Seo Reports

Why Hiring an SEO Company Can Lead to Better Results for Your Internet Marketing

2011-03-03T21:19:00.001-08:00

These days, business owners tend to be more involved with internet marketing, since this will give them more opportunity to get more worldwide recognition for their business. This approach is not just to make a good website for a company, but also an excellent way to optimize it to guarantee that potential customers who may have never heard about their service or product might find it online. As a result, there is an increase in the demand for website optimization.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a process which helps a websites show up with greater frequency and even to appear on the top ten results on the search engine. However, getting into the SEO world will not be an easy task. Without the basic knowledge of what is involved it will be extremely difficult to do it effectively. The basics will lead to basic optimization and results, but the top 10 results that business want will only be accomplished with much work and more than just fundamental knowledge of search engine optimization. It will also be time-consuming if completed on your own, so it is best to hire one of the professionals.

What are the advantages of hiring a professional SEO Company?

For starters, the main benefit of hiring a search engine optimization company is that there are countless websites showing up every day, so you must have an up-to-date sites to ensure that you are appearing in the top results. When dealing with up-to-date websites, that is not only changing or adding pages, but also having the latest strategies on the site. In this instance, you will get even more opportunity for potential customers to visit your site. When you hire professionals you can depend on them to deal with your website requirements such as marketing, ranks, added content, and optimizations. In order to be highly recognized and remembered, SEO will not be a one-time job, but will require skill and devoted consistent time.

Needless to say, this will cost you some money but it will be worthwhile when you are reaping amazing benefits. Keep in mind that these are just some of the ways you can benefit from hiring a SEO company. Prior to hiring, it's vital that you research to ensure that you are choosing the right one. Work with a reputable service that can do all that is possible for a client and certainly for a very competitive cost.

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Bing Expert

People Search Engine - What You Have to Look For Before Using One

2010-02-18T22:52:00.000-08:00

I was wondering about these so called people search databases and thought let me try them out and here are some important points to consider before using any service out there -
1. Free versus Paid
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I found some Free Services out there to be really good. The only thing in a free service is, you just get an overview of a person's detail and if you want further details then you need to pay. If you are satisfied with what you find under the free service, then your work is done. I find these free services handy to just get an overview of a person before entering into any relationship. If you need to go into a deeper relationship on a personal level, then you need to consider the paid services where you get a more detailed report about the person.

For More click http://ezinearticles.com/?People-Search-Engine---What-You-Have-to-Look-For-Before-Using-One&id=3778912

Seo reports - ten factors for doing good seo

2006-11-09T23:01:00.000-08:00

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Hi Friends, there are basically ten factors for doing complete seo as suggested by seo articles from seo reports. This online source for seo reports describe the ten seo factor below.

1. Title Meta Tag

The title tag is what displays as the headline in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). It's also what displays in the top blue band of Internet Explorer when your site is displayed.Your title tag of your website should be easy to read and designed to bring in traffíc. By that, I mean that your main keyword phrase should be used toward the beginning of the tag. True, there are websites being found now that do not use the phrase in the title, but the vast majority still do as of this writing.Don't make the mistake of putting your company name first, unless you are already a household name, like Nascar or HBO. People are likely searching for what you have to offer, not your name.

2. Description Meta Tag

The description tag is the paragraph that people will see when your page comes up in the search results.

Your description tag should be captivating and designed to attract business. It should be easy to read, and compel the reader to act right now and follow your link. Without a description tag, search engines will frequently display thefirst text on your page. Is yours appropriate as a description of the page?

A proper description tag is what people will see below your title. You should make proper use of punctuation, and with readability, use your subject and geographical references.

These are what I believe to be the top 10 most important things (not necessarily in order) that you need, in order to get your website found in the search engines.
There are many other factors as well, but if you follow these guidelines, you'll stand a much better chance, and you'll be off to a good start.

1. Title Meta Tag

The title tag is what displays as the headline in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). It's also what displays in the top blue band of Internet Explorer when your site is displayed.

Editorial Note: SEO-News will not be published (Nov. 16th) next week.
However, our radio show The Alternative, hosted by Jim Hedger, will be broadcast as usual, Thursday, 5pm Eastern GMT:-5 today and on Nov. 16th. Tune in to learn more about the world of independent search engine alternatives and developments at the Big Three.

Your title tag of your website should be easy to read and designed to bring in traffíc. By that, I mean that your main keyword phrase should be used toward the beginning of the tag. True, there are websites being found now that do not use the phrase in the title, but the vast majority still do as of this writing.

Don't make the mistake of putting your company name first, unless you are already a household name, like Nascar or HBO. People are likely searching for what you have to offer, not your name.

Your title tag should be written with a capital letter starting the tag, and followed by all lowercase letters, unless you're using proper nouns. Some people prefer to capitalize every word, too.

2. Description Meta Tag

The description tag is the paragraph that people will see when your page comes up in the search results.

Your description tag should be captivating and designed to attract business. It should be easy to read, and compel the reader to act right now and follow your link. Without a description tag, search engines will frequently display thefirst text on your page. Is yours appropriate as a description of the page?

A proper description tag is what people will see below your title. You should make proper use of punctuation, and with readability, use your subject and geographical references.

3. Keywords Meta Tag

The importance of Meta keyword tags fluctuates from month to month among different search engines. There is a debate in the SEO community as to whether or not they help at all on certain search engines. In fact, in the summer of 2004 it appeared as if they were losing importance altogether.

However, you'll Nevër be penalized on any search engines for using relevant targeted keywords in moderation, and they can only help you with most, especially Yahoo.

Avoid stuffing your keyword metatags with too many keywords. Just use relevant tags that apply directly to the content of that particular page, and don't overdo it.

4. ALT Tags

The small yellow box that comes up when your mouse cursor is placed over an image is called the ALT tag. Every relevant image should have an alt tag with your keywords or phrases mentioned in the tag.

A proper ALT tag goes after the file name, and before the Align indicator.

* - The ALT tag is no longer being considered for ranking purposes by some search engines. That said, it still cannot HURT you, and will still help you with some engines. My recommendation is to continue to use them, but be sure to avoid keyword stuffing. Besides, who knows when the pendulum will swing back the other way?

5. Header Tags

The text of each page is given more weíght by the search engines if you make use of header tags and then use descriptive body text below those headers. Bullet points work well too. It is not enough to merely BOLD or enlärge your text headlines.

6. Link Text

Search engine spiders cannot follow image links. In addition to having image links or buttons on your web pages, you should have text links at the bottom or elsewhere. The text that the user sees when looking at the link is called the link text. A link that displays products does not carry as much weíght to the search engines as a link called oregon widgets. Link text is very important and is actually one of the most frequently overlooked aspects of web design that I've seen.

7. Site Map

Using a site map not only makes it easy for your users to see the entire structure of your website, but it also makes it easier for the search engines to spider your site. When the search engine spiders come to visit, they will follow all of the text links from your main index page. If one of those links is to a site map, then the spiders will go right to the sitemap, and consequently visit every page you have text linked to from that site map. On the site map page, try to have a sentence or two describing each page, and not just a page of links.

8. Relevant Inbound Links

By relevant, I mean similar industry or subject related sites. Right now, no single strategy can get your site ranked higher faster than being linked to by dozens of other relevant websites. It used to be that the quantity of incoming links mattered most, but today, it's much better to have three highly relevant links to you from other popular related websites than 30 links from unrelated low ranked sites. If there are other businesses in your industry that you can trade links with, it will help your site enormously. Link to others, and have them link to you. It's proven, and it works. To see who's linking to you, in Google type the following...links: yourdomain.com

9. Your Content

Not to be forgotten of course, is the actual content of your webpage. It must be relevant helpful information that people want to read. These days, each webpage should be laser focused on one specific product or subject in order to rank highly for that search phrase. The days of writing one webpage to appeal to dozens of search terms are long gone. Ideally, each page should have between 400 to 650 words on it. Too few, and the search engines won't consider it to be relevant enough. Too many words and the search engine spiders may have a hard time determining the actual subject or focus of the page.

Use your keywords or phrases often, and use them at the beginning of your paragraphs wherever possible. Don't overuse them and make the page sound phony, but don't write a page about a certain subject, and not mention that subject repeatedly either. Reading it out loud to yourself is a great way to judge how natural your text sounds.

Concentrate on writing quality pages that actually appeal to the human reader. Write pages that provide the reader with exactly what they are looking for; that is, information about the exact search phrase they've entered.

10. Avoid Cheating

With all of these tidbits of information, it's tempting to think that you can stuff 100 keywords into your title, or create a page with the phrase oregon widget company being used 100 times in headers, text links, ALT tags, bullet points etc. but that cannot help you. In fact, it can penalize you, and get your website banned from certain search engines.

Clíck Fraud – Google and yahoo

2006-10-19T21:21:00.000-07:00

Some call it clíck fraud and some call it invalid clíck activity but nobody questíons that questionable clicks happen. How they happen and to what degree might be up for debate but the existence of industrial level skullduggery is a widely known but poorly recognized secrët of the search marketing industry.
This dirty little secrët is made up of hundreds of millíons of dollars, which are unevenly split between tens of thousands of participants. Some astute observers might suggest this constitutes a conspiracy to commit fraud and is therefore illegal behavior. In that, they would be half right. Clíck fraud isn't actually illegal, at least not in a criminal sense. Not yet anyway.

Google knows about issues associated with clíck fraud though it doesn't like using the term "fraud". The popularity of AdWords and ease of access to Google's lucrative AdSense distribution system gave online scammers the two essential elements, motive and opportuníty. Google has been playing catch-up ever since. Yahoo knows a lot about clíck fraud as well. Extremely credible allegations have been made about Yahoo's commercial connections with clíck fraud artists. Many in the shadier side of the search marketing industry are in on the clíck-fraud secrët as well, so much so that they publish how-to guides and self-congratulatory blogs. Frighteningly, spyware and malware makers are also in on the secrët, often benefiting by becoming unwanted content-delivery partners.

Everyone's making a lot of monëy and, like the great ínsurance scams of yesteryear, the costs to the ultimate victims are so widely distributed they often seem negligible to individuals affected. Negligible is, of course, a relative term. Is $10 negligible to you? How about $100 or $1000 or more?

Another group of people who've learned a great deal about clíck fraud are the victims, which tend to be small online businesses. Unfortunately, it is harder to track the impact on smaller businesses because they often lack the resources to properly police their own web and account logs. SEO-News.com editor, Kim Roach, wrote a strong piece titled, "Going Broke on Google AdWords" in SiteProNews last week.

Victims of Clíck Fraud come in all sizes. While Kim's article addressed damage done to smaller businesses, a July 2006 report by online industry research firm Outsell estimated clíck fraud accounted for $800 million of a total of $5.5 billion spent on search engine advertising in 2005. Outsell reached these figures by studying 407 online advertisers that collectively controlled about $1 billion in ad spending.

Google disputes these figures along with other figures reported by San Antonio based PPC-auditing firm Clíck Forensics in their monthly Clíck Fraud Index, questioning the methodology used in determining incidents of billed clíck fraud.

In an August 8, 2006 report titled, "How Fictitious Clicks Occur in Third-Party Clíck Fraud Audit Reports" Google's Clíck Quality Team found two serious issues served to consistently inflate incidents of "fictitious clicks" recorded in third-party analysis.

According to their findings, "The major root causes for fictitious clicks falls into the two following categories: ... detection of page reloads as ad-clicks", and, "... conflation across advertisers and ad networks, or the counting of one advertiser's traffíc in another advertiser's reports."

The first cause of "fictitious clicks" noted by Google's team suggests that sometimes users reload pages; use their back buttons, or open landing pages in new windows. Each action could be interpreted as a second, third or fourth clíck where only one should have been recorded.

The second cause of "fictitious clicks" is a bit more confusing, stemming from the massive AdSense system Google uses to distribute AdWords advertising. Google has thousands, (perhaps millíons) of AdSense distribution partners. Some of these partners are extremely large corporations though most are independent webmasters. The largest of these partners often have complicated advertising systems that mix and match different types of ads (banners, AdWords, text-links, etc...) from different advertising platforms. They have their own internal system for measuring the effectiveness of these ads and sometimes those internal systems cause subtle incongruities in tracking ad-impressions. One such weirdness is the way some hits from the AOL network are grouped together under a single block of IP addresses.

Google's business product manager for trust and safety, Shuman Ghosemajumder, wrote a long post "About Invalid Clicks" to the Inside AdWords blog in early August. In it, Ghosemajumder suggests that surveys and reports from many click-analysts, including Clíck Forensics, do not give a full view of factors as seen by Google, or in some cases, by the analysts' own clients.

Ghosemajumder says Google's internal filters catch and cancel charges for the vast majority of invalid clicks, even though evidence of those clicks might be reflected in advertisers' log files.

"If an advertiser is monitoring clíck activity, these automatically filtered clicks may show up in an advertiser's logs, but not in their bills. When invalid clicks are detected after an advertiser is charged, we reimburse for them. Because of our detection efforts, losses to advertisers from invalid clicks are very small," Ghosemajumder's comments.

Moreover", he continues, "the study does not indicate whether the advertiser was actually charged for any of the clicks, only that the traffíc analysis suggested that the clicks may have been invalid."

It isn't just the number of billed clicks that have advertisers and analysts concerned. Another report produced by Clíck Forensics showed that of 170 advertisers in the financial services sector, over 6% reported recorded visits from sites clearly identified as parked domains.

Dozens of third-party firms engage in ad-stuffing documents on parked domains. If the general consensus that an invalid clíck is one that is reasonably unlikely to lead to a potential conversion, then counted clicks from parked domains are assumed by many analysts to be invalid.

Parked domains are housed at URLs that, while owned, are not really operating as most Internet users might expect. A page at parked domain is generally one containing very limited information and a number of PPC Ads. The page is basically a placeholder being used as a billboard. Believe it or not, parked domains are said to drive a significant amount of traffíc, especially under highly searched terms relating to health, travel and financial services. Given the number of clíck-throughs found in a report covering 170 financial services companies, 6% represents a huge number of clicks, each costing advertisers ten cents or more.

Jessie Stricchiola is considered one of the leading experts in clíck fraud detection and analysis. On the website of her firm, Alchemist Media, Sticchiola writes about an automated form of third-party clíck fraud that was publicly associated with Yahoo by clíck fraud researcher Ben Edelman.

"Another method of fraudulent clicking is initiated through automated clíck generation methods, using "hitbots" - software applications specifically designed to clíck on paid listings. This kind of activity is also initiated by both competitors and by search engine partners and/or affiliates, the latter often instituting extensive technology arrangements to enable their fraudulent clíck traffíc to slip past the internal filtering methods used by the CPC engines. For CPC affiliates, there is a vested interest in generating as much traffíc as possible to increase their portion of the shared revenue generated by paid listings. This is an often overlooked source of fraudulent clíck activity."

The examples cited in this article are only some of the ways used by the unscrupulous to scam unsuspecting advertisers in an environment that is extremely difficult to police properly. Indeed, in the absence of any external oversight, the only real watchdogs are the search engines themselves. Clíck auditors working with advertisers are, apparently, not privy to information used by Google and Yahoo to examine the issue and, therefore, are unable to effectively create reports recognized by the two largest search advertising providers.

While Google and Yahoo both claim to be working on finding solutions to the problems posed by invalid clicks, both admit they are months or even years from finding foolproof solutions. That both make a great deal of monëy from invalid clicks, clicks directed from parked domains, and other third-party shenanigans has lead some to speculate that the major search engines might not be approaching the problem with missionary zeal. There is a lot of murky ground. The only obvious things about the issue is that there is an issue and that a solution, though not immediately forthcoming, is desperately needed.

A search engine based on expert documents

2006-09-14T20:43:00.000-07:00

In response to a query a search engine returns a ranked list of documents. If the query is broad (i.e., it matches many documents) then the returned list is usually too long to view fully. Studies show that users usually look at only the top 10 to 20 results. In this paper, we propose a novel ranking scheme for broad queries that places the most authoritative pages on the query topic at the top of the ranking. Our algorithm operates on a special index of "expert documents." These are a subset of the pages on the WWW identified as directories of links to non-affiliated sources on specific topics. Results are ranked based on the match between the query and relevant descriptive text for hyperlinks on expert pages pointing to a given result page. We present a prototype search engine that implements our ranking scheme and discuss its performance. With a relatively small (2.5 million page) expert index, our algorithm was able to perform comparably on broad queries with the best of the mainstream search engines.
1 Introduction
When searching the WWW broad queries tend to produce a large result set. This set is hard to rank based on content alone, since the quality and "authoritativeness" of a page (namely, a measure of how authoritative the page is on the subject) cannot be assessed solely by analyzing its content. In traditional information retrieval we make the assumption that the articles in the corpus originate from a reputable source and all words found in an article were intended for the reader. These assumptions do not hold on the WWW since content is authored by sources of varying quality and words are often added indiscriminately to boost the page's ranking. For example, some pages are created to purposefully mislead search engines, and are known popularly as "spam" pages. The most virulent of spam techniques involves deliberately returning someone else's popular page to search engine robots instead of the actual page, to steal their traffic. Even when there is no intention to mislead search engines, the WWW tends to be crowded with information on topics popular with users. Consequently, for broad queries keyword matching seems inadequate.
Prior approaches that have used content analysis to rank broad queries on the WWW cannot distinguish between authoritative and non-authoritative pages (e.g., they fail to detect spam pages). Hence the ranking tends to be poor and search services have turned to other sources of information besides content to rank results. We next describe some of these ranking strategies, followed by our new approach to authoritative ranking - which we call Hilltop.

1.1 Related Work
Three approaches to improve the authoritativeness of ranked results have been taken in the past:
Ranking Based on Human Classification: Human editors have been used by companies such as Yahoo! and Mining Company to manually associate a set of categories and keywords with a subset of documents on the web. These are then matched against the user's query to return valid matches. The trouble with this approach is that: (a) it is slow and can only be applied to a small number of pages, and (b) often the keywords and classifications assigned by the human judges are inadequate or incomplete. Given the rate at which the WWW is growing and the wide variation in queries this is not a comprehensive solution.

Ranking Based on Usage Information: Some services such as DirectHit collect information on: (a) the queries individual users submit to search services and (b) the pages they look at subsequently and the time spent on each page. This information is used to return pages that most users visit after deploying the given query. For this technique to succeed a large amount of data needs to be collected for each query. Thus, the potential set of queries on which this technique applies is small. Also, this technique is open to spamming.

Ranking Based on Connectivity: This approach involves analyzing the hyperlinks between pages on the web on the assumption that: (a) pages on the topic link to each other, and (b) authoritative pages tend to point to other authoritative pages.

PageRank [Page et al 98] is an algorithm to rank pages based on assumption b. It computes a query-independent authority score for every page on the Web and uses this score to rank the result set. Since PageRank is query-independent it cannot by itself distinguish between pages that are authoritative in general and pages that are authoritative on the query topic. In particular a web-site that is authoritative in general may contain a page that matches a certain query but is not an authority on the topic of the query. In particular, such a page may not be considered valuable within the community of users who author pages on the topic of the query.

An alternative to PageRank is Topic Distillation [Kleinberg 97, Chakrabarti et al 98, Bharat et al 98, Chakrabarti et al 99]. Topic distillation first computes a query specific subgraph of the WWW. This is done by including pages on the query topic in the graph and ignoring pages not on the topic. Then the algorithm computes a score for every page in the subgraph based on hyperlink connectivity: every page is given an authority score. This score is computed by summing the weights of all incoming links to the page. For each such reference, its weight is computed by evaluating how good a source of links the referring page is. Unlike PageRank, Topic Distillation is only applicable to broad queries, since it requires the presence of a community of pages on the topic.

A problem with Topic Distillation is that computing the subgraph of the WWW which is on the query topic is hard to do in real-time. In the ideal case every page on the WWW that deals with the query topic would need to be considered. In practice an approximation is used. A preliminary ranking for the query is done with content analysis. The top ranked result pages for the query are selected. This creates a selected set. Then, some of the pages within one or two links from the selected set are also added to the selected set if they are on the query topic. This approach can fail because it is dependent on the comprehensiveness of the selected set for success. A highly relevant and authoritative page may be omitted from the ranking by this scheme if it either did not appear in the initial selected set, or some of the pages pointing to it were not added to the selected set. A "focused crawling" procedure to crawl the entire web to find the complete subgraph on the query's topic has been proposed [Chakrabarti et al 99] but this is too slow for online searching. Also, the overhead in computing the full subgraph for the query is not warranted since users only care about the top ranked results.

1.2 Hilltop Algorithm Overview
Our approach is based on the same assumptions as the other connectivity algorithms, namely that the number and quality of the sources referring to a page are a good measure of the page's quality. The key difference consists in the fact that we are only considering "expert" sources - pages that have been created with the specific purpose of directing people towards resources. In response to a query, we first compute a list of the most relevant experts on the query topic. Then, we identify relevant links within the selected set of experts, and follow them to identify target web pages. The targets are then ranked according to the number and relevance of non-affiliated experts that point to them. Thus, the score of a target page reflects the collective opinion of the best independent experts on the query topic. When such a pool of experts is not available, Hilltop provides no results. Thus, Hilltop is tuned for result accuracy and not query coverage.
Our algorithm consists of two broad phases:

(i) Expert Lookup

We define an expert page as a page that is about a certain topic and has links to many non-affiliated pages on that topic. Two pages are non-affiliated conceptually if they are authored by authors from non-affiliated organizations. In a pre-processing step, a subset of the pages crawled by a search engine are identified as experts. In our experiment we classified 2.5 million of the 140 million or so pages in AltaVista's index to be experts. The pages in this subset are indexed in a special inverted index.

Given an input query, a lookup is done on the expert-index to find and rank matching expert pages. This phase computes the best expert pages on the query topic as well as associated match information.

(ii) Target Ranking

We believe a page is an authority on the query topic if and only if some of the best experts on the query topic point to it. Of course in practice some expert pages may be experts on a broader or related topic. If so, only a subset of the hyperlinks on the expert page may be relevant. In such cases the links being considered have to be carefully chosen to ensure that their qualifying text matches the query. By combining relevant out-links from many experts on the query topic we can find the pages that are most highly regarded by the community of pages related to the query topic. This is the basis of the high relevance that our algorithm delivers.

Given the top ranked matching expert-pages and associated match information, we select a subset of the hyperlinks within the expert-pages. Specifically, we select links that we know to have all the query terms associated with them. This implies that the link matches the query. With further connectivity analysis on the selected links we identify a subset of their targets as the top-ranked pages on the query topic. The targets we identify are those that are linked to by at least two non-affiliated expert pages on the topic. The targets are ranked by a ranking score which is computed by combining the scores of the experts pointing to the target.

1.3 Roadmap
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the selection and indexing of expert documents; Section 3 provides a detailed description of the ranking scheme used in query processing; Section 4 presents a user-based evaluation of our prototype implementation; and Section 5 concludes the paper.
2 Expert Documents
Broad subjects are well represented on the Web and as such are also likely to have numerous human-generated lists of resources. There is value for the individual or organization that creates resource lists on specific topics since this boosts their popularity and influence within the community interested in the topic. The authors of these lists thus have an incentive to make their lists as comprehensive and up to date as possible. We regard these links as recommendations, and the pages that contain them, as experts. The problem is, how can we distinguish an expert from other types of pages? In other words what makes a page an expert? We felt than an expert page needs to be objective and diverse: that is, its recommendations should be unbiased and point to numerous non-affiliated pages on the subject. Therefore, in order to find the experts, we needed to detect when two sites belong to the same or related organizations.
2.1 Detecting Host Affiliation
We define two hosts as affiliated if one or both of the following is true:
They share the same first 3 octets of the IP address.
The rightmost non-generic token in the hostname is the same.
We consider tokens to be substrings of the hostname delimited by "." (period). A suffix of the hostname is considered generic if it is a sequence of tokens that occur in a large number of distinct hosts. E.g., ".com" and ".co.uk" are domain names that occur in a large number of hosts and are hence generic suffixes. Given two hosts, if the generic suffix in each case is removed and the subsequent right-most token is the same, we consider them to be affiliated.

E.g., in comparing "www.ibm.com" and "ibm.co.mx" we ignore the generic suffixes ".com" and ".co.mx" respectively. The resulting rightmost token is "ibm", which is the same in both cases. Hence they are considered to be affiliated. Optionally, we could require the generic suffix to be the same in both cases.

The affiliation relation is transitive: if A and B are affiliated and B and C are affiliated then we take A and C to be affiliated even if there is no direct evidence of the fact. In practice some non-affiliated hosts may be classified as affiliated, but that is acceptable since this relation is intended to be conservative.

In a preprocessing step we construct a host-affiliation lookup. Using a union-find algorithm we group hosts, that either share the same rightmost non-generic suffix or have an IP address in common, into sets. Every set is given a unique identifier (e.g., the host with the lexicographically lowest hostname). The host-affiliation lookup maps every host to its set identifier or to itself (when there is no set). This is used to compare hosts. If the lookup maps two hosts to the same value then they are affiliated; otherwise they are non-affiliated.

2.2 Selecting the Experts
In this step we process a search engine's database of pages (we used AltaVista's crawl from April 1999) and select a subset of pages which we consider to be good sources of links on specific topics, albeit unknown. This is done as follows:
Considering all pages with out-degree greater than a threshold, k (e.g., k=5) we test to see if these URLs point to k distinct non-affiliated hosts. Every such page is considered an expert page.

If a broad classification (such as Arts, Science, Sports etc.) is known for every page in the search engine database then we can additionally require that most of the k non-affiliated URLs discovered in the previous step point to pages that share the same broad classification. This allows us to distinguish between random collections of links and resource directories. Other properties of the page such as regularity in formatting can be used as well.

2.3 Indexing the Experts
To locate expert pages that match user queries we create an inverted index to map keywords to experts on which they occur. In doing so we only index text contained within "key phrases" of the expert. A key phrase is a piece of text that qualifies one or more URLs in the page. Every key phrase has a scope within the document text. URLs located within the scope of a phrase are said to be "qualified" by it. For example, the title, headings (e.g., text within a pair of

tags) and anchor text within the expert page are considered key phrases. The title has a scope that qualifies all URLs in the document. A heading's scope qualifies all URLs until the next heading of the same or greater importance. An anchor's scope only extends over the URL it is associated with.
The inverted index is organized as a list of match positions within experts. Each match position corresponds to an occurrence of a certain keyword within a key phrase of a certain expert page. All match positions for a given expert occur in sequence for a given keyword. At every match position we also store:

An identifier to identify the phrase uniquely within the document
A code to denote the kind of phrase it is (title, heading or anchor)
The offset of the word within the phrase.
In addition, for every expert we maintain the list of URLs within it (as indexes into a global list of URLs) and for each URL we maintain the identifiers of the key phrases that qualify it.
To avoid giving long key phrases an advantage, the number of keywords within any key phrase is limited (e.g., to 32).

3 Query Processing
In response to a user query, we first determine a list of N experts that are the most relevant for that query. E.g. N = 200 in our experiment. Then, we rank results by selectively following the relevant links from these experts and assigning an authority score to each such page. In this section we describe how the expert and authority scores are computed.
3.1 Computing the Expert Score
For an expert to be useful in response to a query, the minimum requirement is that there is at least one URL which contains all the query keywords in the key phrases that qualify it. A fast approximation is to require all query keywords to occur in the document. Furthermore, we assign to each candidate expert a score reflecting the number and importance of the key phrases that contain the query keywords, as well as the degree to which these phrases match the query.
Thus, we compute the score of an expert as as a 3-tuple of the form (S0, S1, S2). Let k be the number of terms in the input query, q. The component Si of the score is computed by considering only key phrases that contain precisely k - i of the query terms. E.g., S0 is the score computed from phrases containing all the query terms.

Si = SUM{key phrases p with k - i query terms} LevelScore(p) * FullnessFactor(p, q)

LevelScore(p) is a score assigned to the phrase by virtue of the type of phrase it is. For example, in our implementation we use a LevelScore of 16 for title phrases, 6 for headings and 1 for anchor text. This is based on the assumption that the title text is more useful than the heading text, which is more useful than an anchor text match in determining what the expert page is about.

FullnessFactor(p, q) is a measure of the number of terms in p covered by the terms in q. Let plen be the length of p. Let m be the number of terms in p which are not in q (i.e., surplus terms in the phrase). Then, FullnessFactor(p, q) is computed as follows:

If m <= 2, FullnessFactor(p, q) = 1
If m > 2, FullnessFactor(p, q) = 1 - (m - 2) / plen
Our goal is to prefer experts that match all of the query keywords over experts that match all but one of the keywords, and so on. Hence we rank experts first by S0. We break ties by S1 and further ties by S2. The score of each expert is converted to a scalar by the weighted summation of the three components:
Expert_Score = 232 * S0 + 216 * S1 + S2.

3.2 Computing the Target Score
We consider the top N experts by the ranking from the previous step (e.g., the top 200) and examine the pages they point to. These are called targets. It is from this set of targets that we select top ranked documents. For a target to be considered it must be pointed to by at least 2 experts on hosts that are mutually non-affiliated and are not affiliated to the target. For all targets that qualify we compute a target score reflecting both the number and relevance of the experts pointing to it and the relevance of the phrases qualifying the links.
The target score T is computed in three steps:

For every expert E that points to target T we draw a directed edge (E,T). Consider the following "qualification" relationship between key phrases and edges:
The title phrase qualifies all edges coming out of the expert
A heading qualifies all edges whose corresponding hyperlinks occur in the document after the given heading and before the next heading of equal or greater importance.
A hyperlink's anchor text qualifies the edge corresponding to the hyperlink.

For each query keyword w, let occ(w, T) be the number of distinct key phrases in E that contain w and qualify the edge (E,T). We define an "edge score" for the edge (E,T) represented by Edge_Score(E,T), which is computed thus:
If occ(w, T) is 0 for any query keyword then the Edge_Score(E,T) = 0.
Otherwise, Edge_Score(E,T) = Expert_Score(E) * Sum{query keywords w} occ(w, T)

We next check for affiliations between expert pages that point to the same target. If two affiliated experts have edges to the same target T, we then discard one of the two edges. Specifically, we discard the edge which has the lower Edge_Score of the two.
To compute the Target_Score of a target we sum the Edge_Scores of all edges incident on it.
The list of targets is ranked by Target_Score. Optionally, this list can be filtered by testing if the query keywords are present in the targets. Optionally, we can match the query keywords against each target to compute a Match_Score using content analysis, and combine the Target_Score with the Match_Score before ranking the targets.

4 Evaluation
In order to evaluate our prototype search engine, we conducted two user studies aiming to estimate the recall and precision. Both experiments also involved three other search engines, namely AltaVista, DirectHit and Google, for comparison and were done in August 1999. Note that the current rankings by these engines may differ.
4.1 Locating Specific Popular Targets
For the first experiment we asked seven volunteers to suggest the home pages of ten organizations of their choice (companies, universities, stores, etc.). Some of the queries are reproduced in the table below:

Alpha Phi Omega Best Buy Digital Disneyland
Dollar Bank Grouplens INRIA Keebler
Mountain View Public Library Macy's Minneapolis City Pages Moscow Aviation Institute
MENSA OCDE ONU Pittsburg Steelers
Pizza Hut Rice University SONY Safeway
Stanford Shopping Center Trek Bicycle USTA Vanguard Investments

The same query was sent to all four search engines. We assume that there is exactly one home page in each case. Every time the home page was found within the first ten results, its rank was recorded. Figure 2 summarizes the average recall for the ranks 1 to 10 for each of the four engines: our engine Hilltop (HT), Google (GG), AltaVista (AV), and DirectHit (DH). Average recall at rank k for this experiment is the probability of finding the desired home page within the first k results.

Figure 2. Average Recall vs. Rank

Our engine performed well on these queries. Thus, for about 87% of the queries, Hilltop returned the desired page as the first result, comparable with Google at 80% of the queries, while DirectHit and AltaVista succeeded at rank 1 only in 43% and 20% of the cases, respectively. As we look at more results, the average recall increases to 100% for Google, 97% for Hilltop, 83% for DirectHit, and 30% for AltaVista.

4.2 Gathering Relevant Pages
In order to estimate Hilltop's ability to generate a good first page of results for broad queries, we asked our volunteers to think of broad topics (i.e., topics for which it is likely that many good pages exist) and formulate queries. We collected 25 such queries, listed below:

Aerosmith Amsterdam backgrounds chess dictionary
fashion freeware FTP search Godzilla Grand Theft Auto
greeting cards Jennifer Love Hewitt Las Vegas Louvre Madonna
MEDLINE MIDI newspapers Paris people search
real audio software Starr report tennis UFO

We then used a script to submit each query to all four search engines and collect the top 10 results from each engine, recording for each result the URL, the rank, and the engine that found it. We needed to determine which of the results were relevant in an unbiased manner. For each query we generated the list of unique URLs in the union of the results from all engines. This list was then presented to a judge in a random order, without any information about the ranks of page or their originating engine. The judge rated each page for relevance to the given query on a binary scale (1 = "good page on the topic", 0 = "not relevant or not found"). Then, another script combined these ratings with the information about provenance and rank and computed the average precision at rank k (for k = 1, 5, and 10). The results are summarized in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Average Precision at Rank k
These results indicate that for broad subjects our engine returns a large percentage of highly relevant pages among the ten best ranked pages, comparable with Google and DirectHit, and better than AltaVista. At rank 1 both Hilltop and DirectHit have an average precision of 0.92. Average precision at 10 for Hilltop was 0.77, roughly equal to the best search engine, namely Google, with a precision of 0.79 at rank 10.

5 Conclusions
We described a new ranking algorithm for broad queries called Hilltop and the implementation of a search engine based on it. Given a broad query Hilltop generates a list of target pages which are likely to be very authoritative pages on the topic of the query. This is by virtue of the fact that they are highly valued by pages on the WWW which address the topic of the query. In computing the usefulness of a target page from the hyperlinks pointing to it, we only consider links originating from pages that seem to be experts. Experts in our definition are directories of links pointing to many non-affiliated sites. This is an indication that these pages were created for the purpose of directing users to resources, and hence we regard their opinion as valuable. Additionally, in computing the level of relevance, we require a match between the query and the text on the expert page which qualifies the hyperlink being considered. This ensures that hyperlinks being considered are on the query topic. For further accuracy, we require that at least 2 non-affiliated experts point to the returned page with relevant qualifying text describing their linkage. The result of the steps described above is to generate a listing of pages that are highly relevant to the user's query and of high quality.
Hilltop most resembles the connectivity techniques, PageRank and Topic Distillation. Unlike PageRank our technique is a dynamic one and considers connectivity in a graph specifically about the query topic. Hence, it can evaluate relevance of content from the point of view of the community of authors interested in the query topic. Unlike Topic Distillation we enumerate and consider all good experts on the subject and correspondingly all good target pages on the subject. In order to find the most relevant experts we use a custom keyword-based approach, focusing only on the text that best captures the domain of expertise (the document title, section headings and hyperlink anchor-text). Then, in following links, we boost the score of those targets whose qualifying text best matches the query. Thus, by combining content and connectivity analysis, we are both more comprehensive and more precise. An important property is that unlike Topic Distillation approaches, we can prove that if a page does not appear in our output it lacks the connectivity support to justify its inclusion. Thus we are less prone to omit good pages on the topic, which is a problem with Topic Distillation systems. Also, since we use an index optimized to finding experts, our implementation uses less data than Topic Distillation and is therefore faster.

The indexing of anchor-text was first suggested in WWW Worm [McBryan 94]. In some Topic Distillation systems such as Clever [Chakrabarti et al 1998] and in the Google search engine [Page et al 98] anchor-text is considered in evaluating a link's relevance. We generalize this to other forms of text that are seen to "qualify" a hyperlink at its source, and include headings and title-text as well. Also, unlike Topic Distillation systems, we evaluate experts on their content match to the user's query, rather than on their linkage to good target pages. This prevents the scores of "niche experts" (i.e., experts that point to new or relative poorly connected pages) from being driven to zero, as is often the case in Topic Distillation algorithms.

In a blind evaluation we found that Hilltop delivers a high level of relevance given broad queries, and performs comparably to the best of the commercial search engines tested.

How to analyze a website

2006-09-04T03:01:00.000-07:00

How good is your website? Does it do its job? Is it effective? These are all good questíons that every business owner and marketing manager needs to ask him or herself. The website has become an essential tool for business. We all know we have to have a website, but are we using this venue to its greatest advantage?
Most people responsible for their company's websites have stats packages and counters to tell them how many hits, how many unique visitors, where they are coming from, what their IP addresses are, what browser they're using, and of course the all important monitor resolution. So what! Who cares? The real question is do we have an effective website?

Now if you have a transactional website, commonly referred to as an e-commerce site, you know the number of salës you are generating from your site, which is important, but do you really know how effective your site is? How many orders are you losing because of bad layout, awkward design, confusing navigation, and poor copy? How many potential clients have you chased away because you haven't put a telephone number on your site and an accessible real-person that can answer questíons?

A website is your business' public face. Big businesses can look like mom and pop operations and mom and pop operations can look like General Motors. The design of your website should not be taken lightly, its budget should not be an afterthought, and the designer you hire should be someone who understands more than code. Your Web-designer should be a multimedia-marketing advisor, someone who can counsel you how best to deliver your marketing message, and someone who can go beyond technical issues.

You can spend a lot of monëy and have someone analyze your site for you, but are you really going to believe him, are you really going to act on their recommendations? You can't sell somebody something they really don't want - that may sound obvious, but believe me, salës people do it everyday. If you don't think you need a new website, you aren't going to spend the monëy to have one built. So the best way to tell if you need one is to analyze the one you already have, yourself.

Below is a set questíons you can ask yourself. If you answer them honestly, you'll know whether you need a new site or not. After you've gone through the process, ask some colleagues to do the same. See if your answers compare

1. Does Your Website Have A Purpose?

Every website should have a clearly defined purpose. Having a website just because everyone else has one is not an acceptable strategy. What is your website's purpose?

a. Transactional sales-oriented site
b. Customer service support site
c. How to instructional site
d. Product or service demonstration site
e. Lead generation site
f. Marketing, branding, positioning site
g. Promotional campaign site
h. Viral or buzz creation site

2. Is Your Website Focused?

Too many businesses both large and small use their website as an information junkyard, a dumping ground for everything you do, everything you've done, and everything you ever thought of doing. This won't work. Customers are like children; they want clarity, direction, and unequivocal answers. Your website should be focused on a singular function. URLs are cheap, there is no reason you can't have different websites for every major thing you do, or every marketing campaign you initiate. How focused is your website?

3. How Functional Is Your Website?

Everybody knows that websites should be easy to use, that you shouldn't have to drill-down too deep to find what you're looking for, and of course everything should work. Your website is a communication tool. If your website doesn't work properly, the only thing you're communicating is incompetence. How functional is your website?

4. Does Your Website's Construction Balance Competing Concerns?

Websites by their very nature are a compromise of competing issues. Aesthetics, multimedia, frame construction, HTML, Flash, client-side, server-side, data bases, SEO tactics, information architecture, marketing communication, transaction efficiency all compete for precedence in the design of a site. Are you sacrificing clarity, focus, and communication for SEO tricks and unattainable traffíc numbers? Did you start with an IT solution like a database and build your site around a poorly conceived information delivery system. Does your website's design reflect your sites' defined business purpose or is it a result of secondary technical concerns?

5. Does your website honestly reflect your business personality?

Does your website represent and promote your marketing objectives? Okay, this is a trick question for many small owner-managed businesses. Marketing is not salës. Marketing is about communicating who you are, what you do, and why you do it better than the other guy. Marketing is about image building, branding, and positioning, in other words, enhancing your business personality. Does your website honestly reflect your business personality?

6. Is your Web-presentation integrated into your overall marketing plan?

Too many websites bear no relation to the rest of their business' marketing initiatives. Everything your company does should reflect an over-riding ethos, point-of-view, and personality. If your marketing collaterals don't match your website presentation, you are confusing your audience. Is your Web-presentation integrated into your overall marketing plan?

7. Is content king on your website?

I once had a fairly large manufacturing client ask me to build a website based on a business card and ten 8x10 glossies of discontinued merchandise. This fellow was so paranoid that his competitors would see what he was doing that he hid his products from his customers. This business is now bankrupt. We've all heard the saying 'content is king'. Is content king on your website? Does your website adequately display and explain what you do, what products you sell, and what services you provide? Are there examples of your work? Are there testimonials from your customers? Have you provided information on how to order, how to use, and how to resolve problems? Is content really king on your website?

8. Is your website an experience?

You watch television, you listen to the radio, you read a magazine, but you experience a website. Unlike other marketing vehicles, websites provide you the opportuníty to deliver your marketing message with the full complement of multimedia tools. Websites can stimulate all the senses, sight, sound, and interactive touch in order to communicate and connect with your audience. Websites are not brochures. Visitors shouldn't just see your website, they should experience it. Is your website an experience?

9. Does your website have a distinctive look?

The notion of the flaming animated logo has become a clich� for bad design and style over substance, but that does not mean your website should be aesthetically boring and visually dreary. Your site should display clarity of vision; it should provide functional page layout; its use of colors, type, and static and kinetic visuals should be distinctive and purposeful. Your website should provide a defining "Look" that enhances your business personality. Does your website display a distinctive look that represents your business personality?

10. Do you list appropriate contact information on your website?

I remember going to a meeting with a client who was in the construction business. The Vice President of the company was hopping mad. He demanded his email address be taken off the site immediately. He wasn't going to waste any more time dealing with client emails and inquiries. Websites are all about connecting you to your clients, not hiding from them. If you think you can put your website on autopilot and that a FAQ and Q&A are going to cut-it, you better think again. Does your website have adequate contact information? Do you list appropriate email addresses and telephone numbers for the people responsible for various aspects of your business?

There you have it. Ten questíons that when answered honestly will tell you whether or not you have a website that works and whether or not you need to rebuild.

New tool for optimizing website

2006-09-01T04:09:00.000-07:00

Hi friends, last week I read news about seo. A new tool presented by IBP helps for optimizing site and gets top 10 ranking in google and other major search engines. It was suggested that it is a unique real time website promotion software tool. This tool is free and easy to download from following links.

http://www.axandra-web-site-promotion-software-tool.com/start-download.htm

Search engine optimization - An overview

2006-08-29T02:32:00.000-07:00

Last week I read an article on seo reports. It was suggested that for optimize a website there are some facts which must be consider before making a site search engine friendly. Website optimization starts with content. If the content is irrelevant, the website will not last long in the rankings, no matter how many keywords are included. The best way to get relevant content is to get an expert to write the content. General content may be more friendly to beginners, but in the search optimization arena, content is what is going to keep readers coming back and webmasters linking to the page. Many search engines use link counters to rank sites. If enough people like and value the site, they will link to it from their own site as an example of expert help for visitors seeking more detailed information than they can provide, or are willing to provide. Often, general-interest sites will link to expert sites, thereby also driving their own traffic up as the initial portal to those expert sites and improving their own rankings in the optimization listings. The quality of the sites linked is also a major factor in the rankings, as quality sites such as Microsoft and Google are going to be more effective "heavy hitters" than a link to Bob's House of Website Optimizing.

Use NOODP Tag for search engines

2006-08-08T02:38:00.000-07:00

If your web site is listed in Open Directory Project than google and msn will often use text which ODP uses to describe the web site. The description in the open directory project are not suitable if we changed our site description after some times. That description do not reflect the current status of website.

If we want to rid from ODP description than we can use meta tag in our web page of site to tell google and msn not to use ODP description. We should use following tag for rid from ODP description.
META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"
If we want only google to use updated web site description than we can use
META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP"
We can also change the search engine robots name in case of yahoo and msn by replacing search engine robots name instead of ROBOTS.

GBuy - A Paypal Killer

2006-06-14T04:42:00.000-07:00

Hi friends, yesterday I read an article on seo reports. It was suggested that google launching Gbuy which doing work same as Paypal. Gbuy is direct attention for paypal and it may also affect its popularity. After launching there are some question arise.

Will Gbuy help with ranking
Will google use transaction data to affect ranking.

seo mistakes

2006-06-13T23:50:00.000-07:00

hi friends, there are some seo mistakes which affect the ranking of site. According to latest seo reports the most important factors which lead to lowering in ranking are

1) Web page title
2) Using graphics, flash and animation in excess
3) A complex menu system

Title is identification of a web page by which search engine ranked in proper keyword. by using un related title or not using title tag affect the ranking of a site.
Graphics and flash are harder to read by any search engine crawler. So, if possible use limited graphics and animation code for a site.
Some times a complex menu system affect the site popularity and also affect the no. of visitor visits.

Importance of Content

2006-06-12T23:30:00.000-07:00

A fresh content is very much effective for search engines to place site in good ranking. For any search engine fresh content is like a food for that. Last week I read an article on seo reports. It was suggested that for improving ranking of a site we must give importance to site content as compared to other factors like link building. Visitors search the queries for information in search engines and the main motive of search engine to provide good and update information every time to their visitors. The main reason for popularity of google is it provide fresh information as possible as. So if we want to optimize our site we should keep fresh content for our site according to seo reports article.

Regularly Changing algo by google

2006-06-09T02:15:00.000-07:00

Seo reports: Hi friends, Yesterday I read an article on google search engine. It was suggested that google is changing their algo and will continue to change. For the past few years, Google has been refining their algorithm and rebuilding their index. Anyone who thinks "Big Daddy" is the last of the major updates has not been paying attention. Google does not sit still and will constantly change to more efficiently find what it is they are looking for. Before "Big Daddy" other updates are also major which affects many webmaster sites like Florida Update, post jagger update etc.

We know that Google is looking for content basically good original content. They want websites that are linked to naturally from reputable resources. They want to be able to trust your website, which means that websites that they already trust and that are related to your industry must 'vouch' for you. They want websites that are easy to use for visitors, websites that visitors are actually looking for.

Seo techniques - seo reports

2006-06-08T00:43:00.000-07:00

Seo reports - Hi Friends, yesterday I read an article on seo techniques. It was suggested that for optimize a site there are following techniques.
1. Search Engine Submission
2. Directory Submission
3. Link Popularity Building
4. Keyword Research Analysis
5. Title and Meta Tags Optimization
6. Anchor Text Optimization
7. Search Engine Copywriting.
8. Press Release
9. RSS Feeds Creation and Submission

Uses new spider for indexing by google

2006-06-07T04:18:00.000-07:00

Hi Friends, Yesterday I read a news on google search engine. Google uses a new spider for indexing web pages for the purpose of Adwords advertising system. The new crawler software program analyze the content of a landing page. The main task which google to be acheived is tries to determine the quality of landing page on which ads are placed. If some webmaster not like to index their page by this spider than its page adword quality score go down by google.

Advanced search engine

2006-06-05T21:07:00.000-07:00

Otevi.com is a new advanced search engine which provides fully advanced results for different queries. Optevi is a revolutionary philosophy of search i.e. a Search Engine Interface Modifier that give Web users competitive, personalized control of the Internet searching and browsing process by ensuring that they will obtain the most trustworthy desired information every single time they conduct a new search online. Optevi's tools complement and enhance existing Web search technologies and can technically work as a search engine interface in front of potentially any existing search engine index such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN. This search engine will be very useful in future for quering different processes.

Adwords Model

2006-05-12T03:26:00.000-07:00

For increasing the traffic to the website search engines provide many paid advertising models. The most common method provides by search engines is PPC (Pay per Click) advertising model.

According to buyers point of view PPC is the most popular advertising model. But it also generates the fear of fraud. In PPC the advertiser bid on specific keywords and tells the advertisement company that they will pay X number of dollars for every clicks on their adds or in other words they will pay x number of dollars for every visitors visits their site through advertise company site.

Improve Ranking with Anchor Text Optimization

2006-05-09T01:52:00.000-07:00

Anchor text is very important according to seo point of view. For improving your web site traffic optimized the anchor text is necessary. Anchor text can also improve your web page relevance.

This article is completely focus on optimization of anchor text and discusses the definition and importance of this powerful feature of seo to increase the quality of particular web sites. The anchor text is defined as a visible hyperlinked on a web page. In anchor text mostly seo experts take a prefer keyword and it hyperlinked to target website. Anchor text optimization is basically to target a website for a specific keyword to improve ranking in search engine page results. For example we can optimize an anchor text for a website http://info-seo.blogspot.com/ for keyword “seo reports”. With the help of anchor text optimization we can increase the relevancy of a web page with a specific keyword but the real gainer is the target page url. If you feel that the standard blue underlined hyperlinks appear ugly on your website, then you can re-format its HTML markup code to change color of the text and get rid of the underline without losing the power of the anchor text.

For a search engine algorithm anchor text is very important. The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages. Almost all search engines give significant weight to anchor text on your pages.
Anchor text is important whether it is from external pages or internal pages. Instead of writing url as a anchor text you must write some keywords in the anchor text related to your site and that is used for hyperlinked to your web site.

Some people believe that submit their site to all search engines is sufficient to get the site top ranking, but this is not true you must do other related techniques of seo to improve your site ranking like title tag optimization, meta tag optimization and anchor text optimization.

Keywords within the anchor text are equally useful from links pointing to your web site. It is better to provide your own cut and paste html code for your anchor text. For example the following code is a html code for hyperlinked to a target website http://info-seo.blogspot.com/ for a target keyword Seo Reports. Seo Reports.

Successful Blogging

2006-05-08T03:17:00.000-07:00

Hi Friends, last week i read an article on blogs. It was suggested that there are different types of blogs available on the internet. As seo point of view blogs is very powerful tool. the most common types of blogs are following.

Professional Blogs
Topical Blogs
Business Blogs
Personal Blogs

Other types of blogs include science blogs, cultural blogs, educational blogs and photo blogs.

What is EverFlux?

2006-04-28T00:42:00.000-07:00

Hi friends yesterday I read an article on google update. This article is on everflux topic. The one major update at the end of each month that’s 20th to 28th of each month is done by google called everflux. The everflux can also update the results and ranking in search engine page results of google. This one makes google to desire a fresh content.

According to google guy if your site is not ranked in google than do some easy step. One is submit your site to add url form of google second is get a link from open directory project like yahoo and dmoz.

Title tag is important for seo

2006-04-27T04:46:00.000-07:00

The title tag of a website is important according to seo point of view. Use title as your special keywords and than submit your site in different search engine is the best way to improve ranking of your site.

User behaviour a critical factor for Google

2006-04-26T02:01:00.000-07:00

As we all know that google is the main search engine in the world. The results which are showed by google provide good information as compared to other search engines. But how google provide a relative information. Yesterday I read an article on seo. It was suggested that google collect all the information from its user behaviours. User behaviours means that any number of actions taken by users while using google search engine. Google collect all the information about visitors action, its moving from one side to another and save this information to their documents. Basically google wants to know that what type of information user like and dislike.

Google may also noted that what users do when it visit a website which is index by it. Google collect all the information through its toolbar, google bookmarks, News alert and a simple cookie which feed data back to google servers. The main reason for increasing the popularity of google is that it provide information according to visitor requirements. Today, millions of website pay a large amount of money to seo company for ranking high in search engine results. But if the site owner make the site according to their visitor point of view than a particular website automatically rank high in SERPs. A website owners should make their site more informative.

Google Toolbar Data

2006-04-25T03:58:00.000-07:00

Hi Friends, Yesterday I read an article on google toolbar. It was suggested that Google does not used toolbar data for ranking purpose.

Optimization for Google

2006-04-24T03:42:00.000-07:00

There are four factors for search engine optimization of a site for Google. Google has different strategies for showing results in their SERPs. The factor which is used to optimize a site for Google are: Backlinks, Age, Content, How it fares in the results.

Optimize an e-commerce site

2006-04-19T21:17:00.000-07:00

Optimization of e-commerce site is very important for good ranking in search engines. The main task of these sites are selling products online. If the competitor site is up in organic search results than it effects the selling of your site especially if your competitor is selling the same products. The techniques used in optimizing an e-commerce site is same as other sites.

For a particular page of the site to rank high on search engine results, the page must have some qualities like: a good title and description for a page that targeted to your products, content of the page is unique,good anf rich of keywords you trageted. Your web page also require links from other site to your page.

The home page url of your site ic not redirecting to your product page. Home page is the first attraction for visitors and for search engines crawlers. A site is crawled by crawler through home page. Don,t target your site for selling purpose only, write some good content and try to make a web page informative. Informative page is very important for google point of view.

The main reason for ranking down in organic search results are duplicate contents. If your page have duplicate content than the google remove that page from their search results.If you are selling products that your competitors are also selling, then your product page need to be different than their product page. The percentage of duplicate content on your site is limited to 25 only.

The title tag of your different pages are according to your products. All information about the products of the site must be linked with home page. Home page of the site is the first attraction for visitors and if all products information are placed on it than this is easy for visitor to purchase a product. The search engines also crawled every product page of the site if they are linked to home page.

By making a few changes to our site we can increase the visitors. If the product pages are on good rank in search engines, we increase a lot of potential online sales through a site.

Importance of first search engine page results

2006-04-13T22:48:00.000-07:00

Hi Friends, Last week I read an article on Search Engine Optimization. that article describes the important fact towards search engine results pages. When a visitors search on a topic, they only visit first page results and if they have provide no information on that than mostly visitors turn to different search engine. According to recent study most users will go through only three pages of search results before giving up. A majority, 62 percent, clicked on a result from the first page, and 41 percent moved to a different search engine rather than move to the second page.The industry tends to translate this data by suggesting companies work harder to ensure their sites rank higher in search results.

The Google Sandbox

2006-04-04T03:16:00.000-07:00

The Google Sandbox is the container where new sites are placed for 6-9 months. The time for which our websites spend in google should be consider as a golden opportunity for us. In that time period we make many changes and updates in our websites to make our site ranked high on SERPs(search engine result pages). After submit the website in google we can also focus on other search engines like yahoo and msn. These search engines not take too much time for listing a new sites in their search results as google. The webmaster of site can make changes in their site for listing in yahoo and msn. This means that as far as google is concerned, our websites time in sandbox may well be one of the most important time in its development.

For acquiring a better position in the search engines mostly google we take care about the content of the site. Content of the site is the king according to google point of view. So we can take different steps and methods for improving our website content.Content is the first attraction for visitor in a site, if our site is not rich in content than the visitor move to other site.For the time when our website spend in google sandbox we should focus on content.

Organic Seo and its Benefits

2006-03-31T20:16:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, it was quite easy to draw effective traffic, as a good content-driven site, with good products, was enough to get a Web site ranked highly in the Search Engines. The competition has increased one thousand times over since then, with billions of Web sites existing online now, making for some very stiff competition in the area of Search Engine placement and rankings.

This increase in competition has given rise to many different styles, and many different methods of Web site optimization. Optimization is simply the method of making a Web site "Search Engine friendly", by using methods of enhancement that will increase rankings and placement by placing the Web site higher in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

Everything from software to increase rankings and placement, to Search Engine Management and Marketing Firms exist, with many online merchants becoming confused about what or "whom" to use and how to effectively use the various services to increase rankings and placement.

The real battle seems to exist between those that favor "Organic SEO" as opposed to those that prefer "Non-Organic SEO". The term "organic" itself is defined by Webster's Dictionary as: instrumental; acting as instruments of nature or of art to a certain destined function or end (Webster's: 1913: 3).

"Organic SEO", also called "Natural SEO", is the most time consuming, and the most tedious method of optimization for placement and rankings. However, it is prone to longevity of results, as it has a focus on content, meta-tag enhancement using proper descriptions, keyword enhanced copy within the appropriate specified densities of the Search Engines, and link exchanges. In addition, keyword dense reports, articles, and other content materials are usually added in a routine fashion to a site to maintain the densities necessary and increase rankings and placement.

"Organic SEO", if done properly in a step-by-step approach, can literally promote increased traffic and rankings for years. It can also contain overall marketing costs, as the use of PPC (Pay Per Click), is not needed as much with this method. The main drawbacks with this type of SEO, however, are the length of time it takes to properly implement all the steps necessary, and the length of time it takes the Search Engines to thoroughly spider and index a site that has implemented "Organic SEO".

"Non-Organic SEO", also called "Artificial SEO", can take many forms, and can use some "Organic SEO" coupled with other techniques. These techniques can include software generated keyword enhanced pages, some methods of re-directs, whereby traffic is shunted off from other sites, with their permissions, and software generated doorway pages and meta-tag descriptions. There are many different techniques that can be employed including rather controversial ones such as hidden text loaded with keywords, and tiny text.

Overall, "Non-Organic" SEO methods are quite popular, as it is a much quicker means to rankings and placement. Links might be purchased from "link farms" which are simply services that specialize in the promotion of links to others.

Although "Non-Organic SEO" can speed up rankings and placement initially, care needs to be given when using any of these methods. If keyword dense pages are automatically generated en masse, the Search Engines might view large sites, with large numbers of such pages as "Search Engine Spammers" and a risk of being banned does exist. In addition, pages may initially place very high, only to drop lower rather quickly, as the Search Engines still place a great emphasis on good content, which is not usually the focus of the "Non-Organic" type of SEO.

SEO For MSN

2006-03-29T02:32:00.000-08:00

We are beginning with MSN as rankings are generally faster attained on this engine and thus it is a good place to begin, especially if you have a new site that is likely still in the sandbox on Google or are just at the beginning stages of link building. Like all of the major search engines, MSN builds their index of sites using spiders to crawl the web finding new and changed information. This information is then processed by the MSN servers using complex algorithms to determine which sites are most relevant to the search query entered. This may seem like an extraordinarily complex process and it is however the resulting environment is simple: all search engine algorithms are mathematical and thus, there is a fixed set of rules and factors which, if addressed correctly, will result in a high ranking. In short, because it´s math we have the benefit of knowing that if we take action x and action y we will get result z. The Rules For MSN Assuming that you are following the right rules, the results you can achieve on MSN can be fast and solid. MSN does not apply the same types of aging delays that the other two engines do and thus, when you change your content the change in results can be realized as quickly as they reindex your site and as quickly as your incoming links get picked. This differs greatly from Google and Yahoo! in that those two engines age both domains and links requiring a longer period of time before the full effects of your efforts are realized. As an additional note on MSN, users of MSN are 48% more likely to purchase a product or service online than the average Internet user according to a comScore Media report. So what are the rules for MSN that can help us get top rankings? As with all the major engines, there are two fundamental areas that need to be addressed to attain top rankings. The first is the onsite factors, the second is the offsite. Because they are fundamentally different we will address them separately. Onsite SEO Factors The problem with writing an article about the onsite factors is that by the time many of you read this some of the weight these factors hold and the optimal levels noted may well be out-of-date. Thus, rather than listing overly-specific-and-sure-to-change factors we will focus on how to know what the factors are, how to get a handle on what you need to adjust and by how much, and how to predict what will be coming down the road. And so we´ll begin: How To Know What The Factors Are: Unfortunately there´s no one over at MSN Search calling us up weekly to let us know what the specifics of their algorithm are, we have to figure it out for ourselves with research, reading and playing with test sites. From all of this there is only one conclusion that an SEO can make: the details matter. When we´re discussing onsite factors this includes:
the content of the page including keyword density
the internal linking structure of the site (how the pages of your site are linked together)
the number of pages in your site and the relevancy of those pages to your main topic and phrases
the use of titles, heading tags and special formats There are a number of lower weight factors however the ones noted above, if addressed correctly, will have very significant results on your rankings if the offsite factors noted below are also addressed. Page Content: The content of your page must be perfect. What I mean by this is that the content must appeal to both the search engines and the algorithms. In order to write properly for the visitors you must be able to write clearly and in language that is both appealing and understandable to your target market. While there is much debate about whether the keyword density of your page is important I am certainly one who believes that it is. It only makes sense that a part of the algorithm takes into account the use of the keywords on your page. Unfortunately the optimal keyword density changes slightly with each algorithm update and also by site type and field. For this reason it would be virtually impossible for me to give you a density that will work today and forevermore. For this reason you will need a keyword density analysis tool which you will want to run on your own site as well as the sites in the top 10 to assess what the optimal density is at this time. You may notice a variatio n in the densities of the top 10. This is due to the other factors including offsite which can give extra weight to even a poorly optimized site. I recommend getting your site to a keyword density close to the higher-end of the top 10 but not excessive. Traditionally this percentage will fall somewhere near 3.5 to 4% for MSN. Internal Linking Structure: The way your pages link together tells the search engines what the page is about and also allows them to easily (or not-so-easily) work their way to your internal pages. If your site has an image or script-based navigation it is important to also use text links either in your content, in a footer, or both. The text links are easy to follow for a spider and perhaps more importantly, the text links allow you the opportunity to tell the spiders what a specific page is about though the anchor text and, in the case of footers, allows you to add in more instances of the targeted phrases outside of your general content area. The Number Of Pages & Their Relevancy: MSN wants to please their visitors. For this reason they want to insure that highest likelihood that a searcher will find what they need once they get to your site. For this reason a larger site with unified content will rank higher that a smaller site or a site with varying content topics. (note: this assumes that all else is equal in regards to the other ranking factors) When you are optimizing your site for MSN be sure to take some time to built quality content. Do a search on your major competitors to see how large their sites are, over time you will want to build yours to the same range through general content creation or the addition of a blog or forum to your site. Titles, Heading Tags & Special Formats: Titles are the single most important piece of code our your entire web page for two reasons. The first is that it holds a very high level of weight in the algorithm. the second reason is that it is your window to the world. When someone runs a search the results will generally show your page title in the search results. This means that a human visitor has to be drawn to click on your title or rankings your site is a futile effort (this isn´t about bragging rights, it´s about return on investment). Heading tags are used to specify significant portions of content. The most commonly used is the H1 tag though there are obviously others (or they wouldn´t bother numbering them would they). The H1 tag is given a significant amount of weight in the algorithm provided that it is not abused though overuse (it should only be used once per page). Try to keep your headings short-and-sweet. They´re there to tell your visitor what the page is about, not your whole site. Special formats are, for the purpose of this article, and text formatting that distinguishes a set of characters or words apart from the others. This includes such things as, anchor text, bold, italic, different font colors, etc. When you set content apart using special formats MSN will read this as a part of your content that you want to draw attention to and which you obviously want your visitors to see. This will increase the weight of that content. Now don´t go making all your keyword bold or the such, simply make sure to use special formats properly. Inline text links (links in the body content of your page) is a great way to increase the weight of specific text while actually helping your visitor by providing easy paths to pages they may be interested in. Offsite SEO Factors With MSN, the offsite factors are much simpler to deal with than either Google or Yahoo! MSN will give you full credit for a link the day they pick it up so link building, while time consuming, is reworded much quicker on MSN. When dealing with MSN and offsite SEO there are two main factors we must consider when finding links: Relevancy. The site must be relevant to yours to hold any real weight. Quality is better than quantity. Because PageRank is Google-specific we can´t use it as the grading tool for MSN however upon visiting a website it´s generally fairly clear whether we´re visiting a good site or not. Spending extra time to find quality is well rewarded. Also, finding one-way links as opposed to reciprocal links is becoming increasingly important and I´d recommend utilizing both in your link building strategies. You will have to begin your offsite optimization by running link checks on your competitors to see what you´re up against. This is also a good place to start for potential link partners though those of you using a tool such as Total Optimizer Pro or PR Prowler will find it far faster and more effective to use these tools.

Tips for Improving Website's Conversion Ratio

2006-03-22T21:40:00.000-08:00

There are some important tips that improve the website conversion ratio. According to the seo experts conversion ratio is normally 1 to 2 percent. But if we take care the following steps than the conversion ratio may be improved.

1. Make sure your visitors know what you do, the instant they land on your website. Don't make them have to guess. Tell them right up front with a benefits-laden headline.

2. Make sure the design of your website up to par? Make it easy to navigate. Get rid of distracting flash or stupid, meaningless graphics that are a waste of everybody's time and take forever to load? Simplify your website. Get rid of the flash, graphics and pop-ups!

3. Use psychologically effective colors. The color blue suggests quality, trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness--the perfect choice for sales pages. Avoid purple, which connotes uncertainty and ambiguity, and only use yellow to highlight key words and phrases. In addition, try to have as much white space as possible. It makes for a cleaner looking, easier to read website.

4. Get your own domain name. URL's that contain names like, "Geocities", "Angelfire" or "Tripod" have amateur written all over them.

5. Prove what you say. Back up your claims with cold, hard, indisputable and verifiable facts?

6. Put your name, telephone number and street address on your website?

7. Use authentic customer testimonials, complete with first and last names? Just make sure you get your customers permission first.

8. Offer a fair and reasonable money-back guarantee? Thirty days is good. Sixty or ninety days is better!

9. Make it easy for your customers to pay. And offer a variety of payment options. I can assure you, if you're using Paypal only, you're losing sales. There are a lot of people out there, myself included, that just won't do business with Paypal. It's too much of a hassle!

10. And last but not least, make sure you have a powerful sales letter. A strong and effective sales letter can blast your earnings into the upper stratosphere!

I hope these tips are very much usefull for a website to increase its conversion ratio.

Website Listed at Yahoo

2006-03-19T21:39:00.000-08:00

Treat Yahoo as both a directory AND a search engine. Yahoo offers a number of different search results. Part of their search results come from an actual search engine, and some of their results come from human editors, called surfers.
Every Yahoo directory submission is viewed by a person. (Search engines use spiders and indexing software). Admission into the Yahoo directory is entirely at the discretion of the Yahoo surfer viewing your site. That's why the free submission lead time can often be 8-10 weeks, without using the Express Submit service.
Unlike search engine submissions that accept multiple pages from the same site, Yahoo surfers prefer to view your home page, and they will navigate your site from there.
With directories, the site owner selects the most appropriate directory categories for his/her site and writes descriptions that concisely and accurately describe the content of the site. Factors that affect directory placement are selecting the right category and writing a good description.
Always differentiate between the Yahoo search engine and the Yahoo directory whenever you speak to a search engine marketer. The strategies for getting listed in search engines are different from the strategies for getting listed in directories.
Fill out the Forms on Yahoo Exactly as Requested
We know this seems obvious, but some sites don't get listed because the submitters do not follow directions when filling out the forms. When Yahoo asks for a telephone number, give only one telephone number including the area code. When Yahoo asks for a 25-words-or-less description, don't try any fancy word stacking or keyword tricks. Stick to a concise, accurate description of your site's content. Yahoo surfers often change your site description after it's listed in their directory.
Although some fields are optional, try to fill in all of the fields in the förm, especially the fields asking your company name, address, telephone and fax numbers. Yahoo wants to know that you have a legitïmate business that will be around in years to come.
Select the Categories (only 3) That You Want to be Listed Under Very Carefully
To select your categories, type in your selected keywords in a Yahoo query, and study the results. Your site does not belong where you believe your target audience is searching. Your site's actual content should accurately reflect the category or categories you wish to be listed under.
You will probably be listed under the same categories your competitors are listed under. Study your competitors' directory listing. See what their descriptions are, and then modify your site's description to show the Yahoo surfer that you definitely belong in the categories you selected.
If you are a U.S. company, under the category Regional/United States/ in Yahoo, all 50 states are listed. You should include your site in one of the regional categories, if applicable. Don't be surprised that most of your traffïc from Yahoo is local. Many customers need to hear your voice or see your face to feel secure about hiring you or your company for a project.
Category listings are also at the discretion of a Yahoo surfer. You need to spend the time selecting your categories and studying your competitors so that you do not get listed under an "undesirable" category.
Have Unique Content and Point This Information Out in Your Submission
A web site is of no value to the Yahoo directory if the site contains the exact same information as other sites in the same categories. So to add value to the Yahoo directory, and to call attention to the unique aspects of your online business, make sure you have unique content on your site.

Analyzing One-Way Vs. Reciprocal Links

2006-03-07T20:56:00.000-08:00

Link building has become a cornerstone of SEO/SEM services so many are interested in knowing what makes a good link, what they should strive for, etc. that will provide the biggest impact on their site optimization.

I was recently asked the following:
"These days, I've heard alot about one-way links being better than reciprocal and worth more in respect to pr rankings. If possible, could you please offer me some insight on reciprocal vs. one way links."

Here was my response:
"We certainly believe that one-way links are better than reciprocal links, but not to the extent that many others assume. You hear a lot of talk about reciprocal links being dead and for a while we believed this is the direction the search engines were going, but the more research we did the more we believe this NOT the case.

"The factors that we look at as being the most important are link relevance and quality. If these issues are in line then it’s not going to matter if it's a one-way link or a reciprocal link... just a valuable link."
Search engines certainly want to get a handle on link manipulation but there are many more effective ways of doing so. In fact, many believe the most recent Google algorithm change is the implementation of how links are viewed, and it has nothing to do with one-way vs. reciprocal links.

When analyzing links, determining if a link is reciprocated is not an entirely effective way to gage the users intent. Many sites link back and forth to each other simply because it makes good business sense to do so. If all reciprocal links are devalued search engines are essentially shutting out legitimate links simply by assuming that the intent was ill-formed.
Yes, a large portion of reciprocal links are simply SEOs and site owners manipulating the system, but that in itself isn't necessarily bad. After all, Google claims to have spidered over 8 billion pages. I'm sure its the grand link building campaigns and site cross-linking that has allowed them to find a few of those billion. The bottom line is that just because a link is reciprocated does not mean that it's an illegitimate relationship.

Search engines can determine link quality by a number of other measures:
Comparing themes of the link source and link destination pages
Placement of links on the page (i.e. is it in body content, ad section, navigation area, etc.)
Relatedness of the two linked sites (are they in compatible industries?)
These three measures alone will provide a far greater measure of the quality of a link than looking at whether a link is reciprocated or not.In regards to links, and SEO in general, I don't believe it makes much sense for search engines to look for ways to penalize those who are manipulating the system to their advantage, but rather to make sure that those manipulations work to provide higher-quality search results.

SEO:Important Steps For Optimize Website

2006-03-02T01:16:00.000-08:00

Hi Friends, I want to share some important steps for optimize a website. A Website has no value if it has no traffic. With the help of search engine optimization techniques we can rank our site high on search engine and increase the traffic on it. This is my first blog I want to share my seo studies and its different techniques for optimize our website and make it "Search engine friendly".