Monday, July 12, 2010

SEO-Friendly URLs

Without proper SEO Services, a website stands numerous chances of not getting indexed by search spiders, which in turn, puts a question mark on its ranking in the SERPs and of course, the conversion rate. The situation can be easily resolved by implementing some sort of "cosmetic" operations on a site, and an integral part of these operations is URL Rewriting. Although, it is considered a bit time-intensive, it is very quite effective in the long run by others, is URL rewriting.

Secondary Search Engines

Secondary search engines target at smaller, more specific audiences. They are basically the topical and regional search engines that can provide a user tremendously narrow and focused search results when looking for specific information. However, the volume of traffic they generate is much lesser than the primary search engines do.

Some of the most popular secondary search engines are Lycos, LookSmart, Miva, Ask.com, and Espotting. Although the current list of secondary search engines is fairly small, it is expected to grow and extend with time.

Like primary or major search engines, these search engines also vary in the way they rank search results. The focus remains more or less on keywords and reciprocal links, whereas a few others rely on some other specifications such as meta tags or some proprietary criteria. However, experts suggest that although the amount of traffic generated is not as much as primary search engines do, but their results may gain valuable traffic that should not be overlooked.

Reporting Search Engine Spam

The process used to legitimately eliminate perverse or unfair competition from the search is termed as “search engine spam reporting. The presence of such website or content on the search engine, devalue its significance in terms of being an effective resource. If a competitor is making frequent use of various black hat SEO techniques or spam tactics to gain top positions on the search engines, it is in your best interest and indeed, the best interest of users also, who are getting directed to websites through search engine results, to report the site.
Normally, all black hat SEO services that artificially inflate the apparent relevancy of inferior web sites can be reported as spam.

SandBox Effect

According to industry experts, sandbox is an algorithmic effect, where Google condenses the page rank of new domains on temporary basis by placing them into what is termed as "sandbox". The step is believed to be taken to stand against the tricky techniques of search engine optimizers attempting to influence Google's page ranking through the massive creation of inbound links to a new web site from other web sites that they possess. Google's sandbox is a filter that came into existence back in March of 2004.

Page Rank

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, given by Google King of search engine in the form of numerical weighting ranging from 1 to 10. The PageRank is assigned on the basis of each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, so as to measure its qualified importance contained in the set. Generally, it is described as a Google’s tool, used to weigh up every webpage on the grounds of the number and quality of backlinks.
In simple words, Google performs “elections” where each web page gives votes for web pages with hyperlinks to those pages. Some pages having high integrity are capable of having more than one vote and thus, are given more weight, depending on the search engine result page rankings)and hence help in improving the targets’ PageRank.

Micro Websites

Micro websites are compact and informative websites used by organizations apart from their major websites. It usually contains around 5 to 6 primary pages including home page, product or services page, service portfolio and a contact page with an enquiry or feedback form. These websites are the great help when it comes to analyze the initial online presence of your business or services and its possible outcome. In initial phase of your business promotion, micro websites can be the best associate that helps you to market your product in the global market place and later assists you to convey the wide product scenario among the buyers.

Mirror sites

As it name signifies, mirror sites are a nearly identical or duplicate website of the original one. In common terms, it is basically a little modified or tweaked replica of the original website. However, although the technique is highly purposeful when it comes to accessibility, it is marked under black Hat SEO Tactics and is not supported by the search engines. It is quite easy to create mirror, especially with the use of software that do the automated mirroring of entire sites

Meta Tags

Meta tags are small packets of data about the web pages rendered for the web crawlers. These tags are written in HTML and specify the source code to offer content and site information to search engine spiders. The Meta elements are normally used to state page description, keywords, author of the document, previous customized and other metadata. These tags help you manage the way some search engines may index your site, with the use of keywords and descriptions you offer. So, spiders rely heavily on the information provided by the site owner in the Meta Tags.
Typically, these snippets of informational code presented between your tags that are not counted in your generated HTML document.

LongTail SEO

Long tail SEO is an intelligent technique of bringing together lower-volume and higher-converting keywords for a major impact. The technique is specifically devised to gain relevant traffic from long search queries that are more focused and less frequently searched by searchers than other primary search terms.
As for instance, the term “television” receives millions of Internet searches every month. Hence, the keyword not only covers a wide range of searchers but also infuse the biggest podium of competitors. Therefore, if you have a website that sells televisions, then raking high for “new LCD television sets” can ensure you more narrow but relevant traffic. This because in “new LCD television sets” would not bring you visitors looking for television repair services or etc.

Link Farms

A link farm is a website page or collection of websites having an extensively large list of hyperlinks to different websites with no specific relationship in terms of groupings, categories, or any connection to the site domain name. Although most link farms are a creation of automated programs and services, a few can also be built by hands. It is a kind of spamming the index of a search engine, which is often termed as spamdexing or spamexing.

The Intent of link Farms
Link farms are created to falsely increase the count of incoming links to a website so that the site's index ranking gets a rise in the search engines. An illegal link farm is a kind of search engine spam. It is purposely used for tricking search engines into placing a website among the top position sin the search results, with the backing of inbound link coming from link farm for a specific keyword than the website merits on its own. Such websites usually get penalized by active search engines that are always on check of banning such websites using illicit means of building links and having no real significance. Also, such websites display no PageRank. Adding a link to your website on a link farm may result in getting your website penalized by the search engines.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is a Black hat SEO technique used to add unnecessarily a good number of instances of the targeted keyword phrase to a web page to showcase higher level of relevancy to the search engines and gain top most positions in the search result for those particular keywords. Although, such purposeful integration of several specific phrases in the content of the web page may result in tempo temporary rank benefits but in the long run, it may lead to a series of problems.

Doorway pages

Doorway pages are web pages written in simple HTML pages by customizing a few particular keywords or phrases, to gain attraction from specific search engines and their spiders. The core objective of the doorway pages is to trick the search engines into rendering the site top rankings, only for a limited period of time. Doorway Pages are specifically intended for search engine spiders whereas for human visitors, it is more or less a redirect page that leads to the “real" website. Doorway pages are often termed as "entrance" or "bridge" pages.


Google's Take on Doorway Pages

According to Google's specific recommendation, doorway pages are created purposely for search engines or other "cookie cutter" approaches like affiliate programs with almost no original content and therefore, should be completely avoided by the websites.

Crawler

A web crawler (Search Engine Spider) is an automated and orderly managed program that browses the internet and creates a copy of all the websites it frequently visits. Search engines make use of these to index the downloaded pages and accelerate the entire search process. A crawler has ability to index million pages per day but due to use of different algorithms they produce different search results.


How crawler works
During the process of crawling, a Crawler not only visits the landing pages and primary pages of the website but also all relevant links posted on the websites. Content and keywords on a website are also the vital components that attract the crawler. Every search engine has a scheduler mechanism to intimate crawler the frequency of the crawling and the list of the documents to be crawled next.

The crawler explores and indexes web pages of your website so that whenever a user searches a webpage with a relevant key phrase, your website turns up in the search query. The process of crawling includes bringing together a very comprehensive list of the keywords from the database. After indexing the website, a number of algorithms are used by the search engines to evaluate the visibility of your website in the search engine.

Black Hat SEO Tactics

Regularly webmasters try to "trick" the search engines into ranking sites and pages through illegitimate means. A number of tactics such as hidden text, interlinking, redirecting, doorway pages, keyword spamming and etc, are meant to only trick a search engine into the game of gaining rankings. However, the websites using black-hat SEO tactics are most likely to jump down from these places as fast as they rise.

Given below are some of the most frequently used black-hat tactics. Most SEO's and webmasters modify these tactics in hopes that the new technique will work. Honestly they may, but only for a short while.
Black-Hat SEO Tactics:

Keyword Stuffing
Highly abused form of search engine spam, keyword stuffing is one of the most frequently exploited black Hat SEO services. Heavy amount of related keyword usage in content seems irrelevant to the search engine. Obviously, since this sort of content has no value to it, it is generally placed at the bottom of the web page in very small font size.

Hidden Text

Hidden text is the text that is present on the website only for the spiders to read and not the human visitors. These are the texts that are written in the same color as the background or something very close to it. The technique is best described as blatant spam tactic and websites using it are usually quickly reported to search engine as spam by the competitors and genuine searchers so that they can get it blacklisted.

Interlinking
As incoming links have become a major aspect of search engine ranking, many webmasters have found an easy and lucrative way to build multiple websites and link them together to strengthen the overall link popularity. Performing this trick is obviously much easier than doing the linking accurately. Moreover, as it becomes difficult to detect such interlinking websites, the genuinely linked websites suffer, where they find it difficult to get placed due to the abundance of interlinking websites.

Redirects
    The concept of redirects is complimentary to that of doorway pages. Since doorway pages contain low or no substantial content, redirects are at times, applied to directly direct a visitor to the original page having genuine content such as the homepage of the site. However, if search engines detect these redirects, or if they are reported as spam, then the site can get penalized. Usually, a genuine competitor or an unhappy searcher may get such websites spammed

Cloaking
Cloaking is a technique of presenting dissimilar information to the search engines than a human visitor would see. Although many techniques are today running in the market on the name of cloaking practices, very few are actually detectably by the search engines. Hence, in order to get the cloaking practices out of the market, a lot depends on the reporting search engine spam.

Duplicate Sites
With the popularity of affiliate programs, webmasters find it outright to create a copy of the site they need to promote. With slight tweaking, these duplicate websites are put online, intending that it would outrank the site it was promoting and get their sales. However, since search engine demand unique content from each website, creating duplicate websites is completely banned. Moreover, search engines have introduced their own methods to identify and remove duplicate sites from their index. Also, sites that simply modify to escape automatic detection through the help of hidden text or the, have the chances of getting reported to the search engines and be banned that way..

Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are basically normal web pages added to a website with the sole purpose of targeting a specific keyword phrase or phrases. Normally, these pages provide very little or no information to a visitor and have clear intentions of promoting a specific phrase, hoping that a visitor would land and get directed to the homepage of the website. This is one of the most popular black hat search engine optimization technique and most search engines have special tools to detect such pages. Also, a report of this practice can get your website removed from the search engines results along with pages ranking good with genuine SEO practices and unique content.

Reporting Your Competitors
It is entirely legitimate to report spam the competitors using black hat SEO tactics to gain top most positions in the search engines results. If a competitor using unfair tactics to rank higher than you then ensure to report them.

If you can spot websites that according to you are practicing illegitimate tactics to rank higher than you on the search engines then drop a visit to our Reporting Search Engine Spam page for gaining proper information about reporting a website spam. However, ensure that your website is not employing any such dubious practices.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a smart yet risky technique used to present different content to the search engines than a human visitor would see. It is a Black hat SEO technique employed to present dissimilar content for search engine and human visitors. A totally deceptive search engine optimization technique, it actually cheats search engines in order to rank well for desired keywords.

The Penalties for Cloaking
Cloaking is strictly outlawed in most search engine policies. Detection of any cloaking activity may result in banned website.



Google take on Cloaking
In order to main the high standard of accuracy and quality of the search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or site authors found to be engaged in cloaking activities to change their search rankings.
For cases where search engine is not able to automatically detect a website using cloaking practice and the competitors of the same can send a spam SEO report to the major search engines. On these request research would be done and if found true, action to ban the Cloaking would be taken.
However, irrespective of these strict threats and warning, experts suggest that a good number of methods are known today, under the heading the cloaking, out of which, many still remain undetectable by the search engine.

Bad Neighbourhood

Bad neighbourhood defines a websites that links to a website or network of website that are or have had employed unethical practices such as Link scheming, hosting spyware, malware, offensive material, including other illegitimate activities such as phishing. Don't link to these websites in order to gain a link to improve your search engine rankings, you are doing more harm than good to your website.

Search Algorithm

A definite set of rules specified for a search engine to measure the relevancy of the web pages and sort their listings which will be displayed in response to a search query. It is basically a mathematical formula employed by a search engine to agree on where a web page will rank in the search results for a particular key phrase. Each search engine follows its own algorithm to allot rankings. Also, the algorithm keeps changing frequently from time to time to eradicate the possibility of guesswork and speculations by intelligent webmasters.

Search engine frequently keep changing their algorithms to stand against “spam”. If people or more precisely, webmasters can figure out the algorithm of a search engine, they can easily manipulate the raking of their websites. This will give irrelevant, manoeuvred results.