Inbound links to a Web site, meaning other Web sites have a link to that Web site within them, also are important to SEO. They are important because they can indicate a page’s quality, popularity, or status on the Web, yet site owners have little control over which sites link to them. When links became part of the criteria used by crawlers to rank Web sites, some unscrupulous SEO marketers developed “link farms” to artificially increase rankings.
Today, links usually must be related to the content of the page; if a Web site’s inbound or outbound links do not match the keywords the site is listing, they will be of little value to the site’s ranking . Google and Yahoo! have tools that allow a user to see all of the Web sites that are linked to a particular site. To view links to a Web site in Google, open the Google search
engine and type “link:” before the Web address.
An example of this would be link:http://www.smumn.edu. To view links in Yahoo!, open the search engine and type in the Web address, adding “linkdomain” to the beginning and making sure to leave off “http://”, like this: linkdomain:www.smumn.edu .
It has a huge advantage with regards to site links:
The culture of the Web generally adores noncommercial content—something your website should be chock full of. And, let’s face it, giving you a link doesn’t cost a thing. Any webmaster or blogger who supports your cause—or at least has no major problem with it—will see adding a link [from their site to yours] as a cheap and easy way to help out. You will want to adjust your SEO plan.
After keywords are developed and added to the site tags, the Web site content needs to be adjusted to make sure the keywords are prominently featured throughout the Web site .It seems obvious, but you would be surprised at how many site owners miss this simple point: In order to rank well for a particular set of keywords, your site text should contain them.
Some SEO professionals recommend that a Web site should have 250 to
1,000 words per page and that 5% to 10% of those should be the organization’s keywords. The number of keywords per page divided by the number of words per page is called keyword density.
Search engines also may begin to ignore a Web site if the content is old. It is pointed out that the content of a Web site should be regularly updated. How fresh is your content? How relevant is it? How often is it updated? And how much content is there. Although organic search is cheaper than the paid placement that is the focus of the next section of this research, updating content may be difficult for some nonprofits.
Cortes conducted a series of interviews in 2004 and 2005 to determine the technology adoption of San Francisco–based nonprofits. They noted that some nonprofits relied on volunteers or students to create their organizations’ Web sites. The organizations had to count on those people to update their Web sites, but that presented a problem:
A number of organizations, when asked for examples of how they kept their Web sites current, stated that they returned to the volunteer who had originally built it. When that volunteer was no longer available, they struggled to find a replacement, sometimes with no success. One organization had its Web site developed by a student so that it could easily update the content on its own. It gave an example of a nonprofit and the challenges it faced in updating content on its Web site.
Web sites are text files that exist on Web servers. These text files are much like the files created and used by word-processing software. To enable Web browsers such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, or Opera to read these files, the files must be formatted according to a generally accepted standard. The standard used on the Web is HyperText Markup Language (HTML). HTML uses codes, or tags, that tell the Web browser software how to display the text contained in the text file.
For example, a Web browser reading the following line of text
A Review of the Book Wind Instruments
recognizes the and tags as instructions to display the entire line of text
in bold and the and tags as instructions to display the text enclosed by
those tags in italics.
When assessing a Web site for search engine optimization, one should review a number of elements, including site and page tagging, page content, site links, and the site map. Each of these elements is crawled by search engines to determine Web site ranking . Each of these elements should be addressed separately.
Site and page tagging. The HTML page title is today’s hands-down leader, and an Eternally Important factor, in search engine ranking algorithms.
In addition to the bold and italics tags used to format text, there is another tag on Web sites called the meta tag. Meta tags are included in the coding of a Web site and are essential to having the site listed properly in a search engine .
A META tag is HTML code that a Web page creator places in the page header for the specific purpose of informing Web robots about the content of the page. META tags do not cause any text to appear on the page when a Web browser loads it; rather, they exist solely for the use of search engine robots.
It is pointed out that the most important meta tags to a search engine are the title and the description tag. Schneider and Evans also discussed the use of meta tags, including a keyword meta tag. They stated that many search engines’ crawlers, spiders, or robots do not search an entire Web site. Some search engine robots collect information only from a Web page’s title, description, keywords, or HTML tags; othersread only a certain amount of the text in each Web page.
Schneider and Evans demonstrated the first few lines of HTML from a Web page that contains information about electronic commerce:
electronic commerce developments.”>
data interchange, value added reseller, EDI, VAR, secure socket layer, business
on the Internet”>
Developing the correct keywords to get a site ranked higher than others is a big part of organic search engine optimization. To develop the correct set of keywords, however, one must know which keywords searchers are using. There are many different ways to build a list of keywords, including brainstorming, looking at the competition, and using keyword-building tools. Wordtracker is the leading keyword research tool. Yahoo! and Google both have their own keyword-building tools.
Labels: SEO
When the user types a word or phrase into a search box and clicks a button. “Wait a few seconds and references to thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of pages will appear. Then all you have to do is click through those pages to find what you want” . Some of the results are called organic results, or natural results. These are the most relevant matches for that search request among all of the indexed Web pages.
There also are paid placement listings, which can show up on the top or the side of the search engine. Paid placement listings are described as the technique by which a search engine devotes space on its search results page to display links to a Web site’s page based on the highest bid for that space. Some search engines differentiate the two types of listings
others do not.
An organization’s Web site likely will rank within the first few thousand results in
a search engine. However, as it pointed out, That’s just not good enough. Being ranked on the ninth or tenth page of search results is tantamount to being invisible. To be noticed, your site should be ranked much higher. . . . Most people won’t look past the third page of search results, if they get that far. The fact is, it’s the sites that fall on the first page of results that
get the most traffic. Every Web site is being indexed by crawlers or spiders. It exists with the millions of other sites on the Internet. To get a Web site noticed by the crawlers, certain elements must stand out. Making those elements stand out is the process of search engine
optimization .
Google is receiving the lion’s share of the searches, with Yahoo! and MSN
following up in second and third places, respectively
The crawler is a specialized software program that hops from link to link on the World Wide Web, scarfing up the pages it finds and sending them back to be indexed. This is very similar to Matthew Gray’s earliest search engine, which searched and indexed entire files on the Internet, not just the titles. The crawler sends its data back to a massive database called the index. The runtime system or query processor is the user interface you see on a search engine’s Web site, where you type in your search words.
three critical pieces of search, and all three must scale to the size and continued growth of the Web: they must crawl, they must index, and they must serve results. This is no small task: by most accounts, Google alone has more than 175,000 computers dedicated to this job. That’s more than existed on Earth in the early 1970s!
The Web is huge; it is so big that it is hard to get an accurate count of Web pages. In January of 2004, it was estimated that the Web contained over 10 billion pages; with an average world population of 6.4 billion, that is almost two pages per person. In 2003 Google reported that it served 250 million different searches per day.
Most people are using search engines in their daily lives to find information on the Web. The most recognizable part of a search engine is the query interface. This is the home page that is displayed when you visit a major search engine such as Google, Yahoo!, or MSN.
The query interface is the only part of a search engine that the user ever sees. Every other part of the search engine is behind the scenes, out of view of the people who use it every day. That doesn’t mean it’s not important, however. In fact, what’s in the back end is the most important part of the search engine.
Pay-per-click in its current form began when an entrepreneur named Bill Gross
developed an idea for the first PPC search engine, goto.com, which changed its name to
Overture in 2001 and was acquired by Yahoo! in 2003. People were initially skeptical of
PPC search engines, thinking that users would not want to use a search engine filled with
advertisements.
It was not until late 2000, when Google introduced its AdWords program, that the industry started to mature . From its inception as a business in the late 1990s to 2004, paid search as an industry grew from a base in the low millions to $4 billion in revenue, and it is estimated to hit $23 billion by 2010.