Services / SEO Optimization

In the last few years the term SEO optimization was mentioned very often. What does it mean and can we use it in 'our case'?

SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization

This is a process of remaking a website, in a way, that the end result is an “optimized site”, which will achieve better positions it the search queries in the search engines (SERPs)

SEO process is a long and complicated technique which includes several basic directions:

• Choosing the right domain name, related with the service, company or whatever we want to offer with this website.
• The structure of the site should be done in such way, so the search engines won’t have any troubles crawling it.
• Very important thing is to choose mainly unique, qualitative and accurate content by lots of different approaches like the use of a dictionary of synonyms.
• The keywords which describe the site should be selected very wisely.
• Making the right connections with other sites related with your business in order to exchange links.
• Registration in search engines, directories, so on.
• Daily update of the content of the site.

Researches in the IT show, that over 86% from the traffic to the web sites are generated from online search engines, and only 14% from direct hits and advertisement with banners in other sites. A number of researches show, that because of the targeted traffic from the search engines, they generate 6 times more sales from the standard banner commercials. For all of this to have effect, the people who are looking for something have to find you on several keywords, which are related with what you offer and of course with the content of your website.

The biggest problem in the web space right now is that, if even a current website is very well designed and offer great product and services at competitive prices, if this site is not listed well in the search engines, nobody will now that it even exists.

The search engines send their bots called crawlers. They search the pages of your website and gather information from them. The content they “see” very often is different from the layout, that the user see when they open your site on their computers.

In the aspiration for the web sites to be more attractive for the users, the designers and the programmers “stuff” their sites with flash, javascript application and much more, which are not from the search engine’s favourite. At the end, the content of the site is not accessable for them, and from there this site will be very low indexed in the search results.

In other words when you type in keywords in the search engines site related with that site, even if you know which site you are looking for, it will be very difficult to find it, because this site may come out at position 1000+ depending on the competition, or it may even not be listed at all.

• Content - unique and updated almost daily, directly related with the themes of the site. Even if you have to buy content (which is common practice lately), if it’s not unique, it’s have to be retold with own words, so it will look unique for the search engines.
• Always add description to the links and images in your site. This is done with the tags title (for links) and alt (for images).
• Use navigation which structure is enough comprehensively, without superfluous effects.
• Use Google sitemap and urllist.txt for Yahoo!. This will save you lots of traffic towards your site and will keep the search engines up to date for any changes you’ve made recently.
• DON’T ADD your site directly to Google! The chance to get in their sandbox is very high. It’s just enough to have a link pointing your web site from any other website and Google will find you by all means.

As an indisputable leader in the search engines, Google are very careful of the quality of the results pages the customers get with their search queries and the keywords related with them. The employees of the company know, that for them to stay on top, their users have to be satisfied from the quality of the presented results and because of that allowing a website to be shown in a query for certain keywords without the information in this page to be qualitative enough and related with the search keywords is inadmissible.

To prevent poor and no corresponding content to be shown as part of the results, in the search engines are built scripts, looking for prohibited techniques for raising the PageRank which are used by many webmasters and SEO specialists. These are techniques for which your site can be suspended (banned ) by Google, the site’s PageRank to be drop down to zero or to lead to other more severe penalties, such as deleting from Google servers and a permanent ban on indexing site.

Here is a list of the most common user UNETHICAL optimization techniques :

Multiple URLs - The submission of many web addresses showing the same site or file to Google's index is prohibited because in this way, your site can take 2 or more of a total of 10 spots in the results (on page). An example is the giving a link http://my-site.bg/ and http://www.my-site.bg/index.php both addresses lead to the same page on the same site, but would be indexed as two separate.

Cloaking - Cloaking (also known as Doorway pages) is a technique in which you have two different pages, one optimized for search engine and the other is different and optimized for viewing by people. In other words, the search engine sees optimized page full of keywords, and the user can click on usually the only link on this page and he is forwarded to another page. Sometimes this is done automatically with the redirect tag. This is one of the most obvious ways to get a ban on your site.

Hidden text – Someone webmasters place hidden keywords to their web pages using hidden style or using the same color of the text, as the color of the page, such as white text on white background. This makes the text invisible to the people reading the page, but search engines can read it. In this way the webmaster can put a larger number of the same keywords, without this fact to be unnatural for the reader, and in the same time the search engines are deceived with more keywords and the sites get higher ranking.
Of course now this technique is very easy revealed from the search engines and therefore this is a fast and certain way for your page not to appear in the results of any search..

Hidden links – Hidden links. The number of pages that have put a link to your page has a direct effect on the positioning of your page in the list of results (and the PR of the page). Someone webmasters put links to their website, on sites that are made for their clients. Since not all customers agree to this, sometimes the webmasters hide links in the code or make 1-pixel picture with the color of the background and a link to their site from that picture and hide it somewhere on the page. It is clear that these links are not meant to attract visitors, but only to deceive search engines for the number of links to the designated site and because of that the hidden links are treated as hidden text - the site gets suspended.

Immediate keyword repeats – The reiteration of one keyword several times (3+) in a row is considered from most of the search engines for spam.

Link farms – The link farms are sites created with the purpose of generating links to your site with the goal of achieving higher PageRank. Free-For-All pages with links allowing you to put a link on their site for a link on your site to them, are often considered by Google for link farms, so be careful with the links you put on your website.
You can’t control the links from the other websites that point your domain, so incoming links will not harm you, but control your links to other websites and placing links to sites using forbidden techniques for optimization will affect you.

Spamming – Don’t send unwanted emails to your customers. This should be enough to avoid abuses from spamming.

Selling PR - The announcement of the fact that your site with high PageRank, agrees to sell links to other sites in order to increase their PR is prohibited. The sale of ads is completely acceptable, but not when it is made with the purpose of increasing the PR’s page of the advertised.

Multiple identical sites – For the PageRanking to be increased some webmasters create lots of pages with identical content and exchange links between them. This is not allowed.

Excessive links - Google recommends you to have no more than 100 links on a page. Placement of over 100 links will not lead to a ban by the search engines, but the PageRank page will be reduced, and all links after the 100 will be ignored and will not be indexed.

URL Redirect – the using of the redirect command leads to immediate ban of the site by Google. This is because some webmasters create a first page full of keywords that search engine index for a less than a second, the page get high rating and position it in the first results, but when the site is loaded after a second the visitor is transferred to another page that may not have nothing to do with the searched keywords. One of the brightest examples was the ban the official site of BMW from Google, just because of the use of this technique.

Refrain to use the techniques described above and will avoid ban from Google. The best way to achieve a high PR and positioning in the results is to stay of the side of the "good guys" .

A very important aspect in promoting a site is building a number of "important" links to it. As important we mean links which come from sites that are high valued from the search engines (for Google, this is the so-called PageRank).

When building a network of links, a large number of methods can be used. You don’t need the ads which you put in the net to be fully paid or the opposite. The variety is the most important thing, you shouldn’t stop to only one method of promotion and you must create your own marketing plan.

Here are some of the things that you can do to advertise your site and get the biggest possible amount of links to your site:

• Add the site to most sites and directories allowing that.
• Use programs that can automatically register your site in the major international directories, search engines and portals. Currently, on the market have many products of this kind, such as: WebCEO witch is free of use. This will provide you with over 200 links. (Note that these links won’t be of such great importance, because most probably will come from sites that have hundreds of links on any of their pages).
• Run press releases announcing the new site.
• Check which sites come out on the first page in Google on keywords on which you want to be and make them proposal to link exchange.
• Put links to your competitors and arrange the same to be done by them. Remove the links of those who do not agree to such an exchange.
• Create a video for your site and products and release it at youtube.com, metacafe.com, etc.
• Buy ads in popular sites.
• Avoid expensive sites with high traffic, a invest at several places in small amounts for a longer period of time.
• Find online business like yours and redeem their mailing list.
• Exchange products for ads.
• Find blogs related to the topic of your site and comment on articles published there. Be sure to put your sign on the bottom and include the address of your site there. Do this every few days, and try not to get tedious. Write only when there is something to say.
• Make a special page, urge your visitors to put a link / banner to your site and publish html codes on it . Include a link to this page in the automatic signature of your e-mails.
• Promote the site and its authors, and they'll do the same, placing links on their sites.
• Run RSS Feed and submit it in all RSS directories.
• Sponsor events, which will be monitored by the press.
• Give a discount to customers who placed a link to your site to their site.
• Run online ads containing the address of your site.
• Write in forums and remember to place your web address in your signature.
• Submit your site in DMOZ and hope to be approved.
• Run an article about your site in Wikipedia.

Most of these techniques require very little or no financial investment and will help you to build a solid base of links that later will affect your Google PageRank, but meanwhile will get many visitors to become your customers.

Every new website faces the big problem of getting the maximal quantity of visitors. Usually weeks pass by, even months before the new site is indexed from the search machines and before the internet user can find you. Until then the owner of the site have to find alternative sources of traffic – online and offline advertisement, free links, link exchange with other webmasters, and so on.

The constructions of big system of links to your web site is important not only for getting the customers to your web, but this is the only way for the search engines software to find and index it to its database. The quantity and quality of the websites that had publish links to you site are of vital importance when Google determines the PageRank of this website. The more links you have to your site the better. Every link counts as a single vote for your site, but the thing aren’t so simple. The system of Google and the others search engines is a little more complicated and it’s able to determine the quality of the sites that published your link, the count of the links toward external pages from these sites, and of course their PageRank.

It’s much better to be linked from a site with PageRank – 9, then from 10 sites with PageRank – 0. If the site that “recommend” you has 100 links to other pages, it’s obvious that you page is not very important. And at last, it is also very important the type of page which “recommends” you. If you are in the real estate business, and a site which have nothing to do with real estate recommends you, for example a hardware store, this link won’t contribute much for getting better PageRank and you won’t be positioned very well in the results of the search engines. And the opposite case, if your site for real estate business is “recommended” from 10 top sites fro real estate, it is obvious that your site is very important in that sphere. That way you have greater chance to be positioned better in the Google search results when the users input keywords relevant with real estate.

If you have a chance to create free links on other sites, don’t hesitate and create as much as you can, no matter of their quality, it will still be on some help. But if you have to pay for links, try to buy links from web sites with lots of traffic or smaller sites with the same or similar subject as your site and high PageRank, which don’t have a lot of links to external pages, so your site will get maximal benefit for the matter of optimization.

When you publish links try to publish important keywords as links. Use words that you would like to come out on search results for your business.

If you can choose links in the top part of the page. Information and links situated there are thought to be more important then the information in the bottom part.