How does web traffic reflect your web site rank?

Traffic has a direct impact to your web site’s rank among Google search results. The higher the rank, the more traffic you get. There are specific algorithms that Google and other search engines use to rank web sites, which are secretly guarded. Google uses over 200 ranking factors. SEO involves tailoring your website to ranking criteria.

Ranking algorithms is the part of the search engine that decides which pages show up at the top of the results list. Organic ranking is complicated. Ranking algorithm is the mathematical formula a search engine uses to score page against the query to see which pages are the closest matches.

The two main factors are page factors and query factors.

Page factors- Web search ranking algorithms rely heavily on components that have nothing to do with query entered.
1. Strength of links to a page
2. Number of visits to the page and more
These factors boost the rankings for searches on any word that occurs on that page.

Query Factors – The query that the search enters weighs heavily. The number of occurrences of words in the query, where they are found on the page, title, and body. Other elements are weighed in the search engines regarding rankings.

You are not alone ….. even big business struggle to be noticed. According to Inc Guidebook, the Web has some 120 million Internet domains and tens of billions of index pages. Each competes for search engine visitors. The good news that even small businesses can attract more customers by a focused search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.

SEO is not magic: it takes work and professionals to do the best. Even a professional cannot guarantee landing your site among the top 10 web sites for popular search terms and cannot drive traffic to sites that do not offer value. However, if you have the time or the money to hire a professional, it is worth it.

Some tips for the do-it-yourself:

1) Update your content Frequently.
In today’s survival of the fittest market, web sites containing old
static content reduce rankings. Keeping your content fresh attracts
search engine robots to visit your web site more frequently.
2) Be Persistent.
The age of your site can have a positive effect on search engine
rankings. The longer your web site is online the better your chances.
3) Choose Wisely.
It pays to select the right domain name from the start
and not to change domains.
4) Be Unique:
Do not duplicate content. Duplicate content is damaging to your
rankings. By keeping all pages of your site original you stand a
better chance with the search engines.

Small businesses are not the only group who requires Search Engine Optimization. Even Fortune 500 companies need to spend time working on SEO. According to a 2009 survey conducted by Conductor, more than half of Fortune 500 companies had almost no natural search visibility, with their targeted keywords not within the top 100 natural search results. None of the Fortune 500 companies surveyed had a majority of their keywords ranking in the top 25 search results.

The following are some great ways to improve SEO and make your web site more effective. These practices are ethical, so they will not be greatly affected by Google’s algorithm changes.

1. Create content for people not the search engines
2. Make sure keywords are present in prominent places of your web site such as the headers, subheads, title tags and meta description snippets.
3. Structuring the web sites so that important keyword pages are high in the site architecture and easily found by search engines and people.
4. Create well-written engaging content is an integral way to attract quality links. Use social media sites such as Twitter to get links. Tweet a link to your web site or add it as your profile link. Twitter is crawled by search engines frequently, this will help your new web site to be discovered more quickly.
5. Don’t use link exchanges.  Instead offer testimonials to business vendors that you work with for links.

But there’s good news on the horizon. CSS 3 is currently being drafted, and is providing some awesome animation and graphics tools to web designers. The best part? CSS code allows HTML to be animated, but can be fully indexed by the search engines.

What does this mean? It means that the gap between a great looking site and a well optimized site is slowly becoming smaller. Safari and Google Chrome for example already support some of the most popular CSS3 drafts. If you have the current versions of one of these browsers, check out: http://www.zurb.com/playground. ZURB interactive has been playing around with CSS3 and has come up with some really cool stuff.

My personal favorite is the CSS3 dock. It imitates the Mac OS X dock for navigation. It looks really awesome and allows search engines to index the navigation just like any other set of links. This is a really exciting development.

There are some issues however. First off, the most popular browser of today is Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer has a long history of not adopting the W3C’s (World Wide Web Consortium) standards. (It is the only major browser not to). This means that web designers will have to design their sites in such a way that it still displays ok to Internet Explorer users. (And maybe show them a message that they are not getting a full internet experience.)

Another problem is hardware. These new features are resource intensive. The browsers need to have efficient display engines to display these effects, and probably should have hardware acceleration (which most browsers do not).

These are really the only issues, and I am looking forward to the CSS3 changes coming to the market. So get your hands dirty and start learning some CSS3!

The ALT tag is designed to help visually impaired visitors to determine what the images contain, by allowing you to specify some alternative text. When a visitor points the mouse over an image with the alt tag, the text is shown. Search engines have the same problem as visually impaired users have, they cannot see the images. Images have no meaning to search engines. Search engines can only see the image tag’s text. Therefore it is of vital importance that you tag the images on your with their content.

Search marketers still drop links in blog comments as a way to get links. This method is considered blog spamming. To combat this, Google uses a nofollow link tags (a signal to search engine spiders to ignore a link) and devalue links in blog comments.

Search engine submission has also become unnecessary. Google has the ability to discover and index content. Search engine submission is obsolete and waste of money, not to mention automatically submitting your sites can hurt their rankings.

Unethical site owners and SEOs abuse META keywords by including misleading unrelated keywords to their content. Google ignores the keyword tag due to unethical practices.

Web site owners who practice in link exchange schemes that intentionally influence rankings is a violation of Google. Avoid methods such as link farms,off-topic links, and do not rely heavily on reciprocal links and paid links. These methods will get you penalized by the search engines.

In conclusion, do not practice unethical seo tactics. Unethical seo tactics will get your website penalized by the search engines.

Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to get a sense of how most search engine bots see your site. This exercise can help you determine where you may need to make changes for SEO. You can paste your URL in the Lynx viewer to find out how your page would look when viewed with Lynx, without having to download and install the browser.

Make sure that your site does not have duplicate content. Duplicate content can hurt your search engine ranking.

Create a XML sitemap for your web site and submit it to the major search engines; this gives the search engine bots a list of URLs on your site that you want them to index.

Shoppers visit ecommerce web sites not only to make purchases, but to gather product information, read or write product reviews etc. It is important that the site design allows the consumers to easily find what they are looking for. For example, if the customer wants to get additional product details or read reviews, there needs to be a clear path. Sites that make it easy for consumers to accomplish their goals build long-term loyalty.

Once the retailer has a well designed site, they need to address how to get visitors to the site. An Internet Retailer Survey reports that 40.2% of the respondents would like the search engines to get them visitors. This is done by a process of search engine optimization (SEO). Moreover, 27.8% of the respondents would like to have more community features, which is done by using social media.

Social media is a major source of information for consumers. A social network presence can help drive traffic back to a retailer’s site. This trend is prompting many retailers to participate in social networks and be part of that information exchange.

Submitting your web site is a last option because you were unable to get links to your web site or your web site was blocked by the spiders. If you have to submit your web site, only submit your home page. A site map allows spiders to find everything. Many times individuals submit their sites over and over without checking to see if the spiders blocked their site.

You may receive unsolicited e-mails offering to submit your web site to thousands of search engines. These emails reference some statistics of millions of visitors that this will generate by submitting to thousands of search engines. Always avoid automated submissions. These automated submissions are considered spam and your web site can be banned for excessive submissions.

Firefox is a great browser, and one of the things that makes it so great is it’s wide selection of add-ons. Some of these add-ons are great for SEO work. We’ve compiled a list of 5 SEO add ons that you can get for Firefox:

1. RankQuest SEO Toolbar
   RankQuest SEO(Search Engine Optimization) Toolbar provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and Google respectively ensures the popularity of the site.
2. SEOpen
   SEO services: Track sites placement at Google and Yahoo for any keyword. Watch Google PageRank (PR), Backlinks, Saturation over time. Graph and table presentation of the data.
3. SEOQuake
   Seoquake is a Mozilla Firefox SEO extension aimed primarily at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization(SEO) and internet promotion of web sites.
4. Foxy SEO Tool
   Foxy SEO Tool offers tools for search engine optimization (SEO), web traffic and page analysis for webmasters and web professionals.
5. Keyword Spy
   KeywordSpy SEO/PPC Plugin – Do your competitive research in SEO & PPC right from your browser! Download the revolutionary plugin which will change the way you do keyword research & competitor tracking, while you browse on Google, Yahoo in Real-time.