Ekta Shah's Blog

We all want to be on the top of Google Search. Who does not?  SEO-search engine optimization-is a quite known word around. It was there, but Google made it famous. No, I ain’t trying to sound very techy here.

When we “google” anything, we always want that particular search result on the top. We don’t like, if we have to click next pages for our search coz we are too busy nowadays. Since we all google, all companies want their stuff up on first page. SEO teaches you, how to bring your company name to be on the top. It may sound complicated but goal of SEO is, gaining  targeted visitors.There is a tough competition out there, but with the help of SEO you can bring your product/services on top of the heap.

A major component of search engine is a  a robot or spider, a software that gathers information about your site and brings it back to be analyzed by a powerful central “engine”.  This activity is referred to as crawling or spidering. Search engine robot as an explorer ant, leaving the colony with one thought on its mind: Find food. In this case, the “food” is HTML text, preferably lots of it, and to find it, the ant needs to find obstacle-free paths: HTML links/URLs. Following these paths, the ant (search engine robot), with single-mindedness, carries the food (text) back to its colony and stores it in its anthill (search engine database). Thousands and thousands of the little guys are exploring and gathering simultaneously all over the Internet. If there’s no food, the ant brings nothing back. Keeping those robots well fed and happy is one of your biggest priorities. But again, in SEO you cann’t be 100% sure  that what you’re doing will be rewarded with the rank and the listing you want. Search engine ranking algorithm is the formula that a search engine uses to determine its ranks. Each search engine uses its own algorithm to determine which results to show and in which order. Search engines change their algorithms constantly so its very hard to understand and its not worth to become algoholic.

For spider emulator these two sites would be good to check out.

http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/

http://www.seo-browser.com

Bur there are tech-tics that can help for good SEO results like choose your keywords carefully. Try to see how your competitors choose its keyword. Try to see their source code and read their HTML Code- nope its not stealing, its referring. You are not copying their code but trying to find appropriate words. You can put lot of words in your meta tags but again jamming to many words its not helpful. Try to put unique and rich key words in meta description for each landing page. Never try doing cloaking. Cloaking is a method of identifying robots when they visit your site and showing them special, custom-made pages that are different from what human visitors see. This thwarts the search engines in their attempt to deliver the most accurate search results to their users. In the vast universe of website technology, there are sometimes valid reasons for showing different content to different entities. Tricking the search engines to give you higher ranks than you deserve is not one of them. Never try to put duplicate contents. If the search engines catch on to duplicate content schemes, they’re likely to knock you down in the ranks and you don’t want your site black listed. Also , you can put inbound links which relates to your site contents on your page. So when people are looking for similar sites your sites can also get hits. Communication with  IT guys, graphic designers and sales team people is a very good idea for good SEO results. IT people will help you with algorithms and other technical knowledge. Graphic designers will help you with html codes and images. Just explain graphic designers that when search engine looks for results they always avoid images. Its not a bad idea to put images on your sites but you don’t want it too much. Sales team/PR team/ Editors are people who will  help you with site contents and keywords. Just remember, when you put a  request to them, you gotta nice to them.

Google AdWords, Google Analytics , Google web optimizer are going to help you a lot in your  SEO campaign. Alexa -www.alexa.com, is a good source to see how your competitors doing also  to keep a check on your traffic. Keeping a track with Social web is also going to help you a lot. Success in the social web depends on spontaneity, transparency, frequent communication, and being an authority on your subject matter. Digg, Reddit, and del.icio.us, Mashable are popular examples. Also MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If you want to go the extra mile in social search and participation marketing, follow Web 2.0 gurus like Seth Godin, Chris Burgner, Keith Ferrazi, Neil Patel, Monika O’brien to keep you on the right path.

These are some helpful sites, blogs and forums on SEO. I hope you find this blog helpful for your SEO Campaign.

Some useful sites for SEO

Search Engine Land, http://searchengineland.com

HighRankings.com, www.highrankings.com

ClickZ News, www.clickz.com
Search Engine Watch, www.searchenginewatch.com

SEO Forums

forums.searchenginewatch.com
www.highrankings.com/forum/
www.webmasterworld.com
www.searchengineforums.com
www.cre8asiteforums.com
www.seroundtable.com/forums.html

SEO BLOGS

http://searchengineland.com

• www.mattcutts.com/blog (for Google-centric information)
• www.seomoz.org/blog
• www.problogger.net
• www.smallbusinesssem.com (for small businesses)
• Jill Whalen’s High Rankings® Advisor Newsletter at www.highrankings.com
• Avinash Kaushik’s web analytics blog, Occam’s Razor, at www.kaushik.net/avinash/

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 9:57 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.