For boosting your site’s rankings on search engines, it is important to have a ba‐sic understanding of how search engines work.

Search engines do not perform live or real‐time searches of the web. Instead, they search through their own database which contains ‘snapshots’ of millions, even billions of web pages. An engine attempts to copy and arrange all the in‐formation on the web into its database, and when you enter a search query, it searches through the database and returns results based on an algorithm, with each result pointing to the URL of the webpage.

This search process occurs in three stages: crawling, indexing and retrieving.

1) Crawling: The engine’s robotic crawlers, also known as spiders, go over each available web page and make a partial or full copy (also known as caching) of it. Spiders travel from page to page via the links on a page.

2) Indexing: The engine removes or devalues duplicate pages, removes ‘spam’ pages, and then catalogues and indexes each page according to the content of the page, which includes both text and markup (code).

3) Retrieving: Once a page is indexed, it is available for retrieval in search re‐sults. A retrieval algorithm determines the results and their order; each en‐gine has its own algorithm, which is why results vary from engine to engine.

Performing a search

Let us use Google to perform a quick search for “used books”. In 0.2 seconds, the first SERP is generated, featuring the top ten of about 200 million results related to the query. Google now also features ‘web options’, enabling you to narrow your results down in a number of ways. Each result also has a link to its cached copy on Google, and a link to a list of similar results.

Before these results are generated, Google’s spiders have already accessed and cached all these pages into its database and organized them. Each page is parsed and stored in Google’s database as a collection of words, which are used to de‐termine what the page is about. Each page also has its own information, such as its age, type (news, forums, shopping etc), popularity and authority.

When you search for “used books”, Google searches through its own database to look for:

pages that contain the exact phrase “used books”,

• pages where the words “used” and “books” appear close together, 7
• pages that contain both words, though not necessarily close together,
• pages that contain other variations of both words, such as “use” and “book”
• pages that are linked by other pages with “used books” in the link text, and
• pages that are linked by other pages with “used’ and “books” in the link text.

One or more of these criteria are satisfied by over 200 million web pages in Google’s massive database.

Ranking Factors

The order in which these millions of results are returned depends on their rela‐tive relevance to your query. In short, Google aims to return the most relevant results first, and the least relevant last. The calculation of this relevance is of ut‐most importance to web site developers and optimizers.

In order to determine a page’s rank for a specific query, two main criteria are used by all major search engines:
1. Keyword relevance: how central is the search term to the theme or meaning of the content on the page?
2. Page trust: how popular and trusted is the page on which the term appears?

These criteria are further broken down into over 200 individual factors, and search engines conceal their exact algorithms from users and webmasters in or‐der to avoid manipulation and spamming.

Keyword Relevance

Keyword relevance depends heavily on on‐page factors. In addition to the raw text or body of the page, search engines use a number of criteria to understand what the page is about:

• the title of the page: does the keyword appear in the title of the page?
• the prominence and placement of keywords on the page: is the keyword em‐phasized on the page – by being used in headings, bold text, italicized text, link text, bulleted lists or larger text?
• the meta description of the page: does the ‘description’ meta tag in the page’s markup contain the keywords?
• keyword density: does the keyword appear a number of times?
• anchor text (link text): do inbound links to the page contain the keyword?

A page where “used books” appears once or twice in the body of the page will be considered less relevant than a page where it appears in content headings, which will be less relevant than a page titled “used books” which also uses it in the meta description and main body of the page.
 

Page Trust

If rankings depended only, or even heavily, on on‐page factors, it would be quite easy to manipulate search engines. Since search engines don’t have a human understanding of meaning, it would be easy to create spam pages where key‐words appear in the right places (title, headings, bold text etc). Just a few years ago, it was not uncommon for a top result in Google to be an irrelevant page, where keywords were either hidden or used without relevant meaning.

In order to lower the ranking of such low‐quality results, off‐page factors have gained a great deal of importance in search rankings. In short, search engines now put a lot of weight on what other pages or websites think of a page.

Since spiders (and humans) navigate the web through links, search engines use linking as a way to determine the reliability of the linked page. By linking to an‐other page, a web page leads humans and spiders to it, so a backlink (inbound link to a page) may be considered a vote of confidence for the page, and the words which appear in the link text are used in determining what the linked page is about.

A page’s reliability or trust depends on a number of factors:

The authority of the domain: how reliable and trusted is the main domain? A page on Wikipedia, for example, is much more reliable than a page on a new or low‐traffic website. Domain authority is determined by a number of fac‐tors, including age, traffic and link popularity.

Number of backlinks: how many pages are linking to this page, and from how many different sources (domains)?

The authority of the linking page: how important is the page from which it is linked? A link from a high authority website (such as .edu or .gov sites) is more valuable than a link from an unreliable source such as a blog.

Google has its own method, known as PageRank™, of evaluating the backlinks to a page. Each indexed page is assigned a weighted number between 1 and 10 which signifies its link popularity. You can check the PageRank of a page here or by installing the Google toolbar. Note that PageRank is updated every few months and can sometimes vary unpredictably. So should not be relied upon.

Here are some SEO Myths to wet your appetite:

• Higher bid on PPC ensures a higher Ad placement in the search engine results.
• Once you achieve top/high rank for your keyword you can stop optimising your website.
• SEO Companies that offer guaranteed top placement for your keywords eliminate the risk.
• Fantastic Short term results are a great result in SEO
• Search engine Optimisation mainly consists of endless Search Engine submissions.
• Search engine optimisation basically is a set of clever techniques designed to con the search engine.
• By following standard SEO techniques you will guarantee high rankings.
• If you Hire an SEO company it is expensive and they will blind you with meaningless terms.
• Basically all you need do is repeat your keyword loads of times on every page.
• Most Websites are optimised as they are being built so if you get a new website this will all be done for you.
• There is only one search engine worth optimising for and thats google everybody know that right?
• High PR is all that matters and getting a good PR automatically translates to high position.
• Brand new websites don’t stand a chance in the Search Engines.
• Link building is a completely automated process with little or no user interaction.
• High position for any keyword ensures high sales and conversions.
• PPC has a knock on effect on natural/organic ranking.
• High bid in PPC is directly proportional to high click through and conversions
• PPC is far to costly for small business owners to consider.
• All links in a successful link building campaign are permanent.
• PPC and keyword selection is all done by some clever bit of database.
• Getting more and more links will increase PR
• The number of links a site has is far more important than the quality of back links.
• Endless number of links can be aquired for free given enough time.

Matt Cutts the SPAM guru at google chats about some more complex myths that occur in SEO check out the google video here

The site has been cleverly designed and optimised to give it maximum exposure and generate massive numbers of visitors looking for anything from SAAB news to SAAB New Car information and buying guides.

The site will shortly have dedicated Car pages

This will provide information for anybody in the market for a new or used SAAB the best possible resources and show what options and features are available on the whole model line up.

Be it a New SAAB 9-5 Estate to a Used SAAB 9-3 Convertible the site has it all. Older model SAAB series are of course available and listed by UK website visitors whenever possible such as the SAAB 9000 or SAAB 900.

Check out all the latest SAAB News and reviews online now.

SAAB Garages

Similar techniques were used on the new SAAB site to that previously learned from our SEO of all about ford the online Ford Dealer resource website.

Long Tail Search engine optimisation is often the most effective method to generate massive numbers of visitors to a website.

So what is long tail SEO, basically its optimising for massive numbers of the less popular keywords, the volume in this market is often many times as many as the single hard to obtain keywords at the top of the pile.

Ok, it seems odd and possibly complicated… its not! Targeting much easier to obtain keywords on a mass scale means there is a good chance your going to catch a few right on the nose and get straight in at that number one or number two slot, giving you high returns.

Lets try a real world example:

Ok in this example lets use one of the hardest keywords of all ‘Insurance’ ok so this would require a massivley popular site that is near perfectly written and optimised to get the the top spot for this keyword. However… this is not necessarily the best way to get the most number of targeted visitors. Joe bolgs out there in cyberspace will usually type into google exactly what he is looking for, so if he wants ‘ Life insurance for pensioners ‘ thats exactly what he types in or ‘ Learner driver car insurance ‘ etc etc by targeting the one primary and common factor ‘insurance’ is not a bad thing you should allways target as many variations as possible of the main keyword with dedicated pages or script generated pages showing what you offer and featuring those terms heavily on the page.

I would create dedicated pages for those two terms and as many other terms I could possibly think of! Use the google keyword tool and overture keyword tool to generate lists of terms used and create content rich pages to match. Then hunt the web and find places to advertise your site not forgetting to obtain deep links where possible.

CALLING ALL UK BLOGGERS:

I will help promote your blog for FREE! and increase your adsense clicks and banner impressions in the process. Why I hear you ask? well its not an entirely selfless act, basically I am leaving my company and setting up on my own business so I need to SEO some blogs or websites to be able to show potential customers what I can do, kind of a test case… basically I will do SEO on your blog and get you to the top so that I can then show your site to customers in my region and say WOW look at what I did for them and for only x a month I can do the same for YOU.  So what are you wating for this is a limited time offer, the first five sites I get on board and then thats it no more freebies!

Firstly I think I should tell you a bit about me and how I got here, ok I started life as an accountant of all things then got involved with computers in my spare time building and fixing and pimping them up to the max, loved it. For the next 5 years or so became more and more involced with them in my spare time and my hobbie started to become more of job than my job because I had that much work on, I also found that more and more people simply wanted a PC just to go on the web to use google, I knew then that this web thingy was going to be everywere so I just had to learn how it worked.

I started to teach myself about websites and that was all very well and good and I could create basic sites nothing flash but never seemed to get many visitors so I started to learn about optimisation, the company I worked for had a site that didnt get much traffic so I offered to sort it out for them, they agreed and quickly my job role changed and the amount of business they got from the website quadrupled in a matter of a couple of months. Ever since then I havent looked back and have spent my time optimising and improving other peoples websites. Until a few months ago I never thought of having a site or sites of my own so I decided to create this one.

Yes ok it looks basic but im no web designer like i said, however it gets lots and lots of traffic despite being only a few months old…

It is surprisingly time consuming to get a site to the top of the search engines (but its well worth it!) there are various elements to SEO here are some of the main ones:

Keyword analysis
Competitor analysis
On-page optimisation
Deep site optimisation
Valuable link building
Solutions for non-search engine compatible sites
Catalogue sites or eshop optimisation
Blog optimisation and restructuring
Brand protective approach
Fast, manual search engine submission
Position reporting
On going link building and keyword targeting

Each section has sub sections really that require detailed explaing, but essentially thats it. Oh another thing, each search engine has to be optimised for in slightly different ways the big three are the only ones I bother with ie Google, Yahoo and MSN as you get most of traffic from them.

However it all depends on what you want to be top for and why you want to be there…. some keywords would basically require several SEO’s working constantly to get you to the top for because the payout is so high, like ‘Car insurance’ for example would be a big job to get to the top for, however if you wanted ‘Ford Car Insurance’ then that probably wouldn’t be a problem.

So if you want to get your blog to the Top Spot’s then contact me via the forum or leave a comment on this post and I’ll get back to you. The only requirement is that your site is not completely new you are a UK blogger (brand new sites have to play the waiting game to get to the top of google anyway) and that you are prepared to put a link to my site just to say thanks and I will give you my secrets and help promote your site for FREE

This is either one of two things, a very clever link bait, “hey they got me to link to it” or a genuine error. The site was pointed to a PR10 while he was creating the site, supposidly, yeh right genuine mistake my @ss! So its not an error in my opinion.

But it is a very clever trick, by getting themselves a Fake PR 10 people who are involved in Search engine Optimisation and with directories and forums will want to talk about it and comment but you cant talk about something without giving a link to show what your talking about, so they could walk away from this with a very genuine and decent PR, the only think I would do if I was in there position is not sell a hundred links on the bottom of the page, as this could be very tempting and lucrative. But this will draw the attention of Matt Cutts and his team and undoubtedly result in a PR penalty or ban, if they give a couple of links away to sites they genuinly like then fair play, but using it for anything other than creating a good worthwile website would be a mistake by the designers if you ask me.

Good luck to them they are playing a dangerous game with big fat google dice, good luck to them I say, why shouldnt they get the PR they came up with a plan and it seems to have paid off.

Comments would be appreciated what do you think, are the guys at you tube forums very clever or very silly.