PromotionStep Seo Company Blog

Today, I want to tell you a bit about search engine ranking algorithms’ history and what we should probably expect in the future. Hopefully, this article will help you to optimize your site in advance and secure its visibility in the near and distant future. Let’s start with the aims and problems search engines have been facing.

Before Internet became available and accessible to the major part of the world there was a comparatively small number of personal and business websites, low keyword competition and even a smaller number of websites with well-done on-site optimization. At that time the webmaster could specify Meta keywords, Meta Title and URL structure to rank well for his keywords. As the number of such webmasters increased there would appear 2 or more similar websites with the same keywords and the approximately the same content. Thus a need for new grounds to assess why this or that site is better was needed. This ground was no more bound to sites’ Meta information nor to sites’ content, but rather to its off-site popularity.

Webmasters started to gather links to their websites from any accessible source. As well as doing link exchange with the webmasters of other sites, which is effective but obviously not allowed method of website promotion. In this way some part of sites’ owners was eliminated from top SERPs on the basis of poor off-site popularity. At this point websites ranking would directly depend on how much time a webmaster spends on his creation – that was a perfect way to get rid of spammy sites that came into existence as the popularity of Internet as marketing means grew stronger. When primary off-site optimization would go without saying, search engines needed to go further… Thus the number of filters that is incredibly long at the moment and is giving headache for so many webmaster started to grow steadily.

Your forum, social bookmarking and non-relevant links are devaluated, you can not have too many links at one time popping up, you can not have the same keyword in the anchor of the title to your site, you can not have the same description in the anchor of the link to your site, your link must be at a perfect position at a specific page to give you the maximum SEO juice and you need to run marathon negotiations to get a webmaster of another site place it there… and so on and so forth. That involved even more human time, but what is saddest – started to involve money as well! Pursuit for links set in motion whole networks of spammy yet effective in terms of SEO directories. One could get hundreds of listings for a certain price. Fortunately, they would be filtered as well but still participate in SERPs generation leaving lots of homework for guys who did the optimization without any money involved. But today links seems to come to their capacity limit as means of SERP calculation and what is going to be the next step is а mere surmise…

Link popularity supremacy webmasters have been talking so much about will hopefully come to its decline. And the most sensible step would be to gather extra usage statistics and generate SERPs on the basis of websites’ user-friendliness. Not all webmasters have Google or another analytics script but their number is growing steadily. This script allows to determine how many pages have been viewed by the visitor, how much time was spend on this or that page, determine the bounce rate and ultimately indirectly collect information about how friendly a website is towards this or that keyword – the conclusion based on the visitor behavior. But at the moment there is no statistics counter that would be applicable to all the search engines nor does it seem possible, because such a tactical alliance between all the search engines seem unfeasible while “open-source” access mode to the statistics would not gladden webmasters now vulnerable to statistics leakage. On the other hand a particular search engine will never allow priority of one site over another on the basis of their stats counter presence. Sensible as it is, this method of ranking position calculation leaves much to be done technically but looks a logic step to be made by search engines in the battle for relevant search results and attempt to deliver most user-friendly resources for an Internet user.       

Recent Google PR update brought many discussions regarding Page Rank’s and back link indexation algorithms’ alternations. The most striking piece of news would certainly hit link sellers and buyers since the search engine giant edited and adjusted the Page Rank of some websites with the help of its webmasters. Link purchase is the fastest way to acquire strong back links and achieve top SERPs. Even though it has little to do with actual website popularity, traffic volume and rankings, many webmasters still care about their PR and PR of the websites where their link may appear. Some of the changes are believed to be the following:

1. Human edited PR is now only applicable for well-known resources that can considerably influence any website SERP. Some websites witnessed their sites PR went down from 9 to 7, 7 to 5, 5 to 3. This is a clear message from Google that no link sharp practice will be tolerated.

2. Another Google algorithm change regards the relevancy of an outbound link towards the page, site overall content. In other words – if you want a worthy high PR link – go with the major players in your sector (in other words, competitors).

3. Your link position. Google is working more and more on weighing your link in dependency to its position on the page and in regards to other links. Should the letter be grouped, united in categories (particularly titled “Sponsored” or “Link Section”) – this will cause link purchase suspicion.

These are only the major open to public changes that are discussed at the webmaster forums, some other algorithm alternations are becoming the property of a narrow circle of seo specialists. What is obvious is that today’s website promotion involves more and more human-edited work on personalizing your website and making its content organically constrained, demonstrating for another time that visitor-friendly website is welcomed by search engines as well.

Today, Internet offers a dozen back link checking tools. Some are useful, some are less; some free, the others are paid. Here is the specification of the back link crawler, developed at PromotionStep. This list itself might be a good piece of tip for both SEO specialists and for newbies. So, seo-friendly back link spider’s specifications / requirement:

1. Find a direct link to our website

2. Analyze robots.txt and page code top detect “no follow” tag

3. Analyze if the link Title has been altered

4. Analyze if the page is linked to the home page

5. Analyze how many outbound links are there on the page

6. Analyze the # of our link among other outbound links (including banners)

7. Analyze if the page is indexed by Google

8. Analyze if our link is present in the cashed page snapshot

9. Analyze if the link to our site is direct at the cashed snapshot of the page

Results should deliver the following info:

1. Present / Not Present on the page2. “No follow” present / absent

3. # of our link among other external links

4. Indexed by Google / Not

5. Last indexation date

6. Direct link is on the Google indexed page / Not

First thing you will probably want to ask the seo company, you have chosen to promote your website, is going to be: What are we going to do about it? This article will serve as a short guide and a brief answer to this question. I will try to give a short outline of the stages of search engine optimization depending on the current level of website’s traffic and popularity.

Unfortunately, in most cases we have to deal with newly born websites: a month old domain name, fancy design and a couple of sentences of promotional text that looks pretty much the same on several pages of the website. At this point, you might have already missed some important things for the upcoming seo campaign: you bought a domain name, selected hosting and made design without seo consultancy. Website promotion is all about the details. You might have approximate concept in regards to what you are doing for your future website’s benefit, but it is only a professional seo consultancy that will be able to give you clear instructions and vivid explanation. Search engine optimization work can be further divided into several stages:

Preliminary stage: Starts with the selection of the target keywords, selection of the seo campaign strategy, definition of the target website audience and analysis of the competitors. FTP access is granted, CMS is adopted for seo purposes. Once the desired keywords are selected, client’s participation boils down to merely monitoring of the results of the seo campaign and giving questions / suggestions in regards to the current march of events.

Initial stage: Initial website optimization might presuppose that no pages from the website are indexed by any search engine, let alone some rankings with them. Google, Yahoo and MSN consider your design masterpiece a useless piece of www, and you need to convince them in the opposite. That is where on-site optimization takes place. Every page of the web site is personalized. Meta description, keywords, title, alt tags are in the perfect balance with the on-page text keyword spamming. At this point it is important to do a good homework making the page user friendly. Text should look as natural to the visitor as alluring to the search engines’ bots. Indeed, keyword spamming (which is certainly a white hat seo technique) reminds me the way you are preparing a chess-board before the game. There are definite places for the queen, for the knights, for the pawns. Once the website’s pages are customized, they are ready to give search engines’ crawlers a warm welcome and show their best. Technically, you are taking almost no chases to get into supplemental results if every page of the site is unique. And the less pages you have in the supplemental index – the better you site is treated. There is a special care for the web resources with more than 100 pages. Many webmasters notice that they are easier to promote, but I better stop my reflections regarding this issue – might be a good ground for another post.

Initial stage of search engine optimization also includes creation of the resource pages that later on will be involved in link exchange with other sites. The earlier these resources are created – the earlier they will get indexed, and indexing will bring some page rank for them sooner or later. Page rank update will actually bring in the main phase of the seo work, that is when first organic search visitors start showing up… Roughly speaking, PR update takes place once per 3 months, so the initial stage might continue for several months. In very rare cases reaching even more if the PR update took place a week or two after the seo campaign launching. Certainly, there are many useful things to do during this time, besides on-site optimization. The most useful activities are forum postings and article writing. Signature bound posting (that is where you are allowed to use a link to a website in the signature) at different thematic forums will allow actual keyword promotion at the very early stages of the website optimization. But there are certainly dozen of rules and criteria that will be applied only in regards to forum posting. Another pretty effective way of website promotion is writing an article dealing with it’s subject matter – most of the internet resources, hosting articles will allow a link or two linking to the site you want. There is a point of view that Yahoo appreciates such links, attaching special significance to them. This might end up in some noticeable ranking jump up to top 10, provided the keywords are not too competitive.

Free manual directory submission is a good, but unfortunately time consuming way to gain SE visibility. This method can and should be applied at every stage of the seo work. The number of the directories today is virtually infinite, but each of them has its own submission rules. You might not qualify today, but be a perfect match tomorrow. Well established, thematic directories stand any website in good stead.

Main stage is probably, the most routine. Its primary task is to increase link popularity by making 2 way and 3 way link exchanges. If the client promotes 2 websites that have identical theme – it is going to be pleasure of a job. 3 way link exchange is much more effective as compared to regular reciprocal link exchange. Some webmasters think that 2 way link exchange is an old and ineffective way of search engine optimization. Experience proves the opposite. Successful link popularity building will push the keywords to the top like a rocket carrier. This is not going to be an overnight traffic jump, but a gradual figures’ growth. True to its name, main stage of search engine optimization will be the most enduring one and will reveal if the website is capable of competing for new high-volume target keywords (depending on the seo campaign initial strategy). This stage of seo work might continue for as long as the client wishes, multiplying traffic to infinity.

Maintenance stage is a very important stage of the seo campaign. Its task is to keep track of traffic flow, monitor link exchange partners. It is amazing how often people are selling their domain names, leaving on-line businesses for something else. It is important to manually secure all the pages that link to your resource as to avoid what is called “bad neighborhood” in seo. Even slightest changes might cause in visible traffic losses. Most of the seo companies offer maintenance services that will cost you much less than full scale seo campaign.

I hope that the information given in this article made seo work clearer for a layermen, and did not dazzle with unknown words. Even though optimization procedures vary from company to company, there are basic methods employed everywhere, you had a chance to learn about. Seeming few in number, but a great deal when it gets down to work.

Today’s Internet is a unique borderless depository of knowledge that allows a most affordable answer for virtually any question. Practice shows that at the moment no more than quarter of all Internet users are capable of effective and correctly use search engine machines. In many cases people get absolutely useless information as the result of their 1 – 2 keywords queries. Even though the search engine algorithms are more sophisticated today than ever, they are still based on elementary principles, catered for most popular keywords and keyword clusters. Our experiment in the “Search engine relevancy. 10 years of search engine researches: What do we get?” article proves that some multikeyword queries are tough cookies for existing search engines.

Correct and meaningful search would be impossible without some constituents of human imitation elements. This is not only an issue of search engine developers, but also a stumbling block for linguists working in the field of machine (automated) translation. Whereas great minds are dashing against the rock of artificial intelligence algorithm issues, major search engines have adopted an easier means of relevance degree estimation.

In 2003 Google bought CIRCA technology, the core of the AdSense. The heart of the CIRCA technology is a language scalable ontology comprised of large text corpuses database, were a special focus on the meaning of the words and the words’ relations to other words’ meanings is paid. These relations can be boiled down to the following, the once that have a highest value for practical on-site seo:

• Similarity (”affordable” is similar to “inexpensive”)
• Hypernymy (is a kind of / has kind) (”eagle” has kind “bald”)
• Causation (work causes results)
• Metonymy (whole/part relations) (”laptop” has part “keyboard”)
• Substance (”lumber” has substance “wood”)
• Synonymy / Antonymy (”cheap” is an synonym to “inexpensive”)
• Product (”Microsoft Corporation” produces “Microsoft Word”)
• Attribute (”fast” is an attributes of “speed”)
• Membership (”king” is a governor of “kingdom”)
• Lateral bonds (concepts closely related to one another, e.g. “nut” and “lock nut”)

In every language, particularly English, there are dozen multi-meaning words. For example, bow – the first word that came into my mind. It has the following meanings: cold steel, musical instrument, the front part (of a ship). Semantic analysis allows search engines to automatically analyze and deduct word’s meaning, based on the word’s environment. In the process of on-site optimization it is vital to understand semantics-related algorithms in order to maximize its effectiveness and ultimately better visibility of the website resources.

Today very few would guess that e-mail might be as old as 35 years old. “Is it after or before Internet” – someone may ask. Well, if you can call 15 sites existing at that time an Internet, than after.

Back in 1965 Fernando Corbato and his acquaintances (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) developed software that allowed users to exchange messages. 6 years later Ray Tomlinson elaborated the first e-mail application. What he did was uniting the message exchange software with the application, capable of sending files. His invention was immortalized by the “ @ ” sign, that separated the domain and the destination address.

Ray Tomlinson’s first e-mail was a joyous discovery at that time. Mr. Tomlinson did not even dare to think that one day he would be getting dozen of spam e-mails from all over the world. Despite all the hardships modern e-mail might bring, it still remains important means of contact, communication and socializing.

While artificial intelligence algorithms are still in their cradle stage of development, major search engines have adopted a method of sites’ indexing involving a different type of intellect activity. What is beyond search engine crawlers’ power, can always be performed by Internet users and makers. Among numerous filters search engines employ to select and classify sites, there are very few of those, executed by webmasters themselves. Link partner selection, is probably the most responsible and crucial of all them.

The old proverb says “Content is Power”, but the role of backlinks is now so vital, that it has become another powerful means driving your site to the desired top 10. For a search engine optimization rookie, gathering links might turn out to be a serious challenge. To make a long way short, read our advice on how to find really valuable reciprocal links for your sites without drowning it in the the depths of the search engines.

1. The first thing you want from your link partner is to make sure his/her resources pages are indexed by Google, in particular the page, where your link must appear. You can easily check that by opening Google and typing in: site:www.domain.com/links.html or cache:www.domain.com/links.html – remember, you do not need “http://” for this and there should be no space between the advanced operator and the site’s page URL. If Google shows the link page, it has been successfully indexed and you can proceed to step 2.

2. Do not close the Google window, now click the “Cached” link in the search result window (if there is no results, you will probably want to consider another link exchange partner) and check if you can see the anchors of other sites that are visible on the live link partner’s page by the moment you got there. Today, there are hundreds ways to have a page indexed without having a single outbound link, located on it, be indexed by search engines.

3. Once you made sure the links are visible, aim the mouse pointer on the links and check if they are indeed linking to another site. I have seen many sites, who have an outbound link look like this: http://www.domain.com/www.linkpartner.com. This might happen in two cases: Webmaster’s carelessness (missing http:// prefix) or deliberate intentions to trick Google bot. In both cases you will probably want to skip such a site.

4. Number of links on the resource page. This is a well-known rule for every web-master. No more than 100 links on a single page. Even though the Google bot might crawl 200 and even 300 links, you don’t want to have your link numbered 80 or so. Another fact is that if the page has a page rank it will most likely be distributed among top sites only, bottom links get bits and pieces.

5. You don’t want a link partner who uses frames on his resource page, as the text and links in the frame are not indexed by Google. And even though this problem has a temporary nature, in the near future little will change about it.

6. Done with the technical part of the analysis, let’s proceed to another factor. All the links located on your resource page should exist for the benefit of the Internet user who might take interest in exploring more sites related to the subject matter. For this purpose, make sure the themes of the sites, you are linking to, correspond to the name of the category on the links page and the categories, in its turn, are related in a way to the business your site is conducting. Well organized, human edited links will serve for the benefit of both: your site’s visitors and the site itself.

The technical examination of the resource page of you potential link partner described above will take from 30 to 60 seconds of your precious and will give you the confidence, you might be lacking. Unfortunately, we were unable to provide live examples fraught with some problems for us. We hope that this post will appeal to your vigilance in searching link partners and familiarize newly-fledged webmasters with most common seo scams.

The need and the speed of information exchange in the modern world has reached those volumes, that allow us to speak about a new era of Internet development, making it suitable to sum up what we have witnessed and what we are to see in the near future. As new technologies and techniques are coming up, the attitude to the Internet also changes, requiring timely steps to be taken to stand the test of time and new trends. In this posting you will read basic characteristics of phenomena named web 1.0, web 2.0 and web 3.0.

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues suggested the programming language for World Wide Web, which was implemented and initiated the development of what today is known as Internet. As the Internet developed, Web 1.0 proved itself to be static, commercially driven and inflexible.

The idea behind Web 2.0 is the next step in WWW development. There are several reasons for Web 2.0 to appear. Full list of informational resources, services, products, interest fields and internet groupings is today so huge, that an internet user wants to orient himself in the ocean of information and have a start point where resources, necessary for him, would be gathered in one place. The simplest example is the Google personalized page, where a user can put together specific news blocks, weather forecast for a selected region, have instant access to multiple blogs updates. Ajax technologies, RSS, XML make it possible to personalize the home page on the fly without programming knowledge. What we are witnessing today is a shift from static pages and overloaded search engines towards interactive, dynamic, targeted, human edited resources delivering search specific results at the shortest time. Web 2.0 is characterized by de-centralization of authoritative resources, where information and data become leading factors. It basically a self-adapting system initiated, supported and referred by internet users.

Personalized, interactive, socially and informationally enabled, Web 2.0 is already today our next door Internet neighbor: Wikipedia, Skype, e-Bay, Craiglist.

Web 3.0 is in its embryo stage now, but nevertheless carries ideas that have a bright future. There should not be a place for skepticism in the world of Internet, people could hardly believe that Internet would become what it is today 15 years ago. User beneficial ideas get implemented, and do it fast. It is not easy to believe that one day we will be able to access any information as easily as an apple at arm’s length, but that is what Web 3.0 ultimately offers.

Web 3.0 (or semantic web) suggests that there is a better way to organize and deliver information than just match the keywords. The idea deals with artificial intelligence and its development, but not only. Web 3.0 proponents believe that current state of search engines’ work is far from being perfect and it is destined to be substituted by more intelligent solutions that are to appear in the near future. This approach is promising but is still not even in its alfa version.

So the question remains: whether Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 are new stage of World Wide Web development, or just a new trend that will never bother some webmasters or internet-based businesses in their work. Unfortunately the only person who can give us a sure answer is Mr. Time and it looks like he is still not available.

I was forced to carry out this relatively simple search engine relevancy test after one incident: when my wife kept browsing through multiple websites generated by search engines and still could not find what she was looking for, wasting a good part of her Saturday evening. Frankly, I was in two minds while thinking whether I should pick up a low competition keyword or a high competition – but I finally decided to take a VERY competitive word to check where all these Page Ranks, Links, Artificial Intelligence algorithms would bring us to? I selected 4 Search Engines for my test: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves. Having done so, I turn off all my search engine optimization knowledge and just turn into a regular internet user who wants to buy… one of those new thing called “satellite radio” (Overture indicates 1279 searches per day (October, 2006), Wordtracker shows 799 daily inquiries). OK, done with the theory, let us turn to practice now. I am going to type in “buy satellite radio in USA”, that is going to be logical enough for someone who wants to buy a radio (not read some news or reviews about it), and buy it in USA not abroad (since delivery to any state is available as long as you have a credit card and have a permanent post address). So, let’s see what will the results be.

OK, first result in Google – C-Span website, telling me what is satellite radio and where the headquarters of Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. is located. OK, thanks to Google, now I know what satellite radio is but still don’t know where to buy one…Second result: America’s number 1 way to buy cars on-line. Fortunately in a small article describing radios for cars I was able to find a tiny link to the page selling what I am looking for - at last! But E-BAY CANADA in the top ten Google – oh, good gracious, that is a blow below the belt, Google completely ignored the last part of my search request “in USA”. What an inexcusable mistake for the search monster! Luckily, Google was able to recollect Amazon and E-bay that saved it from a complete collapse. My relevancy mark: 5 out of 10, with all my respect to the Internet giant.

Yahoo – very relevant result, gives RadioShack, Best Buy and Sears as the first three results – pretty good choice of satellite radios – moreover if somebody asked me to put this trio in the order of importance (based on provided choice and consultation) I would do just the same! I would add here WalMart and Target for a complete list of the biggest stores selling electronic items. Very good results with Yahoo, giving consistent relevant output! Yahoo takes 6 point out of 10.

MSN. Absolutely fantastic results!!! Not only MSN gives me an electronics store website – it takes me to the page selling exactly what I am looking for – satellite radios! Pretty high prices there on Infinitipartsusa (looks like Nissan is doing very sophisticated radios), but let’s say I am a very busy person and pay no attention to its cost. Second result goes to Satelliteradiousa – I get the page with the description of satellite radios and the history of XM Radio – but site’s navigation is user-friendly, I can clearly see that I am just one click away from the page where radios for sale are displayed. Unfortunately third result is just the same site, but this time I see a page telling about the history of Sirius radio. MSN need to be a little more diverse in its results. MSN takes 7 relevant results out of 10.

AskJeeves – best results! Not only do I see pictures of satellite radios, not only do I see their prices – I can even enter my zip code to see local stores deals. Absolutely relevant result goes to AskJeeves with a simple web site called Shopping.com and its page devoted to entirely satellite radios. But second result (I am not taking into account supportive results) upset me – the page was not found, what a failure for AskJeeves! There is nothing left for me but to give 10 out of 10 for AskJeeves. All of the results were relevant; I would be able to buy a satellite radio on any page of the generated results.

Even though all the results were so different there was one website that managed to be present in the results of all four search engines, that is www.usatoday.com. I wonder if this site comes out every time somebody is looking for something “in USA”.

Conclusion. The purpose of this test was not to carry out an elaborate testing of the existing search engines, but to find out how user-friendly they are, taking a random key phrase for this experiment. Unfortunately, we only witnessed that the greater the share of the search engine is, the more commercial it becomes and in the long run more irrelevant. Developers of the search engines are certainly pursuing very difficult tasks, and I honestly respect their work; but it becomes clear that the future of the search engine industry lies in relevant and request-friendly results as the most important criteria of search engine effectiveness and accuracy.

I was forced to write this post as I we are getting more and more link exchange offers through e-mail, cautioning us not to consider it as spam. What should be considered as e-mail spam and what should not in regards to link request e-mail. Let us answer these questions that are destined to come up sooner or later for virtually every e-mail user.

Even though, the number of resources, dedicated to link exchange gradually increases, there are still reasons why webmasters might contact another site’s owner directly. The thing is that such link exchange directories might have a very limited or no sites at all that belong to a category in need. Whereas the more thematic the link partner’s website is – the higher the value of the link. Besides, many link exchange partners are not ranked according to their PR, Alexa Rank or domain age. Let alone their SERPs. Thus link hunters are forced to do this job manually.

Here I should say a few words about link search software. ARELIS, being a very popular one, deserved its good name by the ability to browse and automatically select link partners within a selected subject field, requiring minimum human interference. I personally know people who would assert that with the help of this tool a layermen might perform no worse than a seo pro. That might be right, as long as the quantity concerned. As for the quality of such “link partners”, it is left in abeyance. Using harvesting software to search for e-mails and then sending hundreds of e-mail in a minute is fraught with serious consequences. Calling it spam is quite righteous, and webmasters who exercise this should realize that.

Naturally, resorting to direct search and contacting of potential link partners is the best way out of the situation. Targeted websites should be: subject related, user friendly, informative and should have a corresponding category for outbound links. There are typically instructions and an e-mail created for link exchange purposes. Making a separate e-mail, like links@domain.com, will most likely save you from link exchange spammers. This is a most defensible case. Since this practice is still uncommon, many website owners who decided to make pages specially catered for outbound links forget to add link exchange instructions and e-mail. No wonder you will be getting spammy requests forwarded to your main e-mail, given in the “Contact Us” section. If you have external links on the website, people will naturally be offering you exchange. Calling it “spam” would be not righteous from the point of view of common sense. Using this line of reasoning, adding well composed link exchange instructions and a separate e-mail is an inseparable detail of every links swapping website and is a sure way to avoid spamming.