Search Engine Optimization Tutorial

Pub Con 2009 in Vegas Is Nearly Finished

Get ready for the feedback from what is one of if not the best places in the world to get informed on the world of SEO. There are 90 workshops of professionals all waiting to share their learning’s and experiences, form Google to Yahoo to huge corporations that use SEO to market their business. But often the biggest benefit is who you meet during the event. It is a great place to network, but mixing with the right people who have been and done that is a huge positive to learning about the real search engine optimisation techniques that worked will all the search engines and without the risk of being banned pr a penalty put against your site.

I have not been able to get to the Vegas Pub Con this year, as I have some huge projects that are already behind schedule, but even now I am looking to buy my airfare for Dallas 2010 where is looks like another brilliant schedule. But I know that seo companies like mine all over the world will have sold everything to be there.

Can’t wait for the forums to fill with information from Webmasterworld who organise the event, let’s see if there is some newer than social networking that seems to be dominating everything at the moment.

Google and its Page Rank

The search engine Google has transformed search as we know and it all started with its Page Rank formula. The idea was to give each page a value based on other sites linking to that page, the better the quality and quantity of links the higher the page rank. But as a page increases it own page rank and page that is linked to from it, also gain from that high page rank value.

The results have meant that many SEO amateurs and professional have taken page rank as the be all and end all of linking strategies, meaning that they would prefer to receive a link from a site that had a high page rank rather than one that was relevant to the site and helped its readers.

You can tell what page rank a webpage has by installing the Google toolbar and in options selection the relevant tick box option. Every time you browse a page you will see a green bar on the Google toolbar that will give an indication of that particular page’s page rank, but it is not quite what it seems. First of all the result you see (out of 10) is not live and in fact is just a snap shot of sometime ago. Just this weekend much of the UK has seen their toolbars update at what appears to be a page rank update but in fact even these new results are still probably a snapshot sometime a few weeks ago.

The next point is even though we see page rank as a score out of 10, it is very likely that Google has a more accurate scoring system, so it could be out of 1000 or broken down into decimal points. Even with all this inaccuracy it is amazing how much SEO work and money changes hands based on these scores on the page rank bar.

Google tells you not to worry about things like this and only do things that help your visitor. This is a true fact but in highly competitive fields chances are you will have to do both. Ensure you have a compelling unique site for your visitors and find away to get relevant and high page rank sites to link to you. My advice is to aware of what page rank is and how it can help in SEO, but don’t let it rule everything you do. You may find little results.

Anchor Text

It is pretty obvious that sending relevant high quality links to your website can help your ranking on the search engines. However you can get a boost to the link value by incorporation your keywords within your text link.

These keywords are then often called anchor text, because it helps the search engine understand why that website linked to you and will reward you with better rankings. For example if you have a site that you want to rank for the key word “Purple Widget”, then ensure theses keywords are within the text link to your site. Rather than presenting the link only as your URL.

You do need to be careful though. If you send too many links with exactly the same anchor text within, it will become obvious that these links were not crated naturally and were manufactured for better SEO purposes. Google and other search engines have equations that help identify these situations and rather than your rankings improving, it is very likely you could lose positions.

So the trick is to vary the keywords you use when you ask another site to link to you a professional seo company would always do this, in fact the variation will often relate to consumers using different search terms anyway.

Long tail anchor text is normally when 3 words or more are used as a search term within the link. These terms are often easier to rank for and although will deliver less traffic, it is also true that then can realise better conversion rates if you are able to match a very specific web page to that search a consumer has made.

You should also make sure your anchor text does match that page of the website. If you end up sending a link with the same anchor text to 2 or more pages within the same site, it can be difficult for Google to decide which page should gain the positions.

Sitemaps In Webmaster Tools

One of the most important tools to have in SEO is Google’s own webmaster tools. Originally this was called Google sitemaps but over time, more and more useful tools has been added and so now is know as webmaster tools. However this article is about the sitemaps part itself and the benefits is can have when trying to get Google to recognise and list your pages within a website.

Fist of all you should not confuse a sitemap made for Google with a sitemap page that is often added to websites to help your visitors get to their chosen page fast, although the version we are talking about, helps Google find your pages faster.

A Google sitemap is created in XML format and is loaded up on to the server within your root folder. You then register with webmaster tools, tell them where this sitemap is located on your site and wait for webmaster tools to find the sitemap.

The benefits of doing this are, that Google will find your pages quicker; it will also highlight any errors your site have, this can be especially effective for new sites and sites that have pages several layers deep, that normal spiders by Google may struggle to find.

On of the fist things a SEO company will do when working on a new site or new client, is to make sure that site is registered with webmaster tools and a sitemap set up. If after some time, certain pages are still not being listed by Google, there is a god chance there is something weak about those pages, like duplicate content or not enough content. Even pages that are of a similar content to others on the site may find themselves not listed.

As you can be pretty sure that Google knows about the pages as they were entered on the sitemap, you can then concluded that there must be a reason Google does not like the pages and react accordingly. As you site grows you should continue to add these pages also to your sitemap, to keep Google informed.

There are many other features with webmaster tools, but I will talk about them in later posts.

Writing Articles For SEO

A proven way to generate back links to your website is to write an article and then publish it on the many article websites out there, including your profile or signature, which will include your chosen backlinks and anchor text within. Of course the key is to make sure you write an article about the same subject as the website you intend to link back to, without the piece being a sales message.

The benefits for SEO are that you gain back links, these back links are from a page of relevant content, which is exactly what Google wants. It wants to see links from informative, unique information that then links to another site that expands on that information, namely the website you are trying to improve the ranking for.

A professional SEO company would always consider article writing as one part of the backlink strategy, even though it can be time consuming to write and publish. Another benefit is, if someone reads your article and then publishes it on their site, you gain free links. It is possible for one article to be published hundreds of time, gaining you a huge amount of relevant links without any further work.

Here is a video link explaining how article writing can help your SEO projects, although we will touch upon this subject again as the video is a bit basic.

Making Link Building Fun

As you may have gathered, getting other websites to link to yours is one of the most important, if not the most important factor is search engine optimization. Techniques vary from company to company, but there are some basic rules.

Not many people can say that the process of link building is fun, in fact it is a lot of hard work, looking for web directories or writing articles. Well this guy has decised to invent the 101 rap, to explain in rap form some information about obtaining links to your website.

There is an interesting note at the bottom of this seo link building video on youtube, that Matt Cutts states warns you gainst buying links. In better words if you are found out, your site may disapear from google forever.

Web Biz Ideas Basic Tutorial

In order to anything well in any business finction including SEO, it is important to many peoples or comapnies view and strategies on the subject. In this case it is from a seo company called Web Biz Ideas who have created a small video on the basics of Search engine optimization.

It is only 9 minutes and shows their opinions on the basics of SEO, including Meta Titles, free SEO tools, link building and much more.

You may have to watch this seo tutorial a few times to get all the useful information.

What Are Search Engines

It wasn’t that long ago that if you needed to find a business or a service, you picked up the yellow pages and let your fingers do the walking. Now the internet has taken over and even yellow pages are visited more online that through the printed page.

So the natural way to find just about anything in the 21st century is to first visit a search engine, enter what you are looking for and hope that the technology and calculations behind the website will deliver you on screen what you are looking for.

Well that is the principle anyway. But in reality when we action a search we often find different results and so the users tend to have their favourite search engine because of previous success. The big 3 search engines are Google Yahoo and live (aka MSN owned my Microsoft). All 3 use different algorithms (calculations) to deliver the search results, hence different information.

In the war within these 3, Google is winning by a mile, even though they are the newest in the market. It is believed they have around 56% of the total search market within the USA, but this figure increases dramatically in certain other countries. The story of Google is phenomenal, making one of the world’s most successful ventures and to some in the search engine optimization industry or where their income relies on search engine placement, world domination.

Yahoo is normally placed second, still quite and achievement and seems to have a dedicated following. Just as Google is successful, following up just behind yahoo is Live, which considering is supplied automatically with XP or Vista operation system, which is on most of the worlds computers, and owned an run by Microsoft, it is surprising how little progress against the other 2 it has made, even with substantial investment.

To be good at search engine optimization you have to understand how each of these search engines work. A quality seo company will do this every day, consistently keeping abreast all changes. Take Google for example; in 2007 they implemented over 450 changes to their algorithm. In short what looks like simple websites, are in fact a directory of the world. But for you seo guy out there, there is only 10 results that matter and that is the first 10 results on the first page of any search result, nothing else should matter.

What Is Search Engine Optimization

Over recent decades the internet has changed the way we do business in many sectors from buying things at auction, to insurance to booking flights and buying a holiday and so the list goes on. But in order to find business or find any piece of information on the internet, there needs to be a process or a website that allows you to search for what you are looking for.

These websites tend to be called search engines, something which we will talk about in later posts. Over the decades though more and more sites were added to these search engines in fact it is estimated that millions of pages every day are added. This creates a problem of how do you decide which results should be shown to the consumer when they search for a particular business or piece of information?

Well each search engine has its own particular calculation of what results it should show to you and me when we action a search with them. This calculation is called an algorithm which again we will talk about in later posts.
So search engine optimization is where someone learns about the algorithm and applies this information to a website to help get that website near the top of search engine results. During the early years, some black hat techniques were used to try and manipulate the search results, something which the odd unscrupulous SEO company may still try and do. However most search engine companies pretty much know all the techniques and have applied filters to prevent these tactics working anymore. The results mean that now, normally what is good for the visitor is good for search engine optimization purposes also.

In fact Google states, do what is right for your visitors in order to get better SEO (search engine optimization) results. A good SEO company will know this and the work they do will have a double effect of keeping visitors and improving SEO results.

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