SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)

No matter how much you spend on it, a web site is invisible until somebody links to it”

Eric Ward, Link Marketing Consultant

If the first phase of the internet was getting people online and the second phase of the internet was helping people navigate… the third phase of the internet is about producing great information where people can actually spend more time engaged with information, engaged with brands, engaged with writers and things they care about. That's where we believe the next wave of the internet is going.

– Jeff Levick, president, global advertising and strategy, AOL

Content Doesn’t Win. Optimized Content Wins” – Li Evans, search marketing guru

SEO is a marketing function for sure, but it needs to be baked into a product, not slapped on like icing after the cake is baked.” - Duane Forrester, author and conference speaker

Search Engine Optimisation is the most basic and important strategy with a very high potential to generate leads for a company’s products and services in a sustainable manner. SEO is a ‘Keyword Centric’ Activity and has to be used always in conjunction with specific keywords for a given website and its pages.  High ranking on the SERPs will lead to a high level of traffic to the landing pages in the site which increase the chance of getting more and more leads.

Search engine Optimisation is a four way process resulting out of the efforts of webmasters, their clients, the Search engines and a number of  Webmasters interact with a number of content platforms external to the site for sending links and traffic to the web sites for which SEO is being done.

Definition

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search,news search and industry-specific vertical search engine.. Wikipedia.

It must be understood very clearly that, Search Engine Optimisation involves driving traffic to the optimized ‘Landing Page’ of a website for a given ‘Keyword’. Landing page is generally different from the ‘Home Page’ which contains a number of keywords selected for the overall site.

Search engine optimization affects only organic search results, not paid or "sponsored" results such as Google AdWords.

History

According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase "search engine optimization" probably came into use in 1997.[3] The first documented use of the term Search Engine Optimization was John Audette and his company Multimedia Marketing Group as documented by a web page from the MMG site from August, 1997.

Understanding Search operation from point of view of SEO:

What Document Features Make a Good Match to a Query?

• Term frequency: How frequently a query term appears in a document is one of the most obvious ways of determining a document's relevance to a query. While most often true, several situations can undermine this premise. First, many words have multiple meanings — they are polysemous. Think of words like "pool" or "fire." Many of the non-relevant documents presented to users result from matching the right word, but with the wrong meaning.

Also, in a collection of documents in a particular domain, such as education, common query terms such as "education" or "teaching" are so common and occur so frequently that an engine's ability to distinguish the relevant from the non-relevant in a collection declines sharply. Search engines that don't use a tf/idf weighting algorithm do not appropriately down-weight the overly frequent terms, nor are higher weights assigned to appropriate distinguishing (and less frequently-occurring) terms, e.g., "early-childhood."

• Location of terms: Many search engines give preference to words found in the title or lead paragraph or in the metadata of a document. Some studies show that the location — in which a term occurs in a document or on a page — indicates its significance to the document. Terms occurring in the title of a document or page that match a query term are therefore frequently weighted more heavily than terms occurring in the body of the document. Similarly, query terms occurring in section headings or the first paragraph of a document may be more likely to be relevant.

• Link analysis: Web-based search engines have introduced one dramatically different feature for weighting and ranking pages. Link analysis works somewhat like bibliographic citation practices, such as those used by Science Citation Index. Link analysis is based on how well-connected each page is, as defined by Hubs and Authorities, where Hub documents link to large numbers of other pages (out-links), and Authority documents are those referred to by many other pages, or have a high number of "in-links" (J. Kleinberg, "Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment," Proceedings of the 9th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms. 1998,pp. 668-77).

• Popularity : Google and several other search engines add popularity to link analysis to help determine the relevance or value of pages. Popularity utilizes data on the frequency with which a page is chosen by all users as a means of predicting relevance. While popularity is a good indicator at times, it assumes that the underlying information need remains the same.

• Date of Publication: Some search engines assume that the more recent the information is, the more likely that it will be useful or relevant to the user. The engines therefore present results beginning with the most recent to the less current.

• Length : While length per se does not necessarily predict relevance, it is a factor when used to compute the relative merit of similar pages. So, in a choice between two documents both containing the same query terms, the document that contains a proportionately higher occurrence of the term relative to the length of the document is assumed more likely to be relevant.

• Proximity of query terms : When the terms in a query occur near to each other within a document, it is more likely that the document is relevant to the query than if the terms occur at greater distance. While some search engines do not recognize phrases per se in queries, some search engines clearly rank documents in results higher if the query terms occur adjacent to one another or in closer proximity, as compared to documents in which the terms occur at a distance.

• Proper nouns sometimes have higher weights, since so many searches are performed on people, places, or things. While this may be useful, if the search engine assumes that you are searching for a name instead of the same word as a normal everyday term, then the search results may be peculiarly skewed. Imagine getting information on "Madonna," the rock star, when you were looking for pictures of madonnas for an art history class.

Reproduced from : How a Search Engine Works

by Elizabeth Liddy • Director of the Center for Natural Language Processing

Professor, School of Information Studies • Syracuse University

Elizabeth Liddy's e-mail address is liddy@mailbox.syr.edu.

Source: http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/may01/liddy.htm

How is SEO done?

Given that Search engines use over 200 parameters to populate the SERPs for different queries,

SEO has to be a dynamic and diligent activity that tracks the dynamic nature of Search engine behavior  to improve the ranking of the landing pages of the websites.

Search Engine optimization is a methodical, multipronged activity. It consists in-page and off-page activites aimed at building credibility of the website and increasing traffic to the landing pages of the website resulting in its attaining top rank in  the SERPs of all the search engines.

The steps include:

A.      Submit the web site and its urls to Search Engines for storing and indexing purpose.

B.      Research to identify ‘Keywords’ to appropriately describe the nature of business and target the right group of customers at the same time having a favourable position w.r.t the competition.

C.      In-site optimization by using appropriate content in all pages, headers for each page, provide a smooth navigation and internal linking structure for a smooth search engine crawling operation and user experience,

D.      Off page optimization by creating a number of backlinks and inbound traffic from across the blog through appropriate presence in  blogs, forum, social media platforms with positive reference,  other websites and portals.

Google, the No. 1 Search Engine in the world, has suggested guidelines and Best practices to enable the sites rank high on the Search engine result Pages. They can be seen at,http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en.

A.      Submitting Web Page url to Search Engines:

It is not necessary to ask list the Urls of our website to the search engines as the search engines periodically use software called searchbots ( Google uses ‘Spider’) to periodically

crawl  the web, store and index all the pages across the web.

However in case we do wish to submit the urls to the search engines, we can log onto the relevant pages of the search engines and submit the same.

An example of the activities required to submit the urls to Google  are given below:

On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.

On the Dashboard, under Diagnostics, click Fetch as Googlebot.

In the text box, type the path to the page you want to check.

In the dropdown list, select Web. (You can select another type of page, but currently we only accept submissions for our Web Search index.)

Click Fetch. Google will fetch the URL you requested. It may take up to 10 or 15 minutes for Fetch status to be updated.

Once you see a Fetch status of "Successful", click Submit to Index, and then click one of the following:

To submit the individual URL to Google's index, select URL and click Submit. You can submit up to 50 URLs a week in this way.

To submit the URL and all pages linked from it, click URL and all linked pages. You can submit up to 10 of these requests a month.

B.      Researching Keywords relevant to the business for the purpose of SEO:

Using appropriate tools like the Google’s Keyword tool, https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer, we should come out with appropriate keywords

most relevant to describe the business we are operating. While it is possible to come out with any many keywords or keyword groups as possible, it is important to focus our efforts & resources on a limited number of them that we could be identified strongly and end up owning. For example,

Hubspot, one of the finest Social Media Marketing companies, has identified a keyword. Inbound Marketing’ to best describe its activities and has used it very strongly to promote its business.

It is very important to  research competition, relevant businesses and related businesses to come out with an exhaustive list of Keywords that could be used for optimization of the web pages.

Google’s advance Search operators are useful search queries that can help us determine our competitive environment and assess the level and degree of work that an SEO campaign requires. Some  of the important operators are listed below:

1. Site:www.website.com will show you the number of pages in your website that are indexed by Google. This can check for variation between the number of pages submitted and the number of pages indexed.

2. allinurl:www.webpage.com query. Google will return the page in its results page if it is indexed or show no results if it isn’t.

3. Link:www.yourpage.com will display all sites linking to your webpage.  This can be used for finding links to yourpage as well as to those of competition. In case we  find that Competition is getting more links than our site, we can undertake activities to get links from those sites which are linking to competition and not to our site.

4. allinanchor:

Allinanchor:keyword returns all the pages/sites that have links from other pages that contain those specific keywords in link anchor text.

5 allintitle:

Allintitle:keyword returns a list of websites that contain the keyword in its title tag.

6. allintext:

Allintext:keyword returns webpages that contain that particular keyword in the body of the page.

7. cache:

Cache:www.webpage.com returns the version of the last crawled web page. Cache:www.webpage.com keyword list the pages in the cached content with keywords highlighted.

 8. info:

Info:www.webpage.com returns details like, latest cache date, other similar web pages, web pages that link to your site, web pages within the site and web pages containing the your domain name.

C.      On page Optimisation:

Some of the keys factors to be considered  while creating Optimised web pages are as follows:

i.                     Page content:

The text on the anchor page should not be very informative to the page visitor, but also should highlight the usage of the Keywords that  it is focusing on. The search engine responds to the Keyword density in the page to list the page in the SERP.  While it is important to contain a good representation of the keywords and phrases  in the relevant areas of the text, it should not result in a bad experience to the web surfer due to overusage.

ii.                     Unique and accurate Page tags for every page:

The <title> tag describes to the Search engine, what the page stands for. Hence it is important to give a unique page title for each page of the site an. It is placed in the <Head> tag of the HTML. The <title> tag should  contain the Keyword/phrase that is reflected in the body of the anchor text of the page.

iii.                  Meta Tag :

Meta tags contain the description of the Page as submitted to the Search engines and are shown on the SERP along with the Url. Meta tags are not used by SERPs for indexing and ranking the web pages, but are useful to the websurfer in choosing to click on the url, most relevant to their search. Hence it should summarize the page content with a good sprinkling of the Keyword and phrases. Every page should have its own description reflecting the Keyword it is focused on and also the activity that it is expected to reflect.

iv.                   Headlines for Anchor text:

The headlines of the text should be well laid out and should reflect the text accurately. Bold headlines are given more prominence by the Search Engines.

They should have a good representation of the most important Keywords and phrases the page  aims to attract traffic for.

v.                   Title and Alt attributes:

Accurately summarise the various paragraphs in the anchor text of the page with appropriate Keyword oriented titles. Also, as the Search engine robots will not be able to register the images and index them, it is important to label the images and videos with appropriate tiels using the Alt attribute to have a better chance of getting indexed by the Search engine robot.

            

vi.                  Url Structure & Breadcrumb navigation:

Use words in Urls and create a simple directory structure. Use Bread crumbs to describe the position of the page with respect to the overall site layout, giving a clear sense of positioning the site visitor as to where he is present and what are his options in the site.

Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trail is a navigation aid used in user interfaces. It allows users to keep track of their locations within programs or documents. The term comes from the trail of breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in the popular fairytale.

 Breadcrumbs typically appear horizontally across the top of a web page, usually below title bars or headers. They provide links back to each previous page the user navigated through to get to the current page or—in hierarchical site structures—the parent pages of the current one. Breadcrumbs provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting or entry point. A greater-than sign (>) often serves as hierarchy separator, although designers may use other glyphs (such as » or ›), as well as various graphical treatments.

Typical breadcrumbs look like this:

Home page > Section page > Subsection page

( Source: Wikipedia.)

vii.                 Use robot.txt, nofollow, sitemap:

Sitemaps allow the searchbots to smoothly navigate across the site and index the pages there in. However, in case we do not want the searchbots, not to crawl and index any page, we need to use the robot.txt file. Robot.txt file is generally placed in the Main directors so that the robots do not miss them.

Nofollow" provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines "Don't follow links on this page" or "Don't follow this specific link."

Originally, the nofollow attribute appeared in the page-level meta tag, and instructed search engines not to follow (i.e., crawl) any outgoing links on the page. For example:

 <meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />

Nofollow is used when you want to refer to a  text on a hyperlink, but do not want to passon your reputation to the referred website as this may result in the Page rank of your site.

viii.               Smooth flowing site navigation:

A naturally flowing site hierarchy with a breadcrumb navigation with simple text being used for navigation will lead to a much better rating by the Search engines.

Drop down menus, animations, untitled graphics do not score well with the Search Engines and most of the times they are not followed by the search engines.

ix.                   Continuous up-dation of the website:

Search engines give higher weightage to sites with continuous updation and fresh content. Hence for better rank on the SERPs, we should update the site regularly.

       By following the above points, we can significantly improve the chances of being ranked highly on the SERPs of any search engine.

Off Page Optimisation:

Off Page optimization involves driving organic traffic to the landing pages of the website through a number of online and offline activities. Here, we will consider the online activities aimed at generating traffic to the webpages resulting in a higher rank on the SERPs.

HomeBases and Outposts:

Off page SEO activity can be well understood if we understand the concept of HomeBases and Outposts, enunciated by Chris Brogan and later on propogated by Darren Rowse of Problogger.

For any company, present on the web, the places that belong to itself and on which it has complete control are called ‘Home bases’. This is typically, the web site of the company and any other associated websites or sub-sites owned by it.

At the same time the company also has online presence on a number of other platforms not owned by it, but has got access as a member. For example, companies have presence in the form of accounts,  pages or groups in social media sites like Facebook, Google +, Twitter, Linkedin, You tube, Digg, Stumbleupon, Warrior Forum etc.

These are called Outposts. In these outposts, one can create a profile, load and update content, create a social persona, develop relationships, conduct events and activities to engage with prospective clients and customers etc.

For example the Home Base and Outposts for Problogger.net could be represented as follows:

The outposts are the place

The companies have the option of connecting the Home bases and Outposts and creating a 2 way interactions between the two, that will lead to flow of information, links, updates, traffic etc., that will lead to lot of buzz around its online properties. This will further result in increased traffic to its web pages thus resulting in a higher rank on the SERPs through the backlinks thus created.

There are a number of ways in which the backlinks to a landing page can be increased.

They are:

A.      Purchasing Back links: This involves short term tie-up with a third part operator who has runs or has a tie-up with a number of portals and offers to boost the site traffic by inserting links to the website in all  his controlled web properties. This is the most dangerous of all the methods used to increase the back links and is taken very seriously by the search engines. If found to be engaged in such a practice, the search engines drop the url from their listing.

B.      Exchanging links with other pages:

This is another common  SEO activity which is resorted to by a number of web master. Generally, the search bots do not give weightage to reciprocal links and hence these links do not result in an increase in the rank on the SERPs.

C.      Getting Natural, Balanced and Long lasting Links:

This is the most preferred activity for getting links from relevant and appropriate sources across the web.

For this purpose, research has to be done to find  credible sources of links that are relevant to the targeted landing pages. Studying the links obtained by competitor sites is also a good tactic to get the list of potential back linking sites. Blogs, Forums, Message Boards, Local listings, websites of industry associations, related governmental departments and associations offer a good pool of sources for generating in bound links.

Links from highly credible sources like .edu, .gov which represent government and educational bodies are considered highly credible and lead to a much higher position on the SERPs.

Higher the authority , trust and credibility and Page Rank of the backlinking page, higher is the value of the same in the eyes of the search engine.

For the purpose of ranking high on the SERPs, search engines consider not only the number of links directed at  our landing page, but also the authority of the landing page as reflected by the trustworthiness, duration of existence, consistency, non reciprocal nature and the overall position of the referring page with respect to the other pages in the web.

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The position of a web page with reference to the overall web environment is determined by its Page Rank as enunciated by the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

Symbolic interpretation of Page Rank:

In real world, all the citizens of a country look up to their leaders. For example, all the citizens of India look up to Mr Manmohan singh, their Prime Minister. Prime Minister’ position in Inda is equivalent to a highest ranked Web page in the Web world. If Prime Minister of India were to vote for a person for his competence, that would be of highest value, compared to the combined value of all the citizens of India. Similarly,  in the internet world, the value of being linked from of  a page of higher rank with lower number of links is much higher than a page with a lower rank, value of which is further diluted by the number of links it refers to.

Page Rank of a given page is directly proportional to the sum of page ranks of all the pages linking to it from across the web. While more the links connecting to a page improve its ranking, links that are going out from the page dilute its ranking.

Once the target websites or blogs are identified, appropriate strategy should be followed to make our presence the felt in these areas to create baklinks.

Some of the strategies are outlined below:

a.       Participate & comment in a blog, community forums, Yahoo answers etc. Offer expertise, answer questions and provide the url link of the landing page for further discussion.

If you make sense and manage to convince other of your authority in the subject and your genuinity, a number of members of the blog will link back to the page mentioned creating a strong source of back links.

b.        Create content, presentations, slide shows, articles about your company, products, industry reports, best practices and other useful suggestions relevant to your target audience and distribute it freely in various forums in the web and social bookmarking sites.

Some of the most preferred platforms are, Youtube, Technorati, Scribd, Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Kaboodle, Warrior forum, Yahoo buzz,  Clipmarks, Propeller and a number of other such forums. Another important tactic is to hire content writers to keep modifying your content in a number of ways and redistribute them.

These are crawled intensively by the Search Engine Bots and create a tremendous source of Backlinks for your Landing page.

c.        Create a corporate blog and also give away free content on your web site and promote this on the various  social media platforms, RSS feeds, blog comments etc. This will not only lead to a huge back link creation but also as the corporate blog is updated frequently will result in the Search bots visiting your site frequently and provide a chance to improve SERP ranking continuously.

d.       Create your  Profile in Social media websites like Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube andprvide regular updates about your corporate activity. This will lead to a continuous flow of traffic to your page from all those linked to you as they check back to get more details of the updates at your end.

e.        List your business in Local business listings and online classifieds:

A number of prospective customers are surfing the web sites daily to check for providers of products, services, consultancy etc for their needs and being present in such online classified sites increases the number of backlinks to your landing page when they meet the surfer’s criteria.

f.         Create continuous stream of Press releases about your company and your activites and release in online media thus creating a curiosity from those interested in the news to link back to your site from various online news channels.

These steps, if done in a systematic manner will result in a significant boost to the ranking of your landing pages on the SERP.

Optimising for Mobile Phones:

  

Search for [baseball cards] on Google’s desktop search.

Search for [baseball cards] on Google’s mobile search

Mobile search results are built for mobile devices and are different from "standard" desktop results.  Source: Search Engine Optimisation- Starter’s guide by Google.

With the advent of 3G and increased data speeds on the mobile devices there has been a significant shift in the internet access happening onto mobile devices instead of Personal computers.

Mobile sites not only use a different format from normal desktop sites, but the management methods and expertise required are also quite different

As a lot of information Search is happening on the mobile devices, Google has issued guidelines to webmasters for optimizing content accessed over the mobile phones.

For better ranking by the search engines, it is important to have a mobile specific version of the website and this should not be a duplicate of the actual web site  developed for the standard PCs.

Mobile sites are best built on HTML5 with lower emphasis on Flash based animations and also smaller images with shortented ALT tags a compact and readable presentation on the small screens of these devises.

For SEO on mobile devices, Google offers advanced Keyword options that reflect the popularity of the Keywords used for  Mobile based Search.

Once the mobile adapted site is created, the same can be submitted to the search engines for indexing purposes. For this, care should be taken in the program that the mobile site allows the Google searchbot for mobile, namely ‘ Googlebot-Mobile’ or any other search engine programs of are allowed access on the device.

It is important to ensure that the url for the mobile site is recongnisabel by the Search Bots by ensuring that  your mobile-friendly URLs' DTD declaration is in an appropriate mobile format such as XHTML Mobile or Compact HTML (3).

When the mobile users or the searchbots visit  the website, they should be redirected to the mobile friendly version of the site, Care has to be taken to ensure that there is a one to one matching between the pages of the desktop and mobile versions of the sites to ensure a positive user experience, boosting search engine rankings.

By developing a Keyword focused web site specifically taking into account the limitations of the small screen devices, it is possible to get top ranking on the mobile SERPs.

Video Search Engine Optimisation:

Fig: Presence of Videos in General search and Video search for the same topic on Google.

In 2007, Google, the promoter of Youtube, the largest video sharing platform in the world, announced the modification of the SERPs to include images and videos. Now the SERPs contain links to pages with images and videos and it has become imperative for the websites to optimize their page  containing images ad videos to influence click through rates.

With over 30000 hours of videos added to Youtube every day and over 12 million hours every year, the importance of optimizing the web sites with video content has been increasing rapidly.

By optimizing the landing pages with video content it is possible to jump quickly to the top of SERPs.

The videos made by the company can be posted in your own site or on video sharing platforms like Youtube, Metacafe, Blogs etc

Optimizing  the videos posted on the video sharing sites with appropriate title tags, description and video transcripts for targeted keywords that accurately describes the content with in the video, will enable the users to find the videos and enhance the user experience, the real benefit of the videos inimproving the traffic rank on the SERPs could accrue only when the video is posted on the landing page of the site and traffic is driven to it.

The following tactics are used in Video SEO:

a.       Create a number of high quality videos  to promote the products and serviced of the company. Also migrate offline videos created at the time of corporate events, advertisement campaigns, training programs and demos  for online presentation through the web site as well as  channels in the video sharing sites. Create demo videos of short duration and post them in blogs and video sharing sites.

All the original video should be branded with a watermark to ensure that, even if they are played in someother sites, benefit will be accrued to the creator.

b.       Take care to ensure that the videos are compatible with multiple player formats and are also compatible with mobile devices.

c.        Provide easy to relate file names that accurately describe the contents of the video and create appropriate description tags stuffed with keywords. Encode te video with meta tags for prper description.Anchor text on the video page should be stuffed with Keywords to attract the attention of the Search engines. For the purpose of Keyword research, YahooBuzz has been a preferred tool  The term ‘video’ should be generously used in the Keyword groups.

d.       Create a Video Site map that will enable the Search engine spiders to navigate smoothly and comprehensively to index all relevant pages. Search engines tend to crawl the video links with sitemaps more frequently to get regular updates of new videos added.

e.        Encourage the visitors and traffic viewing the videos to share the same with their friends and contacts freely.

f.        Provide backlink to the landing page from the social media sites to the landing page for watching complete video or to get more details about purchasing the same. The landing page should be stuffed with relevant keyword describing the content.

g.        As the Search engines cannot make out what is contained in the video, it will be beneficial to provide the transcript of the video with appropriate reference to the Keywords which will enable the Search engines to find them quickly and rank them on top of the SERPs.

h.       Submit the optimized video page links  to both the video search engines as well as the content search engines as this will increase the opportunity to attract traffic from both the searches. The listing in both the SERPs will result in a much higher traffic and a overall improvement in the ranking of the landing page in the SERPs.

i.         Create RSS Feeds  that will help the information of updated videos spread rapidly across the web when other sites link to your RSS feeds in their readers or websites. This will also help in boosting the backlinks and lead to a higher Search Engine ranking.

Tools

There are  a number of Tools that SEO professionals & Webmasters routinely use to get cracking on the SEO activity.

The most prominent ones are, Alexa Rank, Woo Rank and SEO Tool bar.

While Page Rank  is used by the Search engines to rank pages, SEO professionals use a derivative of the Page Rank, namely the Tool Bar Page Rank, a number between 1 & 10 to understand the authority of the website from which Back links will be more valuable.

Of the over 50 million websites indexed by the search engines, Google and Face Book have the best Tool Bar Page Rank of 10/10 indicating highest authority in the web world. Correspondingly, they rank 1^st and 2^nd (order keeps varying) among the global database of websites as calculated by Alexa Rank, the most referred tools for understanding the position of any indexed web site in the web world.

Alexa Traffic Rank:

Alexa site audit is the most respected tool to rank website traffic.

It provides details like traffic rank, page views, pageviews per user, daily reach, bounce rate, average time on site etc.,m which are very useful for a Search Engine Marketer to analyse the performance of the website, understand the current status and undertake appropriate steps to improve upon these paramaters and track changes.

A screen stat of Alexa’s statistics for www.google.com is provided below (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com ).

According to Alexa, Google  has been ranked the No.1 site in the world and is very closely followed in traffic by Facebook, which is threatening its top position very seriously.

WOORANK (http://www.woorank.com/ ):

Woorank is easily one of the finest free tools available for website analysis from the Search engine perspective.

The WooRank web tool analyses any submitted website for conformance to SEO (Search engine optimization) best practices and shows how it ranks against the competition. Its real-time report consisting of 50 criteria helps to instantly spot critical issues that could impact web traffic, usability and lead generation. WooRank also delivers short descriptions of identified problems and provide advice on how to fix them

It provides complete analysis of a website from the SEO perspective which will allow the SEO marketer to take appropriate steps and track his/her progress.

A screen shot for WOORANK for ‘Facebook’ is given below:

Woorank provides details on parameters pertaining to on Website compliance, offsite seo, usability and web site information. Interpretation of Woorank analysis for self and competitors’ sites provides a good road map for the SEO marketer.

SEO TOOL BAR:

The free SEO Tool bar add on  from Mozilla Firefox is a boon to any Internet Marketer.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/seo-toolbar-13927/

The SEO Toolbar is fully customizable. You can change its location easily from the options menu and even move it down on to the statusbar. There are several different views available, including icons and text, icons only or page ranks only (PageRank, Alexa Rank, PI Rank, Compete Rank and SEMRush). You can even hide ranks you don't wish to see.

Server header view and search engine view are handy tools for any web developer or SEO. Server header view will help you identify any security risks or issues with your webserver. Search engine view can be used to help optimize your webpages for search engines.

The toolbar includes handy shortcuts to popular PPC Engines, SEO tools and forums, Keyword Research tools, and domain tools, including (just to name a few):

PPC Engines: Trellian Direct Search Network, Google Adsense, Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter, Yahoo, Ask.

SEO Tools / Keyword Research Tools: Competitive Intelligence, UrlTrends, Keyword Discovery,  Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool, Priority Submit, Alexa, PI Rank, SEO Toolkit.

Whois : Above.com, Moniker, Domain Tools, Register, Network Solutions, Planet Domain.

Registrars: Above.com, Moniker, Register.com, euroDNS.

Domain Parking: Above Parking Manger, Sedo, Parked,NameDrive

SEO Forums:  Addme.com, SEO News, Webmaster World, WebProWorld

The latest release (Version 1.3) adds some new features:

- Added Compete Rank,  Added SEMRush Rank & Added options to hide particular rank

These tools give the SEO marketer, a very good support to analyse the current status of the website, research competition do a SWOT analysis and take the landing pages most relevant to the business to top of charts , leading to a boost in Leads for New Business.

BlackHat SEO:

While  good SEO practices are aligned with the long term objectives of the companies on the web and are centred around creating good content, great websites and an amazing user experience, some practitioners undertake short term strategies to boost their rankings on the SERP pages.

Excessive Keyword stuffing, Link buying, creating door way pages (pages that are not seen by users, but are meant to trick the searchbots etc., are some such practices frowned upon by the Search engines as these come in the way of great user experience. It is better to avoid such short term tactics and focus on above the board activities for generating traffic. In case you require to get instant results, it is better to consider Search Engine Advertising using programs like Adwords and Microsoft Ad centre which we will discuss in the coming chapters.

For any queries or clarification, please contact, Srinivas M at ms@mastermentors.in