Search Engine Optimization

Keyword Research

abhishek26 — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:50:00 +0000

Example undertaken-

Searched Google for “mutual funds”. Got 1st reult of wikipedia.org (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_fund) in organic listing. The metatag Contents are as follows -

<meta name="keywords" content="Mutual fund,Articles with unsourced statements since November 2007,
Investment-management,12b-1 fee,130-30 funds,1924,2006,2007,401(k) plan,401k,7 Day SEC Yield" />

Online Tools to find Trends/Keywords -

Sitemap

abhishek26 — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:03:41 +0000

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site. Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. The Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded. The Sitemap must:

Begin with an opening tag and end with a closing tag.
Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the tag.
Include a entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.
Include a child entry for each parent tag.

All other tags are optional. Support for these optional tags may vary among search engines. Refer to each search engine’s documentation for details. Also, all URLs in a Sitemap must be from a single host, such as www.example.com or store.example.com. For further details, refer the Sitemap file location

Sample XML Site-map

Following example shows a Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags. The optional tags are in italics.



   
      http://www.example.com/
      2005-01-01
      monthly
      0.8
   
 

Refrences -
www.sitemaps.org

Introduction to SEO

abhishek26 — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:52:57 +0000

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often considered the more technical part of Web marketing. This is true because SEO does help in the promotion of sites and at the same time it requires some technical knowledge – at least familiarity with basic HTML. SEO is sometimes also called SEO copyrighting because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines deal with text. Generally, SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine-friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.

One of the basic truths in SEO is that even if you do all the things that are necessary to do, this does not automatically guarantee you top ratings but if you neglect basic rules, this certainly will not go unnoticed. Also, if you set realistic goals – i.e to get into the top 30 results in Google for a particular keyword, rather than be the number one for 10 keywords in 5 search engines, you will feel happier and more satisfied with your results.

Although SEO helps to increase the traffic to one’s site, SEO is not advertising. Of course, you can be included in paid search results for given keywords but basically the idea behind the SEO techniques is to get top placement because your site is relevant to a particular search term, not because you pay.

SEO can be a 30-minute job or a permanent activity. Sometimes it is enough to do some generic SEO in order to get high in search engines – for instance, if you are a leader for rare keywords, then you do not have a lot to do in order to get decent placement. But in most cases, if you really want to be at the top, you need to pay special attention to SEO and devote significant amounts of time and effort to it. Even if you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work and which items are most important in SEO.