Gopi Krishan garhwal

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

SEO Goal,SEO Plan and Goal Setting

What is seo?
Why do we need seo?
What is seo goal setting?
Why we should set seo goal?



Oops!!!  How many questions arrived in mind and how do i find answers?????

Don't worry here are some solutions of all these questions I have tried to make it easy to understand hope you guys will like it.

SEO is the science of customizing elements of your web site to achieve the best possible search engine ranking. That’s really all there is to search engine optimization. But as simple as it sounds, don’t let it fool you. Both internal and external elements of the site affect the way it’s ranked in any given search engine, so all of these elements should be taken into consideration. Good SEO can be very difficult to achieve, and great SEO seems pretty well impossible at times.

Ideally you want your site to be displayed somewhere on the first three pages of results. Most people won’t look beyond the third page, if they get even that far. The fact is, it’s the sites that fall on the first page of results that get the most traffic, and traffic is translated into revenue, which is the ultimate goal of search engine optimization.
To achieve a high position in search results, your site must be more than simply recognizable by a search engine crawler. It must satisfy a set of criteria that not only gets the site cataloged, but can also get it cataloged above most (if not all) of the other sites that fall into that category or topic.
Some of the criteria by which a search engine crawler determines the rank your site should have in a set of results include:

 Anchor text
 Site popularity
 Link context
 Topical links
 Title tags
 Keywords
 Site language
 Content
 Site maturity
There are estimated to be at least several hundred other criteria that could also be examined before your site is ranked by a search engine. Some of the criteria listed also have multiple points of view.For example, when looking at link context, a crawler might take into consideration where the link is located on the page, what text surrounds it, and where it leads to or from.
These criteria are also different in importance. For some search engines, links are more important than site maturity, and for others, links have little importance. These weights and measures are constantly changing, so even trying to guess what is most important at any given time is a pointless exercise Just as you figure it out, the criteria will shift or change completely.
By nature, many of the elements are likely to have some impact on your site ranking, even when you do nothing to improve them. However, without your attention, you’re leaving the search ranking of your site to chance. That’s like opening a business without putting out a sign. You’re sure to get some traffic, but because people don’t know you’re there, it won’t be anything more than the curiosity of passersby.

SEO Goals,Goal Setting and Plans.
One of the greatest failings of many SEO plans, like all technology plans, is the lack of a clearly defined goal. The goal for your SEO plan should be built around your business needs, and it’s not something every business requires. For example, if you run a simple blog, SEO might be more expense than it’s worth. But if your plans for that blog are to turn it into a brand, then the simplest of SEO strategies might be just what you need to build the traffic that begins to establish your brand.
If you have a larger business, say a web site that sells custom-made silk-flower arrangements, one way to increase your business (some estimate by more than 50 percent) is to invest time, money,and considerable effort into optimizing your site for search. Just don’t do it without a goal in mind.
In the case of the silk-flower web site, one goal might be to increase the amount of traffic your website receives. Another might be to increase your exposure to potential customers outside your geographic region.Those are both good reasons to implement an SEO plan. One other reason you might consider investing in SEO is to increase your revenues, which you can do by funneling site visitors through a sales transaction while they are visiting your web site. SEO can help with that, too.
So before you even begin to put together an SEO plan, the first thing you need to do is determine what goal you want to achieve with that plan. Be sure it is a well-articulated and specifically defined goal, too. The more specific, the closer you will come to hitting it.
Make sure the goal is specific and attainable. Otherwise, it’s very easy to become unfocused with your SEO efforts. In some cases, you can spend all your time chasing SEO and never accomplish anything. Search engines regularly change the criteria for ranking sites. They started doing this when internal, incoming, and external links became a factor in SEO. Suddenly, every webmaster was rushing to add as many additional links as possible, and often those links were completely unrelated to the site. There was a sudden and often meaningless rise in page links. It wasn’t long before the linking criteria had to be qualified with additional requirements.
Today, link strategies are quite complex and must abide by a set of rules or your web site could be banned from some search engines for what’s called SEO spam, or the practice of targeting a specific element or criteria of search engine ranking, with the intention of becoming one of the highest ranked sites on the Web. If an SEO goal has been established, however, you’re more likely to have a balanced traffic flow, which will improve your search engine ranking naturally.
In addition to well-focused goals, you should also consider how your SEO goals align with your business goals. Business goals should be the overall theme for everything you do with your web site, and if your SEO goals are not created with the intent of furthering those business goals, you’ll find the SEO goals ultimately fail. Be sure that any goal you set for optimizing your site for search is a goal that works well within the parameters that are set by your overall business goals.
Finally, remain flexible at all times. Get a goal, or even a set of goals. And hold tightly to them. Just don’t hold so tightly that the goals get in the way of performing great SEO activities. SEO goals and plans, like any others, must be flexible and must grow with your organization. For this reason, it’s always a good idea to review your SEO goals and plans periodically — at least every six months, and quarterly is much better.

Creatig SEO Plan

1.Prioritizing pages
Look at SEO in small, bite-size pieces. For example, instead of looking at your site as a whole, look at each page on the site. Prioritize those pages, and then plan your SEO around each page’s priority.Taking a single page into consideration helps to eliminate the “everything has to happen right now” issue and makes it possible for you to create an SEO plan that will maximize your web site’s potential in the minimum amount of time.
Top priority pages should be the ones that your visitors will most naturally gravitate to, such as your home page, or pages that will generate the most in terms of traffic or revenue. When prioritizing pages, you’re also creating a roadmap for your marketing efforts. If three of the pages on your site are your top priority, those three will have the lion’s share of time, capital, and effort when it comes to SEO and marketing.

2.Site assessment
After you have prioritized your site, you should assess where you stand and where you need to be with your current SEO efforts. Again, assess each page individually, rather than the site as a whole.In SEO, individual pages are equally important (if not more so) than the entire site. All of your efforts are designed to rank one page above all others in search results. Which page is the most important should be determined by your business needs.
Your SEO assessment should be a document that outlines the current standing of the main SEO elements of each page. It should contain columns for the element of the site you’re assessing, the current status of that element, what needs to be improved in that element, and the deadline for improvement. It’s also helpful if you have a check box next to each item that can be marked when improvements are completed and a column for follow-up, because SEO is a never-ending process.
The elements that should be considered during an assessment include: 

a.Site/page tagging: The meta tags that are included in the coding of your web site are essential to having that site listed properly in a search engine. Tags to which you should pay specific attention are the title tags and description tags, because these are the most important to a search engine.

b.Page content: How fresh is your content? How relevant is it? How often is it updated? And how much content is there? Content is still important when it comes to search results. After all, most people are looking for a specific piece of content, whether it’s information or a product. If your content is stale, search engines could eventually begin to ignore your site in favor of a site that has fresher content. There are exceptions to this generalization, however.
And one exception is if your content is, by nature, very rich but not very dynamic. Because of the usefulness of the content, your site will probably continue to rank well. But it’s a difficult case to determine. In most cases, fresh content is better..

c.Site links: Site links are essential in SEO. Crawlers and spiders look for the links into and out of your site in order to traverse your site and collect data on each URL. However,they also look for those links to be in-context, meaning the link must come from or lead to a site that is relevant to the page that is being indexed. Broken links tend to be a large problem when it comes to search engine ranking, so be sure to check that links are still working during the assessment process.

d.Site map: Believe it or not, a site map will help your web site be more accurately linked.But this is not the ordinary site map that you include to help users quickly navigate through your site. This site map is an XML-based document, at the root of your HTML, that contains information (URL, last updated, relevance to surrounding pages, and so on) about each of the pages within a site. Using this XML site map will help to ensure that even the deep pages within your site are indexed by search engines. If you don’t have a site map, you should create one. If you do have one, make sure it’s accurate and up to date.
Finishing the plan
With the site assessment out of the way, you should have a good idea of what areas need work and what areas are in good shape. Don’t assume the areas that don’t currently need work will always be perfect, however. That’s not how it works. At the least, changes to the pages will require changes to the SEO efforts that you’re putting forth; at most they may require that you begin SEO efforts for that page all over again.
You can now take the time to put together all of the information that you’ve gathered into a cohesive picture of the SEO efforts you should be making. Your SEO plan is more than just a picture of what’s there and what’s not, however. This is the document that you use to tie everything together: current standing, marketing efforts, capital expenditures, time frames — all of it.
The document should look much like any other plan that you’ll create, for instance your business plan. In this plan, you should have an area for background information, marketing information,plans for growing the business, and plans for managing problems that may arise.
An SEO plan is very similar. You’ll have your current standings, the goals that you plan to hit, and the marketing efforts that you plan to make for each page (or for the site as a whole). You’ll even have the capital expenditures that you plan to encounter as you implement your SEO plan.You’ll also want to include the strategies you plan to use. Those strategies can be efforts such as submitting your site or pages from your site to directories manually and planning the content you’ll use to draw search crawlers, or they can be keyword marketing plans or pay-per-click programs you plan to use. Also be sure to include a time line for the testing and implementation of those efforts as well as for regular follow-ups.

What is Follow-up?
Follow-up is also an essential part of your SEO plan. Many people believe they can develop and implement an SEO plan and then just walk away from it. The truth is, however, that SEO is not just a one-time event. It’s an ongoing process that requires testing, monitoring, and often re-building.A good plan for conducting follow-ups is to plan for them quarterly. Some companies will choose to follow up and reassess their SEO bi-annually, but to be truly effective quarterly is much better. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that following up on your SEO efforts too soon is non-productive.
In many cases, it takes at least three months to get a clear picture of how successful your efforts are.Conducting an evaluation before that three-month mark could have you chasing after an elusive SEO goal that doesn’t really exist. Or worse, it could lead you away from a successful strategy.
Give your plan at least three months but no more than six between checkups. Once you create the habit of re-evaluating your SEO efforts on that time schedule, it will be much less time consuming than you assume.

Its hard to achieve good result as we want without making any plan,SEO is the game as well as science and every Optimist is a player and if want to win the game don't you play without any plan or strategy.
All The best!!!!!.

Thanks   

Search Engine Overview

1.Primary Search Engines
 
Overview of Google

Each of the major search engines differs in some small way. Google is the king of search engines, in
part because of the accuracy with which it can pull the results from a search query. Sure, Google
offers all kinds of extras like e-mail, a personalized home page, and even productivity applications,
but those value-added services are not what made Google popular.
What turned Google into a household word is the accuracy with which the search engine can return
search results. This accuracy was developed when the Google designers combined keyword searches
with link popularity. The combination of the keywords and the popularity of links to those pages
yields a higher accuracy rank than just keywords alone.
However, it’s important to understand that link popularity and keywords are just two of hundreds
of different criteria that search engines can use in ranking the relevancy of web pages.


Overview of Yahoo!
Most people assume that Yahoo! is a search engine, and it is. But it’s also a web directory, which
basically means that it’s a list of the different web pages available on the Internet, divided by category
and subcategory. In fact, what few people know is that Yahoo! started as the favorites list of
the two young men who founded it. Through the acquisition of companies like Inktomi, All the
Web, AltaVista, and Overture, Yahoo! gradually gained market share as a search engine.
Yahoo!, which at one time used Google to search its directory of links, now ranks pages through a
combination of the technologies that it acquired over time. However, Yahoo!’s link-ranking capability
is not as accurate as Google’s. In addition, Yahoo! also has a paid inclusion program, which some
think tends to skew search results in favor of the highest payer.


Overview of MSN
MSN’s search capabilities aren’t quite as mature as those of Google or Yahoo! As a result of this immaturity,
MSN has not yet developed the in-depth link analysis capabilities of these other primary search
engines. Instead, MSN relies heavily on web-site content for ranking purposes. However, this may
have a beneficial effect for new web sites that are trying to get listed in search engines.
The link-ranking capabilities of Google and Yahoo! can preclude new web sites from being listed for
a period of time after they have been created. This is because (especially where Google is concerned) the quality of the link may be considered during ranking. New links are often ignored until they
have been in place for a time.
Because MSN relies heavily on page content, a web site that is tagged properly and contains a good
ratio of keywords will be more likely to be listed — and listed sooner — by the MSN search engine.
So, though it’s not the most popular of search engines, it is one of the primaries, and being listed
there sooner rather than later will help increase your site traffic.


2.Secondary Search Engines

Secondary search engines are targeted at smaller, more specific audiences, although the search engine’s
content itself is still general. They don’t generate as much traffic as the primary search engines, but
they’re useful for regional and more narrowly focused searches. Examples of secondary search engines
include Lycos, LookSmart, Miva, Ask.com, and Espotting.
Secondary search engines, just like the primary ones, will vary in the way they rank search results.
Some will rely more heavily upon keywords, whereas others will rely on reciprocal links. Still others
might rely on criteria such as meta tags or some proprietary criteria.
Secondary search engines should be included in any SEO plan. Though these search engines might
not generate as much traffic as the primary search engines, they will still generate valuable traffic
that should not be overlooked. Many users of secondary search engines are users because they have
some loyalty to that specific search engine. For example, many past AOL users who have moved on
to broadband Internet service providers still use the AOL search engine whenever possible, because
it’s comfortable for them.


3.Targeted Search Engines

Targeted search engines — sometimes called topical search engines — are the most specific of them all.
These search engines are very narrowly focused, usually to a general topic, like medicine or branches
of science, travel, sports, or some other topic. Examples of targeted search engines include CitySearch,
Yahoo! Travel, and MusicSearch, and like other types of search engines, ranking criteria will vary from
one to another.
When considering targeted search engines for SEO purposes, keep in mind that many of these
search engines are much more narrowly focused than primary or secondary search engines. Look
for the targeted search engines that are relevant to your specific topic (like pets, sports, locations,
and so on).

Thanks

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Distinguish Ethical and Unethical SEO Practices

Search engine optimization in organic way is a little bit hard but interesting webmasters should understand the way that search engines like,simply mean search engine friendly design and practice with the web to getting higher rank and more simply the ethical or white hat seo practices and work with web sites,because search engines don't like the bad practices they counted those things as spamming and that spamming can be dangerous and harmful for website owners and for the business to which web is affecting.
When you will start to do seo you should keep somethings in mind that what can you do with the web and what can not do.      
So what exactly should and should not you do? There’s a list. Here is part of it.


You should do:

1. Create a web site that contains meta tags, content, graphics, and keywords that help improve your site
ranking.
2. Use keywords liberally on your site, so long as they are used in the correct context of your site topic and
content.
3.Include reciprocal links to your site from others as long as those links are legitimate and relevant.
4. Encourage web site traffic through many venues, including keyword advertising, reciprocal links, and
marketing campaigns.
5. Submit your web site to search engines manually, rather than waiting for them to pick up your site in the
 natural course of cataloging web sites.


You should not do:

1. Trick search engines by imbedding hidden keywords in your web site. This is a practice that will very likely
get you banned by most search engines.
2. Artificially generate links to your site from unrelated sites for the purpose of increasing your ranking based
on link analysis. Most search engines have a built-in mechanism that will detect this type of deceptive practice.
3. Artificially generate traffic to your web site so that it appears more popular than it is.Again,there are    safeguards in place to prevent this from happening, and if you trip those safeguards,you could end up on     the banned list for many search engines.
4. Force your web site to appear in search engine rankings by submitting the site repeatedly for inclusion in the rankings. A good general rule of thumb is that you should submit your site once and then wait at least six
weeks before submitting it again. Submitting it repeatedly will, again, only lead to something nasty like being
banned from the search engine.
5. Expect search engines to automatically rank you at the top of your topic, category, or keyword as soon as
the site is picked up. It could take a little time to build the “status” that you need to reach a high search engine ranking. Remember, SEO is a process.

Thanks

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Understanding Search Engine's Behavior

What is a Search Engine?
Basic concept of search engine is to type a word or phrase into a search box, wait a few seconds and references will appear, and all we have to do is click through those pages to find what we want.But exactly the search engine has a back end which is a piece of software that uses applications to collect information about web pages. The information collected is usually key words or phrases, the information is then indexed and stored in a database. On, the front end, the software has a user interface where users enter a search term- a word or phrase.

Structure of a Search Engine:
         
This is a vitally important to succeeding with search engine optimization (seo).

Query Interface:
This is the page that users see when they navigate to a search engine to enter a search term. Today many search engines have added much more personalized content in an attempt for search engine marketing.

Crawlers, Spiders, and Robots:
These little creatures are programs that literally crawl around the web, cataloging data so that it can be searched, like this many SEO’s work in a team and view the search engine behavior by using the search engine characteristics.

Databases:
Every search engine contains or is connected to a system of databases, where data about each 
URL in the web is stored.

Search Algorithms:
Generally a search algorithm is a problem - solving procedure that takes a problem, evaluates a number of possible answers, and return the solution to that problem. There are several types of search algorithms, they are:-
        
List search
Tree search
SQL search
Informed search
Adversarial search
Constraint satisfaction search

Retrieval and Ranking: retrieval of data is a combination activity of the crawler (or spider or robot), the database, and the search algorithm. Those three elements work in concert to retrieve the word or phrase that a user enters into the search engine’s user interface
Ranking plays a large part in search engine optimization. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the best results first. Different search engines use different ranking criteria, they are :-
          
Location : Location describes the location of keywords where the target keywords are placed at the
                  document.

Frequency :  Frequency describes that how many times a keyword appears in the document.
 
Links : Links describes that how many links are for that keywords in the form of Anchor Text(In/Outbound).

Click-troughs : How many clicks a key word collects.It can be see by using analytical tool such as Google Analytics. 

Thus, we see that two search engines that have evolved: one is predefined and hierarchically ordered keywords. The other is the system that generates an inverted index by analyzing texts it locates
Most search engines are commercial ventures supported by employing SEO’s which brings qualified traffic  from the search engine and provide search engine marketing by truly understanding what exactly is the search engine characteristics.
Characteristics of Search:
The characteristics of search refer to how users search the internet. This can be everything from the heuristics they use when creating a search term to the selection the user makes (and the way those selections are made) once the search results are returned. This means different search results are returned depending upon the query, even if using the same search engines.
Today many people search the internet for several purposes depending on what are their needs and what they want.
This wealth of search engine users is fertile ground SEO targeting. This ensures the SEO to understand the search engine characteristics for the search engine optimization.
By using the search engine behavior the SEO can know what the users need and what are their views about the results that are placed in front of them.

Some Major Search Engines:
             
The major search engines are:
                      
Excite-1993
Yahoo-1994
Web crawler-1994
 Lycos-1994
 Infoseek-1995
 AltaVista-1995
 Inktomi-1996
 AskJeeves-1997
 Google-1997
 MSN Search-1998
              
Search engines can be broken down into three different types-
                          
Primary search engines: a primary search engine is the most often used search engines. Ex: yahoo, Google and MSN are primary or major search engines. These will generate the majority of the traffic to the web site and primary focus of SEO as it is shows the search engine behavior. Additional features like e-mail, mapping, news and different entertainment applications are also available from most of the primary search engines. They provide better results which must be kept in search engine optimization.

Secondary search engines: they are targeted at smaller, more specific audiences, although the search engine’s content itself is general. They don’t generate as much traffic as the primary search engines, but they are useful for regional and more narrowly focused searches. Ex: Lycos, LookSmart, Miva, Ask.com, and Espotting. These are just like primary search engines, will vary in the way they rank search results. Some will rely more heavily upon keywords, whereas others will rely on reciprocal links. This should be included in any SEO plan. Though they don’t generate much traffic as primary search engines but they generate valuable traffic that should not be overlooked.

Targeted search engines: these search engines sometimes called topical search engines are the most specific of them all. These are very narrowly focused to a general topic, like medicine, travel sports or some other topic. Here ranking criteria will vary from one to another. Ex: CitySearch, Yahoo! Travel, and MusicSearch. This is helpful for SEO for specific and much more narrowly focused topic which they want. They can use it for more specific search.


Putting search engines to work:
             
A search engine works in the following order:

Web Crawling
Indexing
Searching
                
All search engines go by the basic process. But different search engine use different methodologies and are bound to display different results depending on which search engine is used.
         1) The searcher types a query into a search engine.
         2) Search engine software quickly sorts through literally millions of pages in its database to find  
              matches to this query.
         3) The search engines result are ranked in order of relevancy.     
Search engines work by strong information about many web pages, these pages are retrieved by a web crawler. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed in a database for use in later queries. When a user enters a query into a search engine, the engine examines its index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages. These results are stored by using different methods by different search engines and are ranked accordingly.

This is the vital step in search engine optimization, as the search engine behavior is concerned it helps to know the view placed in front of them.
For the SEO this is the important part as through this they can bring great traffic to the user if search engine works properly and efficiently.
In this search engine when a user enters a query then the search engine characteristics could be well understood.
So now a days the big ventures are employing into search engines optimization and going for search engine marketing which will help their sites grow and their business also.
  
Elements Needed For SEO  

Search engine optimization is essentially the science of designing your web site to maximize your search engine rankings. This means that all of the elements of your web site are created with the goal of obtaining high search engine rankings.

Those elements include:

1.Entry and exit pages
2. Page titles
3. Site content
4. Graphics
5. Web site structure

In addition to these elements, however, you also have to consider things like keywords,links, HTML and meta-tagging. Even after you have all the elements of your page optimized for search-engine friendliness, there are other things to consider. For example, you can have all the right design elements included in your web pages and still have a relatively low search engine ranking. Factors such as advertising campaigns and update frequencies also affect your SEO efforts.
 
All of this means that you should understand that the concept of search engine optimization is not based on any single element. Instead, search engine optimization is based on a vast number of elements and strategies. And it’s an ongoing process that doesn’t end once your web site is live.