Introduction Video

Want to know where your website ranks in the search results? Our Firefox Rank Checker extension allows you to easily check your website rankings in Google (US and international), Yahoo, and Microsoft Live search.

Want to learn more? Watch this video and/or read on.

Download & Installation Instructions:

• You have to use Firefox version 2 or higher to get this to work. If you have not yet used Firefox go download Firefox, and then come back to this page using Firefox as your web browser.
• Click Here to install the Firefox Rank Checker extension.
• If the Software Installation window is visible click Install Now.
• If not, then:
  • See if there is a yellow bar near the top of your browser.
  • Click the Edit Options button on the yellow bar.
  • Click Allow. Then click OK.
  • Click Here
  • Click the Install Now button.
• As a final step, restart Firefox.

Click on the words Rank Checker in the bottom of your Firefox browser to activate the tool. Enter a URL and keyword combination and click the start button to check it's rankings.

Off the start this tool is set up to grab data from the Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft SERPs. After you install Firefox Rank Checker and restart your browser you may want to configure the extension settings to automatically collect data periodically and/or pull data from international Google search results.

The Theory...

I like being able to check my rankings real quickly without worrying that some SEO company is aggregating my data and/or spying on me. This tool is open source and hosted your computer - designed with privacy in mind.

Looking at the rankings of a couple of your sites that you know intimately well and tracking how they change over time allows you to

• learn how to read the search results
• appreciate and understand general algorithmic trends
• be one of the first people to know when the relevancy algorithms change in a major way

This tool is designed to be quick and easy to use, but to also give you the opportunity to gain the level of insight needed to compete with other SEOs at the professional level. Here is an image of what the tool looks like:

• If your site is not listed in the top 200 results you will see a - (there are a few of them in the above picture).
• If you have long URLs and/or long keywords some of them may be cut off in the results display. If that happens you can still see the full page names and keywords by scrolling over them.
• You can verify your position in the search results by double clicking on the URL...this will open the associated search results in Firefox.
• If you are logged into your Google account in Firefox this tool will show you personalized ranking results (which tend to make the rankings appear better than they are in many cases). If you want to, you can turn personalized web search off in the Rank Checker options / preference settings window.

First Things First:

In the status bar at the bottom of Firefox you can click on Rank Checker at any time to turn this extension on.

This extension has courtesy settings which allow you to ping search engines for data at a slow rate. You probably want to set the delay to at least 2 or more seconds. If you set it at 0 do not be surprised if some of the engines at least temporarily block you for scraping data. To set the courtesy feature you need to

• click on the word Tools at the top of your Firefox browser
• scroll over the words Rank Checker
• click on the word Options
• at the bottom of the options window you can enter in the Delay between queries: whatever value you feel comfortable with (in seconds)

Uploading Keyword/ Website Data

You can upload keyword and domain name combinations directly in the Rank Checker interface by inserting them one at a time.

Next to the add keyword button is a link for adding multiple keywords. It allows you to upload a keyword list matching a domain.

If you want to quickly create a relevant keyword list just to sample how well your site is doing I recommend using our keyword research tool, or our keyword list generator.

If after using the tool you want to clear out the interface you can simply close the tool, or if you want to use it again you can click the clear button.

Firefox Rank Checker Extension Advanced Features:

This free rank checking tool allows you to check your rankings in Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live search results, and has the following features:

• International: in the options section (mentioned above) you can select to pull results from international versions of Google and/or Google.com.
• Presets: allows you to grab a list of keywords that you can research data on at any given point in time.
  • useful for segregating data for different websites, different categories, etc.
  • you can save a preset list by clicking on this button inside of the Rank Checker interface
  • you can open a preset list by clicking on this button inside of the Rank Checker interface
• Scheduled Tasks: allows you to look up any of your keyword lists daily, weekly, monthly, or at any periodicity you choose.
  • After you have created a preset list of keywords you can use this feature
  • To use this feature
    • click on the word Tools at the top of your Firefox browser
    • scroll over the words Rank Checker
    • click on the words Scheduled Tasks
    • at the bottom of the scheduled tasks window you can what keyword lists you want to run and how often to look them up
      
      

Want to Export Your Data?

With our free rank checker you can easily export your data to a CSV file. At the bottom of the tool window there is an export button for saving a spreadsheet of your rankings, which is convenient for providing a quick ranking report for clients.

These results can be viewed in any spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, or Open Office.

Inside the presets window there is the option to download the history of that keyword list to a CSV file, which shows you how your rankings for keywords change over time

This spreadsheet lists historical data for one keyword at a time

Possible Future Upgrades:

• Check for multiple listings
• Allow Google extension to be chose on a per preset basis
• Add proxy support (although this is already baked into Firefox - there is even an extension for switching proxies).
• Will see. Depends on feedback :)
• Leave feedback here.

Other Useful Related Firefox Extensions and Goodies:

There are a number of other browser based extensions display other related SEO information. Advanced users may want to give SEO for Firefox a try. We offer a list of related useful extensions on our SEO extension page.

Have Feedback? Know of Any Conflicting Extensions?

If it does not work then throw your computer out the window, or leave feedback and read comments left by others here.

Gain a Competitive Advantage Today

Want more great SEO insights? Read our SEO blog to keep up with the latest search engine news, and subscribe to our SEO training program to get cutting edge tips we do not share with the general public.

Source: http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

Out of experience? Well, I don’t know, but looked like everyone is so interested in talking about getting successful on Twitter. Well, I followed many of them and, guess what? They enlightened me on the below points. With due courtesy to all of them….

1. Please follow your followers
   Or guess what happens? Your followers would be responding to your tweet and they never hear back from you. Okay, you are a pro - master - guru, blah blah…fine..but that doesn’t mean that you won’t talk or reply. Does it ?
2. Please don’t even dare say “Good Morning” or “Good Evening” or even “Good night”
   Cos, the 300ish guys subscribed to your tweet is not from your neighborhood, they’re most likely from the other end of the world. They may think you’re nuts!
3. Please try to respond, or be a bot
   I can’t think of a good reason why one wouldn’t respond. Unless it’s a bot using your profile. I’ve seen Digg bots (some of them even have the profile pic of that of a robot), but twitter bots? Come on…that’s disgusting!
4. Twitter is not a place to yawn..come’on now for God sake!
   Thou shall not yawn, or do any of those organic sounds. Remember, though you’re on your bed, the world’s watching you..err…listening to you.
5. Be logical
   This is tough to explain. Example? Here goes…

   Mr. X : I’m going out for a movie - Dark Knight.
   Mr. Y : @Mr.X - Man, that’s a cool movie. Yaay!

   (After 30 mins….)

   Mr. X : Just woke up..had coffee, off to Gym !
   Mr. Y : @Mr.X huh??

Makes sense?

As a result of this scrutiny Yahoo and Google/Doubleclick are now both providing an easy way for user to opt-out of ad targeting on their receptive networks. Yahoo and Doubleclick were part of Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) and allowed users to opt-out from their network via NAI’s opt-out tool.

Google

To find out more about Google network cookie and how to opt-out visit http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html

Since a lot of you are working in the field of web analytics, you must be wondering how google opt-out will affect the data tracked in web analytics. The simple answer is that this option will not affect Google Analytics. A first party cookie from the site using Google Analytics is used for tracking user behavior on the site using Google Analytics, this cookie is separate from Google ad network cookie. According to Google

“A different cookie is used for each website, and visitors are not tracked across multiple sites…. To disable this type of cookie, some browsers will indicate when a cookie is being sent and allow you to decline cookies on a case-by-case basis. “

Yahoo

Yahoo has been offering that opt-out option for the ads the company runs on it outside partner sites in its network. Yahoo will now extend opt-out option to ads displayed on its own sites. You can read more about this option.
Below is excerpt from Yahoo Press release

Anne Toth, head of privacy and VP for policy, said, "Yahoo! understands the trust of our users is our greatest asset, so we strive to create the most trusted, compelling online experience."
"Yahoo! strongly believes that consumers want choice when customizing their online experience and they have also demonstrated a strong preference for advertising that is more personally relevant to them," continued Toth. "However, we understand that there are some users who prefer not to receive customized advertising and this opt-out will offer them even greater choice."
This new opt-out capability is expected to be available for consumers by the end of August. Users will be able to access the opt-out in the Yahoo! privacy center, which is linked on the home page and nearly every page on the Yahoo! network. Users will also be able to access the opt-out through a link in the public service advertising campaign Yahoo! has been running with online ads across its network to educate users about customized advertising.

Yahoo and Google have taken the steps in right direction but they are not perfect. As I wrote before, both these models are dependent on an opt-out cookie. If you opt-out of these networks and later delete your cookies you will again be automatically opted-in. I have advocated an opt-in model for Behavioral Targeting. This model will remove this dependence on cookie for opt-out. I do realize publishers and ad-networks concern that opt-in model will limit the reach. It is possible that the opt-in model might limit the reach initially but in long run if the value proposition is strong for users then user will opt-in.

What do you think?

Keyword Research is by far the most important aspect in any Search Engine Optimization initiative.

Keyword Phrase Research is process of selecting the most "optimum performance" keyword phrases that can help visitors find your site. You may have spent days and months on fine-tuning your web pages for a better ranking with the major search engines, yet it will all amount to a big waste if the right keyword phrases are not targeted. It's like not being able to reach your destination even after running your best race because you started out on the wrong road. Even if you achieve high search engine rankings, you may not get relevant traffic if you select the wrong keywords. Therefore, the foremost step in any SEO campaign is identifying your target audience and researching what keyword phrases they might be searching in the search engines to locate a site like yours.

For any marketing strategy to succeed, it is critical to know your audience and the means to reach them. A certain focus is required which could be location specific, region specific or country specific; it could be business, trade, service, product specific, since we are talking specific audience. For instance, a dentist practicing in a particular town would most likely target people living in the same region, instead of targeting the entire country. Just as a patient searching for a dentist would search for one in his own area. Focus on region would help her get targeted visitors, not just wasted traffic.
Common Pitfalls

A common pitfall is to start the website optimization exercise with a set of "gut-feel" keyword phrases. Site owners often come up with 'common sense looking' key phrases, which though look obvious, may not match with the ones your buyers are using as their search term. Very often, being from within the trade narrows the vision and you tend to assume that trade-specific terms are easily understood and popularly used. Not so. You need to think out of the box.

Doing Keyword Research invariably means departing from one's gut-feel and going by the facts. 'Facts are sacred' in website optimization as they provide the exact data of what people are actually searching for, thus saving you from starting on a wild goose chase. As mentioned earlier, targeting the wrong key phrases might get you a good ranking for keywords that have few or no search requests or just get you irrelevant junk traffic. So, how does one get the facts and the data regarding a particular search term? There are several online keyword research tools like Wordtracker and Overture, which offer data pertaining to your search term. Relying on search tools to analyze keyword phrase data helps you to get a grip on your target audience.
Keyword Research Process

Keyword Research process involves the following important steps. These steps can be described as:

Keywords

• Analyzing Keywords
• Selecting Keywords
• Deploying Keywords

The Discovering phase should focus on identifying as many keywords as possible that are related to your website and target audience.

The Analysis phase involves adding information about existing competition; PageRank based limitations and potential for ranking.

The Selection process involves objective measurement based short listing of keywords keeping the site focus and target audience within the limitations analyzed.

The Deploying phase is about making optimum use of your selected keywords on your website copy, HTML code and tags.

Importance level of this tag: 0.1/10

Though meta keywords tags are not a major factor search engines consider when ranking sites, they should not be left off the page. Both the meta keywords tag and the meta description tag contribute to your search engine ranking. A meta keywords tag is supposed to be a brief and concise list of the most important themes of your page.

Note: Meta tags are hidden in a document's source, invisible to the reader. Some search engines, however, are able to incorporate the content of meta tags into their algorithms. No engines penalize sites that use meta tags properly, so it's recommended that you always include them.


When you write a meta keywords list, start by scanning the copy on your page. Make a list of the most important terms you see on the page. Then read through the list. Pick the 10 or 15 terms that most accurately describe the content of the page. If you can't narrow your keyword list down to 10-15 keywords, then the content on your page may be rambling too far. Because of the hyper-competitiveness of the current search engine placement landscape, pages need to be very focused on one or two specific keyword phrases in order to have a chance to get a top ten placement. For example, a page about northern Michigan apples and central Florida oranges doesn't have much of a chance to win for either "northern Michigan apples" or "central Florida oranges." To have any chance to win, you need to have one page about northern Michigan apples and one page about central Florida oranges.

Another example: If your page is a list of exercise or fitness tips, and on the page you list tips for things to do before, during, and after a workout, then you need to think to yourself, "What 10 or 15 words or phrases is this page MOST about?" Just because your page mentions dieting in the text doesn't mean that the page is about dieting. If you want to win for dieting, then create a page about dieting. The ultimate example of a page which is focused and ready for search engine optimization is a page from an encyclopedia. Each page is brief, focused, and has just one theme.
Search engine optimization and the meta keywords tag

Long ago in Internet time, the meta keywords tag was very useful in helping pages to win on search engines. Unfortunately, so many unscrupulous webmasters have abused the meta keywords tag that search engines have had to de-emphasize their importance. Still, you should not leave the meta keywords tag off your pages.

Meta keywords tags should adhere to the following guidelines:

1. Keep your list of keywords or keyword phrases down to 10 - 15 unique words or phrases.
2. Separate the words or phrases using a comma (you do not need to leave a space between words separated by commas).
3. Do not repeat words or phrases.
4. Put your most important word or phrases at the beginning of your list.

How to pick keywords for your meta keyword tag

Choosing the right keywords is an important part of Search Engine Optimization. Before you spend hours optimizing your Web pages, make sure you're targeting the right keywords.

Learn how to choose the best keywords for your site.

The Meta Description Tag is a part of HTML code that allows you to give a short and concise summary of your web page content. The words placed in this Meta Tag, are often used in the search engines result pages (SERP), just below the Title Tag as a brief description of your page. In the Search Engine Results Pages, after reading the Title, a user usually studies the description of the page and decides whether she/he wants to visit your site or not.

Some Search Engines prefer to ignore your Meta Description Tag and build the description summary on the basis of the search term for the SERP on the fly. They usually pick up parts of the text on your page wherever the search terms appear. The only exceptions are the Flash, Frame or All Image sites that have no content, and some high importance websites, where the search term is not found in the text. In such a case, Google picks up your entire Meta Description Tag and displays it.
Importance of Meta Description Tag

All search engines do not give very high prominence to the Meta Description Tag and may generate a description on the fly while listing your web page in SERP. However, in some search engines, a good Meta Description Tag might help a page to rank higher for your targeted search terms. This holds true for Flash, Frame or All Image sites that have no content as well as some high importance websites, where the search term is not found in the text. In such cases, some search engines pick up the exact Meta Description Tag and display it in its SERP, just below the Title Tag. Hence, it is important to write a crisp and enticing Meta Description Tag that includes your important keyword phrases and manages to interest your user, thus making her click on your entry.
Keyword Phrases and Meta Description Tag

Include your most relevant and important keyword phrases in your page's Meta Description Tag. As in the case of Title Tag, focus on the same keyword phrases as you used in your page's Title Tag and body text. Fewer and highly targeted search phrases can boost your web page's relevance in the search engines results. Hence, stress should be on writing a brief yet informative description for your web page.

The Meta Description Tag of your web page should not read like a collection of a keywords, but should be written as an informative and interesting summary of your web page.

Dos and Don'ts of a good Meta Description Tag

1. Excessive keyword repetition should be avoided. Instead, pay attention to the sequence in which your keywords appear. Your most important terms should be placed in the beginning.
2. Make sure each page on your web site has a different and a unique Meta Description Tag using the keyword phrases that are relevant to that web page.
3. A Meta Description Tag of 25-30 words should do fine.
4. The most important keyword phrases should, ideally be placed at the beginning of your Meta Description Tag, which increases your chances of better Search Engine Rankings.

1
In a nutshell, the basic ingredients of a good Description Tag

1. Write it in sentence structure.
2. Should be relevant to the similar 25-30 word (under 150 characters) description of the first text within the visible page.
3. Do not repeat your keywords more than 3 times in description tag. If you need, make alternatives (e.g. ‘prescription’ and ‘prescriptions’ can be used 3 times each).
4. Minimize the use of “stop words” such as “and, the, of”.
5. Keyword phrases that appear earliest in the Meta description will generally receive higher ranking value.
6. Try to include this tag in all pages by describing the content and it should be unique.
7. Don’t load your description with only keywords.
8. Strive for 5-10% keyword density.
9. Use different Meta description tag for each page.

Other Do's and Don'ts

1. Consider using both singular and plural forms of the important words in your Title Tag. For instance, you may use both ‘loan’ and ‘loans’ while making the Title Tag. Google is still experimenting with Stemming (interchange of singular and plural terms); however, it is fluctuating in its deployment frequently. A word of Caution: Do not overdo it.
2. Title Tag length: Google usually reads about 90 characters of your Title Tag. Therefore, a Title Tag of about 80-90 characters are good enough.
3. Do not use keywords repeatedly as the density of your keywords does not matter in your Title Tag.
4. The sequence in which keywords appear in your Title Tag is important. Try using natural phrases for your Title Tag, which read better and will likely conform to your Keyword Phrases.
5. Avoid using the same Title Tag throughout your site. Try using a unique Title Tag for each web page and use keyword Phrases that holds theme relevance to that page. You also get to leverage more keyword phrases if you individualize the Title Tag in all pages.
6. Most search engines are not case sensitive; therefore, you can write your Title Tag in a way that looks most visually appealing.
7. Title Tag should ideally read like a phrase that makes some grammatical sense, not just a collection of keywords. This is all the more important as the Title Tag usually appears as the text when you 'bookmark' or add a page to your 'favorites' list. Therefore, it should make sense when a person reads it later. For instance, if you want to include the keywords Home Loans, fast clearance, No credit check in your Title Tag, you can write a Title Tag that reads:

Home Loans: fast clearance with no credit check.
In a nutshell, the basic ingredients of a good Title Tag

1. It should always appear immediately after the opening tag
2. It should be specific keywords and phrases.
3. Use only keywords and phrases that are in the body text on your page.
4. May use the same keyword twice to attain reasonable keyword density, but be sure that you don’t put the same word right next to each other or more than twice.
5. 5-12 words (less than 60 characters) are a good length for title tag.
6. Consider using both singular and plural forms of the keywords.
7. It should be read like a phrase that makes some grammatical and logical sense, not collection of keywords.
8. Try to place your primary keywords at the starting of the tag.
9. Keep the words in title case (e.g. Profession Marketing Tips)
10. Make sure to avoid using search engine stop words or words like Home, Default, Internet or Index.
11. Avoid using superlatives in your title (e. g. the best, fastest, cheapest, leader)
12. Try to minimize the use of commas in this tag.
13. Strive for a keyword density of 25-30% for each keyword.
14. Always remember to close this tag
15. All pages must have a unique and descriptive keyword phrase in the title.
16. Try to keep title tags as unique as possible in each page in your website.
17. Do not change the title tag regularly.

The HTML title tag isn't really a meta tag, but it's worth discussing in relation to Search Engine Optimization.

But what about search engines! The title tag is crucial for them. The text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all major crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings.

Every HTML (web page) should have a Title tag and all tags should be unique. Don’t use the same title tag for multiple documents. It should be inserted into the header of your web page and looks like this:
The title tag belongs in the Head section of your source code, and is generally followed by your Meta description and Meta keywords tags. The order of these tags is not critical, so don't worry if your HTML editor places them in a different position.
Why is the Title Tag Important from Search Engine Optimization perspective?

Title Tag is an important Tag amongst other SEO related options, as it not only communicates the theme of your web page to the human visitors but is also considered very important by the Search Engine crawlers. Title Tag is not a Meta Tag, but nevertheless it is the most important of all Tags. Almost all crawler based search engines use the Title Tag to gather information about your web site. The search engines use the words or the content of the Title Tag during the ranking process to analyze the relevance of your web page. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL, AltaVista, and AlltheWeb use your web page's Title Tag to evaluate its relevance.

Title Tag is the hyperlinked text title that is displayed in the search engine results page (SERP). The users, in turn, click on this hyperlink to go to your web site.

The Title Tag is also used as the text when you ‘bookmark’ a page or add a certain web page to your ‘favorites’ list in your browser.

A carefully constructed Title Tag is very important for your page's ranking with the search engines.
Working with the Title Tag

Since the Title Tag plays a vital role in determining your site's ranking in the SERP, you need to pay a lot of attention to the words that appear in the Title Tag and the order in which they appear. You need to develop a crisply worded Title Tag that includes your most relevant keyword phrases and performs the function of announcing the summary of your web page's content.
Title Tag and Keywords

Amongst all the places you can use your important keyword phrases; the usage of keywords in the Title Tag gives the highest weight.

While using your keyword phrases in the Title Tag, it is important to be highly focused. You should use the same keywords not just in your Title Tag, but also in your page content and the Meta Description Tag of your web page. If the keywords you intend using in your Title Tag do not appear anywhere else in your

page's content, then avoid using them in your page title as the weight of the keywords in the Title Tag gets diluted.

It is essential to sequence your keyword phrases correctly in your Title Tag. The order in which they appear is of great importance. Having your most important keyword phrase towards the beginning of the Title Tag helps display your title in bold in the SERP (search engines result pages).

What to Include in your Title Tag?

You could put the product or service you are offering in the Title Tag, instead of your firm or company name. This is because most users when searching for, information search for specific products or services, not company names. Also note that search engines read about 80-90 characters in your Title Tag. This is prime Real Estate for your important keywords. If you strongly feel like putting your company or domain name in your Title Tag, then, do so at the end. Wasting several characters by inserting your site name does you little good.

What is meta tag?

A meta tag is a special HTML tag that provides information about a Web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page's content. Many search engines use this information when building their indices.

How to use HTML Meta Tags

What are Meta tags? They are information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages. Information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, Meta

Information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what “character set” to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content.

Let's see two common types of meta tags, then we'll discuss exactly how they are used in more depth.

In the example above, you can see the beginning of the page’s “head” area as noted by the HEAD tag -- it ends at the portion shown as /HEAD.

Meta tags go in between the “opening” and “closing” HEAD tags. Shown in the example is a TITLE tag, then a META DESCRIPTION tag, then a META KEYWORDS tag. Let's talk about what these do.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is the art and science of making web pages attractive to the search engines.

Why Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site.

So search engine optimization focuses on techniques such as making sure that each web page has appropriate title tags and meta tags, and that the keyword or key phrases for the page are distributed throughout the content in a way that the particular search engine will like.
Benefits of Search Engine Optimization

Search engines generate nearly 90% of Internet traffic and are responsible for 55% of e-commerce transactions. Search Engine Promotion has shown to deliver the highest ROI, compared to any other type of marketing, both online and offline. Search engines bring motivated buyers to you and hence contribute to increased sales conversions.

Search Engine Optimization offers an affordable entry point for marketing your website and an effective way to promote your business online. SEO makes for a long-term solution, is your access to sustained free traffic and a source of building brand name and company reputation.
5. Basic Rules of Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is crucial for anyone who wants people to visit his or her Web site. You can place as many ads as you like, but most people are still going to find your site because of its listings in search engines or directories.

It's a fact that most people who use search engines only look at the first one or two page of search listings. The goal of effective search engine optimization is to get your pages listed on those critical first pages for particular key terms.

1) Remember that each page of your site is a separate entity.

You need to apply the basics of effective search engine optimization to each individual page.

2) Choose appropriate key words or phrases for each page.

Phrasing matters. Many more people search for the term “effective search engine optimization” than for “effectively optimizing for search engines”. To find out which key words or phrases are more popular than others, you can use a tool such as Overture's and Word tracker’s Search Term Suggestion Tool

3) Give each page an appropriate title that includes the key word or phrase at least once.

We often see sites that use the name of their business as the title of all their pages. Is every page of their site about their business? Probably. But chances are really low that people will be searching for their business’ name!

4) Put the key words or phrase that you've chosen in the page's title tag, meta keywords, and meta description.

Make sure that the meta description is as appealing as possible, because some search engines actually use this description in the search engine results pages that people will be reading.

5) Be sure your chosen key words or phrase is repeated judiciously throughout the content of the page.

You don't want to overdo it, or your page may be rejected as spam, but you need to repeat it enough times that the search engine's software will consider the phrase relevant.

Following are the main areas of web page that search engines give more importance in their ranking algorithms:

Title tag, The main body text, Meta tags, Link popularity, Domain name, Heading tags, Proximity of Keywords, Bold or Italic texts, Folder or file names, Image alt tags, Title attribute and keyword in the beginning of the sentence.

Based on the importance, we can rank those areas as below:

Title

2.0

Link popularity

2.0

The main body text

1.5

Domain name

1.0

Keyword prominence

1.0

Heading tags

0.5

Proximity of keywords

0.5

Bold or Italic

0.4

Folder or file name

0.3

Meta description

0.3

Alt tag

0.2

Title attribute

0.2

Meta keywords

0.1

Total Score

10

What is Google?

“Googol” is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. Google's play on the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.
Google Technology

Google.com began as an academic search engine. In the paper that describes how the system was built, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page give an example of how quickly their spiders can work. They built their initial system to use multiple spiders, usually three at one time. Each spider could keep about 300 connections to Web pages open at a time. At its peak performance, using four spiders, their system could crawl over 100 pages per second, generating around 600 kilobytes of data each second.

Google runs on a distributed network of thousands of low-cost computers and can therefore carry out fast parallel processing. Parallel processing is a method of computation in which many calculations can be performed simultaneously, significantly speeding up data processing. Google has three distinct parts:

* Googlebot, a web crawler that finds and fetches web pages.
* The indexer that sorts every word on every page and stores the resulting index of words in a huge database.
* The query processor, which compares your search query to the index and recommends the documents that it considers most relevant.

Let's take a closer look at each part.
Googlebot, Google's web Crawler

Googlebot is Google's web crawling robot, which finds and retrieves pages on the web and hands them off to the Google indexer. It's easy to imagine Googlebot as a little spider scurrying across the strands of cyberspace, but in reality Googlebot doesn't traverse the web at all. It functions much like your web browser, by sending a request to a web server for a web page, downloading the entire page, and then handing it off to Google's indexer.

Googlebot consists of many computers requesting and fetching pages much more quickly than you can with your web browser. In fact, Googlebot can request thousands of different pages simultaneously. To avoid overwhelming web servers, or crowding out requests from human users, Googlebot deliberately makes requests of each individual web server more slowly than it's capable of doing.

Googlebot finds pages in two ways: through an add URL form, www.google.com/addurl.html, and through finding links by crawling the web.

allows rapid access to documents that contain user query terms.

To improve search performance, Google ignores (doesn't index) common words called stop words (such as the, is, on, or, of, how, why, as well as certain single digits and single letters). Stop words are so common that they do little to narrow a search, and therefore they can safely be discarded. The indexer also ignores some punctuation and multiple spaces, as well as converting all letters to lowercase, to improve Google's performance.

Google's Query Processor

The query processor has several parts, including the user interface (search box); the “engine” that evaluates queries and matches them to relevant documents, and the results formatter.

Google considers over a hundred factors in determining which documents are most relevant to a query, including the popularity of the page, the position and size of the search terms within the page, and the

proximity of the search terms to one another on the page. PageRank is Google's system for ranking web pages.

Google also applies machine-learning techniques to improve its performance automatically by learning relationships and associations within the stored data. For example, the spelling-correcting system uses such techniques to figure out likely alternative spellings

Indexing the full text of the web allows Google to go beyond simply matching single search terms. Google gives more priority to pages that have search terms near each other and in the same order as the query. Google can also match multi-word phrases and sentences. Since Google indexes HTML code in addition to the text on the page, users can restrict searches on the basis of where query words appear, e.g., in the title, in the URL, in the body, and in links to the page, options offered by the Advanced-Search page and search operators.

Let's see how Google processes a query.

History of Site Ranking

In the early 1990's when the web was emerging, several sites having industry specific content were being added to the web each day. Web surfers, on the other hand, had very few tools to locate such sites, which they believed were out there but did not have a clue about their domain names or web addresses. With the birth of Yahoo in 1993, surfers were offered some relief. Yahoo classified each site it discovered in a neatly organized directory list and also embedded a search engine in its site to search for sites based on 'keywords' existing in its database. Several other search engines like AltaVista, Excite, and Lycos etc. followed the search trends offering site search facilities to users. Most of these search engines relied heavily on Meta Tags to classify the relevance of websites based on the keywords they found in the tags.

Things seemed to work out fine before site owners and webmasters realized the value of how they can 'embed' industry specific keyword phrases in their Meta Tags and other site code, thus manipulating their way to show up higher in search results. Over a period of time, search engine results started getting cluttered with sites that spammed their content with relevant keywords but had poor site content for the visitor. The very essence, credibility and importance of search engines was now being challenged to deal with how they could offer a more refined search output to their users.

What is PageRank ?

PageRank is a unique algorithm developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University and determines the importance of a web page measuring page importance on a scale from 0 - 10, where 10 is the highest. The main factor behind the PageRank algorithm is link popularity. If one site links to another site, then Google interprets this link as a vote, the more votes cast, obviously the more important the page must be. ...

From here on in, we'll occasionally refer to PageRank as “PR”.

Note:

Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it.

Emergence of Google PageRank

Google realized the problem conventional search engines faced in dealing with this situation. If the control of relevance remained with the webmasters, the ranking results would remain contaminated with sites artificially inflating their keyword relevance.

Web, by its very nature is based on hyperlinks, where sites link to other prominent sites. If you take the logic that you would tend to link to sites that you consider important, in essence, you are casting a vote in favor of the sites that you link to. When hundreds or thousands of sites link to a site, it is logical to assume that such a site would be good and important.

Taking this logic further the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page formulated a Search Engine algorithm that shifted the ranking weight to off-page factors. They evolved a formula called PageRank (named after its founder Larry Page) where the algorithm would count the number of sites that link to a page and assign it an importance score on a scale of 1-10. More the number of sites that link to a page, higher its PageRank.

The Google Toolbar

You can download Google Toolbar (free) and install it in your Internet Explorer within minutes. Amongst other useful features, it displays the PageRank of each web page you visit.

The Google toolbar appears just below your Internet Explorer browser and can be used for making a search on the web from any page. Google toolbar displays the PageRank of each web page on a scale of 1-10. If you have the Google toolbar installed in your browser, you would be used to seeing each page's PageRank as you browse the web. Google does not display the PageRank of web pages that it has not indexed. Please note that the Toolbar displays the PageRank of individual pages and not the site as a whole.

PageRank in Google's own Words

Google explains PageRank as follows:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an Indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
Relationship between Search Engine Ranking and PageRank

While the exact algorithm of each search engine is a closely guarded secret, search engine analysts believe that the search engine results (ranking) is some form of a multiplier factor of ‘Page Relevance’ and ‘PageRank’. Simply put, the formula would look something like:

PR (A) = (1-d) + d (PR (t1)/C (t1) + ... + PR (tn)/C (tn))

That's the equation that calculates a page's PageRank. It's the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren't telling us what it is. It doesn't matter though, as this equation is good enough.

In the equation 't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A, ‘C’ is the number of outbound links that a page has and ‘d’ is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.

We can think of it in a simpler way:-

A page's PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a “share” of the PageRank of every page that links to it) “share” = the linking page's PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page.

A page “votes” an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to.

From this, we could conclude that a link from a page with PR4 and 5 outbound links are worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and 100 outbound links. The PageRank of a page that links to yours is important but the number of links on that page is also important. The more links there are on a page, the less PageRank value your page will receive from it.

If the PageRank value differences between PR1, PR2 ...PR10 were equal then that conclusion would hold up, but many people believe that the values between PR1 and PR10 (the maximum) are set on a logarithmic scale, and there is very good reason for believing it. Nobody outside Google knows for sure one way or the other, but the chances are high that the scale is logarithmic, or similar.

Whichever scale Google uses, we can be sure of one thing. A link from another site increases our site's PageRank. Just remember to avoid links from link farms.

Source By : Google.com

What is Search Engine?

Internet search engines (e.g. Google, AltaVista) help users find web pages on a given subject. The search engines maintain databases of web sit

es and use programs (often referred to as “spiders” or “robots”) to collect information, which is then indexed by the search engine. Similar services are provided by “directories”, which maintain ordered lists of websites e.g. Yahoo!

How Internet Search Engines Work

The good news about the Internet and its most visible component, the World Wide Web, is that there are hundreds of millions of pages available, waiting to present information on an amazing variety of topics.

When you need to know about a particular subject, ho

w do you know which pages to read? If you're like most people, you visit an Internet search engine.

Internet search engines are special sites on the Web that are designed to help people find information stored on other sites. There are differences in

the ways various search engines work, but they all perform three basic tasks:

• They search the Internet -- or select pieces of the Internet -- based on important words.
• They keep an index of the words they find, and w here they find them.
• They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index.

Early search engines held an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand inquiries each day. Today, a top search engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of milli

ons of queries per day.

Before a search engine can tell you where a file or document is, it must be found. To find information on the hundreds of millions of Web pages that exist, a search engine employs special software robots, called spiders, to build lists of the words found on Web sites. When a spider is building its lists, the process is called Web crawling. (The

re are some disadvantages to calling part of the Internet the World Wide Web -- a large set of arachnid-centric names for tools is one of them.) In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, a search engine's spiders have to look at a lot of pages.

How does any spider start its travels over the Web? The usual starting points are lists of heavily used servers and very popular pages. The spider will begin with a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within the site. In this way, the spidering system quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the mo

st widely used portions of the Web.

Types of Search Engines

The term “search engine” is often used generically to describe both crawler-based search engines and human-powered directories. These two types of search engines gather their listings in radically different ways.

Crawler-Based Search Engines

Crawler-based search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. They “crawl” or “spider” the web, then people search through what they have found.

If you change your web pages, crawler-based search engines eventually find these changes, and that can affect how you are listed. Page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role.

Human-Powered Directories

A human-powered directory, such as the Open Directory, depends on humans for its listings. You submit a short description to the directory for your entire site, or editors write one for sites they review. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted.

Changing your web pages has no effect on your listing. Things that are useful for improving a listing with a search engine have nothing to do with improving a listing in a directory. The only exception is that a good site, with good content, might be more likely to get reviewed for free than a poor site.

“Hybrid Search Engines” Or Mixed Results

In the web's early days, it used to be that a search engine either presented crawler-based results or human-powered listings. Today, it extremely common for both types of results to be presented. Usually, a hybrid search engine will favor one type of listings over another. For example, MSN Search is more likely to present human-powered listings from LookSmart. However, it does also present crawler-based results (as provided by Inktomi), especially for more obscure queries.