The Different Types of SEO Explained

Different Types Of SEOSearch Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about getting your site recognized and where visitors can find you easily.  There are two major types of SEO, white-hat and black-hat. White-hat is really beneficial for you website, and is totally safe, whereas black-hat is the frowned upon type of SEO that. Employing black-hat techniques will get you listed as a spam site and your SEO ratings will drop accordingly, even if initially they seem to work.

Black-hat SEO techniques are to include links called link farms, which will increase traffic, (i.e. visitors) to your site. Link farms are a group of websites which link back to all the other sites. Search engines view it as spam.

Keyword stuffing (putting more keywords than what is necessary), adding irrelevant but popular keywords and hiding text by putting it in the same color as the background are all definite no-no’s. Your site will be blacklisted. It will not appear on the search engines at all.

White-hat SEO, is all about complying to the rules and regulations, working with the search engines, to produce quality pages which internet users want to use and can be trusted. Keywords are an important part of SEO, but they should be used in a density ratio of no more than 3 – 7%. If you use it more often, the sites will think that your contents are spam and if they are truly not, your content pages are probably of low quality. Using keywords in file names, folders, and links do help boost your ratings. It is in the first 50 words that keywords are the most valuable, but they need to be entirely relevant.

Make sure that your pages do not have duplicate content, which might be innocent, but it is regarded dimly by the search engines.

Links to other sites are acceptable, even desirable, just not when their sole purpose is to get your site ranked higher. Backlinks – links which are on other sites and link to your site – are considered white-hat, if they are not part of a wheel of companies that eventually link to each other (Link farms). For some search engines, backlinks are essential.

Social Media is a type of SEO and a very important one, being bookmarked is a help. Sites that bookmark such as Xmarks, or delicious, are a way of getting your site recognized, it brings in visitors and generates more traffic. By sharing the link, more people will find your site, and it will accordingly be placed higher.  Using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google + and the like are all excellent white-hat SEO methods. Having a social networking account in your site’s name will generate more interest and more traffic to your website.

Optimizing your website so that it becomes search engine friendly is a white-hat technique and one that will bring in some immediate results for short term gain. If you create articles that others can share, it will create a backlink.

If you also send out press releases, and have an e-newsletter it will bring more visitors back and help boost your popularity. It is important to have a sitemap and put a different topic on a different page. These help the search engines and make it easier to read your site.

Advertising on the internet is another SEO method, you can pay per click, and your business or the site will be featured on a search page if the person types in a keyword that relates to your business.  If you get listed in local and national directories, it will help rank you higher, and of course, it will help your business to reach the right audience as well.

Advertising by linking in to blogs and news sites is also good if you have a niche market that you want to exploit.

Signing up to a blogging site and creating blogs for your website, or adding blogs on to your site will also help create more content and encourage your visitors to stay, which will drive up your rankings. Blogs should be informative and creative, relate to your business and if you allow comments, you will also give your visitor an interactive experience.

Allowing your visitors to interact with your site is a very good idea; if they  easily find necessary information or find contact details,  they are likely to use them. If they use them, then your site will be ranked higher.

If your site has a large list of things for sale, adding it to the shopping engines will optimize your exposure and help you increase traffic of individuals who are likely to buy from you.

Submit your site to the search engines for optimization, that way you can guarantee that they will index your site, it is a white-hat technique and one that you are strongly recommended to use.

Whatever methods you choose to use, be sure to incorporate SEO as a way of improving your site, but do not let it over ride the experience of using your site. If your site is solely search engine friendly, but the human element of it, is dire, you will not get any customers who come back. If you plan everything just for the SEO content, you will not get the payback you are expecting. SEO compliments your business, not take it over.

What Are Backlinks?

Any individual, who has come across the term “Search Engine Optimization” and has a minimum thought about what it refers to, must hear the word “backlink”. With the development of search engine optimization (SEO) theory, backlink has become more than important in the world of web. In its simplest form, backlinks are those links that direct people from other sites towards your site.

Links on the page are outbound links. This help to connect to sites which are your sister sites or having your products being promoted by your partnership firm or friends site.  Off site links or in bound links are those links which are present on popular sites and give the customer the chance to visit your site. A backlink can be made even from the pages of your own site. However, Google takes the origin of the link into account and values them accordingly. So, to get quality links, try to have the links from trusted sites.

Backlinks may be the one that stands between success and failure of a website. To get higher page ranking in Google search results, backlink is a must. With the introduction of Google Freshness Algorithm, it has become more essential as Google is indexing the sites faster which have most recent contents and backlinks. As a result, failure to put proper emphasis on backlink may result in breakdown to traffic volume and poor performance in search result.

To increase traffic and improve the place in search result, you need many more links. You can get these links free by following some techniques or you can subscribe to some services that will provide you with links for a fee.

Free links are the links you get from sister sites, people in your network who are marketing the same product, and friends who have the time and skill to work for you. To get free links, you can comment on blogs and forums, create new blogs, and use dofollow social bookmarking and dofollow forums embedding the link to your page or site everywhere.

Paid links may be purchased or may be exchanged under an agreement with the owner of that site. These links are given to you by commercial ventures which promote traffic. There are many people who are members of these sites, and the sheer number gives you the confidence of a guaranteed number of visitors. These kinds of sites will also give you links to sites which are similar to yours.

Search engines do not have a mind. It is working solely on the principles of mathematical probability. The product/service name should be emphasized in the link as often as possible and the positivity of the product should be sufficiently emphasized. Only then the search engine will be able to find your web page faster through the links.  Update your web page so that it is in compliance with the recommendations of the web moderators.

It is necessary to note that wrong links could potentially slow down your site. The people who are visiting your site could be searching for something which is not placed on your site. If this happens, the site will begin to drag. The search engines would recognize this trend and the site rankings would start to fall.

Google PageRank (PR) Explained

Understanding how the web works is now becoming simplified through the specifications which are laid down for every one of the web sites or nodes. By laid down, we mean that the mechanism is better understood by assigning those values to the web page which has uniform parameters as far as the normal web user is concerned, and the web behaves rationally. The idea of having the limelight on a particular site is the aim of everyone who is promoting something or some services. There are ways of increasing the limelight, and it is explained by the PageRank. This is an algorithm which is based on some standard institutions like usa.gov and having the values as determined by search engines and other ranking devices.  There are several standard formulas available for determining the relative importance of pages, but what is generally clear is that only those pages, which are linked positively to other sites, will ever have a positive ranking; the more positively the pages are linked, the higher will be the ranking.

PageRank is a trademark owned by Google and hence the name. One of the ways of getting your page noticed is by getting quality advertising. The other way is to get quality backlinks. The first case is obvious. If your site is doing brisk and roaring business, then it will be recognized, and people will be eager to get their advertisement on your page. In the second case, you want some links which will drive traffic to your site. You may have to pay the advertiser to get the backlink, but it will increase your page rank because the amount and quality of the traffic is truly better.

When a page is linked by another page, the PR mechanism figures that the first page is accumulating a point or a vote, the second page is giving a vote or point to the first page. The more votes are counted for a page, the more important the page is. Besides, the importance of the page, which is giving point or vote to another page, is also considered in the mechanism. Both factors are calculated when deciding the PageRank of a web page or web site. The PR is highly crucial because it plays a dominant role in fixing how higher a page will appear in the Google search results.

The PageRank does not happen; it is a calculation based on the number of links and the “damping coefficient”. This damping coefficient is better understood as the way Google standardizes your page by downgrading it. Another factor, which comes into play, is the number of document(s) which is being presented. If there are a huge number of documents, then the page rank will be affected. A single-page web site would naturally not have the same ranking as one which has 1000 pages.

Thus, we have two different ways of evaluating the PageRank. The first is for promoters who have a limited number of pages and the second is for those who run commercial ventures and have several times many more pages than the former. Linking the pages to non-commercial web sites will bring the value of the web page down, while linking the web pages to social sites will increase the value of the private web sites.

Commercial search engines will only search those, which are having links to commercial enterprises, and the rank will be determined by those parameters. To get a good page rank, one should make sure that the web site is clean, the content is relevant; it will increase the speed and improve the ranking of the web pages. It would also be a good idea to increase the number of pages of your commercial website; this should boost your Pagerank considerably.

How Long Does It Take For SEO To Work?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is like painting bridges; you start at one end and by the time you reach the other end, you have to start at the other end again. It will depend entirely on what you are doing, how long your site has been running, how well your keyword phrases are used and whether or not you link in new pages to your home page. All of these factors will make a difference to how well and how long SEO will take to work.

There are some things you should look at, which will make an immediate difference; check that your site is properly optimized. Robot text errors, confusing Meta directives, slow upload and rendering times on sites that are crawled often are all problems which will slow the SEO down. Adding your site to directories will promote it up.

SEO will only take effect after the site is completely crawled, so if you have a small site, it will be quicker, if you have a larger site it will take a lot longer. Sometimes you may see no real improvement at all. There is more than one search engine, and you can target one in particular. However, the things they look for are always evolving. Sometimes, if you do not add tags or contents for SEO, you will drop down in your ranking, just because the older ones are no longer relevant. Having an XML sitemap, zip code Meta tags and a blogging platform will all produce short term SEO gain.

The keywords used are a key to how long it will take. A popular keyword will not rank your site highly no matter how much SEO you put on to your site. The more competition there is out there, the longer it will take for you to rank higher. A keyword that is more original and unique will rank higher. The difference can be a time frame of hours versus months. It often takes between 2 to 6 months for a keyword to be effective on average. Keywords have to be relevant to your site; otherwise, it is treated as spam and you will be pushed down the ranks.

If you add links to your site that are neither reciprocal nor a wheel, your SEO will be taken in to account, if you add links that are linked back to you or a wheel (going from one company to another and then another) your site will not rank well and all the other SEO you are doing is wasted effort. If visitors come to your site and then they immediately leave again, you will drop down in ranking, no matter how great your SEO is.

Current hot topics for your site are mobile optimization. If your site can be viewed on a mobile, then you will get more visitors, and more visitors mean you will be ranked higher in the search results.

For your SEO to be effective you will have to take a long term vision. You will need to keep evolving with the search engines, and as you rise through the ranks, your competitors will notice and then adjust their site. Hence, you will have to do more work on your own site.  The search engines are constantly adjusting what they do, to make sure that they rank sites appropriately and as experts in SEO optimize to things they look for, the search engines will update and replace them.

Short term SEO will operate between a few hours to 60 days, but two to three weeks span is the average time. Medium term SEO solutions take up to 180 days and long term SEO will take – well, long term (more than 180 days to several years). You can expect an SEO specialist to take a look at the obvious solutions for a quick fix, checking your site for various errors that the search engine pick up, and offer solutions that will come within the short term, mid-term or long term category.

All good SEO specialists consider everything they do as a long term strategy. Because like painting the big bridges, it is a never-ending thankless task. Some things they do, will just keep you listed as you are, rather than being pushed down the ranks.  There are no guarantees of how long it will take, but if you feel that you are not getting value for money, you will need to take a look at your strategies and adjust them.