Seo Webmaster Guidelines

Seo tactics and strategies always been along the way yet we need still to abide the google itself of webmaster guidelines for a successful seo.

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.


* Design, content, and technical guidelines
* Quality guidelines

When your site is ready:

* Have other relevant sites link to yours.
* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
* Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
* Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
* Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.


Design and content guidelines

* Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
* Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
* Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
* Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
* Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
* Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
* Check for broken links and correct HTML.
* If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
* Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Technical guidelines

* Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
* Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
* Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
* Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google webmaster tools.
* If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
* Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.


Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.
If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at www. google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Quality guidelines - basic principles

* Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
* Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
* Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
* Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.
Quality guidelines - specific guidelines
* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
* Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
* Don't send automated queries to Google.
* Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
* Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
* Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
* Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
* If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
If a site doesn't meet our quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the index. If you determine that your site doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and then submit your site for reinclusion.

KEI DETAILED EXPLANATION

KEYWORD EFFECTIVENESS INDEX (KEI)

Sumantra Roy, a respected Search Engine Positioning specialist from http://www.1stSearchRanking.com has kindly allowed us to incorporate his KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) into Wordtracker.

The KEI compares the Count result (number of times a keyword has appeared in our data) with the number of competing web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are most effective for your campaign.

In a nutshell: Look for the keywords near the top. The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition they have. Which means you have a better chance of getting to the top.


The article below is a much more detailed look at the KEI and why we have decided to use it. (http://www.wordtracker.com)


DETAILED EXPLANATION

The KEI is a measure of how effective a keyword is for your web site. The derivation of the formula for KEI is based on three axioms:

1) The KEI for a keyword should increase if its popularity increases. Popularity is defined as the number present in the "Count" column of WordTracker. This axiom is self-explanatory.

2) The KEI for a keyword should decrease if it becomes more competitive. Competitiveness is defined as the number of sites which a search engine e.g. AltaVista displays when you search for that keyword using exact match search.

Exact match search means that a search engine searches for only those sites which use the keyword exactly as typed in by the user. It is the equivalent of entering:

Partial match search means that a search engine also searches for sites which contain the individual words of the keyword but not necessarily occurring together or in the order typed in by the user. It is the equivalent of entering:

Partial match search presents a distorted picture of the competitiveness of a keyword because when you optimize your site for a particular keyword, you are actually competing with sites which have used the keyword exactly as typed in by the user.

So to clarify, competitiveness is defined as the number of sites which a search engine displays when you search for that keyword using exact match search, that is with quotes surrounding the term. Rather than those web sites returned when entering the phrase only partially, that is without quotes.

Note: When you select KEI Analysis, quotes will be added temporarily to each of your search terms for the purposes of the search.


3) If a keyword becomes more popular and more competitive at the same time such that the ratio between its popularity and competitiveness remains the same, its KEI should increase. The rationale behind this axiom requires a more detailed explanation. The best way to do this is to take an example:

Suppose the popularity of a keyword is 4 and AltaVista displays 100 sites for that keyword. Then the ratio between popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is 4/100 = 0.04.
Suppose that both the popularity and the competitiveness of the keyword increases. Assume that the popularity increases to 40 and AltaVista now displays 1000 sites for that keyword. Then the ratio between popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is 40/1000 = 0.04.
Hence, the keyword has the same ratio between popularity and competitiveness as before. However, as is obvious, the keyword would be far more attractive in the second case. If the popularity is only 4, there's hardly any point in spending time trying to optimize your site for it even though you have a bigger chance of ending up in the top 30 since there are only 100 sites which are competing for a top 30 position. Each hit is no doubt important, but from a cost-benefit angle, the keyword is hardly a good choice. However, when the popularity increases to 40, the keyword becomes more attractive even though its competitiveness increases. Although it is now that much more difficult to get a top 30 ranking, spending time in trying to do so is worthwhile from the cost benefit viewpoint.

A good KEI must satisfy all the 3 axioms. Let P denote the popularity of the keyword and C the competitiveness.

The formula that we have chosen is KEI = (P^2/C), i.e. KEI is the square of the popularity of the keyword and divided by its competitiveness. This formula satisfies all the 3 axioms:

i) If P increases, P^2 increases and hence KEI increases. Hence, Axiom 1 is satisfied.

ii) If C increases, KEI decreases and hence, Axiom 2 is satisfied.

iii) If P and C both increase such that P/C is the same as before, KEI increases since KEI can be written as

KEI = (P^2/C) = (P/C * P). Since P/C remains the same, and P increases, KEI must increase. Hence, Axiom 3 is satisfied.

Note that the formula for KEI is not unique. In fact, this is one of the nice things about the KEI. If, instead of using 2, you use any power of P greater than 1, the resultant formula will also satisfy the 3 axioms. For example, (P^1.5/C) and (P^3/C) both satisfy the 3 axioms. The exact power of P that you choose depends on how much emphasis you want to give to the popularity of a keyword viz-a-viz its competitiveness. Higher the power of P in the formula, higher will be the emphasis on popularity. If you are very confident about your search engine positioning skills, choose a higher value for the power of P. If you are not that confident about your search engine positioning skills, choose a lower value for the power of P (but the power should still be more than 1). Thus, the KEI can be adapted to your skill level! Feeling confused as to which power you should choose? Stick to 2. It maintains a nice balance between both popularity and competitiveness.

Please note that Wordtracker defaults to 2 (P^2/C) as described above.

The Keyword Effectiveness Index was invented by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected and recognized search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. For free articles and tips on search engine positioning, subscribe to the 1st Search Ranking Newsletter by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/newsletter.htm