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There are many things that you can do to optimize your website for better ranking in search engines. Below are a list of things that anyone can do to rank better. I’d like to imagine search engines using a point system to govern the billions of websites in the universe, giving points for elements and keywords that will help in bringing the most relevant results to searchers. I’ve divided the list into 3 different categories, for better understanding of the importance that each item brings. Important, quite important and very important.

Very Important

Keywords in < title > tag

Imagine walking down a street with dozens of shops on the left and right, each with a name at the top, wanting to buy a table lamp. The street is busy and as you walk down further, you see a shop with the name of ‘Lights & Lamps’. You walk in, buy that table lamp you’ve been searching for and walk out. Little did you know, the shop next door also sells table lamps but with a cheaper price. You didn’t notice it cause it’s name was ‘Mr Chee’. It’s name sounded more like a restaurant than an electrical store.

Shop = your site
Signboard = < title > tag

Keywords in URL

http:// rangit.com / keywords-in-URL /

Directory names can help rankings in Google even if competition is competitive although keyword stuffing in URL may contribute to the site being flagged as spam. If the content is of quality and it matches, you’ll have full points for it.

Keyword density in content

Keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for against the total number of words appearing on a given web page. A naturally written document contains a keyword density of at most 10%. It’s one of the simplest way of gaining points in search engine rankings. Chris did it.

Keywords in anchor text

The anchor text of inbound links can be a decisive factor when going after top ranking on extremely competitive search terms. John Chow displayed the power of anchor test when he lured anchor text in the form of contests, though linking for prizes is considered a violation of Google’s terms and conditions.

Keywords in headings

There are six levels of headings from < h1 > (the most important) to < h6 > (the least important). User agents may use headings to construct a table of contents for a document automatically. If the content is of quality and relevance, you’ll have full points for it.

PR of inbound links

In the world of Google, the higher your PR the higher your reputation. Getting an inbound link from a high ranking site will certainly give more value to the inbound link.

Site similarity of inbound links

A hundred related sites linking to yours is more valuable then a thousand unrelated sites. Full points is awarded for relevance and and similarity.

.edu and .gov inbound links

Both top level domains are not sold to the public, hence the value. They don’t expire, are trusted and an inbound link carries much more weight than any other.

Quantity of inbound links

The more the better. It’s like voting. 1 link = 1 vote. All legitimate ones are counted and weighted against link popularity and originating context.

Site accessibility

Just think like a website visitor and your best selling layout is generated in your mind. Improvements include checking browser compatibility, reducing password protected areas, 404 errors and broken links. Getting more pages successfully indexed will earn a site full points in this area.

Another fundamental issue, which that is often neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is unaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site simply can’t be indexed.

Unique content

Content is king. Wrong.

Unique, high-quality, unduplicated content is king!

Regular content changes

Frequency of content updating in blogs and websites are becoming of more value to Google than it used to be. The more frequent the content, the more likely others are going to visit your site and find articles that they want to link to, which in turn provides leverage in SERPs. I personally regard frequent content updating as the BEST marketing tool you can ever have in today’s web.




Quite Important

The first in line

The heading should contain the most important keyword. Followed by a paragraph containing all the important keywords. Logic being the higher up the keyword, the more important it should be.

Keywords in < alt > tags

< alt > tags are considered by all 4 major engines. Use them to describe images. Put appropriate keywords in them as long as they actually describe the picture.

Anchor text of internal links

Internal links are hyperlinks that join the documents in the website. This is assuming you have more than one page which should be the case if you are serious about optimizing your site. As you have direct control over these internal links this is the place to start using the keywords that you are targeting in the anchor text.

Around the anchor text

Search engines pay attention to all of the text around a link as key words and descriptions to further indicate the relevance of the link. The text around it is also used to determine the nature of the link, whether if it is artificial or natural.

Age of inbound links

Think of it as wine. Also, gaining links consistently will certainly appear natural to search engines. A sudden spike in links will certainly alert them.

Links from directories

Certainly a boost in rankings. However, the most boosts will come mostly from huge directories like dmoz.org, yahoo directory, or about.com.

Age of document

Recent and regularly updated documents gain points from search engines.

Sitemap

Gain favor with search engine spiders. Every website should have one. Here’s a suggestion. Try this sitemap generator.

Site size

The bigger, the better. Also, take user friendliness and ease of navigation into consideration as it grows.

Site age

The older the site is, the more recognized and regarded it will be. Trust points are awarded to respected and established sites, for they indicate the notion that they have been around and are here to stay.

Site theme

This is an area that matters a lot as it promotes the ranking of pages that are related to the theme. The theme ‘because you value your mind‘ is one example of low theme/content relevance.




Important

Keywords in < description > and < keywords > metatags

Since the search engines use a wide variety of factors to determine site rankings, optimizing a page to rank high is a cumulative effort. You should use everything available to you that the engines might give some weight, and therefore you should certainly use < Description > and < Keywords > metatags along with every other legitimate, acceptable technique available. At best, it may help boost your site a bit in those engines that still read them.

Keyword phrases & adjacency

The gap between 2 keywords is best when close to each other. Imagine ‘heart surgery’ in the first paragrgaph compared to ‘heart’ in the 1st sentence and ‘surgery’ in the 10th sentence. Keyword phrases stand a better chance when it is popular like ‘free online dating’ or ‘make money online’.

Secondary keywords

Rank better for targeted traffic. Imagine battling with hundreds of thousands of others for ‘plastic surgery’ compared to a handful for ‘plastic surgery manchester city’.

Misspelled keywords, Word stemming and Plural keywords

Sometimes misspelled keywords can represent a very high number of searches. Obviously, you don’t want to have misspelled words be visible on your page, however, it is a good idea to include them in your keywords meta tag.

Word stemming refers to the use of root words as synonyms for other words. For example, the word “climb” will be treated the same as “climbing”. Most search engines use word stemming, but in many cases the search results will vary. It is best to add the most commonly used versions of each word.

You will also find different results when searching for singular and plural keywords. It is best to include both.

Synonyms

Search engines do take into account synonyms of targeted keywords besides the main ones. The site get points from search engines when ranking and relevancy is calculated.

Total outgoing links from the page that links to your site

Scarcity brings value. Imagine an ice cream sale everyday and an ice cream sale once a month. The less outgoing links that the site has, the more value it brings to your site.

Named anchors

Using named anchors where appropriate improves keyword relevancy. When links are in the form < a href="/keyword.aspx#keyword" >, then keyword targeting is improved.

IP address of inbound link

MSN and Yahoo! may not take into account inbound links that originate from the same IP classes. However, Google takes all inbound link IP classes into account.

Page size

A page size of < 40KB gains more favor than a page size of > 100KB.

Location of files

The nearer a file is to the root directory, the better it ranks. Imagine comparing it against another file that is stored in the 5th layer of the tree.

Domains and Subdomains

The domain name http://rangit.com is definitely given more points by search engines compared to the subdomain of http://rangit.wordpress.com

Hyphens in URL

An underscore ‘_’ is not considered as a divider by Google.
Only hyphens ‘-’ are.

Michael Pedone, who founded eTrafficJams.com in 2000 when he had successfully optimized his wife’s company’s website by increasing online traffic and significantly improving sales. The search engine optimization company is firm in implementing ethical, non-spam search engine optimization solutions to increase targeted website traffic. The company is among the Top 10 most requested profiles in SEO Consultants.

Why?

Because they provide quality ‘organic’ search results. The next question is..

What in the world is ‘organic’ search and how can it benefit a website?

When I first heard organic, I thought of plants and flowers. Is ‘organic’ search supposed to help me get ‘healthy’ visitors? Or is it supposed to prevent diseases?

None of the above.

Organic means a search that returns results by indexing pages based on content and keyword relevancy which is in contrast to listings ranked based on who paid the most money to appear at the top. Organic search results are ‘clean’ and uncontaminated with commercial payments or bids.

The 4 benefits that websites enjoy from organic traffic are :

Greater Click-throughs

Ultimately, organic search results will most likely yield greater click-through rates when all other things are equal. Therefore, it’s this type of listing that will maximize the traffic to websites whenever they climb to the top.

Power of Branding

Smaller companies can give the impression of big business importance by securing a better position in organic search than their larger rivals.

Greater Trust Equals Greater Conversions

On the whole, you should see more visitors from organic search converting to sales, assuming your rankings were for targeted, relevant keywords. In the business world, ROI, or Return On Investment, is king. Fortunately, organic search can give you the high ROI you’re looking for or your boss is demanding.

Organic is Free

A Web site with good quality content and links from third party sites is very useful in getting pages indexed or re-indexed quickly in search engines because it allows you to quickly test various page designs and to feed news and other time-sensitive content to the search engine as quickly as possible.

The main problem with organic traffic is time and nothing but time. Organic rankings are not automatic. You don’t pay and get listed highly. That’s where resources like eTrafficJams come in. They get the job done for you for a certain fee. Know the company better. Get personal with the CEO. Read some of his articles. Get yourself a SEO analysis or even get your site’s keywords analyzed all for free.

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eTrafficJams
Get search engines to your side

Free Monitor for Google is free web promotion software designed for search engine specialists and webmasters. With it, you can find position of your web site in Google Top for popular keywords and get more traffic from Google. Google Monitor will query Google and show you the position of your site by your target keywords and also how well your competitors are doing. It keeps statistics for several URLs and several lists of keywords. You can even add notes. Below are the 3 notable features of Free Monitor for Google.

Monitor Website Ranking

For each keyword, Free Monitor for Google performs a query to Google and shows its rank in the Google index. You can choose the way to perform the query: either the default method (just like in a browser) or via the Google Web API. Free Monitor for Google stores your best position for each keyword and the current trend: whether you have risen since the last search or fallen down.



Additionally, Free Monitor for Google shows the top positions in Google for each keyword (see the right part of the window on the screenshot above). By default, it shows top 10, but you can change this to anything you like.

Track Multiple URLs

One of the convenient Free Monitor for Google features is that it can check the web ranking of several URLs.



Free Monitor for Google keeps the results for each URL separately from others, which allows you to check rankings of several websites independently.

Work Through Proxy



You can make Free Monitor for Google work through a proxy to increase the speed, cache results or bypass country-specific restrictions. There are four proxy options: proxy host, proxy port, username and password. The first two are required (unless you decide to work without a proxy). The username and password are only required for those proxy servers that require authentication.

Free Monitor for Google
Free web promotion software

As the time of writing, the experts are mostly on programming languages. You may type a question there and end up not getting any help in it. So what I would suggest is to go to the directory of tags and click on a tag that you may find relevant to your question.

Help this potential site grow. Join the pool of expert. You may be good in ‘cooking fish n chips’ or ‘train a dog stop biting it’s tail’. What matters is the value of what you are able to offer. Anyway, I have signed myself up and you can find me by the tag of ‘writer’s block’.

Qunu
Help me with..

Codefetch is a code search engine that connects programmers and authors so that programmers get the information they need from the work of supportive and encouraging book authors. Easily get results from 22 different programming languages :

1. C
2. Cold Fusion
3. Ant
4. C#
5. Flash ActionScript
6. Apache Configuration
7. C++
8. HTML / CSS
9. AppleScript
10. Delphi Pascal
11. Javascript / Ajax
12. SQL
13. Java
14. JSP / JSTL / JSF
15. Unix / Shell
16. Objective-C Cocoa
17. Perl
18. XML-Schema
19. Python
20. PHP
21. XSLT / XPATH
22. Ruby / Rails

It’s so easy to use. I tried entering ‘path’ in ‘PHP’ and out came all the PHP codes from 22 different books. Then I entered the search term ‘pizza’ and chose ‘C++’. Out came codes that :

• Determines which of two pizza sizes is the best buy.
• Determines whether a round pizza or a rectangular pizza is the best buy.
• Returns the price per square inch of a pizza.

Codefetch will generally benefit students and basic programmers by providing source codes to learn from. Moreover, this is also a good way for book authors to promote the content of the book.

Code Fetch
Fetch the code you need.

Founded in 2001, Apogee Search is one of the largest online marketing services firms backed by a rapidly growing staff of full time, internet marketing professionals providing all the tools and business expertise required to turn a company’s online efforts into strategic, revenue generators. Apogee’s staff is highly trained in statistical significance and quantitative research who also use powerful web analytics for precise evaluations of website volume and visiting patterns. Only proven methods are provided to help clients carefully manage their ROI to meet specific budgetary requirements.

On January 9th 2007, Apogee Search became the first Google AdWords Qualified Company in the Southwest of the United States. Their focus on specific markets, competition, unique selling advantages, revenue goals and long-term expectations paid off.

Check out the Houston SEO services to learn more. Their proven track record will be a proof to the skeptics. At the time of viewing, all 17 clients of Apogee have achieved first page results for highly competitive common search terms on the Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search.

Apogee is certainly for companies who are serious about optimizing website rankings. Their complete, results-based online marketing solution, backed by the commitment to help every client build their business is huge. In any case, try the free search engine marketing analysis to learn exactly where your website ranks on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Then get a free consult on you how you can move your website to the top.

Online Marketing Blog
Get regularly updated news.

Free SEM Analysis
Free consultation on improving your rankings.

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Yeah, that's what i think of it as. Correct me if I'm wrong. So basically, there are many other portals, directories and web pages invisble to the search engine user. Generally, web directories are maintained by human editors. Here are several pointers to getting around information in the world wide web.

1. Directories and Portals.

Useful when :

• quality is the priority
• you're looking for chosen, reviewed and commented upon sites
  
• it's a bottom's up situation. Starting with a general topic.

Because of the nature of reviewing and evaluation of humans, the indexed sites are generally quality ones. However, because of physical and time limiations, the information may not be parallel to time. Several directories worth a look at :

Librarian's Internet Index
a collection of over 20,000 quality websites, organized into 14 main topics, 300 related topics and 40, 000 subscribing to their weekly newsletter.

Find Law
the highest trafficked legal website.

Info Mine
a university resource collection divided into 9 categories for university staffs, students and professionals.

2. Invisible Searchable Sites and Databases.

Useful when :

• looking for information most likely found in a database
• looking for information that changes dynamically in content

Here are 5 recommended links to find needles in haystacks.

Resource Shelf

Complete Planet
contains over 70,000 searchable databases and specialty search engines.

Animal Search
search by group, type, and geographic regions for clean animal-related sites.

Nuclear Explosions Database
provides location, time, & size of explosions worldwide since 1945.

FindArticles
find magazines and articles by topic, explore all
publications by title or limit your search to "free articles only".

3. Search Engines.

Useful when :

• we're specific on information
• we want to make use of new retrieving technologies

Common ones are google , yahoo , msn , AOL , Ask .

Singingfish
a superior audio/video search engine.

Scirus
a science search engine with over 250 million science-specific Web pages.

UFOSeek: The UFO and Paranormal Search Engine
indexing over 110,000 Paranormal, Spiritual and UFO sites in the their system.

If you’re looking to create an advertisement banner with sound effects, you’ll find a lot here.

Wherever you are, if sound effects is what you’ve been looking for, look no further.

Find Sounds, the sound effect search engine is here to help. Below is a table comparing Find Sounds to the internet’s major search engines.

As you can see, Find Sounds is fully devoted to searching sound effects and musical instrument samples. It has simple, easy to use features that is suitable for users of all ages. To all parents, relax, because audio files containing obscenities will not be found in the search results. They are filtered out before the results are returned.

A user is allowed to play around with the search criteria so that the results are narrowed down. I’ll take the first result of the search term ‘laugh’ and explain a bit further about what you’ll see.

The waveform provides visual information about the content of the audio file. It’s actually a graph of loudness over time. On the other hand, the colour reflects the frequency of the file. There are 2 buttons at the side. The left button is for listening to the file, the right for files similar to this one. A short description is displayed below the direct URL and the technical properties are shown at the bottom.

That’s about it. Keep a bookmark, cause you never know when it might come in handy. =)

Find Sounds
Sound effect search engine