What Is Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is a process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that this ranks your site highly in search engines so that when someone searches for specific phrases it returns your site on tops. It basically involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags and also involves appropriate link building process. The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves. Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine. New sites need not be “submitted” to search engines to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.

If you are unable to research and choose keywords and work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to work with you on these issues.

Search engine marketing and promotion companies, will look at the plan for your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. If you wish, they will also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make recommendations for editing and improvements to keep your site traffic flow and your search engine ranking high. Normally your search engine optimization experts work with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are considered at the same time.

On March 24 a FINDALL search in Google for keywords density optimization returned 240,000 documents. I found many of these documents belonging to search engine marketing and optimization (SEM, SEO) specialists. Some of them promote keyword density (KD) analysis tools while others talk about things like “right density weighting”, “excellent keyword density”, KD as a “concentration” or “strength” ratio and the like. Others even take KD for the weight of term i in document j, while others propose localized KD ranges for titles, descriptions, paragraphs, tables, links, urls, etc. One can even find some specialists going after the latest KD “trick” and claiming that optimizing KD values up to a certain range for a given search engine affects the way a search engine scores relevancy and ranks documents.

Given the fact that there are so many KD theories flying around, my good friend Mike Grehan approached me after the Jupitermedia’s 2005 Search Engine Strategies Conference held in New York and invited me to do something about it. I felt the “something” should be a balanced article mixed with a bit of IR, semantics and math elements but with no conclusion so readers could draw their own. So, here we go.

Background.

In the search engine marketing literature, keyword density is defined as

Equation 1

where tfi, j is the number of times term i appears in document j and l is the total number of terms in the document. Equation 1 is a legacy idea found intermingled in the old literature on readability theory, where word frequency ratios are calculated for passages and text windows – phrases, sentences, paragraphs or entire documents – and combined with other readability tests.

The notion of keyword density values predates all commercial search engines and the Internet and can hardly be considered an IR concept. What is worse, KD plays no role on how commercial search engines process text, index documents or assign weights to terms. Why then many optimizers still believe in KD values? The answer is simple: misinformation.

If two documents, D1 and D2, consist of 1000 terms (l = 1000) and repeat a term 20 times (tf = 20), then for both documents KD = 20/1000 = 0.020 (or 2%) for that term. Identical values are obtained if tf = 10 and l = 500.

Evidently, this overall ratio tells us nothing about:

1. the relative distance between keywords in documents (proximity)

2. where in a document the terms occur (distribution)

3. the co-citation frequency between terms (co-occurrence)

4. the main theme, topic, and sub-topics (on-topic issues) of the documents

Thus, KD is divorced from content quality, semantics and relevancy. Under these circumstances one can hardly talk about optimizing term weights for ranking purposes. Add to this copy style issues and you get a good idea of why this article’s title is The Keyword Density of Non-Sense.

The following five search engine implementations illustrate the point:

1. Linearization

2. Tokenization

3. Filtration

4. Stemming

5. Weighting

Linearization.

Linearization is the process of ignoring markup tags from a web document so its content is reinterpreted as a string of characters to be scored. This process is carried out tag-by-tag and as tags are declared and found in the source code. As illustrated in Figure 1, linearization affects the way search engines “see”, “read” and “judge” Web content –sort of speak. Here the content of a website is rendered using two nested html tables, each consisting of one large cell at the top and the common 3-column cell format. We assume that no other text and html tags are present in the source code. The numbers at the top-right corner of the cells indicate in which order a search engine finds and interprets the content of the cells.

The box at the bottom of Figure 1 illustrates how a search engine probably “sees”, “reads” and “interprets” the content of this document after linearization. Note the lack of coherence and theming. Two term sequences illustrate the point: “Find Information About Food on sale!” and “Clients Visit our Partners”. This state of the content is probably hidden from the untrained eyes of average users. Clearly, linearization has a detrimental effect on keyword positioning, proximity, distribution and on the effective content to be “judged” and scored. The effect worsens as more nested tables and html tags are used, to the point that after linearization content perceived as meritorious by a human can be interpreted as plain garbage by a search engine. Thus, computing localized KD values is a futile exercise.

Burning the Trees and Keyword Weight Fights.

In the best-case scenario, linearization shows whether words, phrases and passages end competing for relevancy in a distorted lexicographical tree. I call this phenomenon “burning the trees”. It is one of the most overlooked web design and optimization problems.

Constructing a lexicographical tree out of linearized content reveals the actual state and relationship between nouns, adjectives, verbs, and phrases as they are actually embedded in documents. It shows the effective data structure that is been used. In many cases, linearization identifies local document concepts (noun groups) and hidden grammatical patterns. Mandelbrot has used the patterned nature of languages observed in lexicographical trees to propose a measure he calls the “temperature of discourse”. He writes: “The `hotter’ the discourse, the higher the probability of use of rare words.” (1). However, from the semantics standpoint, word rarity is a context dependent state. Thus, in my view “burning the trees” is a natural consequence of misplacing terms.

In Fractals and Sentence Production, Chapter 9 of From Complexity to Creativity (2, 3), Ben Goertzel uses an L-System model to explain that the beginning of early childhood grammar is the two-word sentence in which the iterative pattern involving nouns (N) and verbs( V) is driven by a rule in which V is replaced by V N (V >> V N). This can be illustrated with the following two iteration stages:

0 N V (as in Stevie byebye)

1 N V N (as in Stevie byebye car)

Goertzel explains, “-The reason N V is a more natural combination is because it occurs at an earlier step in the derivation process.” (3). It is now comprehensible why many Web documents do not deliver any appealing message to search engines. After linearization, it can be realized that these may be “speaking” like babies. [By the way, L-System algorithms, named after A. Lindermayer, have been used for many years in the study of tree-like patterns (4)].

“Burning the trees” explains why repeating terms in a document, moving around on-page factors or invoking link strategies, not necessarily improves relevancy. In many instances one can get the opposite result. I recommend SEOs to start incorporating lexicographical/word pattern techniques, linearization strategies and local context analysis (LCA) into their optimization mix. (5)

In Figure 1, “burning the trees” was the result of improper positioning of text. However in many cases the effect is a byproduct of sloppy Web design, poor usability or of improper use of the HTML DOM structure (another kind of tree). This underscores an important W3C recommendation: that html tables should be use for presenting tabular data, not for designing Web documents. In most cases, professional web designers can do better by replacing tables with cascading style sheets (CSS).

“Burning the trees” often leads to another phenomenon I call “keyword weight fights”. It is a recurrent problem encountered during topic identification (topic spotting), text segmentation (based on topic changes) and on-topic analysis (6). Considering that co-occurrence patterns of words and word classes provide important information about how a language is used, misplaced keywords and text without clear topic transitions difficult the work of text summarization editors (humans or machine-based) that need to generate representative headings and outlines from documents.

Thus, the “fight” unnecessarily difficults topic disambiguation and the work of human abstractors that during document classification need to answer questions like “What is this document or passage about?”, “What is the theme or category of this document, section or paragraph?”, “How does this block of links relate to the content?”, etc.

While linearization renders localized KD values useless, document indexing makes a myth out of this metric. Let see why.

Tokenization, Filtration and Stemming

Document indexing is the process of transforming document text into a representation of text and consists of three steps: tokenization, filtration and stemming.

During tokenization terms are lowercased and punctuation removed. Rules must be in place so digits, hyphens and other symbols can be parsed properly. Tokenization is followed by filtration. During filtration commonly used terms and terms that do not add any semantic meaning (stopwords) are removed. In most IR systems survival terms are further reduced to common stems or roots. This is known as stemming. Thus, the initial content of length l is reduced to a list of terms (stems and words) of length l’ (i.e., l’ < l). These processes are described in Figure 2. Evidently, if linearization shows that you have already “burned the trees”, a search engine will be indexing just that.

Similar lists can be extracted from individual documents and merged to conform an index of terms. This index can be used for different purposes; for instance, to compute term weights and to represent documents and queries as term vectors in a term space.

Weighting.

The weight of a term in a document consists of three different types of term weighting: local, global, and normalization. The term weight is given by

Equation 2

where Li, j is the local weight for term i in document j, Gi is the global weight for term i and Nj is the normalization factor for document j. Local weights are functions of how many times each term occurs in a document, global weights are functions of how many times documents containing each term appears in the collection, and the normalization factor corrects for discrepancies in the lengths of the documents.

In the classic Term Vector Space model

Equation 3, 4 and 5

which reduces to the well-known tf*IDF weighting scheme

Equation 6

where log(D/di) is the Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), D is the number of documents in the collection (the database size) and di is the number of documents containing term i.

Equation 6 is just one of many term weighting schemes found in the term vector literature. Depending on how L, G and N are defined, different weighting schemes can be proposed for documents and queries.

KD values as estimators of term weights?

The only way that KD values could be taken for term weights

Equation 7

is if global weights are ignored and the normalization factor Nj is redefined in terms of document lengths

Equation 8

However, Gi = IDF = 1 constraints the collection size D to be equal to ten times the number of documents containing the term (D = 10*d) and Nj = 1/lj implies no stopword filtration. These conditions are not observed in commercial search systems.

Using a probabilistic term vector scheme in which IDF is defined as

Equation 9

does not help either since the condition Gi = IDF = 1 implies that D = 11*d. Additional unrrealistic constraints can be derived for other weighting schemes when Gi = 1.

To sum up, the assumption that KD values could be taken for estimates of term weights or that these values could be used for optimization purposes amounts to the Keyword Density of Non-Sense.

References

The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Benoit B. Mandelbrot, Chapter 38, W. H. Freeman, 1983.

From Complexity to Creativity: Computational Models of Evolutionary, Autopoietic and Cognitive Dynamics, Ben Goertzel, Plenum Press (1997).

Fractals and Sentence Production, Ben Goertzel, Ref 2, Chapter 9, Plenum Press (1997).

The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants, P. Prusinkiewicz and A. Lindenmayer, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1990.

Topic Analysis Using a Finite Mixture Model, Hang Li and Kenji Yamanish.

Improving the Effectiveness of Information Retrieval with Local Context Analysis, Jinxi Xu, W. Bruce Croft.

http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk

Choosing an appropriate domain name is very important. First and foremost, when it comes to domain names, try to stay away from the silly, stupid, ridiculous or clever. Keep your domain name simple and make it something your customers can remember if they lose the link to your business website.

Take note that, while your domain name on Geocities or AOL may seem like the least expensive way to go, it may also get you dropped from certain search engines. Some search engines ignore domain addresses that reside on these ‘free servers’ or on the ‘cheap’ servers.

Even if your site is recognized and considered by search engines, a professional domain name that uses your primary company name or associated words is likely to get more attention and be considered as a stable business by your prospective customers.

Purchasing domain names are not that expensive which cost about $100 and there are many companies that can register the name for you, provided it is available and has not already been used by another company.

Using one of your keywords in your domain name can increase your score on some search engines. For example, solderingirons.com could be more effective as Electric-soldering-irons.com, if that domain name was available.

You might also choose to establish more than one domain name using keywords and then link your ‘doorway’ domain sites to your primary site. But you will have to pay for each of the domain name and also the monthly hosting fees. It all depends on the type and size of your business and your competition.

Keep in mind that some search engines disregard ‘doorway’ sites. So put at least a page of content on the doorway site with some useful information and then link it to your primary site. But don’t design it as an empty page. The other reason being, you can have one, three, five, or even more email addresses that all contain your business name, and give your business a professional feel. When customers get emails from dominicstone@solderingirons.com they feel as if they are dealing with a stable, professional business operation.

No need for customers to understand how you manage all your email boxes on your domain. They just need to feel your business is dependable and reputable.

12 Ways to Make Sure Your Internet Marketing Really Works by Neil Stafford

Everyone loves the Internet, but not everyone is ready to buy. There can be a level of skepticism you may have to overcome and one way to do that is let them see your face. Use online video and you have an advantage over your competitors when dealing with customers.
Successful marketing is all about establishing a relationship; and that is so much easier when they can see and hear you. You may be very comfortable online, but some people are still skeptical about doing business with you over the Internet and you need to persuade them to trust you before they will buy from you.
These are my top 12 direct marketing principles you can use to make sure your Internet marketing really works for you:
1. History.
People want to know you are not going to disappear overnight so if you’ve been in business for any length of time then this will add credibility to you and your offers.
2. Statistics.
Use genuine statistics to give you more credibility by listing number of customers served, money saved, profits made, and so on.
3. Testimonials
I can’t overestimate the importance of these so get them from your Customers and Clients saying how you and/or your products have helped them. Get experts in your market to validate and endorse your products and services and if appropriate get celebrities who you either ‘rent’ for your marketing, feature at your events or use by association.
4. Demonstrations.
With the use of online video and ‘how To’ DVDs it is very ease to show a demonstration of your product both on and offline. You can even demo an ebook by printing it out and talking through what it contains live on screen. Camtasia is free software that lets you make a screen capture video where you can demonstrate your website talking though the sales letter or giving a demo of how easy it is to download your ebook. If you are in a market that isn’t really familiar with online buying this works really well.
What better proof that your product or service works than by showing an example of before and after. Many markets and products lend themselves to this treatment and it is very effective.
In our own business we use video to show how to confirm emails when signing up to our email lists, when demonstrating how to use our Membership site and examples of results in a number of our ebook markets.
5. Credentials.
What credentials do you have in your market? They don’t have to be academic, but can awards, accomplishments, membership to organisations that are relevant to your market. Both I and Neil Travers my business partner are CIPD qualified which is a training qualification we attained while working at the Bank.
This is ‘proof’ of our ability to run workshops that are designed to aid the learning and intake and retaining of information by attendees and gives us increased credibility in their eyes.
6. Publicity.
Reprints of articles about you in the press, or your articles being published in the media that lend weight to your credibility as the expert or authority in your market are highly valuable to you. Show your market that you are in demand, and have status as an expert.
7. Celebrity Spokesperson.
To be used with caution. It can be effective but can also backfire when the market remembers the celebrity and the advert, but not what it was advertising.
8. Guarantee.
If you can’t guarantee the product you’re selling then find something else to sell that you can guarantee. To really make your potential customers feel safe to buy from you you need to offer an ironclad guarantee.
9. Accessibility.
On your website have your full contact detail if possible as this will give a big boost to your potential customer confidence in you and your company. Using just an email contact is the worst and an email, phone and address the best.
Never give a PO Box as your address as it immediately makes people suspicious.
10. The Personal Touch.
Being visible in the business to your customers is a confidence booster for them. Make it personal so you are a real individual, anecdotes about you and your business, pictures and videos all make your customer more comfortable as if they have already met you.
11. Make A Damaging Admission.
No matter how good your product is it will have a disadvantage somewhere. Admit it up front and honestly comment on this fact.
Answer Questions and objections up front and when a customer asks them via email or the phone. People can call our office throughout the week and email at any time with questions and that makes them feel safe to buy from us.
12. Excess.
Use a combination of as many of the examples above in your marketing! What may seem like overkill to you may not be enough to overcome some people’s skepticism!
FREE for you. The Internet Marketing Review is the UK’s longest running PRINTED Internet Marketing Newsletter. Just visit this special web page for more information: Internet Marketing Review

Being a full-time SEM (Search Engine Marketer) I have been conditioned like Pavlov’s dog (not a pretty picture) to jump every time Google twitches. Lately Google has been doing a lot of twitching. Specifically, the rather startling news from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa that Google has ditched Page-Rank from Webmaster Tools.

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on Page-Rank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” states Moskwa. “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.” (Source: WebProNews) Now, for SEO reasons or for ranking in Google’s index, Page-Rank has long been eunuchified by Google. However, even missing a few dangling bits, history has shown us, eunuchs still wheel tremendous power. Page-Rank is no different.

Regardless of what Google wants to happen, Page-Rank is still extremely important to anyone marketing on the web, especially if you’re selling SEO services or operating a web business. Try selling SEO services when that little green bar on your site is pointing to PR0 or worst yet, pointing to a solid gray bar. Obtaining a high PR7 or PR8 simply means more business and revenues… regardless of how Google is or is not using Page-Rank. People know how to count and they learned long ago, a ten is a lot more than a big fat zero. Placed against a PR1 site, a PR8 will win more respect in the eyes of potential clients and can produce enormous profits for the site owner and we won’t even mention the still widely practiced habit of selling links, which Google is desperately trying to stop. Total and full elimination of Page-Rank would be an honest start but it will still be an uphill, if not an unwinnable battle, for Google to fully eliminate link selling.

Even with my modest sites, I have turned down a small fortune by not selling text links on any of my sites. When I had a PR6 site instead of a PR4 – those link requests were nearly doubled. So one can easily understand Google’s position and the need to downplay Page-Rank, if they want to put even a small dent in all this link selling and buying, which is still running rampant on today’s web.

Page-Rank is Google’s creation, and unless they remove it fully from their system and the Google toolbar, then Page-Rank still Counts. Actually, in the whole scheme of marketing your website on the net, Page-Rank counts big time. And in more ways than one.

There are several reasons why you shouldn’t count Page-Rank out. For years Google has been downplaying the important of Page-Rank and states it’s only one of about 200 ranking factors which determines how Google ranks its index for keywords. Obtaining top organic rankings for popular lucrative keywords in Google simply means money in the bank. Actually, even a movement of only one or two places on those first page SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) can make a major difference to any online marketer’s bottom line.

Now while you can have a lower PR number and still rank above other higher PR pages for your chosen keywords, I have even had many times when my PR drops but my actual SERPs rankings in Google goes up, mainly due to building related relevant backlinks. So Page-Rank counts little towards your keyword rankings but it can’t be totally dismissed.

Mainly because, even if PR is just one ranking factor, in close competitive keyword battles (I am presently fighting tooth and nail for some very choice keywords) just one ranking factor such as high PR can make the difference of whether or not you get to the top spot. Big dogs are still jumping and for those of us who know how to count, getting a number one spot in Google makes all the difference in the world.

Not only because Google controls roughly 80% of all search engine traffic, but more importantly Google has established unmatched credibility and brand recognition in the eyes of potential customers visiting your site. Web users trust Google. Web users look to Google for guidance and direction. Web users believe what Google is telling them. In the online world, rightly or wrongly, perception is everything.

As an online marketer, I am completely amazed each day at the marketing power Google now commands with web surfers and with the general population. Google is king of online search and no other search engine even comes close to Google.

Page-Rank is Google’s ranking system, and in the eyes of those who notice these things, it still wheels tremendous influence and power. By default, Page-Rank is Google’s opinion of your site, and web users can count (at least to 10) and if Google believes people are still not counting when it comes to Page-Rank, then they are fully mistaken.

Titus Hoskins is a full-time professional online marketer who has numerous niche web sites. For the latest web marketing tools try: Internet Marketing Tools or here: Free Guides 2009 Titus Hoskins.

Your website’s ranking on search engines is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of dishonest web masters seeking to improve their link popularity by faking out search engines.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for “spam” pages and sites that have increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a search engines tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search engine’s index.

The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the “spam” net and tossed from a search engine’s index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment. But there are things you can do – and things you should be sure NOT to do – which will prevent this kind of misperception.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have actually labelled these links “bad neighbourhoods.”

You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighbourhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighbourhood. But you must check, and double-check, all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven’t linked to a bad neighbourhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to download the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are given a “Page rank” which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.

Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale. This is especially important when the scale is completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be difficult to recover from the infection.

There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale. These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.

Another evil trick that illicit web masters use to artificially boost their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of an opportunity to increase your search engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.

Some web masters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the keywords but made them the same colour as the background colour of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on a white background. You cannot see these words with the human eye – but the eye of search engine spider can spot them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it goes back and boosts that page’s link ranking.

Web masters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text – splat! the page is penalized.

The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background colour of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the gray text and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same colour to text as the background colour of the page – ever!

Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called “keyword stuffing.” It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses what is called “Key phrase Density” to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding as if you are stuttering – unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword is “renters insurance,” be sure you don’t use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.

The final potential risk factor is known as “cloaking.” To those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand. For the rest of you? – cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees is “cloaked” because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site’s search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page’s ranking to the top of the list.

It is natural that search engines have responded to this act of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as “page jacking.” This kind of shielding is unnecessary these days due to the use of “off page” elements, such as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.

To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind will put your website at great risk.

Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any appearance of artificially boosting your rankings.

Referrer logging is used to allow web servers and websites to identify where people are visiting them either for promotional or security purposes. You can find out which search engine they used to find your site and whether your customer has come from a ‘linked site’. It is basically the URL of the previous webpage from which your link was followed.

By default, most hosting accounts don’t include referrer logs but may be subscribed for an extra monthly fee. If your web host does not provide a graphic report of your log files, you can still view the referrer logs for your website by logging into the host server using free or low-cost FTP software, like these:
(links have been checked and are OK)

FTP Explorer:   http://www.ftpx.com/(costs around $40 but free trial available)
LogMeIn: https://secure.logmein.com/dmcq/103/support.asp (free trial available)
SmartFTP: http://www.smartftp.com/
FTP Voyager: http://www.ftpvoyager.com/
Filezilla: http://filezilla-project.org/ (the free one I use which is very good)
Ipswitch: http://www.ipswitch.com/ (which is a professional standard FTP solution which I also can recommend)

The log file is available on your web server which can be download into your computer later. You can use a log analysis tool, like those mentioned below, to create a graphic report from your log files so that the files are easier to understand.
(links have been checked and are OK)
Abacre Advanced Log Analyzer http://www.abacre.com/ala/
Referrer Soft http://www.softplatz.com/software/referrer/
Log Analyzer http://www.loganalyzer.net/

You can view the files using Word, Word Perfect, txt or WordPad files even if you don’t have the right tool. This information is very crucial to your business and marketing plans and is not advisable to neglect it.

In addition to identifying the search engine or linked site from where your visitor arrived, referrer logs can also tell you what keywords or keyword phrases your client used for searching.

As referrer information can sometimes violate privacy, some browsers allow the user to disable the sending of referrer information. Proxy and Firewall software can also filter out referrer information, to avoid leaking the location of private websites. This can result in other problems, as some servers block parts of their site to browsers that don’t send the right referrer information, in an attempt to prevent deep linking or unauthorized use of bandwidth. Some proxy software gives the top-level address of the target site itself as the referrer, which prevents these problems and still not divulging the user’s last visited site.

Since the referrer can easily be spoofed or faked, however, it is of limited use in this regard except on a casual basis.

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

A keyword is a word or phrase that a web user types into the web browser in order to search for a topic that she is interested in finding information about. The web search engines take this word or phrase and searches its indexed catalogue and returns to the web browser those items (websites) that contain relevant content to the user. There are sophisticated algorithms behind the search that eliminate junk but that’s basically it – a search engine carries out a rapid search through an indexed database. The trick as website owners is to get our websites into the presented lists as high up as possible for the web user to browse. There is a lot of evidence in general search usage that most users will only skim through at most one to two pages (20 presented items) to find the information they need – they satisfice and use the first presented data that will do. The same argument applies to paid click adverts as users will only browse one or two pages at most they will only see the top ten ads on the right of the screen on the first page. As the ads a placed based on the original keywords selected by the user there is stiff competition to get your ad onto the first presented page (an average rank of at less than ten).

So one needs to choose those keywords that are frequently searched and are in high demand – but not so high as being already used by countless other websites and competitors as these will be very expensive to bid for and can use up you budget at a rate of knots! This is actually a difficult task and will take some effort but fortunately there are a number of keyword research tools that can help you find them.

Apart from the Wordtracker which is a tool I use we have some more important research tools like the Overture, Google AdWords and SEO Book which I briefly review below.

Link to Word-Tracker: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Overture’s http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ keyword suggestion tool is free and much quicker to use than Word tracker – it seems you need an account to use this one now.

Although you have to get an account first – which as usual with the Yahoo small business website is a nightmare to work out – It works something like Wordtracker but without telling you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase. For example if you type ‘Computer’, the Overture search suggestion tool will tell you that during the last month the word ‘Computer’ was searched, say for example 400,000 times at Overture. Similarly ‘computer game’ was searched 309,850 times (I made the numbers up for illustration). Also, given one word it will generate all relevant combinations of that word based on actual searches done by people just as in all the other keyword tools. If the word you keyed is not a common search term then you will not get any results – it means that very few people have actually searched for that word during the last month into Overture.

The Google Keyword Tool generates potential keywords and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends. It is the major tool out there so well worth getting used to it.

Features of this tool include:

• Sorting the results of your desired keyword search by popularity, past performance history within the AdWords system, cost, and predicted ad position (based on your bid).
• Easy keyword manipulation where you can select a few keywords here and there or add them all at once.
• Searches for keywords present in any webpage URL specified by your search.
• More keyword results are generated based on regularly updated usage statistics database that helps you to get new keywords or phrases.

The external link to the keyword tool:

https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

The adding of the right keywords to your adword campaign is a snap your just have to have an account already in place – in the new user interface you can adapt and tune your campaign with a surprising degree of sophistication.

Another tool I occasionally use is ‘The SEO Book’ keyword research tool that is a very sophisticated resource that if you can see past the websites aggressive marketing is actually very good.

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

Type in a phrase or keyword and it will suggest a large number of related searches across all the main search engines. You can also link off into (say) Google and get the full information on a particular word – overall a great resource.

These software tools are useful for researching how people search the web and then optimizing your own web pages so that more people find your web site – so they are essential parts of the webmasters tool kit and you need to learn them.