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.

For millions of reasons, but they can all be classi‐fied into three main types:

1) Informational search: people looking for information online, such as “who directed Gone with the Wind?”, “currency of Angola” etc.

2) Navigational search: people searching for a specific online location, such as the website of British Airways or the online customer service section of HP computers.

3) Transactional search: people looking for specific items online, often but not always in order to buy, such as a color printer or picture frame.
There are hundreds of search engines online, but only a few of them are used by the majority of searchers. In order of popularity, they are Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask. In August 2009, 13 billion searches were performed on Google in the US alone, with 2.8 billion on Yahoo and 1.3 billion on Microsoft’s search sites1. For the purposes of this eBook and for SEO in general, only the top search engines are discussed, with a particular focus on Google.
Search drives traffic
Search is one of the most important sources of traffic for websites, and for new and small websites (which do not enjoy the brand awareness, loyalty or monop‐oly of sites like Amazon, IMDB or Wikipedia) it often accounts for a majority of the traffic.

And traffic is the currency of the internet.

If you have a website – whether you are selling a product, advertising a service or trying to create awareness of an issue – your first goal is undoubtedly to at‐tract visitors; ideally, visitors who are interested in the product, service or infor‐mation on your website.

Scenario: Selling a CD

For the purpose of understanding how search works and why it is relevant to every website owner, imagine that you are selling a CD of relaxation techniques online. Your goal is to bring visitors to your website, ideally those who are inter‐ested in knowing more about or purchasing a relaxation CD.

Your ideal visitor will come to Google or Yahoo and search for “buy relaxation CD” or “relaxation music”. There will be others who will be looking for “relaxa‐tion techniques” or “relaxation tips” as well. The search terms they enter are known as keywords or key phrases.

Every search has an intent or purpose, and a user’s keywords are the first and greatest indicator of his or her intent.

Paid and organic search results

When a user searches for any terms on the major search engines, he sees two kinds of results on the search engine results page (SERP): paid results and organic results. Paid results are also known as ‘sponsored links’ or ‘sponsored results’. This is a form of search advertising based on keywords.

Paid results are the advertisements that search engines display based on the keywords entered by the user. They are clearly marked as sponsored, and every time a user clicks on an advertisement, the search engine makes a little bit of money. The amount depends on the popularity of and competition for that search term. For instance, “color printer” is a much more competitive (and prof‐itable) term than, say, “capital of Russia”; so there will be more sponsored links for the former, and advertisers will pay more for every click. This is also known as Pay‐per‐click or PPC advertising.

Organic search results are the “natural” results, which take up the majority of the search engine result page, and which the user usually assumes are ranked in order of importance or relevance based on the query.

Although this eBook is not about paid search advertising, it is important to know the two biggest ways in which paid search advertising is not as effective as hav‐ing a high natural rank for your keywords:

1) It is costly; you pay for user clicks and have no guarantee of making a sale.

2) Numerous studies indicate that 75‐80% of searchers click on organic results instead of paid links.

Pay per click advertising can work very well, but it is best used as part of an overall marketing strategy which includes search engine optimization for boost‐ing natural rankings.
Various search engine‐related techniques such as SEO and paid advertising to increase a website’s exposure are collectively known as search engine marketing (SEM).

Searching for a relaxation CD

Now imagine your ideal user looking for a relaxation CD online. He opens his browser, navigates to Google and searches for “relaxation CD”. Google will re‐turn nearly 7 million natural search results, and a number of sponsored links on the right based on the search term and other related queries like ‘meditation’ and ‘relaxation music’.

Out of these 7 million search results, the user is, statistically speaking, most likely to click on the top few organic results on the first SERP. The first SERP contains 10 results, and with each decreasing rank his likelihood of clicking on the page decreases. He is also much less likely to click on the second page, especially if he finds what he is looking for on the first page itself.

So lets get down to brass tax!! Rethinking Search

Clearly, it is not accurate to think of search engines as portals or doors to the web – they are more like authoritative guides. Search engines today are ex‐tremely discerning; they organize incredible amounts of information and make recommendations based on rankings which can make or break the fortunes of a website owner.

So in order to attract the right kind of users in large volumes, your website should be featured as a result on the top search engines – with a high rank for the right keywords.
The techniques by which you try to achieve high rankings for the right keywords is known as search engine optimization.

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

Whats a search engine developer to do? Two things: First, combine results from several sources, as discussed earlier. This allows the search engines to intertwine the massiveness of the machine-driven system (robot results) with the finesse of the human touch (directory and PPC results). Second, structure the ranking algorithms to integrate ‘votes’ from human beings. Putting the human touch into a ranking algorithm can be done in a variety of ways, and search engines continue to experiment with solutions. Counting inbound links from other websites, for example, is a way of measuring how many votes a site has from human – and presumably intelligent – webmasters. Other ideas have included measuring how many search engine users click through to your site and how long they stay. Social bookmarking sites and collaborative tagging, even comparing a persons current and past searches, are forms of artificial intelligence intended to improve the search experience.

But artificial intelligence still has a long way to go. In movies you can say to a computer, “computer, rotate and enhance!” and the computer will somehow manage to turn and un-blur a grainy image from a security camera just the way you need it. In real world, we just aren’t there yet. Search engines remain very literal creatures unable to improvise very much beyond the exact words, even the exact syntax of words, they are given. Which leads us to our next Eternal Truth:-

What is the Matrix?? well Neo in the matrix of search engines only one factor drives the whole system etch this on your brain:

TEXT MATTERS
 ’Text is eternally important in Search’

The entire process of a web search is text-based, even when the item being sought isnt text at all, even if its an image or video text and text descriptions drive the web. The search engines care about how much text you have on your site, how it’s formatted, and, of course, what it says.

Keyword Selection is Key

Careful keyword selection is heart of the SEO campaign. Site owners who are on top of their SEO game have a list of top-priority keywords that they use on their site, with reasonable repetition, in strateic places. We never let a site go for six months without checking the keywords to make sure they’re still appropriate. If a site’s focus or positioning changes, new keywords are in order. If a company adds new products or services, new keywords are in order. If a new competitor comes on the scene, its worth peeking into its site for new keyword idea’s. Even if none of these changes takes place regular keyword analysis is in order because search behaviour and trends may change as well.

Cleverly written landing pages are a very useful part of SEO and internet marketing imagine an areoplane that drops a load of sky dyvers out a high altitude (representing your customers), now in order for you to get those customers to land on your site you have to create one great big Target for the search engines to say

Any Customers searching for my product send them here please!

Then mr Google and mrs Yahoo and there ill goten offspring baby msn (or live search… whatever!) will see the big flashy target and send all the people looking for your product to you. When the customer gets there thats your job to convert them into a sale by having a page representing exactly what they were looking with all the info they want as the first thing they see.

So how do we do a landing page?

Simple, heavy keyword usage and inbound links and internal links all using that keyword.

Some simple steps to landing page glory:

1)Cover the Landing Page with talk about the product, use copywriing techniques to blag the customer into buying and kerpow lots of fresh customers looking for your product end up on your site and not the competition!

2) Call to action..  tah dah! click here to get your free bazooka….. ok now it has to be the most prominent and clear piece of info on the page, tell the visitor what they have to do to get the goods, link to buy page, link to contact page phone numbers you name it you want to convert that visitor to a sale as fast as possible. – Marketing Landing Page.

3) Clever use of bold alot of visitors already know about your product and want to just get down to the brass tax so use bold to highlight the most important points on a page.

4) Consider the screen size, seems silly but does your visitor have to scroll down to get to the most important bit? Often people will leave if they dont see what they are after in the first second.

5) When designing your page allways aim to put too much content on your Marketing Landing Page, this way if the page looks too big you can cut it down thats much easier than trying to randomly bulk a page up.

6) Talk in the second person not third, you are talking directly to the visitor you are talking to them and telling them whats best, no customer could really give a monkeys about the site they are visiting they want to know what the site can do for them not what they can do for the site. Keep it direct and to the point.

7) Marketing Marketing Marketing! Its all good but you can over do it.Try not to ask for too much info, its tepmting to put long forms that question customers on how they found the site and why they chose to visit and have they owned ‘said product’ before etc etc this is important information and useful to most business that are clued up on marketing. However this is not in the customers best interest and most customers especially internet ones have little or no Retailer loyalty (although brand loyalty still exists) retailer specific is quickly becoming a thing of the past, so you just need to get that customer to sign on the dotted line as quickly as possible, then after the sale try to get additional marketing info from them in order to retain them as a future customer.
Then and only then do you get megga rich and by your landing page a big present for xmas.

Are you a Logo Maniac????

Read my useful guide to Title Tags and H1 Tags to find out the correct way a blogger should organise there site for optimum SEO benefit.

First things First the Title Tag.

Title tag is the most important piece of information you can put on your site as far as the serps are concerned, if you have the right title tag that maches your content and links or content that are pointing to your page then this is the perfect way to get high position in the search engines.

But it doesnt end there, H1 tags are also critical and must be addressed to ensure the correct info about the page is being give to mr google and his gang of serps.

 Ok lets break it down,

 If you look at this page the title tags show:

“TITILE TAGS AND H1 TAGS SEO GUIDE For Bloggers”

Prety straight forward right. The content is then all about title tags and h1 tags so it all matches up fine.

Then look at our H1 tags, on this page it says

“H1 and Title Tags”

The H1 tags should point at the title of your post, and the title should be as targeted as possible for the serps, you can put a user friendly one underneith if you like and not deminish your user experience.
Now this is the key, on almost every blog i come accross these days the H1 tags point at the name of the blog in our case SEARCH ENGINE this is not clever this makes you a LOGO maniac!

Basically your logo is being shown to google as the most important words on every page of your site, which if you logo is    ‘Window on life’ or something like that then you are in for a long hard road before you get anywhere near the top of the serps for the things you talke about.

Make the changes to your title and h1 tags and I garuntee you will see a differnece.

Good luck and let me know how you get on.

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.

I’m looking for Web Designers in Newcastle? so I put into google ‘Web Design Newcastle’ but you ended up on this site and we dont offer web design in Newcastle…… thats because we used clever internet marketing to influence the search engines and make our site appear high in the index for the keywords Web Design Newcastle.

But wait dont leave just yet you havent heard what we have to say and why we wanted to appear in in the results along with other ‘website Designers Newcastle’

The best website is rarely the one that looks the nicest, they are also very rarely the ones that have snazzy flash graphics and lots of animation unless you have potts of cash to waste on advertising then you need a combination of SEO exports and wed design techniques that are proven to generate SALES. Any web designer in newcastle will be able to provide some assistance in advertising your website and a bit of advice on SEO but if you really want to make a difference you need to have a focused professional SEO team to promote and advertise your website for you years of experience in generating incremental sales for clients.

What is an SEO?  SEO stands for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION, this basically means when you type something into google or other search engine we make your site appear in the results (near the top or at the top). Like when you used the keywords WEB DESGIN NEWCASLE in to find this page and our site.

Although our company can not provide web design Newcastle as such we basically work along side the  best newcastle web design firms to ensure that the site is designed in the best possible way for search engines to ensure the optimul number of visitors to your site and not just focused on the snazzy effects some deisgners will baffle clients with.

If you are about to create a new press marketing strategy your advertising team would sort it out, you wouldnt go straight to a Printing company and give them your entire budget to design the best billboard advert ever then place it at the back of your office so that only your own staff would ever see it? No you wouold get your advertising guru’s to get the message into the market place so that as many people as possible get to read hear and see your advertising message.

Ok if you create a site that is content rich and looks great you spend hours poring content into it and loving care and attention …… but nobody ever gets to see it! Then thats where we come in you need an SEO and you need one at the START of the project to act as a consultant to translate what you want to the web designers to achieve and how to get your message accross. However if you have alread had a Web Design for your Newcastle or North East Company then dont panic we can still help, we can make subtle changes to the site layout and design to ensure it out performs the competition.

 Basically a good web design team are normally experts in producing beautiful sites that look and function flawlessly however this is all well and good but you also need a site that generates sales and enquiries by the bucket load! The way to do this is to Optimise the content for Search engines, this is the cheapest form of Web Advertising and the most rewarding in terms of return. Im not suggesting you sacrifice all that great design and lovingly added contenet by any means, simply build the site not just for users but also for search engines like google, msn and yahoo.

Jobs Newcastle

So check out other sites that the newcastle web design company have produced and then see how good they really are at SEO. Contact us via the forum and we will help promote your site to be the best in the business and not just a local site but generating national sales on a regular basis.

Used Cars Newcastle

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

 Try looking for ‘regional’ terms relating to your site to see if you show up. Search engine optimisation is not as easy as you think and requires lots of time and patientce on by the optimisation team to investigate the nieche to locate targeting websites that probably dont know about your site, but there visitors may be interested. As a result they need to be contact to see if they are interested in linking. This is obviously a slow time taking problem. The best advice is to make websites for people not for search eninges then content related sites will link to you naturally.