Archive for category SEO
The 3 Phases of a website during the SEO process:
The end goal of any SEO project is to drive targeted visitors that will convert to customers, by placing the website on top of search engines results for relevant and popular keywords.
To reach this goal, the website will go through 3 phases during the SEO process:
1.Indexed:
The first milestone is to get the website indexed in the top search engines, especially Google, Bing and Yahoo. (Yahoo’s results will be pulled from Bing soon).
It is important to get all/most of the website’s pages indexed, because each one could represent an entry point to your website.
To know how many of your web pages are indexed in Google, you can use the site operator:
site:example.com
2.Ranked:
Ranking for the right keywords is the core of SEO, because most people will not go beyond the first 3 pages of search results.
Every page on your website could be optimized to rank on first page. Top ranking in search engines could take a bit of time.
Basically, it depends on your domain/page authority rank, how competitive is the search term, what resources do you have, and what you are doing.
3.Visited:
The bottom line of SEO is to drive targeted traffic to your website, therefore it is almost worthless to rank for the wrong keywords, which are too general or too narrow and unpopular.
Optimizing your website’s meta descriptions and rich snippets could increase the click through rates to your website from the search results pages.
Of course, it is essential to engage and retain your website visitors, but this for another post.
If you’d like to improve your search engine ranking, ask about our SEO services.
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Google with Caffeine
Google Caffeine is an update to Google’s infrastructure and architecture.
Google announced on Tuesday, the completion of their new indexing system called Caffeine, which provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than the last index.
They opened up a preview of the Caffeine update in August of 2009, where people could test it and compare the results to their index.
Google with Caffeine
The Google Caffeine Update was needed for three main reasons:
- The amount of content and number of web documents is growing phenomenally in all languages.
- The web pages are getting richer and more complex with videos, images, applications and rich data formats.
- The “need for speed” with real time updates, fresh content and live news.
Plus the popularity rise of vertical searches and non-textual content.
The image below illustrates how Google’s old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:
Google Caffeine Comparison
“Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.
With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before — no matter when or where it was published.”
Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day.
So basically, Google’s Caffeine will crawl and index your newly published pages faster than before.
If you would like to know how Google Caffeine might affect your website, contact us to discuss our SEO services.
How Google Works:
SEO 101
How Search Engines work:
Posted by Cleartag in Online Marketing, SEO on April 15, 2009
Search engines have a 4 steps process for their operation:
1. Crawling the Web: search engines run automatic programs, called “bots”,” spiders or crawlers. They follow the hyperlinks from one page to another.
2. Indexing Documents: once the document has been crawled, it might get indexed and stored in the search engines database. There are different factors that influence if a document will be indexed and how fast.
3. Processing Queries: When the users request information, the search engines retrieves its index all the documents that match the query. A match is determined if the terms or phrase is found on the page in the manner specified by the user.
4. Ranking Results: once search engines determines the documents, the engine’s algorithm runs calculations to determine which document is more relevant and should rank on top the search results.
White hat SEO vs. Black hat SEO
Posted by Cleartag in Online Marketing, SEO on April 9, 2009
Like any profession or service, SEO has certain ethics or rules that must be adhered to. Experts divide the SEO practice between White hat SEO and Black hat SEO. White hat SEO professionals understand search engine algorithms, and comply with their guidelines to make your websites search engine friendly. Black hat SEO professional understand the search engine algorithms, yet try to manipulate the search engine results with unauthorized techniques.
Although black hat SEO might get you immediate short term results, it is an extremely risky practice which may result in your website getting banned from search engines altogether. White hat SEO practitioners wouldn’t have a problem discussing their techniques with search engine representatives. They are the ones who will help you get top ranking results in an ethical way.
Search engines update their algorithms constantly in order to provide their users with the best, most targeted results. And don’t be fooled, their quality assurance team will hunt down websites with black hat SEO sooner or later.