Google

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?

The significance of having an online presence these days should not be undervalued. Having a website not only helps a business to grow, but lets it thrive in a competitive global market place. The strategic importance of a website can be seen from the fact that at the moment there are over two billion websites on the internet, with this number growing literally every minute. To make sure that your website is a success and is found by those who require your services, you need to optimize your site. Website optimization is an almost guarantee that your site will be found among the plethora of websites that are out there at the moment.

Well the answer is simple just read on below and you will understand what needs to be done.

Keywords and phrases:
The first step that you need to take to optimize your site is selecting keywords and phrases that best suit what your site is all about. A keyword best describes what the content of your web page is. For example if your website is about cooking, then the best keyword to use would be 'cooking'. When drafting the content of your website, always make sure that you concentrate on just a few important keywords and phrases, this is because keyword phrases play a very important role in optimizing you site.

Meta Tags:
Meta tags are an HTML code that is found between the < HEAD> and < /HEAD> tags. These tags contain a description of your site and are found in the search engine results when you key in a certain word or phrase. When creating Meta tags, be sure to focus on what your website is specifically all about. Do not generalize. Also make sure that your Meta tags include your most important keywords, so that your customers will know exactly what your website is offering.

Image Alt Tags:
An Image Alt tag comes after a website's graphic address or URL in your HTML code. To fully optimize your graphics and your website make sure that you insert a readable keyword phrase within the Img Alt tags.

Title Tags:
The Title tag of your website should always contain the most important keyword phrase of your site. This is because it will aid you in getting higher search engine ranking results. Type your key word phrase in lower and use only the most relevant keyword phrases.

Text:
Since your text plays a key role in determining your website's page ranking, it is thus of vital significance to optimizing your website. Remember that when composing your text for your site it should contain plenty of important key words and phrases used in different ways. Also keep in mind that your keywords and phrases should appear at least three times, but not more than seven times in your text.

Could you briefly explain PageRank Algorithm?

PageRank is a probability distribution used to represent the likelihood that a person randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular page. PageRank can be calculated for any-size collection of documents. It is assumed in several research papers that the distribution is evenly divided between all documents in the collection at the beginning of the computational process. The PageRank computations require several passes, called "iterations", through the collection to adjust approximate PageRank values to more closely reflect the theoretical true value.

A probability is expressed as a numeric value between 0 and 1. A 0.5 probability is commonly expressed as a "50% chance" of something happening. Hence, a PageRank of 0.5 means there is a 50% chance that a person clicking on a random link will be directed to the document with the 0.5 PageRank.

How PageRank WorksAssume a small universe of four web pages: A, B, C and D. The initial approximation of PageRank would be evenly divided between these four documents. Hence, each document would begin with an estimated PageRank of 0.25.

If pages B, C, and D each only link to A, they would each confer 0.25 PageRank to A. All PageRank PR( ) in this simplistic system would thus gather to A because all links would be pointing to A.

The PageRank theory holds that even an imaginary surfer who is randomly clicking on links will eventually stop clicking. The probability, at any step, that the person will continue is a damping factor d. Various studies have tested different damping factors, but it is generally assumed that the damping factor will be set around 0.85.[4]

The damping factor is subtracted from 1 (and in some variations of the algorithm, the result is divided by the number of documents in the collection) and this term is then added to the product of the damping factor and the sum of the incoming PageRank scores.

So any page's PageRank is derived in large part from the PageRanks of other pages. The damping factor adjusts the derived value downward. The second formula above supports the original statement in Page and Brin's paper that "the sum of all PageRanks is one".[2] Unfortunately, however, Page and Brin gave the first formula, which has led to some confusion.

Google recalculates PageRank scores each time it crawls the Web and rebuilds its index. As Google increases the number of documents in its collection, the initial approximation of PageRank decreases for all documents.

Google is known to actively penalize link farms and other schemes designed to artificially inflate PageRank. How Google identifies link farms and other PageRank manipulation tools are among Google's trade secrets.

What is Spamdexing?

Spamdexing: This is the process of manipulating a search engine's pages to increase the chance of a website being placed higher in the search engine's results. In reference to the Spam, together of the techniques aiming at cheating in order to improve referencing of a site in the search engines. Examples: multiple tenders, repetitions of key words, pages satellite, duplication of pages, cloaking, etc.

Spamdexing is used to decrease the quality of a search engines results to attempt to gain more traffic. One method of spamdexing is to design a page to rank well for a particular keyword when that keyword has nothing to do with the sites content. ...

Any technique that artificially increases the relevancy of the web sites, thus increasing the potential position of a site on the search engines listings, but decreasing the quality of the search engine's database. This term is also used for sending of unsolicited bulk electronic mail.

Spamdexing is any of various methods to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, usually in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system. Search engines use a variety of algorithms to determine relevancy ranking.

What is an SEO, SEM and how important are they for an organization? Explain briefly.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process applied to attract search engine spiders and enhance its value to visitors. Search Engine Optimization is an online marketing technique that improves a site's ranking for targeted keywords and phrases within a database of search engines. SEO is aimed at improving web pages so that the web pages rank higher in search engines for targeted keywords and phrases to generate more revenue from the website.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing): SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is the process of marketing a website via search engines, using paid inclusion, PPC ads and other marketing methods. This is a practice of marketing a website on the internet, including paid and organic advertising. SEM is also known as Search Marketing.

The main difference between SEO and SEM:
SEO and SEM are Two different things. SEO is primarily concerned with optimizing website for natural or organic listings and directories to improve natural search results. But SEM includes additional services like PPC marketing or paid inclusion and paid placement. It involves target marketing and advertising in order to get traffic to the website. SEM is a part of SEO.

Also, many SEM companies, individuals or firm guarantee your site will get top 10 rankings within a short period of time. This is impossible. No one can guarantee that the targeted keywords will get top 10 ranking in major search engines (like: Google, Yahoo, MSN etc...). Beware of guarantees. No company can guarantee this. The search engines (like: Google, Yahoo, MSN etc...) do not guarantee specific ranking even when you pay them directly.