The Toll Men

Search Engines have become the soul of the Internet. They provide a means of aggregating, correlating, indexing and categorizing the vast amounts of content in the wild world of Internet. They have gotten complex over the years with better algorithms to serve the folks who want to find something, really find something. They have become extremely adept at finding out duplicates and hidden texts, detecting and punishing the search engine spammers. Every webmaster should take utmost care on what gets to be listed in the search engine. Things that were employed earlier to spam the search engine to get high ranking will come back to haunt you if you don’t do the garbage disposal. In this article we will employ one tool that makes the SEO or webmaster’s task much simpler. this article provides you with some SEO tips on how to use the saturation tool.

Search engine saturation tools provide a snapshot of what is currently indexed or known to the popular search engines. They provide you a way to understand what areas of your website are indexed and what is not. Alternately it provides information on, did the thing you don’t want to be indexed, got indexed or safe from the eyes of the dragon. This tool shows exactly the weakest portions of your website. Here is the next step you need to understand it is saturation density. This is calculated as the percentage of your website pages that shows up in the saturation tool results. The percentage should exclude the pages that you wanted to be excluded. Additionally you should exclude the image files and object files. Once you take inventory of the file list you want to target and the number of files you got indexed, you can get your personal saturation indicator. This personal target should obviously be close to 100%.

The next factor you need to consider is the saturation density of your competitors. Just look at the saturation index of your competition. And compare against yours. This will give you a pretty good idea on the probability of some one finding your web pages over theirs. If your competition has 1000 pages indexed each for a unique keyword on top of the common keywords. They are going to get the Lion’s share of the traffic. Ultimately this means PageRank. There is a lot you can learn about your competitor than you would by visiting their website. For example your site might be very rich in content and the competitor may seem to be low in content but they still rank higher. But if you look closer they may have a flat file based vibrant forum that gets indexed in the search engines giving them higher relevancy than yours. This is just one example I can reveal. There is tons of other such goldmine data that can be collected by simply using the saturation tool.

There are many search engine optimization websites and companies who offer this tool for free over the web. The resource box contains one such website. The saturation tool is typically a taken for granted tool. The average webmaster just discounts what is indexed and what the competition is index on. Looking at just the top 10 results and analysis of the same won’t suffice. Dig down deeper, you will be amazed at what you can find out about the competition using these tools. Also remember what I said in the first paragraph. There is stuff that you don’t want your competition to know about like a simple customer list that gets stored somewhere because you used an unprotected flat file system. Everybody is learning your competitor is also reading this article and they would have started using the saturation tool to spy on you. This tool is great as it enables you to be a good responsible business. Happy optimization!

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Links are much like referrals in the real world. The more authoritative the people you hang this in turn will be give you more perceived value.

For example, starting out in business you probably did not know very many people. But as you got more clients your area of influence becomes wider. This in turn would allow you to be able to refer people and be referred by people.

On the World Wide Web links work very much the same way. If you get a link ( referral ) from a website such as an .edu or .gov then Google gives you a higher ranking because it considers those site to more authoritative since it is regulated by the school or government. And since everyone knows you can trust schools or governments, thus giving you a great referral.

Do not forget “Bad company corrupts good character.” Therefore if you start linking or hooking up with the people that are shady it will reflect in your rankings.

Also be aware that if you get 250,000 friends over night, then people are going to wonder what made you so popular. Bells start going off and Google starts penalizing.

All in all, just like the story of the ” Tortoise and the Hare” … slow and steady WILL always wins the race.

At Magnetiks, a Houston search engine optimization company, we build our links to ensure that when you do get to the top you get to stay awhile and enjoy because like I said earlier “consistency and perseverance pays off”.

Have you ever visited a web site and noticed the “Site Map” button jammed somewhere near the bottom of the page? Ever click on it? Probably not. So, why do sites have site maps?

The Site Map - Very Important

In the old days of the net [about three years ago], experts proclaimed every site should have a site map. From their ivory tower, they proclaimed the site map as the extraordinary method to assure potential customers could easily navigate the site and find what they needed. Once they found it, they would buy it and you would be rich, rich, rich!

As is typical with such universally accepted proclamations, this one was wrong. Anyone remotely paying attention to server statistics realized very few people were visiting site maps. The proclamation stopped being shouted and evolved into criticisms of sites which still have site maps. These criticisms, of course, also miss the mark.

HTML site maps are archaic. Visitors to your site will almost never use them. You may even forget you have one. You will certainly forget to update it as often as you should. Still, the site map is a critical component of the site.

The first thing to realize is there is a specific purpose for having a site map. The purpose is to make it is as simple as possible for search engine robots to crawl your site. The more pages indexed by the search engines, the better off you are.

To create a site map, just make a page with the meta tag of “site map”. Add hyperlinked text to each fulcrum page of the site. A fulcrum page is simply a gateway page to a particular section of the site. For example, you may have a centralized article page with links to each article. The centralized article page is a fulcrum page and should be included on the site map. Once completed, make sure that every page you want included in the search engine has a hyperlinked text headline on at least one of the fulcrum pages.

A quick word about Google. Google has a new xml feature you can use for a site map. You can use it or forgo it as you see fit. Still, make sure to make an html site map for the other search engines.

Once you have the site map page up, don’t wait for the search engine robots to find it. Publish the link in an article byline or blog as soon as possible. Within a week or so, you should see pages from your site being added to the search engine indexes. This is true for Google even if you don’t use the xml site map tool.

Halstatt Pires is a search engine optimization specialist with http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing and advertising company providing internet marketing services in San Diego, California.