To avoid being left out, it makes sense to manually add your URLs to search engines. (In early times there might be more of a delay before your sites were found, and it really made sense to make sure you were listed!) To manually add your URL to Google, go to http://www.google.com/addurl/. You can get listed at Yahoo! at http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request. Getting listed is, of course, only the beginning of the battle. One of the key goals of core SEO is to get both highly ranked and listed in reference to some specific search terms. Achieving this goal requires taking affirmative control of the information that the search index may use to make ranking decisionsand that it will use to understand the quality of your pages.
If your page (or site) has inbound links from sites in a search index, then Google (or any other broad search engine) will most likely find you pretty quickly. However, it's peculiar but true: different search engines index different portions of the Web. Also, at any given time, it is impossible for any search engine index to include the entire Web!
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Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Search Engines
Monday, February 23, 2009
Web Site Metrics and Measuring Traffic
An important component of SEO is getting a handle on web site metrics and measuring traffic. This is not as easy as it sounds, because a great many competing terms are used, and data is not always reliable. Alexa, http://www.alexa.com, is owned by Amazon.com. On the Alexa site, you can click the Traffic rankings tab to see an ordered list of the top 500 Sites updated daily. The Movers and Shakers list is also interesting. It is a snapshot of the "right here and now" on the Web, and is useful for aligning your SEO efforts with Web-wide trends in real time. It is worth spending time learning about popularity on the Web if you want to build successful sites. Alexa provides the tools you can use to see for yourself what is trafficked, and what is gaining or losing among top-ranked sites. You can also use Alexa to see traffic statistics for sites that are not in the top 500. For almost any site that has been around a while, Alexa will give you an idea of traffic statistics, and whether it is gaining or losing traffic. Alexa lets you enter descriptive information about your web site, which others can see if they check your site traffic using Alexa. You can also make sure that Alexa provides a snapshot of your home page along with its statistics. Since this service is free, it is certainly worth entering a site description and monitoring your Alexagarnered statistics. Alexa works by collating results from users throughout the Web who have installed the special Alexa Toolbar. (If you'd like, you can install the Alexa Toolbar and help with popularity statistics.) There's some question about the statistical validity of Alexa for less-trafficked sites because of this method of gathering dataAlexa's results are probably skewed towards users who are already web savvy and heavy users. Most likely, Alexa's results are not very meaningful for sites that are ranked below 100,000 in popularity (very roughly, with fewer than 10,000 visitors per week). Measuring Traffic The metrics of web site traffic is a huge topic just by itself, and goes way beyond Alexa. There are a number of books just about web metricsif you are interested in this topic, you might want to check out Jim Sterne's Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success (http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471450502.html), which is comprehensive and excellent, if a little dated. You can also take a look at the "Tracking and Logging" thread on WebMasterWorld, http://www.webmasterworld.com. There is also, of course, quite a bit of software designed simply to help webmasters gather and understand the metrics of their sites. Also, your web server's logs contain a great deal of traffic information that can help provide you with useful metrics. Measuring traffic is a very important topic: to optimize your site you need to have baseline information, as well as feedback, so you can understand whether changes improve site trafficand to also see which elements in your site draw traffic.
From an SEO perspective, you need to establish a plan for measuring traffic so that you can find out objectively which SEO measures have succeeded.
How much traffic do you aspire to? Another important question, because SEO approaches will differ depending on whether you want to generate tons of general broad traffic, or if you are targeting a narrow (but significant) niche.
A good (and reasonably objective) source of information and metrics about general and high-trafficked sites is Alexa.
Alexa
Friday, February 20, 2009
Content That Draws Traffic
There's a great deal of variation in goodsuccessfulcontent web sites. The purpose of these sites varies from humor to practical to editorial opinions and beyond. It's hard to generalize. But successful content sites typically do tend to fall into at least one (maybe more than one) of the following categories:
The site is humorous, and makes visitors laugh. While humor is a matter of personal taste, and varies tremendously depending on demographics of the target, humorous features can draw a great deal of traffic to a site. One downside is that humor tends to get stale quickly. An example of a humorous site that is popular is Googlefight, http://www.googlefight.com, a site that compares the Google rankings of two terms such as "God" and "Satan."
The site provides a useful free service. Web services that are free (and desirable) can draw astounding levels of traffic. A good example is TinyURL, http://tinyurl.com, which provides a practical and very useful (but simple) service: it allows you to convert long, unwieldy URLsfor example, those you often see from Amazon.com when you select an inventory itemto short, convenient URLs that are easy to use in HTML code (and easy to enter in a browser). TinyURL gets hundreds of millions of hits per month, and is able to convert some of this traffic for other purposes (such as making money from advertising).
The site is an online magazine, newspaper, or blog. Newsworthy content or interesting opinion pieces can draw considerable traffic. But the fact that anyone can put up a blog means that you'll have to go to considerable lengths to distinguish your content.
The site provides practical information. Many people turn to the Web as their first line of approach for finding information: about technology, relationships, travel destinations, health, and much more. Adding useful articles is often one of the first steps taken by SEO consultancies to beef up traffic to a destination site. Obviously, the more closely related the articles are to the kinds of traffic you want to target, the better this will work from an SEO perspective.
The site services a community, and provides communication tools for that community. The Web is largely about community, and involving community in your site serves several SEO purposes. Not only will your community help keep your content fresh, it's also self-selecting: if you enable your community with care it can help to tell you which topics are of interest, and what content areas will draw traffic.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Understanding Search Engines
Search engines, such as Google, are highly complex implementations of software technology that have evolved into mega-businesses, and certainly Google is a colossus when it comes to providing access to the information you can find on the Internet.
Effective SEO requires a basic understanding of how the pieces of search engine technology fit together.
A search engine, such as Google, implements four basic mechanisms:
Search engines, such as Google, are highly complex implementations of software technology that have evolved into mega-businesses, and certainly Google is a colossus when it comes to providing access to the information you can find on the Internet.
Effective SEO requires a basic understanding of how the pieces of search engine technology fit together.
A search engine, such as Google, implements four basic mechanisms:
* Discovery, meaning finding web sites. This is accomplished using software that travels down web links, which is sometimes called a bot, webbot, or robot.
* Storage of links, page summaries, and related information. Google calls the systems used for this purpose its index servers.
* Ranking, used to order stored pages by how important they are. Google uses a complex mechanism called PageRank to accomplish this task.
* Return of results, used to organize the display of search results, based on ranking, in response to a specific user search query.
Discovery, Storage, Ranking, and Return (DSRR) are all important to SEO. In particular, you'll need to have a basic grasp of Discovery and Ranking in order to be effective with SEO implementationso these mechanisms are explained in greater detail later in this article ("Using PageRank").
