Residual Victory Blog

How to Choose an SEO Provider is a matter of finding a union of comfortable communication, agreeable strategies, financial disclosure, a working relationship, trust, and shared goals.  When you choose a Search Engine Optimization Provider, you choose to put your business and future income in the SEO Provider’s hands.  Your website is important to you, so make sure you are important to your SEO.

Optimizing a website is not an overnight task, it can take months to come to fruition.  The industry is constantly moving forward and new advantages and techniques are always being discovered.  When you choose an SEO, make sure they are current with industry trends.  You could simply ask the SEO if they see any new trends as negative or positive. When you approach an SEO for questioning, have an idea of your budget ahead of time. Make sure pricing for updating is reviewed.  It’s difficult for SEOs to quote a price right away. Some SEOs have developed “packages” so they can give an estimate of the cost, but a true price (from a good SEO) can’t be determined until they evaluate your website.  If an SEO firm tells you they can up your page rank in 24 hours and guarantee you’ll be in first page search engine results by next week, politely say goodbye.

Price structures consist of hourly consulting, which runs $40 an hour for entry-level and up to $1000 for top corporate consultants.  Mid-tier runs about $100-$200 per hour.  Project based pricing is a flat fee which includes time, effort and staff variables. Other less common structures include Contract Services for a specific job, Price per Page, Profit Sharing, Monthly Retainer, Pay for Rankings, and Pay for Traffic. Options include contacting a college to see if  interns are available, or putting the work up for bid on a freelancer web site.
(Further pricing structure and the difficulties of each can be found at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-pricing-costs-what-should-you-charge-how-much-should-you-pay.)

Realize that you might want to make changes to the strategy, and the SEO Provider you choose might come across difficulties that weren’t previously uncovered.  Talk about how changes will be handled in the contract before signing.   The size of your website and the difficulty of the project will be taken into consideration.  Whether it’s an SEO firm or an individual working on their own with low overhead will make a difference in pricing.

In project estimations, SEO Providers may take into consideration client communication, (yes, they may charge you to talk - so plan ahead), communication between team members (you may pay them to talk), baseline reporting (reports prepared for you on where you stand now), competitive analysis (this can be time consuming for some websites), tactical issues such as coding, links, evaluations, keyword research, review of existing pages and creation of new pages, submission to search engines and directories, editing pages, analyzing traffic counts, monthly reports, or any number of other issues.

The Search Engine Optimization Provider will want to look at the structure of your webpage, the URL propagation, design and functionality, code, meta tags, content and linking.  Make sure you spend time (even though it’s costing you it will be worth it in the end) discussing what strategies they intend to apply.  Remember, the goal is to get visitors to your site more than it is to have a high page rank or come up in the top ten search engine results.

Deciding when and How to Choose an SEO provider is an investment.  Do your research well.  Google their name and ask for examples of optimized websites.  Start a blog asking other webmasters you admire for references.  (Expect SEO Provider advertising.)  If it’s in your budget now, then now is a good time.  Communication, trust and shared strategies will indicate a wise investment, and your new visitors will confirm it.  Choose an SEO Provider carefully, and visitors will be your reward.

How to Build a Google Sitemap might appear to be a daunting task, particularly to those of us that aren’t computer gurus.  However, with today’s available generators and online tutorials, support is easily accessible and available to help you accomplish your Sitemap mission.  Google Sitemap Generators are available and the requirements of building and submitting a Google Sitemap is outlined at Google’s Webmaster’s page located at www.google.com/webmasters/.

Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.Com have standardized Sitemaps, and all use XML to facilitate faster crawling by the spiders.  Traditional Sitemaps that use HTML can still be submitted, and Googling an XML Sitemap page next to an HTML Sitemap page should not cause any problems.  However, the major search engines and generators encourage you to build your Sitemap using XML.  Google created www.Sitemaps.org to provide the XML schema for the Sitemap protocol under the Creative Commons License.

As you know, spiders discover pages from links.  Sitemaps are the webcrawler’s assistant.  They help the spiders locate your URLs and provide the spiders with additional information that you have provided.  When building a Google Sitemap you include the date the page was last modified, how often the pages change, and Sitemap index files.  In April of 2007, Google added the ability to place a robots.txt file specifying the location of your Sitemaps.  Just add “Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/Sitemap.xml” in the usual location for the robot.txt file to tell Google and Ask.com to recognize the location of your Sitemaps.

Google provides details about building Sitemaps in the Webmaster Tools Overview and FAQ pages under Sitemap Protocol.  Requirements they list for building Sitemaps include:

*  The format must include XML tags.  (As mentioned above, generators can assist you with submitting or converting the older HTML formats.)

*  Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag; use a <url> entry for each for each URL as a parent XML tag; and a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.

* The Sitemap must be UTF-8 encoded.

* You are limited to 50,000 URLs to each Sitemap file, and each one can be no larger than 10MB.  Sitemaps can be compressed using gzip.

* You can submit a site map for just portion of your URLs that are updated frequently.

* URLs must use entity escape codes and follow the RFC-3986 standard for URIs, the RFC-3987 standard for IRIs, and use W3C Datetime encoding for lastmod timestamps.

* Your URLs must be completely specified.  Make sure your http’s and slashes are in, but you can only have one version of URL in your Sitemap.  Frames must include both URLs (frameset and frame contents).  Multiple versions of URLs will effect the crawling, but the position of your URL does not have an impact.

* Remove session Ids in URLs.

* The “priority hint” is only relative to URLs in your own site.

* It is “strongly recommended” that you put your Sitemap at the root directory of your web server.

Building a Sitemap for Google takes time, but it can give you an edge in being included in search page results.  Absorb all the information on Google’s Webmaster page, critically research the generators available, and take a visit to some blogs and forums focusing on XML and building Sitemaps.  The more you learn about Building a Google Sitemap the less daunting the task will feel.  Give it a try.  There’s a lot of sitemap support available and it certainly can’t hurt.  Maybe you’ll turn into a computer guru after all!

How Google PageRank Works is a discipline in itself, and is at the forefront of discussions for search engine optimization experts, web developers, information and technology experts, academia and mathematicians.  Amazingly they frequently agree on one thing: Content is King.  To verify this, just look at the rankings of www.CNN.com or http://news.bbc.co.uk/.  Google PageRank is a voting system that uses links to a page as votes to a page.  Popular news websites have many links connecting to them; therefore, they have more “votes” and a higher Google Page Rank.  Global and topical popularity are taken into consideration in ranking pages.  PageRank, also known as “PR,” is one of many factors included in search engine results, which is why so much attention is given to its value.

You must be indexed and have links in order to have a PR value.  (To clarify “Page Rank” or “PageRank”: Toolbar Pagerank is updated infrequently, and is said to be unreliable. Search Engine Page Rank (or Search Engine PageRank) is relative to Placement in search engine results.  PageRank (PR) is a factor Google considers in deciding your placement within search engine results and is evaluated frequently.)  Link schemes led Google to refine their link-weighting algorithms.  Websites participating in “link farming” or link selling “for the purpose of manipulating search engines” are being be weeded out.

Buying and Selling links are useful for advertising, but a violation if used to manipulate Pagerank.  “Black hat” competition can be reported to Google on their form at www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks.  Google recommends designating links you paid for with a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the href tag, and keeping links related.  Another tactic of search engine manipulation is
“Google Bombing,” discussed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3298443.stm.

In-depth analysis and significant peer-review of mathematical formulas involved in Google’s PageRank algorithms is rampant.  Mathematical deductions and networking analysis can help you decide link arrangement in a hierarchy that can result in heavier page ranking on one page, or average page ranking applied throughout. Nevertheless, you will find contradicting advice. For the purpose of this article, it will suffice it to say, good links going into your webpage help.

White-Hat Link-baiting suggestions such as free tools, lists, industry research, community building, and competitive analysis can be found at www.seomoz.org, together with a wealth of other information relative to web content, search engine optimization, and Google PageRank.  Cross-Linking (Reciprocal Links) are walking on thin ice.  Google maintains that “as long as the links are relevant” they are safe.  However, Google Guidelines state: “Link schemes include Link exchange and reciprocal links schemes.”  Many sites cross-link successfully, however, a large consensus of developers are afraid of getting banned by having too many reciprocal links.  (Yahoo has been touchy with mass cross-links.)  Since Google themselves have accidentally marked some of their pages as spam, this fear isn’t unjustified.  Get listed in a directory to start with a safe one-way link.

Providing killer content will avoid the cloudy guidelines of Google’s PageRanking and maintain a high Google PageRank.  Create and publicize content people want to link to. Keep up with How Google Page Rank works and the latest PageRanking guidelines on Google by subscribing to their related RSS Feeds.  With killer content and updated information, you will be able to make Google PageRank Work in your favor, and see first hand how Google can work for you.

This Search Engine Optimization Glossary is just a glimpse of some of the vocabulary one will come across in search engine optimization research.

By no means is this comprehensive glossary.  If you can’t find the definition you are looking for, try www.seomoz.org where a more indepth glossary is available.
Absolute Link: A link that shows the full URL of the page being linked.

allintitle:  Restricts results of a search to containing the words in a title of the webpage..

allinurl: Restricts results of a search to words located in a URL.

ALT Attribute: Descriptive text that appears if an image fails to load in an HTML element.

Anchor Text: The text part of a link.

AdSense: A Google advertising program.

Affiliate Network: Affiliated websites that partake in a system of commission on sales of products or services. One who participates is an Affiliate.

Algorithm: A mathematical programming system used to determine which web pages are displayed in search results, when referring to search engine algorithms.

Atom Feed: Atom is an XML-based document format similar to RSS.

Autoresponders:  A program that sends replies to email messages. Often used to send confirmations and boilerplate information.

Back Link: Also referred to as Inbound Link. A link on a web site other than your own that links to your web site.

Bait and Switch: Bringing a visitor or link in under a false premise then switching the intent. 

Black Hat: SEO techniques that don’t follow best practices.

Bot:  A program which performs a task autonomously. Search engines use spiderbots, spammers often use bots to plagiarize.
 
Bounce Rate:  The percentage of people who come to your website and leave instantly.

Cache: The snapshot of a webpage when it is crawled by the search engine’s spider.

Cloaking: Hiding page content or putting up artifical content to keep content from people or robots.

Click Thru Rate: The amount of clicks a visitor makes from search engine results to find the results they sought. Used to track keywords.

Conversion Rate: A rate that defines how many visitors are converted into money or how many viewed a page.

CPC:  Cost Per Click

CPM: Cost Per Thousand impressions. Quantifies the average value/cost of Pay-per-Click advertisements. (M stands for the Roman numeral one thousand).

Crawl: An robot follows links to visit web sites on behalf of search engines or directories then processes and indexes the code and content to store in the search engine’s database.

Cross Linking: Linking within one website.

DC:  Data Center

Data Centers: Different IP addresses.
 
Deep Linking: Linking to content buried “deep” in a website.

Duplicate Content: Content on two or more webpages that is the same or almost the same.  A negative attribute for SEO.

EPV:  Earnings Per Visitor.

EPC:  Earnings Per Click.

Flog:  Fake Blog.

Hijacking: Stealing pages from another site and making it appear that the pages are coming from the hijacker’s site.

Host: Either entire domains or sub-domains.

Hub: A trusted page with high quality content that links out to related pages.

Image Link: A hyperlink that uses a clickable image, as opposed to a clickable text hyperlink.

Inbound Link: Also known as backlink. A link on a web site other than your own that points to your web site.

Index: A search engine’s database of websites that search engines use for queries.

Indexing:  The process of adding Web content to a search engine’s Index (database).

Indexer:   A program that search engines use to update their databases

Internal Links:  Links within your site that point to other pages in your website

Keyword density: The number of times a keyword or keyword phrase is used in a document compared to the total words in the document. You can take the total number of words in the document and multiply it by the percent required to find out how many keywords you need.  Or you can take the number of keywords or keyword phrases you have and divide by the total number of words.

Keyword Stuffing: Spamming, or stuffing, a document by repeating a word or phrase.

Keyword Phrase: A phrase a searcher uses when searching using a search engine.

Keyword: A word used when querying a search engine.

Landing Page:   The page a website visitor lands on after clicking a link, usually in a advertisement and usually contains a sales pitch.

Link Popularity: The measurement of quantity or quality of websites that link to your website.

Linking Strategy: The process of researching, analyzing and developing a strategy to include links on your website and others that will result in maximum visibility and are optimized for search engine results.

Linkage: The number of links pointing to a website. Search engines often consider linkage in their algorithms.

Link Baiting: Content created to attract links from other websites.

Link Building:   Working to generate incoming links to a site.

Link Partner:   Two sites that link to each other.  Also known as link exchange or reciprocal linking.  Not valued in search engine algorithims.

Link Popularity:  The value of a site based upon the number and quality of sites that link to it.

Link Farm: Webpages with several links to each other for the sheer purpose of raising search results.  Looked upon negatively and considered spam. Typically, links may not even be relevant to the website and are often computer generated.

Long Tail:  A specific query as opposed to a broad category query.
Meta Search Engine: A search engine that grabs results from other search engines and directories. Examples: Dogpile, Metacrawler
Meta Tag:  Tags typically found in the header of the HTML document. Some examples of Meta Tags are “description,” “keyword” and “robot.”

NOFOLLOW: An attribute in a hyperlink that tells spiders the link is not  ‘trusted’ and to exclude from Page Rank.  When used in a robots meta tag, it tells search engines to ignore links on a page.

NOINDEX: An attribute in a hyperlink that tells spiders to not put contents in the public index. Used in the robots meta tag.

Non-Reciprocal Link: A one way link. Given more value by search engines.

Organic Results: Search engine results based on relevance and popularity and are not paid for.

Outbound Link: A link from one website that leads to another website.

Ranking:  The place a website shows up in search engine results. Being on the first page is a strong ranking. Not to be confused with Page Rank and Toolbar Rank.

Page Rank: Page Rank ranks every page on the internet based on the number, quality and popularity of inbound links pointing to the page.  Inbound links are considered “votes” towards a page. Page Rank is used by Google as one of the factors in search results.  Not to be confused with Toolbar Rank or Ranking in Search Results.

PR:  Page Rank

Parser:    A  program used by search engines to break down HTML pages into sections for indexing and send it to other indexers.

Pay-per-Click: Also referred to as PPC.  An advertising program where advertisers pay a pre-determined amount for each click made by their ad link. 
AdWords is a popular Pay-per-Click advertising program.

Ping: Used by Bloggers to post blogs on multiple stites. It also means “to bring attention to.”  And example of a ping program is available at ww.pingomatic.com.  Wordpress has a built in “Ping” Function. Technically, Ping is a program that sends a message to another computer and waits for acknowledgment, often used to check if another computer on a network is reachable.

PPC: Pay Per Click. An advertising program where you agree to pay a certain amount every time your link is clicked on.

Quality Links:  Links that are not Spam and are related to website content.

Recipricol Link: Links from two different websites that are linked to each other. A link exchange.

Robot.txt: A file named robots.txt in the root level of a web site used in programming to direct spiders to ignore directories.
ROI: Return On Investment. Often refers to sales per lead. Analytics software can analyze the cost/benefit value of different scenarios.

RSS Feed: Really Simple Syndication. Puts frequently updated information into XML format and makes it readable through an RSS Feeder. User can click on the RSS Feed link and automatically be updated of the Feed he has subscribed to.

Script: A written command interpreter of an operating system

SE:  Search Engine

SEM: Search Engine Marketing.  Drawing visitors through search engines and other means.

SEMPO:  Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (an international group).

SEO: Search Engine Optimization. Making a website favorable to search engines.

SERP: Search Engine Results Page. The page that shows the results of the search.

Site Links:  A link or links under the main link.  They are only shown for the top listing in  popular query results.

Sitemap: A page on your website that links to all other pages. Also one of Google’s Webmaster tools that enable a webmaster to inform Google of changes in content.

Social Bookmarking: A way for users to keep their bookmarks online. Bookmarks are typically given public access to provide a mode for gathering information other than search engines. A form of social media.

Spider: Programs that search the internet to process and index code and content of a web page to be stored in the search engine’s database. Googlebot, MSNbot and Yahoo Slurp are popular spiders. Some spiders are used for leaks in server configurations and disallowed web content.

Spiderbot: See Spider.

Tag: A word determined by a person to identify specific content.

Text Link: An HTML link that does not involve graphic or special code.

Title HTML Tag: The title of a page. Necessary to have a valid document, and must be placed in the head element.

Trackback: Enables blogs to link back to comments on a blog.  A cross-reference system between blogs. Both blogs being used must use blogging software that supports Trackback protocoal

Toolbar Pagerank: A webpages importance determined by Google’s algorithm and assigned a value between 0 and 10.  Not the same as Page Rank. Toolbar Rank is only updated a few times a year.

Viral Marketing: A marketing program where members promote the service for you.

White Hat: SEO techniques that play by the rules to acquire search engine results.

CRT:  Crawl to Ranking Time

Supplemental Index: Pages in Google’s index that are not part of the main index. Spidered less often.

XML: Markup language which incorporates features of HTML but is designed to overcome some of HTML’s limitations.

SEO Tools of the Trade make search engine optimization easier by providing the tools needed to create a well-constructed website built with the finest craftsmanship.  As with any tools, quality counts, and tools are useless if you don’t know how to use them.  A few of the SEO Tools of the Trade that your toolbox shouldn’t be without can assist you with keyword analysis, content evaluation, provide spider simulators, domain name checking, link analysis, statistics, Page Ranking, and competition evaluation.  SEO Tools also include generators that simplify activities such as file conversion, robot generators and Meta Tag generators.  You can provide the finishing touches of any SEO strategy with SEO calculators that determine advertising, pay-per-click values, and return on investment.
 
A toolbox with too many tools will weigh you down and defeat the purpose of the tools.  Research SEO tools and consider whether you need all the options it has available.  Keep in mind that more powerful tools are not always better, and you can always upgrade later.  Make sure you understand the data that the SEO tools provide, and can apply it to your SEO strategies.  SEO Tools are supposed to save time and make money, not take your time and money.  (Of course, if you’re really into tools, you could get a Return on Investment (ROI) tool to determine if tools are profitable to use in the first place.)

Many SEO experts agree that it’s a good idea to start with free tools.  Links to free SEO tools are at www.seopen.com and thousands of other sites.  Yahoo, Google and MSN all have toolbars available with SEO tools of the trade.  Firefox has many plugins available for SEO. The Rankquest toolbar (www.rankquest.com) and the Alexa website (www.Alexa.com) offers a multitude of SEO tools including Keyword Finder, Validation Tools, Content Tools, Meta Tools, Popularity Tools, Search Engine Tools, Traffic Tools and SEM Tools.  Domain registration history (taken into consideration by Google) is available at www.archive.org in their search results.  You can find free online keyword search tools at www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.htm, and www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com.  These also offer upgrades to a more comprehensive SEO toolkit.  A free online keyword search tool is also available at www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ and www.inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/.  If you need keyword suggestions, free keyword list builders are free at www.tools.seobook.com/keyword-list/generator.php and http://www.lexfn.com/. 

Trends for keywords can be researched at www.google.com/trends, and www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/ is a free online tool that checks rankings and links, and provides links to other free tools used for competitive analysis and spidered page views.  Do a search for “SEO Tools of the Trade” from any search engine or search downloads at www.Pcworld.com or www.download.com to find what you need.  Begin filling up your toolbox, but don’t weigh yourself down no matter how fun the tools look.  Find SEO tools of the trade that can be skillfully used to give your website the quality craftsmanship it deserves.  The best tools can produce the best results, and results are what search engine optimization is all about.

How to write good keywords is an important lesson to learn, primarily since keyword optimization is at the heart of developing high visibility and page rankings in search engine results.  One of the most important lessons to learn when learning how to write good keywords is to make sure the keywords are going to be key phrases that users type into search engines.  Business 101 - Know Your Customer.  Business 102 - Know your Competition.  Make sure that your keywords are in a strategically competitive place in the marketing mix.  An overused keyword is likely to get lost in mass-similarities, and an underused keyword won’t have any user requests.  The lesson is balance and relevancy. Business 103 - Know your business.

Brainstorming is a good way to start.  Consider what you want people to associate your business with, what your business is, what customers are thinking when looking for you, and if they might look for something similar to you.  Determine your niche and how to use the most relevant keyword phrases that will bring visitors to your website.  Start writing words describing your business and the highlights of your business.  Write as many good keywords as you can think of, and expand your list to include phrases.  If you need more ideas, use a good SEO consultant or a good keyword suggestion software tool.  There are thousands available; ranging from the highly evaluative to the free online and free downloads.  Take advantage of their analyzing capabilities.

The next step is to learn how other websites use your keywords.  Do an advanced search with “allintitle” and type in your keyword phrase.  This will locate websites that are optimized for the same keyword as yours.  These websites are your primary competitors.  Check out your competition with one of the many keyword suggestion tools or keyword ranking tools.  These tools can tell you what words users have searched for, how often the searches were made, and give you a list of competitors.  Since keywords are critical to your website success, it’s worthwhile to invest the time and money to find the good keywords most relevant to your strategy.  If you don’t have a keyword strategy, develop one.  Keywords are scanned by the spiderbots in domain names, titles, tags, links, RSS feeds and content, and are the signs on the road that bring your customer to you.  Beware though, too many keywords and the search engines will take you for a spam artist.  There must be balance.
 
Learning how to write good keywords is one of the most important lessons you can learn to optimize your website.  It’s a continual process. The more users learn how to use keywords, the more the rankings change.  Don’t develop a keyword and forget about.  Learn how to monitor your keyword and keep writing good keywords relevant to your target market.  By keeping in touch with your competition, your customers, and knowing what your business stands for, you are sure to have the knowledge to build a good, if not excellent, keyword strategy and keep your website results right where you want them to be.

How search engines work is a mystery to many.  Search engine secrets are often
cloaked behind complicated algorithms that undergo constant changing.  The website www.google.com/technology gives an overview of Google’s page ranking system and software, however is void of the mathematics that are underlying in the formulas that determine how search engines work. Fortunately, through articles, forums and blogs, professional search engine optimizers (SEOs) and web developers have analyzed processes and are willing to share their knowledge of how search engines work and the grinding gears that churn out search engine results.
 
To the dismay of these experts, however, the gears are always changing which direction they’re headed - Google has a reputation for changing how their search engine works, often without notice. Moreover, other search engines, such as Yahoo and MSN, continuously change to keep up with Google.  But despite the aggravation of frequent changes, staying updated on how search engines work is imperative to success.  Users use search engines more than typing in direct URLs, and the search engine developers are focused on bringing the most relevant results to users.  

Search engines work by first indexing a website.  Each page in the website is indexed separately.  A website can be submitted directly to search engines or indexed from “spiderbots” crawling through webpages, searching for content and analyzing pages with formulas to determine if the results are relevant to the user.  The spider that Google uses is called “Googlebot.”  If you need help learning how search engines work; visit Google’s webmaster site at www.google.com/support/webmasters/ for free advice on how Google’s search engine works.  Google also has an option to submit a “sitemap” to keep them updated on the details of your website.  This tool also makes your website accessible to other search engines.

“Spiders” will take into consideration domain names, meta tags, html tags, headings and subheadings, keywords, geography, RSS feeds, history of the website, how much time users have spent on the website, how many times the website has been clicked through (referred to as “click through rate”), how relevant the text content is to the user request, the links included on the website, and the reputation and ranking of the links of each individual connecting website.  These are all elements you must consider when developing your strategy to get the search engines working for you.  You can see why there are so many mathematical formulas to ascertain relevancy! 

Search engines keep much of their algorithms secret so they have an edge on their competition, but it is necessary to give general information on how search engines work so that web developers can develop their websites to show up in the results of a search engine request.  Fortunately, the comradery of the Internet and the importance of linking has made a great deal of research available on how search engines work to the general public.  Search engines are the vehicles that bring customers to websites.  Learning how search engines work is a critical area of study for every website developer or anyone wanting to start a website.

How Search Engine Spiders Work is worthy of critical analysis if you seek to optimize your visibility in search engine results.  Spiders are the messengers that carry your website information back to the search engine master, who then determines whether you are worthy enough to be shown in their search engine results page (SERP).  And inside the search engine results are exactly where you want to be.  Making your website spider-friendly guarantees that you will be indexed and taken into consideration to appear in search engine results.

Spiderbots, as they are often called, are given specific commands to search websites according to how the search engine master dictates.  Different “bots” can search using varied formulas within different search engines.  For instance, Google uses Googlebot and Yahoo uses SLURP.  Googlebot and SLURP scan and save whole pages, while MSN generally just crawls over the beginning and the important tags.  Knowing how these search engine spiders work before you design your website will help you make more knowledgeable decisions for your web page creation, including layout, content, text and html tags. 

Streamlining your website for efficiency and fast loading pages will help guarantee spider crawling. Spiders will stop indexing a page if it takes too long to load.  If your information is not indexed, your website will not show up in the search engine results.  Flash based content and large graphics slow down loading so try and avoid them.  Spiderbots easily pick up text, so replace the graphics and flash with text relevant to your website. If you have links that you want the spider to consider in search engine results, don’t use images or JavaScript because the spiders won’t recognize it.  Take advantage of the spider’s gripping effect on text, and put a text description between the <a> tags of a link.  Double check that there aren’t any broken links.

Spiders love title pages.  Using a relevant name in your title tags on each webpage will get the title on the search engine’s listing page.  Spiders tend to put more emphasis on capital letters in title pages and on bold formatting. Empty alt attributes and excessive punctuation in title and description pages are known to cause complications with recognition from the spiders.  If you don’t want the spider to recognize links use JavaScript or robots.txt file so the robots will overlook the information.  The robot.txt file can also be used to personalize different webpages for different search engine bots.  For instance, you can insert commands for Googlebot to read one page and not another, or Yahoo’s SLURP to do the same. 

There are software programs and free online spider analyzing tools to help you get an idea of what the spiders are viewing as they’re crawling over the web analyzing and indexing billions of webpages. Learning how Search Engine Spiders Work is a required task if you truly want to optimize your website for the top of search engine results pages.  Give the spiders web pages worth crawling, and they’ll bring you exactly where you want to be.

How Alexa Ranking Affects Your Traffic should be duly noted in your website search engine optimization strategies.  Alexa (www.alexa.com), is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, and is a popular website and toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox users that includes SEO tools.  Users are part of the “Alexa Community” that is the source of the data acquired by Alexa.  The toolbar offers tools to users that include links to related sites, website traffic, and detailed product and webpage information.  Alexa users are the ones you can reach when they click on a website similar to yours, and your website appears in Alexa’s “Related Links Results.” 

According to the Alexa, their users have visited 11.2 million unique websites.  By learning how Alexa Ranking affects your traffic, you can build your search engine optimization applications to not only end up in the users search engine results page, but also connect with other webmasters to build successful link-building relationships.  Many of the Alexa users are webmasters monitoring or manipulating their own traffic statistics with Alexa tools.  Traffic counts are reputed to be easily manipulated by downloading the Alexa toolbar and visiting your website. However, traffic counts are determined by “Reach” and “Page” views.  Reach measures the number of users, and page measures the number of visits, but multiple visits from the same user on the same day are only counted as one.  Alexa values consistency, and higher value is given to steady traffic than traffic with sudden upswings.

Another factor Alexa takes into consideration is their “Sites Pointing” statistic.  This is an area that you can develop to see how Alexa Ranking can affect traffic to your website.  Four to six times a year, Alexa crawls the web looking for links.  For every website that has a link to your website, you receive one point for “Site Pointing In.”  The Alexa Ranking system counts webpages with links to your site, not the number of links.  This means if there are multiple links to your site on one page, these will only count as one point.  Keep links relevant.  Alexa keeps track of user trends, behavior and preferences.  A link that is never clicked on will end up void.

Other search engines take notice of Alexa, especially Google.  And what Google looks at, everyone looks at - and you want your website looked at.  So, pay attention to how Alexa Ranking affects your traffic.  Your competitors are using Alexa to monitor you with Alexa’s useful SEO tools to compare traffic.  However, If your ranking is below 100,000, your data will most likely not be included in results. Alexa’s rankings are based on far a website is from number one, and it also only ranks domain names and not subpages.
 
By association with Alexa, you also get a big boost in publicity by their parent company, Amazon.com.  When an Alexa viewer visits your site, it gets linked to their Amazon.com profile where other viewers can visit and see your site.  It pays to learn how Alexa Ranking can affect your traffic - so get your wheels rolling and get your website profiled in Alexa’s information highway.

To rank high on Google, your website has to be measured by “500 million variables and 2 billion terms” of Google’s equation, as stated on Google’s Corporate Information Technology Overview page.  Google’s ranking system is based on a democracy, and the citizens are the links on the worldwide web that vote for each other.  Not unlike our government today, many of these “links” are paid for, and some are of greater value.  Ranking high on Google is playing politics.  Links and Keywords are the key players in the ranking game.  Google also takes into consideration the full content of the page including HTML codes, fonts, subdivisions and the “precise location of each word.” 

Links are votes.  You must develop a link strategy.  Google likes linking things together. Create a rich network of links with distinct quality content.  Your website must have quality links going out and coming in.  Quality is the key word.  Links from reputable pages (which ironically includes .gov pages) are given more weight than links on “link farm” pages.  Linking to a “link farm” is one of the worst things you can do and can potentially get your deported off the web.  The better the links, the better your ranking.  Google will factor in your page content and the content of the pages you link to. Do your research.  Google has a free page rank tool on their toolbar.  Use it to find out the page ranking and visit the site.

Google also gives more weight to one-way links that lead to your site, and less weight to reciprocal links.  How do you get these?  Buy them.  List yourself in a reputable directory listing.  Make sure you are listed in the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org).  If you can’t buy links, write good content.  Give someone a reason to link to your site.  Again, the keyword is Quality.  Submitting articles and press releases are also strategies in the linking game.

Keywords are your platform.  They are what you stand for.  Words count.  Graphics don’t.  Make sure your words are not in graphic form and make sure you have relevant titles under your graphics.  Start with your title tag.  Put everything you stand for in ten words or less.  Make your URLs short and keyword specific.  Brand yourself.  If you type in soda, Mountain Dew will not show up on the first page.  If you type in Mountain Dew, it will be on the first page.  Brand yourself so users know what they are searching for.  Do not put the same words in every heading and every tag.  Be descriptive.  Sell yourself.  There are multitudes of free keyword rank and suggestion tools.  Use them as a supplement to your knowledge of your company.

Think of every element in your website as words and pages in a presentation that is going to be up for a vote.  Does everything fit?  Is it all related?  Are you a reputable company with a quality product?  Does it sell?  Now sell it.  Google is waiting for you.