Thursday, 5 May 2011

Link Building – Building Trusted Links

 SEO link building is one strategy found to work for almost every webmaster who puts the time and money into building links. But while the popular search engines like Google and Yahoo aren’t 100% transparent, there is a trend that these search engines are taking to reduce the ranking of sites that are using non-trusted backlinks.

When webmasters realised that one way to increase search engine ranking was by having lots of sites link back to their site, they started submitting links all over the place. They also negotiated with different websites to have their links listed on their site. This actually works great since link building is considered the trump card of increasing web traffic. But the search engines have become privy to the tactics used by websites to improve search engine ranking, and now they want to weed out the sites that aren’t using trusted links when SEO link building. A trusted site is one that isn’t full of advertisements. It’s a site that provides content to users and doesn’t exist for the mere purpose of making money. When a blogger finds your website and links back to it from a blog post, that’s a trusted link.  In an attempt to get more backlinks, if you’ve worked out a deal with a website that carries nothing but Google ads and very little valuable content, that’s not going to get you very far.


 

Local Seo

If  you own a local business with a website and want people to be able to find you through the search engines. The following are some local search engine optimization methods that will help you to rank better. One of the most easiest methods you can use for local SEO is writing optimized classified ads. This is a simple way to take advantage of local search efforts, search engines really like those kinds of sites and use them the more likely that you can send targeted local traffic to your business’s website.

When you are beginning start with Craigslist because it is the most popular classified web site on the internet. As a business owner you need to be sure that you are posting optimized ads on Craigslist. Make sure that the ad is not loud and that it is as simple as possible. When you write the ad, focus on the title because this is what increases most of the response.

Most local websites that are targeted by local businesses are fine with the idea of a business owner asking customers to log on to the site and leave reviews.  Since this is an allowable practice and your local SEO can benefit from it
 
It’s a good idea to take advantage of services such as Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo! Local, and claiming your profile is your first step on these sites. All you have to do is complete some boxes and verify your address and phone number.

People who search are impressed with pictures, and it makes them assume someone is more authentic, so it’s a good idea to upload pictures to your profile on these local site listings. Just find some good quality pictures from your site and upload them to give you a more effective listing. Use the best pictures you can to show your business in a good light, but they don’t have to be taken by a professional photographer. Every SEO marketer knows the value of long tail keywords and how they can help you rank better in the search engines and when you’re working with Local SEO, that’s exactly what you’re doing. Long tail keywords allow you to play around with the anchor texts of your links, the diversification of your anchor texts and you are better able to expand your efforts.

keeping these local SEO strategies in mind, you can get more traffic and better ranking for your local business..

Tuesday, 3 May 2011

Search Engines vs Directories

"Search engine" and "Web directory" are two different search services available; although they are often mistakenly confused.

Search engines are built up by robots or crawlers; whereas Web directories build up their indices through human editors. Many search engines and directories contain both a computer-generated index and a human generated index.
 
Search engines write programs known as robots, crawlers and/or spiders that have the following functions:

Locate Web pages

Read the contents of the Web pages

Report its findings back to the search engine databases


Many search engines update their index either on a bi-monthly or monthly basis. When Web searchers use a search engine to locate Web sites that are relevant to the keyword search, they are searching the search engine's index.

A search engine with a larger and more up-to-date index is a better representation of the information available in the Web. 



Search Engines Differences

There are many examples of the differences between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are very, very important. Also, for Google the older, the better, while Yahoo! generally has no preference towards sites and domains with tradition. Thus you might need more time till your site gets mature to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!.


What Is SEO

SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.

How Search Engines Work

The first basic truth you need to know to learn SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren’t. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven.  Search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next.
First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider. Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web, it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.
What you can do is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you’d better run the Spider Simulator  see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, they will be non-existent for search engines
After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings.
The last step in search engines’ activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser