Characteristics of Search Engine Optimization

One question I get asked a lot is “Are you more of a ‘technical SEO’ or a ‘marketing SEO’?” This question used to puzzle me a bit in the beginning as in my head the answer was pretty clear: I’m a marketer with a technical bent of mind.

This question then led me to think about some of the common characteristics that make a good in-house SEO. This helped me a lot too when making hiring decisions on what characteristics I should look for in an in-house SEO.

The other fact is SEO as an industry has matured over the years. As a result, what is expected out of an in-house SEO has changed as well. Companies don’t want to hire someone who can get them top rankings or create some monthly reports – that is a given now.

Increasingly, in-house SEOs are required to be more analytical and ROI focused. This evolution of SEO clearly demands SEO’s to have a good left brain and right brain combination. That said, there are definitely some peculiar characteristics of an in-house SEO, so let’s go over few of them.

1. SEO as a Thought Leader

Many times people outside the SEO world may not be able to visualize the business benefits you can drive from a successful in-house SEO program. An in-houser can open many new opportunities for a business and generate new streams of revenues.

Simply put: an in-houser can help people understand what SEO can do for their business. So in every conversation, in every meeting a SEO has the opportunity to display their thought leadership in search.

2. SEO as an Influences

As an SEO you have to be an influencer. Influencer of new ideas, new ways of generating traffic, new set of processes, and so on.

In every organization, big or small, there are certain sets of processes that people follow. To integrate SEO into that process, you need influence many stakeholders.

Remember, when you add something new like SEO to an existing process you will encounter resistance. What you need to do: communicate and influence many stakeholders. After all, you’re inserting SEO for the greater good of the business and those convictions can drive you to become an influencer of people or ideas.

3. SEO as a Salesman

Gosh, aren’t we always selling something? Moreso with SEO as you are selling ideas, ROI projections, tools, projects, or even agency partners or consultants. Most of the times in order for SEO to get a seat at the table you have to be that salesman and build your case why SEO is integral to your overall business objectives.

4. SEO as a Collaborator

Over the years I have realized that SEO is baked as part of a bigger project with tens or hundreds of stakeholders and you need a team to climb those big mountains. An in-house SEO works with different sets of teams, stakeholders, and business objectives.

In a typical day you could end up collaborating with tens of different groups – collaboration becomes the key. A classic example is collaborating with your IT team. Another example is baking your SEO part into an agenda of a larger meeting. Sometimes to get those 10 minutes in a meeting you need to collaborate closely with the product or project managers so that you can give your SEO “update.”

5. SEO as an Educator

So much of SEO is viewed as a black magic in the outside world that the onus is on SEOs to bring transparency to the process. Once what we as SEOs do is transparent and stakeholders understand why you recommend the type of changes that you do, it creates a lot of buy-in as well.

SEO education is essential to getting buy-in. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself doing multiple rounds of SEO training across the organization.

6. Analytical SEO

Marketing is analytical in nature and as marketers we base our decisions after looking at analytics reports and then optimize our targets. SEOs have to do forecasting, look at product or keyword level ROI, work with finance, do budgeting, and most importantly also work with your analytics group (if you’re at a large org). As with many things, you need to be clear when working with analytics on not just what reports you want but how to extract the data that will help you in optimizing your campaigns.

7. SEO as a Logic Builder

This is where the power of your left brain comes in and that is logic. Software developers and programmers use their strong logic skills to create software flows and endless loops of if and then statements as an example.

SEOs need to have a logical mind as you would be dealing with programmers and also working through the code yourself. Plus, if you aren’t from programming background, then start learning languages as you need to understand codes. Once you understand code, then you will start forming logic.

8. SEO with Patience

You definitely need boatloads of patience. Depending on the size of the organization, there would be times where a straightforward title tag change could take weeks if not months!

Then you have designers, IT, business partners, and all other elements that your SEO recommendations won’t just move at the speed you desire. In situations like these, you have to exercise patience and push through to ensure that even after few months your recommended changes are done. If there are some bigger projects, then multiply that number by 4!

9. SEO as a Synthesizer

SEOs make many recommendations (e.g., changing URLs, replacing graphics and Flash with text, adding new content, pagination), but not all of your recommendations will be implemented. There could be business or other (political) issues that could come in the way and your job is to synthesize different viewpoints in order to get SEO requests accomplished. This makes SEO a synthesizer of ideas and different viewpoints.

In Summary

The above reads like a long list, but SEOs do wear many hats both in an agency and in-house role. These were just some of my insights into characteristics (or qualities) of an in-house SEO. What would you add to the above list?

Search Engine Optimization (complete Method)

What is SEO: - SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.

How Search Engine work: The first basic truth you need to know to learn SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren't. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.

First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.

What you can do is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you'd better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be speeder, not indexed, not processed, etc. - in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.

After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings. 

When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string. 

There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatarsi. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you'd like to be at the top. The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites. 

Differences between the Big Search Engines: - Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. For different search engines different factors are important. There were times, when SEO experts joked that the algorithms of Bing are intentionally made just the opposite of those of Google. While this might have a grain of truth, it is a matter a fact that the major search engines like different stuff and if you plan to conquer more than one of them, you need to optimize carefully. 

There are many examples of the differences between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are very, very important. Also, for Google sites are like wine – the older, the better, while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time till your site gets mature to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!

Keywords – the Most Important Item in SEO: - Keywords are the most important SEO element for every search engine; they are what search strings are matched against. Choosing the right keywords to optimize for is thus the first and most crucial step to a successful SEO campaign. If you fail on this very first step, the road ahead is very bumpy and most likely you will only waste your time and money. There are many ways to determine which keywords to optimize for and usually the final list of them is made after a careful analysis of what the online population is searching for, which keywords have your competitors chosen and above all - which are the keywords that you feel describe your site best.

Keyword Density: - After you have chosen the keywords that describe your site and are supposedly of interest to your users, the next step is to make your site keyword-rich and to have good keyword density for your target keywords. Keyword density although no longer a very important factor in SEO is a common measure of how relevant a page is. Generally, the idea is that the higher the keyword density, the more relevant to the search string a page is. The recommended density is 3-7% for the major 2 or 3 keywords and 1-2% for minor keywords.

Search Engine Optimization Method:- We can do seo from two category

1-    On page optimization

2-    Off page optimization

On page optimization: On-page Optimization is the first and most important part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). On-page Optimization will help your blog to rank well in search engines and will also help to bring long term traffic. On-page Optimization basically deals with keywords on the page, Headings, Titles and URL’s, Meta keywords, Meta Description and Alt Tags. Some people never look on basic steps of On-page Optimization, and they lose search engine rankings and lots of traffic. Here I am going to explain some important steps of On-page Optimization for a website or a blog.

1. Titles and URL’s: You have to use your keyword early in the title. Make sure that you haven’t written any useless words in it. The title of your page should be interesting, and it must reflect the keyword. The URL of your page should be short and nice.

2. Meta Description: Meta Descriptions permit search engines and bots to get information of what a webpage is about and to display more appropriate listings in the search results.

Distinct Web Pages on a site must include a distinct Meta Description in order to aid bots and search engines to distinctly recognize them over the web.

It is incredibly important for few search engines like Google, the more relevant you are then the better listings you will get but make sure that your page description is not more than 160 characters.

3.) Page Headings

Headings are used to highlight the important things on your webpage. Search Engines place more value to the information which you put in the H1-H6. H1 tags are the most important one, and it improves search engine placement.

Header Tags should contain keywords but don’t stuff them otherwise it will be penalized from search engines.

4.) Meta keywords

Search Engine gives value to Meta keywords, and they help your sites to rank well in search engines. Each page of your site should have Meta keywords, which are related to your webpage content.

Don’t repeat your keyword for more times. If you are too overly making use of your keyword then it will be considered as keyword spamming. Lots of websites are penalized by search engines cause of keyword spamming.

5.) Alt Tags

Adding Pictures to the content is a good and excellent way to attract your site visitors but search engine spiders can only read text, they cannot read images. So you need to use Alt tags for your images by using a keyword. It will not only help in search engine rankings, but also it will appear in Google images search results. Alt tags will also be shown to the people who have image disabled browsers.

6.) Page Content

Content is always King. Unique content is always being a key to search engines. Unique content pages will be quickly indexed and rank well in search engines.

Try to place your keyword in the first sentence and at the end of your sentence. Make sure that you have at least 2-3% of keyword density to your page. Do not stuff with more keywords, let the content look natural and if its made for readers.

Off Page Optimization refers to the Search Engine Optimization which are done external to the website. Off page involves a number of activities to improve a web site's search result ranking. Some of the off page optimization services which we provide are listed below

• Link Building
• Directory Submission
• Article Writing
• Article Submission
• Press Releases
• Social Bookmarking

Directory submission refers to the process of adding your website to a web directory. The directory submission process involves submitting your website URL along with other details of your website to the most appropriate category. In the SEO world, directory submission is the basic step taken by marketers to improve link popularity of a website. This can be done by the webmaster himself or he can outsource it to somebody who is good at this. The charges for doing directory submission for a website URL mainly depends on the number of directories. Some of the directories can be paid and some others can be free. Based on these calculations the internet marketing guys will charge you. But why do people spend so much money to get listed in such directories? There are plenty of reasons to explain that.

Link Building is the process of creating inbound links to one’s own website. This can be done by reciprocal links, being listed in e-zines, newsletters, directories, search engines, etc. Link building is one of the best ways to make your site popular. There are few types of linking one of which is reciprocal links.

Link Building: - Reciprocal links or link exchanges are the process where two webmasters agree to show the other's link on their website. After link building when the number of sites which link to a particular site is known as link popularity which helps in the search engine ranking of a website.

Article Writing: Internet marketers have made SEO article writing way more complicated than it actually is. There is a good way of doing SEO article writing, a bad way of doing it, and a better way of doing it. We will cover the 3 further down in this post. SEO article writing is done simply for on-page optimization. We all know how back links are important to improve search engine rankings, right? Well, on-page SEO has proven to have its role to play too. Now without further delay, let’s get into how to write them.

Article Submission: Now that search engines give great importance to back links, many link building strategies have come into the industry. Article submission allows the users to submit their articles to the article directories and have live links in the author resource box. Here article directories get free content for their website and webmasters get their free back links. When finding one way back links became highly challenging, article submissions came as a great blessing to the webmasters. They did not mind writing articles rather than sending hundreds of mails to get just one of two links. It is very important that we get good quality back links for our website. All the web masters worked on this premise and article submission was used as one of the major link building strategies. There are hundreds thousands of articles to the name of certain webmasters in the article directories. 

To get your links from article submissions, you will have to first compile a complete list of article directories and start signing up for your free account. After you sign up for your free account, can submit your articles. The articles that you submit will have a title, article body, summary in some cases and author resource text. In the author resource text, you will be able to add your website’s link. It is from the author resource box you will get your back links. Each article submission site will have its own submission guidelines. You will have to make sure that your submissions comply with the article directory submission guidelines. Only when the guidelines are followed, article directories will approve your articles. Without this approval, your articles will not be accessible by the other users or by the search engines. So you will have to follow the guidelines closely so that you get your back links for your website through your submissions. There is no use submitting to hundreds of article directories without getting your articles approved. 

There is couple of other benefits to article submissions. You will be able to send a considerable amount of traffic to your website through article submissions. You will be able to increase your organic traffic count using article submissions. These articles can also feature in the search results independently. This again is another source of traffic to your website. Make use of article submissions to get permanent one way links for your website. 

Press Releases: Many search marketing tactics come and go, but one channel of promotion that has steadily evolved is the practice of optimizing press releases for search engines. While it’s true that the future of the traditional press release has been up for debate over the past few years, wire services and the web sites they syndicate content to continue to produce results for the clients of savvy public relations professionals and online marketers.

Yahoo News is still more popular that MSNBC, AOL News or CNN. Being able to rank well on the most popular online news web site as well as Google News simply by optimizing and distributing a press release offers attractive benefits at a nominal cost.

In the course of prepping for an upcoming public relations workshop where I’m speaking on a panel about press release optimization, I thought I’d do a review of the top wire services. Part of that presentation also includes press release optimization tips from industry friends that work at the newswires, where thousands of press releases are distributed daily.

Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking is a method for web users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of tags or keywords on sites such as Digg or Del.icio.us. This helps you in accessing bookmarks from any computer with online access. These bookmarks can either be public or private. If public, your favorite bookmarks visible for others to view and follow as well, hence the social networking aspect.

Social bookmarking has become a great tool in building web presence and promoting a business on the Internet. In addition, if you place your links wisely and know which social bookmarking sites offer do follow links, this strategy will also help your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

About Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search consequences. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) object paid listings. In general, the earlier, and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more guests it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific perpendicular search engines. This gives a website web presence.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of back links, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.
The acronym "SEOs" can refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopt by an industry of consultant who bring 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 movement. Because successful SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site and site content, SEO tactics may be included into website development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe website designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts, and other fundamentals that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine disclosure.
Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, uses method such as link farms, keyword stuffing and article spinning that degrade both the relevance of search results and the quality of user-experience with search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

Web directory for Search Engine Optimization

Web directory for Search Engine Optimization

A web directory is not a search engine and does not display lists of web pages based on keywords; instead, it lists web sites by category and subcategory. Most web directory entries are also not found by web crawlers but by humans. The category is usually based on the whole web site rather than one page or a set of keywords, and sites are often limited to inclusion in only a few categories. Web directories often allow site owners to submit their site for inclusion, and have editors review submissions for fitness.
RSS directories are similar to web directories, but contain collections of RSS feeds, instead of links to web sites.

Scope of listing

Most of the directories are general in scope and list websites across a wide range of categories, regions and languages. But some niche directories focus on restricted regions, single languages, or specialist sectors. One type of niche directory with a large number of sites in existence is the shopping directory. Shopping directories specialize in the listing of retail e-commerce sites.
Examples of well known general web directories are Yahoo!Directory and the Open Directory Project (ODP). ODP is significant due to its extensive categorization and large number of listings and its free availability for use by other directories and search engines.
However, a debate over the quality of directories and databases still continues, as search engines use ODP's content without real integration, and some experiment using clustering. There have been many attempts to make directory development easier, such as using automated submission of related links by script, or any number of available PHP portals and programs. Recently, social software techniques have spawned new efforts of categorization, with Amazon.com adding tagging to their product pages.
Directories have various features in listing; often depend upon the price paid for inclusion:
•    Free submission – there is no charge for the review and listing of the site
•    Reciprocal link – a link back to the directory must be added somewhere on the submitted site in order to get listed in the directory
•    Paid submission – a one-time or recurring fee is charged for reviewing/listing the submitted link
•    No follow – there is a rel="nofollow" attribute associated with the link, meaning search engines will give no weight to the link.
•    Featured listing – the link is given a premium position in a category (or multiple categories) or other sections of the directory, such as the homepage. Sometimes called sponsored listing.
•    Bid for position – where sites are ordered based on bids
•    Affiliate Links – where the directory earns commission for referred customers from the listed websites

Human-edited directories

A human-edited directory is created and maintained by editors who add links based on the policies particular to that directory.
Another direction taken by some web directories is the paid for inclusion model. This method enables the directory to offer timely inclusion for submissions and generally fewer listings as a result of the paid model. They often offer additional listing options to further enhance listings, including features listings and additional links to inner pages of the listed web site. These options typically have an additional fee associated, but offer significant help and visibility to sites and/or their inside pages.
Today submission of websites to web directories is considered a common SEO (search engine optimization) technique to get back-links for the submitted web site. One distinctive feature of 'directory submission' is that it cannot be fully automated like search engine submissions. Manual directory submission is a tedious and time consuming job and is often outsourced by the webmasters.

Bid for Position directories

Bid for Position directories or also known as bidding web directories, are paid-for-inclusion web directories where the listings of websites in the directory are ordered according to their bid amount. They are special in that the more a person pays the higher up the list of websites in the directory they go. With the higher listing, the website becomes more visible and increases the chances that visitors who browse the directory will click on the listing.

Search engine optimization method

The leading search engines, such as Google Bing and yahoo, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Some search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantees crawling for either a set fee or cost per click. Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results. Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open directory project both require manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers Google webmaster tools, for which an XML sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that aren't discoverable by automatically following links.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.