![will increase the chances for the page get to the top of search engine lists
for particular phrases.
White hat versus black hat techniques-
SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that
search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of
which search engines do not approve. The search engines attempt to
minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing. Industry
commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who
employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO.[29] White hats
tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate
that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or
permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.[30]
. An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search
engines' guidelines and involves no deception.. White hat SEO is not just
about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search
engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.
White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not
for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the
spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended
purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that
promotes accessibility although the two are not identical
Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved
of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique
uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in
an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different
page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor
or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.
Introduction to "robots.txt"
There is a hidden, relentless force that permeates the web and its billions
of web pages and files, unbeknownst to the majority of us sentient beings.
I'm talking about search engine crawlers and robots here. Every day
hundreds of them go out and scour the web, whether it's Google trying to
index the entire web, or a spam bot collecting any email address
it could find for less than honorable intentions. As site owners, what little
control we have over what robots are allowed to do when they visit our
sites exist in a magical little file called "robots.txt."](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/seo-manual4350/85/Seo-Manual-33-320.jpg)
Seo Manual
- 1. SEO Manual Introduction to seo This document is intended for webmasters and site owners who want to investigate the issues of seo (search engine optimization) and promotion of their resources. It is mainly aimed at beginners, although I hope that experienced webmasters will also find something new and interesting here. There are many articles on seo on the Internet and this text is an attempt to gather some of this information into a single consistent document. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is simply the act of manipulating the pages of your website to be easily accessible by search engine spiders so they can be easily spidered and indexed. Information presented in this text can be divided into several parts: - Clear-cut seo recommendations, practical guidelines. - Theoretical information that we think any seo specialist should know. - Seo tips, observations, recommendations from experience, other seo sources, etc. General seo information History of search engines In the early days of Internet development, its users were a privileged minority and the amount of available information was relatively small. Access was mainly restricted to employees of various universities and laboratories who used it to access scientific information. In those days, the problem of finding information on the Internet was not nearly as critical as it is now. Site directories were one of the first methods used to facilitate access to information resources on the network. Links to these resources were grouped by topic. Yahoo was the first project of this kind opened in April 1994. As the number of sites in the Yahoo directory inexorably increased, the developers of Yahoo made the directory searchable. Of course, it was not a search engine in its true form because searching was limited to those resources who’s listings were put into the directory. It did not actively seek out resources and the concept of seo was yet to arrive.
- 2. Such link directories have been used extensively in the past, but nowadays they have lost much of their popularity. The reason is simple – even modern directories with lots of resources only provide information on a tiny fraction of the Internet. For example, the largest directory on the network is currently DMOZ (or Open Directory Project). It contains information on about five million resources. Compare this with the Google search engine database containing more than eight billion documents. The WebCrawler project started in 1994 and was the first full-featured search engine. The Lycos and AltaVista search engines appeared in 1995 and for many years Alta Vista was the major player in this field. In 1997 Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google as a research project at Stanford University. Google is now the most popular search engine in the world. Currently, there are three leading international search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. They each have their own databases and search algorithms. Many other search engines use results originating from these three major search engines and the same seo expertise can be applied to all of them. For example, the AOL search engine (search.aol.com) uses the Google database while AltaVista, Lycos and AllTheWeb all use the Yahoo database. Common search engine principles To understand seo you need to be aware of the architecture of search engines. They all contain the following main components: Spider - a browser-like program that downloads web pages. Crawler – a program that automatically follows all of the links on each web page. Indexer - a program that analyzes web pages downloaded by the spider and the crawler. Database– storage for downloaded and processed pages. Results engine – extracts search results from the database. Web server – a server that is responsible for interaction between the user and other search engine components.
- 3. Specific implementations of search mechanisms may differ. For example, the Spider+Crawler+Indexer component group might be implemented as a single program that downloads web pages, analyzes them and then uses their links to find new resources. However, the components listed are inherent to all search engines and the seo principles are the same. Spider. This program downloads web pages just like a web browser. The difference is that a browser displays the information presented on each page (text, graphics, etc.) while a spider does not have any visual components and works directly with the underlying HTML code of the page. You may already know that there is an option in standard web browsers to view source HTML code. Crawler. This program finds all links on each page. Its task is to determine where the spider should go either by evaluating the links or according to a predefined list of addresses. The crawler follows these links and tries to find documents not already known to the search engine. Indexer. This component parses each page and analyzes the various elements, such as text, headers, structural or stylistic features, special HTML tags, etc. . Spider:- . This program downloads web pages just like a web browser. The difference is that a browser displays the information presented on each page (text, graphics, etc.) while a spider does not have any visual components and works directly with the underlying HTML code of the page. You may already know that there is an option in standard web browsers to view source HTML code. A spider is a robot that search engines use to check millions of web pages very quickly and sort them by relevance. A page is indexed when it is spidered and deemed appropriate content to be placed in the search engines results for people to click on. Crawler – . It is a program that automatically follows all of the links on each web page This program finds all links on each page. Its task is to determine where the spider should go either by evaluating the links or according to a predefined list of addresses. The crawler follows these links and tries to find documents not already known to the search engine.
- 4. Indexer – It is a program that analyzes web pages downloaded by the spider and the crawler. . This component parses each page and analyzes the various elements, such as text, headers, structural or stylistic features, special HTML tags, etc. Database. This is the storage area for the data that the search engine downloads and analyzes. Sometimes it is called the index of the search engine. Results Engine . The results engine ranks pages. It determines which pages best match a user's query and in what order the pages should be listed. This is done according to the ranking algorithms of the search engine. It follows that page rank is a valuable and interesting property and any seo specialist is most interested in it when trying to improve his site search results. In this article, we will discuss the seo factors that influence page rank in some detail. Web server. The search engine web server usually contains a HTML page with an input field where the user can specify the search query he or she is interested in. The web server is also responsible for displaying search results to the user in the form of an HTML page Google has a very simple 3-step procedure in handling a query submitted in its search box: 1. When the query is submitted and the enter key is pressed, the web server sends the query to the index servers. Index server is exactly what its 8 name suggests. It consists of an index much like the index of a book which displays where is the particular page containing the queried term is located in the entire book. 2. After this, the query proceeds to the doc servers, and these servers actually retrieve the stored documents. Page descriptions or “snippets” are then generated to suitably describe each search result. 3. These results are then returned to the user in less than a one second! (Normally.)
- 5. Google Dance:- Approximately once a month, Google updates their index by recalculating the Page Ranks of each of the web pages that they have crawled. The period during the update is known as the Google dance. Google has two other searchable servers apart from www.google.com. They are www2.google.com and www3.google.com. Most of the time, the results on all 3 servers are the same, but during the dance, they are different. Cloaking:- Sometimes, a webmaster might program the server in such a way that it returns different content to Google than it returns to regular users, which is often done to misrepresent search engine rankings. This process is referred to as cloaking as it conceals the actual website and returns distorted web pages to search engines crawling the site. This can mislead users about what they'll find when they click on a search result. Google highly disapproves of any such practice and might place a ban on the website which is found guilty of cloaking. Google Guidelines Here are some of the important tips and tricks that can be employed while dealing with Google. Do’s:- A website should have crystal clear hierarchy and links and should preferably be easy to navigate. A site map is required to help the users go around your site and in case the site map has more than 100 links, then it is advisable to break it into several pages to avoid clutter. Come up with essential and precise keywords and make sure that your website features relevant and informative content.
- 6. The Google crawler will not recognize text hidden in the images, so when describing important names, keywords or links; stick with plain text. The TITLE and ALT tags should be descriptive and accurate and the website should have no broken links or incorrect HTML. Dynamic pages (the URL consisting of a ‘?’ character) should be kept to a minimum as not every search engine spider is able to crawl them. The robots.txt file on your web server should be current and should not block the Googlebot crawler. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Don’ts:- When making a site, do not cheat your users, i.e. those people who will surf your website. Do not provide them with irrelevant content or present them with any fraudulent schemes. Avoid tricks or link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking. Do not employ hidden texts or hidden links. Google frowns upon websites using cloaking technique. Hence, it is advisable to avoid that. Automated queries should not be sent to Google. Avoid stuffing pages with irrelevant words and content. Also don't create multiple pages, subdomains,or domains with significantly duplicate content. Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with hardly any original content.
- 7. Step By Step Page Optimization:- Starting at the top of your index/home page something like this: (After your logo or header graphic) 1) A heading tag that includes a keyword(s) or keyword phrases. A heading tag is bigger and bolder text than normal body text, so a search engine places more importance on it because you emphasize it. 2) Heading sizes range from h1 - h6 with h1 being the largest text. If you learn to use just a little Cascading Style Sheet code you can control the size of your headings. You could set an h1 sized heading to be only slightly larger than your normal text if you choose, and the search engine will still see it as an important heading. 3) Next would be an introduction that describes your main theme. This would include several of your top keywords and keyword phrases. Repeat your top 1 or 2 keywords several times, include other keyword search terms too, but make it read in sentences that makes sense to your visitors. 4) A second paragraph could be added that got more specific using other words related to online education. 5) Next you could put smaller heading. 6) Then you'd list the links to your pages, and ideally have a brief decision of each link using keywords and keyword phrases in the text. You also want to have several pages of quality content to link to. Repeat that procedure for all your links that relate to your theme. 7) Next you might include a closing, keyword laden paragraph. More is not necessarily better when it comes to keywords, at least after a certain point. Writing "online education" fifty times across your page would probably result in you being caught for trying to cheat. Ideally, somewhere from 3% - 20% of your page text would be keywords. The percentage changes often and is different at each search engine. The 3-20 rule is a general guideline, and you can go higher if it makes sense and isn't redundant. 8) Finally, you can list your secondary content of book reviews,humor, and links. Skip the descriptions if they aren't necessary, or they may water down your theme too much. If you must include descriptions for these non- theme related links, keep them short and sweet. You also might include all
- 8. the other site sections as simply a link to another index that lists them all. You could call it Entertainment, Miscellaneous, or whatever. These can be sub-indexes that can be optimized toward their own theme, which is the ideal way to go. Creating correct content:- The content of a site plays an important role in site promotion for many reasons. We will describe some of them in this section. We will also give you some advice on how to populate your site with good content. - Content uniqueness. Search engines value new information that has not been published before. That is why you should compose own site text and not plagiarize excessively. A site based on materials taken from other sites is much less likely to get to the top in search engines. As a rule, original source material is always higher in search results. - While creating a site, remember that it is primarily created for human visitors, not search engines. Getting visitors to visit your site is only the first step and it is the easiest one. The truly difficult task is to make them stay on the site and convert them into purchasers. You can only do this by using good content that is interesting to real people. - Try to update information on the site and add new pages on a regular basis. Search engines value sites that are constantly developing. Also, the more useful text your site contains, the more visitors it attracts. Write articles on the topic of your site, publish visitors' opinions, create a forum for discussing your project. A forum is only useful if the number of visitors is sufficient for it to be active. Interesting and attractive content guarantees that the site will attract interested visitors. - A site created for people rather than search engines has a better chance of getting into important directories such as DMOZ and others. - An interesting site on a particular topic has much better chances to get links, comments, reviews, etc. from other sites on this topic. Such reviews can give you a good flow of visitors while inbound links from such resources will be highly valued by search engines.
- 9. Types of Search Engine Optimization There were two types of search engine optimization. 1 .Onpage Optimization 2 .Offpage Optimization 1.on-page optimization In search engine optimization, on-page optimization refers to factors that have an effect on your Web site or Web page listing in natural search results. These factors are controlled by you or by coding on your page. Examples of on-page optimization include actual HTML code, meta tags, keyword placement and keyword density. 2.off-page optimization In search engine optimization, off-page optimization refers to factors that have an effect on your Web site or Web page listing in natural search results. These factors are off-site in that they are not controlled by you or the coding on your page. Examples of off-page optimization include things such as link popularity and page rank. 1.On-page Optimization Techniques: The most important On Page optimization techniques include content optimization, the title-tag, several META-Tags, headlines & text decoration, alt- and title-attributes and continuous actualization.
- 10. (1) Content Optimization This is a tough one, because you should of course concentrate on your user and easy readability, but you always have to have an eye on the search engines as well. For your users clear what a certain page is about if written in the headline, but for search engines better to repeat the important keywords several times. So you have to strike the right balance: - Concentrate on your users first That what the website is about you don’t sell your products or services to search engines but to people. And if they don’t get what you are saying or find it hard to read through your website they very likely hit the back button of their browser and visit your competition. - Then modify for search engines If you got your text together go over it again and try to get some more keywords and phrases in where they fit and make sense. There is no certain amount or percentage that is best, just make sure to just use them a couple of times. The best ways to avoid using them too often are to use different words and phrases and to create some lists. Lists are always good to bring in some keywords. (2) TITLE-Tag This is one of the most important tags for search engines. Make use of this fact in your seo work. Keywords must be used in the TITLE tag. The link to your site that is normally displayed in search results will contain text derived from the TITLE tag. It functions as a sort of virtual business card for your pages. Often, the TITLE tag text is the first information about your website that the user sees. This is why it should not only contain keywords, but also be informative and attractive. You want the searcher to be tempted to click on your listed link and navigate to your website. As a rule, 50-80 characters from the TITLE tag are displayed in search results and so you should limit the size of the title to this length <title>Website title</title> It is displayed at the top of your browser and it is also used as the title of your website. Therefore you should take your time and think about the best title for your page. Important aspects of the title-tag: - Give every page of your website its own title and don’t use one title for the whole website. - It should contain no more than around 10-12 words. - Think of it as a short ad copy, because that basically it when users see them.
- 11. (3) META-Tags META-Tags are not as important any more as they used to be. That basically because people started using them to spam search engines “ especially the keyword-tag was heavily used for that. Nevertheless there are still some important META-Tags you should use <meta name= description content= /> The description-tag is probably the most important META-Tag. It is displayed and you should select it as carefully as the title-tag. Important aspects of the description-tag: - Give every page of your website its own description and don’t use one description for the whole website. - The description -tag is one of the few meta-tags that still positively influences your website’s ranking, so its good to use your most important keywords in it. - It should contain not more than around 25-30 words. - Think of it as a short ad copy, because that is basically it when users see them. description-tags they find if you have an entry at the DMOZ. This is especially helpful of you are not satisfied with the tags there, or you want to change them. Everyone who ever had something to do with changes at the DMOZ knows that we are not talking about days or weeks if it comes to how long that can take. So if you use the NOODP-Tag you are basically telling the search engines that they must not use the DMOZ entry, but the tags that are currently on your website. (4) Headlines & text decoration Headlines shouldn’t only be used to structure your content and keep it easy to read, but also for SEO reasons. Search engines tend to give headlines between <h1></h1>¦<h3></h3> tags more relevancy - <h1> being the most relevant headline. Just like the headlines also other text decorations can help search engines identify the most important party of your website. Use <strong> to mark some text where it is useful Everything of course with an eye on your defined keywords and phrases.
- 12. (5) «ALT» attributes in images:- «ALT» attributes are used to describe text-links and images. It is not only for search engine reasons you should use them, but also for accessibility. They are shown if you move the mouse over links and images. Besides, the alt-attribute is shown if the image is not (yet) loaded. Any page image has a special optional attribute known as "alternative text.” It is specified using the HTML «ALT» tag. This text will be displayed if the browser fails to download the image or if the browser image display is disabled. Search engines save the value of image ALT attributes when they parse (index) pages, but do not use it to rank search results. (6) Keep it up-to-date Search engines always want new content, so feed them! Not only your website will grow automatically if you always add something to it, but also search engines tend to spider your website more often if they always find something new. 2. Offpage Optimization- Off-page optimization (off-page SEO) are strategies for search engine optimization that are done off the pages of a website to maximize its performance in the search engines for target keywords related to the page content. Examples of off-page optimization include linking, and placing keywords within link anchor text. Methods of obtaining links can also be considered off-page optimization. These include: 1.Public relations 2.Article distribution 3.Social networking via sites like Digg and Slashdot 4.Link campaigns, such as asking complementary businesses to provide links 5.Directory listings 6.Link exchanges 7.Three-way linking 8.One-way linking 9.Blogging 10.Forum posting 11.Multiway linking The number 1 off page optimization technique is link building. Getting top
- 13. quality links from established sites is an absolute must for any webmaster who is serious about developing his online business. Here are the top three ways of getting quality one way links: 1. Article Marketing Writing articles related to your niche and sending them to hundreds of high traffic article directories can rapidly increase your site's traffic and generate permanent one way links that will improve rankings. Just remember to write a good resource box and make sure you include a link back to your site, preferably with your main keyword as the link title. 2. Linking services You can always buy quality one way links if you're on a good budget and know where to look. Trusted services can be easily found by doing a little research on Google and reading user reviews and comments. Just don't buy too many links at once or search engines may penalize you. 3. Blog Comments This strategy can never get too old. You should always look to find interesting blogs in your niche that are popular and make useful comments while leaving a link back to your site. Internal ranking factors Several factors influence the position of a site in the search results. They can be divided into external and internal ranking factors. Internal ranking factors are those that are controlled by seo aware website owners (text, layout, etc.) and will be described next. 1. Web page layout factors relevant to seo 1.1 Amount of text on a page the number and quality of inbound links to a site. Citation index is a numeric estimate of th A page consisting of just a few sentences is less likely to get to the top of a search engine list. Search engines favor sites that have a high information content. Generally, you should try to increase the text
- 14. content of your site in the interest of seo. The optimum page size is 500-3000 words (or 2000 to 20,000 characters). Search engine visibility is increased as the amount of page text increases due to the increased likelihood of occasional and accidental search queries causing it to be listed. This factor sometimes results in a large number of visitors. 1.2 Number of keywords on a page Keywords must be used at least three to four times in the page text. The upper limit depends on the overall page size – the larger the page, the more keyword repetitions can be made. Keyword phrases (word combinations consisting of several keywords) are worth a separate mention. The best seo results are observed when a keyword phrase is used several times in the text with all keywords in the phrase arranged in exactly the same order. In addition, all of the words from the phrase should be used separately several times in the remaining text. There should also be some difference (dispersion) in the number of entries for each of these repeated words. Let us take an example. Suppose we optimize a page for the phrase "seo software” (one of our seo keywords for this site) It would be good to use the phrase “seo software” in the text 10 times, the word “seo” 7 times elsewhere in the text and the word “software” 5 times. The numbers here are for illustration only, but they show the general seo idea quite well. 1.3 Keyword density and seo Keyword page density is a measure of the relative frequency of the word in the text expressed as a percentage. For example, if a specific word is used 5 times on a page containing 100 words, the keyword density is 5%. If the density of a keyword is too low, the search engine will not pay much attention to it. If the density is too high, the search engine may activate its spam filter. If this happens, the page will be penalized and its position in search listings will be deliberately lowered. The optimum value for keyword density is 5-7%. In the case of keyword phrases, you should calculate the total density of each of the individual keywords comprising the phrases to make sure it is within the specified limits. In practice, a keyword density of more than 7-8% does not seem to have any negative seo consequences. However, it is not necessary and can reduce the legibility of the content from a user’s viewpoint.
- 15. 1.4 Location of keywords on a page A very short rule for seo experts – the closer a keyword or keyword phrase is to the beginning of a document, the more significant it becomes for the search engine. 1.5 Text format and seo Search engines pay special attention to page text that is highlighted or given special formatting. We recommend: - use keywords in headings. Headings are text highlighted with the «H» HTML tags. The «h1» and «h2» tags are most effective. Currently, the use of CSS allows you to redefine the appearance of text highlighted with these tags. This means that «H» tags are used less than nowadays, but are still very important in seo work.; - Highlight keywords with bold fonts. Do not highlight the entire text! Just highlight each keyword two or three times on the page. Use the «strong» tag for highlighting instead of the more traditional «B» bold tag. 1.6 «TITLE» tag This is one of the most important tags for search engines. Make use of this fact in your seo work. Keywords must be used in the TITLE tag. The link to your site that is normally displayed in search results will contain text derived from the TITLE tag. It functions as a sort of virtual business card for your pages. Often, the TITLE tag text is the first information about your website that the user sees. This is why it should not only contain keywords, but also be informative and attractive. You want the searcher to be tempted to click on your listed link and navigate to your website. As a rule, 50-80 characters from the TITLE tag are displayed in search results and so you should limit the size of the title to this length. 1.7 Keywords in links A simple seo rule – use keywords in the text of page links that refer to other pages on your site and to any external Internet resources. Keywords in such links can slightly enhance page rank. 1.8 «ALT» attributes in images
- 16. Any page image has a special optional attribute known as "alternative text.” It is specified using the HTML «ALT» tag. This text will be displayed if the browser fails to download the image or if the browser image display is disabled. Search engines save the value of image ALT attributes when they parse (index) pages, but do not use it to rank search results. Currently, the Google search engine takes into account text in the ALT attributes of those images that are links to other pages. The ALT attributes of other images are ignored. There is no information regarding other search engines, but we can assume that the situation is similar. We consider that keywords can and should be used in ALT attributes, but this practice is not vital for seo purposes. 1.9 Description Meta tag This is used to specify page descriptions. It does not influence the seo ranking process but it is very important. A lot of search engines (including the largest one – Google) display information from this tag in their search results if this tag is present on a page and if its content matches the content of the page and the search query. Experience has shown that a high position in search results does not always guarantee large numbers of visitors. For example, if your competitors' search result description is more attractive than the one for your site then search engine users may choose their resource instead of yours. That is why it is important that your Description Meta tag text be brief, but informative and attractive. It must also contain keywords appropriate to the page. It is important that your Description Meta tag text be brief, but informative and attractive. It must also contain keywords appropriate to the page. 1.10 Keywords Meta tag This Meta tag was initially used to specify keywords for pages but it is hardly ever used by search engines now. It is often ignored in seo projects. However, it would be advisable to specify this tag just in case there is a revival in its use. The following rule must be observed for this tag: only keywords actually used in the page text must be added to it. 2 Site structure 2.1 Number of pages
- 17. The general seo rule is: the more, the better. Increasing the number of pages on your website increases the visibility of the site to search engines. Also, if new information is being constantly added to the site, search engines consider this as development and expansion of the site. This may give additional advantages in ranking. You should periodically publish more information on your site – news, press releases, articles, useful tips, etc. 2.2 Navigation menu As a rule, any site has a navigation menu. Use keywords in menu links, it will give additional seo significance to the pages to which the links refer. 2.3 Keywords in page names Some seo experts consider that using keywords in the name of a HTML page file may have a positive effect on its search result position. 2.4 Avoid subdirectories If there are not too many pages on your site (up to a couple of dozen), it is best to place them all in the root directory of your site. Search engines consider such pages to be more important than ones in subdirectories. 2.5 One page – one keyword phrase For maximum seo try to optimize each page for its own keyword phrase. Sometimes you can choose two or three related phrases, but you should certainly not try to optimize a page for 5-10 phrases at once. Such phrases would probably produce no effect on page rank. 2.6 Seo and the Main page Optimize the main page of your site (domain name, index.html) for word combinations that are most important. This page is most likely to get to the top of search engine lists. My seo observations suggest that the main page may account for up to 30-40% percent of the total search traffic for some sites 3 Common seo mistakes
- 18. 3.1 Graphic header Very often sites are designed with a graphic header. Often, we see an image of the company logo occupying the full-page width. Do not do it! The upper part of a page is a very valuable place where you should insert your most important keywords for best seo. In case of a graphic image, that prime position is wasted since search engines can not make use of images. Sometimes you may come across completely absurd situations: the header contains text information, but to make its appearance more attractive, it is created in the form of an image. The text in it cannot be indexed by search engines and so it will not contribute toward the page rank. If you must present a logo, the best way is to use a hybrid approach – place the graphic logo at the top of each page and size it so that it does not occupy its entire width. Use a text header to make up the rest of the width. 3.2 Graphic navigation menu The situation is similar to the previous one – internal links on your site should contain keywords, which will give an additional advantage in seo ranking. If your navigation menu consists of graphic elements to make it more attractive, search engines will not be able to index the text of its links. If it is not possible to avoid using a graphic menu, at least remember to specify correct ALT attributes for all images. 3.3 Script navigation Sometimes scripts are used for site navigation. As an seo worker, you should understand that search engines cannot read or execute scripts. Thus, a link specified with the help of a script will not be available to the search engine, the search robot will not follow it and so parts of your site will not be indexed. If you use site navigation scripts then you must provide regular HTML duplicates to make them visible to everyone – your human visitors and the search robots. 3.4 Session identifier Some sites use session identifiers. This means that each visitor gets a unique parameter (&session_id=) when he or she arrives at the site. This ID is added to the address of each page visited on the site. Session IDs help site owners to collect useful statistics, including information about visitors' behavior. However, from the point of view of a search robot, a page with a new address is a brand new page. This means that, each time
- 19. the search robot comes to such a site, it will get a new session identifier and will consider the pages as new ones whenever it visits them. Search engines do have algorithms for consolidating mirrors and pages with the same content. Sites with session IDs should, therefore, be recognized and indexed correctly. However, it is difficult to index such sites and sometimes they may be indexed incorrectly, which has an adverse effect on seo page ranking. If you are interested in seo for your site, I recommend that you avoid session identifiers if possible. . 3.5 Redirects Redirects make site analysis more difficult for search robots, with resulting adverse effects on seo. Do not use redirects unless there is a clear reason for doing so. 3.6 Hidden text, a deceptive seo method The last two issues are not really mistakes but deliberate attempts to deceive search engines using illicit seo methods. Hidden text (when the text color coincides with the background color, for example) allows site owners to cram a page with their desired keywords without affecting page logic or visual layout. Such text is invisible to human visitors but will be seen by search robots. The use of such deceptive optimization methods may result in banning of the site. It could be excluded from the index (database) of the search engine. 3.7 One-pixel links, seo deception This is another deceptive seo technique. Search engines consider the use of tiny, almost invisible, graphic image links just one pixel wide and high as an attempt at deception, which may lead to a site ban. External ranking factors 1.Why inbound links to sites are taken into account As you can see from the previous section, many factors influencing the ranking process are under the control of webmasters. If these were the only factors then it would be impossible for search engines to distinguish between a genuine high-quality document and a page created specifically
- 20. to achieve high search ranking but containing no useful information. For this reason, an analysis of inbound links to the page being evaluated is one of the key factors in page ranking. This is the only factor that is not controlled by the site owner. It makes sense to assume that interesting sites will have more inbound links. This is because owners of other sites on the Internet will tend to have published links to a site if they think it is a worthwhile resource. The search engine will use this inbound link criterion in its evaluation of document significance. Therefore, two main factors influence how pages are stored by the search engine and sorted for display in search results: - Relevance, as described in the previous section on internal ranking factors. - Number and quality of inbound links, also known as link citation, link popularity or citation index. This will be described in the next section. 2 Link importance (citation index, link popularity) You can easily see that simply counting the number of inbound links does not give us enough information to evaluate a site. It is obvious that a link from www.microsoft.com should mean much more than a link from some homepage like www.hostingcompany.com/~myhomepage.html. You have to take into account link importance as well as number of links. Search engines use the notion of citation index to evaluate e popularity of a resource expressed as an absolute value representing page importance. Each search engine uses its own algorithms to estimate a page citation index. As a rule, these values are not published. As well as the absolute citation index value, a scaled citation index is sometimes used. This relative value indicates the popularity of a page relative to the popularity of other pages on the Internet. You will find a detailed description of citation indexes and the algorithms used for their estimation in the next sections. 3 Link text (anchor text)
- 21. The link text of any inbound site link is vitally important in search result ranking. The anchor (or link) text is the text between the HTML tags «A» and «/A» and is displayed as the text that you click in a browser to go to a new page. If the link text contains appropriate keywords, the search engine regards it as an additional and highly significant recommendation that the site actually contains valuable information relevant to the search query. 4 Relevance of referring pages As well as link text, search engines also take into account the overall information content of each referring page. Example: Suppose we are using seo to promote a car sales resource. In this case a link from a site about car repairs will have much more importance that a similar link from a site about gardening. The first link is published on a resource having a similar topic so it will be more important for search engines. 5 Google PageRank – theoretical basics The Google company was the first company to patent the system of taking into account inbound links. The algorithm was named PageRank. In this section, we will describe this algorithm and how it can influence search result ranking. PageRank is estimated separately for each web page and is determined by the PageRank (citation) of other pages referring to it. It is a kind of “virtuous circle.” The main task is to find the criterion that determines page importance. In the case of PageRank, it is the possible frequency of visits to a page. I shall now describe how user’s behavior when following links to surf the network is modeled. It is assumed that the user starts viewing sites from some random page. Then he or she follows links to other web resources. There is always a possibility that the user may leave a site without following any outbound link and start viewing documents from a random page. The PageRank algorithm estimates the probability of this event as 0.15 at each step. The probability that our user continues surfing by following one of the links available on the current page is therefore 0.85, assuming that all links are equal in this case. If he or she continues surfing indefinitely, popular pages will be visited many more times than the less popular pages.
- 22. The PageRank of a specified web page is thus defined as the probability that a user may visit the web page. It follows that, the sum of probabilities for all existing web pages is exactly one because the user is assumed to be visiting at least one Internet page at any given moment. Since it is not always convenient to work with these probabilities the PageRank can be mathematically transformed into a more easily understood number for viewing. For instance, we are used to seeing a PageRank number between zero and ten on the Google Toolbar. According to the ranking model described above: - Each page on the Net (even if there are no inbound links to it) initially has a PageRank greater than zero, although it will be very small. There is a tiny chance that a user may accidentally navigate to it. - Each page that has outbound links distributes part of its PageRank to the referenced page. The PageRank contributed to these linked-to pages is inversely proportional to the total number of links on the linked-from page – the more links it has, the lower the PageRank allocated to each linked-to page. - PageRank A “damping factor” is applied to this process so that the total distributed page rank is reduced by 15%. This is equivalent to the probability, described above, that the user will not visit any of the linked-to pages but will navigate to an unrelated website. Let us now see how this PageRank process might influence the process of ranking search results. We say “might” because the pure PageRank algorithm just described has not been used in the Google algorithm for quite a while now. We will discuss a more current and sophisticated version shortly. There is nothing difficult about the PageRank influence – after the search engine finds a number of relevant documents (using internal text criteria), they can be sorted according to the PageRank since it would be logical to suppose that a document having a larger number of high-quality inbound links contains the most valuable information. Thus, the PageRank algorithm "pushes up" those documents that are most popular outside the search engine as well. 6 Google PageRank – practical use Page rank is Google's way of measuring your rank in terms of links to your site from other sites, based on both quantity and quality. Google page rank varies from 0 (terrible) to 10 (ideal). If you have lots of links from sites
- 23. with low page ranks, they will mean very little to your page rank, whereas even a few links from other sites with good page ranks can make a difference. That doesn't mean you should cancel existing links -- they still have value. Your page rank is a good indicator of how your link campaign is going. You want to be at 5 or above. Here is a link to a free page rank tool that tells you any URL's page rank across all the Google data centers. Having a good page rank at Google is great, as it will help you place above similar sites at Google (page rank is likely a strong part of the algorithm that decides placement when other factors are equal). However, we recommend you track it primarily because the factors that Google tracks as part of your page rank are universal. Improving your page rank will improve your entire web presence, in addition to your placement at Google. As of October 2005, underhanded sites can now fake their page rank. So, if a site with a page rank equal to or higher than yours contacts you about trading links, we recommend checking their page rank as part of your standard actions. Use this page rank fraud detection tool from SEO Logs. The tool works by telling you the correct page rank for the site that you input, so whatever it displays is the real page rank, regardless of what displays when you browse to that site. Currently, PageRank is not used directly in the Google algorithm. This is to be expected since pure PageRank characterizes only the number and the quality of inbound links to a site, but it completely ignores the text of links and the information content of referring pages. These factors are important in page ranking and they are taken into account in later versions of the algorithm. It is thought that the current Google ranking algorithm ranks pages according to thematic PageRank. In other words, it emphasizes the importance of links from pages with content related by similar topics or themes. The exact details of this algorithm are known only to Google developers. You can determine the PageRank value for any web page with the help of the Google ToolBar that shows a PageRank value within the range from 0 to 10. It should be noted that the Google ToolBar does not show the exact PageRank probability value, but the PageRank range a particular site is in. Each range (from 0 to 10) is defined according to a logarithmic scale. Here is an example: each page has a real PageRank value known only to Google. To derive a displayed PageRank range for their ToolBar, they use a
- 24. logarithmic scale as shown in this table Real PR ToolBar PR 1-10 1 10-100 2 100-1000 3 1000-10.000 4 Etc. This shows that the PageRank ranges displayed on the Google ToolBar are not all equal. It is easy, for example, to increase PageRank from one to two, while it is much more difficult to increase it from six to seven. In practice, PageRank is mainly used for two purposes: 1. Quick check of the sites popularity. PageRank does not give exact information about referring pages, but it allows you to quickly and easily get a feel for the sites popularity level and to follow trends that may result from your seo work. You can use the following “Rule of thumb” measures for English language sites: PR 4-5 is typical for most sites with average popularity. PR 6 indicates a very popular site while PR 7 is almost unreachable for a regular webmaster. You should congratulate yourself if you manage to achieve it. PR 8, 9, 10 can only be achieved by the sites of large companies such as Microsoft, Google, etc. PageRank is also useful when exchanging links and in similar situations. You can compare the quality of the pages offered in the exchange with pages from your own site to decide if the exchange should be accepted. 2. Evaluation of the competitiveness level for a search query is a vital part of seo work. Although PageRank is not used directly in the ranking algorithms, it allows you to indirectly evaluate relative site competitiveness for a particular query. For example, if the search engine displays sites with PageRank 6-7 in the top search results, a site with PageRank 4 is not likely to get to the top of the results list using the same search query. It is important to recognize that the PageRank values displayed on the Google ToolBar are recalculated only occasionally (every few months) so the Google ToolBar displays somewhat outdated information. This means that the Google search engine tracks changes in inbound links much faster than these changes are reflected on the Google ToolBar. 7 Increasing link popularity 7.1 Submitting to general purpose directories
- 25. On the Internet, many directories contain links to other network resources grouped by topics. The process of adding your site information to them is called submission. Such directories can be paid or free of charge, they may require a backlink from your site or they may have no such requirement. The number of visitors to these directories is not large so they will not send a significant number to your site. However, search engines count links from these directories and this may enhance your sites search result placement. Important! Only those directories that publish a direct link to your site are worthwhile from a seo point of view. Script driven directories are almost useless. This point deserves a more detailed explanation. There are two methods for publishing a link. A direct link is published as a standard HTML construction («A href=...», etc.). Alternatively, links can be published with the help of various scripts, redirects and so on. Search engines understand only those links that are specified directly in HTML code. That is why the seo value of a directory that does not publish a direct link to your site is close to zero. You should not submit your site to FFA (free-for-all) directories. Such directories automatically publish links related to any search topic and are ignored by search engines. The only thing an FFA directory entry will give you is an increase in spam sent to your published e-mail address. Actually, this is the main purpose of FFA directories. Be wary of promises from various programs and seo services that submit your resource to hundreds of thousands of search engines and directories. There are no more than a hundred or so genuinely useful directories on the Net – this is the number to take seriously and professional seo submission services work with this number of directories. If a seo service promises submissions to enormous numbers of resources, it simply means that the submission database mainly consists of FFA archives and other useless resources. Give preference to manual or semiautomatic seo submission; do not rely completely on automatic processes. Submitting sites under human control is generally much more efficient than fully automatic submission. The value of submitting a site to paid directories or publishing a backlink should be considered individually for each directory. In most cases, it does not make much sense, but there may be exceptions. Submitting sites to directories does not often result in a dramatic effect on site traffic, but it slightly increases the visibility of your site for search
- 26. engines. This useful seo option is available to everyone and does not require a lot of time and expense, so do not overlook it when promoting your project. 7.2 DMOZ directory The DMOZ directory (www.dmoz.org) or the Open Directory Project is the largest directory on the Internet. There are many copies of the main DMOZ site and so, if you submit your site to the DMOZ directory, you will get a valuable link from the directory itself as well as dozens of additional links from related resources. This means that the DMOZ directory is of great value to a seo aware webmaster.The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as Dmoz (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories. It is not easy to get your site into the DMOZ directory; there is an element of luck involved. Your site may appear in the directory a few minutes after it has been submitted or it may take months to appear. If you submitted your site details correctly and in the appropriate category then it should eventually appear. If it does not appear after a reasonable time then you can try contacting the editor of your category with a question about your request (the DMOZ site gives you such opportunity). Of course, there are no guarantees, but it may help. DMOZ directory submissions are free of charge for all sites, including commercial ones. Here are my final recommendations regarding site submissions to DMOZ. Read all site requirements, descriptions, etc. to avoid violating the submission rules. Such a violation will most likely result in a refusal to consider your request. Please remember, presence in the DMOZ directory is desirable, but not obligatory. Do not despair if you fail to get into this directory. It is possible to reach top positions in search results without this directory – many sites do.
- 27. 7.3 Link exchange The essence of link exchanges is that you use a special page to publish links to other sites and get similar backlinks from them. Search engines do not like link exchanges because, in many cases, they distort search results and do not provide anything useful to Internet users. However, it is still an effective way to increase link popularity if you observe several simple rules. - Exchange links with sites that are related by topic. Exchanging links with unrelated sites is ineffective and unpopular. - Before exchanging, make sure that your link will be published on a “good” page. This means that the page must have a reasonable PageRank (3-4 or higher is recommended), it must be available for indexing by search engines, the link must be direct, the total number of links on the page must not exceed 50, and so on. - Do not create large link directories on your site. The idea of such a directory seems attractive because it gives you an opportunity to exchange links with many sites on various topics. You will have a topic category for each listed site. However, when trying to optimize your site you are looking for link quality rather than quantity and there are some potential pitfalls. No seo aware webmaster will publish a quality link to you if he receives a worthless link from your directory “link farm” in return. Generally, the PageRank of pages from such directories leaves a lot to be desired. In addition, search engines do not like these directories at all. There have even been cases where sites were banned for using such directories. - Use a separate page on the site for link exchanges. It must have a reasonable PageRank and it must be indexed by search engines, etc. Do not publish more than 50 links on one page (otherwise search engines may fail to take some of the links into account). This will help you to find other seo aware partners for link exchanges. - Search engines try to track mutual links. That is why you should, if possible, publish backlinks on a domain/site other than the one you are trying to promote. The best variant is when you promote the resource site1.com and publish backlinks on the resource site2.com. - Exchange links with caution. Webmasters who are not quite honest will often remove your links from their resources after a while. Check your backlinks from time to time.
- 28. 7.4 Press releases, news feeds, thematic resources This section is about site marketing rather than pure seo. There are many information resources and news feeds that publish press releases and news on various topics. Such sites can supply you with direct visitors and also increase your sites popularity. If you do not find it easy to create a press release or a piece of news, hire copywriters – they will help you find or create something newsworthy. Look for resources that deal with similar topics to your own site. You may find many Internet projects that not in direct competition with you, but which share the same topic as your site. Try to approach the site owners. It is quite possible that they will be glad to publish information about your project. One final tip for obtaining inbound links – try to create slight variations in the inbound link text. If all inbound links to your site have exactly the same link text and there are many of them, the search engines may flag it as a spam attempt and penalize your site. Indexing a site Before a site appears in search results, a search engine must index it. An indexed site will have been visited and analyzed by a search robot with relevant information saved in the search engine database. If a page is present in the search engine index, it can be displayed in search results otherwise, the search engine cannot know anything about it and it cannot display information from the page.. Most average sized sites (with dozens to hundreds of pages) are usually indexed correctly by search engines. However, you should remember the following points when constructing your site. There are two ways to allow a search engine to learn about a new site: - Submit the address of the site manually using a form associated with the search engine, if available. In this case, you are the one who informs the search engine about the new site and its address goes into the queue for indexing. Only the main page of the site needs to be added, the search robot will find the rest of pages by following links. - Let the search robot find the site on its own. If there is at least one inbound link to your resource from other indexed resources, the search robot will soon visit and index your site. In most cases, this method is
- 29. recommended. Get some inbound links to your site and just wait until the robot visits it. This may actually be quicker than manually adding it to the submission queue. Indexing a site typically takes from a few days to two weeks depending on the search engine. The Google search engine is the quickest of the bunch. Try to make your site friendly to search robots by following these rules: - Try to make any page of your site reachable from the main page in not more than three mouse clicks. If the structure of the site does not allow you to do this, create a so-called site map that will allow this rule to be observed. - Do not make common mistakes. Session identifiers make indexing more difficult. If you use script navigation, make sure you duplicate these links with regular ones because search engines cannot read scripts (see more details about these and other mistakes in section 2.3). - Remember that search engines index no more than the first 100-200 KB of text on a page. Hence, the following rule – do not use pages with text larger than 100 KB if you want them to be indexed completely. You can manage the behavior of search robots using the file robots.txt. This file allows you to explicitly permit or forbid them to index particular pages on your site. The databases of search engines are constantly being updated; records in them may change, disappear and reappear. That is why the number of indexed pages on your site may sometimes vary. One of the most common reasons for a page to disappear from indexes is server unavailability. This means that the search robot could not access it at the time it was attempting to index the site. After the server is restarted, the site should eventually reappear in the index. You should note that the more inbound links your site has, the more quickly it gets re-indexed. You can track the process of indexing your site by analyzing server log files where all visits of search robots are logged. We will give details of seo software that allows you to track such visits in a later section. Choosing keywords 1. Initially choosing keywords
- 30. Choosing keywords should be your first step when constructing a site. You should have the keyword list available to incorporate into your site text before you start composing it. To define your site keywords, you should use seo services offered by search engines in the first instance. Sites such as www.wordtracker.com and inventory.overture.com are good starting places for English language sites. Note that the data they provide may sometimes differ significantly from what keywords are actually the best for your site. You should also note that the Google search engine does not give information about frequency of search queries. After you have defined your approximate list of initial keywords, you can analyze your competitor’s sites and try to find out what keywords they are using. You may discover some further relevant keywords that are suitable for your own site. 2. Frequent and rare keywords There are two distinct strategies – optimize for a small number of highly popular keywords or optimize for a large number of less popular words. In practice, both strategies are often combined. The disadvantage of keywords that attract frequent queries is that the competition rate is high for them. It is often not possible for a new site to get anywhere near the top of search result listings for these queries. For keywords associated with rare queries, it is often sufficient just to mention the necessary word combination on a web page or to perform minimum text optimization. Under certain circumstances, rare queries can supply quite a large amount of search traffic. The aim of most commercial sites is to sell some product or service or to make money in some way from their visitors. This should be kept in mind during your seo (search engine optimization) work and keyword selection. If you are optimizing a commercial site then you should try to attract targeted visitors (those who are ready to pay for the offered product or service) to your site rather than concentrating on sheer numbers of visitors. Example. The query “monitor” is much more popular and competitive than the query “monitor Samsung 710N” (the exact name of the model). However, the second query is much more valuable for a seller of monitors. It is also easier to get traffic from it because its competition rate is low; there are not many other sites owned by sellers of Samsung 710N monitors. This example highlights another possible difference between
- 31. frequent and rare search queries that should be taken into account – rare search queries may provide you with less visitors overall, but more targeted visitors. 3 .Evaluating the competition rates of search queries When you have finalized your keywords list, you should identify the core keywords for which you will optimize your pages. A suggested technique for this follows. Rare queries are discarded at once (for the time being). In the previous section, we described the usefulness of such rare queries but they do not require special optimization. They are likely to occur naturally in your website text. As a rule, the competition rate is very high for the most popular phrases. This is why you need to get a realistic idea of the competitiveness of your site. To evaluate the competition rate you should estimate a number of parameters for the first 10 sites displayed in search results: - The average Page Rank of the pages in the search results. - The average number of links to these sites. Check this using a variety of search engines. Additional parameters: - The number of pages on the Internet that contain the particular search term, the total number of search results for that search term. - The number of pages on the Internet that contain exact matches to the keyword phrase. The search for the phrase is bracketed by quotation marks to obtain this number. These additional parameters allow you to indirectly evaluate how difficult it will be to get your site near the top of the list for this particular phrase. As well as the parameters described, you can also check the number of sites present in your search results in the main directories, such as DMOZ and Yahoo. The analysis of the parameters mentioned above and their comparison with those of your own site will allow you to predict with reasonable certainty the chances of getting your site to the top of the list for a particular phrase. Having evaluated the competition rate for all of your keyword phrases, you can now select a number of moderately popular key phrases with an acceptable competition rate, which you can use to promote and optimize your site.
- 32. 4. Refining your keyword phrases As mentioned above, search engine services often give inaccurate keyword information. This means that it is unusual to obtain an optimum set of site keywords at your first attempt. After your site is up and running and you have carried out some initial promotion, you can obtain additional keyword statistics, which will facilitate some fine-tuning. For example, you will be able to obtain the search results rating of your site for particular phrases and you will also have the number of visits to your site for these phrases. With this information, you can clearly define the good and bad keyword phrases. Often there is no need to wait until your site gets near the top of all search engines for the phrases you are evaluating – one or two search engines are enough. Example. Suppose your site occupies first place in the Yahoo search engine for a particular phrase. At the same time, this site is not yet listed in MSN, or Google search results for this phrase. However, if you know the percentage of visits to your site from various search engines (for instance, Google – 70%, Yahoo – 20%, MSN search – 10%), you can predict the approximate amount of traffic for this phrase from these other searches engines and decide whether it is suitable. As well as detecting bad phrases, you may find some new good ones. For example, you may see that a keyword phrase you did not optimize your site for brings useful traffic despite the fact that your site is on the second or third page in search results for this phrase. Using these methods, you will arrive at a new refined set of keyword phrases. You should now start reconstructing your site: Change the text to include more of the good phrases, create new pages for new phrases, etc. You can repeat this seo exercise several times and, after a while, you will have an optimum set of key phrases for your site and considerably increased search traffic. Here are some more tips. According to statistics, the main page takes up to 30%-50% of all search traffic. It has the highest visibility in search engines and it has the largest number of inbound links. That is why you should optimize the main page of your site to match the most popular and competitive queries. Each site page should be optimized for one or two main word combinations and, possibly for a number of rare queries. This
- 33. will increase the chances for the page get to the top of search engine lists for particular phrases. White hat versus black hat techniques- SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve. The search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing. Industry commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO.[29] White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.[30] . An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception.. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility although the two are not identical Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking. Introduction to "robots.txt" There is a hidden, relentless force that permeates the web and its billions of web pages and files, unbeknownst to the majority of us sentient beings. I'm talking about search engine crawlers and robots here. Every day hundreds of them go out and scour the web, whether it's Google trying to index the entire web, or a spam bot collecting any email address it could find for less than honorable intentions. As site owners, what little control we have over what robots are allowed to do when they visit our sites exist in a magical little file called "robots.txt."
- 34. "Robots.txt" is a regular text file that through its name, has special meaning to the majority of "honorable" robots on the web. By defining a few rules in this text file, you can instruct robots to not crawl and index certain files, directories within your site, or at all. For example, you may not want Google to crawl the /images directory of your site, as it's both meaningless to you and a waste of your site's bandwidth. "Robots.txt" lets you tell Google just that. Creating your "robots.txt" file So lets get moving. Create a regular text file called "robots.txt", and make sure it's named exactly that. This file must be uploaded to the root accessible directory of your site, not a subdirectory but NOT It is only by following the above two rules will search engines interpret the instructions contained in the file. Deviate from this, and "robots.txt" becomes nothing more than a regular text file, like Cinderella after midnight. Now that you know what to name your text file and where to upload it, you need to learn what to actually put in it to send commands off to search engines that follow this protocol (formally the "Robots Exclusion Protocol"). The format is simple enough for most intents and purposes: a USERAGENT line to identify the crawler in question followed by one or more DISALLOW: lines to disallow it from crawling certain parts of your site. Selecting a domain and hosting Currently, anyone can create a page on the Internet without incurring any expense. Also, there are companies providing free hosting services that will publish your page in return for their entitlement to display advertising on it. Many Internet service providers will also allow you to publish your page on their servers if you are their client. However, all these variations have serious drawbacks that you should seriously consider if you are creating a commercial project. First, and most importantly, you should obtain your own domain for the following reasons: - A project that does not have its own domain is regarded as a transient project. Indeed, why should we trust a resource if its owners are not even prepared to invest in the tiny sum required to create some sort of minimum corporate image? It is possible to publish free materials using
- 35. resources based on free or ISP-based hosting, but any attempt to create a commercial project without your own domain is doomed to failure. - Your own domain allows you to choose your hosting provider. If necessary, you can move your site to another hosting provider at any time. Here are some useful tips for choosing a domain name. - Try to make it easy to remember and make sure there is only one way to pronounce and spell it. - Domains with the extension .com are the best choice to promote international projects in English. Domains from the zones .net, .org, .biz, etc., are available but less preferable. - If you want to promote a site with a national flavor, use a domain from the corresponding national zone. Use .de – for German sites, .it – for Italian sites, etc. - In the case of sites containing two or more languages, you should assign a separate domain to each language. National search engines are more likely to appreciate such an approach than subsections for various languages located on one site. A domain costs $10-20 a year, depending on the particular registration service and zone. You should take the following factors into consideration when choosing a hosting provider: - Access bandwidth. - Server uptime. - The cost of traffic per gigabyte and the amount of prepaid traffic. - The site is best located in the same geographical region as most of your expected visitors. The cost of hosting services for small projects is around $5-10 per month. Avoid “free” offers while choosing a domain and a hosting provider. Hosting providers sometimes offer free domains to their clients. Such domains are often registered not to you, but to the hosting company. The hosting provider will be the owner of the domain. This means that you will
- 36. not be able to change the hosting service of your project, or you could even be forced to buy out your own domain at a premium price. Also, you should not register your domains via your hosting company. This may make moving your site to another hosting company more difficult even though you are the owner of your domain. Changing the site address You may need to change the address of your project. Maybe the resource was started on a free hosting service and has developed into a more commercial project that should have its own domain. Or maybe the owner has simply found a better name for the project. In any case, moving to a new address can be problematic and it is a difficult and unpleasant task to move a project to a new address. For starters, you will have to start promoting the new address almost from scratch. However, if the move is inevitable, you may as well make the change as useful as possible. Our advice is to create your new site at the new location with new and unique content. Place highly visible links to the new resource on the old site to allow visitors to easily navigate to your new site. Do not completely delete the old site and its contents. This approach will allow you to get visitors from search engines to both the old site and the new one. At the same time, you get an opportunity to cover additional topics and keywords, which may be more difficult within one resource. Important terms Back links or Inbound Link- Back links are incoming links to a website or web page. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of back links is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the back links of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page. In basic link terminology, a back link is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web
- 37. node. Back links are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links. An inbound links send visitors to your web site. Generally, this is seen as a good thing. An inbound link is a hyperlink transiting domains Many sites go to great lengths to achieve as much of this "free" advertising as possible, although a few sites are very particular about where the links are pointing. . Inbound links are counted to determine link popularity, an important factor in SEO. Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO).In addition to rankings by content, many search engines rank pages based on inbound links. How do we get inbound links? There are a number of ways. Some of them are:- Directories Directories usually provide one-way links to websites, although some require a reciprocal link. Personally, I have no time for those that require reciprocal links, because they aren't really trying to be useful directories. Submitting to directories is time-consuming and boring, but there are a number of cheap directory submitting services that do a very good job. There are several of them in this forum thread. Forums Join forums and place links to your site(s) in your signature line. Use your main searchterms as the link text - I'll come to why that is necessary later in this article. But before spending time writing lots of posts with your signature line in each post, make sure that the forum is spiderable by checking the robots.txt file, and make sure that non-members don't have session IDs in the URLs. Also make sure that links in signature lines are not hidden from spiders (view the source code to make sure that signature links are in plain HTML format and not in Javascript). Link exchange centers Find a join free link exchange center like LinkPartners.com. There you can find a categorized directory of websites that also want to exchange links. Be careful not to sign up with FFA (Free For All) sites because they are mostly email address gatherers and you can expect a sudden increase in email spam soon after you sign up. Also, only sign up with centers where
- 38. you can approach other sites personally, and where they can approach you personally. Do not join any link farms!!! Link farms, such as LinksToYou.com, sound excellent for building up linkpop and PageRank, but search engines (Google in particular) disapprove of them as blatant attempts to manipulate the rankings and they will penalize sites that use them. Once a site has been penalized, it is very difficult to get the penalty lifted, so avoid all link farms. Email requests (a) Search on Google for your main searchterms and find the websites that are competing with you. Then find which sites link to them by searching "link:www.cometitor-domain.com". Email them and ask for a link exchange. (b) Search on Google for websites that are related to your site's topic, but not direct competitors, and ask them for a link exchange. Buy them There are websites that want to sell links. They are usually medium to high PageRank sites, and often the link will be placed on multiple pages, or all pages within the site. It's possible to approach individual sites where you would like your links to appear, but it is much quicker, easier and more reliable to use a middle-man service (or broker). Link brokers offer links for sale on behalf of other websites (you could use the service to sell links on your site!). With these services, it is usual to be able to choose the type (topic) of the website(s) where you want to place your links. I am not aware of any disreputable practises with link brokering. Outbound Link A link that points away from your website. Outbound links can add value to your site by providing useful information to users without you having to create the content. It is difficult for a single website to be comprehensive about a subject area. At the same time outbound links are a potential jumping off point for users and also provide PageRank for the target page. Outbound links send visitors away from your web site. Attitudes towards outbound links vary considerably among site owners. Some site owners still link freely. Some refuse to link at all, and some provide links that open in a new browser window. Opponents of outbound linking argue that it risks losing time and money
- 39. from site visitors. This can be a large risk if a site is facing high customer acquisition costs. Proponents argue that providing high quality references actually enhances the value of a site and increases the chance of return visitors. “When site A links to site B, site A has an outbound link and site B has an inbound link. Links are inbound from the perspective of the link target, and conversely, outbound from the perspective of the originator “ RSS Feed- RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based or desktop-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed's "URL", into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds. SS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. RSS allows you to syndicate your site content. RSS defines an easy way to share and view headlines and content. RSS files can be automatically updated .RSS allows personalized views for different sites. RSS is written in XML. RSS is useful for web sites that are updated frequently, like: News sites - Lists news with title, date and descriptions Companies - Lists news and new products Calendars - Lists upcoming events and important days
- 40. Site changes - Lists changed pages or new pages