Ethical search engine optimization

Spending budget in SEM is worth so long as it attracts more unique visitors through search engines. Internet advertising in India is fast moving from flashy boxes and sponsored links to the new buzzword: search-engine marketing. In 2005, total online ad expenditures in India exceeded Rs4 billion ($88 million), of which Rs2.36 billion was SEM, out of which Rs720 million was spent by companies in India, and the rest from enterprises abroad.

According to an industry study by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), Industry wide, the biggest SEM spenders are retail companies, followed by technology, travel and the automotive and banking industries, with non-governmental organizations and property markets also advertising.

Why Can’t We Ignore Spending on SEM?

Those who are into online business wanting to increase the web traffic through search engines should keep their eyes opened to study the trends. Otherwise, they’ll be lagging behind.

Furthermore, the old rules of web1.0 SEO hold less importance in the new web 2.0 world. In a fast changing behavior of search engines, the role of SEM consultant/SEO firm should be to keep a good track of the current trends and accordingly suggest the changes required to be implemented to drive more traffic.

Let’s have a look at the following table – I have drawn according to my level of understanding.

Web 1.0 SEO vs Web 2.0 SEO

Page views vs Accessibility

Reciprocal Links vs Bookmarking/del.cio.ous/dig/BLs

Keyword rich contents vs User generated contents/Interactivity

Meta tags vs description and Title/Optional

SE submission vs Optional

Directory submission vs Automatic crawling by spider

HTML optimization vs AJAX optimization

Reliability on Search engine PR vs P2P network

Personal sites vs Wikis/blogs

Double Click vs PPC

Digg is news search engines while delicious is a social book marking site and del.ciou.ous are news sites while techcrati is a search blog search engine

Technocrati

Blog search engines – rivals (Google, Yahoo! Msn!)

As of August 2006, Technorati indexes over 55 million weblogs
Technorati uses and contributes to open source software.

In gist, there are a few steps, such as, social networking, dig & delciou.ous, tagging, links from user generated contents, etc need to be taken. Moreover, we need to adopt search engine marketing mix to drive traffic not only through global search engines (google, msn, yahoo), but also through specialty search engines like it.com.

This article is for SEOs, Internet marketers, webmaster and site designers and all those who are interested in Search Engine Optimization.

For a long time now designer and developers used to stay away from flash because they were considered SEO unfriendly. SEOs had a bad time optimizing the flash files. The common trick used for this was the Google swf object a javascript package that used to manipulate a named div that already carried formatted text describing the flash content on a webpage. This was not only clumsy but it allowed keyword spamming too.

Now Google and Adobe got together and brought about a revolution in search engine crawling algorithms. Google search process can now read the text on your flash files. The flash files are now indexed like web pages. But make sure the text you are putting on the flash is flash text only. If you put an image that reads “apple” then no way the SE robot can read the text. So all information that you want to get cached must be in text. Images and movies in .flv format are still not indexed or understood by the SE bots.

As far as links are considered in the flash files or in other words the navigation from flash files they are done in the same way as done from the html pages. So even flash menus will not be a problem any more. I know its difficult to accept but its true folks. The things will now be easier. Hats off to Google.

All those who are using the swf object have nothing to worry. You may still continue to use the same code as Google says it will continue to support the code too that was used to fetch the flash file to manipulate the named Div as mentioned before.

So designers you have free hand form now onwards. Go ahead and so your creativity to the world. Flashy sites are now in.

The knowledge Of Promoting One Page At A Time

Many webmasters do not know it, but real SEO success can come from promoting a single page or a few pages at most to search engines. Actually the most common mistake most people make is to try and promote the whole site and worse still to generate links targeted at the home page rather than a specific page that you are promoting.

Little do they know that there is tremendous power in focusing on a single page on the site at a time and concentrating all the SEO promotional activities on it at least for extended periods of time before moving to another different web page.

Find The Best For SEO Promotion
Firstly there is a need for you to realize that the World Wide Web is fiercely competitive and not all the pages or content on your site can compete effectively. But chances are that you have an article or two that you are really proud of and feel confident that they can hold their own against the very best. That is the article or the articles that you should actively promote on the web and do everything to generate links pointing to.

If there is already such an article that you have done, a good way to start is to go back and brush it up with an excellent headline and the right keywords to get you attention from search engines. You must do a little keyword research and look for a keyword phrase that you can target successfully. Choose carefully. Do not select a keyword that has only a few hundred hits a month. And don’t select a keyword from the very top that is obviously just too competitive for you. Select something popular enough that you feel you have a good chance of rating highly on. A good gauge to analyze your chances would be to compare your Google PR (Page rank) with that of the site currently in the position that you would like to go for. If the other site is only one position higher or you are even the same page rank, then it is a realistic shot and you can go for it.

Link To That Special Page From Your Other Sites
Recent changes in the Google algorithm has attached much more importance to the total number of sites linking to a page rather than how high their page rank is. This is to counter the common trick many unworthy sites have used in the past of buying links from a high PR site and instantly watching both their PR and positioning in the search engine change overnight. The way the algorithm has been tweaked to deal with this problem, is such that although the PR of the sites linking to you and their relevance is still a factor, it is not as important as it was previously.

What this means is that it is now more of a numbers game than anything else, which to my mind is the fairest way out of a complex problem. So your SEO efforts should focus on generating as high a number of one way links pointing to your sites as possible. Which means that you should not pass by the opportunity to have some of your other sites pointing to the single web page on your site that you are currently promoting.

How To Use Comments To Boost Your Search Engine Positioning
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that self-created links from spam comments left at blogs do not work anymore with a leading search engine, Google. Just as well because this is a rather annoying habit that many lazy webmasters have picked up in recent times. The right way to leave comments at blogs and discussion forums is to firstly find highly relevant posts and discussion topics. Then the idea here is not instant gratification but to build a reputation over a longer period of time. This will be much more effective in drawing attention to you and the web page you are promoting. I have seen this resulting in many folks reposting articles written by a regular commentator they like, complete with one way links pointing back to their sites.

The immediate and very welcome result of leaving comments is that traffic shoots up dramatically, which is also desirable for your SEO efforts because the more people who see and appreciate the contents of your web page, the higher the chances that it will get re-posted with valuable one way links leading back to your site.

In Conclusion
This strategy of concentrating all your SEO promotional efforts on one of your web pages over a long period of time can be very effective in helping lift up any site from obscurity to prominence and will help you to generate more traffic.