mainsearches blog

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. When a topic is typed for search, nearly instantly, the search engine will sift through the millions of pages it has indexed about and present you with ones that match your topic. The searched matches are also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Remember that a prospective customer will probably only look at the first 2-3 listings in the search results. So it does matter where your website appears in the search engine ranking.

Further, they all use one of the top 6-7 search engines and these search engines attract more visitors to websites than anything else. So finally it all depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your site.

It is the Keywords that play an important role than any expensive online or offline advertising of your website.

It is found by surveys that a when customers want to find a website for information or to buy a product or service, they find their site in one of the following ways:

• The first option is they find their site through a search engine.
• Secondly they find their site by clicking on a link from another website or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.
• Occasionally, they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an article.

Thus it’s obvious the the most popular way to find a site, by search engine, represents more than 90% of online users. In other words, only 10% of the people looking for a website will use methods other than search engines.

All search engines employ a ranking algorithm and one of the main rules in a ranking algorithm is to check the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Don’t forget that algorithms also give weightage to link population (number of web pages linking to your site). When performed by a qualified, experienced search engine optimization consultant, your site for high search engine rankings really does work, unless you have a lot of money and can afford to pay the expert. With better knowledge of search engines and how they work, you can also do it on your own.

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

·        Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.

·        Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.

·        Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.

·        When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.

·        Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.     

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.  

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site’s

Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages! 

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine. 

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day. 

Example:  Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google. 

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.  

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

There was a thread started on a popular Forum asking the following Question.

(I Have Removed All Names)

Hi folks, Is it acceptable to increase the price of a sitewide when PR increases, or should the agreed price be set for the duration of the contract, even if the directory has no PR?

 

1st Reply:

 

You don’t cancel a subscription on people who are already existing subscribers just because you gained a little PR, just to try and extort more money from them or raise your prices. A subscriber should stay subscribed until they themselves cancel out.

That is at least my view on it and how I see it. Opinions will vary. (I guess)

 

2nd Reply:

 

During the contract period that should stay the same.

When the link is up for renewal you can discuss the price again.

Thanks

 

3rd Reply:

 

Yes, I don’t think its good idea to cancel any subscribed customer without letting them know BEFORE they actually buy a link.

I have changed the payment options several times. It was initially $10 one time fee. Then $15 one time fee.

But those prices were when my directory pages were PR3. Now I charge monthly for the same pages, except they are all PR4.

Those who have bought their links on my directory never get to pay more just because the PR got high. It wouldn’t be fair for them unless you mention and let them know beforehand.

 

4th Reply:

 

I also agree that a subscriber should ALWAYS stay subscribed until they themselves cancel out, even if your site gains a lot of pagerank. Long term subscribers/customers are too valuable. If my site went from pr3 to pr6 I would not try to increase the money unless they cancelled and then tried to subscribe again. That is just the way I prefer to do business. Also a generous reputation will bring you more happy customers in the future.

 

5th Reply:

 

If you have integrity, then you’ll keep your subscribers onboard at the price they paid until their subscription period runs out. With anyone NEW that joins up, you can charge more.

Remember, PR can go up and PR can go down…will you be refunding people when your PR drops midstream?

 

6th Reply:

 

Contracts must be honoured till expiry–while PR is temporary, reputation and honesty are permanent.

 

7th Reply:

 

Hello….

Don’t fool around like that….

You are given the option at paypal for the subscription length of term…

Make it 3 month intervals then when PR updates

If they want to go at it again then it’s all good and your new price is set.

 

My Conclusion:

I think the best response had to be post 7.

If I sign a Subscription I expect it to last for 1 year unless I’m told otherwise.

Whenever you sell anything you should make it clear what the terms are before a transaction takes place.

Some would say that the buyer should make sure of the terms before buying and after all there do say buyer beware.

To avoid confusion both parties should ask questions and keep a copy of the details as proof if needed for the future.

You should never use CLICK HERE for a link to your website, always try and use a keyword as a navigation link, Look at the Example below.

To View my directory Click Here the search engines will not give you any benefit for the keyword “Click Here”.

You should use: To visit my Directory notice the only keyword used is “Directory”

If you want to get the users Attention try GET Backlinks!

Note that “GET” is left out of the hypertext; it’s not recommended putting verb phrases in link text.

Remember to try and link your main keywords, say your website is a So Related Blog and your main keyword is Seo Blog your text link should look like this.

Come and look at our Seo Blog where you can find some useful Seo related advice as well as Deeplinks Directories list, free Phpld Templates and much more.