EasyPostcard

Algorithm. A set of rules that a search engine uses to rank the pages contained within its index in response to a particular query. No search engine reveals exactly how its algorithm works, to protect itself both from competitors and from those who wish to spam the search engine.

Back links. These are links to a website from external sources, including other web pages, directories, and advertising.

Banned. When pages are removed from a search engine’s index because the search engine has deemed them to be spamming, or violating one of the search engine’s other rules.

Click-through rate. How many people clicked on a link, as a percentage of the total number of people that saw the link.

Cloaking. The act of serving content to search engine spiders that is different to what normal visitors would see. Search engines will ban you if they find you doing this.

Contextual links. Contextual links are displayed on web pages when the content on the page indicates to an ad server that the page is a good match for specific keywords or phrases.

Conversion rate. The percentage of visitors to a website who buy something.

Cost per click (CPC). A system where an advertiser pays an agreed amount for each click someone makes on a link leading to their website.

Cost per mille (CPM). A system where an advertiser pays an agreed amount for the number of times an ad is seen, regardless of how many people actually click through. The ‘mille’ refers to one thousand viewings of the ad.
Crawler. A component of a search engine that gathers listings by automatically ‘crawling’ the web, following links to understand how pages are connected.

De-listing. This is when pages are removed from a search engine’s index, usually because they haven’t been updated for a long time.

Directories. A type of search engine where listings are gathered by humans, rather than by automated web crawlers.

Doorway page. A web page created in the hope of improving another page’s ranking in a search engine’s listings. Doorway pages don’t give much information to the people viewing them.

Graphical inventory. Banners and other ads that appear depending on the keywords a page contains. This includes pop-ups, browser toolbars and rich media.

Index. The collection of information a search engine has that searchers can query.

Landing page. The web page that a visitor reaches after clicking your search engine listing.

Link popularity. A count of how ‘popular’ a page is based on the number of other pages that link to it.

Link. A link is text that you can click on to go to another website, or another page on the same website.

Listings. The information that appears on a search engine’s results page in response to a search.

Meta-search engine. A search engine that returns listings from two or more other search engines, instead of using its own index.

Meta tags. Tags placed in a web page’s code that pass information to search engine crawlers, browser software and some other applications.

Meta description tag. This meta tag allows pages to provide descriptions to search engines.

Meta keywords tag. Allows authors to add text to a page to help with the search engine ranking process.

Meta robots tag. Allows page authors to keep some web pages from being indexed by search engines. Similar to a robots.txt file.

Natural listings. The listings that search engines do not sell. Instead, sites appear solely because a search engine believes it is important for them to be included, regardless of payment. Note that paid inclusion listings are still treated as natural listings by many search engines.
Outbound links. Links on one website that lead to other websites.

Paid inclusion. An advertising program where pages are guaranteed to be spidered and included in a search engine’s index in exchange for payment.

PPC. Pay-per-click – means the same as cost per click (CPC).

Paid listings. Listings that search engines sell to advertisers, usually through paid placement or paid inclusion programs.

Pay-for-performance. A term popularized by some search engines as a synonym for pay-per-click. It stresses to advertisers that they are only paying for ads that “perform” in terms of delivering traffic, as opposed to CPM-based ads, where ads cost money even if no-one clicks on them.

Paid placement. An advertising program where listings appear in response to particular search terms, with higher rankings typically obtained by paying more than other advertisers.

Rank. The order in which web pages are listed in search engine results.

Reciprocal link. A ‘link exchange’ in which two sites link to each other.

Results page. The page that appears after a user enters their search terms.

Robots.txt. A file used to keep web pages from being indexed by search engines.

Search engine. A service designed to allow users to search the web, or another database of information.

Search engine marketing (SEM). Marketing a website using search engines, whether you’re improving your ranking in natural listings, purchasing paid listings or some combination of the two.

Search engine optimization (SEO). Altering a website so that it ranks higher in the search engines.

Search terms. The words a searcher enters into a search engine’s search box.

Shopping search. Shopping search engines allow shoppers to search the web for products and their prices.

Spam. Any search engine marketing method that a search engine decides is detrimental to its efforts to deliver relevant search results.

Spider. See crawler.
Submission. The act of sending a URL to a search engine, for inclusion in its index.

XML feeds. A process in which information about a page is fed to the index without using a crawler, for example using RSS.

The best advice is to follow a good search engine promotion system. Keep track of when you submit your sites and how soon they’re indexed — checking once a week is sufficient.

Ranking systems can be confusing and there are often complex factors involved, but you do not need to be an expert in the field to achieve top results. Take a chance – after all, you have nothing to lose.
Many thanks to Danny Sullivan, Kevin Lee, Ikonya Nginyo, and all the other volunteers who contributed

About the Author

Luie De Von is a marketing consultant with Easypostcard Marketing and has been providing consumers and business owners with marketing strategies. For years he has helped businesses to have more and growing clients through Advertising Postcards , Marketing Postcard , Business Post Card.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Before you can evaluate your site’s SEO profile, you need to understand what an SEO profile is and how it works. An SEO profile for a website is just like a marketing plan or a business plan – basically, it’s a strategy document, putting your decisions into words. This is best performed on a computer program such as Microsoft Word as these programs do provide the best bang for your buck. All else aside, Microsoft does put out some excellent business oriented software so take advantage of it!

Writing your SEO profile should consist of the following:

An introduction – This should include a BRIEF description of your company as well as a purpose statement of some kind. If you can describe your company in a neat, tight format, you will be one step ahead of most in the SEO game.

Goals relating to your Search Engine Status – What do you want your page rank to be? Where do you want to be listed under specif key words? top 50? 25? 10? How many pages of your site do you want search engines to index? Do you want to pay for listings? These questions will get you started, but you must go more in-depth into your SEO goals. Also include the search engines and directories that you feel are necessities such as Google, DMOZ, Yahoo!, and MSN.

Information regarding SEO actions and achievements – This one is pretty self-explanatory. List everything that you do regarding Search Engine Optimization as well as any successes caused by these actions.

Once you’ve written an SEO profile, you can compare it from time-to-time with what’s going on with your site, before either adjusting the site to reflect your strategy or adjusting the profile to reflect a strategy change. Generally, it is wise to stick to the plan, but occasions may arise when you find that this is simply not logical anymore. In these cases, you must re-evaluate your entire plan because one change can effect the rest of your strategy. If you have an extremely intricate strategy that depends on one thing going well, you may want to diversify your strategy. Your profile should especially focus on special things you plan to do that aren’t standard SEO practice. Standard SEO work can get you only so far. Every one of your competitors is probably doing the same things so get creative. This is one place where doing something for yourself can really push you to the top. If you already have a high-ranking site, you should use your profile to document the reasons why it has happened, to help you maintain your high ranking.

Keeping your SEO profile updated will allow you to stay current not only on what’s going on with your website, but also on what’s going on in the SEO industry. The SEO industry is very fickle. It can change suddenly without warning to reflect what a search engine or directory believes to be the opinion or benefit of the market. Remember that search engines are always in competition with one another to deliver the most results of the highest quality. If you stay on top of your quality, changes in the SEO industry will have minimal effect on you. It is still important to track these changes in order to ensure that your site gets maximum exposure. Evaluating your website and profile regularly give you an advantage in the market – you should never let a profile get older than 3 months, and you should refer to it and update it every time you make major changes to your site. These changes include additions of services or removal of services as well as design changes and SEO work.

There is software available online that can help you evaluate your site’s SEO profile. Some of these software are very useful, others are very overrated. The difference that these programs will make in your fight for page rank and listings depends on your interpretation of the results nearly as much as it depends on the value of the software itself. In order to find some software simply google for SEO software. Reading the reviews and making judgement calls is the best way to determine the worth of SEO software. If you think that its worth going for look at the cost of it. If the cost seems to high, it probably is. You can generally evaluate your SEO profile on your own once you have learned what to look for in an Search Engine Optomized page.

About the Author

Luie De Von is a marketing consultant with Easypostcard Marketing and has been providing consumers and business owners with marketing strategies. For years he has helped businesses to have more and growing clients through Advertising Postcards , Marketing Postcard , Business Post Card.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Search engine optimization isn’t rocket science, but it can feel complicated at times. There’s no need to worry about the jargon when you’re just starting out, though, and part of the point of SEO is to make everything simpler and cleaner, the way search engines like it.

Everything a search engine does has a pattern and a reason. Even if the algorithms are too complex for you to understand, there are patterns that can be found if you look hard enough. All you have to do in order to find the patterns is be willing to look for them which basically just consists of keeping your eyes and your mind open.

Being good at SEO requires some effort, but is – for the most part – very basic. To have a successful campaign, just follow these simple rules – they apply to all websites.

Search engines always try to give users whatever they can find that is relevant to their search. You have to realize that most search engines don’t work by moving the good stuff towards the top: instead, they try to push the bad stuff towards the bottom, and hope that what’s good will ‘float up’. Content is King and it can get you good search engine rankings easily if it’s written properly and sprinkled with the appropriate keywords. This not only brings visitors to your site but also feeds search engine spiders and crawlers. I can’t stress enough that good content is the key to good SEO.

A fast way to develop good content is to generate a series of articles or an ebook regarding your topic. These items are very powerful in the world of SEO because they provide your visitors with something to read and they allow you to conquer some key words that you normally wouldn’t be able to touch. If you are managing a website for pets, an article about dog food is more likely to generate a high position in the search results for “dog food” than your home page. Therefore, if you write articles pertaining to your subject but slightly more in depth than you can put on your home page, you will benefit drastically.

To try to get to number one in an index, you must first find out where your site is now. That means checking each search engine to see your position, and coming up with a strategy for each one – who knows, maybe you’re already number one on one of the smaller search engines! You can’t just assume, however, that because your site is listed in one search engine that it will be listed in all of them. That’s not how search engines work.

Look at the sites that currently rank high on the search engines and you will see that have simple designs with graphics that use minimal bandwidth, and they’re easy to navigate. Simple, clean designs are what both search engine crawlers and search engine users like, as it lets them get the content they want without any fuss. This is what you should be aiming for.

Some sites are considered good enough to be ranked highly in search engines, even though their designs make them difficult to look at. This goes to show that the looks of a site have nothing to do with where a search engines places it in the rankings – all search engines care about is text. If the content of a site is relevant to what people are searching for then that’s all that matters to a search engine.

Let’s take a look at meta tags, keywords, descriptions, and titles. They’re all important elements, even if they’re not what will make or break your site – they’re just one part of your strategy. These elements need to be compelling and sprinkled with your keywords, as this will entice users to click through from the search results page to your website. It’s best to start off slowly, gradually adding things in as you learn.

If you have any questions and you don’t know where to go, then check out some of the forums on the subject – just do a search for ‘seo forum’. These people are usually more than willing to post answers to your questions, or direct you to someone who can answer your question if they can’t. Remember to be patient with yourself: learning something new takes time and effort, and SEO is no different.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Search engine rankings are an important factor to consider when you have a website that needs more traffic. If your website doesn’t have a good position in the rankings then no-one will find it, so you need to make sure that your website is ranked highly enough to be seen. The other important quality to getting high traffic to your site is having a nice arsenal of links. The more links that you have to your site the more traffic you will get, but also, the more links to your site the more search engines like your site. Keeping a nice supply of links pointing at your site requires similar precautions and practices as getting high search engine listings.

Although no SEO company can guarantee a high ranking for your site, here are some tips for raising your search engine ranking. Using these tips will not get you to the top unless your site is the best out there, but they will at least put you into the positioning that you truly deserve. After all, the internet is basically a free market. You will naturally flow into the place that you deserve and many search engines try to insure that you do not rise above or fall below this position. This is why they are so strict, and this is why you must keep yourself on good terms with them.

1) Content is an important factor in high search engine rankings. Make sure that you have plenty of content throughout your site with your target keywords in the articles. It’s also worth doing a search for websites similar to yours and taking a look at their articles for ideas. The more content you have the better. It is generally a good idea to have between three hundred and five hundred words per page, but more important than a quantity of content is the quality of the content that you are providing. You cannot just put out three hundred words of jargon and expect your visitors to find it interesting and stick around for the long haul.

2) Your website’s URL can help you rank higher with the search engines if it contains your keywords. However, don’t think that naming your site after your keywords will always help your rankings – you need to do more than just that.

3) Search terms should be written out in text, instead of graphics. If you do use pictures, be sure to give them alt tags. The alt tags in your pictures are almost as important as text. It’s also a good idea to put some of your key words in links to other pages. In the eyes of a search engine it is almost as good to have a link to a page full of the content that the visitor is looking for as it is to have the content that the visitor is looking for on your page. If a visitor is looking for something that you are linking to and he or she finds your page, they may look around your site on the way through.

4) The title of your page is very important, and making sure that you choose it wisely will make a big difference. Terms such ‘free article on safe children’s toys’, or ‘contact the children’s toy expert today’ are good to use as titles, for example – they would get you a high ranking. The title area is the most important place to include your keyword phrases, so make sure that you put them all in.

5) The navigation menu that appears on each page of your website should include your page’s title.

6) Don’t just use the most popular keyword phrases – the market is so competitive that you should be sure to include some niche keywords too.

7) Make sure that you don’t have a lot of irrelevant links on your site. The more closely related to your site your links are, the better your chances of being ranked in a higher position.

You need to periodically update the content of your website, even if it’s only a slight change, as websites like sites that are kept updated.

9) You need to consider the fact most search engines don’t like automatic submissions or multiple submissions – submit once, manually.

10) Always be on the look out for SEO news – staying up to date and using the latest techniques will help you stay one step ahead of your competition.

About the Author

Luie De Von is a marketing consultant with Easypostcard Marketing and has been providing consumers and business owners with marketing strategies. For years he has helped businesses to have more and growing clients through Advertising Postcards , Marketing Postcard , Business Post Card.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites