Beginner's Guide to SEO

SEO Fundamentals:

Before we are going to discuss about seo we first have known about website, because it basically depends upon these things.......

Website:

A website (or Web site) is a collection of web pages, images, videos and other digital assets and hosted on a particular domain or sub domain on the World Wide Web (www). You can get to a website by typing in the home page address, or URL (also known as Domain), in your browser. From this home page, you can get to all the other pages on a website.

THINGS NEEDED FOR A WEBSITE:

Ø Navigations

Ø Font and Text

Ø Content

Navigations:

§ Navigation is very important for a website. Why do people come to your website? Usually to find out some information. How about making it easy for people to find what they are looking for? It should be organized. Divide your navigation up into sections when you can (such as by topic). Group together navigation items that are related to each other.

§ Navigation should contrast from the rest of the site. This will greatly help people to instantly find it. Positioning isn't everything.

Font and Text:

§ If you want the content on your website to be read (which you probably do), you need to make it readable. Don't have fixed sizes for fonts. Use % or em... not px for sizes. That way, people will see it just the size they want to see it at. If they have a low resolution, the font won't be too big, and if they have a very high resolution, the text won't be unreadable. Use 1em or 100% for your standard size for your body text. Use good contrast. Have good contrast between the text and the background it is on. And for text that is read (not just scanned, like a navigation or product descriptions for example), use the color black with a white or very light colored background. It is OK to have not-so-good contrast on parts of your website if it looks good and there isn't a lot of text to read. Also make sure that the two colors you are contrasting actually look good together as well (don't put yellow text on a blue background please).

§ Make it scanable. Make all your text scanable. Use short paragraphs (about 8 sentences), simple words, and contractions when writing. Write at an 8th grade level (without the misspellings). People don't read on the internet, they scan.

§ You may think, "But now it doesn't look as good!" But think about this; what is more important, the 'looks' or the content. Regardless of your answer... people coming to your website for information care much more about the content.

Content:

§ Content is very important. That's why people come to your website. But you need to make it good content!

All the websites needed a domain name.

Here question arise what is a domain name?

Ans: - The domain name is a single name of the website which is used to view a particular site. The name you type in the address bar of the Internet Browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator is called domain name. Basically each web site has single IP address [a numerical digit] which is very hard to remember; therefore it is replaced by a domain name to easily remember and find by people. For instance domain name of our website is www.clungtechnology.com a domain name provides an online identity and a contact point for your business, organization, or service.

Why do I need a Domain Name?
There are numerous uses of a domain name

· Domain names are used to establish a unique identity in internet. Organizations choose a Domain name that corresponds to their company name. Anyone thinking about establishing a presence on the Internet should register a Domain name. You can register domain now & use it later.

· Domain names can be used to give you a unique, permanent email address. You can create

· To maximize the chances of a successful Internet presence and have a global reach.

What is Sub domain name?
A sub domain allows you to create separate web addresses from just one domain, for example we can create different sub domains on http://www.xyz.com as http://domain.clungtechnology.comhttp://mr.xyz.com , http://login.xyz.com , etc... ,

What are the valid characters for a domain name and how long can a domain name be?

The domain name must conform to Standard rules for domain names:

· Only characters in the range of A to Z, 0 to 9 and hyphen are allowed for example www.abc-123.com

· Names cannot begin or end with a hyphen for example www.-text123.com is not acceptable.

· You can use UPPERCASE or lowercase letters when registering a Domain name, but you may occasionally run into problems if you mix cASes, depending on the exact configuration of the web server that will be hosting your website.

· The easiest way to make sure your Domain name will not cause you any problems later is to register it using all lowercase letters.

· Domain name can contain up to 67 characters.

Who is the Owner of the Domain name?
The holder of the Domain name is the person / company listed on the top of the WHOIS record whose name is displayed, as a Registrant is the owner of the Domain name. The administrative, technical contacts are the contacts allotted to the responsible representatives who are entrusted by the organization / individual with relation to the Domain name.

For how long can I register a Domain name?
We offer registration from 1 year up to maximum 10 years for .com, .net or org extension.

How much time does it take to register a Domain name?

It takes just 15 minutes to register a domain provided we have all required information with us.

How can I order for New Domain Registration?
You can call us on +91-671-3260512 OR email us on domain@xyz.com OR fill in Inquiry Form.

For how many years can I renew my Domain name?

You can renew for 1-9 years, for a total registration period of up to 10 years.

For example, let's assume that today's date is April 18, 2001 and that your current registration period ends April 18, 2005. You have exactly 4 years remaining on your registration period. You can extend your registration period for up to 10 years by renewing today for 6 years.

Let's take another example. Assume that today's date is April 29, 2003 and that your current registration period ends April 30, 2006. You have 4 years and 1 day remaining on your registration period. You can extend your registration period to 9 years by renewing today for 5 years. If you tried to renew for 6 years, your total registration period would exceed, by 1 day, 10 years, which is the limit imposed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN"). Therefore, we would renew your domain name registration by 5 years, which is closest to the number of years you asked for, without going over the ICANN limit.

Can I renew my domain name after its expiry?
Once your domain name expires, it enters a grace period of 15 days which depends on Registrar to Registrar.

Please note that there are no guarantees that your domain can be renewed after the expiry date, even if it is in the grace period.

What is a Registrar transfer?
Registrar Transfer is the process that occurs when the owner of a domain name wishes to move their domain name from their current Registrar into the control of a new Registrar.

How much does a Registrar transfer request cost?
We do not take any charges for Registrar Transfer. 1 Year renewal OR extension is required while transferring domain from current Registrar to New Registrar which will be charged at normal domain renewal cost.

What is Domain Secret Code?
Domain Secret code is given by Registrar without which one cannot transfer domain from one Registrar to another.

How can I manage my domain name(s)?

All our customers have access to the "My Account" control panel. It is a unique, powerful & full featured tool, which helps you manage your domain names. To access the "My Account", login to your account with your username and password from http://customer.url.net.in.

You can manage mainly following features:

- Register New Domains
- Renew Domains
- Change Contact Details
- Change Name Servers ( NS Records )
- Lock Domain for Security ( Very Important )
- Search your domains
- Create Child Name Servers
- Pay Using Credit Cards / PayPal / Cheque

What is DNS?
DNS stands for Domain Name System. This system is used to associate a domain name (e.g. www.xyz.com ) with one or multiple IP addresses. Now, an IP (Internet Protocol) address is like a phone number to a computer. Every computer has one but just like a phone number, sometimes an IP address can be hard to remember. This is why there is DNS. Instead of having to remember, 216.226.138.60 we only have to remember www.xyz.com

SEARCH ENGINE

What is a search engine?

A search engine is a website that likes to a database of many internet files. These can be Web sites, homepages, gophers, newsgroups, etc. The sites allow you to use their engine (or software program) to search their database. So what you do is go to one of these sites, type your topic in a little text field, then the engine searches and shows you what it's found.

In reality, there is no single online search tool that has an index to the entire contents of the Internet. Each search engine uses different search techniques and various software tools (called spiders) to build indexes of the Internet. When doing search through then, they also yield different "views" of the Web and the Internet as a whole. Each of the search engines listed below comes with strengths and weaknesses.

EXCITE (http://www.excite.com)

Sun Microsystem's engine does key word or concept searching so you tend to find what you're looking for. Its search engine uses ICE (intelligent concept extraction) to learn about word relationships. This enables a kind of cross-referencing, so that Excite "knows" that "pet grooming" and "dog care" are related topics even if the words "dog" and "care" are not actually on a "pet grooming" page/ Excite claims to be the only search engine with this feature.

AltaVista ( http://altavista.digital.com )

Digital's engine is relatively new, very fast, and extremely thorough. It would be nice if it were a little more selective in what it brings back.

Alta Vista supports Simple or Advanced searching. Simple Search uses machine intelligence to force some of the features of Advanced Search. Advanced gives the searcher more specifics control.

InfoSeek (http://home.netscape.com/home/internet-search.html)

InfoSeek uses the title or words found near the start of the document in matching query terms. It also will place weight on terms that occur frequently in the document or terms that are uncommon to its database.

InfoSeek offers two modes: Ultra smart offers comprehensive query results. You can narrow you results quickly, as each new Ultra smart query you do searches within your previous results. Ultra smart also offers links to "related topics" and "related news". Ultra seek is aimed at "power users" offering levels of speed accuracy, currency and comprehensiveness "unmatched by other search engines".

LYCOS ( http://www.lycos.com )

Carnegie-Mellon University's engine was one of the first search tools. It has become as slick and fast as the pro's, but it doesn't seem to find as much. But Lycos is does full-text indexing unlike some search engines that only index URL or titles.

BlueWeb'n ( http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/bluewebn )

The Pacific Bell Education First Fellows catalog hundreds of great sites. This might be a good place to get ideas for your activities, but it doesn’t link to enough sites to use it as your only search tool.

WebCrawler ( http://webcrawler.com )

WebCrawler suggests you supply synonyms, implying that it does not do this. Displays of hits may be customized using the two choice boxes above the search box: Title or Summaries views results in either a short or detailed format. Short format lists titles of Web resources. Detailed format provides titles plus summaries. URLs, numerical relevancy scores, and the option of viewing similar pages for each result returned.

YAHOO (http://www.yahoo.com)

YAHOOLIGANS ( http://www.yahooligans.com/ ) for young children

Yahoo searches the four area of its database for keyword matches: Yahoo! Categories, Yahoo! Web Sites, and Yahoo!’s Net Events & Chat, Most Recent News Articles. Yahoo finds all keyword matches, and then sorts the results according to relevancy within each specific area. Results are ranked in the following manner:

• documents marching more of the keywords will have a higher rank
• documents matching words found in the Title are ranked higher than those found in the body or URL
• categories matching high in the Yahoo tree hierarchy (general categories) are ranked higher than those lower in the hierarchy

If your favorite search engine isn't listed here, you might use CNET Online ( http://www.cnet.com ). CNET offers multiple services, including up-to-the-minute tech news. Its searching services encompass web searching, product searching, and shareware searching.

Déjà News (http://www.dejanews.com ) Déjà News is your gateway to a simple search engine for Usenet newsgroup postings. Enter your keywords in the box and Déjà News will search its database of postings to the Net's 15,000+ topical bulletin boards in seconds.

LISZT (http://www.liszt.com) for Listservs. Enter any word or phase to search the world’s largest directory of mailing lists. Some groups and lists are unmoderated and not appropriate places for K-12 students.

Specialized Searching

Research It (http://www.iTools.com/research-it/research-it.html) Offers access to dozens of searchable resources via a single Web page! Includes several dictionaries, thesaurus, acronyms, quotations, French and Japanese translators, French conjugator, anagrams, King James Bible searches, world map searches, CIA World Fact book searches, U.S. Area Code and 800 number directory, Global Currency Converter, Stock Quotes and Symbol Lookup, Zip Code locator, and tracking of UPS and FedEx packages.

Net-Happenings (http://www.mid.net/NET/ ) Net-Happenings site is your link to exploring the thousands of NEW Internet sites that come online every month. Hundreds are education-related, since that has always been Sack man’s task -- to find new online links of interest to the educational community.

The Electric Library (http://www.k12.elibrary.com/classroom/) The Electric Library makes it possible to conduct real research over the Internet, using a deep database of reliable sources. Never before has finding the information you need been so fast and so easy!

Actually how search engine works?

Search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, and others scan the text in your site to understand what message your site is trying to give the general public. This scanning, also called crawling, searches your site word content, image tag content, keywords and Meta tag info. When you think about search engines, I want you to think of search engines as readers that only can translate text. When you think about your website, I want you to think of it as a text book the search engine is reading. If you think in these terms, it is easier to try and clean up your site for text based searches, and to understand the importance of keywords.

Google:-

Most of the internet users use Google to find out their search results. It is one of the major search engines. Here we are mentioned what Google likes or dislike.

Google likes:

• On-topic incoming links:
  It means your website (or weblog) should be linked by the websites that are focused on the same topic. It means when your website is related to internet marketing, it is better to be linked from the internet marketing related or at least marketing related websites and not - for example - from weight loss websites. It is really logical because when internet marketing websites want to have more resources for their visitors, they link to other good internet marketing related websites. They never link to weight loss websites. So when, for example 70% of the incoming links to your internet marketing related website are from off-topic websites, Google understands that these links are not created to help the visitors to have access to more resources but they are created to make an artificial link popularity for the linked website. It will assure Google more when it finds out that most of these links are reciprocal.
• Natural incoming links:
  Yes, Google likes natural incoming links. Natural incoming links are the links that your website receives from other websites just because their webmasters think that your website has something valuable and informative for their visitors, not because you have paid them to put your link on their websites or because you have also placed their links on your site.
• Keyword/phrase in the anchor text of incoming links:
  Google considers the anchor text of incoming links a lot. Google wants to know about your website is about. This is the first thing that Google wants to know about your website and as Google finds your website through the incoming links, so Google likes these links to help it to know what your website is about by having the keywords/phrase in their anchor text.
• Good title tag:
  Google likes the title tags that contain the main keyword/phrase because the title tag is the first thing that Google sees when it comes to your website and as Google wants to know what your website is about, when the title tag helps it to know this sooner and easier, it will like the website too.
• Good description tag:
  The description Meta tag is the second thing that Google sees when it comes to your website. Your website can be ranked by Google even without the description meta tag but if you make a good one that describes your website in about 15 to 20 words, it will make a big difference.
• Unique, fresh, useful and informative site content:
  Google loves to find new and unique information on the websites because as I told you, its goal is providing good and quality search result for its users. When Google finds such kinds of content in a website, it understands that this website is a quality one that its webmaster spends time on it and provides good and helpful information for the visitors. So such a website should be trusted and ranked higher than the others.

Google hates:

• Artificially incoming links:
  Too many reciprocal links, purchased links and crossed links are the links that Google knows as bad links. Google knows that they are created naturally and you have paid something to make them for your website. It can be money or a link that you place on your website. How Google distinguishes natural and unnatural links? Natural links have different anchor texts. They are not created in a short period of time. Their number becomes increased slowly and gently. They are not reciprocal. But most of unnatural links have the same anchor texts; are created in a short and most of them are reciprocal. These are the links that you buy or exchange with other websites. Google does not like these kinds of links and when most of the incoming links of a website are among these links, that website will be penalized. MSN and Yahoo ban such websites permanently. Of course sometimes they make mistake and ban an innocent website that should not be banned. I wish them grow up soon!
• Door-way pages:
  Door-way pages are really hateful. They are pages that search engines spiders can see but will be redirected to other pages when a real visitor opens them. So search engines see and index these pages with their title and content which is about a special subject and when a users finds these pages in the search result and clicks on them, he/she will see different pages which are not related to something that he/she was looking for. This is a kind of cheating, isn’t it? Search engines don’t like their users to be cheated. So a website that has door-way pages has to be banned definitely.
• Keyword stuffing:
  Google that likes natural incoming links should like natural web pages and websites too and should hate unnatural ones. Google says you should design your website and web pages for visitors and people not for search engines .Do you repeat a word or sentence too many times when you speak with someone? Definitely not. So your website’s pages that are supposed to speak with your website’s visitors, should not repeat the keywords and key phrases too. If they do, Google understands that you have tried to attract the search engines attention by having too many keywords on your website pages .Having unnatural links may cause your website just to get penalized by Google but having door-way pages or keyword stuffing will kick your website out of the Google index permanently.

Ten Things You Need to Know About Google...

1. Plural searches are not the same as singular searches.
For example: “car” does not = “cars”
(So be sure to create pages using plural variations of your keywords, too.)

2. Likes to find pages on its own. Do not submit all your pages. Simply submit your home page and/or sitemap and let Googlebot find the other pages by itself.

3. Looks at image "alt tags" and file names. If possible, make sure they contain either your keywords or synonyms related to your keywords.
For example: [img src=“/images/keyword.gif” alt=“Where can I find keywords online?”]

4. Gives added weight to bold face or larger font keywords (especially heading tags).

5. Gives added weight to text within a URL link.
For example: [ href= http://www.site.com/keyword/index.html link target

6. Gives added weight to keyword in link descriptions – for example:
[a href="www.site.com"]keyword[/a]

7. Sites tend to rank higher with keywords in the domain name, page URL, and file name.
For example:
Domain: http://www.keyword.html
URL: http://www.site.com/keyword/index.html
File: http://www.site.com/keyword.html

8. Search results are affected by keyword order– for example:
"download software" does not equal "software download"

9. Keyword in the "title" tags is crucial. – for example:
[title]This site is about keyword [/title]

10. Does not support the "description" or "keywords" META tags in your page header. Of course, some engines still look for information there, so don't eliminate them. It's just that the Meta tags aren't as important as they used to be.

How does Google decide on the order of search results?

Google uses more than 200 assessments of a site's content to determine the order of search results and the exact algorithms are a secret - just as they are with Yahoo and Microsoft's search tools. But the criteria are roughly split between on-page factors such as the actual text and content and off-page factors that include the number of external links to the site in question.

So how do I make sure my content can be picked up by search engines?

Google publishes its own SEO guidelines. First, ensure your site is indexed by search engines, which means automated "spiders" will crawl over your site's content and put it on the map. From there, optimization involves a combination of editorial and technical tweaks. Essentially, content - particularly headlines - needs to be descriptive and literal, using keywords consumers are likely to use. Some sites may try to "trick" Google, either by loading pages with too many irrelevant keywords, or with "doorway" pages that use links in bulk with no original content.