| What is
SEO?
Creating a successful Internet presence involves much more than designing a great website. Submitting and promoting your website to the major search engines is also essential. Listing your web site with the Search Engines will play a major role in how well your pages rank and the amount of traffic your site will receive. Many companies build excellent website but forget to do effective search engine promotion and search engine ranking optimization to get good ranking in major search engines. We work to support your existing search engine marketing or completely manage, handle your search engine marketing including search engine optimization, search engine submissions, pay per click campaigns (PPC) and link popularity. SEO is all about links so more the links you have more chances to be ranked on google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL etc. Unless there is an effective promotion done, few are seldom seen by the internet users. They simply don't know the website exists as they never rank at top. With expereince in SEO marketing we can bring your website to good positions where you can look forward to more business
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of
improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from
search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search
results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is
presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more
searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds
of search, including image search, local search, and
industry-specific vertical search engines.
As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's
relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people
search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation,
and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search
engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Another class
of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods
such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search
engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ
these techniques and may remove them from their indices.
The initialism "SEO" can also refer to "search
engine optimization", terms adopted by an industry of consultants who
carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by
employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine
optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a
broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require
changes to the HTML source code of a site, some tactics may be
incorporated into web site development and design SEO experts. The term "search
engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus,
content management systems, URLs, and shopping carts that are easy
to optimize.
• Search Engine Rankings :
We
have three plans for making your web site reachable by the masses of
the clients . For example we may want your site to be ranked in top
10 positions in google when some one types in a related word .
1.
Top 5 Google ranking for your web site for 5 keyword sets : promised
results within 3 months of contract .
2. Top 10 Google ranking
for your web site for 10 keyword sets : promised results within 3
months of contract .
3. Top 14 upon negotiation .
History
Webmasters and content
providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the
mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early
Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or
URL, to the various engines which would send a spider to "crawl"
that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return
information found on the page to be indexed. The process involves a
search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search
engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer,
extracts various information about the page, such as the words it
contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for
specific words and all links the page contains, which are then
placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.
Site owners started to recognize the value of
having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine
results.They also recognised that the higher their site ranking the
more people would click on the website. According to industry
analyst Danny Sullivan, the earliest known use of the phrase "search
engine optimization" was a spam message posted on Usenet on July 26,
1997.
Early versions of search algorithms relied on
webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or
index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provided a guide to
each page's content. But using meta data to index pages was found to
be less than reliable because the webmaster's account of keywords in
the meta tag were not truly relevant to the site's actual keywords.
Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags caused
pages to rank for irrelevant searches. Web content providers also
manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page
in an attempt to rank well in search engines. By relying so much on
factors exclusively within a webmaster's control, early search
engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide
better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure
their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather
than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous
webmasters. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is
determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to
any given search allowing those results to be false would turn users
to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing
more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional
factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.
Graduate students at Stanford University, Larry
Page and Sergey Brin developed "backrub", a search engine that
relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web
pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a
function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. PageRank
estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web
user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to
another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than
others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by
the random surfer.
Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google
attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet
users, who liked its simple design. Off-page factors such as
PageRank and hyperlink analysis were considered, as well as on-page
factors, to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in
search engines that only considered on-page factors for their
rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters
had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence
the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly
applicable to gaining PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging,
buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these
schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites
for the sole purpose of link spamming.
To reduce the impact of link schemes, as of 2007,
search engines consider a wide range of undisclosed factors for
their ranking algorithms. Google says it ranks sites using more than
200 different signals. The three leading search engines, Google,
Yahoo and Microsoft's Live Search, do not disclose the algorithms
they use to rank pages. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry
Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different
approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their
opinions in online forums and blogs. SEO professionals may also
study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into
the algorithms. By 1997 search engines recognized that some
webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their search engines,
and even manipulating the page rankings in search results. Early
search engines, such as Infoseek, adjusted their algorithms to
prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings by stuffing pages with
excessive or irrelevant keywords.
Due to the high marketing value of targeted search
results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between
search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference, AIRWeb,
Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web, was created to discuss
and minimize the damaging effects of aggressive web content
providers.
SEO companies that employ overly aggressive
techniques can get their client websites banned from the search
results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal profiled a company,
Traffic Power, which allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed
to disclose those risks to its clients. Wired magazine reported that
the same company sued blogger Aaron Wall for writing about the ban.
Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban
Traffic Power and some of its clients.
Some search engines have also reached out to the
SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO
conferences, chats, and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid
inclusion, some search engines now have a vested interest in the
health of the optimization community. Major search engines provide
information and guidelines to help with site optimization. Google
has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having
any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google
traffic to the website. Yahoo! Site Explorer provides a way for
webmasters to submit URLs, determine how many pages are in the
Yahoo! index and view link information.
Getting indexed
The leading
search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, use crawlers to find
pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked
from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted
because they are found automatically. Some search engines, notably
Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling
for either a set fee or cost per click. Such programs usually
guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific
ranking within the search results. Yahoo's paid inclusion program
has drawn criticism from advertisers and competitors. Two major
directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both
require manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers
Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created
and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found,
especially pages that aren't discoverable by automatically following
links.
Search engine crawlers may look at a number of
different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by
the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a
site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.
Preventing
indexing
Main article: Robots Exclusion
Standard
To avoid undesirable content in the search
indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files
or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root
directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly
excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag
specific to robots. When a search engine visits a site, the
robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled.
The robots.txt file is then parsed, and will instruct the robot as
to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may
keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a
webmaster does not wish crawled. Pages typically prevented from
being crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts
and user-specific content such as search results from internal
searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should
prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are
considered search spam.
White hat versus black hat
SEO
techniques are classified by some into two broad categories:
techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design and
those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt
to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Industry
commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners
who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. 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.
An SEO technique is considered white hat if it
conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no
deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a
series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to
note. 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.
Search engines may penalize sites they discover
using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or
eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such
penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines'
algorithms, or by a manual site review.
One infamous example was the February 2006 Google
removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive
practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the
offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.
As a marketing strategy
Eye
tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a search results
page from top to bottom and left to right (for left to right
languages), looking for a relevant result. Placement at or near the
top of the rankings therefore increases the number of searchers who
will visit a site. However, more search engine referrals does not
guarantee more sales. SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy
for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be
much more effective, depending on the site operator's goals.A
successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic traffic to
web pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on
search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to
engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep
search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up
analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes,
and improving a site's conversion rate.
SEO may generate a return on investment. However,
search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their
algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued
referrals. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business
that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses
if the search engines stop sending visitors. It is considered wise
business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from
dependence on search engine traffic.A top ranked SEO blog Seomoz.org
has reported, "Search marketers, in a twist of irony, receive a very
small share of their traffic from search engines." Instead, their
main sources of traffic are links from other websites.
International markets
A Baidu search results page The search engines'
market shares vary from market to market, as does competition. In
2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google represented about 75% of all
searches. In markets outside the United States, Google's share is
often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine
worldwide as of 2007. As of 2006, Google held about 40% of the
market in the United States, but Google had an 85-90% market share
in Germany.While there were hundreds of SEO firms in the US at that
time, there were only about five in Germany.
In Russia the situation is reversed. Local search
engine Yandex controls 50% of the paid advertising revenue, while
Google has less than 9%. In China, Baidu continues to lead in market
share, although Google has been gaining share as of 2007. Successful
search optimization for international markets may require
professional translation of web pages, registration of a domain name
with a top level domain in the target market, and web hosting that
provides a local IP address. Otherwise, the fundamental elements of
search optimization are essentially the same, regardless of
language. |