Attempt value of a link

Most important elements search engines look at when attempting to value a link:

• The Anchor Text of Link - Anchor text describes the visible characters and words that hyperlink to another document or location on the web. For example in the phrase, "IBNLive is a good source of news, but I actually prefer the IBN’s take on events," two unparallel pieces of anchor text exist - "IBN" is the anchor text pointing to http://www.ibnlive.com/news/ while "the IBN's take on news" points to http://www.ibnlive.com/news/ Search engines use this text to help them determine the subject matter of the linked-to document. In the example above, the links would tell the search engine that when users search for "IBN", we think that http://www.ibnlive.com /is a relevant site for the term "IBN" and that www.ibnlive.com and relevant to "the IBN's take on news". If hundreds or thousands of sites think that a peculiar page is applicable for a given set of terms, that page can manage to rank well even if the terms NEVER seem in the text itself
• Global Popularity of the Site - More popular sites, as announced by the number and power of the links pointing to them, provide more powerful links. Thus, while a link from may be a valuable vote for a site, a link from ibnlive.com or usatoday.com carries far more weight. This is one area where Page Rank (taking over it was precise), could be a good assess, as it's planned to compute world-wide quality.

• Popularity of Site in Applicable Communities - In the example above, the weight or power of a site's vote is based on its raw popularity across the web. As search engines became more advanced and granular in their access to link data, they recognized the existence of "current communities"; sites on the same subject that often interlink with one another, citing documents and rendering unique data on a peculiar topic. Sites in these communities provide more value when they link to a site/page on a relevant subject rather than a site that is largely irrelevant to their topic.

• Text Directly bordering the Link - Search engines have been noted to weight the text directly bordering the link with keen important and applicable than the other text on the page. Thus, a link from inside an on-topic paragraph may carry greater weight than a link in the sidebar or footer.

• Subject Matter of the Indexing Page - The current relationship between the subject of a given page and the sites/pages get linked to on it & the factor into the value a search engine allots to that link. Thus, it will be more worthful to have links from pages that are related to the site/pages subject matter than those that have trivial to do with the topic.

These are only a few of the many factors search engines measure and weight when evaluating links.

Search Engines Index

Search engines index the web's link structure and page contents, they find two distinct kinds of information about a given site or page - attributes of the page/site itself and descriptive about that site/page from other pages. Since the web is such a commercial place, with so many parties interested in ranking well for particular searches, the engines have learned that they cannot always rely on websites to be honest about their importance.

The theory goes that if hundreds or thousands of other websites link to you, your site must be popular, and thus, have value. If those links come from very popular and important and trust able websites, their ability is reproduced to even greater degrees. Links from sites like USAToday.com, edu. Gov.in and many others carry with them underlying trust that search engines then use to promote your ranking position. If, on the other hand, the links that point to you are from low-quality, interconnected sites or automated garbage domains, search engines have systems in place to discount the value of those links.

The most well-known system for ranking sites based on associate data is the simple minded formula developed by Google's founders - Page Rank.

Page Rank, which trusts on log-based figuring’s, is described by Google in their Technology section:

Page Rank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.

Page Rank is gained by mixing all the links that point to a particular page, adding the value of the Page Rank those they pass (based on their own Page Rank)

Google's tool bar includes an icon that shows a Page Rank value from 0-10

Page Rank, in center, measures the brute link force of a site based on every other link that points to it without significant regard for quality, relevance or trust. Hence, in the modern epoch of SEO, the Page Rank measurement in Google's tool bar, directory or through sites that query the service is of limited value. Pages with PR8 can be found ranked 20-30 positions below pages with a PR3 or PR4. In addition, the tool bar numbers are updated only every 3-6 months by Google, making the values even less useful. Rather than focusing on Page Rank, it's important to think holistically about a link's worth.

Measuring Relevance and Popularity

Modern commercial search engines rely on the science of information recovery (IR). That science has existed since the middle of the 20th century, when recovery systems powered computers in libraries, research facilities and government labs. Early in the development of search systems, IR scientists realized that two critical components made up the majority of search functionality:

Relevance - The degree to which the content of the documents returned in a search matched the user's query intention and terms. The relevance of a document increases if the terms or phrase queried by the user occurs multiple times and shows up in the title of the work or in important headlines or sub headers.

Quality - The relative importance, measured via reference of a given document that matches the user's query. The popularity of a given document increases with every other document that references it.

These two items were translated to web search 40 years later and certify themselves in the form of document analysis and link analysis.

In document analysis, search engines look at whether the search terms are found in important areas of the document - the Title, the Meta data, the Heading Tags and the Body of text content. They also undertake to automatically measure the quality of the document (through complex systems beyond the scope of this guide).

In link analysis, search engines measure not only who is linking to a website or page, but what they are saying about their page/website. They also have a good appreciation on who is affiliated with whom (through historical link data, the website's registration records and other sources), who is suitable of being trusted (links from .edu and .gov pages are generally more valuable for this reason) and contextual data about the site the page is hosted on (who links to that site, what they say about the site, etc.).

Link and document analysis combine and overlap hundreds of factors that can be individually measured and filtered through the search engine algorithms (the set of instructions that tell the engines what importance to assign to each factor). The algorithm then determines scoring for the documents and (ideally) lists results in decreasing order of importance (rankings).

Speed Bumps and Walls

Certain types of navigation may block or entirely prevent search engines from reaching your website's content. As search engine spiders crawl the web, they trust on the computer architecture of hyperlinks to find new documents and revisit those that may have changed. In the analogy of speed bumps and walls, complex links and deep site structures with little unique content may serve as "encounters." Data that cannot be accessed by spider able links qualify as "fences."
Possible "Speed Hindrance" for SE Spiders:
• URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters; i.e. http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom% (spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors)
• Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each one)
• Pages immersed more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages)
• Pages requiring a "Session ID" or Cookie to enable navigation (spiders may not be able to retain these elements as a browser user can)
• Pages that are split into "frames" can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.
Possible "Fences" for SE Spiders:
• Pages approachable only through a select form and submit button
• Pages requiring a drop down menu (HTML attribute) to access them
• Documents accessible only via a search box
• Documents blocked purposefully (via a robots meta tag or robots.txt file)
• Pages requiring a login
• Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this draping or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic)
The key to ensuring that a site's contents are fully crawl able is to provide direct, HTML links to each page you want the search engine spiders to index. Remember that if a page cannot be accessed from the home page (where most spiders are likely to start their crawl) it is likely that it will not be indexed by the search engines. A sitemap (which is discussed later in this guide) can be of tremendous help for this purpose.

Search Engine Operations

Search engines have a short list of critical operations that allows them to provide relevant web results when searchers use their system to find information.

Crawling the Web
Search engines run automated programs, called "bots" or "spiders" that use the hyperlink structure of the web to "crawl" the pages and documents that make up the World Wide Web. Estimates are that of the approximately 20 billion existing pages, search engines have crawled between 8 and 10 billion.

Indexing Documents
once a page has been crawled, its contents can be "indexed" - stored in a giant database of documents that makes up a search engine's "index". This index needs to be tightly managed, so that requests which must search and sort billions of documents can be completed in fractions of a second.

Processing Queries
When a request for information comes into the search engine (hundreds of millions do each day), the engine retrieves from its index the entire document that match the query. A match is determined if the terms or phrase is found on the page in the manner specified by the user. For example, a search for PC Magazine at Google returns 155,000,000 results, but a search for the same phrase in quotes ("PC Magazine") returns only 4,990,000 results. In the first system, commonly called "Find all" mode, Google returned all documents which had the terms "PC" and "magazine" (they ignore the term "and" because it's not useful to narrowing the results), while in the second search, only those pages with the exact phrase "PC magazine" were returned. Other advanced operators Google can change the results as search engine will consider a match for a given query.

Ranking Results
once the search engine has determined which results are a match for the query, the engine's algorithm (a mathematical equation commonly used for sorting) runs calculations on each of the results to determine which is most relevant to the given query. They sort these on the results pages in order from most relevant to least so that users can make a choice about which to select.

Optimized Website

When a search engine spider like Google bot analyzes a web page, it determines relevancy based on the search engines algorithm, a formula that calculates how web pages are ranked in that search engines results pages (SERPs). The most important search engine (generates most traffic), Google bases it's algorithm on at least 100 factors with both on page factors; body text, page title, headers etc... And off page factors; links to the page, especially the anchor text and Page Rank (PR) of links ranking highly.

As a firm of SEO consultants we've analyzed and reanalyzed almost every aspect of the search engine algorithms and this SEO Tutorial (when complete) will reveal the secrets of the search engines.

Pay per click

Pay-per-click (PPC) search engines are those that offer the marketing option called "pay-per-click" to users. PPC is defined as the guaranteed placement of a small "ad" on the search results page for a specific keyword or keywords in return for a specified payment, but ONLY when a visitor clicks on that ad. The advertiser pays nothing to appear on the results page; they only pay the amount they have agreed to (or bid for) when someone actually clicks on their ad and is taken to their landing page; therefore, the term "pay per click".

A PPC listing on a search engine results page typically consists of a title, which usually is your website's name or perhaps a short heading (around 50 characters maximum) and also a short (usually no more than 200 characters long) description of your service or some promotional wording. Some PPC search engines strictly control the text that can appear in the listing, while others are more open to using the advertiser's own text.

Keyword Phrase SEO

Keyword Research is by far the most important aspect in any Search Engine Optimization initiative. This article shall discuss the important aspects- of keyword research process.

Keyword Phrase Research is processes of selecting the most “optimum performance” keyword phrases that can help visitors find your site. You may have spent days and months on fine-tuning your web pages for a better ranking with the major search engines, yet it will all amount to a big waste if the right keyword phrases are not targeted. It’s like not being able to reach your destination even after running your best race because you started out on the wrong road. Even if you achieve high search engine rankings, you may not get relevant traffic if you select the wrong keywords. Therefore, the foremost step in any SEO campaign is identifying your target audience and researching what keyword phrases they might be searching in the search engines to locate a site like yours.

For any marketing strategy to succeed, it is critical to know your audience and the means to reach them. A certain focus is required which could be location specific, region specific or country specific; it could be business, trade, service, product specific, since we are talking specific audience. For instance, a dentist practicing in a particular town would most likely target people living in the same region, instead of targeting the entire country. Focus on region would help her get targeted visitors, not just wasted traffic.

Facts, Not Gut Feel

A common pitfall is to start the website optimization exercise with a set of “gut-feel” keyword phrases. Site owners often come up with ‘common sense looking’ key phrases, which though look obvious, may not match with the ones your buyers are using as their search term. Very often, being from within the trade narrows the vision and you tend to assume those trade- specific terms are easily understood and popularly used. Not so. You need to think out of the box.

Facts are sacred in website optimization as they provide the exact data of what people are actually searching for, thus saving you from starting on a wild goose chase. As mentioned earlier, targeting the wrong key phrases might get you a good ranking for keywords that have few or no search requests or just get you irrelevant junk traffic. So, how does one get the facts and the data regarding a particular search term? There are several online keyword research tools like Word tracker and Overture, which offer data pertaining to your search term. Relying on search tools to analyze keyword phrase data helps you to get a grip on your target audience.

Leveraging

Whether it's called networking, word-of-mouth or some trendy buzzword, such as “leveraging” or “viral marketing,” getting the word out about your products and services with every human contact you make has been one of the most effective marketing tools long before e-commerce.

When you operate an e-commerce website, the key entity you own is your domain name, which is effectively your company name. And the best way to succeed in your business is to attract as many potential customers to your website as possible by continually spreading the domain name, your address on the Web, in any ethical way possible.

You can include this web address on all your business cards and as part of your signature at the bottom of all your e-mail messages. Just think of all the times business cards are passed on and messages are forwarded, creating countless opportunities for your Web address to be noticed at little cost.

If you attend trade shows, look at all the companies that give away freebies, such as T-shirts and pens and refrigerator magnets, imprinted with their web addresses. Doing the same will give potential customers an item that will get the FunnyWidgets.com address before them every time they use the item.

Press releases are another inexpensive and effective marketing tool—if they are targeted to the appropriate newspapers and magazines. A press release about your new products sent to Widgets & Gizmos Quarterly magazine, for example, might lead to a call from a writer seeking more information and an article—and plenty of free publicity to your target audience—about your products and company.

Even though you are operating in the online sphere, don't forget traditional forms of advertising. Print, television and radio ads have often proven effective in attracting website visitors. Even billboards can draw in visitors as passing motorists make a mental note of a catchy website name and are curious to see what it's all about.

Back in the online world, there are other ways to promote your website, although you'll want to be careful not to antagonize Internet users weary from blatant marketing pitches where they don't belong. Posting information, along with your website address, in newsgroups and mailing lists can draw in visitors if you are providing information newsgroups and mailing list subscribers want and not just blindly spamming them.

Another online marketing technique is to approach websites with products and services related to yours and offer to publish links to their websites if they will reciprocate. Driving web visitors from you website to theirs and vice versa is often a great way to boost sales for all involved.

Pro-Active Marketing

E-mail marketing has got a bad name, and who can really blame weary consumers from turning a deaf ear to e-mailed marketing pitches when they receive hundreds and even more than a thousand useless spam messages each day.

Still if you are using e-mail to market products and services and communicate with customers can be effective when used responsibly and ethically.

It’s inexpensive, as you can send simple text messages to many customers for just pennies. Second, it's effective if you can tailor the message to your customers' wants and needs, don't inundate them with marketing pitches, provide a degree of customization and personalization so they feel like valued customers, and provide an opportunity to easily join or leave your mailing lists.

The easy and ethical way to gather the e-mail addresses of interested customers is to let them request more information about your products and services through your website. Creating a simple website form that will direct messages to your e-mail account is matter of some basic HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) skills.

Perhaps you can provide them something useful in exchange for their e-mail address, which can go a long way toward promoting good will with your customers.

Say, for example, you have a website specialized in sale of high-quality yarn. When customers give you their e-mail addresses requesting information, you can have them receive your free e-mailed newsletter, where you offer tips on choosing the right yarn for different types of crocheting, crocheting tips, etc—maybe even an offer code giving them the opportunity to receive $2 off their next purchase if they are a repeat valued customer.

This type of pro-active marketing is a great way to keep valued customers coming back to shop at your website.

Another tried-and-true method is acquiring e-mail lists from reputable list brokers. If you choose a targeted list wisely, you gain access to an excellent database of potential customers who are likely to be interested in your products and services and will not mind if you contact them via e-mail.

For more sophisticated e-mail marketing campaigns, you may want to consider an e-mail marketing service that has set up shop on the Internet. Many offer many products and services, such as e-mail lists, bulk-mailing software, message customization, and ways to track customer response and ROI (return on investment).

Banner Advertisements.

Advertising with “banners” on websites was all the rage in the late 1990s and was considered by many as the best way to reach potential customers online. Some of the enthusiasm about banner advertisements has faded, but pitching products with banner ads has endured.

Banners ads, even elaborate ones with graphics and movement, are basically simple HTML files inserted as a rectangular graphical form into a web page, and many are easy to create inexpensively. If web page visitors are interested, they will click the ad, which acts as a hyperlink to the e-commerce website that the advertiser wants them to visit.

There are typically eight sizes of banner ads offered, usually as horizontal rectangles although vertical ads and squares are also popular. The size of the ad and its complexity (and sometimes its memory size) helps determine its cost, much like an advertisement placed in a newspaper or magazine.

Ads can be as simple as just text, although that's not probably the best option in the multimedia world of today's Web. Usually, text is accompanied by artwork or a graphic of some kind, and creating full-motion ads with video and even audio are increasingly popular. More complex ads will require experienced professional designers skilled at making the banners attractive while conforming to the technical specifications of the website on which the retailer is advertising.

An important consideration when buying banner advertising is being able to measure its effectiveness. One measurement offered by advertisers is “click-through,” which is the percentage of Internet users visiting a web page who click on the ad. Even small click-through rates of 1 or 2 percent are considered effective.

Another measure is the number of “impressions” or “page views” an ad makes. This is simply the number of times a web page containing the ad was viewed, regardless of whether the visitor clicked the ad or not. This is roughly analogous to selling a radio ad based upon the number of listeners, without any real idea if they did or didn't pay attention to it.

Retailers will want to gauge the effectiveness of their banner ads by determining their sales achieved from banner advertising compared to the cost. Most banner ad sales firms will be able to provide this information in their sales pitch.

There are many approaches about where to place banner ads. Sometimes, of course, salespeople will come knocking, hoping you will advertise on their websites and detailing their success rates with sales figures, click-through rates and promised impressions.

Alternatively, you can do the knocking and approach websites on which you want to advertise. This approach gives you better control over which websites your banner ads will appear. Often, Internet marketers will represent many different websites, so you may not always know exactly where your ads will appear. This may be off-putting to some who want tight control over their company's advertising and marketing messages.

If ad budgets are tight, an alternative may be to join a “banner network,” in which you exchange space for websites' banners and other links with other website operators. Joining some of these networks is free (if you agree to their terms and conditions), but most charge fees. It's important to keep in mind that you can lose some control of your advertising and marketing messages as you may not be aware of all the sites on which you are advertising.