|
|
What is website promotion?
Website promotion is the process of increasing traffic to your website through search engine optimization (SEO), link exchanges, banner placements, pay-per-click (PPC), etc…
|
| Top |
What does search engine optimization mean?
Search engine optimization is the process that enables search engines to better identify, index, and rank your website. The primary reason for optimizing a website is to improve rankings on search engine results pages.
|
| Top |
What is a search engine?
Search engines use bots and spiders to regularly crawl the web in search of new and updated websites. This information is then stored in a keyword searchable database that ranks websites based on their content. Each search engine bases their results on a unique algorithm that rates the relevancy of a website for the search keywords. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL are currently ranked as the most popular search engines.
|
| Top |
What is a directory?
A directory is catalog of websites sorted alphabetically by categories and sub-categories. Website owners can submit their URL to a directory and then a human editor reviews the submission for relevancy and accuracy. Category and description information may be suggested by the submitter, but directory editors always have the final approval on what will be displayed and where. Submission to a directory does not guarantee that your site will be included - even when you pay for the submission. The most popular directories are Yahoo Directory (annual fee of $299 for each listing) and Open Directory Project (free listing).
|
| Top |
How long does it take to become listed in a search engine?
Most search engines provide free listings and will crawl your website with 4-8 weeks of your submission. Sites that provide free listings do not guarantee the site you submit will be indexed.
|
| Top |
How often should I submit my site to search engines?
Submit your site only once to each search engine. In the past, it was found that submitting your site for review regularly could actually improve your site's ranking. Currently, multiple submissions may do more harm than good to your site's ranking.
|
| Top |
Do I have to submit my site to a search engine to be listed?
No, improvements in search engine technology have made it possible for search engines to easily locate new sites. The fastest way to get indexed by Google or Yahoo! is to add your URL to an existing site that is already indexed.
|
| Top |
How do search engines rank web pages?
Search engines have to deal with hundreds of millions of web pages. They follow a set of rules, known as an algorithm. Exactly how a particular search engine's algorithm works is a closely kept trade secret. However, all major search engines follow the general rules (frequency of a keyword in a web page, meta tags, the number of links that point to your site, content, etc...)
|
| Top |
What can cause my position to change on the search engines?
Your position on the search engines can change dramatically and unpredictably as new competitors go online. The search engines also frequently re-indexes, sometimes altering the criteria used to determine ranking.
|
| Top |
What can I do to help my website achieving better ranking?
Updating your web pages frequently, adding content (about a product, event, location, etc...), exchanging links with other websites helps increase your visibility in the search engines.
|
| Top |
Are all links created equal?
No. The search engines can look at the source of a link and weight it differently from others. For instance, a link to your site from CNN.com is better than a link from LowRankingSite.com (in theory). So, if two sites are equal in every respect except that one has a link to it from the home page of CNN.com, and the other site has a link from LowRankingSite.com, the first site will perform better for relevant keyword searches. If you've had your site posted to thousands of bogus link farms (sites designed to artificially inflate Link Popularity) don't hold your breath. Bottom line: obtain as many relevant and credible links as possible and don't count on shortcuts.
|
| Top |
Why is Link Popularity important?
Link Popularity is important to several groups for different reasons. Link Popularity (a concept mostly pioneered by Google) is important to the major search engines because it provides one of the strongest methods available for delivering highly relevant search results. If a search engine cannot deliver useful and relevant information to its users, those users will find another search engine. For the website owner or operator, Link Popularity becomes a strategy or tactic that can be used to boost site referrals and develop new online relationships. Market researchers and analysts are interested in Link Popularity because it provides a real-time marketing performance metric that is based on an index of independent and publicly available data sources (i.e. Google, FAST, Alta Vista, AOL, MSN, HotBot).
|
| Top |
What is search engine optimization?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is designing, writing, and coding (in HTML) your entire web site so that there is a good chance that your web pages will appear at the top of search engine queries for your selected keywords and key phrases.
|
| Top |
What is Spamming?
Spamming is used to artificially improve rankings on search engines and includes the following techniques: heavy repetition of keywords, hidden keywords, indiscriminate use of multiple pages at multiple domains that point to the same page, and the use of automatic redirection that takes viewers to a URL different than the one submitted to the search engine. Though these techniques may lead to immediate results, they are considered illegal by the search engines and search engines will ban a site from their index for spamming. Avoid any technique that search engines might regard as Spam.
|
| Top |
What is a Robot?
This refers to a program that mimics a browser to download web pages automatically. A spider is a type of robot that is also referred to as a web bot.
|
| Top |
What is robots.txt?
A file on a web site in the root directory of a website that is used to control which spiders have access to which pages within a website. When a spider or robot connects to a website, it checks for the presence of a robot.txt. Only spiders that adhere to the Robots Exclusion Standard will obey a robots.txt command file.
|
| Top |
What are Spiders?
A spider is a program used by a search engine to collect content made available on the Internet. Spiders capture information regarding the content of web pages on a web site and return that information to the search engine to be indexed.
|
| Top |
What is a Hit?
Hits are the number of times web page content is accessed. A single web page can generate multiple hits each time it is viewed. The number of web pages viewed is a better measurement of a website’s activity than the number of hits.
|
| Top |
What is a Doorway Domain?
A doorway domain redirects traffic to a different website located on another domain.
|
| Top |
What is a Doorway Page?
A page designed using techniques favorable to a specific search engine's ranking algorithm to artificially improve the ranking of a website for that search engine. When the robot or spider for that search engine visits the website, the doorway page designed for that search engine is presented for indexing. Doorway pages are usually different than the page presented to normal users and therefore banned by most search engines.
|
| Top |
What are search engine keywords and keyword phrases?
Keywords and keyword phrases are 'key' words or 'key' phrases that users input on a search engine site to clarify their search.
|
| Top |
What is a Title?
Titles are the critical elements for search engines. Title reflects the subject of a page in about four or five words. Include the most important keywords in the page title. The most important string a search engine reads is your page's title. This is the title appearing on the top bar of your web browser and also listed under the menu when you bookmark a site. If a keyword(s) in a search query are found in your page's title, it will be indexed ahead of those sites containing the keyword in the body text only. The search engines consider this the best description of your web page's content and index it accordingly. Therefore, always use the most powerful and relevant keywords in your pages title.
|
| Top |
What are META Tags?
META Tags are contained in the HEAD portion of an HTML document that provide information that describes the content of the web page. Some search engines use this information to categorize and describe a web site in their search results.
|
| Top |
What is a Meta Description?
The META description is a brief description of the content on your web page and should contain keywords relevant to your page. The length of a description should be approximately 25 words.
|
| Top |
What are Meta Keywords?
META keywords are words and phrases relevant to your page. Most major search engines no longer rely on this tag when indexing your site, but you should still include a list of keywords for those search engines that do not generate their own list. Your list of keywords and key phrases should not exceed 20-30 words. Do not repeat keywords more than 2 or 3 times in your list.
|
| Top |
What is Link Popularity?
The number of 'quality inbound links' to a web site is termed as Link Popularity. The link popularity is determined by the number of web sites that are linking to your site, the link popularity of the sites are that are linking to your site, the similarity of the content on sites that offers link to your site. The other terms synonymous to Link Popularity are Reciprocal Links or Link Exchanges
|
| Top |
What is a Reciprocal Link?
A reciprocal link is when website A provides a link to website B and website B provides a similar link to website A.
|
| Top |
What is a Link Farm?
A link farm is a site or a group of sites that provide an indiscriminant number of links to other websites. Link farms are used to improve page rank results by providing external links to websites. According to Google, ‘Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or ‘bad neighborhoods’ on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.’ Guilt through association can get your website banned from a popular search engine, so we recommend avoiding link farms.
|
| Top |
What is a FFA?
FFA stands for 'Free For All' and is much the same as a link farm. You should avoid FFAs if you don't want your web site banned by a search engine.
|
| Top |
What is a SERP?
SERP is an acronym for search engine results page.
|
| Top |
Do search engines index dynamic websites?
Yes, most major search engines index dynamic pages. Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista do a very good job of spidering dynamic pages. Lycos however doesn't appear to index dynamic pages. For those search engines that do not index dynamic web content, you can use Isapi Rewrite for IIS web servers and mod_rewrite for Apache web servers to convert dynamic links into static links.
|
| Top |
