Saturday, August 29, 2009

Onpage Opitimization and Website Relevance

Everyday I keep learning new things about Search Engines. Just when I thought I have figured it out I find something that I have not thought of before - like the deeper meaning of relevance.

1. When you send a internal link to your own site with the keywords that you chose, it will actually help the search engine tell what your site is all about.

2. As you feed it with more keywords the search engine will eventually come up with an overall figure of your site and this will help you rank better for all related terms in the future.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Current SEO Facts

On my two previous post I provided you with tools that you can use with SEO. I would like to point you to a few things I have also learned.

1. The Google Keyword Suggestion tool is a good tool to use for finding related keywords. But it will not exactly tell you how many visitors you will receive daily if you rank well for those keywords.

In the first place the tool only provide you with estimates. Moreover it is monthly so that means what you are getting is the total for a month. Which means you have to divide it according to the number of days in that particular month to get the daily average.

And lastly, I found that it doesn't cover all keyword phrase combinations. There are keywords/keyword phrases that it says it does not have enough data. At first I assumed this to mean that there are to few people searching for them. But as I look at my own statistics, I find that some of the keywords that it says it has no data, are actually my best performing keyword phrases daily in terms of traffic.

So when the Google Keyword Research tool tells you that it does not have enough data to show how many people searches for particular keyword/keyword phrases monthly, it could mean it chose or was not able to record statistics for them. But it does not necessarily means that no one is searching for them.

2. There is another keyword suggestion tool from the seobook website. It gives a smaller estimate number. I can't give an opinion on its accuracy because I have not really tested it yet.

3. In order to have a better idea of how you can rank with the Search Engines you must think like the search engine programmers.

If you were a search engine designer, what criteria will you use to ensure that your search engine displays the most relevant result?

What criteria will you include that will allow you to measure if a webmaster is trying to game the system?

If you are targeting Google search engine, I would suggest you read books about the history of Google to get a better understanding about what its founders are trying to do.

4. The algorithm for search engines constantly changes so the best way to keep in step is to experiment and test. But even though this is the case, the basics will remain the same because they remain the most sensible way to measure web page relevance.

This means that even though Google is rolling an update which they call Caffeine. I believe SEO practitioners should not worry much because the basics will remain the same.

Just like the policy regarding nofollow tags. It did not really changed things too much.