Search Engine Optimization Ranking Tips

Images are one of the most important elements

Images are one of the most important elements of the site. Like the webpages, they can also be linked to and can bring search engine traffic through Image Search results. To find the websites which are linking to images on your website, type "imagesite: www.example.com -site:www.example.com" in the Google Image Search. This operator is helpful in finding the image optimization opportunities (and occasionally, finding websites copying your content).

Search Engines make minor updates to their

Search Engines make minor updates to their search algorithms quite frequently. Google alone made about 500 updates to its algorithms last year. Most of these updates have trivial effect on search results and go unnoticed but a few are substantial enough to have a significant impact on rankings. One such update happened on 1st May this year which is more popularly known as Mayday Update. The two main effects it had on websites were:

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a technique through which search engines try to figure out phrase relationships when processing queries and consider webpages that have many words semantically close to queried phrase. Pages that are focused on a wider net of semantically related keywords tend to have higher rankings for the core keyword. For e.g. a document mentioning SEO should also include terms such as SEM, website optimization, search engine promotion, content optimization, website promotion etc. This improves relevancy score and in turn, rankings. Pages that are too much focused on one phrase tend to be filtered out and rank low.

Query Deserves Freshness or QDF

Query Deserves Freshness or QDF is a component of Google algorithm in which it pays attention to queries which need frequent updating of results. For example latest news happenings and other popular stuff. These queries need fresh content and news results to be shown rather than standard algorithmic results. For example if we search for "Fifa world cup" today, the search results will quite different from what we will see after the World Cup is over.

QDF takes a number of factors into account:

Online Reputation Management

Online Reputation Management refers to monitoring, working on and mitigating the negative results for a particular search query on Search Engines. If there is a website, Blog or a forum which speaks negatively about your product or service, you may want to remove that undesirable listing from search results. While some of these may be genuine, most of these negative reviews are overhyped or sometime, work of your competitors.  While we don’t have any control on sites publishing negative content, we can certainly outrank them with other favorable listings. Some of the methods to outrank undesirable listings

One of the crucial aspects of SEO is to build content

One of the crucial aspects of SEO is to build content and links that are readable by search engines. We often wonder if a certain part of the content is visible to Search Engines or if links within a drop down menu are SE readable. One of the easiest ways to seeing pages the way SEs do is to check the Cache snapshot of the page. For this, type cache:www.example.com/page1.html and then click on "Text-only Version" on the right hand side. This will enable you to see the content and links which are accessible to search engines. This will also enable you to see when the SEs have last indexed the webpage. The down sides to this method are that it works only on indexed page and shows the past version of the webpage. You can use other tools such as seo-browser.com or download Lynx browser to see a wepage the way SEs do.

Google Caffeine

Google Caffeine update is mostly an infrastructural change which has made Google’s results more fast and accurate. It does have some changes on search results although not very profound yet:

Besides on-page and off-page optimizations factors

Besides on-page and off-page optimizations factors, User Behavior data also plays a role in organic rankings of a website on Google. Although it is not much significant yet, Google looks at parameters such as Bounce Rate, Pages Viewed, time spent on website, pages bookmarked, website usage history of user and possibly the Click Through rate of a website on search result pages. It is believed that most of this data is collected through:

An ecommerce website might allow various

An ecommerce website might allow various sort orders for a page (like by Lowest Price, Most Popular, Sort by Brand etc.) or webmaster might want tracking codes added to URLs for Analytics. You could end up with multiple pages with similar content. There may be 1000s of pages with almost same content. This can lead to content duplication issues and incoming links may get divided among these similar pages. To solve this problem, search engines now support Canonical tag which specifies a canonical or original version of page which you want to promote among all the pages with similar content. For e.g.

There are many geo-targeted (keyword with location name)

There are many geo-targeted (keyword with location name) for which search engines show Local Business listings within the main search result pages. For e.g. if you search for "san diego restaurants" or "new york realtors" in Google.com, you will see a 7-pack local results listings along with a small snippet of Google Maps indicating the location for these businesses. These Local listings can be quite beneficial if you have local customer base. You won’t even need a website to appear in these results; although having a website is good for your rankings. Optimize you business for these listings, you will need following steps:

Google advocates the use 503 Server Response Codes

Google advocates the use 503 Server Response Codes for downtime or when site is under maintenance. A 503 (Service Unavailable) status codes can help avoid a page that’s under construction or experiencing problems getting crawled and indexed, which can be a big problem especially for large, popular sites.  You can’t specify when you’d like Google to re-crawl, but they will come back and won’t index the maintenance content of the page.

The first three results on search engine result pages

The first three results on search engine result pages (SERPs) get more than 60% of the clicks. The Click percentage drops significantly after the third clicks. Below mentioned chart shows the percentage of total visitors clicking on the top 10 results. This percentage can be calculated upon to get approximate number of visitors coming to your website provided you know the average monthly search count for the keyword.

Position % age of Clicks 1st 34.35% 2nd 16.96% 3rd 11.42% 4th 7.73% 5th 6.19% 6th 5.05% 7th 4.02% 8th 3.47% 9th 2.85% 10th 2.71%

The percentage of clicks for some of the top results may seem to be low but this can happen due to query refinement (user modifying query without clicking on results), misspellings or due to news sites, local results or other multimedia results present in top spots. Please note that these are just approximate values and may change over a period of time.

It is widely believed that domain registration and hosting

It is widely believed that domain registration and hosting also plays an important role in website rankings as it helps Search Engines to establish domain trust. Some of these factors are listed below in order of their relevance.

The first two officially announced by Google and have a significant impact on your rankings. Remaining three are not very prominent yet but they do influence website rankings.