Adapt or die. Like in life, in business in order to survive you must adapt and modify. In these times things change at such a rapid pace it seems tomorrows technology is here before we've had a chance to learn today's technology. What used to be a simple chain of supply and demand has instead become an information war. Whoever can learn the most the quickest and apply it wins. On the internet there are many ways you can advertise your business. Only one is sustainable however and this is called Search Engine Optimization. This means that you make a website as relevant to your industry as possible in the hopes that when someone searches for your product or service they can find it and more specifically find you with ease.
There are several reasons why an internet business needs to optimize their website to appear highly in any major search engine. First and foremost, you need traffic to your website, without traffic nobody will buy your product. So then how does one attain traffic to a website? Well you must market your website so that you can reach your target customers. There are several ways to do this. You can pay for advertising on major websites or search engines. You can send out mass e-mails. Or you can be one of the first results a user sees on any given keyword in a search engine. If you use mass e-mails this is usually a turn off as it is seen as an unwanted solicitation a.k.a. spam. If you pay for ads this can be effective but has much larger opportunities for malicious manipulation and also is statistically less effective than traditional search results.
Search engine optimization then stands alone as the most effective and trustworthy form of internet marketing. Search engine companies have highly intelligent think tanks that create algorithms or a set of well defined instructions. These algorithms determine how web sites are categorized and which ones come up in the top of any search result.
These often are changed or modified so there is no foolproof way to ensure that your website is going to be the first website to appear in a search engine. However, as any experienced SEO expert will tell you there are many methods that can positively influence your rankings.
In the world of search engines content is king, because search engines give you the most relevant website according to your search. If you truly want to be successful with your internet business, you must invest into search engine optimization. Making your website theme oriented and not overly stuffed with keywords is important. When considering SEO for your website, there are a few myths to dispel. Most important of all is that SEO is not a magic bean that will boost your business to the top of the internet and there are NO guarantees. In addition like any investment true SEO takes time. Don't expect to throw a few thousand dollars haphazardly into SEO and expect your site to be a runaway success. Creating quality isn't easy. Also there are fluctuations; at first you may be ranked at #1 and then suddenly drop or you may also start off of the radar and eventually work your way up to #1. Developing a content rich website with value and relevancy is the way to achieve high rankings.
As you begin to consider all these complications and minute details take time to consider your business and your goals. If you're willing to invest in yourself and your future, then purchasing SEO services is an absolute must. When you're ready to pursue SEO services look for those with a proven track record and fair prices. Be wary of an extravagantly designed website with no references or SEO case studies. Also mind the pricing, if it is exceptionally low, you're probably going to get what you pay for and that's poor service. In the same regard if it is exceptionally high, that companies' services are likely overpriced and results may not yield any better than other companies.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Google Sitemaps and your SEO Strategy
Like many of you, I am always trying to find as much information as I can on Search Engine Optimization. And also like many of you, I am doing it myself. I read online and buy books on search engine optimization and many of them all say the same things, just in a different way.
Sadly with most search engines the solution is simply the number of links pointing back to your site. The search engines feel that they can control the quality of their search results by focusing on the websites that have a large number of links pointing to them. Simply put, it's a popularity vote. Their reasoning is that if nobody else thinks your site is important, why should they index it.
That doesn't mean you can't get your site indexed though. In 2005 Google created a submission system called Google sitemaps. Yahoo soon followed with one of their own as well.
Aside from taking advantage of this tool to insure your site indexing, Google sitemaps also provide a variety of statistics related to your site. You can see what the search engines see in regards to pages that they can't find, your page rank and even search statistics.
"That's really great Ben, but my site is HUGE and I don't know anything about xml and how to format these things". Well I had the same problem, I have sitemaps with over 6000 links in them, and frankly I was not about to try and manually create a sitemap with all of those links, I just don't have the time. So I went ahead and created a smaller sitemap of all of my sites with a dozen or less elements included so that I would at least get something indexed.
That was until I stumbled over a sitemap generator that did all of the work for me. There are others out there but this one has a web page that you can go to and have them generate your sitemap, as well as a desktop version. It's called the ROR Sitemap Generator. And all you have to do is key in your domain name and let it do the rest.
There is also another great tool which also handles the Yahoo sitemap and that program is GSiteCrawler.
Save the sitemap to your directory, and viola! I used the desktop version personally because I've found that it performs quicker and doesn't hang up on sites with thousands of links. They also have the "ROR Feed Generator" which I've used with equal success.
Oh Yeah, and the best part, these tools are free. You can find them at www.rorweb.com and www.gsitecrawler.com. You will be able to let this tool create your sitemap, save the generated map as sitemap.xml, upload it to your website root directory, then log into your Google Sitemap account and enter the path to your sitemap and let google do the rest.
I recently did this for a friend and his site was indexed in 3 days. That's uncommon, it might take up to 30 days, but you'll get your pages indexed on google, and many of the other search engines will be able to index your site now too. Is it guaranteed? No. But I've had 100% success getting my pages and sites indexed personally.
Just in case you need help with Google Sitemaps, here's how you want to do the complete process.
Set up your account with Google Sitemaps at www.google.com/webmaster/sitemaps
Generate your sitemap.
Place your sitemap in your root directory of your website.
Log into your Google account.
Click the "Add" tab to add a new sitemap with your account.
Select the "General Website Sitemap" option.
Click Next.
Put in your domain name and path to your sitemap.xml file.
Click "Add Web Sitemap" 10. Take a deep breath, let out a big sigh, let the dog out or take him for a walk.
Now you've taken a major step in the right direction with search engines and utilizing Google Sitemaps with your SEO strategy. I hope this helps anyone trying to increase their site visibility using the D.I.Y. method, which is all many of us can afford.
Thanks for reading and much success.
Sadly with most search engines the solution is simply the number of links pointing back to your site. The search engines feel that they can control the quality of their search results by focusing on the websites that have a large number of links pointing to them. Simply put, it's a popularity vote. Their reasoning is that if nobody else thinks your site is important, why should they index it.
That doesn't mean you can't get your site indexed though. In 2005 Google created a submission system called Google sitemaps. Yahoo soon followed with one of their own as well.
Aside from taking advantage of this tool to insure your site indexing, Google sitemaps also provide a variety of statistics related to your site. You can see what the search engines see in regards to pages that they can't find, your page rank and even search statistics.
"That's really great Ben, but my site is HUGE and I don't know anything about xml and how to format these things". Well I had the same problem, I have sitemaps with over 6000 links in them, and frankly I was not about to try and manually create a sitemap with all of those links, I just don't have the time. So I went ahead and created a smaller sitemap of all of my sites with a dozen or less elements included so that I would at least get something indexed.
That was until I stumbled over a sitemap generator that did all of the work for me. There are others out there but this one has a web page that you can go to and have them generate your sitemap, as well as a desktop version. It's called the ROR Sitemap Generator. And all you have to do is key in your domain name and let it do the rest.
There is also another great tool which also handles the Yahoo sitemap and that program is GSiteCrawler.
Save the sitemap to your directory, and viola! I used the desktop version personally because I've found that it performs quicker and doesn't hang up on sites with thousands of links. They also have the "ROR Feed Generator" which I've used with equal success.
Oh Yeah, and the best part, these tools are free. You can find them at www.rorweb.com and www.gsitecrawler.com. You will be able to let this tool create your sitemap, save the generated map as sitemap.xml, upload it to your website root directory, then log into your Google Sitemap account and enter the path to your sitemap and let google do the rest.
I recently did this for a friend and his site was indexed in 3 days. That's uncommon, it might take up to 30 days, but you'll get your pages indexed on google, and many of the other search engines will be able to index your site now too. Is it guaranteed? No. But I've had 100% success getting my pages and sites indexed personally.
Just in case you need help with Google Sitemaps, here's how you want to do the complete process.
Set up your account with Google Sitemaps at www.google.com/webmaster/sitemaps
Generate your sitemap.
Place your sitemap in your root directory of your website.
Log into your Google account.
Click the "Add" tab to add a new sitemap with your account.
Select the "General Website Sitemap" option.
Click Next.
Put in your domain name and path to your sitemap.xml file.
Click "Add Web Sitemap" 10. Take a deep breath, let out a big sigh, let the dog out or take him for a walk.
Now you've taken a major step in the right direction with search engines and utilizing Google Sitemaps with your SEO strategy. I hope this helps anyone trying to increase their site visibility using the D.I.Y. method, which is all many of us can afford.
Thanks for reading and much success.
SEO: Real Black Hat Secrets Unleashed and How to Avoid it
SEO techniques are classified by some into two, broad categories:
1. White hat SEO: They are techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design and will give lasting results. 2. Black hat SEO: These are those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing.
Cloaking: Cloaking or Masking is a black hat technique used by some companies for their websites to deliver one version of the webpage to a search engine for indexing while delivering an entirely different page to users who visit the website. The search engine assumes the page that is being submitted to it as the correct match based on the metatags and the keywords of that webpage and indexes it highly. But, this page is not the correct one. The correct page is the one that is been visited by the users which is having a good navigation and usability. Why do companies adopt Cloaking? Because companies want to increase the search engine ranking of their websites and also protect these highly optimized pages(by the search engines) from other SEO firms.
There are 2 types of cloaking or page swapping:
1. User Agent Cloaking (UA Cloaking) 2. IP Agent Cloaking (IP Cloaking)
User Agent Cloaking
When a visitor (a search engine or a human) requests a page, the cloaking script compares the User Agent text string with its list of search engine User Agent names and then sends the appropriate page. Now, usually if a search engine spider requests a page, the User-Agent variable contains the name of the search engine. Thus, a page designed for the search engines is delivered. But, if the cloaking script does not detect the name of a search engine in the User-Agent variable, it assumes that the request has been made by a human being and delivers the page which was designed for human beings.
IP Agent Cloaking
This is the more complicated method to do cloaking. It involves IP address of search engine spiders. When a visitor (a search engine or a human) requests a page, the cloaking script checks the IP address of the visitor. If the IP address is present in the IP database, the cloaking script knows that the visitor is a search engine and delivers the page optimized for that search engine. And if the IP address is not present in the IP database, the cloaking script assumes that a human has requested the page, and delivers the page that is meant for human visitors.
But, you may now ask, how can a Search Engine Detect Page Cloaking?
There are 3 ways, how a search engine detects Page Cloaking or Code swapping. They are:
1. User Agent cloaking method: When a search engine sends a spider to a website without reporting the name of the search engine in the user agent variable. Now, If search engine finds dissimilar pages - one that is accessed by a spider which reports the search engine name and the other spider which doesn't report, then it is likely to be considered as a page cloaking.
2. IP Based cloaking method: When a search engine sends a spider to a website from a different IP address than the one that the spider has been continuously using so far, it becomes a totally new IP address for that spider which is not there in the database. So, when the page which is delivered to a spider having a known IP address is detected different than the page delivered to the spider with new IP address, then search engine knows that the page cloaking has been used by a site.
3. Human representative: When a human is assigned by search engine to visit a site in order to find out if the site has used cloaking. Now, if he finds that the page delivered to a search engine spider is totally different than the page he has viewed, then he identifies that the site has used cloaking.
Reverse Cloaking:
The DNS stores and relates many types of information with domain names, but most importantly, it translates domain names (computer hostnames) to IP addresses. At each and every step, the program queries a corresponding DNS server to provide a pointer to the next server which it should consult. However, if that pointer (PTR) is blank or misdirected, search engines-often-regard that site as cloaked.
Off late it was found that many websites were not been seen in the search engine results or were disappearing after a website migrates to a new server. After analysis, it was found that search engines could not resolve Domain Name Systems (DNS) with Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. That's where IP cloaking commonly begins.
If the DNS server points to 2 or more of your websites which are hosted on the same IP address, it is called reverse IP cloaking. It is a black hat technique. Why would anyone host a multiple number of websites on the same IP address? Because, to gain more back links for all those websites. As, most of the web pages of those the websites in this case are interlinked to each other to get more number of incoming links. So, this is considered to be a negative factor in terms of SEO.
So what to do to prevent such cases?
We should host multiple number of our websites in different IP addresses each, and then we can link a few number of pages of each of our site to each other. It is a valid technique in terms of SEO as the search engine treats each of the different IP address as a separate legal entity. So, your websites will now not be penalized as they are hosted on different IP addresses.
So, do not try to cheat search engines by using any of these black hat tactics. If you want lasting results, you should concentrate only on ethical search engine optimization.
1. White hat SEO: They are techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design and will give lasting results. 2. Black hat SEO: These are those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing.
Cloaking: Cloaking or Masking is a black hat technique used by some companies for their websites to deliver one version of the webpage to a search engine for indexing while delivering an entirely different page to users who visit the website. The search engine assumes the page that is being submitted to it as the correct match based on the metatags and the keywords of that webpage and indexes it highly. But, this page is not the correct one. The correct page is the one that is been visited by the users which is having a good navigation and usability. Why do companies adopt Cloaking? Because companies want to increase the search engine ranking of their websites and also protect these highly optimized pages(by the search engines) from other SEO firms.
There are 2 types of cloaking or page swapping:
1. User Agent Cloaking (UA Cloaking) 2. IP Agent Cloaking (IP Cloaking)
User Agent Cloaking
When a visitor (a search engine or a human) requests a page, the cloaking script compares the User Agent text string with its list of search engine User Agent names and then sends the appropriate page. Now, usually if a search engine spider requests a page, the User-Agent variable contains the name of the search engine. Thus, a page designed for the search engines is delivered. But, if the cloaking script does not detect the name of a search engine in the User-Agent variable, it assumes that the request has been made by a human being and delivers the page which was designed for human beings.
IP Agent Cloaking
This is the more complicated method to do cloaking. It involves IP address of search engine spiders. When a visitor (a search engine or a human) requests a page, the cloaking script checks the IP address of the visitor. If the IP address is present in the IP database, the cloaking script knows that the visitor is a search engine and delivers the page optimized for that search engine. And if the IP address is not present in the IP database, the cloaking script assumes that a human has requested the page, and delivers the page that is meant for human visitors.
But, you may now ask, how can a Search Engine Detect Page Cloaking?
There are 3 ways, how a search engine detects Page Cloaking or Code swapping. They are:
1. User Agent cloaking method: When a search engine sends a spider to a website without reporting the name of the search engine in the user agent variable. Now, If search engine finds dissimilar pages - one that is accessed by a spider which reports the search engine name and the other spider which doesn't report, then it is likely to be considered as a page cloaking.
2. IP Based cloaking method: When a search engine sends a spider to a website from a different IP address than the one that the spider has been continuously using so far, it becomes a totally new IP address for that spider which is not there in the database. So, when the page which is delivered to a spider having a known IP address is detected different than the page delivered to the spider with new IP address, then search engine knows that the page cloaking has been used by a site.
3. Human representative: When a human is assigned by search engine to visit a site in order to find out if the site has used cloaking. Now, if he finds that the page delivered to a search engine spider is totally different than the page he has viewed, then he identifies that the site has used cloaking.
Reverse Cloaking:
The DNS stores and relates many types of information with domain names, but most importantly, it translates domain names (computer hostnames) to IP addresses. At each and every step, the program queries a corresponding DNS server to provide a pointer to the next server which it should consult. However, if that pointer (PTR) is blank or misdirected, search engines-often-regard that site as cloaked.
Off late it was found that many websites were not been seen in the search engine results or were disappearing after a website migrates to a new server. After analysis, it was found that search engines could not resolve Domain Name Systems (DNS) with Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. That's where IP cloaking commonly begins.
If the DNS server points to 2 or more of your websites which are hosted on the same IP address, it is called reverse IP cloaking. It is a black hat technique. Why would anyone host a multiple number of websites on the same IP address? Because, to gain more back links for all those websites. As, most of the web pages of those the websites in this case are interlinked to each other to get more number of incoming links. So, this is considered to be a negative factor in terms of SEO.
So what to do to prevent such cases?
We should host multiple number of our websites in different IP addresses each, and then we can link a few number of pages of each of our site to each other. It is a valid technique in terms of SEO as the search engine treats each of the different IP address as a separate legal entity. So, your websites will now not be penalized as they are hosted on different IP addresses.
So, do not try to cheat search engines by using any of these black hat tactics. If you want lasting results, you should concentrate only on ethical search engine optimization.
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