It has been observed that most tips that has been floating over the internet are those that are supposed to be followed by those who are undergoing SEO campaigns. But what can be noted is that there are no specifics given on what to avoid, most specifically the different steps or strategies that may unknowingly be implemented by the SEO agent or website owner. Knowing the different amiable steps or strategies in Search engine optimisation may be beneficial but having an informed mind in SEO about what not to apply or what not to do is equally important as it helps us avoid committing errors in our Search engine optimisation efforts. Knowing the errors in search engine optimisation where an SEO or a website owner is susceptible to committing such errors may be avoided. Having established therefore the importance of search engine optimisation and knowing what to utilise in and what not to utilise in the said campaign prompts us to learn that the first error that should not be undertaken by an SEO company or SEO consultant toward his or her target company is that there should be a strict understanding that resorting black hat seo techniques would do more harm than good towards a website. It is a known fact that some websites, more particularly SEO companies and SEO documents because of the fact that the use of such technique will do more harm to your website than good.
Second you should not put so many dynamic data in your website, most particularly the incorporation of too many client side application as well as server side applications in your website. This is due to the fact that most dynamic website properties or website applications are not heavily being favored by search engines during it’s crawling stage and when data is already being gathered and processed by the central or main engine. Third, when coding for your website do not include or use excessive client side scripting language such as ajax and or javascript. This is because due to the very reason that search engine agents, crawlers or spiders are incapable of searching through or reading through javascript or ajax codes. Next, although having an interactive website with animation is a favorite it is but fit to remind everyone that using flash based features should be minimised and the maximum use of such Flash code will put your website to being in danger.
According to the latest survey on internet users’ share Microsoft Bing’s internet users share has increased while the two search engine pioneer company namely Google and Yahoo has noted a decline in their internet users’ share. The survey was done during the month of July by Comscore. According to Comscore the increase in the internet users share of Microsoft Bing has increased by two percent (2%). On the other hand Google’s number of internet users’ share has slipped down by four percent (4%), while Yahoo also slipping down with five percent decline. Although there is a decrease in Googles’ internet user share it still remains to be the worlds leading search engine company as it’s total user share amounts to roughly around sixty-four percent of the total internet users’ share. It can safely deduced therefore that Google still has a solid lead over the rest of the search engine may it be new or old. Microsoft’s minute increase in the internet users share can also be attributed to the fact that many users are still on the hunt for a better search engine and trying out the new features being offered by Microsoft’s Bing could be a contributory factor to its increase in search engine users. With the recent merger of Yahoo and Microsoft internet users hopes to see an improve search engine algorithm, however, Google also has quietly launched their new program “caffeine” which involves developers and internet users alike in the development of their new search engine and search engine algorithm.
Google has been the foremost search engine that SEO companies and SEO consultants are always aiming at, which means that the basis of every SEO company or SEO consultant is via the criteria that Google has set. This move by the SEO consultants and SEO companies is just but right because Google is the leader in terms of the total number of users for such search engine. In the latest count done by comscore Google leads the pack by having sixty five percent of internet users share while the remaining part is being divided among and between Yahoo, Microsoft and other small search engine companies. However, the question arises whether or not Google’s number one spot is also based on a customers’ satisfaction in using the search engine or is it just a product of the search engine’s popularity in which case the loyalty factor may easily be shattered by the other upcoming search engines, also in talking about the other search engine did Yahoo and Microsoft fair as well as Google?
According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index the combination of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft under one category as internet search they scored a total of eighty-three (83) on the index and this thus mean that it even scored higher than the Customer Satisfaction that was raked in by the PC industry who garnered seventy five satisfaction rating. The breakdown of satisfaction rating among the three leading players in the search engine field are as follows; Google posting the highest search engine users’ satisfaction garnering the satisfaction score of eighty-six (86) which is a testament to Googles’ continued supremacy not only in the internet users share but now also with customer satisfaction in the use of their search engines. Yahoo on the other hand has recorded a seventy-seven customer or search engine user satisfaction while Microsoft has garnered seventy five search engine user satisfaction rating. This yearly search engine user or customer satisfaction report is annually released and the report was gathered only before Microsoft has released its new search engine Bing. This is the reason why the next survey for customer satisfaction is going to be very interesting as new players or new search engines have already entered the fray.
Search engine optimisation’s aim is to have your website indexed by search engines and ranked among its indexed websites. This aim emanated from the fact that having your website indexed and ranked by search engines is a good online marketing strategy that will help in increasing your web presence and further increase your chances of raking in that much needed traffic and conversion in a very competitive marketing arena. One real factor that can affect your web presence and the number of traffic going into your website and the percentage of conversion from visitors to clients is the rank of your website in the search engines’ SERP or the Search engine results page. In order to be ranked your website should have a particular keyword where it will serve as the indexing word that when typed in the search query by the user your website will then appear on the SERP, but it is not that easy as there are several processes that are to be done before your website is even indexed by search engines. Search engine optimisation is one such process that can help index your website and hopefully rank them. Ranking however also follows several criteria before bestowing your website with a high ranking, the two main criteria are relevance and importance. Relevance is determined by the content that is present in the website and how related are the keywords to its content. Effective use of keyword is the key to gain relevance apart from linking to websites that is also related to your websites’ main theme and content.
On the other hand importance is determined by the number of websites that link to yours, this is because of the fact that search engines consider a link to your website to be a vote that can be credited to you. The more websites linking to your own website increases your importance over the web and thus would make your ranking increase significantly. Getting into a number one ranking in the search engines’ SERP does not however have a sure fire formula, it is a combination of SEO processes and constant monitoring and satisfying the criteria that is set within the search engine’s algorithm.
Outbound links or sometimes called external links is often viewed as a link that will point into another website or web page other than your own. This is a type of an SEO strategy more particularly in the aspect of link building. Although considered as an SEO strategy and sometimes a necessity in creating a web page there are fears and apprehensions in the incorporation of external links to a website, this is because of the fact that it has been constantly questioned on whether or not leakages happens whenever a website links to an external website. Leakages means two-fold in Search engine optimisation, one is that the leakage will happen within your users and loyal visitors, wherein some users or visitors of your site who moves away from your website by clicking on the external link might find the external website to be better and will then not return to your website and will then be converted as a loyal user of the external website thus a leakage of users will occur. Another leak is the leak on your page ranking as it is believed that a page rank is determined by votes to your website which is counted through the number of websites other than yours that links to your own website. It is believed that when you make an outbound link or a link going to other websites or external websites you are decreasing your votes’ value as the computation of such is an external link will be divided with the total number of external links in your website, thus the more external links the lesser the value of your vote.
If having external or outbound links in your website poses a problem for your website especially in search engine optimisation why then is outbound linking is also considered to be an essential part of SEO and online marketing in general? For one, having internal links without external links can prove to be a problem to your SEO efforts, remember that you do not only create and optimise a website for search engine crawlers but most of all for your human website visitors. With the advent of social media networking having an external link could establish your websites’ reputation that is dependent of course on what particular site you are linking to and such site must have the property of being reliable and relevant to your own website. In addition having an outbound link can also establish your websites’ area of expertise or main theme and connecting with other websites that has more or less the same theme and content topic as that with your website will make such website the property of reliability.
Outbound links may have their downside but having a balanced presence of the external link will give your SEO campaign a very good edge against any competition.
Linking your web pages with each other to form your whole website, linking your web pages properly will ensure your websites’ usability a characteristic that website designers and developers should always take into consideration. In an online marketing aspect especially in Search engine optimisation, linking is also a significant part of the entire SEO strategy as it allows you to optimise your website as a whole that will enable the different search engines to index your website and hopefully contribute to the increase in the page ranking and SERP ranking of your website. Internal linking however does not only mean throwing a series of HTML scripts into your website and connecting one page to another, in SEO, most SEO companies and SEO consultants utilises or follows a strategy that will allow the links to be displayed and used in an optimised manner. First strategy that is being utilised by SEO companies and SEO consultants is by having the link to be text based instead of an image based link. The rationale behind is that a text based link provides an opportunity for the web developer and SEO alike to utilise some of the target keywords. Incorporating keywords in your text based links is one form of having an optimised link but you also have to make sure that your text based link will also follow the accepted structure as it might cause a disturbance in your overall web page design or in other words make sure that it does not interfere with the aesthetic presentation of your website.
Second strategy with regards to internal links is that if you are designing a large website that involves more than ten web pages then it would be appropriate for you to create a site map page. This is because a site map will help search engine spiders to efficiently crawl your entire website, in addition it also allows your visitors and or users to easily crawl your website and as it aides them to find the web pages that they need quickly. Further, having a site map also is believed to distribute your websites’ page ranks to other pages that are in your website.
Additional pages that are considered to be irrelevant in Search engine optimisation but are integral part of the website should link back only to the home page and nowhere else as you do not want these pages to be receiving any page ranking share of your whole websites’ page rank. Relevance is determined via the use of keywords and the most likely web page that your visitor is looking for. Thus a web page that gives information about copyright or privacy policy is an irrelevant but integral web page because of the fact that keywords are less likely to appear on these pages and that these pages are seldomly viewed by your visitors.
It has been years since Yahoo has tasted the lead in the search engine business and Microsoft has yet to prove that their own brand of search engine is better that the current leader Google. Both companies Yahoo and Microsoft has been struggling to keep their ranking afloat in terms of internet users’ share and it is because of this constant and frustrating struggle for number one spot has prompted Microsoft to reinvent their search engine from MSN to Bing. But even that change has not defeated Google and take the number one spot in the search engine business, what is worst Microsoft has spent millions of dollars to advertise Bing before it’s actual launch in May. For several months Microsoft has only been getting one percent increase in their internet users share an insignificant increase compared to the millions of dollars spent to the introduction of the new search engine. It is because of this slow increase in internet user’s share that a previously failed business strategy has been revived and that is to strike a deal with the second leading search engine, Yahoo. In the past month Yahoo and Microsoft has inked the deal in sharing their resources, where Microsoft provides the power of their search engine while Yahoo provides the content and the search ads. Even with this unprecedented move Microsoft and Yahoo are still in on for a new challenge as Google announced that a new or improved search engine and search engine algorithm is being developed and Google is taking in suggestions from the public in general. It means therefore that Google will not take the merger of Yahoo and Microsoft lightly that they are constructing a much better search engine with a much better search engine algorithm. Microsoft and Yahoo’s move to a merger might not be a Google-killer strategy after all, but what these two companies should do is to go back to the basics and try to convert their website visitors or their casual users into a permanent and full-time loyal users, this advice is also coming from comscore.
The main characteristic that a keyword should posses is it’s competitiveness, due to this competitiveness the keyword being utilised will have a better chance of giving your website a higher rate of conversion. However, competitiveness of a keyword is not the only factor that will affect your search engine optimisation efforts. There are several factors that search engines will look for in a keyword before it gives the specific ranking to the website as a whole. These keyword factors helps the search engine determine the web page’s relevancy as incorporated in their algorithm, although algorithms are subject to change the factors still affects the ranking of a website as a whole. The first of these factors is the keyword proximity, it is the measure on how close a keyword is with another word, the closer the keywords are which also should be on the correct position, meaning it should not just be a list of keywords but rather the words are actually used in a sentence and are conveying actual information then such is more favorable for the search engine to gather as data and use it to rank your website. Keyword placement is the second factor, here search engines looks at where the keywords are located, search engines particularly looks at the page title, heading, body, links and the ALT attribute for images. Having the keywords high up in the paragraph particularly in the heading of the paragraph would highly be favored by search engines, this factor is referred to as keyword prominence. Another factor that SEO companies and SEO consultants should look at is the keyword density or also known as the keyword weight. The keyword density is particularly being focused on by SEO consultants because it allows you to spread the keyword along the webpage more particularly in the content. Keyword density is the total number of keywords used in the content divided by the total number of words in the content. Since keyword density looks at how many times the keywords are utilised in the web content of the page search engines however do not allow SEO’s to incorporate into the webpage keywords that will exceed the desired keyword density limit because if one exceeds the limit search engines will consider it as keyword stuffing which in turn make the website to become a spam website. Thus, care should also be observed when utilising this strategy in the use of the keyword.
In the battle for supremacy over the web many companies have already taken steps in order to get ahead. One of such step was facebook’s acquisition of Friend Feed in order to give Facebook the microblogging and search engine capability which would thus make facebook a competitor in the field of being dominated by Twitter and Google. Another is the merger of Yahoo and Microsoft in order to get ahead in the search engine playing field which is currently being dominated by Google holding at least 65% of the total internet users’ share. Google, not to be out done has also taken several steps one of which is the announcement of a new search engine algorithm that is currently being programmed. Another is the incorporation of a social media feature in its personalised website igoogle. The new features added are YouTube video sharing, online games like scrabble and a feature that enables a user to incorporate his or her to-do list. The addition of the social features on igoogle is made possible by making igoogle compatible with the Google OpenSocial API which allows developers to create features specifically social features to the gadgets for the customisation of the users’ own page.
This incorporation of new features in igoogle has enables the Google product to have social media network features that can rival that of the features of the leading social media network Facebook, which recently is starting to capture the interests of SEO companies and SEO consultants alike with its acquisition of Friend Feed. Although igoogle has a new integrated social media features its Vice President still maintains that igoogle will still remain to be a customisable or a personalised website.
It is no secret that a website’s page ranking is important especially in the marketing of such websites’ products or services. Page ranking is received or given to websites mostly due to the external links that points towards the target website. This is because of the fact that a link going to or connecting to another website is being considered by search engines, more particularly Google, as a “vote” to the target website. This thus creates a positive outlook to your website by the search engines and would then bestow as specific page ranking to your website. Aside from gaining a page rank such technique is also utilised to gain more traffic going into your website coming from different sources. The process of gaining page ranking through links is considered as link building. There are several ways of building your link and one of these ways is by using content to build your link. Contents are the texts that are contained within a website and using such content to incorporate a link going to your target website will also mean a vote to your website. There are several type or SEO strategies that can be done in Link Building through the content and one of which is through writing articles that is for purposes of syndication and publication. This link building SEO strategy requires you to write a one page article about one product or services that your website or company is offering and post such article in the different websites that offer such publication and syndication services, make sure however, that the article should contain relevant keywords and the link to your website.
Another way of link building through the use of contents is by posting blogs and comments on forums. Blogs are now considered to be a fad and the trend and having a blogsite that will allow posting of articles referring to topics that is related to your target website can also give you the much needed page rank or opportunity to incorporate links. The process done is the same as posting an article in this manner the content should also therefore be related and relevant and such should also contain the link to the target website. For forums, you have to post relevant comments and not just some random comments that will contain the link to your website. Post to forums that tackle topics that are related to your website.
Another effective way to use contents to build your links is by posting press releases to press release websites. This is also an SEO-accepted strategy that would pertain to link building. In using this type of SEO strategy you are also required to post your press release in such a manner that it would observe relevance and keyword use.
