Recently I have been concentrating on Yahoo and the elements on a page that they look at when ranking, I looked close at their own guidelines and noticed a few very important key points. Think of this document as a break down of their guide lines. As the following text points out, Yahoo are focusing heavily on page criteria.



Quoted from Yahoo:

Users are more likely to click a link if the title matches their search. Choose terms for the title that match the concept of your document.

Sound advice to make the title tag descriptive of the pages contents as this is what people will see in the search results and click on.



Quoted from Yahoo:
Use a "description" meta-tag and write your description accurately and carefully. After the title, the description is the most important draw for users. Make sure the document title and description attract the interest of the user but also fit the content on your site.

This is the clearest indication that Yahoo read and give weight to the meta description tag, make sure that the tag is a desriptive sentence with all of the pages keywords present. I would aim at no more than 3 lines.



Quoted from Yahoo:
Use a "keyword" meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page.

Clearly Yahoo hold weight to the Meta keyword tag, what once was deemed to be a spammy aspect of ranking tactics is now an ok method of getting your sites message across - by no means stuff it full of keywords and repeat them to the extreme, just make sure that the pages keywords are mentioned twice or so in the tag.



Quoted from Yahoo:
Keep relevant text and links in HTML. Placing them in graphics or image maps means search engines can't always search for the text, and the crawler can't follow links to your site's other pages. An HTML site map, with a link from your welcome page, can help make sure all your pages are crawled.

Basic sound seo advice, keep links and text plain HTML that way the spiders can read and follow the links.



Quoted from Yahoo:
Use ALT text for graphics. It's good page design to accommodate text browsers or visually impaired visitors, and it helps improve the text content of your page for search purposes.

From this it is clear that Yahoo, read and asign weight to the alt text. Make sure that the text describes the image, but be sure to include a keyword to increase your keyword density.



Quoted from Yahoo:
Correspond with webmasters and other content providers and build rich linkages between related pages.
Note: "Link farms" create links between unrelated pages for no reason except to increase page link counts. Using link farms violates Yahoo!'s Site Guidelines and will not improve your page ranking.

Link exchanges are in favour with Yahoo at the moment, some sound advice regarding link farms - avoid them!

Why does my site have a PageRank of zero?
A page may be assigned a PageRank of zero for a variety of reasons, such as:
Googlebot hasn't yet crawled this site, or the site has only been developed recently.
There are no or few trusted links to the site.
Google believes the site violates our Webmaster Quality Guidelines.
To learn more about PageRank, please see http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

SEO is an abbreviation for "search engine optimizer." Many SEOs provide useful services for website owners, from writing copy to giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories to which a site can be submitted. However, a few unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results.


While Google doesn't have relationships with any SEOs and doesn't offer recommendations, we do have a few tips that may help you distinguish between an SEO that will improve your site and one that will only improve your chances of being dropped from search engine results altogether.



  • Be wary of SEO firms that send you email out of the blue.

    Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:



    "Dear google.com,

    I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."


    Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night"
    diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.


  • No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

    Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google,
    or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to
    submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL
    page or through the Google Sitemaps program,
    and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.


  • Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do.

    Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content
    on your behalf, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from
    Google's index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best
    to be sure you know exactly how they intend to "help" you.


  • You should never have to link to an SEO.

    Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link popularity schemes, or
    submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don't
    affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely
    consider to be positive.


  • Some SEOs may try to sell you the ability to type keywords directly into the browser address bar.

    Most such proposals require users to install extra software, and very few users do so.
    Evaluate such proposals with extreme care and be skeptical about the self-reported number of users who
    have downloaded the required applications.


  • Choose wisely.

    While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry.
    Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have
    appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO:
    http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html.
    While Google doesn't comment on specific companies, we've encountered firms calling themselves
    SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.


  • Be sure to understand where the money goes.

    While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines
    combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will
    promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the
    search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that
    they "control" other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam
    doesn't work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results,
    but be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply
    toward temporary advertising.


  • Talk to many SEOs, and ask other SEOs if they'd recommend the firm you're considering.

    References are a good start, but they don't tell the whole story. You should ask how long a
    company has been in business and how many full time individuals it employs. If you feel pressured or uneasy,
    go with your gut feeling and play it safe: hold off until you find a firm that you can trust.
    Ask your SEO firm if it reports every spam abuse that it finds to Google using our spam complaint form at
    http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html.
    Ethical SEO firms report deceptive sites that violate Google's spam guidelines.


  • Make sure you're protected legally.

    For your own safety, you should insist on a full and unconditional money-back guarantee.
    Don't be afraid to request a refund if you're unsatisfied for any reason, or if your SEO's actions cause your
    domain to be removed from a search engine's index. Make sure you have a contract in writing that includes pricing.
    The contract should also require the SEO to stay within the guidelines recommended by each search engine for
    site inclusion.





What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?


One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects.
These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf. However, if the
relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens,
the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.


Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere.
The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual
pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often
contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a
site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

What are some other things to look out for?


There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It's far from a comprehensive list,
so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:



  • owns shadow domains
  • puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
  • offers to sell keywords in the address bar
  • doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear in search results
  • guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
  • operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
  • gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware
  • has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google

If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.


What is seo? Seo is all about helping the search engines to crawl your site better and give them the best of your site. This requires a lot of things to be done. We will try to post some of the valuable search engine optimization information here.



Blogs and websites get success by achieving a huge traffic. So how do we actually get traffic? For this there are many factors to it. We will try to put up some of the factors here:



1) google page rank, higher the page rank the better it is. Page rank starts from 0 and goes to 10. page rank 4-6 should be considered decent. Google pagerank is found in the google toolbar. Though it is not all that accurate, so perhaps checking the pr from data centers are a better idea.



2) Backlinks are important, but geting backlinka involves a lot of work.



3) Unique content and fresh content.





If you get backlinks and fresh content, google page rank will go up, so let’s talk about the backlinks first. These are a few methods to get backlinks,



1) Article submission : it is one of the easiest ways to get backlinks. Just write a quality article, and submit it to as many article submission websites as you can. And add your website’s link in the article. This is how you get easy and free backlinks. Remember to check the page rank, as higher page rank article submission sites, are the best to get some quality backlinks. Remember this is contextual links, so this traffic is absolutely targeted, so it is adviced to write articles of the same category as the link in it.



2) Directory submission : I don’t recommend the free directories, as there are too many links. If you go for the free directories, then don't submit all in one day, do it slowly so that the search engines don't detect a lot of links at once! Too many links are link farms and it can get your site blacklisted by google and other search engines. Try the paid directories, must be pr3+ else it is pretty much waste of time. Some of my favorites are alive, aviva, v7n, gii etc!



3) Link exchange : this is another free method, but don’t do this too much. Find high pagerank websites, that are of the same category of your website. Then do link exchange with them. Do this with caution, and remember not to have more than 5% of your incomming links from link exchange, else it will hurt the rankings.



4) Buy links : well, one of the most easiest ways of getting quality backlink is buying links. You need to be careful to buy link, try getting links from pr4+ sites and get it from the home page. This is the best way, as you get quality one sided links. But then matt's recent blogs are a bit against it, so perhaps doing this safely will be a lot better. Don't put paid links or sponsored links in your sites. Do not actively sell or buy links.





You must optimize your keywords also. So for that, whenever you buy links or do link exchange, use your most important keyword to hiperlink your URL. This way your keywords importance in the search engines will increase. This is known as anchor text optimization. It is the best Seo technique.





Meta tags are very important, keep proper Meta tags in the head of your web site, following Meta tags much be present in your pages if you want to get higher rank and better traffic from the search engines:



1) keywords = must be around 120-150 characters long. 50% of your keywords and key phrases must be on your web site’s content, else it will be considered as keyword spamming. This is not the most important meta tags, these days search engines are more or less ignoring the keywords, so am repeating, that please don’t put up keywords that are not part of your page’s content.



2) Description: this is a very important Meta tags, when the site’s don’t have much contents, the meta description is used by the search engines to determine what type of site it is. This one must be around 150-175 characters, not more than that.



3) Title : this is the most important Meta tag. Title is the main reason why a site dose good in search engines and why a site dose not. A title tag must not be more than 50-60 characters. Try not putting up anything other than text in the title’s field. Also it is very important to put up your most important keyword in the title. Avoid special symbols, and if you want to put two keywords or key phrases in the title use this symbol “ ” between them.





These little things make huge difference for your search engine rankings and search engine traffic. Seo is all about helping the search engines, not finding way to cheat it. Try making nice websites, so that you visitors like them, and come back whenever they want more information.





Then next point is unique content and fresh content. These are two things that are very much necessary to make a successful site. You need quality unique content, and then you need to add these contents everyday. You can bring search engines crawlers by a lot of methods, but then only if you have quality unique content then your site will have better position in the search engines. High page rank and lot’s more depends on the content. So start writing and write, as often you want. Perhaps this is one of the major reasons that blogs works better than most websites.





If you are on the blogger try the feeds. Feeds are one of the best way to bring more people to read your content. The rss and xml feeds are pretty common these days. Blogger feeds are atom.xml and it works great. Use feedburner.com to get the most out of your feeds. Just get a free account there, add your site's feed in the feed burner, after that make some add to "my google" and "my yahoo" buttons, that's it! just add those buttons on your site, easy!





Social networking is one of the best ways to drive a huge traffic to your websites or blogs, but then it dosenot really help to much from the seo point of view, as the nofollow tags are available with the link on those sites. But then am getting over a few thousand hits from the social network sites, so it is worth a try, most of all, it is all free!

del.icio.us, stumbleupon, digg, furl etc are a few of these!



A quick link building tips :

Start giving comments on blogs, there are some of the famous blogs with huge pr, and traffic, though the nofollow tags might be there, but then it is still good to go for a try. Just add a link with the comment!



Forum signatures are a nice way to make traffic, good for backlinks.



Try blog posts, reviews and contextual links!

Thinking of outsourcing your reciprocal linking? Think again. There are more benefits to linking than just getting links. Consider doing at least some work yourself.



First let's make a master list, all the usual ways we can think of to get quality, relevant links back to a website.



1. Fill out a form or email a webmaster, asking for a reciprocal link.

We'll assume for the purpose of clarity that we mean exchanging links to post to a traditional directory page.



2. Deep linking.

You embed your partner's link into relevant text on a page other than your directory page, and your partner does the same with your link.



3. Links from signatures.

This can be a signature you place at the end of every email you send out, or in forum posts.



4. Comments left on other websites.

This can be a blog or a comment form on any website. These will usually have your website url attached to the comment.



5. Submit your website to niche or general website directories.

These can be paid or free; I choose depending on what I need to do to get a link without having to put a link on my website. I prefer free, but it's a personal choice.



6. Write and syndicate articles and include your url link in the resource box.

Write exclusive articles for high-traffic sites that rank highly in search engine results.



7. Mix up the above 5 ways.

For example, if you'd like a link from a site with a higher page rank than your own, ask for a link on their directory page in exchange for a link on your homepage as well as in your directory. Save this idea for one or two HIGHLY relevant but non-competitive sites, and only if their search engine results are on, say, page 1 of Google.



8. Write testimonials and reviews.

Communicate personally with webmasters. Write up a short review of their website or product rather than sending them a generic request for a link trade. Don't wait for them to ask for a testimonial, send them one anyways. For example, instead of saying "I visited your site and like it a lot, I agree with what you say about (blah blah) and thought we'd make great link partners, would you like to..." try summing up what it is about your business that relates to the other website. Promote your business in a way that's in XYZ's best interests to print as a testimonial- how their product benefits your business.



9. Write reviews where they're asked for.

Search around. Don't look too far ;-) The big names are the places you want to go. Take Amazon.com for example. People click over to Amazon with their credit cards ready. They are discerning shoppers and they are often repeat customers; they read reviews, they follow links to "what else purchasers of [a particular product] bought". So write reviews of products that relate to your website topic. Book reviews are the easiest; follow your nose to the bestsellers or new books in your category at the library.



10. Communicate with whoever you represent as an affiliate.

Create a product such as a user manual or report ("10 Tips for Succeeding as an XYZ Affiliate" or "How to Increase Your Productivity Using [XYZ's Product] in your Home Office")and imbed your url link(s) in it. Let the affiliate program manager distribute your report or manual to his affiliates. Or again, write a glowing testimonial to the program, product or owner's customer service, etc.