When trying to find information on the internet, you typically go to a search engine. When using the most popular search engine, Google, a user enters a query, Google’s machines search their index for matching pages and return the results that are the most relevant to the user. Google determines relevancy by over 200 factors, one of critical factors is the PageRank (PR) for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In more detail, PR can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web, i.e., that sums up all backlinks and their associated ranking weight. We assume page A has pages T1…Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations)[1]. The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages’ PageRanks will be one. Also, a PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation. There are many other details which are beyond the scope of this article.

In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other [black-hat] practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content. It is not the quantity of backlinks, but the quality of backlinks that help you rank better in Search Engines. Having backlinks from unrelated or “bad” sites can actually penalize your ranking. Also a 1,000 poor quality backlinks may have less weight than 1 high quality backlink. Quality is very important in creating your backlinks.

How to determine a quality backlink?

A quality backlink will have these characteristics:

1. The theme of the backlinking website is similar to your website or web page
2. The backlink’s anchor text has the keyword or keyphrase that you are optimizing for
3. The backlinking webpage has a Google PageRank (important for Google SEO) of 1 or higher (the higher the better)
4. The backlinking webpage has few outgoing links, the fewer the better (see above equation as to why)

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it’s important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. WebPaws.com uses Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and white-hat techniques using some of the best practices that can help your website avoid common pitfalls and improve your site’s ranking.

[1] The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

PageRank: How to Rank Well with Google is a post from: WebPaws.com

SEO Lesson 2

by Ryne C Allen, WebPaws.com

Search Engine Optimization starts at the inception of your web page or site and evolves with a purpose or direction, appropriate content, semantic structuring of the HTML document and then formating this document into an attractive presentation using CSS.  All the while following known web standards to produce a solid foundation in which to further market your web page.

Business websites should be part of the business’ marketing plan or broader yet, the business plan. Even non-business websites should have a plan or written conception. In lieu of a previous written plan, the minimum suggestive guide would be a “statement of purpose” for your website followed by some basic marketing research to be used in the development of your website.

The statement of purpose defines the reason to create your website (sell products, disseminate information, provide a service, become a portal, promote a business, collect data, etc.), the primary purpose of your website (transactional, informational, social, promotional or a hybrid of purposes) and what measurable goals you expect after 3 months, 6 months and 1 year from launching your website. This information is critical to having a successful website, one that meets your goals and expectations. You develop and write content to meet your website’s purpose. This is your primary focus for the content you add to build your website. If you lose focus of your primary purpose, then your website will not meet the goals you have set and will not rank well for its primary purpose.

Examples statement of purpose and results:

Organization: Humane Society

Primary Purpose: Rescue animals, care for them and find them good homes

Website Purpose: Promote & find sheltered animals good homes, donations

Goals: 3 m – 3% adoptions, 6 m – 10% adoptions, 1 year – 25% adoptions

Results: 3 m – 2% adoptions, 6 m – 7% adoptions, 1 year – 35% adoptions

Website: Example Website – http://www.webpaws.com/mwhs/

In order for this example website to be successful, the site needed to be designed around the animals rescued and up for adoption. In this case, cats where the primary animals rescued and the primary focus of the website. So visitors looking to adopt a pet cat can easily navigate within the example website and learn about the different cats up for adoption, get attached or attracted to a certain cat, fill out a request form (a lead) which might motivate them to go in person to the shelter and adopt their new pet (a conversion).

Now that you have the focus of your website content, you can start to assemble the primary pieces into an SEO friendly format or semantic structure. Developing good semantic HTML (HyperText Markup Language) structure is one key to a solid foundation for your website. Good HTML structure is based on communicating properly, using logic, order, in your content with semantically correct markup (HTML) structure. For example, if you have a heading, then use the heading element, beginning with the <h1> element. If you have a paragraph, then use a paragraph element <p>. If you have a list, then use a list item element <li>. If you are quoting text content, then use a blockquote element <blockquote>. If you are placing code examples in your content, then use the code element <code>. These and other HTML elements provide meaning to the content, making them semantically correct, in addition to providing a solid HTML foundation for your web page.  Expert SEO marketers will in addition to using correct semantically structured HTML elements, add appropriate attributes to these base HTML elements (tags) to fully optimize the content’s message and readability by user agents (web bots).  An example attribute would be:
<h1 title="Good SEO practices start with a solid HTML document">SEO Practices</h1>

Good semantic HTML practices require two things of authors:

1. To avoid the use of presentational markup (elements, attributes, and other entities) in the primary content of the document
2. To use available markup to differentiate the meanings of phrases and structure in the document. So for example, a book title would need to have its own element and class specified, such as <cite class="booktitle">The Adventures of Tom Sawyer</cite>. Here, the <cite> element is used because it most closely matches the meaning of this phrase in the text. However, the <cite> element is not specific enough to this task, since we mean to cite specifically a book title as opposed to a newspaper article or an academic journal.

The development and proliferation of CSS has led to increasing support for semantic HTML, because CSS provides designers with a rich language to alter the presentation format of semantic-only documents. With the evolving development of CSS, the need to include presentational properties in the basic HTML structure of your web document is now hurting your SEO in favor for proper semantic HTML structure followed by CSS design to appease both the automated user agents and human visitors or your web pages.

Proper semantic HTML is one key element to building an SEO friendly website. By providing a semantically rich HTML document (web page) it will yield additional value to your code in several ways:

1. First, it provides consistency in style across elements that have the same meaning. Every heading, every quotation and every similar element receives the same presentation properties, which in turn,.makes your HTML web page more intelligible to a wider range of user agents which range from web browsers and e-mail clients to search engine crawlers (“spiders”), as well as mobile phones, screen readers and Braille browsers used by people with vision impairments, but in this case, especially user agents as search engines bots

2. Second, semantic HTML frees authors from the need to concern themselves with presentation details. Such details would be left up to stylesheet designers, which would make better use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets – a kind of type-setting and page formatting code) for the human visitor

3. A third advantage is device independence and repurposing of documents to reach or be viewed by different user agents. A semantic HTML document can be paired with any number of stylesheets (CSS documents) to provide the proper type of output to various computer screens (Web browsers), high-resolution printers, handheld devices, aural browsers or Braille devices for those with visual impairments, and so on

4. Additionally, these user agents may more easily find clues for developers to use possible web hooks of interest and add them in their projects or products. A web hook is a very simple server-side mechanism for web applications that allow users to do what they want with their data. You just let them specify the URI for various events that the application will use to pass data or information to in real-time

Developing proper semantic design of your content, followed by the appropriate design elements of the style sheets (CSS) makes it easier to follow the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) web standards. You can check if your code meets the current web standards by checking these on-line validators:

· W3C X/HTML Validator: http://validator.w3.org/

· W3C CSS 2 Validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

· W3C Semantic Checker: http://www.w3.org/2003/12/semantic-extractor.html

Please note, even if your web code is XHTML or CSS valid, it is not necessarily semantically correct. This still needs to be checked by a human, but the Semantic Extractor above aids humans (web developers) in their semantic HTML structure designs.

We now have a good map to help us develop a rock-solid foundation for our web page that will yield the most effective SEO performance in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

SEO – Search Engine Marketing, Lesson 2 is a post from: WebPaws.com