What is a Search Engine?
Search engines are the primary tools of Internet users for finding products, services and information over the web. Search engines allow people to search the entire Web (or at least those pages of the Internet that are in the search engine's database.)
1. Document Inception Date
The document inception date is the date the document was created, first indexed or linked to or the first registration date of the domain. The inception date is used to determine the rate of growth of links to a document. For example, a document with yesterday's inception date with 10 links to it could be scored higher than a document with an inception date of 10 years ago and a 100 links to it. For
Some searches that are made on a search engine, an older document may be more favorable than a newer document therefore older documents may be ranked higher and vice-versa .Additionally to this, proper navigation allows search engine spiders to follow your links and put your pages into their database. People need to find their way around your site, as well. Sometimes,
Organization is what distinguishes a high quality site from a loser. A well designed navigational system will have a positive impact on search engine optimization.
•Chart the link growth to see if there is a natural growth. A spiky growth could indicate SPAM.
•Have a structured link building program
2. Content Updates/Changes
Every document has parts that are more important to the search engine like the main piece of content on the page and elements that are much less important like JavaScript code, date/time information, adverts or boiler plate information. Using the relative importance of each element the search engine looks at the frequency and amount of changes over time. For example, changes to the content would have significantly more importance than changes to advertisements on a site. Google looks at whether fresher or staler documents are preferred by a search user and then ranks fresher or staler documents higher, accordingly. For example, people searching for 'Top of the league' would prefer a fresher document than perhaps people that were searching for information on 'Winner of 1982 World Cup'. So, content is King. All search engines, directories, or otherwise, will index your web site based on
CONTENT . ALL of them . Content is the key to developing an Internet presence. You will build a good reputation with high-quality content. If you have interesting content other webmasters will want to link to your site. (Obtaining links into your site is a priority for SEO.)
Also, your content must be focused. Content that works around one theme will help you attract your target market. You will attract attention to your site if you can become a respected provider of information about your niche.
Look at whether Google favors fresh or stale documents by conducting a search and seeing if the top results are from fresher or staler documents. Once you have this information you will have an idea of how often or not to update the main content elements of your document.
3. Query Analysis
Google analyses the volume and kind of searches that users make through the search engine. It analyses these results over time and documents associated with the fastest growing keyword searches are ranked higher as they could indicate a hot topic or breaking news story. Google also looks at search terms and records whether a search term should produce a consistent set of results or whether searches like 'World Cup Winning Team' should produce a different set of results every year.
•If a document appears highly in the search results for a discordant set of search results, then it may be considered as SPAM and ranked lower as it is unlikely for one document to be a good source for a number of different topics.
•Each document should be optimized and contain information related to a few searched for keywords. If you try and put all the keywords into one document then you are unlikely to rank very highly and are much more likely to be considered as search engine SPAM.
4. Link Based Criteria
Google looks at the number of links to a document (back links) and the growth or disappearance of these links
Over time A downward trend in the number of links to a document, decline in the rate of link growth or disappearance of links may indicate that a document is getting stale whilst an upward trend in links and rate of link growth may indicate that a document is fresh. In addition, detailed graphs of link growth over time can be used to show particular patterns for fresh documents, stale
Documents those that may no longer be updated or that have been superseded. This software will help you analyze your links: Link Analyzer. Also, a weight may be given to every link based on the freshness of the overall document in which it is contained. Links from authoritative sources, like Government pages are weighted higher.
• The dates that links appear can be used to detect if links are SPAM. A 'legitimate' document attracts back links slowly whilst a sudden growth in links particularly from documents without editorial discretion, like guest books, referrer logs, 'free for all' pages could indicate SPAM.
Using a link generating program in the beginning could be beneficial. Services such as Link-Submission.com are worth examining. This to great way to get your incoming link ball rolling Then once your site gains popularity you’ll see a lot more natural links coming your way.
• Make sure that you have a link building program in place that lets you grow your links organically by for example:
1. Asking suppliers, customers and partners to link to you.
2. Submitting to online discussion forums.
3. Creating a blog.
4. Submitting to shopping portals and industry sites.
5. Offering something great like a free gift or service so other sites value linking to you.
6. Creating your own affiliate program where all the links are direct to you.
5. Anchor Text
Anchor text is the clickable text that is associated with a link. Google looks at the anchor text, freshness of the anchor text and changes to the anchor text over time.
If there is a disparity between the anchor text and the document that it links to, possibly due to changes in domain ownership, Google could look at the time this occurred and ignore all the valuable links to your document prior to this event.
• Let people link to you with appropriate anchor text.
6. Traffic
Google will look at the traffic that a document gets and changes to that traffic over time. It will also consider seasonal, daily or other timely changes to see if a document receives more traffic at these times and is therefore more relevant at these times. Any significant drop in traffic may indicate that a document is stale. Google may also consider 'advertising traffic' separately.
Is your primary goal in a search engine promotion campaign to increase overall traffic or to increase
sales? The determination of your success will depend on your goals.
You will need to have the following statistics or metrics available to analyze your success:
• How many unique visitors you get each week
• The specific search engines that are sending you traffic
• How many hits each search engine is sending you
• The keywords people use to find your site
• What your ranks are for certain keyword phrases
• Sales per week
7. User Behavior
Google analyses the amount of time that a user spends on a site after he/she has clicked a link from a search results page. If there is a significant decline in the time spent on the site then it could indicate that the document contains information that is out of date and has become stale. For instance, if after clicking from a Google search results link to a timetable, an average person spent 2 minutes on the
site and now the average was under 30 seconds, it would indicate that the timetable was out of date.
8. Domain Related Information
Information that you used to register your domain name, including contact information, length of registration and name servers (servers that resolve your domain name to IP address) is used to determine the legitimacy of domains. Google uses pattern matching between information about your domain with that of known illegitimate domains. Google also looks at whether this contact information, hosting company or name servers has changed relatively often.
9. Ranking History
Google will look at the historical ranking of a document to help determine the current ranking. A historically highly ranked document will have an influence on the current ranking. A document that falls significantly in rank would be flagged as 'out of favor' and may be considered outdated.
• A document that jumps in ranking across a number of queries might be a topical document or could be SPAM. Commercial queries can be repeated and documents that are ranked highly can be nagged and checked for SPAM. The change in rank over time is considered to see if a
Document is SPAM. If there is a sudden spike and the document is not linked to or from an authoritative or trusted source, like a news article, then a document may be considered as SPAM.
• Try to get links from trusted news and authoritative sites.
10. Document Topic
Google attempts to extract the topic of a document using the URL, low frequency words contained in the document, categorization, content analysis, clustering or
summarization.
• If Google sees a significant change in the number of topics associated with a document after a stable period of set topics or the disappearance of the original topic, Google may consider that the document has been taken over as a 'doorway page' and may consider the document
and any links or anchor text associated with the document as SPAM.
• Ensure your site stays consistent with its original topic.
11. Localization
Pick regional search engines you want to appear on based upon the countries you trade in. If you sell to France and you want to appear on Google.fr, the French version of Google, you should either host your site in France or have a French domain that your site can be indexed under.
It is important to continue repeating these steps on a structured basis and planning in advance of seasonal trends like Holiday Season. Over a period of time the keywords will change in relevancy as search terms evolve and the relevancy of your product range changes.
With an analytics system you should be able the see what words are working for you, the traffic they are bringing in and the level of conversion you are getting for them. With this information, you can see how much of an improvement you have made and also if any changes you have made have improved your results.
12. Using Social Networks, Blogs and RSS to increase ranking and traffic
The rise of Social Networks, Blogs and RSS on the web has been driven by individuals feeling empowered to tell their story, communicate feelings, chronicle events or write anything that can think of. This is the age of self-publishing as never seen before and with it comes all the positives and negatives of personal opinion.
According to Metcalfe's law "the value of a network grows in proportion to the square of the number of users" which essentially means the larger the network the more connections/benefit the users get out of it.
You may love the comments or hate them but with 27% of internet users in the US having been involved, either reading or writing a blog, companies that ignore the messages posted may be doing so at their peril. Blogs are a valuable source of research to understand what consumers are thinking about your brand, latest advertising campaign or products/services.
A web log (blog) is a shared online journal where people can post diary entries about their personal experiences and interests. Blogs have become legitimate standard business practices and progressive marketers are building strategies around their use to influence a target audience. Many of these self- developed forums are generating significant revenue streams for their creators. Teen networks such as MySpace.com have become destinations of choice for an increasingly connected youth culture.
Witness the success of Gawker.com in creating large audience pull and drawing advertisers' media dollars through the public interest in 'A' list celebrities and fashion icons. Yahoo! is also including blogs to the search criteria within news, further highlighting the increased interest of consumer opinion, unique insights or footage of events. In addition to using blogs for research, as a feature to your site, they can increase traffic, membership and your SEO ranking.
Video logs (VBlog), are proliferating as bloggers seek to enhance their messages. Mobile blogs (Moblogs, mBlogs) can be posted directly to from your mobile communication device. Podcasting enables anyone to create their own radio or television show for download to others. And it goes on and on.
At the heart of the technical revolution in the explosion of self-expression via the Web, is a family of standards called RSS and a rival specification called Atom. RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication and allows individuals or web sites to opt-in and receive content or recent changes from other web sites, the most common of which are news, blogs, entertainment, and ecommerce.
