Search Engines

Search engines attempt to help a user locate desired information or resources by seeking matches to user-specified key words. The usual method for finding and isolating this information is to compile and maintain an index of Web resources that can be queried for the key words or concepts entered by the user.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Google Official Logo
Few tips on how to get better ranking with google Search
In this post I published opinions of different web industry experts.


1. Simplify your URL

Keep your URL as simple as possible and exclude characters such as question marks and ampersands. Search engines generally use spiders to locate searchable pages on web sites but they won't index URLs with excessive use of symbols. Some public search engines and most site and intranet search engines will index dynamic URLs but others will not. Because it's difficult to link to these pages, they will be penalized by engines that use link analysis to improve relevance ranking, such as Google's PageRank algorithm.

Use keywords well

Key terms play a big part in indicating to search engines the relevance of your site when using specific search terms. If the relevant key terms do not appear within the text on your site, it is less likely that your site will be matched to tcorrectect category. Ensure that your text reads correctly instead of trying to pack it with as many search terms possibleibe. Otherwise you will end up with content that dosen't t make a lot of sense. A general use of thumb to ensure that most key terms are covered is to have at least 250 words of continuous text on each page (Andy Williams, SEO consultant www.bluhalo.com)

Don't hide your keywords

Have you ever seen a site that has hundreds of keywords repeated at the bottom of the page? Sometthesesthses words are the same colour as the background so you only notice them if you highlight a section of the page and they show up as reversed white on black text. This is an attempt to rank well in the different search engines for the keywords listed there. Search engines used to be fooled by this technique, but now penalizealise big time and it can even get you blacklisted. Avoid hiding your keywords in your web site content and don't include white text on a while background.

Avoid cloaking


Cloaking is a technique designed to deliver different web pages under different circumstances. For instance, search engine spiders may pick up a heavily optimised page for a certain keyword. Howhener wen the user goes to the page using the same keyword, an altogether different page is delivered in an attemp to send them somewhere else. If you are caught cloaking web pages, your web site may be permanently banned from search engine. Although doorway pages can be effective for sites with content that is overlooked by search engines, they are generally frowned upon.

Provide enough content

Make sure you have sufficient content on your web site to cover the keywords that your visitors will search for you under. If you add two to three pages of new, original content to your site every week, the cumulative impact on your ranking will be dramatic. If this is too time consuming then make sure that your business is represented in a high quality directory that has high ranking and high traffic. And remember to include at least a dozen sentences of keyword-rich text in new content.

Have hardworking HTML and meta tags.

To improve search readabilityibility you should use unique, descriptive HTML on every page of your web site. Use both description and abstract meta tags (shorter descriptions). This will compel users to click through from a search page to your web site. Such titles and meta tags are often displayed to users using search engines, and so using promotional text such as Free Delivery or real unique selling points entice users to click through.

Use an enticing design

Every page needs to be designed to draw users to other pages on your site.
Being ranked on a search listing means users will be entering at different pages and not necessarily visiting the home page at al.. You should give each page equal consideration during the design process to enable the search engines to properly index them.

Focus on a few engines.

Software that submits you to hundreds of engines can be effective in getting your site as far and wide on the web as possible, but it's best to stick to the big names. Real search engines use robotic agents to crawl the web. Finding and indexing pages is what they are built to do, so Google, Yahoo! Msn and Ask Jeeves should be your primary targets. Ensuring that your site is submitted to the right engines arightt the rigt frequency is a skill and should not be underrated(John Hannawin, managing director www.i-next.co.uk). The majority of free, submitted-to thousands-of-sites services are very low quality and should not from part of an SEO strategy.

Repeat keywords as often as possible

Nigel Botterill, managing director of thebetof.co.uk says the heart of your SEO strategy is all about keywords. Paragraphs should be written so that keywords are mentioned as early as possible, because some search engines place more importance on keywords near the bottom. Keywords density is very important.
Make sure content you write makes sense-don't think you can just list your keywords many times over and it will boost your ranking. If you try that approach you are much more likely to be classified as a sam site and your ranking will disappear altogether.

Talk to customers and visitors

What's the easiest way to ruin an SEO campaign? Use the wrong keywords. When selecting keywords, use techniques that include your target audience. This means talking directly to customers, focus groups, online reviews, forums, and even blogs. Churchill (president of www.keyrelevance) also recommends tapexisting an exisiting fountain of knowledge in your own organization the sales and customer support personnel who regularly talk directly with customers or visitors.

Friday, February 17, 2006

Search Engines Review

Hi folks.

Back to 1997 when I just started my web master career, I couldn't possibly imagine how important in the terms of search, the web site optimization would be. Below is brief review of most popular search engines, you might notice there is no Goggle mentioned, well that's because there will be an additional review which I decided to post separately, meanwhile please feel yourself comfortable with reading this one.





AltaVista

Alta Vista is a fast, powerful search engine with enough bells and whistles to do an extremely complex search, but first you have to master all its options. If you're serious about Web searching, however, mastering Alta Vista is a wise policy.

Type of search: Keyword
Search options: Simple or Advanced search, search refining.
Domains searched: Web, Usenet
Search refining: Boolean "AND," "OR" and "NOT," plus the proximal locator "NEAR." Allows wildcards and "backwards" searching (i.e., you can find all the other web sites that link to another page). You can decide how search terms should be weighed, and where in the document to look for them. Powerful search refining tools, and the more refining you do, the better your results are.
Relevance ranking: Ranks according to how many of your search terms a page contains, where in the document, and how close to one another the search terms are.
Results presented as: First several lines of document. "Detailed" summaries don't appear any more detailed than "standard" ones.
User interface: Reasonably good, but not very friendly to the casual user. Advanced query now allows you to further refine your search at the end of each results page. You can also visit specialized zones or channels in areas like finance, travel, news.
Help files: Complete, but confusing. Too much thrown at you at once. More clarity and more explanation of options would be appreciated!
Good points: Fast searches, capitalization and proper nouns recognized, largest database; finds things others don't. Alta Vista searches both the Web and Usenet. It will search on both words and on phrases, including names and titles. You can even search to discover how many people have linked their site to yours. You can also have the resulting pages of your searches translated into several other languages.
Bad points: Multiple pages from the same site show up too frequently; some curious relevancy rankings, especially on Simple search.
Overall Rating: A-

Excite

Spidap Tidbits--Did you know this? America Online made a deal with Excite, giving AOL a share in the company and making Excite AOL's partner and official search engine. In fact, AOL is now using the Excite engine as their proprietary AOL search engine, accessible both from within the AOL network and via the Web. Check out AOL's NetFind.
Excite bills itself as the "intelligent" search engine because of its concept-based indexing. While "intelligent" is an exaggeration (the apparent intelligence comes from the clever use of statistics, not from a sudden advance in artificial intelligence), Excite is one of our favorite search tools.

Type of search: Both concept and keyword Search options: Simple, refined Domains searched: Web, Usenet and classified ads
Search refining: Suggests you use more words, repeating key choices several times. Uses a fuzzy AND, which searches AND and OR, giving preference to AND. Has recently added Boolean operators to aid in search refining--AND, OR, AND NOT, and the characters + and -.
Relevance ranking: Confidence percentile provided on all searches, derivation unclear. Results returned in: Summaries; will also sort them by site. By clicking on an icon beside each summary, you will get a cross-reference of similar sites.
User interface: Generally good, nothing exciting.
Help files: Very good, including a handbook that explains the site, the Web, the software, and how best to use their site.
Good points: Large index. Not quite as up-to-date as it used to be. Excellent summaries, which they admit are actually highlights--the top few most important sentences in the document. You can view your hits in various ways, too--grouped by confidence or grouped by Web site.
Bad points: Does not specify the format or the size in megabytes of the hits it returns, nor does it tell you upfront exactly how many hits there are. Overall rating: B

Infoseek

Type of search: Keyword
Search options: Simple, but powerful (see comments below). Infoseek now uses the Ultraseek engine, which really zips along. The site has added an extensive catalogue section for subject-oriented searching. You can also cross-reference your search terms with similar catalogue subject items and searches come back with subjects automatically appended. You can also search images, which seems to be popular suddenly.
Domains searched: Web, Usenet, Usenet FAQs, Reviews, Topics.
Search refining: Phrases, capitalization, no Boolean operators, but uses + and - instead (similar to AND and NOT).
Relevance ranking: Gives numerical scores based on frequency and comparison to words already in their database.
Results presented as: First 30-100 words of the page
User interface: Good, easy to use, clear. Infoseek is also now allowing free searches of some of its extensive databases (stock quotes, company information, e-mail addresses, various reference works like dictionaries and zip code directories).
Help files: Good, useful.
Good points: Fast, flexible, reliable searching. Good output, which gives the URL, the size of the document and the relevancy score. Allows you to see similar pages (based on topic information about the pages). Full-text indexing, allows capital letters and phrases.
Bad points: We're sure Infoseek has some bad points, but we really can't think of any offhand!
Overall Rating: A-

Lycos

Type of search: Keyword, but Lycos is gradually becoming less of a search engine, it seems, and more of a Yahoo-like subject index. Has recently had a cool graphical facelift. Proud of its ability to search on image and sound files.
Search options: Basic orAdvanced
Domains searched: Web, Usenet, News, Stocks, Weather, Mult-media.
Search refining : Lycos now has full Boolean capabilities (using choices on drop-down forms).
Relevance ranking: Lycos no longer provides a relevancy ranking.
Results presented as: First 100 or so words in simple search, you choose in advanced search--summary, full results or short version.
User interface: Clean, clear, focuses more on directory now than on simple search.
Help files: Good, informative, graphical help screens are easy to understand.
Good points: Large database. Comprehensive results given--i.e., the date of the document, its size, etc. Lycos indexes the frequency with which documents are linked to by other documents to make sure the most popular web sites are found and indexed before the less popular ones.
Overall Rating: B+

Webcrawler

Spidap Tidbits--Did You Know This? AOL owns Webcrawler, but AOL's new deal with Excite means that the Webcrawler search engine and directory will be incorporated into Excite.

Type of search: Keyword
Search options: Simple, refined
Search options: Domains searched: Web, Usenet
Search refining : Uses either "and" or "any." Webcrawler has added full Boolean search term capability, including AND, OR, AND NOT, ADJ, (adjacent) and NEAR.
Relevance ranking: Yes--frequency calculated--computes the total number of times your keywords appear in the document and divides it by the total number of words in the document. Webcrawler returns surprisingly relevant results.
Results presented as: lists of hyperlinks or summaries, as the user chooses.
User interface: Good--easy and fun to use
Help files: Useful tips and FAQ.
Good points: Easy to use. Popular on the Web because it belongs to AOL and there are a lot of websurfers who sign on from AOL. Publishes usage statistics on their site. Also provides a service by which you can check to see whether a particular URL is in their index, and, if so, when it was last visited by their "spider." There is also some fascinating information about how Webcrawler's search strategy works.
Bad points: Speed seems to be slowing down a little recently. Its previous weakness--no way to refine search--has been eliminated with the addition of Boolean operators.
Overall Rating: B-

HotBot

Type of search: Keyword
Search options: Simple, Modified, Expert
Domains searched: Web
Search refining: Multiple types, including by phrase, person and Boolean-like choices in pull-down boxes. No proximal operators at present. In Expert searches you can search by date and even by different media types (Java, Javascript, Shockwave, VRML, etc.).
Relevance ranking: Yes. Methods used--search terms in the title will be ranked higher search terms in the text. Frequency also counts, and will result in higher rankings when search terms appears more frequently in short documents than when they appear frequently in very long documents. (This sounds sensible and useful).
Results presented as: Relevancy score and URL
User interface: Very cool and lively. Some users have complained about the bright green background, but we kinda like it.
Help files: A FAQ that answers users' questions, but not a lot of serious help files.
Good points: Claims to be fast because of the use of parallel processing, which distributes the load of queries as well as the database over several work stations.
Bad points: Some limitations still on Boolean operators, and the help files still aren't very good.
Overall Rating: B

Yahoo

Although not precisely a search engine site, Yahoo is an important Web resource. It works as an hierarchical subject index, allowing you to drill down from the general to the specific. Yahoo is an attempt to organize and catalogue the Web.
Yahoo also has search capabilities. You can search the Yahoo index (note: when you do this you are not searching the entire Web). If your query gets no hits in this manner, Yahoo offers you the option of searching the Alta Vista, which does search the entire Web.
Yahoo will also automatically feed your query into the other major search engine sites if you so desire. Thus, Yahoo has the capacity to act as a kind of meta-search engine.

Type of search: Keyword
Search options: Simple, Advanced
Domains searched: Yahoo's index, Usenet, E-mail addresses. Yahoo searches titles, URLs and the brief comments or descriptions of the Web sites Yahoo indexes.
Search refining: Boolean AND and OR. Yahoo is case insensitive.
Relevance ranking: Since Yahoo returns relatively few hits (it will never return more than 100), it's not clear how results are ranked.
Results presented as: Yahoo tells you the category where a hit is found, then gives you a two-line description of the site.
User interface: Excellent, easy-to-use
Help files: Not very complete, but since there aren't a lot of search options, detailed help files are not necessary.
Good points: Easy-to-navigate subject catalogue. If you know what you want to find, Yahoo should be your first stop on the Web.
Bad points: Only a small portion of the Web has actually been catalogued by Yahoo.
Overall rating: A (This rating refers simply to Yahoo's quality as a directory--searches of the entire Web are not possible).

The information is taken partly from the web site: http://www.monash.com

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Search engines


StepForth offers a comprehensive range of search marketing services.
StepForth offers: small business SEO, Corporate Placement Campaign, SEO Placement Maintenance, Web Presence Overview, Small Business Analysis, Competitor, Analysis and Pay Per Click Management. In addition you can get a free web site review. You will just be asked to complete a form or call a free number 1-877-385-5526. You can also subscribe to weekly newsletter.

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