Common SEO FAQ

What is SEO?

SEO is the abbreviation which stands for Search Engine Optimization. In this regard, it is not about optimizing search engines. However, it’s all about optimizing websites for search engines.

How long does the website optimisation process take?

This greatly varies with each and every web site we are to work on and the requirements to reach the top positions.  An A5 page website in a low competition area, thus will obviously take less time than a 100 page site competing for highly competitive keywords.

Generally speaking, an average SEO promotion – a 25 page, aged website with moderate competition – would take around two weeks for site-optimization.  Undoubtedly, you will see improvements after just the optimization. In most cases it will take months to realize the full effects of our SEO campaigns.

Why is my website not showing up in the search engines?

There are many reasons why a web site doesn’t show up in search engines results. One or more of the following can affect on your web site search engine positioning and traffic:

  • Using an unoptimised search engine web design
  • Your  website may not be readable by popular search engines
  • Some critical information may be missing to properly index your webpage.
  • Using some scripts may prevent search engine bots from crawling your website or reading your web content.
  • Your site being banned by Search Engines for some black hat trick.
  • Your site not properly submitted to search engines

How do Search engines work?

Essentially, all search engines consists of three parts as follows:

1.The Crawler or the spider.

The spider as the part of a search engine is a simple robot that downloads pages of a website and crawls them for links. Then, it opens and downloads each of those links to crawl (spider) them too. The crawler visits websites periodically to find the changes in their content and modify their rankings accordingly. Depending on the quality of a website and the frequency of its content updates this may happen from say once per month up to several times a day for a high popularity news sites.

The crawler does not rank websites itself. Instead, it simply passes all crawled websites to another search engine module called the indexer.

2.The Indexer.

The indexer stores all the pages crawled by the spider in a large database called the index. Think of it as the index in a paper book: you find a word and see which pages mention this word. The index is not static, it updates every time the crawler finds a new page or re-crawls the one already presented in the index. Since the volume of the index is very large it often takes time to commit all the changes into the database. So one may say that a website has been crawled, but not yet indexed

Once the website with all its content is added to the index, the third part of the search engine begins to work.

3. The ranker or search engine software.

This part interacts with user and asks for a search query. Then it sifts millions of indexed pages and finds all of them that are relevant to that query. The results get sorted by relevance and finally are shown to a user.

What is Ethical SEO?

Ethical SEO is popularly known as White Hat SEO. Ethical search engine optimization follow guidelines and accepted standards to optimize a web site. Final result of Ethical SEO is often stronger positioning that is long lasting, and may withstand frequent changes made to algorithms.

What is Black hat SEO?

Black hat SEO technique often employs tricks such as hiding white text on white background. It may also include spamming of keyword tags with hundreds of keywords, or cloaking.  These black hat techniques used to be a good thing in the past. Nowadays, the Search Engines look for these cheats and penalize a website for their use.

Black Hat Optimization uses optimization techniques that result in faster results, but most often are not long lived

At Pagesnake we use ethical SEO techniques. We don’t employ cheats or tricks to fool Search Engines

What is blacklisting?

Unethical Search Engine Optimization tactics will cause a website to be blacklisted. It is very difficult to recover from a blacklisting.

 

Posted in Pagesnake, Search Engines, SEO, Tutorials | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Dynamic Keyword Research :– Avoid Optimizing Campaigns on Sinking Sand

Online marketing is demand-driven as all searchers are looking for answers.  Thus, the best way to lead the game is to become the best answer to their questions. For this reason it is vital to do dynamic keyword research instead of static keyword research.

It is also important not to copy and paste the same adverts into all of your ad groups talking about your business and what makes it great.

Your business can only be great if it is great at answering the searcher’s question.  If all your paid search promotions are not well thought-out around this foundational principle, your business needs to go back and make this happen.  The above case in point happens all the time. Searchers are always looking for a specific type of business card.

The searchers do not care about your view of yourself.  They do care about getting their questions answered.  If you are looking at your metrics and crunching the numbers every month without first getting this right, go back and do this first.

Naturally, searchers demands change and so questions change too.  What are searchers asking right now compared to what they were asking last year?  Has anything changed?  Is it the same? Knowing all this helps your business to become the best answer to your searcher’s questions.  Dynamic keyword research does not end just when you initially did keyword research at the start of your account.  But, this involves finding out what’s going on in your market. In this way, you can organize your ads to be the right answer to the questions searchers are asking in their search queries.

Why is dynamic keyword research so important? Once your business doesn’t answer the questions your prospects are asking right now, your business performance downward spiral start on…

  1. Searches get matched to ads that don’t answer the searcher’s questions
  2. CTRs drop
  3. Impressions drop because search engines don’t want to show irrelevant ads to users
  4. Quality score suffers
  5. Money is wasted

Thus, in order to keep this downward spiral from happening, it’s important that search managers take their time in dynamic keyword research. Creation of ads that answer new and rising searches enhance the organization of ads to show to the right search queries

Failing to do dynamic keyword research first, all other optimizations are done on sinking sand.

 

Posted in Search Engines | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Top 5 Key SEO Tips for Newbies

Getting the basics right is all important to your site. Below is a list of fairly simple SEO tips for beginners to get started. Following these straightforward changes may jump you up the listing. Though you may not be on the number one spot on Google, this simple optimisation will increase your site visibility.

       I.            Title Optimisation

It is a must to have each and every page of your website to have a unique title that is precise and descriptive. All titles should be 70 characters or less as Google does not encourage long titles.  Your company name is not so important in titles. Goole will know your company name from browsing through your site. Thus, better save this space with nice keyword phrases that best describe your page.

    II.            Natural quality content writing

Quality of your web content is one of the most important SEO tips.  AVOID repeating words over and over again. Always write as naturally as possible. Once users are pleased with your writing, they will always come back.

                What does good content entail?

  • Simple content that makes sense to the reader.
  • Avoiding repetition.
  • Offer some value to the reader that makes them want to come back
  • Make option for client once done with reading. e.g. related article or call to action.
  • Using fresh content marketing strategy.

 III.            Go social

In promoting your content, it is important that you become active in social media and make use of Twitter and Facebook. A great place to do this is using a blog aggregator to post your new entries and tell the world what you have that is so cool. You may not be the most social person but Google is counting all your little rants and comments every time you link back to your site.

 IV.            Get rid of the keywords tag

Google has never used keywords tag.  As a beginner avoid using them or just remove it completely.

    V.            Sign up for Webmaster tools account

Sign up for a Google Webmaster Tools account and make a profile for your account. This is a simple service offering from Google that informs you on what Google thinks of your site and if it has come across any errors in its crawling process. Thus, it is always best to hear it from the horse’s mouth instead of guessing. It is also possible to upload an XML sitemap into Webmaster Tools so Google knows exactly what is on your site.

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SEO

Search Engine Optimization

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