Search Engine Optimisation

If search engines are free, how do they make money?……. simple, advertising the root of all evil.

It's all about page impressions and click throughs. A search engine is in the business of advertising to as wider audience as possible. Consider this, its mother's day and you are searching for a supplier of flowers who deliver. You go to your favourite search engine and type in "flower delivery". The results come back and you are disappointed- everything from "flower power save the whale" to the "history of flower and bread". So you go to another search engine and try there. This time you get the results you expected, find an online flower delivery service, place the order, they deliver and your mother is happy. Where are you going to search next time?

Page impressions count. Search engines have been tricked in the past to give results that are not worthy of the original search. In so doing they have been striving to reduce the non-relevant results by employing tricks of there own. A good rule of thumb is to ensure your site is relevant to the search.

Don't try to trick a search engine, with hidden text, "spam" keywords etc. For a page to be agreeable to a search engine the header text should be relevant, the text in the pages should be relevant, it should have relevant links, graphics and even domain name.
In the world of search engine optimisation this will still not guarantee you a listing but it is a good start.

Understanding Search Engines

The term "search engine" is often used to describe both types of Search Engine. Crawler-based search engines and Human-powered directories both gather their listings in significantly different ways.

Crawler-Based Search Engines

Crawler-based search engines, such as HotBot, "crawl" the web with a "web spider", then people search through what they have found. Eventually changes your web pages are found by the spider, and will have an impact on how the site is listed. Page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role in how the page is given relevancy.
Crawler-based search engines have three major elements. First is the spider, it visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. It usually returns to the site on a regular basis to identify site changes. The information the spider finds goes into the index. The Index is a huge electronic list containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a web site changes this book is updated with the new information.

Updates can take a while the time between being spidered and Indexed can be several months. Until a site is indexed it is not available to searchers. The third part of a search engine is the search program, it sifts through the millions of pages in the index to identify relevant matches to a search.

Human-Powered Directories

A human-powered directory, such as DMOZ and Yahoo, depends on human editors for its listing. During submission you submit a short description to the directory for your entire site, the editors may take this description or write one for the sites under review. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted.

Changing your web pages has no effect on your listing. Things that are useful for improving a listing with a crawler-based search engine have no impact on improving a listing in a directory. However a good site, with good content, might be more likely to get reviewed for free than a poor site.

"Hybrid Search Engines"

Times have changed it used to be that a search engine either presented crawler-based results or human-powered listings. It is now extremely common for both types of results to be used for Website listing. A hybrid search engine will usually favour one type of listings over the other. For example, Yahoo is a human-powered search engine, however it does also present crawler-based results provided by Google.

Keywords

Without the right keywords/phrases, search engine optimisation is pointless. The trick with keyword selection is not what most people think, keyword selection can be a very involved process which should not be taken lightly. You want your keywords and phrases to be focused on the exact words your prospective customers are most likely to use.
Here's an example to illustrate the point:

A recent client had been employing a Search Engine Optimisation Company (SEO) to optimise their Website. Words selected like "cars" and "vehicles" were proving just too popular to pursue. A recent search at Lycos resulted in the following:

"cars"- 6,764,785 pages
"vehicles" - 5,504,970 pages

It would be very difficult to get to the top using these keywords, although given time not impossible. You're much better off going after a less popular, more specific keyword or phrase such as "used car " (3,259,428 listings). This would attract people looking for a specific keyword, which is actually better because there is less competition. Being more targeted they are more closely related to your actual product or service and are much more likely to buy.

The danger, of course, is not to make the keywords too obscure. The client had a wish for the keyword "car buying advice" however this keyword phrase was identified as not being used very much by would-be clients.

Keyword	No. of searches	Competition Listings
"car buying advice"	356 times	560,754 listings in Lycos
"used car"	357,349 times	3,259,428 listings in Lycos
"new car"	134,172 times	7,445,256 listings in Lycos
"car insurance"	109,548 times	1,961,869 listings in Lycos
"car buying guide"	69,900 times	530,400 listings in Lycos
"car loan"	42,648 times	665,040 listings in Lycos

By choosing the wrong keyword say "car buying advice" the competition is almost the same as for "car buying guide", but because the number using the search term is so small the possibility of results are also small.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are not the answer to everything wrong with your web site and why your site is not being listed. They are, however, an essential part of a well-designed web site promotion program. Most search engines ignore Meta Tags, however some do still give some relevance to their content. The Title tag is probably the most important along with the Meta description.

Most search engines give additional weight to words found in the Title tag if those words are also found in the body text.. The Meta description is the text that is presented by the search engine following the sites listing, it describes to the humans reading the search results that the search is relevant and that they should click on your site -not the one above.

Flash, Frames and Java

To humans they look great but to Search Engines flash, frames and Java are meaningless. Their very presence on a page can at best cause the page to be ignored. A text rich page is often the only answer when it comes to search engines.

Keyword Density

One way the spiders can tell how relevant your page matches the needs of the searcher is to examine how many times your page contains the keyword or keyword phrase entered by the searcher.

But even more, how many times the page contains the phrase in relation to the total number of words on the page. Keyword packing is most definitely not the answer as having too higher keyword density can be as damaging as too low, and each search engine works differently.

The biggest problem is that getting keyword density often makes a page unattractive to humans.

Anchor Text

Having created the best, most relevant, most beautifully crafted seach engine spider friendly site you might think that is the end of it. Wrong! whilst all the points above are important there is one that without which will keep your site as an "also ran". Many search engines examine how your site is navigated and how other sites navigate to you. Since For some search engines it has become one of the most critical elements to good search engine optimisation. Text links or "anchor text" from pages or sites which are on a related subject are best.

PageRank

Page Rank is a means that Google uses to give pages and sites importance for a search term. Each link incoming and outgoing link forms part of the calculation.

There is a difference between Page Rank (PR) and Page Points Score (PPS). Typically a spidered pages with no incoming links has a PPS of 1 this equates to a PR=0. Each link gives page points to the recipient page. The value of how many points that migrate to the recipient page is based on the originating page's points divided by the number of outgoing links on that page. For example if a site has 11 pages, a homepage that links directly to 10 other pages which all link back. PPS of 1 will be awarded to the 10 pages but the homepage having 10 incoming links (from page point 1's) will be awarded 10 points.

If the home page is linked to by another site with say PR4 (512 PPS ) then you can see how the calculations take on a whole different perspective. The number of PPS to PR goes something like this;-

PR0 =1 PPS
PR2 = 8 PPS
PR3 = 64 PPS
PR4 = 512 PPS
PR5 = 4,096 PPS
PR6 = 32,768 PPS
PR7 = 262,144 PPS

In Conclusion

Give a lot of thought to keywords they are the most important element to any search engine optimisation programme, get into the minds of your would-be clients. Avoid Frames, Flash and Java, don't try to trick a search engine and be very wary of any Search Engine Optimisation Company that guarantees results for next to no cost. The only route to the top is hard work, ethically without tricks.