Shailendra Dubey

Search Engine Optimization – An Introduction

Search Engine Optimization is probably the cheapest and most cost effective form of Internet marketing. In fact some studies indicate Search Engine Optimization as being the second most effective marketing strategy. The increasing popularity of Search Engines and the fact that good quality and cost effective traffic can be brought through them to websites has led to the development of a whole industry that revolves around how to make Web pages/Websites more search engine friendly or in other words better optimized. The result of this advent of Search Engine Optimization industry is the feeling among webmasters and novices in the industry that SEO is like rocket science and has to be handled by professionals only. Thankfully, the truth is that anyone can search engine optimize Websites. All it takes to optimize a Web site and get better ranking and traffic are 9 simple steps.

The 9 Simple Steps

1. Select Right Keywords

This is THE most important step and can easily be the reason for your ranking ahead or ranking below your watch sites (competition). Identify the words or phrases using which people search(might search) for your Web page on the Internet. If you sell dog food, your keywords must have something to do with “dog food”. Do not use irrelevant keywords, even if they get you more traffic. If you are not sure of the keywords to be used, use any of the following tools to find good target phrases:

• Overture is a great tool for assessing popularity of target phrases.
• Googleis great for brainstorming target phrases.
• Word Tracker can help you assess popularity and compare how the competitors use the target phrase.

2. Analyze Competition

Determine who your competitors are. It is quite simple; search for the keyword on popular search engines. The sites that show up above your page are your competitors. Analyze those sites and find out how effectively they have used the targeted keywords. Remember that the more popular a target phrase is, the more competition there is likely to be. Sometimes, it makes sense to target a less popular phrase where you can corner the market rather than aiming for the highest popularity phrase.

Check out yours and your competitor’s link popularity. In many engines, you can type: link:http://domain-name and get a link count for that particular site. The more the link count, the better.

3. Page Creation and Optimization

After identifying the keywords, create Web pages by targeting one word or phrase for each page. One common mistake most novice SEO’s do is dump many keywords into a page. Not only does it make it difficult for you to rank high for each of those keywords, but also it makes the page less readable.

i) Make sure your keywords are present in the following places:

• Title tag
• META tags: Description tag and Keywords tag
• Body text: Heading tags, comment tags,alt tags and prominent places on the page content

ii) Conduct HTML validation for your Web pages. HTML validation helps you find out the errors in HTML code, which may prevent search engines from indexing your site.

iii)Then check and ensure that your pages are Spam-free. When your page elements, such as Title tag, META tag, and body text, are stuffed with repeated keywords, search engines may consider them Spam and ban your site.

4. Visual Review of Page

• Check whether your site has usable navigation.
• Ensure you have informative and readable content. Good content will ensure that your page appeals to human visitors as well as spiders.

A badly written page may get a good ranking on search engines, but visitors will move away from your site with the same speed they came in. Although Search engine spiders that grade your site will not look for visual appeal, directory editors and human visitors will!.

5.Link Building

Get inbound links from quality sites. Quality sites are those that rank high on search engines and/or have a good Google PageRank. If the sites are in someway connected with the theme of your webpage that will help increase your rank better. DO NOT turn to link farms for link building this can get your site banned in search engines.

6. Submitting to Search Engines

If you have followed steps one to five you are ready to submit your webpages to the search engines. Chances are the search engines found your webpages through the links that you built but if they some how missed your webpages don’t worry you can always let them know that your pages exist through Search Engine Submission.

You can refer the below link for details on submission to search engines

Altavista

http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl

All The Web
http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php

Google
http://www.google.com/addurl.html

MSN
http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

Yahoo
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

7. Submitting to Directories

Search Engines consider Web Directories as expert documents. A presence in popular directories can help you get a better ranking on search engines. You can submit your site to popular directories, such as DMOZ, Yahoo!, World Wide Index, and Microsoft bCentral. For more information on Web Directories and guidelines for submission.

8. Maintain

Search Engine Optimization is a continuous process. Popular Search Engines keep making changes to their algorithms i.e the way they rank webpages quite often. Thus it is imperative that you continually optimize your pages based on the current algorithms to achieve high ranks.
It’s important to measure your rankings atleast monthly. Re-optimize any pages that drop in rank and then re-submit or wait for the search engine to revisit the page.

9. Tracking

Ultimately, it is not top rankings you are really after, but more traffic and sales. High traffic is not something that automatically follows top rankings. It is something you get by ranking high for “good keywords”. Thus it is important that you track your website usage using a good log file analysis program and find out which keywords and which keywords bring in most visitors to your pages. Use this information to optimize your pages better for these terms and search engines.

Conclusion

At first glance, search engine optimization may look like magic; but actually all it takes is 9 simple steps. Search Engine Optimization is a simple continuous process that helps search engine do their job more efficiently. It does take a lot of time and patience but stay the course search engine optimization pays for itself in increased revenue. It is worth the time and trouble.

If you follow all the above-listed steps, you will definitely see an improvement in the search engine rankings for your keywords. The best part is that you do not have to spend any money on the expensive search engine optimizers!

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The Advent of MSN as a Search Engine

Microsoft had been napping for a long time and ignored the advancements in the field of Search Engine and Content Targeted Advertising. Although now dependent on Yahoo’s Intokmi for their search results, Microsoft has made it very clear that they will compete with Yahoo and Google for their share in the Search Engine market. Given Microsoft’s aggressive nature in fighting competition, it would be a grave mistake to underestimate them.

The recently re-launched MSN Search and future MSN Search integration with upcoming versions of Windows is about to make MSN one of the biggest and most important players in the world of searching. Thus, it is imperative to get good ranking in MSN if you want the share of traffic they can give to your Web page. Although MSN search spider does a fairly good job in crawling Web pages, you may benefit by submitting your website at http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx .

Optimizing for MSN Search

With Microsoft sharing Yahoo’s Inktomi search index to provide their search results, optimizing for yahoo meant optimizing for MSN. But things are changing at a rapid phase and with Microsoft getting active on the patent front, it is evident that they are working on their own search algorithm.

Luckily for us, the rules of Web page optimization that thought to be followed to please the MSN search algorithm aren’t very different when compared to those already followed for other search Engines.

What They Lay Emphasis On?

As with most other Search Engines, MSN Search places heavy emphasis on content. They even allow higher keyword density than Google does. For MSN Search, it is best to keep your pages at least 200 words long and have phrases which searchers commonly use. Other than that, they lay importance in the following in the order they are listed.

• As MSN team declares in their blog that, they attach a lot of importance to the number and quality of sites that link to your pages.

• Clean coding is necessary with MSN Search. They even go to the extent of asking Webmasters to ensure that their pages are HTML validated. MSN’s spider has a strong preference for well-written code. If a Website’s coding is poorly written, it appears that MSN Search downgrades the site’s search rankings heavily.

• A well-designed site map with good link text will help the MSN spider to crawl the site and ensure that all pages are indexed.

• Title tag should be less than 80 characters long and should be attractive enough to make a searcher click on the link.

• MSN Search doesn’t rank based on Meta Keywords and Description, but it seems to place some importance on meta tags. So adding appropriate meta tags for each page might be beneficial as well.

• MSN Search recommends that an HTML page with no pictures should be under 150 KB. Therefore, ensure that you limit the size of your Web pages to a reasonable limit.

What MSN Doesn’t Like?

MSN search lists the following as being search engine unfriendly due to the difficulty search engine robots have with this type of content:
• Frames
• Flash
• JavaScript navigation
• HTML Image Maps
• Dynamic URL’s

Techniques not liked by MSN Search

MSN thinks the following to be unscrupulous SEO practices:
• Loading pages with irrelevant words in an attempt to increase a page’s keyword density, this includes stuffing ALT tags that users are unlikely to view.
• Using hidden text or links. You should use only text and links that are visible to users.
• Using techniques to artificially increase the number of links to your page, such as link farms.

As you can see, these “rules” are no different from those mentioned by the rest of the industry. So avoid the above-mentioned techniques and the chances of your getting banned by any search engine are remote. On a related note, this is what MSN search’s Program Manager, Eytan Seidman, has to say about spamming MSN.

“You crawled my site, so why can’t I find it in your search index? This is one is a little bit easier. The reason that this is most likely happening is that we are detecting the page as spam when we analyze the page to build our index. How can you make sure that this does not happen? The best thing to do is to not spam us. On our site owners help, we talk about some of the things that we consider spam. In case you have not read it, here is a quick refresher: dirty javascript redirects, stuffing alt text, white on white links, off topic links etc. We take this stuff very seriously and we are continuously working to improve our spam detection.”

Conclusion

With the increasing popularity of MSN Search and with Microsoft planning to make the search a part of their next windows release, your efforts to optimize your site for MSN are sure to pay off. For more details on optimization for MSN Search, read their help document and blog.

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