SEO Tips Master

How The Google decide which ones should be at the top of the results?

2011-07-23T05:30:00.000-07:00

How does Google work out which sites to show in the search results and how does it decide which ones should be at the top of the results?

Google uses an algorithm that takes into account thousands of factors. This algorithm is like a formula that is used to determine search results. Google doesn’t explain this algorithm to us in layman’s language but we do know what some of the most important aspects are.

There are 2 main aspects to SEO that we need to consider:

Off-site optimisation

On-site optimisation

If you are serious about improving your search engine rankings you will need to pay attention to both off-site and on-site optimisation – both should work in harmony with each other.

Off-Site Optimisation

Off-site optimisation is essentially generating links that point to your website. Google uses programs called spiders (otherwise known as robots, bots or Googlebot) to crawl the Internet and follow links. The more links it finds that point to your site the better.

So do I just need to get more links than my competitors if I want to be number one in Google?

Unfortunately it’s not that simple. It is not just the quantity of links that is important, but the quality.

What makes a link a high quality link?

In general the following are indicators of a high quality link:

A link from a website or page whose content is relevant to your site

A link from a website or page that is already considered by Google to be trustworthy or authoritative (a Google Page Rank of 3 or above is a good indicator for this)

A link from a page that has very few other links that point to other sites

A link that contains relevant keywords in the anchor text

A link that points to a relevant page on your site

A link that does not have the nofollow attribute

The more of these indicators that apply to a single link the better, so a link from a page that has content relevant to your site, has a good Google Page Rank, few outgoing links, no nofollow attribute, points to a relevant page on your site and has relevant keywords in the anchor text would be an excellent link to have.

Conversely, the following are indicators of low quality links:

A link from a website or page whose content is irrelevant to your site

A link from a website or page that is not considered by Google to be trustworthy or authoritative

A link from a page that has lots of other links that point to other sites

A link that contains irrelevant keywords in the anchor text (e.g. ‘click here’)

A link that points to an irrelevant page on your site

A link that has the nofollow attribute

What is the nofollow attribute?

The nofollow attribute allows webmasters to specify to search engines that a link should not be followed. A link with the nofollow attribute will not be counted by Google and so has no SEO benefit. Some social media sites like twitter and Facebook sometimes use nofollow on their links. This does not mean all nofollow links are bad – links from sites like twitter and Facebook can generate traffic to your site – but they won’t have any direct SEO value.

How can I spot a nofollow link?

The HTML source code will look something like this:

Your Link Here.

As Google has evolved the emphasis has been on trying to deliver the most relevant search results for any given search phrase. Above all Google attempts to reward sites that appear to be naturally the most popular. The theory goes something like this: If someone has an interesting website, people who find it will link to it and tell other people about it, who may also in turn link to it. This generates a natural linking pattern and this is what Google looks for as an indicator that a website should rank highly.

Now the truth is that even if you do have a really interesting website, it won’t get enough incoming links to move it to the top of the search results unless people know about it. Imagine you’re the best guitarist on the planet – unless you promote yourself or hire someone to promote you, the chances are you’ll be the best unknown guitarist on the planet. So it is with websites – you need to promote them somehow.

Google understands that you want to promote your website and get better rankings so it produces some rules on how to play the game. As with all games there are legitimate ways to play as well as ways to cheat. The ongoing challenge for Google to is to spot the difference between the two and make sure that legitimate practices are rewarded and cheating punished.

Take a look at Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for more details.

Bad Links

There is no real need to go too deeply into bad links at this stage – suffice to say there are plenty of ways in which unscrupulous webmasters try to cheat the system. If you concentrate on following the advice below on generating good links you can’t go far wrong – and just be wary of anyone who contacts you to offer you any kind of SEO / link building services.

So what can I do to promote my website and generate high quality incoming links to it?

Thankfully there are lots of things you can do. There’s no point re-inventing the wheel so I highly recommend you 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity - Aaron Wall and co at SeoBook.com have a wealth of information about all things SEO. I would highly recommend printing off a copy of this guide.

So now you have your list of what to do to generate links to your site, you need to keep working with the list until you get the results you want. How long this will take depends greatly on the amount of competition there is for the phrases you want to optimise for.

On-Site Optimisation

On-site optimisation is all about putting the right words in the right format in the right places on your site. This includes, amongst other factors:

Page Titles

Page Headings

Descriptions / on-page text

Meta Description Tag

It’s hard to put an exact figure on how important on-site optimisation is compared to link building but it probably accounts for about 20% of SEO. In other words 80% of what makes a site rank highly is due to link building, so it’s best to divide your efforts accordingly and put 80% of your time into link building and 20% into your on-site optimisation.

Page Titles

The main purpose of the page title is to tell visitors what that page is about before they arrive on the page. Let’s say you have a Toshiba 30” Widescreen TV for sale. If someone goes to a search engine and searches for phrases like Toshiba TV, Toshiba Widescreen TV, Toshiba 30” TV, you want your page to show up in the search results. Not only that, you also want that potential customer to be able to see clearly that if they click through to that page they will see a TV matching the phrase they searched by. When search results are displayed what you see are the page title and the description. If you search for a Toshiba TV and you see a website listed in the search results with a page title of ‘Terry’s Televisions – All Makes & Models’, this will not seem like a very good match. What you want to see is a page title that includes the words Toshiba and TV. So for this example some good page titles would be:

Toshiba 30” Widescreen TV

Toshiba 30 inch Widescreen Television

Toshiba 30 inch Widescreen Television – with 5 Year Guarantee

Toshiba TAS3013 30 inch Widescreen Television – with 5 Year Guarantee (the TAS3013 refers to the model number)

Personally I would go for the last option – give as much information as you can in the page title, so long as the information is likely to be relevant to the search. The TV may come in different colours so it can also be a good idea to include the colour in the page title – if someone specifically wants the silver version it’s best to put silver in the page title.

The meta description also shows up in the search results, just under the page title, so this should also be optimised. A good meta description for this example page would be something like:

Toshiba TAS3013 30 inch Silver Widescreen Television, complete with 5 Year Guarantee. In stock, next day delivery for just £10.

The Meta description is not a major factor in determining rankings but it can be very influential in improving click through rates, i.e. getting more people to click through to that page on your site. When people use search engines they want to see a website in the search results that matches exactly what they are looking for and even answers questions they have in their mind. I can’t ask Google how much you charge for delivery, whether you have the item in stock, or how quickly I can get it, but you can answer all those questions for me in your meta description. When someone tells you what you want to know before you’ve even asked, that’s impressive and can greatly enhance your chances of making a sale.

As a general rule your page title and page heading (aka Product Name) should be the same or very similar. If you have a page with a page title and page heading that are identical it helps to show the search engines exactly what that page is about. It can also be a good idea to vary the wording, mainly if different people are likely to use several variations of a key phrase to search for the same product.

For more in-depth discussion on this topic take a look at http://www.seobook.com/cleansing-seo-ignorance-public-seo-cesspool-one-blog-post-time

Finally, your on-page product description should be as informative as possible and try to answer as many questions as you can imagine your potential customers might have. As a general rule your product description should be an expanded version of your meta description.

Keywords

Keyword optimisation applies to both on-site and off-site optimisation.

If you sell handbags and scarves you may think the 2 most important keywords for your site are ‘handbags’ and ‘scarves’ and you may then set about trying to optimise your site for these 2 words. This would be a mistake for 2 reasons:

‘handbags’ and ‘scarves’ are considered to be very competitive search phrases – there are so many other websites competing for these phrases that you would need to spend a lot of money over a long period of time to have any chance of getting into the top 10 search results for these phrases.

Most people who use generic phrases like this for searching are not looking to buy something there and then. Most people who are ready to buy a product will have done some research already and will use a more specific phrase when searching.
Somebody searching for ‘Televisions’ is less likely to buy something than someone who has searched for a ‘Toshiba 30 inch Widescreen TV’ for example. The person searching for ‘Toshiba 30 inch Widescreen TV’ has already decided what he wants – if you have that product at a good price there is a good chance he will buy it from you. The person searching for ‘TVs’ or ‘televisions’ has not yet decided which television to buy so you are less likely to get a sale from that visit. If you can rank highly for the keyword ‘televisions’ it can have great benefits – someone who is just browsing may bookmark your site and come back to it a later date for example - it’s just not the best thing to focus your efforts on in the early stages of optimising your site.
When optimising for more generic phrases it is often a good idea to take a longer term view and try to provide as much information as you can on your site relating to that keyword. If you sell televisions and someone finds your site by searching for ‘televisions’, the chances are that they want more information before they decide what to buy and where to buy it from. If you can make it easy for that person to find information about the various different types of televisions available and make it easy for them to narrow their search, you will be increasing the chances that it will be your site that they buy from when they do eventually decide to purchase.

This principle applies more to higher value goods and will not be true for all product industries.

Miscellaneous SEO Questions and Answers

I’ve been contacted by someone who says he can offer me ‘Guaranteed Top Ten Rankings in Google’ for my website – is this possible?

No. There is no way to guarantee top ten rankings in Google or any other search engine. Imagine that 12 people offer the same gaurantee for the same search phrases to 12 different website owners – there are only 10 places in the top ten so it stands to reason that 2 of these people will not be able to deliver on their guarantee. There is no way of knowing what your competitors will be doing to improve their rankings whilst you are working to improve yours, and this is why it is impossible to offer guaranteed rankings.

The only kind of guarantee that an SEO company could offer is the kind where they gaurantee to refund your money if they don’t deliver the results they initially promise, although these kind of guarantees are hard to come by. If a money-back guarantee is offered it will usually be for providing rankings for lesser search phrases, for which there is not much competition.

My site has not been listed by Google, what can I do?

Submit your website URL to Google via this link http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/?continue=/addurl

It usually takes a few days for your site to be indexed by Google, although sometimes it can take up to a few weeks. If you can get a link to your site from another site that has a high Page Rank this process can often be sped up.

How will I know when my site has been indexed by Google?

Search on Google uisng your website address. If it shows up in the results that means it has been indexed. If it doesn’t show up then your site has not yet been indexed.

After my site gets indexed how long do I need to wait before it will show up for the search phrases that are important to me?

That depends entirely on the amount of competition there is for those search phrases. If you are providing a service in your local area and there are not many people with websites offering the same service, you stand a good chance of your site showing up on the first page of the search results within a few weeks. If there is lots of competition for those search phrases then it will take a lot longer.

As a general rule (depending of course on how much optimisation / link building you do and how well it is done) you should expect it to take at least 6 – 12 months to get top rankings for competitive search phrases.

I’ve been told that what I need to do is optimise my meta keywords – will this help my rankings?

In the early days of search engines you could boost your rankings by adding keywords to the meta keywords tag, but these days have long since passed. Google does not use the meta keywords tag in its search algorithm. Some other search engines and directories may still make use of the meta keywords tag content, so if you have time there is no harm in optimising them.

As a general rule less is more when it comes to meta keywords – it’s better to concentrate on one phrase or a few variations of the same phrase rather than adding too many keywords.

A couple of years ago I noticed a phenomenon whereby rankings could suffer if a webmaster had put keywords in the meta keywords tag that didn’t appear in the readable text on the page. Bear in mind that text in graphics cannot be seen by search engine robots, so if a keyword does not appear in the text on that page, do not add it to your meta keywords tag.

Here’s the official line from Google on the keywords tag http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/keywords-meta-tag-in-web-search/

What about filling my home page with lots of keyword-rich content – will that boost my rankings?

By itself this will do nothing, but well-optimised content is one factor of on-site optimisation, so it is a good idea to add quality content to your site that contains relevant keywords. Bear in mind there is a difference between informative content that would be useful to visitors and text that has been added solely to boost rankings. Put your website visitors’ interests first at all times.

What are one-way links, reciprocal links & three-way links? Which ones are best for SEO?

One-way link: Site A links to Site B

Reciprocal link: Site A links to Site B and site B links to Site A

Three-way link: Site A links to Site B. Site B links to Site C. Site C links to site A

One-way links are better for SEO. Reciprocal links imply that a deal has been made between 2 sites to artificially boost rankings (i.e. you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours). Reciprocal links were once a much-used tool for boosting rankings but gradually reciprocal links were devalued by the search engines. This is why three-way links came into being – people thought that a three-way link would look to the search engines like 3 one-way links rather than a reciprocal link. Usually the only reason for a three-way link is to disguise the fact that it’s a reciprocal link, so for that reason I would advise against engaging in three-way linking practices.

What about outbound links? Are they good or bad?

Many SEO people will say that outbound links (links from your site to another site) are bad for the SEO of your site. This is not only untrue but also a bit simplistic. If you start linking to other websites simply because they ask you to, this will bring no benefit for your rankings. If on the other hand you link to other sites because they could be useful to your customers then this can be a good thing. It’s all about context. If you post an article on your website about something of interest to your customers and which relates to what you do, and then link to an authority site so that people can get more information on that subject, this is viewed as a positive thing to do and can help your rankings.

If you link to no-one and expect people to link to you, it suggests that you are not entering into what is considered to be the true spirit of the Internet, namely the sharing of information.

The other positive aspect of linking to other websites is to give Google a clearer picture of what niche your site belongs to. If you sell football equipment, linking to sites where people can read the latest news or gossip about football can be a positive thing for your site.

I’ve heard that my site may be in the Google Sandbox – can you explain this?

The Google Sandbox is a term given to describe what happens to new websites. Google ranks websites very much on trust – a trusted site will rank more highly than one that isn’t trusted. New sites need to gain the trust of Google before they can rank highly for competitive search phrases and it is generally considered by many webmasters that new websites go into the Google Sandbox for the first 6 months of their lives. Some of the observed effects of being in the Google Sandbox are:

Your site’s rankings keep fluctuating, even when you search by your actual domain name

Your site ranks quite well for phrases that are not very competitive but ranks nowhere at all for more competitive search phrases

Google prefers to reward long-term endeavours rather than short-term gain. By putting a new website on probation for the first few months of its life, Google is able to evaluate your site properly before it decides how much to trust it. During this time Google looks at a variety of factors including which sites you link to and which sites are linking to you – this helps it to build up a picture of why your site exists and how much value it should have to Google’s users.

I’ve heard that Google uses PageRank™ to determine search results – is this the same as the Page Rank tool I have on my Google Toolbar?

Not exactly. Google’s PageRank™ formula is very complex. The Page Rank tool on the Google toolbar is just a rough indicator of a site’s importance – i.e. it’s part of the story but not the whole story.

What is Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO is a term that refers to unethical ways of improving rankings, i.e. attempts to cheat the system. Any gains achieved by Black Hat SEO will likely be only short-lived and will most likely get your site banned from Google in the longer term. Avoid Black Hat SEO at all costs.

White Hat SEO is the opposite of Black Hat SEO, namely ethical, legitimate SEO practises.

If you concentrate on optimising your site in a way that is good for your customers you can’t go far wrong. The best type of SEO is one that helps Google to display relevant content in the search results, helps your customers find what they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible, and helps you to generate more sales. In other words everyone wins.

In Google’s Own Words

Here is the official wording from Google about how its search engine works:

“We stand alone in our focus on developing the ‘perfect search engine’, defined by co-founder Larry Page as something that "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want....

The software behind our search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we're able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.

PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance.

Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Our search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. We also analyze the content of neighbouring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query.”

What’s wrong with SEO?

Ah, my favourite question! How much time have you got? OK seriously....

SEO exists because of the way search engines work. People want to find things so the idea of a search engine is a good one. But if someone wants to buy a handbag and there are 30,000 websites that sell handbags, there has to be a system for the search engine to use so it can decide which of those 30,000 website to show you first. Now if people were happy to look at all 30,000 sites before deciding which handbag to buy and which site to buy it from, there would be no problem. But that’s not what happens. No-one has the time or the patience for that. So the majority of people will look at only the first page of search results, i.e. the top ten and most of those people will not look beyond the first 2 or 3 results.

So the search engines need to use a formula of some kind to decide which of those 30,000 sites should be in the top 3 on the first page of the search results. The current system uses link popularity as the most influential factor in calculating rankings. This leads to the idea that if you want to get better rankings you need more links. From this perceived need for links all sorts of SEO practices are born. These practices lead to millions of web pages on millions of websites being created for the sole purpose of boosting the link popularity of other websites. Examples of websites that have no other purpose than to be part of the SEO game:

Link directories

Micro sites

Article sites

Fake blogs

Thousands of online directories exist solely to provide links to other websites, but does anybody ever use them to find anything? If you want to find something you’re most likely to use a search engine or go to a trusted resource directory about a specific subject.

Micro sites – the creation of multiple websites whose sole function is to link to a larger, central website.

Article sites – sites that exist to display articles. These sites make money by displaying adverts on the pages on which articles appear. Because so many article websites exist, a link from one article is considered to be of minimal value – this gave rise to software that creates multiple variations of a single article. These so-called ‘unique’ articles are then scattered across the Internet like muck from a muck spreader, purely and simply to generate more incoming links to a website.

Fake blogs – I’ve heard of people creating 50 blogs, then populating them with a mixture of human- and machine-generated content, solely to generate links for another website. Of course the blogs themselves need links pointing to them as well, so on it goes.

In short, the way in which search engines work (i.e. putting so much emphasis on links) gives rise to huge amounts of noise and clutter on the Internet. Too much noise and not enough meaningful communication or information. It’s like being in a large room full of people constantly talking gibberish.

So what’s the alternative to SEO?

If I were building a new website now this is what I would do: I’d pay attention to some basic on-site SEO techniques like making sure the page titles clearly represented what I was doing, I’d make the site nice to look at, easy to navigate, and provide informative content that would be of interest to other people. I would then set about telling people about it. I’d start a blog, post regularly on social media sites like twitter and Facebook, I’d join discussions on other blogs that related to what I was doing and make useful contributions to those discussions – if I’m going to devote my working life to something I have to believe that people will benefit from what I am doing, so my focus should be on doing a good job and creating quality content for my site, then letting people know about it.

Some of my best clients have come from word of mouth, referrals or as a result of people seeing a website I built or an article I had written (which incidentally was written because I felt I had something useful to share with people and not because I thought they would help my rankings). I get a lot of enquiries from people who find my site by using search engines, but many of those enquiries come to nothing.

Recommendations, referrals and introductions are worth so much more than search engine rankings. When I first went into web design many people told me I wouldn’t be able to make a living from it because there were too many other people doing the same thing. But what they missed is the fact that people like people they can trust – there may well be thousands of other people who do the same kind of work, but people are much more likely to choose someone that has been recommended to them. I trust my friends. If my friends tell me that Mr Smith is a good plumber I’m more likely to trust Mr Smith and ask him to do my plumbing. So many times I have met trades people who don’t have a website and never advertise, yet they always have work. They started out by concentrating on doing a good job and gradually built up a customer base by word of mouth.

So in my humble opinion it is better to concentrate on these:

Do a good job

Make sure your website is as good as it can be

Incentivise people to let their friends and family know how good your website is and how you did a good job for them

Encourage people to participate in your website by making it interactive – a blog is a great way of doing this

Participate in other websites that you believe offer value

To learn more about how good ideas can spread quickly read Unleashing the IdeaVirus by Seth Godin

Now I know there will be a lot of sceptics out there who believe that the modern world just doesn’t work like that anymore and you may be right. There’s absolutely no reason why you should agree with what I’m saying, in fact here are some reasons why you might disagree:

What I’m saying is all well and good if you want to earn a modest income from being nice to people but you have grander plans and want to make huge amounts of money

Much of what I’m saying you should do is just white hat SEO anyway

You’ve heard it all before and you know that Google is all that matters. You use Google when you want something so everybody else must do as well

You don’t buy into some fake notion that if you do a good job or sell nice products your business will grow organically

You just disagree for no particular reason and you have every right to

So if you’ve come this far and still want to engage in SEO, here are some useful resources and tools.....

Useful Resources

Matt Cutts – He works for Google and knows a thing or two

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Google Webmaster Guidelines

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

SEOMOZ – great site with lots of info about all things SEO

http://www.seomoz.org/articles

SEOMOZ Search Ranking From the seomoz.org website:

“The following ranking factors were rated by our panel of 72 SEO experts. Their feedback is aggregated and averaged into the percentage scores below. For each, we’ve calculated the degree to which the experts felt this factor was important for achieving high rankings as well as the degree of variance in opinion, estimated using the standard deviation of the contributors’ answers. Thus, factors that are high in importance and low in contention are those where experts agree the most that the factor is critical to rankings.”

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors

SEOBOOK – Aaron Wall – Lots of trusted and reliable SEO advice and tools

http://www.seobook.com/

101 Ways to Build Link Popularity – Excellent Reference for Link Building

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml

The Case Against SEO made by Derek Powazek

http://powazek.com/posts/2090

and his explanation once he realised how much he’d struck a nerve amongst the SEO community:

http://powazek.com/posts/2101

and the other side of the argument from Peter and Aaron at SEOBOOK:

http://www.seobook.com/seo-scam

Useful Tools

Google Keyword Tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Web CEO – Excellent Free Tool for Checking Rankings plus other SEO Tools included

http://www.webceo.com/download/index.htm

Thanks: www.matrix23.co.uk

Type of Search Engine

2011-05-31T23:53:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia defines a search engine as: ‘a program designed to help find information stored on a computer system such as the World Wide Web, or a personal computer. The search engine allows one to ask for content meeting specific criteria (typically those containing a given word or phrase) and retrieving a list of references that match those criteria. Search engines use regularly updated indexes to operate quickly and efficiently.’

In other words, a search engine is a sophisticated piece of software, accessed through a page on a website that allows you to search the web by entering search queries into a search box. The search engine then attempts to match your search query with the content of web pages that is has stored, or cached, and indexed on its powerful servers in advance of your search.

There are so many searching methods available but initially we need to consider the following point

· Style of search

· Search Place

There are main types of search indexes we access when searching the web:

Crawler-based search engines create their listings automatically. They "crawl" or "spider" the web, then people search through what they have found. If web pages are changed, crawler-based search engines eventually find these changes, and that can affect how those pages are listed. Page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role.

The life span of a typical web query normally lasts less than half a second, yet involves a number of different steps that must be completed before results can be delivered to a person seeking information

Example Search engine

www.google.com

www.yahoo.com

www.bing.com

Instead of that offers a single source to search the Web, images, audio, video, news from Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and many more search engines.

http://www.dogpile.com

http://vivisimo.com/

http://www.metacrawler.com/

http://www.mamma.com

http://www.surfwaxcom

You can visually navigate and easily refine in order to find relevant information faster and more efficiently! With three dimensional search

Example

http://www.quintura.com/

http://clusty.com

www.iboogie.tv

Computational Search Engine

Its gives you direct answers to your questions, just as if you were talking to another human being

Example

www.wolframalpha.com/

www.trueknowledge.com

Semantics search Engine

A semantics search engine attempts to make sense of search results based on context. It automatically identifies the concepts structuring the texts. Semantic search has the power to enhance traditional web search, but it will not replace it. A large portion of queries are navigational and semantic search is not a replacement for these. Research queries, on the other hand, will benefit from semantic search.

Example

www.evri.com/

www.hakia.com/

www.yebol.com/

Social Search Engine

Social search or a social search engine is a type of web search that takes into account the Social Graph of the person initiating the search query. When applied to web search this Social-Graph approach to relevance is in contrast to established algorithmic or machine-based approaches where relevance is determined by analyzing the text of each document or the link structure of the documents Search results produced by social search engine give more visibility to content created or touched by users in the Social Graph.

http://answers.yahoo.com/

http://www.answers.com/

www.ehow.com

News Search Engine:

News search engine that provides coverage from about hundreds of different sources

Example

http://news.google.com/

http://news.yahoo.com/

http://www.daylife.com/

http://www.samachar.com/

http://www.searchindia.com/search/News/

http://www.dinamalar.com/

http://thatstamil.oneindia.in/

Job Search Engine

Start your job search on one of the purest job search engines on the web. Find and apply to job openings found directly on company websites.

http://www.timesjobs.com/

http://www.naukri.com/

http://www.monster.com/

http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/

http://www.careerbuilder.com

http://www.bixee.com/

Property Search Engine

www.indianpropertysearch.com/

http://indiarealproperty.com/

http://in.iproperty.com/

www.indiaproperties.com/

www.realestateonline.in/

www.magicbricks.com

Shopping Search engine

http://shopping.yahoo.com/

www.bing.com/shopping/

www.google.com/products

www4.shopping.com

Video Search Engine

www.bing.com/videos/browse

www.blinkx.com/

www.podscope.com/

http://video.google.com/

http://video.yahoo.com/

For more Search engine details here. Please Visit

http://thesearchenginelist.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Search_Engines/

http://www.internet4classrooms.com/search.html

Powerful Search Engine Optimization Tips

2011-05-30T22:05:00.000-07:00

Set your Goal like the following schedule

High Priority
Medium Priority
Low Priority
Avoid
Avoid or Get Banned

High Priority

Write great content (HIGH PRIORITY)
Write unique content (HIGH PRIORITY)
Add new content all the time (HIGH PRIORITY)
Create a great keyword phrase (HIGH PRIORITY)
Choose a phrase that is popular, but not too popular (HIGH PRIORITY)
Write an accessible site (HIGH PRIORITY)
Use the keyword phrase in your title tag (HIGH PRIORITY)
Get a domain with your keyword phrase (HIGH PRIORITY)
Use the keyword phrase in your URL (HIGH PRIORITY)
Use your keyword phrase a lot, but not too much (HIGH PRIORITY)
Use your keyword phrase in headlines (HIGH PRIORITY)
Use your keyword phrase in anchor text of links (HIGH PRIORITY)
Ask other people for links to your page (HIGH PRIORITY)
Try to get your keyword phrase inside incoming links (HIGH PRIORITY)
Please link to this page: SEO Tips and Tricks
Try to get links from reputable sites (HIGH PRIORITY)
Try to get links from similar sites (HIGH PRIORITY)
Try to get links from .edu, and .gov sites (HIGH PRIORITY)

Medium Priority

Create as much content as you can (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Keep your site content inside one theme (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Keep your site live as long as possible (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Create a sitemap (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Create an XML sitemap or Google sitemap (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Use 301 redirects for permanent redirects (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Use 302 redirects only for long or ugly URLs (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Get as many inbound links as you can (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Put your keyword phrase in the first paragraph (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Put your keyword phrase at the top of the HTML (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Put your keyword phrase in alternative text (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Increase the font size of your keyword phrase (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Format your keyword phrases to stand out (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Format your keyword phrases to stand out (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Link to your page from within your site (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Put up links that flow within the text (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Keep asking for inbound links (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Get linked in DMOZ and Yahoo! (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Periodically check your outbound links for pagerank (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Link all major images (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Keep your pages up-to-date (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
If you must use frames, always use the noframes tag (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
If you must use Flash, always include alternative text (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
Use Flash for non-critical pieces of a page (MEDIUM PRIORITY)

Low Priority

Keep your pages close to the root directory (LOW PRIORITY)
Use the meta keywords tag and include your keyword phrase (LOW PRIORITY)
Keep your keywords together (LOW PRIORITY)
Use your keyword phrase in your Meta description (LOW PRIORITY)
Set your language meta keyword (LOW PRIORITY)
Optimize for a few secondary keywords (LOW PRIORITY)
Use your keyword phrase in named anchors (LOW PRIORITY)
Use different forms of words for your keyword phrase (LOW PRIORITY)
Use synonyms for your keywords (LOW PRIORITY)
Don't link a lot to external sites (LOW PRIORITY)
Register a separate domain instead of a sub-domain (LOW PRIORITY)
Register a .com domain over a .biz or .us domain (LOW PRIORITY)
Use hyphens to separate words in domains (LOW PRIORITY)
Use hyphens or underscores to separate words in URLs (LOW PRIORITY)
Write short pages (LOW PRIORITY)
Use JavaScript with care (LOW PRIORITY)
Include text transcripts of podcasts and sound files (LOW PRIORITY)

Avoid

Don't host your site with a host that allows spammers (AVOID)
Don't host your site with a host that is down a lot (AVOID)
Don't write your content with JavaScript (AVOID)
Don't omit alt text for images especially images inside the text (AVOID)
Don't use images instead of text links (AVOID)
Don't misspell your keywords in your content (AVOID)
Don't try to optimize for more than 2-3 keywords and phrases (AVOID)
Don't use your keyword phrase too much (AVOID)
Don't rely on links from domains on the same IP (AVOID)
Don't have more than 10 words in your URL (AVOID)
Don't use URL parameters if you can avoid it (AVOID)
Don't use dynamic URLs (AVOID)
Don't use session IDs (AVOID)
Don't rely on AdSense to boost your rankings (AVOID)
Don't rely on AdWords to boost your rankings (AVOID)
Try to get your site off link farms (AVOID)
Don't link to link farms (AVOID)
Don't create pages of links (AVOID)
Don't link to and from the same site repeatedly (AVOID)
Don't get into link circles (cross-linking) (AVOID)
Don't have broken links on your site (AVOID)
Don't use the meta refresh tag to redirect users (AVOID)
Don't use 302 redirects (AVOID)
Don't make constant minor changes to content (AVOID)
Don't separate content artificially (AVOID)
Don't violate copyright or other laws (AVOID)
Don't duplicate content on your site (AVOID)
Don't use robots.txt to ban large portions of your site (AVOID)
Don't write bad or incorrect HTML (AVOID)
Don't use frames (AVOID)
Don't create Flash splash pages (AVOID)
Don't write Flash-only sites (AVOID)

Avoid or Get Banned

Never redirect to another domain (AVOID OR GET BANNED)
Be Careful Redirecting to New Domains - You Could Be Banned
Never link invisible images (AVOID OR GET BANNED)
Don't Link Single Pixel Images - Your Site Will Be Banned
Never include invisible text on your pages (AVOID OR GET BANNED)
Don't Hide Text - Your Site Will Be Banned
Never create doorway pages (AVOID OR GET BANNED)
Don't Use Doorway Pages - Your Site Will Be Banned
Never display different content to a spider than customers (AVOID OR GET BANNED)
Don't Cloak Websites - Your Site Will Be Banned

SEO RECOMMENDATIONS

2011-05-28T04:17:00.000-07:00

Between 85% to 90% of all web site traffic comes from the search engines and directories. Using those handy-dandy submission services that will submit your site to 980 search engines for a mere $19.95 won’t take care of this traffic. Just because your site is listed in the search engines won’t mean that your customers can find it. In fact, several search engines will actually penalize your site for using that method. Only manual “search engine optimization and positioning” efforts end up working. This is because these efforts are custom tailored to your site and are designed to give the engines what they want and need in order to find your site among your competitors and other sites related to your category.

Search engine optimization and positioning is challenging at best. It’s not a simple matter of adding a few tags that contain your important keywords. It is an art and a science, because it is applying creative techniques to an in-depth study of the search engines and directories.

PinMedia is committed to meeting the search engine optimization & positioning needs of your web site and proposes a campaign plan. Our goal will be to meet your Search Engine Optimization outsourcing needs thoroughly and professionally.

Included within this proposal is a detailed Scope of Work outlining specific proposed activities and fees for your review. The Scope of Work will include site optimization and allied web promotion & development activities, SE-friendly content writing, and submission and tracking to over all major and support Search Engines and Directories.

On project completion your web site will be more accessible on the Internet in terms of Top rankings for specific keywords across the major search engines.

WEB SITE ANALYSIS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Analysis:

SE-friendly Content

Recommendations:

The web page can offer far more SE optimized content specifically related to its category. Spider–Food (SE-friendly content writing); Extensive keyword-rich content will need to be added to individual pages to improve rankings. Search Engine friendly, keyword rich content in line with Meta tags to be implemented as appropriate on the site to achieve high traffic and rankings. Text has to be added on the home page as well as inner pages.

Analysis:

Keywords analysis

Recommendations:

Our recommendation is use of two or three-word phrases instead of single words, pair general keyword with more specific ones. We also recommend the use of combination keywords that are distantly related, common misspelled related terms, service region specific keywords and long variation of keywords.

Analysis:

Site Meta tags

Recommendations:

Create page-wise Meta tags with a view to re-writing page-wise content to incorporate these - without allowing the body text to lose ‘marketing appeal’.

Analysis:

Web site uses frames

Recommendations:

Frames are roadblock for search engines. Very few top-ten ranked sites use frames. Keeping that in mind it’s very difficult to get framed site into the top-ten rankings. Frames increase the file size and the total number of words that make up a web site. Therefore, they also decrease the overall keyword weight, which can put you at a disadvantage to your competition. We strongly recommend against use of frames.

Analysis:

Web site URL is not static

Recommendations:

The main page should be at www.domainname.com and NOT redirected to a different directory. If it must redirect, it should be at the server level. Generally, it's safer to avoid refreshes and redirects all together. Redirects can also impact your directory listings, because directory editors may want to use the redirected URL as opposed to your root domain. If they do this, it can affect the link popularity of your main page. Redirection to a different directory on the site; e.g., www.designcompanydomain.com redirected to www.designcompanydomain.com/main/default.asp accomplished through a Meta refresh that which looks like this:

This is just the kind of thing that search engines might consider to be spam, due to the abuse of Meta refreshes by porn sites and the like. (They serve up one page to the engines and then redirect it to another page.)

Analysis:

Web site uses JavaScript code

Recommendations:

We recommend placing the JavaScript code like mouseovers, etc., in a separate .js file in order to create less code for the search engine spiders to wade through to get to the "meat." Place all your JavaScript into a plain text file. Name the file whatever you want, and use the .js file extension. You will NOT use the tags with your external JavaScript file, though.... just the JavaScript.

Link to the JavaScript from your web page like this:

With filename.js being the name of your JavaScript file. Like any other link, make sure you use the correct directory path. The above is if it's in the same directory as the web page."

Analysis:

Web site directory structure

Recommendations:

All web site pages should be as close to the root directory as possible, as pages closer to the root directory are often given more weight with the engines; e.g., www.domainname.com/page1.htm as opposed to www.domainname.com/directory/page1.htm. AltaVista mentions this in their FAQ for Webmasters. Pages closer to the root also seem to have higher PageRanks in Google. (This is probably due more to the internal linking structure to those pages, but it's something to consider.)

Analysis:

Web site serves dynamically generated pages

Recommendations:

Ideally, dynamic pages should not have equal signs or question marks and other query strings in them. Query string pages are starting to get indexed by most of the search engines, however we still recommend against their usage.

Analysis:

Web site uses splash page

Recommendations:

We recommend against the use of splash page - A site needs to be content rich with carefully placed keyword phrases, especially the main page.

Since splash pages and Flash intros may have very little (or no) HTML text, they are not helpful for search engines and could potentially inhibit indexing. If your main page has little or no text, there's very little content that the crawler will index... which means your site won't rank high when people do searches.

There are also search engines that only index your main page, so if it happens to be a splash page with very little text, your site has little-to-no chance of popping up in any search results. META tags can help for search engines that recognize them, but without rich content, your odds of getting listed at all, much less achieving top rankings, are tremendously reduced.

Analysis:

Web site uses JavaScript, image maps, Flash and other multimedia techniques

Recommendations:

Provide text-only alternatives for your content that can't be read by search engines (such as JavaScript, image maps, Flash and other multimedia). Include text for image ALT tags.

Other recommendations:

Any folder should not have more than 30 files in it
All images should be in a folder called images
Page should be named after the top keyword, which is being targeted for that page.
Targeted keyword should occur 3-4 times in the body, in alt, one image to be renamed after that keyword, with same keyword in alt tag
Keeping the header clean so that keywords can be found as early as possible in the body
Use of unique title tag (8-10 words), Meta description (less than 200 characters), Meta keywords (make sure you do include spaces between each keyword) for each page.
The only META tags that you MUST have are the "description" and "keyword" tags
Use of sitemap is important, and should be linked from each page of the site
Use of robots.txt file

Remember that each search engine has a different ranking algorithm. This means that one may consider a particular factor to be important whereas another search engine may consider the same factor of no importance of whatsoever. Thereby we have listed more general analysis and recommendations above, that work on wide variety of search engines. We cannot provide search engine specific information for your site at the proposal state. Though as a sample we provide you one Google search engine specific factor for your site:

SEO Marketing Strategies | Essential SEO Strategies

2011-05-27T05:22:00.000-07:00

The following Points are very important in the SEO

Keyword research

Competitor research

Content analysis

Language Skills...

Then

Link Strategies

Affiliate Management

Adwords Management

Website Optimization

Data collection

Submissions

SEO Copywriting

Advanced link building

Desired Profile Link Strategies

Affiliate Management

Adwords Management.

Optimize various web site components including

Title tags

Meta-descriptions

Keyword density

Internal linking

Site map, etc.

Drive traffic by achieving top rankings in organic search results and creating and managing PPC campaigns

Management of SEO budget to deliver substantial growth

Creation of reports for web site traffic and SEM/SEO efforts

Research and understand the latest search engine algorithms, rules, techniques and trends.

Monitor website performance and reports

Support external partners and affiliates with technical integration

SERP- (Search engine result page)

Web Page Optimization

Selecting the right keyword phrases for each page of your web site is the first step towards ranking high in the Search Engines. However, it is only the first step.

In addition to selecting targeted keyword phrases, you must also strategically optimize your page including:

META description tag

META keyword tag

Title

Image ALT tags

Heading tags

Image names

Hyperlinks

Body text

<META>

The META description tag will contain a description of your site. This description will be visible in some of the Search Engines when your site is returned in a search.

Your description should include your site's most important keyword phrases.

Example:

The META Keywords tag will contain a list of your keyword phrases separated with a comma. Your primary keyword phrase should be first, followed by one or two secondary keyword phrases.

Example:

<IMG ALT>

An image Alt tag follows your graphic address or URL in your HTML code. These words will be displayed in place of your graphics through an older browser or when your visitors have their graphics turned off

To fully optimize your graphics, insert your keyword phrases within the Alt tags of your graphics. At a bare minimum, make sure you use enough images to display all of your keyword phrases. Remember...your primary keyword phrase should always come first.

Example Images (Notice the images are named using the three primary keyword phrases):

seo_Tips_Master.jpg

seo_tips_and_tricks.jpg

seo_strategies.jpg

Example:

<TITLE> Tag

Just as you must place your keyword phrases within your META description and keyword tags, you must also use your primary keyword phrase as your web page title. Nothing more should appear between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> tags except your primary keyword phrase.

<H?> Tag

Heading tags are used to separate topics and range from <H1> being very large and bold to <H6> which is very small and bold. Some Search Engines place relevance on text displayed within the heading tags. Top priority is placed on the highest listed heading tag.

Your keyword phrases should each be used as a heading for sections within your web page (placed in the same order as your keyword phrases within your META keywords tag) and placed within an appropriate heading tag. These headings should be followed by some descriptive text.

Your headings should look something like this:

<H1> SEO Tips Master </H1>

Your descriptive content containing your keyword phrase.

<H2> Best SEO Strategy </H2>

Your descriptive content containing your keyword phrase.

<H3> SEO Marketing Strategies </H3&gt

Your descriptive content containing your keyword phrase.

<A HREF> Tag

When creating links on your web page, your links should be displayed together with a small image in front of each link. This image might be a graphic bullet, arrow, or whatever you'd like. These images will not only enhance your web page, but they will also enable you to place your keyword phrases within the Alt tags.

When you begin creating your links, make sure the page name, image name and page description text all contain your keyword phrases.

Your HTML code might look something like this:

<a rel="nofollow" href=seotipsmaster.htm>SEO Tips Master</a>

<BODY>Text</BODY>

Optimizing your text is another important step towards ranking higher in the Search Engines. Your web page should contain plenty of text and should contain each of your keywords and keyword phrases used in different variations. If all of your keyword phrases you've listed within your META tags aren't found within your text, the Search Engines will simply ignore them.

Search Engine Submissions

Once you've optimized your web pages and uploaded them to your server, your next step will be to submit your main pages to the Search Engines. However, don't submit your pages to Google. Your pages will rank much higher if you allow this Search Engine to find your pages on its own.

You may want to consider creating a site map for your site and submit this page to Google instead. A site map is a page that outlines how your pages are set up and linked together. If you design a site map with links to all of your pages, the Search Engine robots can easily spider and index them.

Taking the time to optimize each of your web pages is the most important step you can take towards ranking high in the Search Engines and driving your more traffic to your web site.

Babu Natesan is the author of this blog, SEO Tips Master. http://www.seotipsmaster.blogspot.com And Computer Tips - http://www.babunatesantips.blog.com

Essential SEO Tools | Best SEO Tools

2011-05-26T05:36:00.000-07:00

Basic on-page analysis

Popuri by Xavier Larrea - Popuri.us allows you to quickly check your link popularity across social bookmarking sites, Google Page Rank and much more.

http://www.popuri.us/

SEO Browser by Anduro Marketing and McAnerin International Inc - SEO-Browser.com is a free tool which lets you see your website like a search engine sees it. Useful to find image with no alt text, to ensure drop downs are crawlable and much more.

http://www.seo-browser.com/

Keyword Rank Tracker

goRank - Free Professional SEO Tools - Keyword Rank Tracker, Keyword Density Analyzer, Link Popularity Checker, and more

http://www.gorank.com/analyze.php

Basic SEO health check and analysis

Website Grader by Hubspot - Website.Grader.com is a free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness potential of a website. It provides a score that incorporates elements such as website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

http://website.grader.com/

Duplicate Content

Copyscape is a free plagiarism checker. The software lets you detect duplicate content and check if your articles are original.

www.copyscape.com/

Website Analysis Tool

Builtwith by Gary Brewer - BuiltWith.com is a website analysis tool, providing technical analysis and SEO optimization information to assist in your website's SEO effectiveness.

http://builtwith.com/

Basic back link analysis

Yahoo Site Explorer is a fantastic tool for basic back link information, to view the most popular pages from any site and to dive into a comprehensive site map.

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

TG Google Browser

Google Browser - TG Google Browser is a free Java application which you can use to explore the connections between related websites.

http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

The SEMToolBar is an attractive, easy-to-use toolbar that allows users access to statistics relating to online marketing campaigns. It provides users with powerful tools and information necessary for understanding and monitoring how sites of interest are seen by search engines and thus presented to search engine users. We have two versions available; one for Internet Explorer and one for Firefox.

http://www.seotoolset.com/tools/free_tools.html

Social Bookmark

The Bookmarketer is a free set-it-and-forget-it traffic generator for your website. But this simple script is not one of those automated, machine-driven schemes that have thankfully been discredited. If your website has quality content, this simple code will prompt your visitors to "social bookmark" the page

http://www.seo-writer.com/tools/bookmarker.php

Multiple Page Rank Checker

Multiple Page Rank Checker is a completely free tool to check Google PR, page rank of your web sites easily.

http://multipagerank.com/

Firefox with the Web Developer Extension

Firefox in itself is the most flexible browser out there. But when you pair it with the Web Developer extension Firefox becomes a useful SEO tool. With it you can easily remove the cascading styles (inline, external or both), you can take a fast glance at all the external links in a page, or you can remove all the javascript components at once just to name a few of its features. The nicest part of the extension is that you can add your own SEO tools to the menu (online or desktop).

http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer

Google Analytics / Google Webmaster Console by Google.com

http://www.google.com/analytics/

XENU's Link Sleuth

XENU is one of those tools that you download for free and keep a copy just in case the owner decides to start charging for it. This tool is basically a spider. And the benefits of having a spider in your SEO toolbox is priceless. Using this tool you can determine if a site has endless loops, broken links, redirect detections and much more. As its name indicates, Xenu is like having a detective look at your site - a free detective that is.

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

FREE CLASSIFIEDS ADS NO REGISTRATION (No Signup Required)

2011-05-25T03:41:00.000-07:00

www.deepindus.com	www.diversifiedtopics.com
www.infoaround.co.cc	www.classifiedpro.co.cc
www.globalhiring.co.cc	www.globalleads.co.cc
www.classifiedpostings.co.cc	www.promote123.co.cc
www.classifieddeals.co.cc	www.diggclassifieds.com
www.koppafreeclassifiedads.com	www.adshouse.info
www.metro-ads.co.in	www.hotfreelist.com
www.adireo.com	www.in.razzza.com
www.classifieds.tamilnaduclassic.com	www.classifieds.yavum.com
www.freeclassifiedssites.com	www.mirzaslist.com
www.wantedwants.com	www.parttimejobsinnet.com
www.tauque.com	www.tohle.com
www.perfectdone.com	www.freehawaiiclassifieds.com
www.web-free-ads.com	www.dewalist.com.au
www.apnaarea.com	www.yardit.com
www.freead1.net	www.postings.in
www.sunclassifiedads.com	www.superindian.net
www.chennaibeats.in	www.andhrapradesh.com
www.affari.to	www.ahmedabadclassifieds.in
www.cityad.ws	www.adpress.in
www.in.adroo.com	www.adsriver.com
www.ahaindia.com	www.axads.com
www.biggestclassifieds.com	www.bharatpatal.org
www.classifiedads.com	www.chalali.in
www.chennaiking.com	www.gccclassifieds.com
www.omanclassified.co	www.postadverts.com
www.usaclassifiedz.com	www.europe.sebule.com
www.adomnia.com	www.andhrapradesh.com
www.chennaibeats.in	www.nwlondonads.com
www.classifieds777.com	www.classified-alabama.com
www.56east.com	www.classifieds-ohio.com
www.postlocal.co.uk	www.hotlisttoday.com
www.hotlistusa.net	www.listadstoday.com
www.listadsurl.com	www.toplistednow.com
www.toplistedonline.com	www.usaclassifiednow.com
www.usalistedtoday.com	www.usalistonline.com
www.usclassifiedstoday.com	www.usclassifiedsurl.com
www.1click-ads.com	www.indyaz.com
www.usalistednow.com	www.yallacoupon.com
www.noregisterads.co.cc	www.classi-fieds.com
www.classifieds4free.biz	www.topusaclassifieds.com
www.bostonianbuzz.com	www.toplistednow.com
www.dozaq.com	www.bahrainsclassified.com
www.qatarsclassified.com	www.gccclassifieds.com
www.libyaclassified.com	www.chinaclassifiedz.com
www.onlineclassifiedz.com	www.onlinewebclassifieds.com
www.marshallislandsclassifieds.com	www.classifiedillinoisads.com
www.cathaylist.com	www.usaclassifiednow.com
www.arkansas-classifieds.com	www.jeanza.com
www.marshallislandsclassifieds.com	www.adsx5.com
www.usalisturl.com	www.usclassifiedsnow.com
www.listingfrog.com	www.classifieds.blackworld.com
www.bostonianbuzz.com	www.hotseeks.com
www.meetpark.com	www.a1net.net
www.chennaiclassic.com	www.mirzaslist.com
www.beatyourprice.com	www.usalistednow.com
www.usalistedonline.com	www.mcslist.com
www..anunico.com	www.adsfarm.co.uk
www.libyaclassified.com	www.saudiarabclassifieds.com
www.grizzlylist.com	www.chinaclassifiedz.com
www.listica.com	www.dozaq.com
www.classifiedwyoming.com	www.classifiedoregon.com
www.usahotads.com	www.town-ads.com
www.classifiedsvalley.com	www.raycentral.net
www.nwlondonads.com	www.usalistedurl.com
www.usalistnow.com	www.easyadslist.com
www.easyadslistnow.com	www.nevadaslist.com
www.freeclassifieds2.com	www.india.classifiedindia.co.in
www.adomnia.com	www.zp1.com
www.slingding.com	www.seenotice.com
www.porkypost.com	www.ottawacity.ca
www.omegaclassifieds.com	www.mumbaisuburbs.com
www.multidimensions.net	www.muslim-ads.co.uk
www.local-area-classifieds-jobs.com	www.kingstons.com
www.kbclassifieds.com	www.justaroundtown.com
www.italyclassifieds.net	www.freeadnow.com
www.ffaclassifieds.com	www.en.karuzela.net
www.eksakto.com	www.classifiedsintaiwan.com
www.classifiedscanadian.com	www.classifiednewmexico.com
www.hotlistusanow.com	www.listadsnow.com
www.adzonenow.com	www.adzoneonline.com
www.adzonetoday.com	www.freeclassifiedtoday.com
www.freeglobalad.com	www.freelistonline.com
www.alisttoday.com	www.easyadlistnow.com
www.easylistnow.com	www.easylisturl.com
www.freeclassifiednow.com	www.freelisttoday.com
www.freeusalisted.com	www.globaladnow.com
www.usaclassifiedsnow.com	www.usalisted.net
www.globaladtoday.com	www.hotlistnow.com

Pay Per Click (PPC)

2011-05-25T03:10:00.000-07:00

What is PPC ?

PPC stands for "pay per click". Pay per Click is an advertising model where businesses pay an agreed upon amount, each time their advertisement is "clicked", not each time their ad is displayed.

Advertisers typically setup ppc on a PPC network and define how much they are willing to spend for each click-through that they receive.

Advertisers select keywords, keyword phrases, keyword groups, or categories in which they want their advertisements to appear.

Advertisers willing to spend the most money for a relevant advertisement will generally be listed first. *Google's PPC ranking system assesses CPC (cost per click), ad relevance, click through rate, and daily budget, so the order on which the ads appear is based on a number of factors.

Benefits to PPC

When you setup a PPC campaign you can controlthe traffic. While a new website takes time to rank well in search engines, with PPC you can turn the traffic on and off. With PPC you can create almost instant traffic.

Unlike organic search listings you control the information (ie. description) and where the visitor is directed on your website.

Another benefit to PPC listings is the opportunities for international exposure. Organic search listings vary in different geographical regions. With PPC you control where you are seen.

The primary factors in determining what I recommended to them were:

They are currently only using Google AdWords.
They are not using any automatic bid management software
The person responsible for managing the PPC program has limited time to dedicate to daily management
The level of advertising spend is relatively low (in the single-digit $$thousands)
The program is targeted at B2B lead generation, requiring an extra level of ROI

PPC Management Checklist

Task	Frequency	Notes
Check Spend	Daily	Things to look for – 1) Did the previous day run into any budget limits on a Campaign level? 2) Is monthly spend on track?
Adjust Bids Criteria: Cost Per Conversion Conversion Rate Average Position Bounce Rate	Daily, Or 2-3 times/week	Ideally you would check on the “top” keywords daily to ensure that bid levels are set appropriately. The top keywords are those that generate roughly 50% of your spend (this may vary, but you are looking to actively manage the keywords that eat up the most budget). 2 to 3 times per week you would dig deeper into keywords that are not on your daily watch list. The key factor is whether or not individual keywords are producing the desired ROI. This would be measured by Cost Per Conversion (or by Closed Sales). When conversion data is not enough, look at the Avg. Position for keywords and attempt to bid at levels that generate average positions between 3 and 6. In addition, look at Web analytics and find keywords that have an unusually high Bounce Rate – either pause these keywords or lower bids if you feel that there is still opportunity for these keywords.
Review & Pause Ads	2-3 times/week	Make sure to have at least 2 ad copy version running in each Ad Group at all times. Look at Ad Versions to determine which ads are generating: 1) The best Conversion Rates and Cost Per Conversion. 2) The highest Click Through Rate (CTR). Make decisions about which ads to pause based first on conversion performance, and then on CTR. Pause under-performing ads frequently, but not too soon. Give an ad a chance to pick up a good sample size of Impressions. The ideal sample size of Impressions will vary on the search volume for the Ad Group as a whole (e.g. in some cases a good sample size will be 2,000 to 3,000 impressions, and in others it will be 300 to 400 – or less).
Create New Ads	Weekly	Make sure to have at least 2 ad copy version running in each Ad Group at all times. Test out new ad concepts to see if you can improve conversion performance and CTR. Try different headlines, body text, word order, punctuation, etc. Use this opportunity to test offers as well. Sometimes small changes can have a surprising impact. Make sure to include some mention of your primary keywords for that Ad Group in the Ad Copy – this affects Ad Quality Scores.
Look For Negative Keywords	Weekly	You can look for negative keyword opportunities either on the Campaign or Ad Group level. There are a few techniques to consider. 1) The best place to start is by using the “See search terms” button in the new AdWords interface. You can either select the Keywords tab on the Campaign or Ad Group level and then click on “See search terms”. Choose “All”, and then look at which actual search phrases are generating traffic to your site. I recommend writing down the basic words (usually 1 word) in a Notepad or Word document file and then copying and pasting the words at the Campaign level. 2) Use Google’s Keyword Tool in the Tools section of AdWords. Research words/phrases that you are targeting in PPC, and look at Google’s suggestions – you are sure to find words that are not a match for your business. Paste words into the Negative Keyword section of the appropriate Campaign in AdWords. 3) Conduct searches on Google.com for your keywords. By looking through the results you may find search results that give you ideas for Negative Keywords.
Pause Under-Performing Keywords	Weekly	See the “Adjust Bids” task in this document and follow the same logic to make decisions about which words to pause. In addition to the criteria listed in “Adjust Bids”, look for keywords that have a high number of impressions but a low number of clicks (low relative to other keywords you are bidding on). The idea is to pause keywords that are not generating any results for you, but are negatively impacting Google’s assessment of the quality of your account because people are not clicking on your ads.
Run Reports
Impression Share	Weekly	In the Reports section of Google AdWords, run a “Campaign Performance” report for the prior week (or for the desired time period). In Section 3 of the report, click on Add or Remove Columns. Check the boxes for Impression Share (IS), Lost IS (Rank), and Lost IS (Budget). When the report is ready, look to see if you are losing impressions due to Budget. Looking at lost impression share for Rank may not be useful if you are deliberately keeping bids low to lower your position on a page (due to ROI performance). So, by looking at lost impression share due to Budget, you can see if you are running out of money too quickly to be visible for a sustained period.
Keywords	Monthly	Running a monthly report for Keyword/Placement Performance will allow you to generate data that you can put into an Excel spreadsheet and sort through. This is a nice way to see if you have missed anything during your normal management activities.
Ads	Monthly	The same logic holds here as in running the Keyword/Placement report – catch anything you missed.
Update Excel Report	Monthly	Keep track of overall Account and Campaign performance on a monthly basis so that you can generate graphs and look at performance trends.
Monitor Conversion Rates	Daily	While you will be looking at individual Keywords and Ads for conversion performance during the other activities listed in this document, make sure to keep a high-level view of conversion performance as often as you can. In this way you will be able to see if there is an overall conversion issue with your program, and it will be likely that you will be forced to look at Landing Pages to identify opportunities for improvement.
Drill Down to Quality of Leads	Monthly	Use any data you have in your CRM system to match up which keywords are generating the best quality leads, and leading to sales. You will begin to see which keywords you can bid more for based on real business results. You may find that you can afford a higher Cost Per Conversion for some words than for others.
Test Landing Pages	Weekly, or Bi-Weekly	Landing Pages are often the most important factor in improving conversion performance. Think of this as the one area where you have the most leverage to improve overall performance. Test offers, copy, headlines, graphics, layout, position/location of contact forms, length of contact forms, and navigation. (read more about testing landing pages)

What can PPC do for you?

Here is a summary of what PPC offers you and your business:

Be seen - your brand and advertising copy can be seen for any audience you choose to target.
Deliver almost instant traffic to your website.
Get qualified leads – your ads only appear in front of searchers using relevant keywords that you have chosen.
Make immediate sales.
A much higher (and more immediate) Return On Investment (ROI) than traditional advertising methods.
Limit your daily budget to as little as you want.
Add, change and delete the keywords you bid on and the ad copy you display.
Test the profitability of different keywords and ad copy.
Target different languages, regions and cities in most countries.

A Checklist for PPC success

To create your Google AdWords account, visit the AdWords homepage and follow the sign-up wizard which will walk you through the process.

Once your account has been activated, organization is the key to managing your PPC. Here are my top tips for setting up your AdWords campaign, use them as checklist for your own PPC success:

Set your budget’s daily limit. This is the most you can spend in any one day. Start with a small amount and then you can bid with confidence until you’ve learned how to make a profit.
Use Wordtracker to carefully choose the keywords you bid on. Your keywords are the heart of your campaign and Wordtracker shows you real words searched with by real people.
Segment your keywords into different Ad Groups so that they can each have different bids, ad copy and landing pages.
Write different adverts and test them against each other. And never stop testing – always trying to beat your best performing ads.
What have you got that your competitors have not? What’s your Unique Selling Point (USP)? Use your USP in your ad copy to make your ad more appealing and increase your clicks. The higher your click rate, the higher up Google’s pages your ad will appear.
Learn about Google’s different match bids and use exact match and broad match. With exact match you bid on specific keywords only. With broad match you bid on all keywords containing the word you are bidding on.
Introduce negative keywords into your campaign. Your ad will not show for any searches containing the negative keywords you bid on.
Make sure your ad copy and landing pages all use the keywords they serve. Do this and your ads can move higher up Google’s results pages without the need to increase bids – that means less cost and more profit.
Geo-target your ads. Make sure your ads only appear for searchers in regions that you can sell to.
Limit your ads to display only during times of the day relevant to your company and products.

Measure your results using Google Analytics or Yahoo’s Index Tools and learn what works and what doesn’t, always chasing a higher return for your investment

Creating an SEO Strategy, Part 1: What is Search Engine Optimization?

2011-05-24T05:02:00.000-07:00

Search engine optimization goes beyond traditional marketing and advertising by providing techniques to help a site increase its organic traffic (visitors from search engines) by increasing relevance and assisting the indexing activities of search engines. Search engines use special software to index, or record, the content of your site. Much like library patrons who find books based on title, author, or subject, the search engines find websites based on the unique words (keywords) we type in. Relevance is a website's connection or affinity with the keywords typed into a search engine. Search engines calculate the relevance using a number of criteria, including how often those keywords are used, where they are used, and the site's relationship to other websites with similar keywords. From this we can begin formulating the basis of our SEO strategy. These three foundational elements are: content, coding, and community.

Content

People are searching for something- an answer, a recipe, a service, a product. Your content must use or pertain to the keywords people are searching for. Good content is the most important thing.

Coding

Your content is supported by a scaffolding called code- the html used to structure and present your copy to end users. That scaffolding can be optimized to help search engines better index your website.

Community

Your site isn't an island but is part of a larger community of websites that are related by mission, audience, and/or content. Being an active part of this community helps increase your relevance. In order to know who to appeal to and how to appeal to them it's best to start by being very clear with yourself and your website by asking:

What do we do?
Who do we do it for?
How do those people find us? What words might they use?

From this exercise you should begin formulating a list of your keywords- those unique words that describe what you do and how your audience will find you. In upcoming post we'll look at each of the three foundational items in more detail and begin drafting our strategy.

other parts soon....!

Search Engine Websites

2011-05-20T05:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.google.com/	http://www.yahoo.com/
http://www.altavista.com/	http://www.search.com/
http://www.ask.com/	http://www.alltheweb.com/
http://go.com/	http://www.surfwax.com/
http://www.msn.com	http://www.kanoodle.com/
http://www.ixquick.com/	http://www.gigablast.com/
http://www.exalead.com/search	http://www.ditto.com/
http://www.beaucoup.com/	http://www.alexa.com/
http://www.whatuseek.com/	http://www.scrubtheweb.com/
http://www.navisso.com/	http://www.l3xicon.com/
http://www.killerinfo.com/	http://www.ilor.com/
http://www.iboogie.com/	http://www.entireweb.com/
http://www.amfibi.com/	http://www.accoona.com/
http://www.wotbox.com/	http://www.websquash.com/
http://www.web-search.com/	http://www.searchhippo.com/
http://www.objectssearch.com/	http://www.homerweb.com/
http://www.findit-quick.com/	http://www.clickey.com/
http://www.anoox.com/	http://searchsight.com/
http://search.ezilon.com/	http://www.tygo.com/
http://www.stopdog.com/	http://www.searchit.com/
http://www.search123.com/	http://www.netsearch.org/
http://www.moodule.com/	http://www.mixcat.com/
http://www.kazazz.com/	http://www.jdgo.com/
http://www.fybersearch.com/	http://www.exactseek.com/
http://www.dipbox.com/	http://www.cuil.com/
http://www.claymont.com/home/	http://www.cipinet.com/
http://www.chelepa.com/	http://www.allsearchengines.com/
http://www.admcity.com/index.shtml	http://searchramp.com/
http://www.zerx.com/	http://www.the-search-site.com/
http://www.shoula.com/	http://www.reallybigsearch.com/
http://www.hotlaunch.com/	http://www.ghetosearch.com/
http://www.dinosearch.com/index.htm	http://www.coolfishy.com/
http://www.azoos.com/	http://www.0pn.com/
http://www.uwad.com/	http://www.search-blue.com/
http://www.search4more.com/	http://www.igwanna.com/
http://www.ctfast.com/	http://www.coyotesearch.com/
http://iconnic.com/	http://www.intelliverb.com/
http://www.boitho.com/

Banner Ads Sites

2011-05-20T05:39:00.000-07:00

Banner Ads Sites.

http://www.showyoursite.com/	https://www.cocoavillagepublishing.com/marketing/advertising/websites/banners
http://www.wilsonweb.com/articles/bannerad.htm	https://www.cocoavillagepublishing.com/marketing/advertising/websites/banners/hazard.com/
https://www.cocoavillagepublishing.com/marketing/advertising/websites/banners/cocoavillage.com/	http://www.inetgiant.com/advertise
http://www.bannersmania.com/	http://www.projectwonderful.com
http://www.buysellads.com	http://www.trafficvance.com/
http://www.rightmedia.com/	http://www.burstmedia.co.uk/
http://www.zedoadnetwork.com/	http://cpmstar.com/
http://www.valueclickmedia.com/	http://yourwebapps.com/
http://www.adknowledge.com/usa/	http://www.adbrite.com/
http://www.industrybrains.com/	http://corporate.adonnetwork.com/
http://www.adready.com/	http://www.advertising.com/
http://advertising.aol.com/advertiser-solutions/sponsored-listings	http://www.azoogleads.com/corp/index.php
http://www.bidplacesb.com/	http://www.bidvertiser.com/
http://buysellads.com/	http://chitika.com/publishers.php
http://www.clicksor.com/	http://www.epilot.com/
http://www.findology.com/	http://www.instantbuzz.com/
http://www.kontera.com/	https://www.mediatraffic.com/
http://www.marchex.com/	http://www.mirago.com/
http://www.miva.com/	http://www.neverblue.com/
http://www.openx.org/	http://www.oxado.com/
http://www.pulse360.com/	http://7search.com/
http://publisher.shopzilla.com/	http://www.trafficvance.com/
http://www.textads.biz/	http://www.text-link-ads.com/
http://www.valueclick.com/	http://www.vibrantmedia.com/
http://www.widgetbucks.com/home.page	http://publisher.yahoo.com/
http://www.click4click.com/	http://www.thebannerexchange.net/
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/cpm-calculator/	http://www.garyspctalk.com/Advertisement/BannerAds/tabid/90/Default.aspx
http://www.groovyscripts.net	http://www.gunownersca.com/
http://www.valueclick.com/	http://www.google.com/doubleclick/
http://www.valueclickmedia.com/	http://www.burstmedia.com/
http://www.tribalfusion.com/