Search Engine Optimization

How much weight do links have?

 You can find part 1 of FAQs over here.

Link building is one of the most important elements of SEO. Here is what Google has to say about links:

“PageRank 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 more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; 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.”

Search engines rely on links to determine relevancy of websites. If a site on mortgages has a high number of links from websites on mortgages, search engines will consider it important and give it good visibility.

There are other, off page link factors that search engines take into consideration. For Example:

• Anchor text (a word or a phrase containing the actual link). If a limousine service website gets a link from another highly important limousine website and that link has a keyword in it, search engines will give a lot of weight to thank link. For example:“You can find limousines here” is better than “You can find limousines here”

Search engines also consider text close to the link.

Links increase the overall visibility of a website. If two exact website were taken and website A had 20 links, while website B had 500 links, website B would beat website A for almost every keyword.

How does link building work.

There is a number of link building techniques.

Asking for a link. Involves emailing the site of interest and requesting to be linked. One of the hardest SEO tasks since it involves deep research into vast amounts of websites. Manual requests, submissions and exchanges – most effective long term link building strategies.

Directory Submission. A number of directories offer free submissions as well as pay for submissions, with specified anchor text(link text) and description. The example would be Yahoo!, Business.com.

Link Bait. Link bait is described as the content, so useful in its nature that people voluntarily link to it. Link bait can be anything. One of the most popular baits is written content. Offering very valuable article usually gets people linking without requests, creating natural, automatic link building opportunity.

Does correct HTML markup has any impact?

It is said that splitting presentational code(CSS) from content(HTML) helps to increase search engine rankings. We need to remember that search engines designed their spiders before CSS standards. Spiders were meant to punch through numerous tables and this stays true to this day.

Search engines will not genereally have any problems if an article is inside the table, but it is best to stay away from too many nested tables (one inside the other). By separating data from design with HTML/CSS code, optimizers can communicate with spiders more efficiently.

Does Meta information matter? (Meta Keywords, Meta Description)

Meta Keywords (code within the page containing keywords) do not play any role in the ranking process since it is too easy to manipulate it. Practical use for meta keywords tag is to include misspellings of the most commonly used keywords.

Meta description (code within the page containing short description of the page) has much more weight. It does not affect rankings, but is used for presentational purposes. Short description beneath the link on search results is usually pulled from “meta description”.
If there is no meta description, search engines will pull random snippets from the website, which may not as compelling to your target audience as a swift and informative call to action.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Term Black Hat SEO refers to manipulation of search engines in an effort to get high search engine rankings. The practice may involve: link farms, cloaking, keyword stuffing, spam indexing, interlinking and more. Black Hat is also referred to as spam. Search engines do not tolerate any manipulation. If a website is found to be using banned methods, in most cases, it gets permanently banned from search results. Some advanced “Black Hatters” may manage to get the website up on top, however search engines spend million of dollars keeping their results clean and spam free. Such websites get quickly caught and banned.

The only path to long term search success is through proven, approved methods. Learn more about SEO at SEO Book.

Today Steve Ballmer sent a letter to Yahoo, walking away from the deal.

Also check a very interesting article by Danny at Search Engine Land regarding this.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons . . .

Microsoft and Yahoo had been genuinely negotiating, apparently, for the first time toward the end of this past week, after Microsoft increased its bid to $33 per share. But Yahoo and its largest shareholders were still holding out for $2 to $4 more per share. Yahoo may see its stock lose considerable value on Monday in reaction to the move.

Here’s the full text of the letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer:

Dear Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

· First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.

· Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.

· In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.

· This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.

· It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.
Sincerely yours,

/s/ Steven A. Ballmer

Steven A. Ballmer

Chief Executive Officer

Microsoft Corporation

How do Search Engines Operate?

Search Engine Operations can be broken down into 3 sections:

1. Crawling. Search Engines send out bots, referred to as spiders, which crawl the web and copy websites to search engine storage servers. Spiders follow every link they see unless specified otherwise with rel=”nofollow” attribute within a link(tells spiders not to follow) or with exclusion command in robot.txt file (file on the website server that has instructions for spiders). In some instances sophisticated scripts or dynamic pages are not indexed due to their complexities.

2. Indexing. Once a page is crawled, its copy gets stored on servers for later examination. Information retrieved gets organized and prepared for processing.

3. Ranking. When users run a query, search engines determine relevancy of a website to that query by putting it through as set of algorithms (mathematical equations) that look at more than a 100 factors. Algorithms analyze: links, anchor text of a link, text next to the links, pages from which the link is received, as well as on page factors such as headers, page names, file names, navigation and more. Once analyzed, websites are presented in SERPs(Search Engine Result Pages) from the most relevant to the least relevant. This is done in advance.

What are the obstacles to search engine visibilty?

The biggest bricks on the road are:

• Long tail URLs. For example: http://yoursite.com/0EHND0/ref=2?pfrdm=AIKDER&pf%rd%s=center-0-1&pf Search engines have trouble identifying it and users have no idea as to what may be contained within.
• Pages using frames confuse spiders as to what to show in the results.

Best way to ensure that all pages get indexed, is to include a sitemap. A sitemap is a page that contains links to all other pages. It is also useful to ensure that homepage links to the most important pages, since homepage is most likely the first page that search engines will see.

What is Keyword Research? What are the guidelines?

Search Engine Optimization starts with keyword research. Keyword research is the practice of sourcing customer determined keywords that are most commonly used in a specific industry. Successful keyword research makes a difference of targeting right audience or shouting for the wrong crowd.

The guidelines are to find the most relevant, traffic rich terms that will generate the highest return on investment. In most cases longer, refined terms are the best way to go. For example. Instead of targeting people looking for “men suits”, it is more beneficial to target “Calvin Klein Double Breasted Suits” since prospects looking with second phrase are more likely to buy, because they’ve already made up their mind. Though there may be less traffic with such keywords, longer, refined terms tend to convert more.

In some industries however, general terms are the way to go. Mortgage field is better off targeting “mortgages”, “home loans” and so on. It all comes down to the industry. It is essential to get the keywords right, because SEO campaign will be worthless if the keywords targeted are wrong.

What keyword research tools do you use?

Number of companies offer keyword research platforms including major search engines.

• Google Tool – offers free, keyword research tool.
• Yahoo Search Marketing – offers keyword research for it’s pay per click subscribers.
• WordTracker – professional, subscription based service. Gathers data from a large network of smaller search engines. Also has a free tool.
• Keyword Discovery – professional, subscription based service. Gathers data from 180 small search engines, as well as 3.5 million toolbar users. Free tool.

The most effective keyword research comes from a combination of tools. As SEO professionals we conduct keyword research using all of these tools in an effort to source the most relevant, traffic rich terms for our clients.

What are critical SEO components?

Title Tags. It is crucial to include keywords within titles, as well to write compelling, interesting titles that draw visitors from search engines. Page titles are one of the most important on-page factors that affect search rankings.

Body Text. Search Engine Bots need to see and read your copy in order to analyze the keywords. Website does not stand a chance of being featured is search results if it cannot be crawled. This is why flash is bad in terms of SEO. Spiders do not see text within flash, so it is crucial to feature content accessible to spiders in HTML..

Domain Name. A good, old domain name containing one of your keywords increases the chances of being featured on the first page by 20-30%.

Website Elements. Elements such as image names, URLs, folders, file names, ALT tags – all play their part in the ranking process. It is best to look at them as essential pieces, where a separate piece does not have as much weight, but combined, they boost rankings quite a bit.

Links. There is no search visibility if there are no links. Links are the most important factors that affect search rankings. Not all links are equal.

Part 2

An American who sent hundreds of thousands of spam emails was recently sentenced to 21 months of prison after pleading guilty of counts of tax avoidance and email headers falsification.

Edward “Eddie” Davidson, 35 years, of Louisville in Colorado, will have to also give nearly 715 000$ to the IRS – Internal Revenue Service.

It’s a good thing that spammers are actually going to jail for their actions because I’m one of their victims: I get approximately 60 &%?$@ spam every single day!!!

Each HTML document must begin with a document type declaration that declares which version of HTML the document adheres to. There’s a few common DOCTYPE declarations:

HTML 4 Strict

HTML 4 Strict is a trimmed down version of HTML 4 that emphasizes structure over presentation. Deprecated elements and attributes (including most presentational attributes), frames, and link targets are not allowed in HTML 4 Strict. By writing to HTML 4 Strict, authors can achieve accessible, structurally rich documents that easily adapt to style sheets and different browsing situations. However, HTML 4 Strict documents may look bland on very old browsers that lack support for style sheets.The document type declaration for HTML 4.01 Strict is

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

Newer browsers such as Internet Explorer 5 for Mac, Netscape 6, and Mozilla use a standards-compliant rendering for HTML 4 Strict documents. These browsers use a “quirks” mode for most other document types to emulate rendering bugs in older browsers.

 

 

HTML 4 Transitional

HTML 4 Transitional includes all elements and attributes of HTML 4 Strict but adds presentational attributes, deprecated elements, and link targets.The document type declaration for HTML 4.01 Transitional is

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

Newer browsers such as Internet Explorer 5 for Mac, Netscape 6, and Mozilla use a standards-compliant rendering for HTML 4.01 Transitional documents that include the URI of the DTD in the DOCTYPE. These browsers use a “quirks” mode to emulate rendering bugs in older browsers if the URI is omitted:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

 

 

XHTML 1.0 Strict

<!DOCTYPE htmlPUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

Use this when you want really clean markup, free of presentational clutter. Use this together with Cascading Style Sheets.

XHTML 1.0 Transitional

<!DOCTYPE htmlPUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Use this when you need to take advantage of HTML’s presentational features and when you want to support browsers that don’t understand Cascading Style Sheets.

Deciding between HTML and XHTML

The World Wide Web Consortium(W3C) recommends writing XHTML over HTML to better enable you to covert your documents to XHTML 2 when it arrives, so if this is something you plan to do, write XHTML now. If you find yourself having to take into consideration other factors, such as legacy applications or CMSs that are producing HTML 4 and if you need to save on bandwidth then it makes sense to use HTML 4 . But remember that it’s a dependent judgment on you own circumstances.