the strategy with regard to search engine optimization or search engine promotion that would exactly work for your online business promotion.

• The technical evaluation of your website to get the strong and weak point of the website.

• Analysis of the indexing of pages.• Analysis of current ranking of

website on various search engines.

• Analysis of factors which are preventing your website to get a good search engine ranking.

• Keyword used in your website.• Analysis of search engine

compatibility of your website.• A report which consisting the

practical prospective for organic position.

• Analysis of website’s structure.

Initial Site Analysis

SEO Competitor Analysis (or Competitive Analysis) is all about “Learning From Your Competitors”. Competitor Analysis is the process of analyzing and understanding your competitors’ Internet Marketing strategies and techniques. It’s about identifying your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.

• What Keywords are they targeting?

• How many Quality Backlinks do they have?

• What are their On-Page and Off-Page SEO strategies?

• Are they practicing any Black Hat SEO methods like paid links?

• How many Indexed Pages do they have?

• What are their Traffic sources?• How well are they ranking in

SERPs?

Competitor Analysis

Your SEO keywords are the key words and phrases in your web content that make it possible for people to find your site via search engines. A website that is well optimized for search engines "speaks the same language" as its potential visitor base with keywords for SEO that help connect searchers to your site. In other words, you need to know how people are looking for the products, services or information that you offer, in order to make it easy for them to find you—otherwise, they'll land on one of the many other results in the SERPs. Implementing keyword seo will help your site rank above your competitors.

This is why developing a list of keywords is one of the first and most important steps in any search engine optimization initiative. Keywords and SEO are directly connected when it comes to running a winning search marketing campaign. Because keywords are foundational for all your other SEO efforts, it's well worth the time and investment to ensure your SEO keywords are highly relevant to your audience and effectively organized for action.

Keyword Research

A marketer attempting to optimize a web page for the "leather dog collars" keyword group should consider doing most if not all of the following:

•Using the keyword in the title of the page•Using the keyword in the URL (e.g., www.online-petstore.com/dog-collars/leather)•Using the keyword, and variations (e.g., "leather collars for dogs"), throughout the page copy•Using the keyword in the meta tags, especially the meta description•Using the keyword in any image file paths and in the images' alt text•Using the keyword as the anchor text in links back to the page from elsewhere on the site

When optimizing your web pages, keep in mind that keyword relevance is more important than keyword density in seo.

Keyword Research

Keyword Density:Stuffing a page with a keyword is termed a black hat practice by search engines and might get your website banned. We check the pages of your website to ensure the density of the word is at acceptable levels in the titles, descriptions and content of your web pages.

Keyword Proximity:We analyse the placement a keyword or specific phrase in the body of the HTML source program of a webpage. Our tools tell us the proximity of one part of a phrase to the other part, the exact matches and the best placement of the keyword or phrase.

Keywords Combinations:We generate a keyword list and create keyword combinations, phrases or groups of keywords. Then we test the combinations on your website and the position of the result. We repeat this procedure to ensure a top ten ranking in search engine results.


Search Engine Comparison:A keyword phrase is then tested in several search engines appropriately targeted to your market and goals. This is an important step: if your audience in a particular sector/country is using AltaVista instead of Google and the keyword is unrecognised by AltaVista but achieves a top 10 ranking in Google then adjustments must be made.

Keyword Buckets:After successful testing and an appropriate keyword list or phases are generated we then place these into buckets called: Products, Services and Customer Solutions. This forms the basis of a webpage optimisation.


What is a Title Tag?

The Title Tag is an HTML code that shows the words that appear in the Title bar at the top of your web browser. These words do not appear anywhere else on your web page. For instance, the Title Tag of this page appears as ‘Meta Tag Optimization: Title and Meta Description Tag Optimization‘ at the top bar of your web browser. This is because these words were entered into the Title Tag of the web site’s HTML code. Usually, the Title Tag is the first element in the <Head> area of your site, followed by the Meta Description and the Meta Keywords Tags.


What is Meta Description Tag?

The Meta Description Tag is a part of HTML code that allows you to give a short and concise summary of your web page content. The words placed in this Meta Tag, are often used in the search engines result pages (SERP), just below the Title Tag as a brief description of your page. In the Search Engine Results Pages, after reading the Title, a user usually studies the description of the page and decides whether she wants to visit your site or not.

Some Search Engines prefer to ignore your Meta Description Tag and build the description summary on the basis of the search term for the SERP on the fly. They usually pick up parts of the text on your page wherever the search terms appear. The only exceptions are the Flash, Frame or All Image sites that have no content, and some high importance websites, where the search term is not found in the text. In such a case, Google picks up your entire Meta Description Tag and displays it.


This is the way Meta Description Tag appears in your site’s HTML code:

<Head><Title> Meta Tag Optimization: Title and Meta Description Tag Optimization</Title>

<Meta name=”description” content=”Meta Tag Optimization: Title Tag Optimization and Meta Description Tag Optimization. Tips about how to optimize your most important Tags.”>

<Meta name=”keywords” content=”meta tag, optimization,title tag,meta description,tag optimization,important tags.”>

</Head>

Title & Meta Tags developmentTitle tag = max 90 characterDescription tag = max250 characterKeywords = max 500 character


Inorganic

Organic

Inorganic

1. Dynamic URL solutions for:•Shopping cart systems•Content management systems

2. Coding Issues:•Suggest W3C compliant HTML code•Comment out JavaScript and use remote .js files•Use remote cascading style sheet .css files•Eliminate client side JavaScript and Meta 302 redirects where not appropriate•Substitute navigational links written in JavaScript with a static solution or at least a suggestion•Keep page file size as small as possible (<100K)•Avoid frames, Iframes and Whole Flash front pages

Site Structure Analysis

3. Architecture Issues:•Resolve canonical issues:

Ensure only one domain serves content and that all other owned domains 301 redirect to main domain

Ensure that [site.com] 301 redirects to [www.site.com]•Use of a site wide navigational system that ties the major areas together, consistently•Use of a footer•Use of a sitemap•Cross linking of similar or related pages/categories•Use of keyword text in links

Site Structure Analysis

There could be two very strong reasons for you to rewrite your URLs. One of them is related to Search Engine Optimization. It seems that search engines are much more at ease with URLs that don't contain long query strings.

A URL like http://www.example.com/4/basic.html can be indexed much easier, whereas its dynamic form, http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&view=basic, can actually confuse the search engines and cause them to miss possibly important information contained in the URL, and thus preventing you from getting the expected ranking.

With clean URLs, the search engines can distinguish folder names and can establish real links to keywords. Query string parameters seem to be an impediment in a search engine's attempt to perform the indexing. Many of the SEO professionals agree that dynamic (a.k.a. dirty) URLs are not very appealing to web spiders, while static URLs have greater visibility in their "eyes".

URL renaming/re-writing

The other strong reason for URL rewriting would be the increase in usability for web users, and in maintainability for webmasters. Clean URLs are much easier to remember. A regular web surfer will find hard to remember a URL full of parameters, not to mention that they would be discouraged by the idea of typing, one character at a time, the entire URL. And they could also mistype it, and not get to where they wanted.

This is less prone to happen with clean URLs. They can help you create a more intuitive Web site altogether, making it easier for your visitors to anticipate where they could find the information they need.

Webmasters will find themselves that maintaining static URLs is a much easier task than with dynamic ones. Static URLs are more abstract, and thus more difficult to hack. The dynamic URLs are more transparent, allowing possible hackers to see the technology used to build them and thus facilitating attacks.

Also, given the length of dynamic URLs, it is possible for webmasters to make mistakes too during maintenance sessions, usually resulting in broken links. Not to mention that, when static URLs are used, should it be necessary to migrate a site from one programming language to another (e.g. from Perl to Java), the links to the site's pages will still remain valid.


Sometimes Static URLs Do Make For Better SEO

•The URLs look nicer and will likely get clicked on more often.•The URLs will provide better anchor text if people use the URLs as the link anchor text.•If you later change CMS programs having core clean URLs associated with content make it easier to mesh that content with the new CMS the benefit Google espouses for dynamic URLs (Googlebot being able to stab more random search attempts into a search box) is only beneficial if your site structure is poor and/or you have way more PageRank than content (like a Wikipedia or techcrunch).•Dashes vs. Underscores.•Remove old Url.•Use robots.txt (or) webmaster tool.


Content Development Check

SEO Content Management

Problems:•Duplicate Content.•Low quality pages (Content)

Solutions:•User-Generated Content.•Hire Writers (Manual)•Existing Web Content Optimization

Correct Use of header tags - H1, H2, H3:What are header tags? They are simply paragraph headings and they are very important to SEO, as search engine spiders check them to help decide which key terms the page is relevant for. H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 header tags also make things easier for the reader to quickly find the information that they are looking for on your web page.

Correct use of H1 Header Tag:The top heading on your page should always us the H1 header element and it should be the only instance of the H1 header tag on the page. On this page, the H1 tag is Correct Use of header tags - H1, H2, H3. Again, as covered in the previous two day’s articles on Page Titles and Description meta tags, the Key terms that are used in the H1 header tag, are also used in the page title and the description tag, keeping the optimisation on-focus.

H1, H2, H3 Tags

7 anchor text SEO:

1.Exact match2.Partial match3.Relevant keyword4.URL (Domain name)5.Brand name6.Generic7.Misspelled words

Anchor Text

1. <a href="http://www.example.com">anchor text seo</a>



4. <a href="http://www.example.com">http://www.example.com </a>

5. <a href="http://www.example.com">example</a>

6. <a href="http://www.example.com">Click here</a>

7. <a href="http://www.example.com">anker text seo</a>

What is the HTML / XHTML Validator?

The HTML Validator is a free seo tool that checks web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. In essence, it is a html code checker.

The HTML Validator returns any errors that may cause your website not to be indexed properly by search engines. All errors from the validator are not necessarily detrimental but it's best to check your site to ensure you're not losing rankings in the major search engines because of errors in your html syntax.

•HTML / XHTML•CSS•JavaScript•Flash

HTML Validation

What is an xml sitemap

A xml sitemap is a file that lists URLs for a web-site, writt en in XML (eXsten si ble Markup Lan guage), a lan guage much like HTML used as the stan dard to struc ture, store and trans port infor ma tion. XML was cho sen because it is much more pre cise, doesn’t tol er ate errors and is more descrip tive than HTML cod ing, allow ing you to define your own tags. Since the syn tax must be exact, it is sug gested to use an XML syn tax val ida tor or auto mated XML sitemap gen er a tors avail able on the web (see on-line tools). But if you want to learn how to make a sitemap on your own, see all avail able tags for xml sitemaps.

•New page link add•File Size = 10MB•URL’s = 50,000

Creation of XML / Robots / .htaccess / Text Sitemaps

What is Robots.txt?

The robots exclusion protocol (REP), or robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct robots (typically search engine robots) on how to crawl & index pages on their website.

Block all web crawlers from all contentUser-agent: *Disallow:

Block a specific web crawler from a specific folderUser-agent: GooglebotDisallow: /no-google/

Block a specific web crawler from a specific web pageUser-agent: *Disallow: /no-bots/block-all-bots-except-rogerbot-page.html

User-agent: rogerbotAllow: /no-bots/block-all-bots-except-rogerbot-page.html


How to use .htaccess

'.htaccess' is the filename in full, it is not a file extension. For instance, you would not create a file called, 'file.htaccess', it is simply called, '.htaccess'. This file will take effect when placed in any directory which is then in turn loaded via the Apache Web Server software. The file will take effect over the entire directory it is placed in and all files and subdirectories within the specified directory.

You can create a .htaccess file using any good text editor such as TextPad, UltraEdit, Microsoft WordPad and similar (you cannot use Microsoft NotePad).

•301- Redirection•400 - Bad request•401 - Authorization Required•403 - Forbidden•404 - File Not Found•500 - Internal Server Error


HTML Sitemaps

Using HTML sitemaps for SEO is a powerful alternative to using anchor text links in the primary navigation to ensure deeper pages get crawled. HTML sitemaps create a significant and distinct type of residual ranking factor that are crawled by all search engines that xml sitemaps simply cannot replicate.

•User friendly page•Easy navigate all pages


Search engine submission:

Search engine submission is how a webmaster submits a web site directly to a search engine. While Search Engine Submission is often seen as a way to promote a web site, it generally is not necessary because the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing use crawlers, bots, and spiders that eventually would find most web sites on the Internet all by themselves.

Google, Yahoo and Bing – Link Submission

Monthly Report

Thank You

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Technology

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