SE Optimization: Do search engines like your Web site?

Do search engines like your Web site?

Written by Paul Silver and David Rosam

Between 75% and 98.8% of visitors to Web sites come from searches made at search engines. If you're going to get high levels of traffic - and hence repparttar

levels of ROI you're looking for - it's very important that repparttar 135498

search engines can access all repparttar 135499

information on your Web site.

Do repparttar 135500 search engines know about all of your pages?

You can find out which pages on your site repparttar 135501 search engines know about by using a special search. If you search for 'site:' and your Web site address, repparttar 135502 search engine will tell you all of repparttar 135503 pages on your Web site it knows about.

For example, search for: site:webpositioningcentre.co.uk in Google. Yahoo or MSN Search, and it will tell you how many pages they know about.

If repparttar 135504 search engines haven't found some of repparttar 135505 pages on your Web site, it is probably because they are having trouble spidering them. ('Spidering' is when repparttar 135506 search engine uses an automated robot to read your Web pages.)

Spiders work by starting off on a page which has been linked to by another Web site, or that has been submitted to repparttar 135507 search engine. They then read and follow any links they find on repparttar 135508 page, gradually working their way through your whole Web site.

At least, that's repparttar 135509 theory.

The problem is, it's easy to confuse repparttar 135510 spiders - especially as they are designed to be wary of following certain kinds of link.

Links which confuse spiders

If your links are within a large chunk of JavaScript code, repparttar 135511 spider may not be able to find them, and will not be able to follow repparttar 135512 links to your other pages.

This can happen if you have 'rollovers' as your navigation - for instance, pictures that change colour or appearance when you hover your mouse pointer over them. The JavaScript code that makes this happen can be convoluted enough for repparttar 135513 spiders to ignore it rather than try to find links inside.

If you think your rollovers are blocking your site from being spidered, you will need to talk to your Web designers about changing repparttar 135514 code in to a 'clean link' - a standard HTML link, with no extra code around it - that is much easier for repparttar 135515 spiders to follow.

LSI and Link Popularity

Written by Andy Hagans

When Paypal's official Web site no longer ranked #1 in Google on a search for "paypal," it was obvious that Google had become more aggressive in penalizing sites with "unnatural" backlink anchor text. Although repparttar

high-profile Paypal example has since been rectified, thousands of webmasters are suffering repparttar 135455

consequences of not ranking for even their official company name, let alone their top keywords. It is important for search engine optimizers to understand both how anchor text penalties are being applied and how LSI ensures that anchor text variance will not dilute a link popularity building campaign.

Anchor Text Penalties

In repparttar 135456 past year, webmasters have found that repparttar 135457 aggressive link popularity building tactics that work well in search engines such as Yahoo! do not fare well in Google. Google has implemented several features to filter out sites that appear to have an unnatural backlink structure; one of these features seems to be specifically penalizing sites with unnatural backlink anchor text.

It has always been an SEO best practice to use descriptive anchor text in both external and internal links. But search engine optimizers have often focused on a single keyword phrase when choosing anchor text, especially if their topic has one keyword that receives vastly more traffic than any secondary keywords. Since good links are hard to come by, they do not want to "waste" any of those backlinks with anchor text that does not contain their main keyword.

The drawback to this approach is that it can be interpreted as unnatural by a search engine. A site with organic, passively-obtained backlinks will have a wide variety of backlink anchor text variations such as: "official site title," "keyword," "keyword synonym," "www.thesite.com" and even "click here." If repparttar 135458 vast majority of a site's backlink anchor text is simply "keyword," it is obvious to an algorithm that repparttar 135459 link popularity was not obtained organically.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Basics

Let's now touch upon repparttar 135460 myth I mentioned before, that if a backlink's anchor text does not contain your Web site's main keyword, its power is wasted. The concept of latent semantic indexing, which may be more fully implemented by major search engines in repparttar 135461 near future, will prove this myth to be false.

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