Search Engine Optimisation- SEO
No matter how much you spend on it, a web site is invisible
until somebody links to it”
Eric Ward, Link Marketing Consultant
If the
first phase of the internet was getting people online and the second phase of
the internet was helping people navigate… the third phase of the internet is
about producing great information where people can actually spend more time
engaged with information, engaged with brands, engaged with writers and things
they care about. That's where we believe the next wave of the internet is
going.
– Jeff Levick, president, global advertising and
strategy, AOL
Content
Doesn’t Win. Optimized Content Wins” – Li Evans, search marketing guru
SEO
is a marketing function for sure, but it needs to be baked into a product, not
slapped on like icing after the cake is baked.” - Duane Forrester, author
and conference speaker
Search Engine Optimisation is the
most basic and important strategy with a very high potential to generate leads
for a company’s products and services in a sustainable manner. SEO is a
‘Keyword Centric’ Activity and has to be used always in conjunction with
specific keywords for a given website and its pages. High ranking on the SERPs will lead to a high
level of traffic to the landing pages in the site which increase the chance of
getting more and more leads.
Search engine Optimisation is a
four way process resulting out of the efforts of webmasters, their clients, the
Search engines and a number of
Webmasters interact with a number of content platforms external to the
site for sending links and traffic to the web sites for which SEO is being
done.
Definition
Search engine optimization (SEO)
is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search
engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or
"algorithmic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher
ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the
search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's
users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local
search, video search, academic search,news search and industry-specific
vertical search engine.. Wikipedia.
It must be understood very clearly
that, Search Engine Optimisation involves driving traffic to the optimized
‘Landing Page’ of a website for a given ‘Keyword’. Landing page is generally
different from the ‘Home Page’ which contains a number of keywords selected for
the overall site.
Search engine optimization affects only organic
search results, not paid or "sponsored" results such as Google
AdWords.
History
According to industry analyst
Danny Sullivan, the phrase "search engine optimization" probably came
into use in 1997.[3] The first documented use of the term Search Engine
Optimization was John Audette and his company Multimedia Marketing Group as
documented by a web page from the MMG site from August, 1997.
Understanding Search operation
from point of view of SEO:
What Document Features Make a Good
Match to a Query?
• Term frequency: How frequently a query term appears in a document is one
of the most obvious ways of determining a document's relevance to a query.
While most often true, several situations can undermine this premise. First,
many words have multiple meanings — they are polysemous. Think of words like
"pool" or "fire." Many of the non-relevant documents
presented to users result from matching the right word, but with the wrong
meaning.
Also, in a collection of documents
in a particular domain, such as education, common query terms such as
"education" or "teaching" are so common and occur so
frequently that an engine's ability to distinguish the relevant from the non-relevant
in a collection declines sharply. Search engines that don't use a tf/idf
weighting algorithm do not appropriately down-weight the overly frequent terms,
nor are higher weights assigned to appropriate distinguishing (and less
frequently-occurring) terms, e.g., "early-childhood."
• Location of terms: Many search engines give preference to words found in the
title or lead paragraph or in the metadata of a document. Some studies show
that the location — in which a term occurs in a document or on a page — indicates
its significance to the document. Terms occurring in the title of a document or
page that match a query term are therefore frequently weighted more heavily
than terms occurring in the body of the document. Similarly, query terms
occurring in section headings or the first paragraph of a document may be more
likely to be relevant.
• Link analysis: Web-based search engines have introduced one dramatically
different feature for weighting and ranking pages. Link analysis works somewhat
like bibliographic citation practices, such as those used by Science Citation
Index. Link analysis is based on how well-connected each page is, as defined by
Hubs and Authorities, where Hub documents link to large numbers of other pages
(out-links), and Authority documents are those referred to by many other pages,
or have a high number of "in-links" (J. Kleinberg,
"Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment," Proceedings of
the 9th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms. 1998,pp. 668-77).
• Popularity :
Google and several other search engines add popularity to link analysis to help
determine the relevance or value of pages. Popularity utilizes data on the
frequency with which a page is chosen by all users as a means of predicting
relevance. While popularity is a good indicator at times, it assumes that the
underlying information need remains the same.
• Date of Publication: Some search engines assume that the more recent the information
is, the more likely that it will be useful or relevant to the user. The engines
therefore present results beginning with the most recent to the less current.
• Length : While length per se does not necessarily predict
relevance, it is a factor when used to compute the relative merit of similar
pages. So, in a choice between two documents both containing the same query
terms, the document that contains a proportionately higher occurrence of the
term relative to the length of the document is assumed more likely to be
relevant.
• Proximity of query terms : When the terms in a query occur near to each other within
a document, it is more likely that the document is relevant to the query than
if the terms occur at greater distance. While some search engines do not
recognize phrases per se in queries, some search engines clearly rank documents
in results higher if the query terms occur adjacent to one another or in closer
proximity, as compared to documents in which the terms occur at a distance.
• Proper nouns sometimes have
higher weights, since so many searches are performed on people, places, or
things. While this may be useful, if the search engine assumes that you are
searching for a name instead of the same word as a normal everyday term, then
the search results may be peculiarly skewed. Imagine getting information on
"Madonna," the rock star, when you were looking for pictures of
madonnas for an art history class.
Reproduced from : How a Search
Engine Works
by Elizabeth Liddy • Director of
the Center for Natural Language Processing
Professor, School of Information
Studies • Syracuse University
Elizabeth Liddy's e-mail address
is liddy@mailbox.syr.edu.
How is SEO done?
Given that Search engines use over
200 parameters to populate the SERPs for different queries,
SEO has to be a dynamic and
diligent activity that tracks the dynamic nature of Search engine behavior to improve the ranking of the landing pages
of the websites.
Search Engine optimization is a
methodical, multipronged activity. It consists in-page and off-page activites
aimed at building credibility of the website and increasing traffic to the
landing pages of the website resulting in its attaining top rank in the SERPs of all the search engines.
The steps include:
A.
Submit the
web site and its urls to Search Engines for storing and indexing purpose.
B.
Research to
identify ‘Keywords’ to appropriately describe the nature of business and target
the right group of customers at the same time having a favourable position
w.r.t the competition.
C.
In-site
optimization by using appropriate content in all pages, headers for each page, provide
a smooth navigation and internal linking structure for a smooth search engine
crawling operation and user experience,
D.
Off page
optimization by creating a number of backlinks and inbound traffic from across
the blog through appropriate presence in blogs, forum, social media platforms with
positive reference, other websites and
portals.
A.
Submitting
Web Page url to Search Engines:
It is not necessary to ask list the Urls of our website to
the search engines as the search engines periodically use software called
searchbots ( Google uses ‘Spider’) to periodically
crawl the web, store and index all the pages across
the web.
However
in case we do wish to submit the urls to the search engines, we can log onto
the relevant pages of the search engines and submit the same.
An
example of the activities required to submit the urls to Google are given below:
On the Webmaster Tools Home page,
click the site you want.
On the Dashboard, under
Diagnostics, click Fetch as Googlebot.
In the text box, type the path to
the page you want to check.
In the dropdown list, select Web.
(You can select another type of page, but currently we only accept submissions
for our Web Search index.)
Click Fetch. Google will fetch the
URL you requested. It may take up to 10 or 15 minutes for Fetch status to be
updated.
Once you see a Fetch status of
"Successful", click Submit to Index, and then click one of the
following:
To submit the individual URL to
Google's index, select URL and click Submit. You can submit up to 50 URLs a
week in this way.
To submit the URL and all pages
linked from it, click URL and all linked pages. You can submit up to 10 of
these requests a month.
B.
Researching
Keywords relevant to the business for the purpose of SEO:
most relevant to describe the
business we are operating. While it is possible to come out with any many
keywords or keyword groups as possible, it is important to focus our efforts
& resources on a limited number of them that we could be identified
strongly and end up owning. For example,
Hubspot, one of the finest Social
Media Marketing companies, has identified a keyword. Inbound Marketing’ to best
describe its activities and has used it very strongly to promote its business.
It is very important to research competition, relevant businesses and
related businesses to come out with an exhaustive list of Keywords that could
be used for optimization of the web pages.
Google’s advance Search operators
are useful search queries that can help us determine our competitive
environment and assess the level and degree of work that an SEO campaign
requires. Some of the important operators
are listed below:
1. Site:www.website.com will show
you the number of pages in your website that are indexed by Google. This can
check for variation between the number of pages submitted and the number of
pages indexed.
2. allinurl:www.webpage.com query.
Google will return the page in its results page if it is indexed or show no
results if it isn’t.
3. Link:www.yourpage.com will
display all sites linking to your webpage.
This can be used for finding links to yourpage as well as to those of
competition. In case we find that
Competition is getting more links than our site, we can undertake activities to
get links from those sites which are linking to competition and not to our
site.
4. allinanchor:
Allinanchor:keyword returns all
the pages/sites that have links from other pages that contain those specific
keywords in link anchor text.
5 allintitle:
Allintitle:keyword returns a list
of websites that contain the keyword in its title tag.
6. allintext:
Allintext:keyword returns webpages
that contain that particular keyword in the body of the page.
7. cache:
Cache:www.webpage.com returns the
version of the last crawled web page. Cache:www.webpage.com keyword list the
pages in the cached content with keywords highlighted.
8. info:
Info:www.webpage.com returns
details like, latest cache date, other similar web pages, web pages that link
to your site, web pages within the site and web pages containing the your
domain name.
C.
On page
Optimisation:
Some
of the keys factors to be considered
while creating Optimised web pages are as follows:
i.
Page content:
The
text on the anchor page should not be very informative to the page visitor, but
also should highlight the usage of the Keywords that it is focusing on. The search engine responds
to the Keyword density in the page to list the page in the SERP. While it is important to contain a good
representation of the keywords and phrases
in the relevant areas of the text, it should not result in a bad experience
to the web surfer due to overusage.
ii.
Unique and accurate Page tags for every page:
The
<title> tag describes to the Search engine, what the page stands for.
Hence it is important to give a unique page title for each page of the site an.
It is placed in the <Head> tag of the HTML. The <title> tag should contain the Keyword/phrase that is reflected
in the body of the anchor text of the page.
iii.
Meta Tag :
Meta
tags contain the description of the Page as submitted to the Search engines and
are shown on the SERP along with the Url. Meta tags are not used by SERPs for
indexing and ranking the web pages, but are useful to the websurfer in choosing
to click on the url, most relevant to their search. Hence it should summarize
the page content with a good sprinkling of the Keyword and phrases. Every page
should have its own description reflecting the Keyword it is focused on and
also the activity that it is expected to reflect.
iv.
Headlines for Anchor text:
The
headlines of the text should be well laid out and should reflect the text
accurately. Bold headlines are given more prominence by the Search Engines.
They
should have a good representation of the most important Keywords and phrases
the page aims to attract traffic for.
v.
Title and Alt
attributes:
Accurately
summarise the various paragraphs in the anchor text of the page with appropriate
Keyword oriented titles. Also, as the Search engine robots will not be able to
register the images and index them, it is important to label the images and
videos with appropriate tiels using the Alt attribute to have a better chance
of getting indexed by the Search engine robot.
vi.
Url Structure
& Breadcrumb navigation:
Use
words in Urls and create a simple directory structure. Use Bread crumbs to
describe the position of the page with respect to the overall site layout,
giving a clear sense of positioning the site visitor as to where he is present
and what are his options in the site.
Breadcrumbs or
breadcrumb
trail is a navigation aid used in
user interfaces. It allows users to keep track of
their locations within programs or documents. The term comes from the trail of
breadcrumbs left
by
Hansel and Gretel in the popular
fairytale.
Breadcrumbs typically appear horizontally across the top of a web
page, usually below title bars or headers. They provide links back to each
previous page the user navigated through to get to the current page or—in
hierarchical site structures—the parent pages of the current one. Breadcrumbs
provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting or entry point. A
greater-than sign (>) often serves as hierarchy separator, although
designers may use other glyphs (such as »
or ›), as well as various graphical treatments.
Typical breadcrumbs look like
this:
Home page > Section page
> Subsection page
(
Source: Wikipedia.)
vii.
Use robot.txt, nofollow, sitemap:
Sitemaps
allow the searchbots to smoothly navigate across the site and index the pages
there in. However, in case we do not want the searchbots, not to crawl and
index any page, we need to use the robot.txt file. Robot.txt file is generally
placed in the Main directors so that the robots do not miss them.
Nofollow"
provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines "Don't follow links
on this page" or "Don't follow this specific link."
Originally,
the nofollow attribute appeared in the page-level meta tag, and instructed
search engines not to follow (i.e., crawl) any outgoing links on the page. For
example:
<meta name="robots"
content="nofollow" />
Nofollow
is used when you want to refer to a text
on a hyperlink, but do not want to passon your reputation to the referred
website as this may result in the Page rank of your site.
viii.
Smooth
flowing site navigation:
A
naturally flowing site hierarchy with a breadcrumb navigation with simple text
being used for navigation will lead to a much better rating by the Search
engines.
Drop
down menus, animations, untitled graphics do not score well with the Search
Engines and most of the times they are not followed by the search engines.
ix.
Continuous up-dation of the website:
Search
engines give higher weightage to sites with continuous updation and fresh
content. Hence for better rank on the SERPs, we should update the site
regularly.
By following the above points, we can
significantly improve the chances of being ranked highly on the SERPs of any
search engine.
Off Page Optimisation:
Off Page optimization involves
driving organic traffic to the landing pages of the website through a number of
online and offline activities. Here, we will consider the online activities
aimed at generating traffic to the webpages resulting in a higher rank on the
SERPs.
HomeBases and Outposts:
Off page SEO activity can be well
understood if we understand the concept of HomeBases and Outposts, enunciated
by Chris Brogan and later on propogated by Darren Rowse of Problogger.
For any company, present on the
web, the places that belong to itself and on which it has complete control are
called ‘Home bases’. This is typically, the web site of the company and any
other associated websites or sub-sites owned by it.
At the same time the company also
has online presence on a number of other platforms not owned by it, but has got
access as a member. For example, companies have presence in the form of
accounts, pages or groups in social
media sites like Facebook, Google +, Twitter, Linkedin, You tube, Digg,
Stumbleupon, Warrior Forum etc.
These are called Outposts. In
these outposts, one can create a profile, load and update content, create a
social persona, develop relationships, conduct events and activities to engage
with prospective clients and customers etc.
For example the Home Base and
Outposts for Problogger.net could be represented as follows:
The outposts are the place
The companies have the option of connecting
the Home bases and Outposts and creating a 2 way interactions between the two,
that will lead to flow of information, links, updates, traffic etc., that will
lead to lot of buzz around its online properties. This will further result in
increased traffic to its web pages thus resulting in a higher rank on the SERPs
through the backlinks thus created.
There are a number of ways in
which the backlinks to a landing page can be increased.
They are:
A.
Purchasing
Back links: This involves short term tie-up with a third part operator who has
runs or has a tie-up with a number of portals and offers to boost the site
traffic by inserting links to the website in all his controlled web properties. This is the
most dangerous of all the methods used to increase the back links and is taken
very seriously by the search engines. If found to be engaged in such a
practice, the search engines drop the url from their listing.
B.
Exchanging
links with other pages:
This
is another common SEO activity which is
resorted to by a number of web master. Generally, the search bots do not give
weightage to reciprocal links and hence these links do not result in an
increase in the rank on the SERPs.
C.
Getting
Natural, Balanced and Long lasting Links:
This
is the most preferred activity for getting links from relevant and appropriate
sources across the web.
For
this purpose, research has to be done to find
credible sources of links that are relevant to the targeted landing
pages. Studying the links obtained by competitor sites is also a good tactic to
get the list of potential back linking sites. Blogs, Forums, Message Boards,
Local listings, websites of industry associations, related governmental
departments and associations offer a good pool of sources for generating in
bound links.
Links
from highly credible sources like .edu, .gov which represent government and
educational bodies are considered highly credible and lead to a much higher
position on the SERPs.
Higher
the authority , trust and credibility and Page Rank of the backlinking page,
higher is the value of the same in the eyes of the search engine.
For
the purpose of ranking high on the SERPs, search engines consider not only the
number of links directed at our landing
page, but also the authority of the landing page as reflected by the
trustworthiness, duration of existence, consistency, non reciprocal nature and
the overall position of the referring page with respect to the other pages in
the web.
.
The position of a web page with
reference to the overall web environment is determined by its Page Rank as
enunciated by the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.
Symbolic interpretation of Page
Rank:
In real world, all the citizens of
a country look up to their leaders. For example, all the citizens of India look
up to Mr Manmohan singh, their Prime Minister. Prime Minister’ position in Inda
is equivalent to a highest ranked Web page in the Web world. If Prime Minister
of India were to vote for a person for his competence, that would be of highest
value, compared to the combined value of all the citizens of India.
Similarly, in the internet world, the
value of being linked from of a page of
higher rank with lower number of links is much higher than a page with a lower
rank, value of which is further diluted by the number of links it refers to.
Page Rank of a given page is
directly proportional to the sum of page ranks of all the pages linking to it
from across the web. While more the links connecting to a page improve its
ranking, links that are going out from the page dilute its ranking.
Once the target websites or blogs
are identified, appropriate strategy should be followed to make our presence
the felt in these areas to create baklinks.
Some of the strategies are
outlined below:
a.
Participate
& comment in a blog, community forums, Yahoo answers etc. Offer expertise,
answer questions and provide the url link of the landing page for further
discussion.
If
you make sense and manage to convince other of your authority in the subject
and your genuinity, a number of members of the blog will link back to the page
mentioned creating a strong source of back links.
b.
Create content, presentations, slide shows,
articles about your company, products, industry reports, best practices and
other useful suggestions relevant to your target audience and distribute it
freely in various forums in the web and social bookmarking sites.
Some
of the most preferred platforms are, Youtube, Technorati, Scribd, Stumbleupon,
Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Kaboodle, Warrior forum, Yahoo buzz, Clipmarks, Propeller and a number of other
such forums. Another important tactic is to hire content writers to keep
modifying your content in a number of ways and redistribute them.
These
are crawled intensively by the Search Engine Bots and create a tremendous source
of Backlinks for your Landing page.
c.
Create a
corporate blog and also give away free content on your web site and promote
this on the various social media
platforms, RSS feeds, blog comments etc. This will not only lead to a huge back
link creation but also as the corporate blog is updated frequently will result
in the Search bots visiting your site frequently and provide a chance to
improve SERP ranking continuously.
d.
Create
your Profile in Social media websites
like Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube andprvide regular updates about
your corporate activity. This will lead to a continuous flow of traffic to your
page from all those linked to you as they check back to get more details of the
updates at your end.
e.
List your
business in Local business listings and online classifieds:
A
number of prospective customers are surfing the web sites daily to check for
providers of products, services, consultancy etc for their needs and being
present in such online classified sites increases the number of backlinks to
your landing page when they meet the surfer’s criteria.
f.
Create continuous stream of Press releases
about your company and your activites and release in online media thus creating
a curiosity from those interested in the news to link back to your site from
various online news channels.
These steps, if done in a
systematic manner will result in a significant boost to the ranking of your
landing pages on the SERP.
Optimising for Mobile Phones:
Search for [baseball cards] on Google’s desktop
search.
Search for [baseball cards] on Google’s mobile
search
Mobile search
results are built for mobile devices and are different from
"standard" desktop results.
Source: Search Engine Optimisation- Starter’s guide by Google.
With the advent of 3G and increased
data speeds on the mobile devices there has been a significant shift in the
internet access happening onto mobile devices instead of Personal computers.
Mobile sites not only use a different format
from normal desktop sites, but the management methods and expertise required
are also quite different
As a lot of information Search is
happening on the mobile devices, Google has issued guidelines to webmasters for
optimizing content accessed over the mobile phones.
For better ranking by the search
engines, it is important to have a mobile specific version of the website and
this should not be a duplicate of the actual web site developed for the standard PCs.
Mobile sites are best built on
HTML5 with lower emphasis on Flash based animations and also smaller images
with shortented ALT tags a compact and readable presentation on the small
screens of these devises.
For SEO on mobile devices, Google
offers advanced Keyword options that reflect the popularity of the Keywords
used for Mobile based Search.
Once the mobile adapted site is
created, the same can be submitted to the search engines for indexing purposes.
For this, care should be taken in the program that the mobile site allows the
Google searchbot for mobile, namely ‘ Googlebot-Mobile’ or any other search
engine programs of are allowed access on the device.
It is important to ensure that the
url for the mobile site is recongnisabel by the Search Bots by ensuring that your mobile-friendly URLs' DTD
declaration is in an appropriate mobile format such as XHTML Mobile or Compact
HTML (3).
When the mobile users or the searchbots
visit the website, they should be
redirected to the mobile friendly version of the site, Care has to be taken to
ensure that there is a one to one matching between the pages of the desktop and
mobile versions of the sites to ensure a positive user experience, boosting
search engine rankings.
By developing a Keyword focused
web site specifically taking into account the limitations of the small screen
devices, it is possible to get top ranking on the mobile SERPs.
Video Search Engine Optimisation:
Fig: Presence of Videos in General
search and Video search for the same topic on Google.
In 2007, Google, the promoter of
Youtube, the largest video sharing platform in the world, announced the
modification of the SERPs to include images and videos. Now the SERPs contain
links to pages with images and videos and it has become imperative for the
websites to optimize their page
containing images ad videos to influence click through rates.
With over 30000 hours of videos
added to Youtube every day and over 12 million hours every year, the importance
of optimizing the web sites with video content has been increasing rapidly.
By optimizing the landing pages
with video content it is possible to jump quickly to the top of SERPs.
The videos made by the company can
be posted in your own site or on video sharing platforms like Youtube,
Metacafe, Blogs etc
Optimizing the videos posted on the video sharing sites
with appropriate title tags, description and video transcripts for targeted
keywords that accurately describes the content with in the video, will enable
the users to find the videos and enhance the user experience, the real benefit
of the videos inimproving the traffic rank on the SERPs could accrue only when
the video is posted on the landing page of the site and traffic is driven to
it.
The following tactics are used in
Video SEO:
a.
Create a
number of high quality videos to promote
the products and serviced of the company. Also migrate offline videos created
at the time of corporate events, advertisement campaigns, training programs and
demos for online presentation through
the web site as well as channels in the
video sharing sites. Create demo videos of short duration and post them in
blogs and video sharing sites.
All
the original video should be branded with a watermark to ensure that, even if
they are played in someother sites, benefit will be accrued to the creator.
b.
Take care to
ensure that the videos are compatible with multiple player formats and are also
compatible with mobile devices.
c.
Provide easy
to relate file names that accurately describe the contents of the video and
create appropriate description tags stuffed with keywords. Encode te video with
meta tags for prper description.Anchor text on the video page should be stuffed
with Keywords to attract the attention of the Search engines. For the purpose
of Keyword research, YahooBuzz has been a preferred tool The term ‘video’ should be generously used in
the Keyword groups.
d.
Create a
Video Site map that will enable the Search engine spiders to navigate smoothly
and comprehensively to index all relevant pages. Search engines tend to crawl
the video links with sitemaps more frequently to get regular updates of new
videos added.
e.
Encourage the
visitors and traffic viewing the videos to share the same with their friends
and contacts freely.
f.
Provide
backlink to the landing page from the social media sites to the landing page
for watching complete video or to get more details about purchasing the same.
The landing page should be stuffed with relevant keyword describing the
content.
g.
As the Search
engines cannot make out what is contained in the video, it will be beneficial
to provide the transcript of the video with appropriate reference to the
Keywords which will enable the Search engines to find them quickly and rank
them on top of the SERPs.
h.
Submit the
optimized video page links to both the
video search engines as well as the content search engines as this will
increase the opportunity to attract traffic from both the searches. The listing
in both the SERPs will result in a much higher traffic and a overall
improvement in the ranking of the landing page in the SERPs.
i.
Create RSS
Feeds that will help the information of
updated videos spread rapidly across the web when other sites link to your RSS
feeds in their readers or websites. This will also help in boosting the
backlinks and lead to a higher Search Engine ranking.
Tools
There are a number of Tools that SEO professionals
& Webmasters routinely use to get cracking on the SEO activity.
The most prominent ones are, Alexa
Rank, Woo Rank and SEO Tool bar.
While Page Rank is used by the Search engines to rank pages,
SEO professionals use a derivative of the Page Rank, namely the Tool Bar Page
Rank, a number between 1 & 10 to understand the authority of the website
from which Back links will be more valuable.
Of the over 50 million websites
indexed by the search engines, Google and Face Book have the best Tool Bar Page
Rank of 10/10 indicating highest authority in the web world. Correspondingly,
they rank 1st and 2nd (order keeps varying) among the
global database of websites as calculated by Alexa Rank, the most referred
tools for understanding the position of any indexed web site in the web world.
Alexa Traffic Rank:
Alexa site audit is the most
respected tool to rank website traffic.
It provides details like traffic
rank, page views, pageviews per user, daily reach, bounce rate, average time on
site etc.,m which are very useful for a Search Engine Marketer to analyse the
performance of the website, understand the current status and undertake
appropriate steps to improve upon these paramaters and track changes.
According to Alexa, Google has been ranked the No.1 site in the world
and is very closely followed in traffic by Facebook, which is threatening its
top position very seriously.
Woorank is easily one of the
finest free tools available for website analysis from the Search engine
perspective.
The WooRank web tool analyses any
submitted website for conformance to SEO (Search engine optimization) best
practices and shows how it ranks against the competition. Its real-time report
consisting of 50 criteria helps to instantly spot critical issues that could
impact web traffic, usability and lead generation. WooRank also delivers short
descriptions of identified problems and provide advice on how to fix them
It provides complete analysis of a
website from the SEO perspective which will allow the SEO marketer to take
appropriate steps and track his/her progress.
A screen shot for WOORANK for
‘Facebook’ is given below:
Woorank provides details on
parameters pertaining to on Website compliance, offsite seo, usability and web
site information. Interpretation of Woorank analysis for self and competitors’
sites provides a good road map for the SEO marketer.
SEO TOOL BAR:
The free SEO Tool bar add on from Mozilla Firefox is a boon to any
Internet Marketer.
The SEO Toolbar is fully
customizable. You can change its location easily from the options menu and even
move it down on to the statusbar. There are several different views available,
including icons and text, icons only or page ranks only (PageRank, Alexa Rank,
PI Rank, Compete Rank and SEMRush). You can even hide ranks you don't wish to
see.
Server header view and search
engine view are handy tools for any web developer or SEO. Server header view
will help you identify any security risks or issues with your webserver. Search
engine view can be used to help optimize your webpages for search engines.
The toolbar includes handy
shortcuts to popular PPC Engines, SEO tools and forums, Keyword Research tools,
and domain tools, including (just to name a few):
PPC Engines:
Trellian Direct Search Network, Google Adsense, Google Adwords, Microsoft
adCenter, Yahoo, Ask.
SEO Tools / Keyword Research Tools: Competitive Intelligence, UrlTrends, Keyword
Discovery, Google Adwords keyword
suggestion tool, Priority Submit, Alexa, PI Rank, SEO Toolkit.
Whois : Above.com,
Moniker, Domain Tools, Register, Network Solutions, Planet Domain.
Registrars: Above.com,
Moniker, Register.com, euroDNS.
Domain Parking: Above
Parking Manger, Sedo, Parked,NameDrive
SEO Forums: Addme.com, SEO News, Webmaster World, WebProWorld
The latest release (Version 1.3)
adds some new features:
- Added Compete Rank, Added SEMRush Rank & Added options to
hide particular rank
These tools give the SEO marketer,
a very good support to analyse the current status of the website, research
competition do a SWOT analysis and take the landing pages most relevant to the
business to top of charts , leading to a boost in Leads for New Business.
BlackHat SEO:
While good SEO practices are aligned with the long
term objectives of the companies on the web and are centred around creating
good content, great websites and an amazing user experience, some practitioners
undertake short term strategies to boost their rankings on the SERP pages.
Excessive Keyword stuffing, Link
buying, creating door way pages (pages that are not seen by users, but are
meant to trick the searchbots etc., are some such practices frowned upon by the
Search engines as these come in the way of great user experience. It is better
to avoid such short term tactics and focus on above the board activities for
generating traffic. In case you require to get instant results, it is better to
consider Search Engine Advertising using programs like Adwords and Microsoft Ad
centre which we will discuss in the coming chapters.
