WHAT IS SEO? 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. 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. Designing a website so that it ranks highly in the search engines when someone searches for specific phrases related to the site. What is the Google Sandbox? The Google Sandbox is an alleged filter placed on new websites. The result is that a site does not receive good rankings for its most important keywords and keyword phrases. Even with good content, abundant incoming links and strong Google PageRank, a site is still adversely affected by the Sandbox effect. The Sandbox acts as a de facto probation for sites, possibly to discourage spam sites from rising quickly, getting banned, and repeating the process. The Google Sandbox is very similar to a new website being placed on probation, and kept lower than expected in searches, prior to being given full value for its incoming links and content. Doing a search for allinanchor:"keyword" is the best way to tell. My general rule is if you have go through and search page by page looking for your URL and find it then you are not in the sandbox. But if you get tired of looking and your fingers start to hurt and you quit before you find it then you are in the sandbox A site map (or sitemap) is a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site. Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don't have a sitemap. Cloaking - The hiding of page content. Involves providing one page for a search engine or directory and a different page for other user agents at the same URL. Legitimate method for stopping page thieves from stealing optimized pages, but frowned upon by some search engines resulting in penalties. At the same URL (web address) showing one page to a search engine spider and a different page to a human visitor. Cloaking describes the technique of serving a different page to a Search Engine bot/spider than what a human visitor sees. A robot is a program that automatically traverses the Web's hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced. 301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option. The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently". This is a special redirect used by most SEO Experts. This particular redirect forwards search engine rankings such as PageRank to the new page. The 302 redirection is described in RFC2616 "The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection might be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests". When a URL returns a 302 redirect, it means that the owner of this link asks users to continue to use this address as the redirect could be modified at some later time. OBL- outbound-link (OBL) is a link from your website to another website. A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two objects, commonly between two websites in order to ensure mutual traffic One way link is a term used among webmasters for link building methods. It is a Hyperlink that points to a website without any reciprocal link; thus the link goes "one way" in direction. SERP- Short for search engine results page, the Web page that a search engine returns with the results of its search. IBL - Inbound Link - A link from another page that links to your page. A link from a site outside of your site. A Grey Bar would be when the PageRank Bar (located on Google Toolbar) shows a grey color rather then White or green to indicate a pagerank value. A grey hat is a skilled hacker who sometimes acts legally and in good will and sometimes not. They are a hybrid between white and black hat hackers. They hack for no personal gain and do not have malicious intentions, but commit crimes. Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing, this is, for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page. Doorway pages are easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings. This page explains how these pages are delivered technically, and some of the problems they pose. (ex. http://www.tamba.co.uk/web-design-and-development/web-design-uk.htm) Mirror Site A Web site that is a replica of an already existing site, used to reduce network traffic (hits on a server) or improve the availability of the original site. Mirror sites are useful when the original site generates too much traffic for a single server to support. Mirror sites also increase the speed with which files or Web sites can be accessed: users can download files more quickly from a server that is geographically closer to them. A link farm post large amount of unrelated links on their site. Link farm sites and the links that the site provides are pretty much useless and not worth adding links to. (aka FFA - Free for All). Landing Page ~ An Entry page is the first page visible to web visitors and is also known as home page. Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender. PageRank is a function of Google that measures the quality of a website on a scale of 0 to10. The theory is that high quality sites receive a higher PageRank based on visitors and traffic your site receives. PageRank is a “voteâ€, by all the other pages on the internet. PageRank is essentially a score out of ten as to the “value†of your site in comparison to other websites on the Internet. It is based on two primary factors; the number of links you have pointing to your website and the value of the links pointing to your website. Real PR is updated all the time, but toolbar PR is generally updates every couple of months. But don't worry about it. It means almost nothing. some says every 3 months. Link popularity - A measure of the quantity and quality of sites that link to your site. Keyword prominence - measures how close the keyword appears of the beginning of the sentence. The closer to the beginning your targeted keyword appears, the higher the prominence will be, with a higher keyword prominence being favorable. Prominence applies to word in the title, web page body, META tags, Heading tags, and the alt-tags. Keyword proximity measures the closeness between two keywords. Keyword density - calculates the percentage of keyword words and phrases compared to the total of words in your web page body. .htaccess htaccess is the default name for a file that is used to indicate who can or cannot access the contents of a specific file directory from the Internet or an intranet. The .htaccess file is a configuration file that resides in a directory and indicates which users or groups of users can be allowed access to the files contained in that directory. KEI stand for Keyword Effectiveness Index, which measures how effective a keyword is for your web site. It compares the number of search for a keyword (popularity) with the number of search results (competitiveness) to identify which keywords are the most effective for your campaign. The higher the KEI value the more popular the keywords are and the less emulation they have. So the better chance they can get into the top position. The KEI is calculated as follows: (count ^ 1/3 * eng_weight * pos_weight ) / 10,000 3 way linking An example of 3-way linking is when a person owns two Web sites, and uses one of the Web sites to offer link exchanges, in an attempt to build up the popularity of the other. In doing so, he or she adds a link to your site on the link exchange Web site, and asks in return that you link to the main site being promoted. LSA - LATENT SYMANTEC ANALYSIS LSI is a methodology involving statistical probability and correlation that helps deducing the semantic distance between words. It’s obviously a complex methodology but can be easily applied to understand the relation between certain words in a paragraph or in a document. This methodology is being used while indexing a page in the search engine’s database.s. LSA / LSI websites are constructed with the specific intention of taking away the top rankings of ordinary web sites. These new sites are ruthlessly efficient at bumping “ordinary†sites out of the top slots for a very wide range of search phrases. Who is Matt Cutts? Matt Cutts works for the quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam. Cutts is one of the co-inventors listed upon one of the most well-known patent filings from Google, involving search engines and web spam, which was the first to publicly propose using historical data to identify link spam. Why does google put pages in the Supplemental Results? I’ve been able to identify 3 main reasons: 1. Duplicate Content - take someone elses content, get sent to Google Hell (Supplemental Results) 2. No Content - create pages with no content (remember the days of directories that would create 1 million pages with only 100 listing?) - empty pages get sent to Google Hell. 3. Orphaned web pages. Pages that no one links to, including yourself. Now, for the dirt - how to get out. 1. If you stole content - change it. 2. If there’s no content - add some. 3. If it’s orphaned - link to it. Spider - a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a "crawler" or a "bot." Spiders are typically programmed to visit sites that have been submitted by their owners as new or updated. A program that automatically fetches Web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It's called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Another term for these programs is webcrawler. Meta Tags - Tags included in an HTML document which are used by search engines to categorize a web site. They include information about keywords and description. Meta elements provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly, and are inserted into the HTML code in the format illustrated above, but are not visible to a user looking at the site. Are HTML tags that provide information describing the content of the pages a user will be viewing. Conversion Conversion refers to site traffic that follows through on the goal of the site (such as buying a product on-line, filling out a contact form, registering for a newsletter, etc.). Webmasters measure conversion to judge the effectiveness (and ROI) of PPC and other advertising campaigns. Effective conversion tracking requires the use of some scripting/cookies to track visitors actions within a website. Log file analysis is not sufficient for this purpose. I hope you like it....