Do the Search Engines Know Your Website? by Chet Childers

Do the Search Engines Know Your Website? by Chet Childers

Are you considering a search engine promotion campaign to improve your website's search engine visibility? To aid in your decision, have you checked your website to determine its search engine awareness?

Perhaps you may be thinking why do I need to check my website? Do you remember going to the doctor for an illness? Hopefully, your doctor performed some tests to diagnose your illness before prescribing your medication. If not, you may have gotten some very undesirable results.

In the case of your website, you need to diagnose the patient and determine the extent of your website's search engine visibility. Based on your findings, you can decide to focus on standard search results or paid search results.

Your checks should be done in the Google and Yahoo search engines since they are the major search engines in today's marketplace. As an option, you should consider MSN since they have recently released their search engine. It is only a matter of time before they are considered a player, if not already.

Your first check determines if your website is indexed in Google or Yahoo. Think about the card catalog in your library. Each book has a card in the card catalog signifying the indexing of the book in the library. In this exercise you'll check if your website has a "card" in the Google or Yahoo card catalog.

The first exercise is opening your web browser to the Google - www.google.com, Yahoo - www.yahoo.com or MSN - www.msn.com website. Enter your website's URL, www.yourdomainname.com, in the search box and review the search results. Your website's domain name or URL should appear in the search results if your site is indexed.

If just the domain name or URL is listed, the website has been indexed but not crawled by the search engine spider. A domain name and several lines of descriptive text indicate the website has been crawled by the search engine spider to determine the website's content. Also, look for the link "Cached Page" or a similar phrase. This is another indication the website has been crawled for content by the search engine.

Now, you should know if your website is indexed and has a "card" in the search engine card catalog. Your second check evaluates the extent of your website's indexing by determining which website pages are indexed by the respective search engine.

The second exercise is opening your web browser to the Google, Yahoo or MSN website. Enter the "site" command and your website's URL in the search box in the format "site:www.yourdomainname.com" (quotation marks not required) and review the search results. All of your website's pages indexed by the queried search engine should be listed. At the top of the search results screen look for "Results X - Y of about Z from www.yourdomainname.com" or a similar phrase. The value for Z indicates the total number of pages indexed by the queried search engine for your website.

In addition, you might see the comment "repeat the search with the omitted results included" in the results listing. Since the search engine does not always show the entire listing, you can click the link and view the complete list of your website's indexed pages.

Your third check determines the number of inbound links from other websites to your website. The number of inbound links is very important in the ranking algorithms of many of the search engines. The commands for this exercise are slightly different between the search engines. We'll review the commands for the three major search engines. The other search engines have similar commands.

Google & MSN

Open your web browser to the Google or MSN website. Enter the "link" command and your website's URL in the search box in the format "link: www.yourdomainname.com" (quotation marks not required) and review the search results.

All the external website pages linked to your website and indexed by the queried search engine should be listed. At the top of the search results screen look for "Results X - Y of Z linking to www.yourdomainname.com" or a similar phrase. The value for Z indicates the total number of externally linked pages to your website.

Yahoo

Open your web browser and go to the Yahoo website. Enter the "linkdomain" and "-site" command and your website's URL in the search box in the format "linkdomain:www.yourdomainname.com -site:www.yourdomainname.com" (quotation marks not required). The "-site" command is used exclude the internally linked website pages from the results.

Review the search results. All the external website pages linked to your website and indexed by Yahoo should be listed. At the top right of the search results screen look for "Results X - Y of Z linking to www.yourdomainname.com." The value for Z indicates the total number of externally linked pages to your website.

Do not be alarmed if the displayed results from Yahoo and MSN are significantly different from Google. Recently, Google began displaying limited or no results from the "link" command. The general conclusion from the search engine optimization community was that Google felt disclosing the link information might possibly share too much information regarding their ranking algorithm and its impact on a specific website.

From these three simple checks you should have determined if the search engines know the existence of your website and be prepared to select the proper search engine promotion campaign. A pay-per-click search engine campaign would be a good choice if your website's search engine visibility is limited and the time deadline to achieve your desired search engine rankings is short. If the time to achieve the desired search engine rankings is not critical to your website's marketing plans, then a search engine optimization campaign to improve the standard search results could be a logical decision.


About the Author
Chet Childers is a successful Internet marketer utilizing both pay-per-click marketing and search engine optimization to increase website visibility and profitability. Click http://www.ThePayPerClickMarketer.com and enroll in our e-course, "Discover Tips and Secrets for Pay-Per-Click Marketing Success," or visit http:www.ChetChilders.com.

Keywords Finalization Methodology by Vikas Malhotra

Keywords Finalization Methodology by Vikas Malhotra

To arrive at the set of keywords that:

Describe business correctly (are relevant)
Attract traffic (are popular & are searched for)
Have less competition (are relatively un-optimized for )

Steps

Step I:
Lets start by saying that the for the keyword finalization of a web site the first step is to device the theme of the web site. The keywords then should be generated which are in sync with the themeing structure of the site. The home pages & the other higher level pages should target more general(main theme)keywords. The deeper pages (embedded in subdirectories or sub domains) should target more specific & qualified keywords.

Once the sites themes & sub-themes are done, lets start by looking for the keywords

StepII:

The finalization of the keywords for any given site can be done in the following way:

Generation of the seed keywords for the site (theme keywords).

Expansion of the seed keywords into key-phrases by adding qualifiers (sub theme keywords)

Generating a larger set of keywords by word play on the key-phrases generated in step II.(sub theme targeting)

Lets take them one by one:

SEED Keywords/Primary keywords:

The seed keywords can be generated by either of the ways mentioned below:

The client provides the terms he feels are relevant to his business.

The SEO firm generates the seed words by understanding the business domain & the business model of the client.

Some outside domain consultant provides them.

Another way of generating seed keywords is to look for the meta tags of the competition web sites.

WARNING: do not place any unnecessary emphasis on these tags. Use them just to generate you seed keywords list.

If one has certain set of keywords then tools like WT & Overture can also be used to arrive at the other relevant seed keywords.

Typically seed keywords are single word.
A good number of seed Keywords is between 10-12.

SUB theme Keywords (add Qualifiers)

Now to these seed keywords add qualifiers.

These qualifiers can be anything location/sub-product/color/part no/activity/singular etc.

By utilizing these qualifiers one can expand the list of the seed keywords.
Say a good number would be anywhere between 20-30.

Typicaly a sub theme key phrase could be of 2-3 -4 word length.

One recent study suggests that

The typical searcher often uses longer queries. Many contain more than three words. Within three different search engines, keyword distribution data tells a compelling story:

Words in Query LookSmart (%) Ask.com (%) Teoma (%)
1 27.00 12.76 38.04
2 33.00 22.46 29.59
3 23.00 19.34 18.13
4 10.00 11.89 8.00
5 7.00* 7.86 3.51
6 - 6.19 1.39
7 - 5.47 0.63

LookSmart does not report beyond 5 search terms, instead grouping five or more terms into one category.

Approximately 40 percent of queries in LookSmart have three or more words. About 32 percent in Teoma have three or more. Ask Jeeves has an even higher skew, nearly 62 percent, because of its natural language focus. Within FAST, the database that powers Lycos and others, the average is 2.5 terms. That suggests a similar frequency distribution to LookSmart and Teoma.

Hence we can keep the average length of sub theme keywords at around 3.
About the Author
I'm an eBiz consultant and owner of Mosaic Services- an SEO Company. I regularly write and submit articles on various SE specific topics.

To find more articles, please visit my site http://sem.mosaic-service.com