Importance of Page Optimization part one

Components of Optimizing a Site

Each of the following components are critical pieces to a site's ability to be crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engine spiders. When properly used in the construction of a website, these features give a site/page the best chance of ranking well for targeted keywords.

Accessibility

An accessible site is one that ensures delivery of its content successfully as often as possible. The functionality of pages, validity of HTML elements, uptime of the site's server, and working status of site coding and components all figure into site accessibility. If these features are ignored or faulty, both search engines and users will select other sites to visit.

The biggest problems in accessibility that most sites encounter fit into the following categories. Addressing these issues satisfactorily will avoid problems getting search engines and visitors to and through your site.

Broken Links - If an HTML link is broken, the contents of the linked-to page may never be found. In addition, some surmise that search engines negatively degrade rankings on sites & pages with many broken links.

Valid HTML & CSS - Although arguments exist about the necessity for full validation of HTML and CSS in accordance with W3C guidelines, it is generally agreed that code must meet minimum requirements of functionality and successful display in order to be spidered and cached properly by the search engines.

Functionality of Forms and Applications - If form submissions, select boxes, javascript, or other input-required elements block content from being reached via direct hyperlinks, search engines may never find them. Keep data that you want accessible to search engines on pages that can be directly accessed via a link. In a similar vein, the successful functionality and implementation of any of these pieces is critical to a site's accessibility for visitors. A non-functioning page, form, or code element is unlikely to receive much attention from visitors.

File Size - With the exception of a select few documents that search engines consider to be of exceptional importance, web pages greater than 150K in size are typically not fully cached. This is done to reduce index size, bandwidth, and load on the servers, and is important to anyone building pages with exceptionally large amounts of content. If it's important that every word and phrase be spidered and indexed, keeping file size under 150K is highly recommended. As with any online endeavor, smaller file size also means faster download speed for users - a worthy metric in its own right.

Downtime & Server Speed - The performance of your site's server may have an adverse impact on search rankings and visitors if downtime and slow transfer speeds are common. Invest in high quality hosting to prevent this issue.

URLs, Title Tags & Meta Data

URLs, title tags and meta tag components are all information that describe your site and page to visitors and search engines. Keeping them relevant, compelling and accurate are key to ranking well. You can also use these areas as launching points for your keywords, and indeed, successful rankings require their use.

Search-Friendly Text

Making the visible text on a page "search-friendly" isn't complicated, but it is an issue that many sites struggle with. Text styles that cannot be indexed by search engines include:

Text embedded in a Java Application or Macromedia Flash file
Text in an image file - jpg, gif, png, etc
Text accessible only via a form submit or other on-page action

If the search engines can't see your page's text, they cannot spider and index that content for visitors to find. Thus, making search-friendly text in HTML format is critical to ranking well and getting properly indexed. If you are forced to use a format that hides text from search engines, try to use the right keywords and phrases in headlines, title tags, URLs, and image/file names on the page. Don't go overboard with this tactic, and never try to hide text (by making it the same color as the background or using CSS tricks). Even if the search engines can't detect this automatically, a competitor can easily report your site for spamming and have you de-listed entirely.

Along with making text visible, it's important to remember that search engines measure the terms and phrases in a document to extract a great deal of information about the page. Writing well for search engines is both an art and a science (as SEOs are not privy to the exact, technical methodology of how search engines score text for rankings), and one that can be harnessed to achieve better rankings.

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/article/bg4

Purpose of Link Building

Link Building... Time-intensive. Frustrating. Sometimes confusing. Yet Unavoidable. Because ultimately, it's still the trump card for higher rankings.

The pertinent questions:

1. Will link building still be very important for rankings in the medium term?
2. When will link popularity be devalued in favor of other algo elements (that are less tedious, from a webmaster's point of view)?

The answers:

1. Sorry, but link building is still going to be the SEO trump card for the foreseeable future.
2. I wouldn't hold your breath for search engine algorithms to place less importance on link popularity until the Semantic Web arrives, or maybe when HTTP gets replaced by a new protocol. Because links are still the basic connector, the basic relationship, on the Web. And for the forseeable future they're going to be the easiest way for a computer program to judge the importance and trustworthiness of a Web page.

Source: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml

5 Ways to Discover Link Building Ideas

Keyword Research

Use your favorite keyword research tool to find out what people are searching for. Look for phrases that indicate the person is looking for answers to a problem. These could include such words as "how to," "help," "tutorial," "fix," and "problem." Now you know specific problems that customers need to have solved. Use this information to create a great link building strategy -- and gain new customers at the same time.

Customers

You can discover link building ideas simply by talking to customers and uncovering their challenges. This includes conducting a survey, making phone calls, or asking customers in your brick-and-mortar locations.

B2B? Conduct a survey of clients to find out their challenges for the upcoming year. Make sure to ask open-ended questions. That's the best way to find the less obvious opportunities.

Staff

Talk to your account managers, customer service staff, and salespeople. They're the people in your organization who have the most contact with customers and the best understanding of their issues.

Tip: Have customer service representatives keep track of problems or questions customers have throughout the week.

Forums, Blogs and Social Media

Spend time reading forums, blogs, and social media sites in your industry to discover recurring problems people face. For blogs and social media, pay close attention to the comments people leave. Much is revealed in those comments.

If someone said something you want to explore in more detail, don't hesitate to contact them directly. Many will be willing to elaborate.

Consumer Review Sites

Spend time researching consumer review sites for your industry. Try to spot recurring issues. Review sites provide a wealth of invaluable customer data.

Use the information gathered about what customers are searching for and brainstorm link building ideas with your staff. Include people from different departments since you never know who'll come up with that incredible idea.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3628498

Understanding SERP's (Search engine results page)

A search engine results page, or SERP, is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query.

Query caching

Some search engines cache SERPs for frequent searches and display the cached SERP instead of a live SERP to increase the performance of the search engine. The search engine updates the SERPs periodically to account for new pages, and possibly to modify the rankings of pages in the SERP.

SERP refreshing can take several days or weeks which can occasionally cause results to be inaccurate or out of date, and new sites and pages to be completely absent.

Different types of results

SERPS of major search engines like Google and Yahoo! may include different types of listings: contextual, algorithmic or organic search listings, as well as sponsored listings, images, maps, definitions, or suggested search refinements. The major search engines also offer different types of search, such as image search, news search, and blog search. The SERPS for these specialized searches offer specific types of results.

Advertising (Sponsored Listings)

SERPs usually contain advertisements. This is how commercial search engines fund their operations. Common examples of these advertisements are displayed on the right hand side of the page (e.g. Google Adwords) as small classified style ads or directly above the main organic search results on the left (e.g. Yahoo! Sponsored Search).

Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_results_page