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The Super SEO Guidebook

TABLE OF CONTENTS

WELCOME TO THE SUPER SEO GUIDEBOOK! .................................... 8

SUBMITTING YOUR SITE TO THE SEARCH ENGINES ....................... 14

Site Maps ......................................................................................................... 15

Submission Software ......................................................................................... 15

If Budget Allows ................................................................................................ 16

Search Engine List ............................................................................................. 16

Directories ........................................................................................................ 16

DIRECTORIES, SEARCH ENGINES & TRAFFIC… ............................... 26

Dogpile ............................................................................................................ 37

Mamma.com ..................................................................................................... 38

A Search Engine Is Just A Tool ............................................................................ 38

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WHAT THE HECK IS AN ALGORITHM? ............................................. 40

Hypertext-Matching Analysis: .............................................................................. 42

The Algorithm Shuffle ........................................................................................ 43

GOOGLE Dance Tool .......................................................................................... 44

In case you are feeling lucky ............................................................................... 44

The multi-faceted Google Toolbar ........................................................................ 45

Pandora’s Box ................................................................................................... 45

Stock Quotes .................................................................................................... 45

Calculator ......................................................................................................... 46

Dictionary Definitions ......................................................................................... 46

File Types ......................................................................................................... 46

News Headlines ................................................................................................. 46

Advanced News Search ...................................................................................... 47

Similar Pages .................................................................................................... 47

Web Page Translation......................................................................................... 47

SafeSearch Filtering ........................................................................................... 47

Do’s ................................................................................................................. 49

Don’ts .............................................................................................................. 49

Google Answers ................................................................................................. 50

Google Groups .................................................................................................. 51

Google’s Image Search ...................................................................................... 51

Google’s Catalog Search ..................................................................................... 52

Froogle ............................................................................................................. 52

Values: ............................................................................................................ 55

Query-dependent factors include: ........................................................................ 56

Blanket policy on doorway pages and cloaking ...................................................... 57

Meta tags (Ask.com as an Example) .................................................................... 57

Keywords in the URL and file names .................................................................... 57

Keywords in the ALT tags ................................................................................... 57

Page Length ...................................................................................................... 57

Ask.com Search Features ................................................................................... 58

WHAT YOUR WEBSITE ABSOLUTELY NEEDS .................................... 74

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ROBOT.TXT MORE THAN A LITTLE USEFUL ...................................... 85

Some commonly excluded "stop words" ............................................................... 88

REGIONAL SEARCH ENGINES .......................................................... 92

Human Categorization ........................................................................................ 92

Domain Filtering ................................................................................................ 93

SPAMDEXING AND CLOAKING – TIME WASTERS ............................ 94

WEB HOSTING SERVICES AND DOMAIN NAMES .............................. 97

Always avoid free or very inexpensive .................................................................. 99

Giving YAHOO! Its Alphanumeric Due ................................................................. 101

This is the alphanumeric order: ......................................................................... 102

Influencing Click Popularity ............................................................................... 103

REGISTERING YOUR DOMAIN NAME ............................................. 104

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CHOOSING A HOST FOR YOUR WEB SITE ...................................... 106

Shared IP hosting ............................................................................................ 107

Downtime ....................................................................................................... 107

24 hour server back ups ................................................................................... 108

Other features include ...................................................................................... 109

SEARCH ENGINES MAY SEEM PICKY ............................................. 110

INCREASING YOUR SE RANK AND IMPROVING YOUR SEARCH

ENGINE POSITIONING ................................................................. 114

And What Is Link Popularity Again? .................................................................... 117

Some sites offer to run comparison .................................................................... 118

There’s Good And Bad Back Links ...................................................................... 119

Reciprocal Links .............................................................................................. 120

Outbound Links ............................................................................................... 120

Inbound Links (Also Know As Back Links) ........................................................... 121

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Yes there are more Meta Tags but… ................................................................... 127

RESEARCH TOOLS ......................................................................... 128

Keyword Density ............................................................................................. 130

Simple steps to check the density:..................................................................... 131

TRACK YOUR SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS LIKE A BLOODHOUND . 134

SECRET TOOLS TO HELP YOUR ACHIEVE & MAINTAIN HIGH SE

RANKINGS .................................................................................... 137

HOW TO FIND OUT HOW MUCH MONEY YOUR INVESTMENT IS

YIELDING ..................................................................................... 141

HYBRID PPC & SEO TACTICS ........................................................ 144

DoubleClick's DART .......................................................................................... 145

WebTrends from NetIQ ..................................................................................... 145

HitBox from WebSideStory ............................................................................... 146

Urchin ............................................................................................................ 146

RESOURCE SUMMARY ................................................................... 147

SEMPO’s mission ............................................................................................. 147

Alexa ............................................................................................................. 148

LinkPopularity.com .......................................................................................... 148

Tools from Marketleap ...................................................................................... 149

NetMechanic HTML Code checker ....................................................................... 149

OptiLink Link Reputation Analyzer ...................................................................... 149

PositionPro ..................................................................................................... 150

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Welcome To The

Super SEO Guidebook!

This course covers everything that you could ever want to know about getting high rankings in the search engines. Many courses only give you a

little bit of information and then try to sell you additional courses with the

“real secrets” in them. You’ll never have to worry about that with this

course.

If you aren’t familiar with what Search Engine Optimization is let’s break

that down so you understand it. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is

simply the act of manipulating the pages of your website to be easily

accessible by search engine spiders so they can be easily spidered and

indexed. A spider is a robot that search engines use to check millions of

web pages very quickly and sort them by relevance. A page is indexed when

it is spidered and deemed appropriate content to be placed in the search

engines results for people to click on.

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.

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It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the

prospective customers. When a topic is typed for search, nearly instantly,

the search engine will sift through the millions of pages it has indexed about

and present you with ones that match your topic. The searched matches are

also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Remember that a prospective customer will probably only look at the first 2-

3 listings in the search results. So it does matter where your website

appears in the search engine ranking.

Further, they all use one of the top 6-7 search engines and these search

engines attract more visitors to websites than anything else. So finally it all

depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your

site.

It is the Keywords that play an important role than any expensive online or

offline advertising of your website.

It is found by surveys that, when customers want to find a website for

information or to buy a product or service, they find their information in one

of the following ways:

or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.

reading in an article or e-zine/newsletter.

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Thus it’s obvious the most popular way to find a site, by search engine,

represents more than 90% of online users. In other words, only 10% of the

people looking for a website will use methods other than search engines.

All search engines employ a ranking algorithm and one of the main rules in a

(number of web pages linking to your site). When performed by a qualified,

experienced search engine optimization consultant, your site for high search

engine rankings really does work, unless you have a lot of money and can

afford to pay the expert. With better knowledge of search engines and how

they work, you can also do it on your own.

A search engine is the most effective tool that can bring a prospective

customer to your Company website. Millions of web visits are initiated daily

through one or the other search engine to locate information or sources of

supply. This is considered to be the most effective and targeted channel for

you as a website owner to acquire a hot lead. Businesses all the over the

world spend a huge sum on designing, building, maintaining and promoting

their websites.

Online advertising and marketing budgets have also soared. Relative to

these, the investment required for getting traffic through search engines is

much lower. However, as search engines have millions of pages in their

coverage, it is important to have a proper approach to using this channel

effectively.

The art and science of understanding how search engines identify pages that

are relevant to a query made by a visitor and designing marketing strategies

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based on this is called search engine optimization. Search engines offer the

most cost effective mechanism to acquire “real” and “live” business leads. It

is found that in most cases search engine optimization delivers better ROI

than other forms such as online advertisements, e-mail marketing and

newsletters, affiliate and pay per click advertising, and digital campaigns and

promotions.

Before you begin to develop your own strategy and implementation plan to

optimize your website for improved page ranking and more importantly

major objective of this initiative. Is it your objective to attract more visitors

to your site or convert more persons from being a visitor to a loyal

stakeholder in your business, (A customer)?

The dot com mania period showed a marked change in evaluating a website’s

success in terms of number of eyeballs that it could collect, without a

perspective as to what these eyeballs or site visits meant to the business. The

attitude was; “If we get enough visits, the money will come.” That has changed

now, and most companies realize getting new visitors and making them

RETURN visitors is what’s really critical to a business unit’s success. It is sticky

visitors, loyalty and ultimately the impact return customers have on its bottom

line.

Valuing a website in terms of what advertising it can attract and sustain is no

longer the benchmark or performance indicator; what is certainly more

existing customers.

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As search engines have several million pages that are available on the

world-wide web, it is necessary to use specialized techniques to match your

web page with the algorithms and ranking criteria that such engines use,

thereby improving the chance of catching the limited attention span of the

visitor.

The first step that advertisers and marketing professionals need to take to

apply optimization techniques to a website is to articulate the objective and

characterize the visitor, the desired visitor experience and outcome. The

optimization plan should evolve out of this.

The word optimization by itself suggests that the plan should balance the

initiative and the budget so as to get cost effective results. If the stakes are

high, it may sustain higher advertisement and paid listing options. How

much would you like to spend on this exercise? If the budget is limited, the

expensive options of several advertisements, linking programs, directory

listings will have to be forsaken and attention given to getting the best

results from limited but focused efforts. The key metrics to this program is

to assess the ROI it delivers: marketing dollars vis-à-vis measurable benefits

to the organization.

Search Engines provide you an effective vehicle for promotion of your

website. There are no doubt other channels available. ‘Directories’ is often

included in the generic term ‘search engines’ although they are distinct in

their characteristics and function.

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Advertisements through banner displays at popular and often visited sites

and “portals”, reciprocal links, affiliate links and programs that direct visitors

from one site to a targeted site (with a payment associated with such

arrangements) and publicity through other media are other well known

avenues of promotion. Mass email campaigns, publishing and distributing

internet newsletters, ‘permission marketing’ using list servers and internet

based marketing promotions including coupons and sweepstakes are other

forms of online advertising.

The key determinant is what value the initiative offers you in return for the

investment. Metrics are somewhat more difficult to establish for search

engine optimization compared to other direct forms of advertisement. Some

suggested measures for determining ROI are discussed in a later section.

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Submitting Your Site To The Search

Engines

This section will show you how to go about submitting your website to the

search engines and directories in the most efficient manner.

If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business

is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and

marketing is done by submitting to a search engine. No amount of press

release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will

achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.

Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to

hundreds of search engines which are but only false promises. The best way

to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it

yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search

engine companies and directories.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines, ensure your

website pages are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the

right key words, the right amount of keywords good graphics and pictures

with “Alt” description tags and the relevant spell and grammar checked

content. Don’t submit websites or web pages that are incomplete. While

submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your

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website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent,

including the name and contact information of your business. Preparation

will be discussed in more detail later.

Mere submission to search engine companies does not guarantee that your

site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there

are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite

sometime before they take up your site for review by human editors.

Site Maps

One important factor to remember while submitting a site is to include a site

map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots.

Search engines like ‘http://www.google.com’ hardly considers submissions

without sitemaps. (More on site maps in a later chapter.)

Submission Software

There are many online companies that accept search engine submission

services. You can choose to do it yourself with a software package and

service like this one:

(Free Trial Available)

http://www.webposition.com/order/trial.asp?WT.mc_id=google%3A%7Bifse

arch%3Asearch%7D%7Bifcontent%3Acontent%7D%3A%7Bcreative%7D%3

Atrial%3A%7Bkeyword%7D&WT.srch=1

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If Budget Allows

Or if you want professional help try the following sites:

http://www.addpro.com/professional_submission

http://www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.html

Don’t use the automatic submission services.

Here is a list of the most popular Search Engines and directory companies:

Search Engine List

Go.com/InfoSeek AltaVista

Google.com, HotBot

Excite.com/Webcrawler

Ask.com

Directories

AOL Search PositionTech

Lycos Open Directory

MSN, Yahoo!

LookSmart Snap

In addition to the above there are thousands of search engines and site

directory companies, where you can submit your website to as many

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companies as possible. The following links gives info on other search engines

and directories:

http://websearch.about.com/library/searchengine/blsearchenginesatoz.htm

http://websearch.about.com/library/tableofcontents/blsearchenginetableofco

ntents.htm

Free listing is available with some major search engines such as Google,

AltaVista, and Webcrawler. As stated earlier, even after submission of your

website, a listing is not guaranteed. Generally, it takes up to 2 to 3 months

to be listed after submission. A recent research concluded that the audience

potential for websites submitted through free search engines is about 39%.

Do not let that deter you. There are ways to get listed faster discussed later

in this course.

Some search engines charge a nominal fee for every URL submitted. You are

more likely to get favorable results by submitting your website to a search

engine with paid inclusion. AskJeeves, PositionTech, AOL, and LookSmart are

the most popular search engines in this category. Once you submit your

website with these Search Engines, your website is most likely to be listed

within a week. The Audience potential for paid search engines is 100%.

Search engines generally list pages of ten to twenty results per page. Most

search items will return thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of results.

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Obviously the key is to get listed among the top results if you expect to get

any appreciable traffic through your search engine results.

There are two methods of submitting your URL to Search Engines. One is to

use Search Engine Submission services such as “Submit it”, which is a part

of MSN Central. The fee for submitting URLs using this service ranges from

$79 to $299 per year. Another is to submit your URL by submitting it

individually to popular Search Engines and thus avoiding the fee charged by

submission services. The prevailing counsel is that manual submissions

should be made to the top five search engines or so and one could use

automatic submission services for the rest.

It is possible to submit your URL to search engines for free. At the same

time, you have to keep in mind that there are premium programs offered by

some search engines that assure listing or provide better positioning in

ranking. Some use of paid listing programs is recommended if you wish to

receive serious traffic on your website from the search engine. Paid Listing

Programs are explained later in this chapter.

Free submission could result in much lower traffic, a low rank, positioning

the results returned, and longer period of time before your website actually

shows up in the results returned by the search engine. (That is unless you

have a few tricks up your sleeve.) Also there is no guarantee that your

website would be included with these free services. To avoid these issues

some search engines offer “paid participation” that guarantees high traffic

and ranking for a fixed fee per year.

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Formulating a Search Engine submission budget is crucial. It should be such

that you have the best possible combination of free submission, paid

submission and paid placement programs for the absolute best results.

How much would you like to spend on this exercise? If the budget is limited,

options such as some of the paid programs, advertisements, expensive

directory listings will have to be forsaken and attention given to getting the

best results from limited but focused efforts.

The key is to strike a balance between free and paid programs that yield

maximum ROI. You should submit your website to all the free search

engines such as Google, AltaVista, and WebCrawler, at least one paid search

engine such as PositionTech.com ($89 for submission of 3 URLs), and Yahoo

Directory ($299 a year). Apart from these, you should think of submitting

your website to a couple of “paid participation” or “paid placement”

programs such as Google Adwords and Overture, which are discussed later.

Google is probably the most widely used web crawler search engine. One

way of letting Google automatically detect and include your web page URL is

as discussed in the above paragraph. Submission to Google through its free

listing program can be done using the Add URL form available at

http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Having mentioned that, there is no guarantee that Google would include a

web page submitted to it by either of the free methods. Also, it might take

as long as a month before Google lists your web pages.

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Google has advertising program called “Adwords” that offers you a

combination of paid listing and positioning of your pages in search results.

Paid listings in Google appear above and to the side of its regular results.

These are discussed in detail in the section on Paid Placement programs.

Google allows maximum 5 to 10 web pages from a website to be submitted

per day.

Other web crawler search engines with both free as well as paid submission

services are discussed below. The free submission method for these search

engines is very similar to those described in the case of Google.

To submit a homepage using Add URL, you would have to use one of

PositionTech’s partners. HotBot UK is recommended for this purpose.

The submission through the addurl feature is levied a penalty on ranking if

that is the only way the page has been crawled. If the same page gets

covered through normal crawling or through paid inclusion, the ranking

penalty is removed.

PositionTech has a paid submission program called “Search Submit” that

charges a fee of $39 a year for your homepage. More web pages can be

added for $25 per web page. After a year, if you do not renew the service,

PositionTech might drop your homepage. PositionTech’s partners sell this

program.

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PositionTech allows maximum 20 web pages from each website to be

submitted per day. PositionTech also provides Bulk Program wherein you can

add thousands of web pages at a time. A small fee is charged each time

someone clicks on your web page listing.

With this it might take up to six weeks until your web pages show up.

Fast Search’s paid submission service cannot be accessed directly by you. It

can be used through its partner Lycos. The fee for this service is $30 for one

year. Additional pages can be submitted at $12 per page.

Fast Search also provides Bulk Program wherein you can add thousands of

web pages at a time. A small fee is charged every time someone clicks on

your web page listing.

This is owned by Ask Jeeves (Ask.com), one of the popular search engines.

Like other engines, it has a paid submission program for a fee of $30 a year.

Additional pages can be submitted at $18 per page. Paid service can be

accessed at:

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Fortunately, there are ways to verify and whether your site has been listed

or not. This is described in the section on “verify and monitor listing”.

Directories are very popular and are widely used by people as a source of

information. Web crawler search engines may also have better chances of

finding your website if it is listed with any of these directories. Most of the

directories charge a fee for listing your website. Some sites such as Yahoo

offer free submission as well.

An important aspect of submitting your website to a directory is to have a 25

word or less description of the website. This allows the web crawler search

engines to efficiently find and include your website.

Yahoo and the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) are some of the most popular

directory services on the World Wide Web.

Yahoo provides two submission options: Free submission known as

“Standard” and paid submission known as “Yahoo Express”. The free

submission cannot be used for commercial websites. Also, with free

submission there is no guarantee that your website will be approved for

submission.

Submission of commercial websites can be done with Yahoo Express that has

a fee of $299 per year. Although a majority of websites are accepted in this

category, note that, paid submission also doesn’t guarantee acceptance of

your website. It only ensures an answer whether your site was accepted or

not. For non-commercial websites there is a one-time fee of $299.

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For submission of free non-commercial websites you will have to fill up a

submission form that is displayed once you click the “Suggest a Site” link at

the bottom of each category. In case of paid commercial websites you would

have to fill up the submission form that can be accessed at

http://add.yahoo.com/fast/add?+Business

Once your website is approved for submission, you can submit your website

by using the “Manage” link at the top of each of the categories.

Having your website listed with Open Directory Project (DMOZ) is essential.

It provides results to Google, AOL, Lycos and Netscape Search. Open

Directory doesn’t have a paid submission service. Commercial as well as

non-commercial websites can be submitted to Open Directory absolutely free

of cost. This, however, has its drawbacks.

There is no guarantee if and when your website will be approved for

submission. Having mentioned that, Open Directory does generate high

traffic for your website, once approved. Thus, submission to this directory is

worth the uncertainty involved.

Submission can be done by using the “Add URL” link at the top of each of

the categories. Generally, if your website is accepted, it would appear within

the directory in about three weeks’ time. If rejected, there is no limit to how

many times you can resubmit your website.

These are three most important Directories on the World Wide Web. Getting

your site listed on each of these is a must as it can lead to a significantly

large audience for your website.

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Yahoo requires that you submit the Title, Description, Your name and Email

for website submission, whereas Open Directory only require the Title and

Description of the website.

Yahoo allows a maximum submission for one category per website; Open

Directory allows a maximum submission for one category per URL.

There are currently hundreds of search engines out there, most of them are

not much more than an advanced FFA page. You can surely not submit your

site to each of these. The best strategy to follow is to use automated

submittal software as discussed earlier for the Search Engines that are less

popular, while hand submitting to the top 10 Search Engines.

Beware of the ads such as 'submit to the top 500 search engines for only

doesn’t take much time to manually submit to these top engines and your

$99 could better be spent on overture.com or buying ads in ezines or

whatever.

At the moment the top ten search sites - meaning both directories and

search engines account for just over 93% of all search engine traffic. The

other 6.something% is made up of hundreds of sites claiming to be search

engines. Even at that the 11th - 15th biggest search engines make up most

of that figure. So what are the search sites you need to concentrate on?

Some of the top search engines are discussed above. There are a few others

which are also quite popular. The following is a suggested list of search

engines and directories.

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Directories, Search Engines & Traffic…

Want to know the difference between a search engine and a directories and

why each is so important to your success? This section will give you all of

that information and more.

You would be using search engines so you know how they work from the

user perspective. From your own experience as a user, you also know that

only those results that list at the top of the heap are most likely to attract

you. It doesn’t amuse you to know that your search yielded 44316 results.

Perhaps even number 50 on your list will not get your custom or even your

attention. Thus you know that getting listed on the top or as near to the top

is crucial. Since most of the search engine traffic is free, you’ll usually find it

worth your time to learn a few tricks to maximize the results from your time

and effort. In the next section, you will see how search engine works – from

your perspective as a website owner.

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.

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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.

A Spider visits a web site, reads the content on the actual site, the site's

Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects to. 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.

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.

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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

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.

Most of the top-ranked search engines are crawler based search engines

while some may be based on human compiled directories. The people behind

the search engines want the same thing every webmaster wants - traffic to

their site. Since their content is mainly links to other sites, the thing for

them to do is to make their search engine bring up the most relevant sites

to the search query, and to display the best of these results first.

In order to accomplish this, they use a complex set of rules called

algorithms. When a search query is submitted at a search engine, sites are

determined to be relevant or not relevant to the search query according to

these algorithms, and then ranked in the order it calculates from these

algorithms to be the best matches first.

Search engines keep their algorithms secret and change them often in order

to prevent webmasters from manipulating their databases and dominating

search results. They also want to provide new sites at the top of the search

results on a regular basis rather than always having the same old sites show

up month after month.

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An important difference to realize is that search engines and directories are

not the same. Search engines use a spider to "crawl" the web and the web

sites they find, as well as submitted sites. As they crawl the web, they

gather the information that is used by their algorithms in order to rank your

site.

Directories rely on submissions from webmasters, with live humans viewing

your site to determine if it will be accepted. If accepted, directories often

rank sites in alphanumeric order, with paid listings sometimes on top. Some

search engines also place paid listings at the top, so it's not always possible

to get a ranking in the top three or more places unless you're willing to pay

for it.

Let us now look at a more detailed explanation on how Search Engines work.

Crawler based search engines are primarily composed of three parts.

A search engine robot’s action is called spidering, as it resembles the

multiple legged spiders. The spider’s job is to go to a web page, read the

contents, connect to any other pages on that web site through links, and

bring back the information. From one page it will travel to several pages and

this proliferation follows several parallel and nested paths simultaneously.

Spiders frequent the site at some interval, may be a month to a few months,

and re-index the pages. This way any changes that may have occurred in

your pages could also be reflected in the index.

The spiders automatically visit your web pages and create their listings. An

important aspect is to study what factors promote “deep crawl” – the depth

to which the spider will go into your website from the page it first visited.

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Listing (submitting or registering) with a search engine is a step that could

accelerate and increase the chances of that engine “spidering” your pages.

The spider’s movement across web pages stores those pages in its memory,

but the key action is in indexing. The index is a huge database containing all

the information brought back by the spider. The index is constantly being

updated as the spider collects more information. The entire page is not

indexed and the searching and page-ranking algorithm is applied only to the

index that has been created.

Most search engines claim that they index the full visible body text of a

page. In a subsequent section, we explain the key considerations to ensure

that indexing of your web pages improves relevance during search. The

combined understanding of the indexing and the page-ranking process will

lead to developing the right strategies.

The Meta tags ‘Description’ and ‘Keywords’ have a vital role as they are

indexed in a specific way. Some of the top search engines do not index the

keywords that they consider spam. They will also not index certain ‘stop

words’ (commonly used words such as ‘a’ or ‘the’ or ‘of’) so as to save space

or speed up the process. Images are obviously not indexed, but image

descriptions or Alt text or “text within comments” is included in the index by

some search engines.

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The search engine software or program is the final part. When a person

requests a search on a keyword or phrase, the search engine software

searches the index for relevant information. The software then provides a

report back to the searcher with the most relevant web pages listed first.

The algorithm-based processes used to determine ranking of results are

discussed in greater detail later.

These directories compile listings of websites into specific industry and

subject categories and they usually carry a short description about the

website. Inclusion in directories is a human task and requires submission to

the directory producers. Visitors and researchers over the net quite often

use these directories to locate relevant sites and information sources. Thus

directories assist in structured search.

Another important reason is that crawler engines quite often find websites to

crawl through their listing and links in directories. Yahoo and The Open

Directory are amongst the largest and most well known directories. Lycos is

an example of a site that pioneered the search engine but shifted to the

Directory model depending on AlltheWeb.com for its listings.

Hybrid Search Engines are both crawler based as well as human powered. In

plain words, these search engines have two sets of listings based on both

the mechanisms mentioned above. The best example of hybrid search

engines is Yahoo, which has got a human powered directory as well as a

Search toolbar administered by Google. Although, such engines provide both

listings they are generally dominated by one of the two mechanisms. Yahoo

is known more for its directory rather than crawler based search engine.

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Search engines rank web pages according to the software’s understanding of

the web page’s relevancy to the term being searched. To determine

relevancy, each search engine follows its own group of rules. The most

important rules are

For example, if the keyword appears in the title of the page, then it would be

considered to be far more relevant than the keyword appearing in the text at

the bottom of the page.

Search engines consider keywords to be more relevant if they appear sooner

on the page (like in the headline) rather than later. The idea is that you’ll be

putting the most important words – the ones that really have the relevant

information – on the page first.

Search engines also consider the frequency with which keywords appear.

The frequency is usually determined by how often the keywords are used out

of all the words on a page. If the keyword is used 4 times out of 100 words,

the frequency would be 4%.

Of course, you can now develop the perfect relevant page with one keyword

at 100% frequency - just put a single word on the page and make it the title

of the page as well. Unfortunately, the search engines don’t make things

that simple.

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While all search engines do follow the same basic rules of relevancy, location

and frequency, each search engine has its own special way of determining

rankings. To make things more interesting, the search engines change the

rules from time to time so that the rankings change even if the web pages

have remained the same.

One method of determining relevancy used by some search engines (like

HotBot and Infoseek), but not others (like Lycos), is the Meta tags. Meta

tags are hidden HTML codes that provide the search engine spiders with

potentially important information like the page description and the page

keywords.

Meta tags are often labeled as the secret to getting high rankings, but meta

tags alone will not get you a top 10 ranking. On the other hand, they

certainly don’t hurt. Detailed information on meta-tags and other ways of

improving search engine ranking is given later in this chapter. Fact is, these

days with popularity playing a more major role in search engine positioning,

meta tags do not carry as much weight as they used to.

In the early days of the web, webmasters would repeat a keyword hundreds

of times in the Meta tags and then add it hundreds of times to the text on

the web page by making it the same color as the background. However,

now, major search engines have algorithms that may exclude a page from

ranking if it has resorted to “keyword spamming”; in fact some search

engines will downgrade ranking in such cases and penalize the page.

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Link analysis and ‘click through’ measurement are certain other factors that

are “off the page” and yet crucial in the ranking mechanism adopted by

some leading search engines. This has emerged as the most important

determinant of ranking, but before we study this, we must first look at the

most popular search engines and then look at the various steps you can take

to improve your success at each of the stages – spidering, indexing and

ranking.

Google is a privately held company that was founded by two Stanford

graduates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. Dr. Eric Schmidt, the CEO

joined in 2001 and by the end of the year the company had shown a profit.

Google is the search engine that powers the search directory for Yahoo. This

partnership started in the year 2000 and recently there was a report that the

contract is being extended. Last year, Yahoo paid Google about $7.2 million

for Web search services. PositionTech has been a contender too for Yahoo’s

business. Google also provides an Apple-specific Search Engine specifically

tailored to deliver highly targeted results related to Apple Computer and the

Macintosh computing platform.

makes searching for everything from Apple's corporate information to

product-related news faster and easier.

PositionTech has a robust networking business and a foothold in enterprise

search. However, it recently posted deep losses. The company reported a

wider net loss in the second quarter 2002, with lower revenue. Its loss

broadened to $104 million or 72 cents a share, from $58.3 million, or 46

35

cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue fell to $30.8 million from $39.5 million

a year earlier.

To stay healthy and competitive in consumer search, PositionTech

introduced in the last year a program that generates fees from Web sites

listed in its database. PositionTech charges companies such as Amazon.com

and eBay to list more than 1,000 Web addresses; they might pay anywhere

from 5 cents to 40 cents per click when Web surfers jump to their pages

from PositionTech's database. The revenue generated from paid inclusion is

shared with partners such as MSN and Overture.

The most recent 2007 estimates, according to “Internet World Stats, there are

an estimated 232 million Internet users online in North America alone, at work

or at home, 90 percent of whom are estimated to have made some type of

search request during any month.

AltaVista is one of the oldest and most well-known search engines. It was

launched in December 1995. It was owned by Digital, then run by Compaq

(which purchased Digital in 1998), then spun off into a separate company,

which is now controlled by CMGI and is now owned by Overture Services, Inc.

Over the years it has lost its prominent position to Google and Yahoo.

In March 2002 AltaVista was the last launched release of Enterprise Search v2.0

software that it sells to the Enterprise search market, similar to Verity prior to

the Overture buy out. AltaVista was the first to launch ‘important freshness and

relevancy initiatives’, crawling key areas of the Internet four times per day and

increasing relevancy by 40%.

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Overture returns search results based on the amount of money an advertiser

has paid. This system has made Overture one of the few profitable advertising

based search engine businesses. At one time Yahoo signed a three-year deal

with Overture to provide paid search results. As this write up does not cover

pay per click advertising, we are not focusing much on Overture.

America Online signed a multiyear pact with Google for Web search results and

accompanying ad-sponsored links, ending relationships with pay-for-

performance service Overture Services, its algorithmic search provider of nearly

three years

We thought it worth mentioning Verity in this, although this is not relevant to

search engine optimization. Verity is among the leading providers of enterprise

search software. This software is used by numerous enterprises for offering

information search within their own sites, portals, intranets/extranets and e-

commerce sites.

Several software OEMs providing portal or enterprise software also bundle such

software in their offerings. If you wish to provide search facilities to visitors

within your site, Verity may be an option, particularly if you have a large site

with lots of information. However, GOOGLE has made it extremely to use their

search tool for individual sites and it’s free.

Overture returns search results based on the amount of money an advertiser

has paid. This system has made Overture one of the few profitable Net

businesses. Yahoo has already signed a three-year deal with Overture to

provide paid search results. As this write up does not cover pay per click

advertising, we are not focusing much on Overture.

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America Online signed a multiyear pact with Google for Web search results

and accompanying ad-sponsored links, ending relationships with pay-for-

performance service Overture Services and PositionTech, its algorithmic

search provider of nearly three years

We thought it worth mentioning Verity in this, although this is not relevant

to search engine optimization. Verity is amongst the leading providers of

enterprise search software (PositionTech is another well known player in

this). This software is used by numerous enterprises for offering information

search within their own sites, portals, intranets/extranets and e-commerce

sites.

Several software OEMs providing portal or enterprise software also bundle

such software in their offerings. Verity (VRTY) went public in 1995 and has

achieved sales worth $ 145 million in fiscal 2001. It is a profitable company.

If you wish to provide search facilities to visitors within your site, this may

be an option, particularly if you have a large site with lots of information.

engines such as About, Ask, FAST, FindWhat, Google, LookSmart, Overture

and many more. With one single, powerful search engine, you get more

relevant and comprehensive results. When you use Dogpile, you are actually

searching many search engines simultaneously.

Dogpile, founded in 1996, is the most popular Internet meta-search engine.

The site joined the InfoSpace Network in 2000 and is owned and operated

by InfoSpace, Inc.

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query Mamma simultaneously searches a variety of engines, directories, and

deep content sites, properly formats the words and syntax for each,

compiles their results in a virtual database, eliminates duplicates, and

displays them in a uniform manner according to relevance. It's like using

multiple search engines, all at the same time.

Created in 1996 as a master's thesis, Mamma.com helped to introduce

meta-search to the Internet as one of the first of its kind. Due to its quality

results, and the benefits of meta-search, Mamma grew rapidly through word

of mouth, and quickly became an established presence on the Internet.

Mamma.com's ability to gather the best results available from top Internet

sources and to procure an impressive array of advertisers during the

Internet boom of the late 1990s caught the interest of many potential

investors. In late 1999 Intasys Corporation (Nasdaq: INTA) invested in a

69% stake of the company and in July 2001 bought the remaining shares

and now fully owns Mamma.com.

A Search Engine Is Just A Tool

A search engine is just a tool. It's only as smart as the people who master-

other metasearch engines (and many highly qualified people would agree

that it is), it's because it was conceived to meet the needs of some of the

most inquisitive minds in the world - those of researchers, educators,

scholars and the world scientific community.

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proprietary technology simultaneously queries ten major search engines and

properly formats the words and syntax for each source being probed.

uniform format and presents them by relevance and source. In this manner,

results.

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What The Heck Is An Algorithm?

Each search engine has something called an algorithm which is the formula

that each search engine uses to evaluate web pages and determine their

relevance and value when crawling them for possible inclusion in their sear

engine. A crawler is the robot that browses all of these pages for the search

engine.

Google has a comprehensive and highly developed technology, a

straightforward interface and a wide-ranging array of search tools which

enable the users to easily access a variety of information online.

Google users can browse the web and find information in various languages,

retrieve maps, stock quotes and read news, search for a long lost friend

using the phonebook listings available on Google for all of US cities and

basically surf the 3 billion odd web pages on the internet!

Google boasts of having world’s largest archive of Usenet messages, dating

all the way back to 1981. Google’s technology can be accessed from any

conventional desktop PC as well as from various wireless platforms such as

WAP and i-mode phones, handheld devices and other such Internet equipped

gadgets.

The web search technology offered by Google is often the technology of

choice of the world’s leading portals and websites. It has also benefited the

advertisers with its unique advertising program that does not hamper the

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web surfing experience of its users but still brings revenues to the

advertisers.

When you search for a particular keyword or a phrase, most of the search

engines return a list of page in order of the number of times the keyword or

phrase appears on the website. Google web search technology involves the

use of its indigenously designed Page Rank Technology and hypertext-

matching analysis which makes several instantaneous calculations

undertaken without any human intervention. Google’s structural design also

expands simultaneously as the internet expands.

Page Rank technology involves the use of an equation which comprises of

millions of variables and terms and determines a factual measurement of the

significance of web pages and is calculated by solving an equation of 500

million variables and more than 3 billion terms. Unlike some other search

engines, Google does not calculate links but utilizes the extensive link

structure of the web as an organizational tool. When the link to a Page, lets

say Page B is clicked from a Page A, then that click is attributed as a vote

towards Page B on behalf of Page A.

Quintessentially, Google calculates the importance of a page by the number

of such ‘votes’ it receives. Not only that, Google also assesses the

importance of the pages that are involved in the voting process.

Consequently, pages that are themselves ahead in ranking and are

important in that way also help to make other pages important. One thing

to note here is that Google’s technology does not involve human intervention

in anyway and uses the inherent intelligence of the internet and its

resources to determine the ranking and importance of any page.

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is a search engine which is hypertext-based. This means that it analyzes all

the content on each web page and factors in fonts, subdivisions, and the

exact positions of all terms on the page. Not only that, Google also evaluates

the content of its nearest web pages. This policy of not disregarding any

subject matter pays off in the end and enables Google to return results that

are closest to user queries.

Google has a very simple 3-step procedure in handling a query submitted in

its search box:

1. When the query is submitted and the enter key is pressed, the web

server sends the query to the index servers. Index server is exactly

what its name suggests; it consists of an index much like the index

of a book which displays where is the particular page containing the

queried term is located in the entire book.

2. After this, the query proceeds to the doc servers, and these servers

actually retrieve the stored documents. Page descriptions or

“snippets” are then generated to suitably describe each search

result.

3. These results are then returned to the user in less than a one

second! (Normally)

Approximately once a month, Google updates their index by recalculating

the Page Ranks of each of the web pages that they have crawled. The period

during the update is known as the Google dance.

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The Algorithm Shuffle

Because of the nature of Page Rank, the calculations need to be performed

about 40 times and, because the index is so large, the calculations take

several days to complete. During this period, the search results fluctuate;

sometimes minute-by minute. It is because of these fluctuations that the

during the last third of each month.

Google has two other servers that can be used for searching. The search

results on them also change during the monthly update and they are part of

the Google dance.

For the rest of the month, fluctuations sometimes occur in the search

results, but they should not be confused with the actual dance. They are due

to Google's fresh crawl and to what is known "Everflux".

Google has two other searchable servers apart from www.google.com. They

are www2.google.com and www3.google.com. Most of the time, the results

on all 3 servers are the same, but during the dance, they are different.

For most of the dance, the rankings that can be seen on www2 and www3

are the new rankings that will transfer to www when the dance is over. Even

though the calculations are done about 40 times, the final rankings can be

seen from very early on. This is because, during the first few iterations, the

calculated figures merge to being close to their final figures.

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You can see this with the Page Rank Calculator by checking the Data box

and performing some calculations. After the first few iterations the search

results on www2 and www3 may still change, but only slightly.

During the dance, the results from www2 and www3 will sometimes show on

the www server, but only briefly. Also, new results on www2 and www3 can

disappear for short periods. At the end of the dance, the results on www will

match those on www2 and www3.

GOOGLE Dance Tool

This Google Dance Tool allows you to check your rankings on all three tools

The Google Web Directory works in combination of the Google Search

Technology and the Netscape Open Directory Project which makes it possible

to search the Internet organized by topic. Google displays the pages in

order of the rank given to it using the Page Rank Technology. It not only

searches the titles and descriptions of the websites, but searches the entire

content of sites within a related category, which ultimately delivers a

comprehensive search to the users. Google also has a fully functional web

directory which categorizes all the searches in order.

In case you are feeling lucky

searching for a highest ranked web page for a particular search. This

saves time in searching for a webpage.

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The multi-faceted Google Toolbar

browser and be of quick assistance.

Pandora’s Box

just typing the street name in the query box.

Stock Quotes

ticker symbol or the name of one of the stock indices stock and mutual

fund information and Google will return the relevant information in

association with high-profile financial and trading concerns.

Google takes a snapshot of each page it examined as it crawls the web and

stores or caches them as a back-up in case the original page is unavailable.

This cached link always displays the page in the same manner as it was

indexed and this is used by Google to match the relevancy of the page to the

query submitted by the user. The "Cached" link will be missing for sites that

have not been indexed, as well as for sites whose owners have requested

Google not to cache their content.

Google offers a variety of special features which helps users to find exactly

what they are looking which is all in addition to providing easy access to

more than 3 billion web pages. The following is an overview of its key

features:

Examples:

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Calculator

Google has a built-in calculator function which can be used to calculate

mathematical expressions involving basic arithmetic, more complicated

math, units of measure and conversions, physical constants and even

hexadecimal and binary numbering systems. You can simply enter the

expression you'd like evaluated in the search box and hit the Enter key or

click the Google Search button.

Dictionary Definitions

When searching about any particular term, if the Google database has a

definition or meaning for the term, then it will be highlighted with an

underline on the results page. This definition is derived in association

with a reliable dictionary source.

File Types

In addition to HTML files, Google search also supports 12 other formats

such as PDF, Microsoft Office, PostScript, Corel WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3,

and others. Additionally, Google also offers the user the ability to "View

as HTML", which allows users to view these files in case the

corresponding software is not installed on the user’s PC. It also

eliminates the hazards of opening a virus-infected document.

News Headlines

While searching for a particular term, if that term is also in any of the

current news, it is displayed as a separate news link on the results page.

This is derived from various news providers who work in association with

Google and who let Google monitor them.

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Advanced News Search

A new offering from Google - Advanced News Search, allows visitors to

scour headlines by date, location, exact phrases or publication. People

can use it retrieve articles from more than 4,500 news outlets publishing

on the Web. Advanced News Search lets visitors search for headlines

using several parameters. Among other features, people can locate

stories that contain an exact phrase, within the Unites States or abroad,

or written by a specific publisher.

Similar Pages

The results page also displays a link for ‘similar pages’ which uses the

GoogleScout technology to explore the web for similar pages. This is

particularly helpful if you have hit upon a page which has relevant

content, but you want something similar but more.

Web Page Translation

This feature is particularly helpful if your search has non-English results.

Google offers a facility to automatically translate a page for you in

English. Currently, Google supports Italian, French, Spanish, German,

and Portuguese languages.

SafeSearch Filtering

Google provides a SafeSearch option to filter pornographic contents from

its results page. This is especially useful for shared computers which

need to be protected for children surfing the Internet. Google’s

technology tries to check keywords and phrases, URLs and Open

Directory categories and eliminate these from the search results.

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Google is primarily a fully-automatic search engine with no human-

intervention involved in the search process. It utilizes robots known as

‘spiders’ to crawl the web on a regular basis for new updates and new

websites to be included in the Google Index. This robot software follows

hyperlinks from site to site. Google does not require that you should submit

your URL to its database for inclusion in the index, as it is done anyway

automatically by the ‘spiders’. However, manual submission of URL can be

done by going to the Google website and clicking the related link. One

important thing here is that Google does not accept payment of any sort for

site submission or improving page rank of your website. Also, submitting

your site through the Google website does not guarantee listing in the index.

Sometimes, a webmaster might program the server in such a way that it

returns different content to Google than it returns to regular users, which is

often done to misrepresent search engine rankings. This process is referred

to as cloaking as it conceals the actual website and returns distorted web

pages to search engines crawling the site. This can mislead users about what

they'll find when they click on a search result. Google highly disapproves of

any such practice and might place a ban on the website which is found guilty

of cloaking.

Here are some of the important tips and tricks that can be employed while

dealing with Google.

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Do’s

preferably be easy to navigate.

case the site map has more than 100 links, then it is advisable to

break it into several pages to avoid clutter.

website features relevant and informative content.

when describing important names, keywords or links; stick with plain

text.

website should have no broken links or incorrect HTML.

to a minimum as not every search engine spider is able to crawl them.

not block the Googlebot crawler. This file tells crawlers which

directories can or cannot be crawled.

Don’ts

will surf your website. Do not provide them with irrelevant content or

present them with any fraudulent schemes.

advisable to avoid that.

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create multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains with significantly

duplicate content.

"cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with hardly any

original content.

Google Answers

Google Answers is an interesting cross between ‘online marketplace’ and

probably a ‘virtual classroom’. Those who wish to participate must register

with Google Answers. Here, the researchers who have considerable expertise

in online researching provide answers to the queries posted by other users

for a fee. When a user posts a question, he or she also needs to mention

the price the user is willing to pay in case the question is answered. When

the question is answered by any user, then the payment is made accordingly

to the user answering the question. Moreover, the questions and the

discussion that ensues will be publicly viewable and other registered users

can also share their opinions and insights.

There is a non-refundable listing fee of $0.50 per question plus an additional

'price' you set for your question that reflects how much you're willing to pay

for an answer. Three-quarters of your question price goes directly to the

Researcher who answers your question; the remaining 25 percent goes to

Google to support the service.

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Google Groups

Google Groups is an online discussion forum and it contains the entire

archive of Usenet discussion groups dating back to 1981. These discussions

cover the full range of human dissertation and present a fascinating look at

evolving viewpoints, debate and advice on every subject from politics to

technology. Users can access all of this information all in a database that

contains more than 800 million posts by using the search feature of Google.

Google’s Image Search

Google offers a wide collection of images from around the web; its

comprehensive database consists of more than 425 million images. All a

user has to do is to enter a query in the image search box, then click on the

"Search" button. On the results page, by clicking the thumbnail a larger

version of the image can be seen, as well as the web page on which the

image is located. By default, Google's Image Search uses its mature content

filter on the initial search by any user. The filter removes many adult images

but it cannot guarantee that all such content will be filtered out. It is not

possible to ensure with 100% accuracy that all mature content will be

removed from image search results using filters.

Google analyzes the text on the page near the image, the image caption and

dozens of other factors which enables it to determine the image content.

Google also utilizes several sophisticated algorithms which make it possible

to remove duplicates and it in turn ensures that the highest quality images

are presented first in the results. Google’s Image search supports all the

complex search strategies like Boolean operators, etc.

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Google’s Catalog Search

Google offers a unique service in the form of its Catalog Search. Google’s

Catalog Search has made it easy to find information published in mail-order

catalogs that were not previously available online. It includes the full content

of hundreds of mail-order catalogs selling everything from industrial

adhesives to clothing and home furnishings. Google’s Catalog Search can

help you if you are looking to buy for either yourself or for your business.

The printed copies of catalogs are scanned and the text portion is converted

into a format which makes it easy for users to search for the catalog. The

same sophisticated algorithm employed by the Google Web Search is then

employed to search for catalogs. This makes sure that most recent and

relevant catalogs are displayed. Google is not associated with any catalog

vendors and is not liable for any misuse of this service on part of the users.

Froogle

The word ‘froogle’ is a combination of the word ‘frugal’ which means ‘penny-

wise’ or ‘economical’ and of course ‘Google’. Currently in its beta version, or

testing format, Froogle is a recent concept put forth by Google. Google’s

spidering software crawls the web looking for information about products for

sale online. It does so by focusing entirely on product search and applying

the power of Google's search technology to locate stores that sell items you

want and consequently pointing you to that specific store.

Just like the Google Web Search, Froogle also ranks store sites based only

on their relevance to the search terms entered by the users. Google does

not accept payment for placement within their actual search results. Froogle

also includes product information submitted electronically by merchants. Its

search results are automatically generated by Google’s ranking software.

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AltaVista has an index that is built by sending out a crawler (a robot

program) that captures text and brings it back.

The main crawler is called "Scooter." Scooter sends out thousands of threads

simultaneously. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, Scooter and its cousins

access thousands of pages at a time, like thousands of blind users grabbing

text, pulling it back, throwing it into the indexing machines so the next day

that text can be in the index. And at the same time, they pull off, from all

those pages, every hyperlink that they find, to put in a list of where to go to

next.

In a typical day Scooter and its cousins visit over 10 million pages. If there

are a lot of hyperlinks from other pages to yours, that increases your

chances of being found. But if this is your own personal site, or if this is a

brand new Web page, that's not too likely.

AltaVista has in incredibly large database of Web sites, such that searches

often return hundreds of thousands of Web site matches. AltaVista's spider

goes down about three pages into your site. This is important to remember if

you have different topical pages that won't be found within three clicks of

the main page. You will have to index them separately.

You cannot tell Alta Vista how to index your site, it is all done via their

spider, but you can go to their site and give the spider a nudge by

submitting specific pages. That way, AltaVista's spider knows to visit that

page and index it. Once you have done that, it's all up to your META tags

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and your page's content! AltaVista's spider may revisit your site each month

after its initial visit.

AltaVista ranking algorithms reward keywords in the <TITLE> tag. If a

keyword is not in a title tag, it will likely not appear anywhere near the top

of the search results! AltaVista also rewards keywords near one another, and

keywords near the beginning of a page

Add a Page

Search results on AltaVista are powered by Yahoo! Search Technology. For fast

submission to the Yahoo! Search index via the Yahoo! Search Marketing Search Submit

with Error 404, which means there is no such page. If that page was in the

index, it will remove that page from the index the next day.

Also, consider technical factors. If a site has a slow connection, it might

time-out for the crawler. Very complex pages, too, may time out before the

crawler can harvest the text.

If you have a hierarchy of directories at your site, put the most important

information high, not deep. Some search engines will presume that the

higher you placed the information, the more important it is. And crawlers

may not venture deeper than three or four or five directory levels.

Above all remember the obvious - full-text search engines such index text.

You may well be tempted to use fancy and expensive design techniques that

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either block search engine crawlers or leave your pages with very little plain

text that can be indexed. Don’t fall prey to that temptation.

The simple rule of thumb is that content counts, and that content near the

top of a page counts for more than content at the end. In particular, the

HTML title and the first couple lines of text are the most important part of

your pages. If the words and phrases that match a query happen to appear

in the HTML title or first couple lines of text of one of your pages, chances

are very good that that page will appear high in the list of search results.

A crawler/spider search engine can base its ranking on both static factors (a

computation of the value of page independent of any particular query) and

query-dependent factors.

Values:

letters and words).

have related content (topic similarity, rather than random meaningless

links, such as those generated by link exchange programs or intended

to generate a false impression of "popularity").

to a page but where the links come from: the number of distinct

domains and the "quality" ranking of those particular sites. This is

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calculated for the site and also for individual pages. A site or a page is

"good" if many pages at many different sites point to it, and especially

if many "good" sites point to it.

considered more important. If a page is buried too deep, and the

crawler simply won't go that far and will never find it.

These static factors are recomputed about once a week, and new good

pages slowly percolate upward in the rankings. Note that there are

advantages to having a simple address and sticking to it, so others can build

links to it, and so you know that it's in the index

Query-dependent factors include:

words that appear early in the text (unless the meta tags are patently

unrelated to the content on the page itself, in which case the page will

be penalized)

your pages. (E.g., if lots of good sites link to your site with anchor text

"breast cancer" and the query is "breast cancer," chances are good

that you will appear high in the list of matches.)

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Blanket policy on doorway pages and cloaking

Many search engines are opposed to doorway pages and cloaking. they

considers doorway and cloaked pages to be spam and encourages people to

use other avenues to increase the relevancy of their pages. A description of

doorway pages and cloaking is given later on in this guide.

Meta tags (Ask.com as an Example)

Though Meta tags are indexed and considered to be regular text, Ask.com

claims it doesn't give them priority over HTML titles and other text. Though

you should use meta tags in all your pages, some webmasters claim their

doorway pages for Ask.com a rank better when they don't use them.

If you do use Meta tags, make your description tag no more than 150

characters and your keywords tag no more than 1,024 characters long.

Keywords in the URL and file names

It's generally believed that Ask.com gives some weight to keywords in

filenames and URL names. If you're creating a file, try to name it with

keywords.

Keywords in the ALT tags

Ask.com indexes ALT tags, so if you use images on your site, make sure to

add them. ALT tags should contain more than the image's description. They

should include keywords, especially if the image is at the top of the page.

ALT tags are explained later.

Page Length

There's been some debate about how long doorway pages for AltaVista

should be. Some webmasters say short pages rank higher, while others

argue that long pages are the way to go. According to AltaVista's help

58

section, it prefers long and informative pages. We've found that pages with

600-900 words are most likely to rank well.

Frame support

AltaVista has the ability to index frames, but it sometimes indexes and links

to pages intended only as navigation. To keep this from happening to you,

submit a frame-free site map containing the pages that you want indexed.

You may also want to include a "robots.txt" file to prohibit AltaVista from

indexing certain pages.

Ask.com offers a wide range of search features. Most of these options are

available in its "Advanced Search" section.

to an AND between search terms and supports the use of - for NOT.

Either OR or ORR can be used for an OR operation, but the operator

must be in all upper case. Unfortunately, no nesting is available, so

term1 term2 OR term3 is processed as (term1 AND term2) OR term3.

(term2 OR term3) search.

Times" Ask also supports phrase searching when a dash is used

between words with no spaces as in cd-rom-drivers.

another. Can be nested with other tags.

59

end or in the middle of a word.

search.

It supports around 30 languages.

Ask.com adds a new dimension and level of authority to search results

To determine the authority—and thus the overall quality and relevance—of a

60

Specific Popularity ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages

integration of Ask.com 2.0.

Ask.com 2.0: Evolution and Growth

In early 2003, Ask.com 2.0 was launched. The enhanced version represents

a major evolution in terms of improvements to relevance and an expansion

of the overall advanced search functionalities. Below are detailed

explanations for the improvements made in this version:

More Communities

Like social networks in the real world, the Web is clustered into local

communities. Communities are groups of Web pages that are about or are

closely related to the same subject. Ask.com is the only search technology

that can view these communities as they naturally occur on the WebThis

method allows Ask.com to generate more finely tuned search results. In

other words, Ask.com's community-based approach reveals a 3-D image of

the Web, providing it with more information about a particular Web page

than other search engines, which have only a one-dimensional view of the

Web.

Ask.com is now owned by Ask.com

Web-Based Spell Check

Ask.com's proprietary Spell Check technology identifies query misspellings

and offers corrections that help improve the relevance and precision of

search results. The Spell Check technology, developed by Ask.com's team of

61

scientists, leverages the real-time content of the Web to determine the

correct spelling of a word.

Dynamic Descriptions enhance search results by showing the context of

search terms as they actually appear on referring Web pages. This feature

provides searchers with information that helps them to determine the

relevance of a given Web page in association with their query.

Advanced Search Tools

Ask.com's Advanced Search tools allow searchers to search using specific

criteria, such as exact phrase, page location, geographic region, domain and

site, date, and other word filters. Users can also search using 10 Western

languages, including Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian,

Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. A link to Ask.com's Advanced

Search tools can be found next to the search box on Ask.com.com.

The Ask.com Algorithm

In addition to utilizing existing search techniques, Ask.com applies what they

call authority, a new measure of relevance, to deliver search results. For this

purpose, Ask.com employs three proprietary techniques:

Refine

First, Ask.com organizes sites into naturally occurring communities that are

about the subject of each search query. These communities are presented

allows a user to further focus his or her specific search.

62

For example, a search for "Soprano" would present a user with a set of

refinement suggestions such as "Marie-Adele McArther" (a renowned

soprano), "Three Sopranos" (the operatic trio), "The Sopranos" (the wildly-

popular HBO television show) as well as several other choices. No other

technology can dynamically cluster search results into the actual

communities as they exist on the Web.

Results

Next, after identifying these communities, Ask.com employs a technique

the relationship of sites within a community, ranking a site based on the

number of same-subject pages that reference it, among hundreds of other

criteria. In other words, Ask.com determines the best answer for a search by

asking experts within a specific subject community about who they believe is

the best resource for that subject. By assessing the opinions of a site's

peers, Ask.com establishes authority for the search result. Relevant search

results ranked by Subject-Specific Popularity are presented under the

In some instances companies pay to have their Web sites included within

Ask.com's dataset, otherwise known as the Ask.com Index. Like all Web

sites, these sites are processed through Ask.com's search algorithms and are

not guaranteed placement in the results. This ensures that relevancy is the

primary driver of results.

Resources

Finally, by dividing the Web into local subject communities, Ask.com is able

to find and identify expert resources about a particular subject. These sites

feature lists of other authoritative sites and links relating to the search topic.

63

For example, a professor of Middle Eastern history may have created a page

devoted to his collection of sites that explain the geography and topography

in response to a Persian Gulf-related query. No previous search technology

has been able to find and rank these sites.

Sponsored Links

listings. Google generates highly relevant sponsored results by allowing

advertisers to bid for placement in this area based on relevant keywords.

These results, which are powered by Google's advanced algorithms, are then

distributed across the Internet to some of the world's most popular and well-

known Web sites, including Ask.com.com and Ask Jeeves.

Other factors

Boolean Searching

Limited Boolean searching is available. Ask.com defaults to an AND between

search terms and supports the use of - for NOT. Either OR or ORR can be

used for an OR operation, but the operator must be in all upper case.

Unfortunately, no nesting is vailable.

Proximity Searching

Phrase searching is available by using “double quotes” around a phrase or by

checking the "Phrase Match" box. Ask.com also supports phrase searching

when a dash is used between words with no spaces. Until Nov. 2002,

Ask.com's help page stated that "Ask.com returns results which exactly or

64

closely matches the given phrase" which meant that not all phrases matches

will necessarily be accurate. As of Nov. 2002, that appears to have been

corrected and phrase searching now works properly.

Truncation

No truncation is currently available.

Case Sensitivity

Searches are not case sensitive. Search terms entered in lowercase,

uppercase, or mixed case all get the same number of hits.

Stop Words

Ask.com technology as do most search engine technologies, do ignore

frequently occurring words such as 'the,' 'of', 'and', and 'or'. However, like at

Google, these stop words can be searched by putting a + in front of them or

by including them within a phrase search.

Sorting

By defaults, sites are sorted in order of perceived relevance. They also have

site collapsing (showing only two pages per site with the rest link via a “More

Results” message. There is no option for sorting alphabetically, by site, or by

date.

Display

Ask.com displays the title (roughly first 60 characters), a two line keyword-

in-context extract from the page, and the beginning of the URL for each hit.

Some will also have a link to "Related Pages" which finds related records

based on identifying Web communities by analyzing link patterns. Two other

65

sections displayed are the "Refine" section (formerly folders) that suggest

other related searches based on words that Ask.com uses to identify

communities on the Web and the "Resources: Link collections from experts

and enthusiasts" (formerly "Experts' Links") which are Web pages that

include numerous links to external resources – meta sites or Internet

resource guides. Some "Sponsored Links" may show up at the top. These

are ads from the Google AdWords program.

Ask.com will only display 10 Web page records at a time; however, up to a

100 at a time can be displayed through a change in the preferences and on

the advanced search page. Ask.com may also display up to 10 metasites

under the "Resources" heading and up to 6 Refine suggestions.

PositionTech is one of the most popular crawler based search engines.

PositionTech is a crawler-based search engine. However, it does not make its

index available to the public through its own site like other crawler-based

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