Internet Marketing Indonesia Journal

There is a lot of talk on the web regarding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how, if you just do this one thing, you will be at the top of Google. If only it were that easy! In fact, I believe there are seven distinct skills that a search engine optimiser needs to possess. Most people possess one or maybe two of these skills, very rarely do people posses all seven. In truth, to get to all seven, people who are good at two of these need to actively develop the other skills. This takes time and effort and, if you are running your own business, do you really have the time to do this?

The seven skills that I believe are necessary for SEO work are:

Web Design – producing a visually attractive page

HTML coding - developing Search Engine friendly coding that sits behind the web design

Copy writing – producing the actual readable text on the page

Marketing – what are the actual searches that are being used, what key words actually get more business for your company?

An eye for detail - even the smallest errors can stop spiderbots visiting your site.

Patience - there is a time lag on any change you make, waiting is a virtue.

IT skills - an appreciation of how search engine programs and the algorithms they use actually work

Many website designers produce more and more eye-catching designs with animations and clever features hoping to entice the people onto their sites. This is the first big mistake; using designs like these may actually decrease your chances of a high Google rating. Yes, that’s right; all that money you have paid for the website design could be wasted because no-one will ever find your site.

The reason for this is that before you get people to your site you need to get the spiderbots to like your site. Spiderbots are pieces of software used by the search engine companies to crawl the Internet looking at all the websites, and then having reviewed the sites, they use complex algorithms to rank the sites. Some of the complex techniques used by web designers cannot be trawled by spiderbots. They come to your site, look at the HTML code and exit stage right, without even bothering to rank your site. So, you will not be found on any meaningful search.

I am amazed how many times I look at websites and I immediately know they are a waste of money. The trouble is that both the web designers and the company that paid the money really do not want to know this. In fact, I have stopped playing the messenger of bad news (too many shootings!); I now work round the problem.

So, optimising a website to be Google friendly is often a compromise between a visually attractive site and an easy to find site. The second skill is that of optimising the actual HTML code to be spiderbot friendly. I put this as different to the web design because you really do need to be “down and dirty” in the code rather than using an editor like FrontPage, which is OK for website design. This skill takes lots of time and experience to develop, and just when you think you have cracked it, the search engine companies change the algorithms used to calculate how high your site will appear in the search results.

This is no place for even the most enthusiastic amateur. Results need to be constantly monitored, pieces of code added or removed, and a check kept on what the competition are doing. Many people who design their own website feel they will get searched because it looks good, and totally miss out this step. Without a strong technical understanding of how spiderbots work, you will always struggle to get your company on the first results page in Google. We actually run seven test domains which are testing different theories with different search engines. Remember that different search engines use different criteria and algorithms to rank your site - one size does not fit all.

Thirdly, I suggested that copy writing is a skill in its own right. This is the writing of the actual text that people coming to your site will read. The Googlebot and other spiderbots like Inktomi, love text – but only when written well in properly constructed English. Some people try to stuff their site with keywords, while others put white writing on white space (so spiderbots can see it but humans cannot).

Spiderbots are very sophisticated and not only will not fall for these tricks, they may actively penalise your site – in Google terms, this is sandboxing. Google takes new sites and “naughty” sites and effectively sin-bins them for 3-6 months, you can still be found but n t until results page 14 – really useful! As well as good English, the spiderbots are also reading the HTML code, so the copy writer also needs an appreciation of the interplay between the two. My recommendation for anyone copy writing their own site is to write normal, well-constructed English sentences that can be read by machine and human alike.

The fourth skill is marketing, after all this is what we are doing – marketing you site and hence company and products/services on the Web. The key here is to set the site up to be accessible to the searches that will provide most business to you. I have seen many sites that can be found as you key in the company name. Others that can be found by keying in “Accountant Manchester North-West England”, which is great, except no-one ever actually does that search. So the marketing
skill requires knowledge of a company’s business, what they are really trying to sell and an understanding of what actual searches may provide dividends.

The next skill is an eye for detail. Even a simple change to a web page can create an error that means the spiderbots will not crawl your site. Recently, I put a link to a page that didn’t have www. at the front of the address. The link still worked but the spiders stopped crawling, and it took my partner to find the error. We have recently invested in a very sophisticated html validator that picks up errors that other validators just fail to see. These errors do not stop the pages displaying correctly to the human eye, but cause massive problems with spiderbots. Almost all the code that I look at on the web using this validator flags major errors, even from SEO companies.

The sixth skill is patience, or is it a virtue! Some people seem to want to make daily changes and then think they can track the web page ranking results the next day. Unfortunately, it can take a week for absolutely correct changes to take effect, in which time you have made six other changes. Add to this Google’s
reticence to allow new sites straight on to its listings by adding a waiting factor of, maybe, three months for new sites, and you have a totally uncontrollable situation. We say to all our clients that a piece of SEO work should be looked at like a marketing campaign that runs for six months, since it is only after that time that a true judgement of the effectiveness of the work can be made.

The final and seventh skill is an appreciation of how search engines and algorithms work, for this where both IT and maths experience is useful. People who have programmed at a detailed systems level have a natural feeling for how spiderbots will read a page, what they will search for, what tables they will set up, what weightings they may give to different elements. All of this builds a picture of the database that will be created and how it will be accessed when a search is undertaken. Unfortunately, this skill is the most difficult one to learn as it relies on many years experience of systems programming.

So, in summary, I would say “If it was easy everyone would be doing it!”. I hope you will see that professional Search Engine Optimisation companies need more than a bit of web design to improve your business. Make sure anyone you choose for SEO work can cover all the bases.

This article is distributed by Hansel Gunners. He owns a site, earth4energy review. Feel free to look at his earth4energy review website. You can also send your feedback at his earth4energy review site. Thank you.

Search engine is all about content and every SEO gurus have been trying very hard to optimize their pages just for the search engine and often forgetting that the end user is actually the human reader. It is of paramount importance that a page has to be written for humans and designed for search engines in terms of SEO.

There is nothing more important than creating unique content for a site. In SEO, allocating keywords in the title, header and bold HTML tags not only helps the reader to identify the topic of a page easily but it also aids in optimization since search engine takes into consideration of the keywords in these tags.

Many writers are concerned about the perfect keyword density for the maximum benefit of SEO. Unfortunately, there are no hard figures for a perfect keyword percentage. The most important factor when creating content is to make it readable and unique. As long as the content is readable, there is no need to follow a set percentage of keyword density.

Designing a page to facilitate the indexing by the search engine bots is another important factor to consider next to content creation. A page with rich content without indexed by the search engine bots is equivalent to no content at all. To help the search engines to find the page, the navigation system and sitemap plays important roles here. It is advisable to have text links navigation so that bots can spider all the internal pages smoothly. Avoid using JavaScript and Flash made navigation system because most bots will ignore them but designer can always include a set of text links at the bottom of the page where these kinds of navigation system are used to overcome this issue.

Some search engines place great emphasis on the content near the top of a page. Therefore, it is advisable to design the layout in such a way that the content appears before other parts of the page. One example is to use the content first CSS template; it allows the navigation to appear on the left of a page followed by the content but the content is the first to appear in the codes. This method helps search engine bots to identify the important content of a page and index them since they are placed near the top of a page. Another easy work around is to employ a right side navigation menu.

The ultimate purpose of SEO is to make sure that the designated content appears in search engine according to the specific searches. Making the content readable and designing the page for easy indexing should always be the first priority for webmasters when SEO comes into play.

Thank you.

This article is distributed by Hansel Gunners. He owns a site, catering singapore. Feel free to look at his catering singapore website. You can also send your feedback at his catering singapore site. Thank you.

Search engine ranking is the ranking of a website or web page in the search engine results, for a given keyword phrase

Getting top search engine ranking requires that your site is designed well and is easily spiderable. Designing a search-engine-friendly web site isn’t difficult; you just have to keep a few basic concepts in mind.

Search engines like to spider and rank sites that appeal to users. This is the main challenge for search engine developers to create algorithms that will favor user-friendly web sites while casting aside sites that are created mainly for spiders. This means that the rule of search engine friendly design is the same as the rule for web design in general: Make it user-friendly!

There are a few important things you should do in order to improve your search engine ranking:
• Your title tag should have keywords that meaningfully describe your page. Note that this “title” refers to the one in the ‘head’ section of your document, not the one displayed in your browser window.

• The description meta tag may also influence the ranking of your page for specific search terms. This means, presumably, that if someone searches for a particular keyword, and it appears in your description and title tags, Google will accord that page a higher rank.

• Keyword density is important to Google. This probably means that if someone searches for “search engine ranking” and your page has many instances of those three words in sequence, your page is considered more relevant than another page with those three individual words scattered all over the page.

• Words in the keyword meta tag have the same value as the other words on the web page itself, except for one very important case: if your meta keyword tag contains keywords that do not occur in your main web page, your page will be penalized. Your search engine ranking may improve if you use both the title tag and relevant meta tag.

• Avoid keywords stuffing, extremely small text, hidden text, etc. Google considers these to be spammy techniques.

• Stay away from duplicate content: this includes mirrors of your site as well as identical content appearing from different domain names.
Remember, search engine users generally only explore the first 20 sites in the search results. If you site isn’t in the top 20, you won’t be found, it’s as simple as that. You should always include search engine optimization in your marketing budget to make your site as effective as a billboard on a street. So what are you waiting for? Select the best SEO services available, and start the journey towards higher search engine ranking NOW!

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Getting in-bound links to your site is one of the most important things you can do for generating traffic to your site:

* It helps to get your site listed in the search engine.

* It helps to boost your position in the search engine.

* It helps to build small streams of traffic to your site.

Links to your site are normally given by also giving a link from your site to the other one. These are called reciprocal links or link swaps. And naturally there are a few services available to automate the link somehow.

Some of these services will automatically add the link to your site and the other site once your link request is approved (through some software to be installed on your site).

Some will simply point you to sites which do use link swaps and who are interested in hearing from you.

Some will also check that the link to your site remains in place, and email you if it disappears. It’s then up to you to either contact the owner of that site to find out why the link has vanished, or to remove the reciprocal link on your site.

But there is one thing they do not do, and which you need to watch for:

How would a visitor to the other site FIND the link back to your site?

Because you can be sure that if a human visitor cannot find it, then it’s unlikely that a search engine will.

Let me give you an example: Andrew was using the service at LinkMetro.com to get links to one of his sites. Someone had a site on a related topic, and they requested a link back to Andrew’s. He checked the link back to his site, and everything looked OK. The other site had requested a link back to their homepage (rather than another specific page), so Andrew checked out that home page.

What did he find?

* No links to the “link directory”.

* No link to a “related sites” page.

* No link to a “resources” page.

It seemed that the link directory on that other site was not linked from the home page of that site.

The other site was requesting inbound links back to its home page, but effectively hiding the return link from the search engines and from website visitors. And that makes the link back to Andrew’s site useless - it’s like that link doesn’t even exist.

So next time you get asked for a reciprocal link, check the route that people and search engines would use to get from that site over to yours. You might be surprised what you find.

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Tough question, “What is SEO?”. As with pretty much all internet-related terms, concepts and notions, that of “SEO” does not have a unique definition and it is a blurry concept in most people’s mind.

Still, what is SEO? Since there is no ultimate, fully comprehensible definition for “SEO”, the only way to go is to take a look at several definitions and try to merge them in order to have the right perspective.

Wikipedia : “Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings. The term also refers to an industry of consultants that carry out optimization projects on behalf of client sites.”

Fakezilla : “The changes that are made to the content and code of a web site in order to increase its rankings in the results pages of search engines and directories. These changes may involve rewriting body copy, altering Title or Meta tags, removal of Frames or Flash content, and the seeking of incoming links.”

The Web Search Workshop : “The term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a website to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken. A number of factors are important when optimizing a website, including the content and structure of the website’s copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process.”

6am Media : “The process of improving web pages so that it ranks higher in search engine for targeted keywords with the ultimate goal of generating more revenue from the web site. There are many SEO techniques. In general, these techniques can be categorized as On-Page Optimization, On-Site Optimization, and Off-Site Optimization. There are also two schools of SEO: white hat SEO and black hat SEO. White hat SEOs are those that play by the rule (actually guidelines provided by search engines). Black hat SEOs are those that push the limit of SEOs and employ some questionable or prohibited techniques (according to the guidelines). These black hat SEO techniques are also commonly known as spam.”

Website NOVA : “acronym for search engine optimization. This is the process of making a website ’search-engine-friendly. Search engine optimization is primarily used to increase rankings in SERPs, and effective SEO can increase the potential of your website and bring in more traffic.”

Thousands more definitions are available, almost as many “SEO guru’s” you will find online (”The Guru Problem” is actually the title of another article to be published soon).
As you can see, no definition is like another, but they all tend to converge to a certain common understanding.

There are numerous techniques and tools used to achieve SEO goals, and they should NOT be included within a definition.

Since it is not correct to define a concept through its tools, here is a definition I have come up with after long deliberations. The suggestion is to define SEO as follows:

SEO = abbreviation for “Search Engine Optimization”, the process of optimizing and tuning a web site and gaining online awareness for it, in order to deliver targeted visitors and ensure high conversion rates.

When done correctly, SEO activities must:
- make search engines crawl the site;
- make search engines index the site;
- ensure a high ranking among SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for given keywords;
- achieve a high page rank;
- drive targeted traffic;
- achieve high conversion rates among the site’s visitors.

Since nothing is definitive and ultimate in the world of SEO, I’d like to receive your feedback and comments: TeaWithEdge.com is a way to contact me and speak up about your Marketing concerns.

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