SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization refers to services that are provided to website owners in order to boost the appearance of their website in search engine results. The marketing efforts to improve the visibility of the website could involve the improvement of the written copy on the website, building an effective architecture of the site and the inclusion of the website in relevant directories among many other services. These days, the market abounds in SEO service providers who use multifarious marketing efforts to influence the search engine results to the advantage of the website owner. 
With hundreds of websites sprouting everyday, aggressive marketing by SEO service providers has become the norm of the day.

However, website owners have to be very cautious in the choice of an SEO as many SEOs often adopt unethical means to boost the visibility of a website which ends in serious consequences for the website owner such as the permanent dropping of a website from search engine results. A cautious approach should be adopted in the choice of an SEO. Many SEOs make tall claims to the website owners and guarantee them top rankings in the search engines. Remember that no search engine has any priority for any SEO and hence no SEO can guarantee you top rankings in a search engine result.  
Be wary of SEOs that do not provide you a clear outline of how they intend to improve your search engine ratings.

Since this success is not attributed to the practice of some magical powers, the SEO should be able to provide you a clear outline of how they plan to implement their plan of action. Remember that you will be held responsible for the actions of the company whose services you hire for the promotion of your website. Certain SEOs may charge you a large sum to help your website rank higher in the search engine results. However, what they may actually do is to place your website in the advertising sections.

There are certain search engines that accept payments for pay per click or pay for inclusion results so you should know that your money is being put for temporary advertising rather than permanent inclusion, as claimed by the SEO.  
Always remember to ask for references. Look into the important details such as the names of the sites that have been promoted by the SEO, the number of years it has been in business, the number of full time employees that it has on its rolls and whether the SEO makes it a point to report any spams, that it detects, to Google. A reputable SEO should always be preferred over a new SEO even if that means you have to shell out much more money for the services. Ask for a money back guarantee from the SEO so that you may seek a refund if you are dissatisfied with the services provided by the SEO.  
There are a number of guidelines that a website owner can follow to improve the visibility of his/her website before seeking the help of an SEO. The accessibility, the quality of the written content and the lay out of the website are parameters that influence the visibility of a website and can be effectively managed by a website owner. If a website owner still feels that he needs the services of an SEO, the services of a reputable Search Engine optimization firm will definitely come in handy.          

Meta Relevance

Do you know that you can see how relevant your website’s metas are? Just check it at whois.sc/yourdomain.com

Note the 3-4th row, where is written
Seo Score and Meta Relevance.

I don’t know whether their algorithm match with the Google’s and Yahoo ones, but that should be easy handy tool to verify your websites metas quality. As for my opinion, description and keywords tags are not so important as Title tag. You may noticed high ranking sites over the net, without description and keyword tags. This is the fact that the 1st considiration of the site depend on title, rather than other meta tags.

How many web sites hosted on the same ip

Do you wonder how many other websites hosted on the same ip address with you? You can check it easily if you type in your web browser whois.sc/yoursitename.com, the page will show you many useful information such as your registration details, alexa ranking, your domain’s registration date… along with ip address and a number of sites hosted on the same server ip.

As for my opinion, as less websites under your ip the better share of traffic you would have, but in another hand, more websites means� higher responsability. Because if your website is down for some server problem, you will know that hundred other people would contact hosting support for resolving the problem.

Does search engines� take into account ip addresses of websites?
It was another subject on agenda how bad to host multiple domain names on the same ip address. Some seo experts still consider the fact that search engines like Google take into their account domain’s ip address, and don’t value cross links among the sites located on the single ip address. Some hosting companies offer shared ip addresses, where you can assign various ip addresses per each your domain name, this should help.

How Powerful Text Links Are.

Many bloggers are politically outspoken and view George Bush in a less than favorable light. Hundreds of people have linked to his biography page using the phrase “miserable failure” as the link text. This Google Search should show how powerful the internet is, and how powerful link text is.

Part of why it is so expensive to build a current search engine is that all of this feedback and linking takes time to measure and collect. The whole time you are collecting it, everything is changing. The text used in links is going to be very important in the foreseeable future.

Why are Links so Powerful?

When we write stuff about ourselves we have a tendency to lie. It is human nature to boost your own site. This is why meta tags and page copy are nowhere near as powerful as the once were.

Links from other webmasters are viewed by search engines as unbiased third party votes. While Yahoo! tends to put more weight on page copy than most other major search engines do. who links to you and with what words are the #1 ranking criteria for competitive phrases in all major search engines.

Many people look for links just thinking “link,” but ofter this is not the most effective way to do link building. If you think of the web as a huge social network and think of links as relationships you have a huge advantage over your competition.

You can do many manipulative things to make your ideas appear better than they are, but if you can find more natural ways to embed yourself in the social structure of the web you will likely become extremely successful.

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IP Cloaking Technology

Cloaking is the technique of returning different pages to search engines than to people. When a person requests the page of a particular URL from the website, the site’s normal page is returned, but when a search engine spider makes the same request, a special page that has been created for the engine is returned, and the normal page for the URL is hidden from the engine - it is cloaked. The usual purposes of cloaking are to hide the HTML code of high ranking pages from people, so that it can’t be stolen, and to provide search engine spiders with highly optimized pages that wouldn’t look particularly good in browsers.

There are three ways of cloaking. One is “IP delivery”, where the IP addresses of spiders are recognized at the server and handled accordingly; another is “User-Agent delivery”, where the spiders’ User-Agents are recognised at the server and handled accordingly, and the third is a combination of the two.

How cloaking works

Every website contains one or more ordinary webpages. For every page in the site that needs to be cloaked, another page is created that is designed to rank highly in a search engine. If more than one search engine is being targeted, then a page is created for each engine, because different engines have different criteria for ranking pages, and pages need to be created to match each engine’s criteria.

The search engine pages may be totally different to their ‘normal’ equivalents, or they may only be slightly different, or anywhere in between. For instance, a page may rank highly in a particular engine if it starts out with an additional paragraph of keyword-stuffed text, so a page like that is created for the engine.

When a request for a page comes in, a programme in the site detects what is making the request. If it is a person, then the normal page is returned, but if it is search engine spider, the appropriate search engine page is returned. In that way the engines never see the site’s normal page, and, of course, people never see the pages that are created for the search engines.

Dynamic sites work in the same way, except that the normal pages, and the search engines pages, are created dynamically. The search engine pages could even be static, while the normal pages are dynamic.

Is cloaking ethical?

Some people say that claoking is unethical, but they are mistaken. Their idea is that serving different pages to the engines than to people is simply wrong, because the engines are ranking the page according to what they believe it to be and not according to what it actually is. That idea is purely a matter of principle, and nothing at all to do with ethics.

The ethical view is that, if a page is ranked correctly, according to its topic, then surfers will see it listed in the search results, click on the listing, and find what they expected to find at the other end. It doesn’t matter how the page came to be ranked in that position, and it doesn’t matter if another page took its place when the engine was evaluating it. As long as the ranking is correct according to its topic, and the page at the other end is what was expected when clicking on the listing, then surfers are perfectly happy.

Cloaking can be used unethically, by sending people to sites and topics that they did not expect to go to when clicking on a listing in the search results, and that is an excellent reason to be against the misuse of cloaking, but it doesn’t mean that cloaking is unethical. It just means that, like many other things, it has unethical uses.

An example of how cloaking can actually help Google

Google’s crawlers won’t spider pages that have anything that looks like Session IDs in their URLs. If they did, they run the risk of spidering a potentially infinite number of pages, because each page that is requested would contain links to other pages, and the link URLs would contain the current session ID, which makes them different URLs than the last time the page was requested. And so it would go on and on and on, producing a vast number of unique URLs to spider and index.

It means that Google won’t spider most of the pages on some websites. But Google actually wants to spider most or all of each website’s pages. The solution is to cloak the pages. By spotting page requests from the Google spiders, and delivering modified pages without the normal Session IDs in the link URLs, Google is able to spider all of a site’s pages. This is precisely what Google wants, it’s what the website owner wants and, if asked, it would be what sufers want. It helps everybody and harms no-one.

This example alone demonstrates that cloaking is not intrinsically wrong or unethical. The technique can be used unethically, but it has various perfectly ethical uses.

Misuses of the word “cloaking”

Over the years, some people have mistakenly used the word “cloaking” to describe methods that are not cloaking. One of the mistakes is that all IP delivery is cloaking. It isn’t. IP delivery is delivering content on the basis of the IP address (just like cloaking), but it doesn’t involve creating special pages for search engines, and it doesn’t involve hiding a site’s normal pages from search engines, so it isn’t cloaking. The cloaking method is about creating and delivering special pages for search engines, and hiding the site’s normal pages from them.

Another mistake is that conditional auto-redirecting is cloaking. It isn’t. It’s conditional auto-redirecting. Search engines do it all the time, by sending people to their local search engine version when they type the .com address into the browser’s address bar. They use a person’s IP address to determine where s/he is in the world, and automatically redirect the person the local version of the engine.

Cloaking is the technique of creating special pages for search engines, delivering those pages to the engines when they request normal pages, and hiding the normal pages from them. Other methods have their own names, but they are not cloaking.

Cloaking was quite common when search engines used a page’s content to determine its ranking, but when Google became popular, and other big engines followed Google’s lead, rankings became mainly links-based. Page content is still used for rankings, but it doesn’t have the weight that it used to have, so cloaking isn’t as common now as it used to be. For this reason, it is probable that a great many people never learned how cloaking works, but they often come across the word being used, so they incorrectly attribute other things to cloaking, because the word “cloaking” could conceivably be used to describe them. But cloaking is a method that works in a very specific way, and using the word to describe other methods is a mistake that sometimes causes confusion.

Google PR update list

Are you always anxious of waiting google pr update? me too. In fact the intervals between updates� are various, please have a look at the google update history table at this page.

But as you see the last GDPR Export hold off over 201 days, and who knows how long it will take yet. Seems google prepares some surpris for us.

Find Keywords for Google

One of the most annoying thing for web developers over the last five years has been the customer insistence on “keywords”. Mainly because of all the misunderstandings surrounding that term.

Customers would even call or email asking if we could buy some keywords for them.

And woe betide us if they couldn’t be found in the search engines for a certain query. It had to be our fault because we had forgotten the keyword!

So at their insistence, we felt compelled to waste our time adding all those barely relevant terms to their web pages.

We felt compelled because we knew it was a completely useless addition to the website.

Of course, the main reason keywords didn’t work was because everyone abused them. So in the end, search engines just said, let’s ignore the keywords and concentrate on what this website is REALLY about, rather than what the web owner would like us to think it is about.

But for about a year now we’ve had the feeling that just maybe they were starting to matter again.

Yesterday, I was researching “web 2 design”. (In fact, I should probably have been researching “web 2.0 design”, and my search results might have been more prolific. But it is often wise to get round the terms rather than hit them straight on.)

So after digging my fill of O’Reilly, and spoiling my head with del.icio.us flickr’s, I was doing some housekeeping on this site and, without much thought, I added the phrase mentioned earlier to the keywords of one of the pages. That was yesterday.

This evening I continued my researches, and hit Google again with the same query. What a shockeroonie. We are (probably were, by the time anyone reads this) top of the world for the phrase ‘web 2 design’.

Of course, after the initial surprise, I realized it is not as clearcuttingly in favour of the keywords thesis as it might first seem.

We are probably the only website in the world that happens to have mentioned that phrase anywhere on the site at all - how modern are we!- and the keyword does come into action in this case.

More research needed.

What is google sandbox

I’m always asked what is sandbox of google, and I try to explain them with common words, so let me make another attempt to explain google’s sandbox, I researched it’s operating from practise and read some appropriate resources about it, In conclusion my idea about sandbox as follow:

Sandbox is so called filter which developed in 2004. The filter put in its box all new born sites and mark them as “new” site, until they are get “trusted”. This affect on the sites SERP’s (search engine results pages), untill google keep out the new website from its sandbox. The new website might appears in the result pages, for non competitve keywords or phrases, but when it come to competitve keywords, then it is no where. The reason of the filter is to keep new websites from having prompt success in the search engine result pages.

The sandbox affect to all newly websites. It is important to note that the filter is not a punishment for anything a webmaster does with a new website. The filter is merely an initiation period for new websites.

So, if you createed new website and submitted on google, even linked from other sites, your site will be kept in sandbox for a while, weeks, month, nobody know, except google. Be pathient, and go ahead with natural content building and link exchange, once you will get it. This sandbox is pointed against spam websites, and if your website is quality enough, then no reason to worry about., Google will go on to change it algo concerning inbound links and content, but the basic elements of ranking will remain the same.

Wikipedia here and there

Whatever I search for in google en.wikipedia.org comes in top results, this new informative website come in my attention recently. This is huge free encyclopedia with144,000,000 internal pages (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-40,GGLD:en&q=site:en.wikipedia.org).

What I found out the Wikipedia is open encyclopedia website which edited by anybody who want to. The software was� developed by Ward Cunningham in 1995 (Wiki Wiki Web). The idea behind such sites is to create truly communal repositories of knowledge where the contribution cost is so low as to allow novice and expert users alike to act as active members of a community.

In another word Wiki is a kind of website that permit internet users to visit the website to add, remove, or edit all content directly, usually without membership. This easy way makes Wiki to grow up rapidly and to be an effective community and knowledgeble resource.

But my doubt in spam on this kind of website, because if anyone has access to content, then the site can be place of rubbish for some bad people(spammers), even any kind of spam filters woun’t help.

Whether you have any important or unique information in your mind, then the Wiki is a place to post your idea in written form, this would also help you to promote your link along with useful information for people who look for the resource you added.

Let robots submit your website automaticly

Do you know there is software and services available, which will give you an opportunity to automatically submit your page or articles you h to web sites and to newsletters?
Some people send out a dozen or more like this everyday. Is this doing them any good? Well maybe yes, and maybe no. Let’s first examine the different types of web sites that accept free ads, and why.

Many web sites that accept free ads, do it purely to collect email addresses, which they can then sell as targeted lists. They don’t really care if your ad is ever seen. In fact, many have a high limit of 300 ads. When the next one is submitted, the oldest is dropped, and the process continues.

With thousands of ads submitted hourly, how long do you think your ad will remain on their site - a minute or two - hardly worth your time. The flip side is you will suddenly find a lot more unsolicited email arriving daily from those who bought your address. If you like receiving unsolicited email, I guess this is good.

Other web sites do care if your ad is seen. So what is their motive? They are trying to build an advertiser base, and hope you will purchase a paid ad from them. Ads submitted to sites like this usually have a life of a week or more, and can be renewed indefinitely. Their goal is to attract people to their site and hope that you do business as a result of your ad.

The first group couldn’t care less if you send them multiple email addresses on a frequent basis - they never see the ads. Their software automatically collects your email address, checks for duplicates, and adds it to their file.

The second group however, and all newsletters published on a regular basis that allow free ads, are a different story. When they receive ads, each one is checked manually. They usually only permit one ad per cycle, and if you submit 7-12 ads a day, you will quickly overwhelm their processing capabilities. To them, this is spamming. Their only recourse is to “fight fire with fire”. What they do is automatically filter out the ads submitted using this type of software. They will never see your ad submissions.

So what does this automatic submission software do for/to you. In the first example, your ads might have a useful life measured in minutes. In the second case your ads are “blocked” from the sites that will produce your best results.

Once you are blocked (depending on how they do it) you may never be able to submit ads to these quality sites again - even if you do it manually. Some block at the email address level. Once an address is blocked, their filters will automatically delete your incoming email, whether it is an ad or not. Maybe automatic submission isn’t the best investment you could make.

Some companies are sending out articles written by “would be authors” for a fee. These articles cover the gamut from Aardvark hunting to Zip Lock Bags and are not targeted at all. Most reputable publishers have a relationship with authors that have been around for awhile, and have grown to trust them. They trust not only the accuracy of their content, but also know that their grammar and spelling are up to par, and they won’t have to do a rewrite of their article. Most publishers simply trash articles received like this, and for the most part it is not a good investment.

Did you know that subscribers to Bob Osgoodby’s Free Ezine the “Tip of the Day” get a Free Ad for their Business at his Web Site? Great Business and Computer Tips - Monday. Wednesday. And Friday. Instructions on how to place an ad are in the Newsletter. Subscribe at: http://adv-marketing.com/business/subscribe2.htm
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