There are a lot of small things you can do when designing or re-designing a site to get better treatment in the search engines — and every little bit helps in the end result. There is no one magic thing you can do to get top placement at a search engine for your website. But you can do a bunch of small things that will add up to excellent placement in the search engines for the key words you select.

You can and should optimize more than one page of your website for the search engines; it’s not something you do on just one page and skip doing on the rest of the site. You can optimize your home page for your single most important keyword phrase and other pages for different key word phrases. If you sell different products on different pages, each page can be optimized for that particular product. That’s a good way to organize it. We recommend search engine optimization on at least a dozen main pages of your site, for the best effect. Don’t bother optimizing pages on which you do not have public content, or pages such as a “contact us” or “privacy policy” or “copyright info” pages. (No one will be searching for your copyright info.) The pages you want to optimize are the pages you want people to find — those pages with content about your service or product–whatever you are selling.

Note: If you have a database-driven website, there are special concerns. Click here for more info on how to optimize a database-driven site for the search engines.

Also Note: If you have a website that is designed using <frames>, there are special concerns. Click here for more info on optimizing a frames-built website for the search engines.

If you are designing a site from scratch, see also especially this page: SEO Techniques in Web Design.

Search Engine Optimization – Let’s get started!

To get a good feel for what is required in optimizing a normal commercial website for the search engines, let’s pretend we’re creating a website which sells after-market accessories for the “Alfa Romeo Alfetta”, a 70’s 4-door sports car that provides a snap-your-head-back kind of driving experience. (It is a car with a small but fanatical base of fans.) Our site will sell floor mats, hood ornaments, key chains, steering wheels, and so on — all for the Alfa Romeo Alfetta.

Alfa Romeo Alfetta

Pick a Good Domain Name

This step is not very important - but every little bit helps. For the perfect domain name matchup in a search engine so that a page of our “Alfa Romeo Alfetta” website comes up #1 in the search results, the website itself would be best named:

http://www.alfa-romeo-alfetta.com

For more info on picking a good domain name for optimum search engine placement, and what you can do if you already have a domain name that isn’t very good in this respect, click here. Don’t sweat it if you haven’t got a great domain name, you can skip this step. This aspect of search engine optimization doesn’t count for much, just a little.

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Pick a Good Web Hosting Company

What type of website hosting company do you have? This can be very important to the search engines. Free website hosting is usually bad for search engine rankings, for several reasons. For a detailed article about how your website hosting company can affect your rankings in the search engines by Larisa Thomason (Senior Web Analyst for NetMechanic), click here.

The most important factor is that your website should have its own “static” IP address. In other words, its numeric IP address should be stable, and not be different every time someone types in your URL–that’s called a “dynamic” IP Address and is typical of Windows NT Hosting. Big hosting companies typically use “dynamically assigned” IP addresses which work this way: when someone types in your URL into his browser, the HTTP request is presented to your hosting company’s server, which quickly assigns an IP address to your website files on its server and connects the visitor to your files. Some search engines don’t like this, for various technical reasons.

But more importantly, if your web hosting company has some “bad hats” (spammers or pornographers or whatever) who have been banned from search engines for good reason, your site could also be banned “by association” because, to the Search Engine your site’s IP address looks to be that of the bad hats. In the eyes of the search engines it has an identical numeric IP address — the one that belongs to your web hosting company.

If you are serious about getting good search engine rankings for your site, you need to have a static IP address of your own. If you don’t know whether you do or not, call or email your web hosting company and find out whether your IP address for your site is static or dynamic. If it a static IP address, they should be able to tell you exactly what your static numeric IP address is. Find out what that is. For example, the static numeric IP address for Words in a Row is: 65.38.173.39. You should be able to substitute your numeric IP address after the “http://______”, type that into your browser and go directly to your website.

There’s another way to find out if you have a dynamic or static IP address, and that is to use this tool provided free by Bruce Clay:

Put Your URL to Check in this box:

it will tell you exactly what the numeric IP address of your site is, and a bunch of other info about it. Did your site pass the test? If not, contact me and I will try to advise you what to do to fix the problem.

You can also “ping” a website to find out the IP address being used. For example, if you open a DOS command window on your Windows PC, you can type the following:

ping:www.wordsinarow.com

and it will return the IP address of 65.38.173.39. You can ping any website, get its IP address, and try to reach it through HTTP:// at that IP address. If it has a static, dedicated IP address, you’ll get to the website. If not (and that’s usually the case) you’ll either get a different website, or a generic message from the server saying that there’s no website configured at that address.

Now take the numeric IP address from that report and type it in your browser after typing “http://” *mdash; don’t put in “www” — just type the four numbers after the “http://” — if it returns a “page not found” or some site other than yours! — you have a dynamic IP address. If your site shows up in your browser, then that four-part number is your static IP address. (Many thanks to Bruce Clay for providing this tool!)

We like the website hosting from Data393 for many reasons - one of them is that they will set up hosted websites on their server with static IP addresses. If your hosting company does not offer static IP addresses, my advice is that you should change web hosting companies. Data393 is a good choice but not your only choice — you could also use Verio or many others. In 2007, even Godaddy.com offers cheap hosting with a dedicated static IP address for an extra $3.00/month. WebWizards.net also offers inexpensive hosting and a dedicated static IP address. Words in a Row also offers hosting, but only to our marketing or web design clients.

Unless you are locked into a proprietary shopping cart or content management system, it is not usually very difficult or expensive to move your site from one hosting company to another. Just make sure your new hosting company gives you a static IP address and that your site passes through the Bruce Clay analysis tool (the form above) without any problems.

In our experience, with all other factors being equal, the site with its own static IP address will rise to the top at the search engines over those with dynamic IP addresses. This is something your hosting company may dispute–especially if they don’t provide static IP addresses. Approximately 97% of all IP addresses on the web are dynamically assigned, so do not be surprised if your site has a dynamic IP address when you check it.

Here’s a blog post from BruceClay.com about their tests of static vs. dynamic IP addresses to see if they really make a difference in search engine rankings.

Here’s an article from Michael Banks Valentine of About.com, about “Playing Hide and Seek with Search Engines”. It explains in detail some of the ways your server setup can make your site a problem in the search engines.

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Figure Out Your Key Word Phrases

Your next step should be to do some homework and figure out what your key word phrases should be for your website pages. You need to make a short list of 1 or 2 key word phrases for each page of the site you want to optimize. Each phrase should be no more than three or four words. It is okay if the same words are in more than one key word phrase, and it is okay if some of the pages overlap their keyword phrases.

For each page you should wind up with a list of no more than two key word phrases, each less than three or four words long. Longer phrases are less effective. Single words are often useless. The word “Software” for example, is ignored by many search engines - it is what they call a “stop” word, like “the” or “a” - they just ignore it when you search for it, unless you put it inside quotation marks or otherwise make it clear it is part of your search.

For more info about picking the right key word phrases for your website, click here. There are several tools that will help you pick the right keywords.

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Set up your Meta Tags

There are several “tags” that go into the HTML code for a page of a website. These tags are placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD>. These are invisible to the average person browsing the site but are used by the search engines when they come crawling through your site and index the pages–a process called “spidering”. These tags should be present on every page of the website. The most important tags are:

• The <title> tag
• and the “description” <meta> tag.

The “keyword” <meta> tag used to be important but is basically useless now.

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Set up your <Title> Tag

Our site would contain a <title> tag like this:

<title>Alfa Romeo Alfetta Accessories</title>

What we put in here is based on the key word phrases we figured out above. It should contain our main key word phrase, “Alfa Romeo Alfetta” at least once. It shouldn’t contain more than 60 characters. In fact, if you can make it seven words or less (discounting words like “and” and “for”, which the search engines ignore anyway) you’re better off.

The <title> tag must contain the main keyword phrase for which you are optimizing that page. Google in particular places heavy emphasis on what is in your page’s <title> tag. So does MSN.

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Set up your Meta Keyword Tag

The <meta> keyword tag will contain our key word phrases for the specific page we are on:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Alfa Romeo Alfetta, automobile accessories, aftermarket, hood ornaments, floor mats, auto parts, blah, blah, blah”>

Don’t make this more than about 250 characters long. Don’t use the same key word more than three times in it. Vary the capitalization. Don’t use all capital letters unless the word is an acronym, like “SEO“, which is short for Search Engine Optimization.

Note: Don’t obsess about the keywords tag. It is mostly disregarded nowadays due to abuse by people stuffing keywords that didn’t belong into it. You can almost skip it entirely.

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Set up your Meta Description Tag

The <meta> description tag is a description of the page. It should contain our key word phrases for the specific page we are on:

<meta name=”description” content=”Alfa Romeo Alfetta accessories, blah, blah, blah”>

This tag should describe the specific page it is on, not the whole website. This is the description of the page that shows up at the search engine when someone is lucky enough to find this page in his search. Don’t make the description more than about 200 characters long. Make it descriptive, and make sure it contains your key word phrases!

We won’t repeat individual key words more than twice in any one meta tag because that can get a site banned from a search engines for something called “spamdexing”, which is “spamming” the index of a search engine. For more info on how to avoid spamming the search engines, click here.

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Put Key Words in Headings

Back to our Alfa Romeo Alfetta site: It will have “headings” like the one at the top of this section. It was created using heading tags that look like this: <H4>Put Key Words in Headings</H4>.

These “headings” make your browser display the text larger and set it aside from the rest of the text, on its own line. Search engines will look for and index our headings when they index the pages on our site, so our headings should ALSO contain the main key word phrases for our site, like this:

• <h1>Alfa Romeo Alfetta</h1>
• <h2>Alfa Romeo Alfetta - Hood Ornaments</h2>
• <h2>Alfa Romeo Alfetta - Maintenance Manuals</h2>
• <h2>Alfa Romeo Alfetta - Floor Mats</h2>
• and so on through as many headings (in this case our products for sale) as we can think of that we want to include on that page.

Headings like that are weighted heavily in the search engines — many of them use a formula that LIKES the key words in headings more than elsewhere in the site. Don’t neglect these. Use them to set off areas of text, in the same way this page you are reading is divided up by headings.

Note: Some people detest using headings because they tend to be big clunky elements in web designs, and they can add a lot of space down the page. You can easily bypass this using a simple inline style command, like this:

<H1 style=”margin-bottom: 0px; font-size: 12px;”>This will make a small heading with no space after it!</H1>

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Use Key Words in Your Text

Our optimized page would contain TEXT of at least 250 words, with the key word phrase “Alfa Romeo Alfetta” occurring several times near the beginning of the text. If a page doesn’t contain at least 250 words, some search engines won’t bother to index it. It’s preferable to have 500 words or more if possible, on a page. You’ll get better results from the search engines if you have more text.

It also seems to help to put the key word phrase near the end of the text, too. Search engines use a factor called “key word density” to determine how relevant that key word you’re using is to the page. If it shows up a few times in the text, it is more “dense”. Key word density is a good thing, up to a certain point. The main thing is to make sure you have some text that describes what you do or what you’re selling - that makes your page a resource worth indexing.

In the HTML code for the page, the text should be as close to the beginning of the page as possible, because there is a limit to how far down into a page a search engine spider will go to try to find text. It is generally agreed that this is 3kb. That’s only about 80-100 lines of code! So make sure your text comes before some really long JavaScript menu in the code for the page, or else the search engine won’t make it far enough into the page to index the text. They’ll never see the text if it is buried way down at the end of the code.

There’s a trick of the <table> one can use to keep your menu bar on the left side of the page (where most people put a navigation menu) and still have the text of the page come first in the code. Normally to display to the left, the nav bar has to come first in the code. But not if you use this table trick.

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Put Key Words in Alt Tags

Pictures on a website can and should contain a little text description that only shows up when you move your mouse over the picture. That little description is called an “ALT tag” (”ALT” is short for “alternate”). Hold your mouse over the picture on the right for a couple of seconds and your browser will display the ALT tag for the picture in most browsers.

Some search engines index those ALT tags, so we will make sure we label every picture with an ALT tag–every last picture. Wherever it is possible and appropriate, each ALT tag will contain our main key word phrase — “Alfa Romeo Alfetta”.

Note: Some people surf with “pictures” turned off, to speed up their browsing. The visually handicapped also use the ALT tags to “see” what’s on a picture–there is special software for the blind which reads aloud to the person what’s on the page. If there are no alt tags, the pictures are invisible to them, so it is worthwhile to put an alt tag on every picture. If you can appropriately place some key words in those alt tags, so much the better.

This article by Robin Nobles quotes SEO researcher Jerry West’s research showing that the alt tag is not used by the main search engines at all. My own research tells me that alt tags are only a small part of what the search engines do look at. Even so, I still recommend that you put alt tags on all images (because that is one thing needed to make your HTML code “valid”, and that you put keywords in the alt tags of any images that you use as links where using keywords would be appropriate in helping to describe the image to someone who cannot view the image (i.e., someone who is visually impaired or who is using a text only browser). My research shows that some search engines do use those alt tags describing the image used as a link to determine what the page they point to is about.

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Put Key Words in Anchor Tags

Hypertext links on your site usually look something like this:

<a href=”floor-mats.html”>. Those are called “anchor tags” — that’s what the “a” stands for. You can put some other information in there, which will show up when one mouses over the link. It would look like this:

Sample Anchor Tag:

<a href=”blah.html” title=”Alfa Romeo Alfetta floor mats”> Alfa Romeo Floor Mats </a>

– if the link points to the floor mats page. When someone mouses over the link, they will see what you put in the title. These “titles” for the anchor tags get indexed by the search engines. Every little bit helps! Make sure the words that you wrap the anchor tag around are keywords, too, whenever possible.

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Is a Robots Tag Necessary?

In our experience, a Robots meta tag with instructions to index and follow the links on the page is simply ignored by the search engines. You can safely omit the robots tag if that’s all you have been using it for. In the old days of the net (a few years ago) you would have put this tag in the head of your document:

<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow”>

It might have done some good a few years back - in today’s world it can safely be omitted.

The robots meta tag is more useful for pages you do not want indexed. If you don’t want a page to be indexed — such as a test page, or a page you put up for your own use, then put this robots tag in the head of your document:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

That will keep the page out of the search engines that recognize and follow these tags. Of course, to actually prevent the page from being indexed by the search engines, you need to add the page name to the robots.txt file as one of the disallowed files. A robots meta tag is not enough to prevent the page from being indexed by some of the search engines that ignore them completely.

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Use a robots.txt file

Make an empty file. Name it “robots.txt”. Put it in the root directory of your server; usually this is the same directory where your index.html file is kept. (But not always - sometimes your index.html file is in a sub-directory. In which case, make sure you have a copy of the robots.txt file in the root directory - usually the root directory is as high as you can go in the directory tree on your server.

While it is possible to set up a “robots.txt” file to exclude some or all of the search engine robots, what you probably want it to do is to allow every robot that comes along to index your site. If you do want to exclude specific robots from indexing certain directories or certain files, you will have to put some commands into the robots.txt file. For more info than you probably want about the use of the “robots.txt” file, go here. If you want every robot to be able to index your site, just leave the robots.txt file completely empty — but make sure it is there!

Experience has taught me that on some servers, it is wisest to put something in that robots.txt file and put it in both the root directory and in the directory where your index.html file is located. This text works inside the robots.txt file, to allow robots to access everything except what is noted:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/

That example lets the robots coming to your site index everything except what is in your cgi-bin directory, your tmp directory, and your private directory.

Here is an article called “Search Engine Spiders lost without Guidance” by Mike Banks Valentine, which covers in detail many aspects of creating a robots.txt file.

You can validate your existing robots.txt file using this robots.txt validator tool from searchengineworld.com.

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Validate your HTML code.

Everybody knows that robots, in general, are not too smart. The search engine robots which gather information from your site can really only do two things: 1. Read text. 2. Follow links. That’s all.

These days, modern browsers are much, much smarter than robots. So while you may be able to look at a page using the latest version of Netscape or Internet Explorer, the search engine robots are too dumb to see anything at all if there is a big error in your HTML code. If you have an unclosed HTML tag - for example if you have complicated nested tables, any of which aren’t closed — then that may be the point where the search engine robot gives up trying to read your site. To validate your site, use this link: http://validator.w3.org/. This will tell you where your HTML code is “busted” and needs to be fixed so you don’t confuse the search engine spiders. There’s plenty of advice there on how to make your HTML code validate. If you or your webmaster can’t figure out how to make your HTML code valid, we can help with that. (Note: this page you’re looking at right now validates. Click this link to validate now!)

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Register by Hand with the Search Engines and Directories.

As soon as the website is finished and up on the web, it should be submitted to (registered with) the search engines (like Google and MSN) and directories (like Yahoo! and the ODP). Most of these are free — some of them charge up to $300 for submitting your website. Don’t scrimp here. If people can’t find your site it is doomed.

There are several programs that can automate this process for you — but we don’t recommend them because, in our experience, they do not get as good of results as you get when you register your website by hand.

We’ve set up a page to make it easy to register with the search engines and directories by hand, here.

Here’s a website that offers a service to get your site listed in 300 small directories, for $450. It’s a fair amount of work to get all these inbound links. You can do it yourself, but your site will definitely need links to do well in the search engines.

Then it will take some time (expect it to take several months) for the search engines to actually index and begin listing our site. Some of them only take a day or two, others take months. We have to be patient. But eventually we would be highly placed in a search for “Alfa Romeo Alfetta”, on the first page of the search results in most of the search engines. We could expect to be the first result on some of them for our keyword search for our keywords, “Alfa Romeo Alfetta”!

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Don’t Neglect The Little Things

What are the three most often neglected opportunities for getting better rankings in the search engines? Click here to find out.

Get Links Pointing To Your Site

After our website is created and put up on a server and registered with the search engines, we would then go out and find as many other websites as possible that might have an interest in linking from their site to ours, contact them and convince them to set up such links. We might have to offer reciprocal links back to their sites in order to convince them. There’s no harm in that, you WANT lots of links from your site to other sites–that’s one easily-provided free service you can give away.

Here’s some good advice from About.com on the subject of “How to Request Links“.

Don’t bother with the Free For All Links pages. FFA links pages don’t work, and no one actually uses them. You want websites that are similar to yours, or which provide related services, or which contain specialty listings or directories of your type of business.

The rule is: The more links there are to our site, the more relevance it will have in some search engine results and the better placement it will get. A lone website with no links to it is a sad thing. It has no friends. Get plenty of links to your site. Ten links to your site is a good start. A thousand wouldn’t be too many.

To see which sites are currently linked to your site, go to Google and type in your domain name like this:

mydomainnamehere.com

Of course, you’d substitute your actual domain name instead of mydomainnamehere.com.

Then click on the link to “Find web pages that contain the term ‘mydomainnamehere.com’.” That will give a list of websites that Google shows linking to yours. [Note that the Google toolbar's "backlinks" function is broken and has been for a few years — it gives incorrect results.]

MarketLeap’s link analysis tool lets you put in your URL and find out the number of links to your site that are being reported by Google, Hotbot, Yahoo, AOL and MSN all at once.

We list several places to get inbound links on our page covering how to get links.

Here is a helpful article on how to get worthwhile in-bound links, SEO One-way Web Links: 5 Strategies, by Joel Walsh.

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Page Rank and Links

Page rank is Google’s way of measuring your rank in terms of links to your site from other sites, based on both quantity and quality. Google page rank varies from 0 (terrible) to 10 (ideal). If you have lots of links from sites with low page ranks, they will mean very little to your page rank, whereas even a few links from other sites with good page ranks can make a difference. That doesn’t mean you should cancel existing links — they still have value.

Your page rank is a good indicator of how your link campaign is going. You want to be at 5 or above. Here is a link to a free page rank tool that tells you any URL’s page rank across all the Google data centers.

Having a good page rank at Google is great, as it will help you place above similar sites at Google (page rank is likely a strong part of the algorithm that decides placement when other factors are equal). However, we recommend you track it primarily because the factors that Google tracks as part of your page rank are universal. Improving your page rank will improve your entire web presence, in addition to your placement at Google.

As of October 2005, underhanded sites can now fake their page rank. So, if a site with a page rank equal to or higher than yours contacts you about trading links, we recommend checking their page rank as part of your standard actions. Use this page rank fraud detection tool from SEO Logs. The tool works by telling you the correct page rank for the site that you input, so whatever it displays is the real page rank, regardless of what displays when you browse to that site.

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Disclaimer

Disclaimer: While SEO is very important in order to get visitors coming to your site from the search engines, it is not the only thing you should be doing to get traffic to your site. Here’s an excellent article about some of the other important avenues to use to get visitors to your site.

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Summary

In a perfect world, no other site could receive higher placement in a search for “Alfa Romeo Alfetta” unless the designer of it did exactly as we have done above, only more of it! In THIS not-too-perfect world, our website might get dropped out of a search engine for no good reason because of human error or a glitch in a program somewhere. Murphy’s Laws can’t be avoided, even on the web. Or another site that should get kicked out of the search engine for “spamdexing” might not get kicked out. (You’ve seen this kind of thing when you do a search and the same site comes up 50 times in the first 60 results, obscuring all the other relevant sites.)

For help in optimizing your website for the search engines, contact us. It’s our specialty and a niche we fell into because too many website designers have not studied up on how the search engines work.

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“Yeah, But Does It Work?”

By now you might be thinking, “Does all this stuff really help, in the long run?” or “Is all this really necessary?”

Using only a few of these techniques we have gotten top placement at Google for our client, Art Express, for the highly competitive keywords “motivational art”. We didn’t design this site — it’s one of our marketing clients — all we could get the designer to do was to put in accurate meta tags and titles on every page. It should have ALT tags on all the pictures, more text, and headings. It would do even better on the other search engines if we did.

To give you an example of the relevance of headings containing keywords, on the Chandler’s Natural Soaps website (which we designed from the ground up) there is a glossary in which each ingredient of the soaps is defined within a specially created <h2> heading tag.

The Chandler’s Soaps site routinely gets visitors looking for a specific ingredient, even though that ingredient may be mentioned only a few times in the whole website. Putting key words into headings brings in traffic to the site.

The way this works is that a person searching through Yahoo! (or any search engine) for a particular ingredient (like the herb “chamomile”) sees our page come up in the search results and sees that our page is in a website featuring natural handmade soaps. She may not be looking for soap at all, but if she is curious or it sparks her interest, she’ll visit the site anyway and maybe buy something. It’s a form of impulse shopping via the web. It’s human nature to get distracted during a search for something specific by something related that looks appealing. (Witness the success of all the shopping malls out there with stores feeding off of each other’s customers.)

Read our search engine optimization client testimonials for more info about how Search Engine Optimization might help you.

So — Yes, all this stuff works! And yes, it is necessary to use as much of it as possible. These are the guidelines we use when designing a website to optimize it for the search engines. And no, despite the length of this page, this is NOT a complete listing of all the factors that go into optimizing a website for the search engines, only the most important ones.

To make it even more confusing, all of the search engines do things a little differently, one to another.

Thanks for reading all this. We hope that it will help you design (or re-design) your website to optimize it for the search engines. If you need help doing that, you can contact us here. It is our specialty.

Those of our competitors who read this information and are savvy enough to apply it are welcome to it! Good luck!

Total hadiah Kontes SEO Astaga!com sebesar Rp 30 juta lebih. Penilaian pemenang ditentukan oleh mesin pencari Google Indonesia (Google.co.id). Pemenang diambil dari nomor urut pertama hingga sepuluh.

Kata kunci atau keyword yang dilombakan adalah Astaga.com  Lifestyle On The Net. Kontes berakhir 3 Maret 2010 pukul 00.00WIB. Informasi lengkap klik di sini.

Why pay attention to SEO?

If you write something on the web, it’s often because you want it to be read and be read by the right people. If you don’t want your information to be found, don’t export the wiki-page (or if you’re a webmaster: Make a robot.txt-file.) and stop reading here.

So let us start providing the web with our useful information that will benefit humankind and all that’s good and just.

Selecting keywords

This is the most important step! Select 1-5 keywords that totally describe what your page is about. Have a little thought about competition though. Even if your page describes “sex” generally, you have to be more specific, otherwise you’ll never be found. Unless your page will be very very very good, of course. But if your page describes a keyword that you can’t find at all on Google, then one keyword is enough, but you can add more if the page contains information about that too. But it’s generally best to use the rule one page - one information. Make two pages if it’s two things you’re describing, and make subpages if you have a general page and pieces of more specific information.

Start writing the page

Now you have the keywords. So create a wiki-page with these keywords in its name! Don’t name the wiki-page “Joey’s art”, if it’s an art-page about anime horse art. Then name it either “Anime horse art by Joey” or only “anime horse art”. Remember that both search engines and people reading the page will not like too long page names.

If it’s an image-page, you can start creating it by going to your house and press the “upload a folder of images”-button

Kontes SEO Joko Susilo

Latar Belakang

Begitu banyak rekan yang sedang berbisnis online (atau offline) kehilangan arah. Dan parahnya, mereka kehilangan daya karena terlalu banyak informasi dan rencana tanpa tindakan. Buaian impian menjadi sukses yang terlalu lama membuat mereka semakin terlena dalam lamunan. Mereka cenderung mencari kesempurnaan, mengabaikan cara-cara sederhana, dan terus saja mencari cara ajaib untuk mengubah nasibnya.

Mereka tidak sadar bahwa satu-satunya cara untuk menggapai sukses adalah dengan ACTION secara terarah dan konsisten. Itulah sebabnya, mengapa sering kita temui orang biasa bisa mendapatkan keberhasilan luar biasa walau hanya dengan amunisi sederhana.

Oleh karena itu, saya ingin menggalakkan kampanye “Stop DREAMING Start ACTION” dan menyebarkannya ke segala penjuru internet melalui KONTES SEO.

Tujuan Kontes

Kontes ini saya buat untuk menyadarkan diri saya, dan juga anda semua akan pentingnya ACTION. Pentingnya segera menyudahi mimpi yang tak bertepi, dan segera bertindak.

Melalui kontes ini, semakin banyak orang yang membahas pentingnya action dalam bisnis (atau dalam sisi kehidupan apapun juga), maka akan semakin banyak penjelajah maya yang membaca dan mendapatkan semangat besar untuk segera beraksi demi kemajuannya sendiri. Termasuk bagi para peserta kontes.

Harapan saya, ini akan membantu memberikan aura positif di dunia bisnis internet Indonesia dengan cara yang positif dan bersahabat.

Detail Lomba

Waktu Perlombaan:

Dimulai tanggal 20 Juni 2009, dan berakhir tanggal 15 September 2009 jam 9.00 WIB.

Tema Tulisan:

“Komitmen Stop Dreaming Start Action untuk masa depan yang lebih baik”.

Silakan tulis apa saja yang berkaitan dengan tema itu. Tulisan dianjurkan lebih bersifat motivasional, yang menggerakkan pembaca untuk bertindak. Boleh dalam bidang kehidupan apapun juga, misal bisnis, finansial, fisik, jiwa, sosial dsb.

Anda boleh tulis dari pendekatan manapun juga. Boleh dalam bentuk cerita, pengalaman, contoh, dan sebagainya. Gaya penulisan mau serius, humor, dll dipersilahkan, yang penting tujuannya tersampaikan. Kreativitas anda saya tantang di sini. Untuk bahan tulisan, silakan cari di Google.com. Anda akan temukan referensi melimpah di sana.

Target Kata kunci:

Stop Dreaming Start Action (tanpa tanda petik)

Juri:

Google.co.id, bukan Google.com

Pemenang: Top 10 Google Results.

Mereka yang menjadi pemenang adalah blog atau situs web yang berada pada posisi 1-10 halaman pertama google.co.id dengan kata kunci “Stop Dreaming Start Action” pada akhir masa perlombaan, yaitu tanggal 15 September 2009 jam 9.00 WIB.

Para pemenang akan diumumkan tanggal 16 September 2009 jam 9 pagi, melalui blog JokoSusilo.com. Tepat 4 hari sebelum lebaran. Buat pemenang, ini akan jadi bonus Hari Raya buat anda.

Hadiah:

Total hadiah sebesar Rp 25 juta, dengan komposisi sebagai berikut:

Pemenang 1:  Rp 12.000.000,-  + Free membership RahasiaBlogging.com
Pemenang 2:  Rp   6.000.000,- + Free membership RahasiaBlogging.com
Pemenang 3:  Rp   3.000.000,- + Free membership RahasiaBlogging.com
Pemenang 4:  Rp   1.500.000,- + Free membership RahasiaBlogging.com
Pemenang 5:  Rp     750.000,-  + Free membership RahasiaBlogging.com
Pemenang 6:  Rp     500.000,- + Free membership RahasiaBlogging.com
Pemenang 7:  Rp     500.000,- + Free membership RahasiaBlogging.com
Pemenang 8:  Rp     250.000,- + Free membership RahasiaBlogging.com
Pemenang 9:  Rp     250.000,- + Free membership RahasiaBlogging.com
Pemenang 10: Rp    250.000,- + Free membership RahasiaBlogging.com

Cara kerja:

1. Lakukan pendaftaran terlebih dahulu disini. Anda akan memiliki akses ke Area Peserta.
2. Laporkan tulisan anda dengan memasukkan alamat URLnya melalui Area Peserta.
3. Pemenang akan diumumkan di blog dan di Area Peserta.

Ketentuan Utama:

• Konten harus memiliki makna sesuai tema, dan bukan hanya modifikasi keyword yang semata-mata untuk optimasi SEO saja.
• Konten harus mencantumkan nama Joko Susilo yang nge-link ke salah satu postingan blog JokoSusilo.com.

Ketentuan Umum:

• Kontes ini terbuka untuk para pemilik blog dan situs web di Indonesia.
• Hanya pemilik website dan blog pribadi (gratis atau dengan domain sendiri) yang boleh ikut. Website forum, iklan baris dan website publik lainnya (dimana konten diisi oleh pengunjung) tidak diperbolehkan ikut serta.
• Konten tidak boleh mengandung pornografi, isu SARA, hujatan, permusuhan, atau hal-hal yang tidak baik.
• URL dilarang menggunakan domain bertarget kata kunci. Hanya subdomain dan nama file yang boleh bertarget kata kunci.
• Peserta dilarang menggunakan metode Black Hat untuk mencapai ranking tinggi SEO.
• Dilarang mengcopy artikel peserta lain, atau keikutsertaannya akan digugurkan.
• Anda boleh menulis sebanyak-banyaknya, di berbagai website anda, tapi saat penilaian di Google.co.id, yang diambil hanya satu hasil teratas saja.
• Konten boleh diedit berulangkali untuk kepentingan SEO asal tidak mengubah esensi materi.
• Bila nanti hasil yang muncul di Google.co.id adalah website JokoSusilo.com, FormulaBisnis.com, RahasiaBlogging.com atau website lainnya milik Joko Susilo, maka itu tidak masuk hitungan dan pemenangnya adalah yang berada di posisi berikutnya.
• Bila nanti hasil yang muncul di Google.co.id adalah website publik (tidak diperbolehkan ikut), maka itu tidak masuk hitungan dan pemenangnya adalah yang berada di posisi berikutnya.
• Bila ada perubahan atau ketentuan tambahan, akan diinformasikan melalui blog JokoSusilo.com. Karena itu kunjungi terus blog JokoSusilo.com.
• Panitia berhak menyetujui/tidak keanggotaan peserta atau artikel tertentu berdasarkan peraturan yang ada.

“Sebarkan berita kontes ini dan dapatkan 3 bonus menarik!”

Agar gelegar kontes ini lebih cepat merambat ke seluruh penjuru internet, maka saya adakan penawaran tambahan. Silakan tuliskan di blog anda berita seputar kontes ini, dan anda akan mendapatkan 3 bonus khusus dari JokoSusilo.com. Bonus saat ini masih dalam perancangan, akan diumumkan sekitar tanggal 20 Juni 2009.

Silakan ramaikan kontes ini dengan semangat kejujuran dan sportivitas. Untuk pertanyaan dan komentar berkaitan dengan kontes ini, silakan sampaikan di postingan ini.

Selamat berlomba. Mulai ACTION sekarang juga dengan mengisi Form Pendaftaran Peserta Kontes!

GO! GO! GO!

By Mark Jackson, Search Engine Watch, Apr 28, 2009

Thanks to everyone who sent in sites for me to review this week. I ended up with so many quality Web sites that I may just review another site next week.

Today, however, we’ll look at a Web site that has so many issues that there’s going to be something here for everyone. So thanks to Sam, who submitted this Web site, and apologies in advance for any harsh comments.

Web site: Home-Yard

Overview

This brand new Web site has no SEO history and is trying to compete in a pretty competitive space. The keywords used in the home page’s title are “Yard Decor, Indoor Lamps, Home Decor.”

All good SEO efforts should begin with keyword research. When I checked these keywords in Google AdWords Keyword Tool, I found some enlightening numbers.

First, “Home Decor” is extremely popular, featuring heavy-hitters like Pottery Barn, Overstock.com, and HGTV. Google’s tool estimates that this keyword has been searched for 2.7 million times within a 30-day period. However, to gain traffic from this you would need a high ranking.

Competing here isn’t impossible (anything is possible, given time and money), but a new Web site like this might want to focus its efforts on keywords that it has a good chance of ranking for, and build the necessary authority to eventually compete for “home décor.”

Meanwhile, “Yard Decor” doesn’t seem to have any search traffic, according to Google. There are quite a few searches for “yard decorations.” A look at Google’s top results reveals that the competitive landscape here isn’t too bad.

What’s Your Business All About?

Almost every title tag of this Web site uses the keywords that we’ve discussed above. However, it also sells baby gifts, globes, models, picnic supplies, prints, statues, and ornaments. What’s the focus here? Pick one.

With a URL of home-yard.com, the site should narrow its focus to selling home and garden supplies/products. Build a Web site that can be an authority within this space.

Too often, people try to build a Web site that is a “catch-all.” It’s much better to focus your efforts and build a high-quality Web site that can compete within a given industry. Then, search engines will be more likely to believe your Web site is a quality result that should rank organically.

The day I find this Web site while searching Google for “globes” or “baby gifts” is the day that I know that something has gone awry with Google’s algorithm. If you want to sell baby gifts, find a domain that makes sense and build a Web site for “baby gifts.”

What Will it Take to Compete?

Assuming that this site refocuses its efforts around “home and garden,” what then will it take to compete for “yard decorations”? My favorite “quick” analysis tool: Yahoo Site Explorer.

The Backyard Shoppe is ranking first for “yard decorations.” When I check this Web site out in Yahoo Site Explorer, using the “site:www.thebackyardshoppe.com” search, I see they have 1,228 pages indexed in Yahoo and 169 backlinks indexed in Yahoo.

When I do this analysis, I usually look at the top 10 ranking results in Google and get at least this basic information for each of the top ranking Web sites. So, for those who may not have access to tools that help you with this, just open up a spreadsheet, list every top-ranking Web site for a particular keyword, and then track pages indexed and backlinks indexed for each of these.

For a different keyword, open up another tab in your spreadsheet and repeat the process. This will provide you with the information necessary for what kind of a Web site you might need to build to be successful and which links you will need to get to be successful.

Now let’s explore Home-Yard’s numbers. Yahoo shows 51 pages indexed and 190 backlinks indexed/.

Wait a minute. These backlinks look a little “iffy.” OK, Sam, you run a few different Web sites, huh? And, you have them all interlinking to one another. And, some of these actually show me that you know how to create a “theme” for a Web site, such as your ancient sculpture Web site (that’s what I call a niche).

All of these Web sites linking to one another share the same class C IP. Read this old SEW Forum Post for more information. Some hosting plans will allow you multiple class C IPs.

Where’s the Content?

Basically, there’s no content on the home page. A common failing of e-commerce Web sites is that they lack quality content. Search engines don’t read images (only the alt text associated with the images).

Write quality content. You must find a balance among usability, branding, and SEO. Check out our client’s gift basket Web site. Their site is pretty, presents images in a very usable fashion, and has content. It really can be done.

Basic Details Never to Be Ignored

Every page of your Web site should have unique content. As such, you should be writing unique title tags and meta descriptions for every page. If your page is about Birdhouse Musical Figurines, then let the keywords in the title tag be specific to this (no need to list “indoor lamps” in the title tag of this page), and the same for the meta description.

Site Structure Issues

If people can’t afford full-blown SEO services, then — at a minimum — they should have an SEO Audit, including a site structure analysis.

When I checked to see pages indexed in Google for home-yard.com, I saw 2,400 pages. Contrast that with what we saw on Yahoo (51 pages). Again, something seems fishy.

Many of the pages showing in Google’s results are 404s. If you take a closer look, you’ll see that you’ve also been redirected (URLs have changed). What makes this even more interesting is that the URL Google shows is also a 404.

So, follow along with me. We have a 404 page/URL showing in Google, which is then 302 (temporary redirect — no good for SEO) redirected to another 404 page. That needs fixing. To check this out for yourself, use Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer.

Robots.txt

There’s no page for robots.txt (www.home-yard.com/robots.txt returns a 404), but if you look at the source code on the home page, you’ll see this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />

What does this mean, boys and girls? It means, “please, search engines…don’t index or follow my home page.”

Sam, I hope this review helps you with your efforts for home-yard.com and your other Web sites. And, of course, I hope that all readers can take something away from this review as well. I may write another review next week, to try and find areas that weren’t covered this week.

History

Before there were web search engines there was a complete list of all webservers. The list was edited by Tim Berners-Lee and hosted on the CERN webserver. One historical snapshot from 1992 remains. As more and more webservers went online the central list could not keep up. On the NCSA Site new servers were announced under the title “What’s New!” but no complete listing existed any more.

The very first tool used for searching on the (pre-web) Internet was Archie. The name stands for “archive” without the “v.” It was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of file names; however, Archie did not index the contents of these sites.

The rise of Gopher (created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota) led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Like Archie, they searched the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers. While the name of the search engine “Archie” was not a reference to the Archie comic book series, “Veronica” and “Jughead” are characters in the series, thus referencing their predecessor.

In June 1993, Matthew Gray, then at MIT, produced what was probably the first web robot, the Perl-based World Wide Web Wanderer, and used it to generate an index called ‘Wandex’. The purpose of the Wanderer was to measure the size of the World Wide Web, which it did until late 1995. The search engine Aliweb appeared in November 1993. Aliweb did not use a web robot, but instead depended on being notified by website administrators of the existence at each site of an index file in a particular format.

JumpStation (released in December 1993^[4]) used a web robot to find web pages and to build its index, and used a web form as the interface to its query program. It was thus the first WWW resource-discovery tool to combine the three essential features of a web search engine (crawling, indexing, and searching) as described below. Because of the limited resources available on the platform on which it ran, its indexing and hence searching were limited to the titles and headings found in the web pages the crawler encountered.

One of the first “full text” crawler-based search engines was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any webpage, which has become the standard for all major search engines since. It was also the first one to be widely known by the public. Also in 1994 Lycos (which started at Carnegie Mellon University) was launched, and became a major commercial endeavor.

Soon after, many search engines appeared and vied for popularity. These included Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, and AltaVista. Yahoo! was among the most popular ways for people to find web pages of interest, but its search function operated on its web directory, rather than full-text copies of web pages. Information seekers could also browse the directory instead of doing a keyword-based search.

In 1996, Netscape was looking to give a single search engine an exclusive deal to be their featured search engine. There was so much interest that instead a deal was struck with Netscape by 5 of the major search engines, where for $5Million per year each search engine would be in a rotation on the Netscape search engine page. These five engines were: Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite.

Search engines were also known as some of the brightest stars in the Internet investing frenzy that occurred in the late 1990s.^[5] Several companies entered the market spectacularly, receiving record gains during their initial public offerings. Some have taken down their public search engine, and are marketing enterprise-only editions, such as Northern Light. Many search engine companies were caught up in the dot-com bubble, a speculation-driven market boom that peaked in 1999 and ended in 2001.

Around 2000, the Google search engine rose to prominence.^{[citation needed]} The company achieved better results for many searches with an innovation called PageRank. This iterative algorithm ranks web pages based on the number and PageRank of other web sites and pages that link there, on the premise that good or desirable pages are linked to more than others. Google also maintained a minimalist interface to its search engine. In contrast, many of its competitors embedded a search engine in a web portal.

By 2000, Yahoo was providing search services based on Inktomi’s search engine. Yahoo! acquired Inktomi in 2002, and Overture (which owned AlltheWeb and AltaVista) in 2003. Yahoo! switched to Google’s search engine until 2004, when it launched its own search engine based on the combined technologies of its acquisitions.

Microsoft first launched MSN Search (since re-branded Live Search) in the fall of 1998 using search results from Inktomi. In early 1999 the site began to display listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. In 2004, Microsoft began a transition to its own search technology, powered by its own web crawler (called msnbot).

As of late 2007, Google was by far the most popular Web search engine worldwide.^{[6] [7]} A number of country-specific search engine companies have become prominent; for example Baidu is the most popular search engine in the People’s Republic of China.

How Web search engines work

A search engine operates, in the following order

1. Web crawling
2. Indexing
3. Searching

Web search engines work by storing information about many web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated Web browser which follows every link it sees. Exclusions can be made by the use of robots.txt. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed (for example, words are extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields called meta tags). Data about web pages are stored in an index database for use in later queries. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas others, such as AltaVista, store every word of every page they find. This cached page always holds the actual search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it. This problem might be considered to be a mild form of linkrot, and Google’s handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations that the search terms will be on the returned webpage. This satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects the search terms to be on the returned pages. Increased search relevance makes these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data that may no longer be available elsewhere.

When a user enters a query into a search engine (typically by using key words), the engine examines its index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document’s title and sometimes parts of the text. Most search engines support the use of the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. Some search engines provide an advanced feature called proximity search which allows users to define the distance between keywords.

The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the result set it gives back. While there may be millions of webpages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the “best” results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve.

Most Web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue and, as a result, some employ the practice of allowing advertisers to pay money to have their listings ranked higher in search results. Those search engines which do not accept money for their search engine results make money by running search related ads alongside the regular search engine results. The search engines make money every time someone clicks on one of these ads.

Revenue in the web search portals industry is projected to grow in 2008 by 13.4 percent, with broadband connections expected to rise by 15.1 percent. Between 2008 and 2012, industry revenue is projected to rise by 56 percent as Internet penetration still has some way to go to reach full saturation in American households. Furthermore, broadband services are projected to account for an ever increasing share of domestic Internet users, rising to 118.7 million by 2012, with an increasing share accounted for by fiber-optic and high speed cable lines.

source from : wikipedia

You first need to understand search engines, and how they work. First of all, let me begin by defining a search engine. You may be familiar with Google, Inc. - the most prevelant search engine at the time of this writing. There are other search engines that have worn the crown in the past, including AltaVista and Inktomi to name a few.

A search engine is typically in the form of a web site that provides the visitor with an HTML form to fill out, which then searches the search engine’s database of content. With Google’s web site, you can enter specific “keywords” into the form, and it will find all relevant web pages on the internet that contain those search terms you entered. For example, if I search for “horse veterinarians” I would expect the results to be web pages which have the words “horse” and “veterinarians” in them. Of course there is a ranking order applied through a search engine’s algorithm to determine which site is the most relevant.

Understanding Spiders

Search engines, for the most part, all work the same way. A search engine company operates what is called a “spider” - an automated program that “crawls” the Internet looking for web sites. The spider then reads the content on those web pages it finds, and classifies it and assigns value to that page in terms of backlinks. In Google’s case, it assigns what’s called a PageRank© (more on this later).

A deep crawl is when a spider, for example Googlebot, crawls the entire web site. The first time a site is encountered by Googlebot, it only indexes the first page. It can be up to 1 full month before Googlebot comes back to the site and does a deep crawl, indexing every page that is interlinked on a web site. Patience is a virtue with SEO, as improvements are not seen overnight.

Popular Search Engines

Google (http://www.google.com)

Yahoo! (http://search.yahoo.com)

MSN

Blog Participant Busby SEO Test

• dudi
• David
• Andi
• IndoFreeBSD

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The acronym “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimizers,” a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

source : wikipedia

Dudi and friend is Participant in the Busby Web Solutions Search Engine Optimization Challenge with Keypahrse : Busby SEO Test ,  if you are want support them just put link with anchor text “Busby SEO Test“  like this

<h1><a href="http://dudi.bliblog.com/">Busby SEO Test</a></h1>
and
<h1><a href="http://www.indofreebsd.or.id/busby-seo-test.inbsd">Busby SEO Test</a></h1>
just a simple as that.

Busby SEO Test is Keyparse for Busby SEO Worldcup Competition.

BUSBY is proud to invite SEO specialists, guru’s, masters and hot shots to compete over a 4 month period to gain the highest position they can achieve on Google (USA Google Data Center - http://72.14.207.99)