24 September 2010

The History of Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimisation or SEO has been used strategically by thousands of individuals and companies all over the world to generate higher revenues. It is also one of the cheapest ways to continually advertise your web site and get a lot of targeted traffic who are truly interested in your services and products. It is important that you learn more about its history first to determine the right approaches that will appeal to your target market.

How It All Started
Web site content writers and webmasters started to optimise web sites for search engines during the middle part of the 1990s, since the initial search engines were still cataloguing the early Web. In the beginning, a webmaster can submit the webpage address or URL to different search engines that will send a spider to navigate and crawl the given page. The spider will gather links to other pages from the page and return the information located on the page to be indexed.

The entire process involves a search engine spider that will download a page and store it on the very own server of the search engine. The second program or indexer, will gather different information regarding the page, like words in the content and location, together with the weight for given words and all other links contained in the page, to be placed in a scheduler for later crawling.
Increased Value

Web site owners understood what it means to increase the ranking of their web sites and being visible to their target market through search engine results. They can then create the opportunity for SEO practitioners using either black hat or white hat. Danny Sullivan, an analyst of the industry in the 1990s, indicated that SEO or search engine optimisation may have been coined and used frequently in 1997.
Early versions of the search algorithms heavily depended on information given by the webmaster like the keyword meta tag or index files in search engines such as ALIWEB. Meta tags function by giving a guide to every content of web pages. The Meta data can be used to index pages that were found to be unreliable due to the choices made by the webmaster in the given keywords. It can become an inaccurate representation of the web site's true content. Inaccurate and inconsistent meta tags can change the rankings of various pages.

Keyword Density

Keyword density was incorporated very much during the early parts of SEO. Search engines would usually suffer because of ranking manipulation of overuse of given keywords. Search engines needed to adjust to make sure that results pages will only present the most useful web sites, instead of unrelated web pages that only had several keywords, but really did not mean anything. More complex ranking algorithms were created and developed by search engines to ensure that visitors only got the most useful results possible.
Modern Results

At present, rankings in search engines are very accurate and dependable. In 2004, search engines have used different factors in the algorithms of rankings to significantly minimize link manipulation. Some of the best search engines use more than 200 various signals. The algorithms are not disclosed by the biggest engines to prevent unscrupulous webmasters from manipulating the results. Some of the best SEOs have used various approaches, with different techniques and opinions posted in blogs and online forums.

17 September 2010

SEO Effect of Duplicate Content

There are a lot of ways that you can improve your site’s page ranking in search engines, unfortunately, not all of them are good. Some people employ certain methods in acquiring a high page rank in search engines, even if these are considered to be deceitful in the sense that they are designed to trick the search engines – one of these methods is actually duplicating web content.

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content in SEO is actually any web content that is considered to be similar to another site. Search engines have actually implemented new filters specifically to monitor these types of deceitful attempts to improve site’s search engine page rankings. A lot of people think that by creating multiple but similar replicas of their web pages or content, that they will be able to improve their site’s page rankings since they will be able to get multiple listings for their site. Since search engines are now monitoring these types of trickery, sites using duplicate content can actually end up getting banned from search engine indexes instead of improving their ranking.
What are considered as duplicate content?

There are a couple of duplicate content types that are being rampantly utilized by a lot of people, each one a bit different in their use, but all of them employed for the same purpose, which is to trick search engines to get better page rankings.
One way of getting a duplicate content is by having very similar websites or identical web pages on different sub-domains or domains that offer basically the same content. This may include landing or door pages aside from the content, so make sure that you avoid using this if you don’t want your site to become vulnerable to search engines’ duplicate content filter.

Another method of creating duplicate content is by simply taking content from another website or page and reorganising it to make it appear dissimilar to its original form, though it is actually the same.

Product descriptions from many e-Commerce sites are actually being utilised by other sites as well. Other sites simply copy the product description of manufacturer’s utilised by other competitive markets as well. And add the fact that the product name, as well as the name of artist, manufacturer, writer or creator would be included, a significant amount of content would show up on your page. Although this is much harder to spot, it is still considered to be a duplicate content, or spam.

Distribution of copied articles by other sites other than the one that distributed the original article can also be considered to be a duplicate content. Unfortunately, although some search engines still deem the site where the original article came from as relevant, some however, do not.

How do a search engines filter duplicate content?

Search engines filter for duplicate content by using the same means for analysing and indexing page ranking for sites, and that is through the use of crawlers or robots. These robots or crawlers go through different websites and catalogues these sites by reading and saving information to their database. Once this is done, these robots then analyses and compares all the information it has taken from one website to all the others that tt has visited by using certain algorithms to determine if the site’s content is relevant, and if it can be considered as a duplicate content or spam.

How to avoid duplicate content?

Although you may not have any intentions to try and deceive search engines to improve your site’s page ranking, your site might still get flagged as having duplicate content. One way that you can avoid this from happening is by checking yourself if there are duplicate contents of your page. Just make sure that you avoid too much similarities with another page’s content for this can still appear as duplicate content to some filters, even if it isn’t considered to be a spam.

10 September 2010

Build Site Traffic With Free Blogging

Don’t have enough readers for your free blog website? Do you want to create your own blog the fast and easy way?

If you answered yes to any of these questions then free blogging sites are for you. Firstly, you might be wondering what blog is all about. A blog or a web blog is like an online log where you can use to build traffic for your website. It can contain any topics you want and it can even contain your diary.

So just how do you start blogging for free?

Creating your own blogging website is very simple. You can visit websites that offer free blogs which has step by step process on creating your blogging website. It will usually just take a few minutes of your time to create a blogging websites in sites that offer free blogging web pages.

However, before starting to go to websites that offer free blogs, you should first determine several factors for your blogging web page.

Firstly, you have to think of a name for your blog. To do this, you must first determine what kind of topic you will dedicate your blogging webpage to. Ask yourself what you want to discuss, what are your interests or hobbies or if you have a website that is dedicated to a particular topic, you can discuss that to. It can be anything, it can be dogs, cars, casinos, food, travel, and you can even create a blog about yourself.
After knowing what name your blogging site should have, the next step would be what to put in it. Basing from your title, you will have an idea on what to put on your blog. You can put in any comments you want with different topics regarding your title and headline. You can even post in surveys as your topic; this is very useful if you sell a particular product where you can get consumers opinion on how to sell your product more effectively.

Another way to generate interest in your blog and attract a lot of readers is to make your blog a bit controversial. People like controversies and making your blog one, can create a lot of curious people to read your blog. You should post comments that can be controversial and this can result in many people wanting to post in their comments too.
Now that you have finished creating your blog, with title or headline, a comment, how should you attract people into reading your blogs? One of the best ways is to write an article about a particular topic in your blog and post them into article submission websites. This can generate a lot of targeted traffic and in no time at all.
To make this work, you should write the article with your blog site URL included at the ending of the article or in the footnote. With a good article and a little bit of luck, your blog will be discovered by people and chances are, your blog will create a lot of traffic by word of mouth.

Free blogging websites are one of the most useful tools to generate targeted traffic to your website. It can even generate a lot of loyal readers or fans of your work to post in comments and suggestions regularly to your blogging website and will often recommend it to other people. The best thing about this is that it’s easy, convenient, fun, and as the name suggests, it’s all for free.

03 September 2010

Keyword selection For SEO

One of the main components that helps determine the success, or failure, of your search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign is your keyword selection. Although this may not appear much, choosing the right keyword to use for your website is one of the more gruelling parts of the entire SEO process, especially if you aim to find one that will be most effective for your site’s search engine optimisation.

When using keywords for SEO, you just need to follow a few simple steps in order to properly find the right keyword that will do the job. There are also a couple of things that you need to look out for in order to avoid any problems when trying to optimise your web page.

The first thing that you should do if you want to be able to use keywords effectively is to start out by making a list of “key” keywords or phrases that are relevant to the content of your site, and by doing this, it can actually lead you to create or discover more keywords or phrases that may blossom from the original one that you have chosen.

Select key phrases or words

Once you’ve made a list, try to select ones that contain a “key” keyword or phrase that can help you identify your site’s content. Let’s say your site’s content is all about cars, using cars as a keyword won’t put you high up in the page ranking of search engines, especially since a lot of sites or pages have that as a keyword. Try to avoid using words or phrases that are too general, as this will not help improve your page ranking. By adding other key terms to your chosen keyword, such as “second-hand cars”, or “second-hand sports cars” will actually help improve your chances of going up higher in the page rankings. Just make sure that these are relevant to your site’s content.

It also helps if you took the time to search for keywords or phrases that your competition are using so that you can narrow down which ones to use, and which ones to avoid. There is no sense in using a type of keyword or phrase, such as “cars”, which a lot or most of your competition are using as well, and if their site’s are ranked high up in the search engine’s index, then you might have a difficult time going up against that.

Use your location

You can also improve your chances of getting a much better page ranking result if you incorporate your location to the keyword or phrase that you are trying to use. Let’s say your business is located somewhere in Hertfordshire, by simply adding the word “Hertfordshire” to your keyword selection (“Hertfordshire second-hand sports cars”), you can fair better in your page ranking. However, this type of method usually entails that people are planning on seeing you in person when they do searches like this, so make sure that you only utilise this technique if you are open to the idea of them visiting you in person.

Use your niche
Always try to choose the keyword that you specialise in, or at least the one that offers you with the most profit. Keep in mind that you want to offer the keyword that best describes your business, but if the search volume of users is leaning towards one that isn’t your main product, then you can actually opt to use that keyword instead, just as long as that keyword is still related or relevant to your site’s content.