NOYDIR Tag

What is the new NOYDIR tag?

Yahoo, Google and other search engines often use the title and the abstracts that are used in Open Directory Project (ODP) listings or in Yahoo Directory listings for their search result lists.
Unfortunately, the titles and the descriptions that are used in these directories are often not the titles and descriptions that webmasters want to see in the search results.
The reason for that is that the editors of the directory assign the titles and the descriptions to the listed web sites and not the webmasters of the sites. Editors often see web sites differently than webmasters do.
In addition, these directory descriptions often become outdated and it is very difficult to change the title and the description of a web site in a big directory.
As many webmasters didn't like the ODP directory title and description in the search results on Google and other search engines, search engines invented the NOODP tag.
If the NOODP tag is used on a web page, search engines won't use the title and the description of the Open Directory Project entry for that web page. Yahoo now did the same with the NOYDIR tag.

How can you add the new tag to your web pages?

Just add the following code to the section of your web pages:

< !--- META name="ROBOTS" content="NOYDIR" ---! >

If you insert that code snippet on your web pages then Yahoo won't use its directory description for your web site in the organic search results. If you also don't want that the Open Directory Project description is used for your web site, insert the following in the section of your web pages:

< !--- META name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP" ---! >

How will the new tag influence your rankings on Yahoo?

If you use the new tag on your web pages than Yahoo will use the title of your web pages in its search results. The description will be created based on the content of the displayed web page.
Yahoo might still use the Open Directory Description so it is better to include both tags on your pages if you don't like your directory descriptions:

< !--- META name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP, NOYDIR " ---! >

The NOYDIR tag does not mean that the link from the Yahoo directory won't be considered in link popularity calculations. A link from the Yahoo directory to your web site will still have a positive effect on the link popularity of your web site.
The new NOYDIR tag will be supported by the next IBP version that is going to be released within the next two weeks. The NOODP tag and many other tags are already supported by the current IBP version.
If you haven't done it yet, you should optimize some of your web pages for Yahoo's search engine algorithm. Although Google delivers the majority of web traffic, it is not a good idea to rely on a single source of traffic.
Use IBP's Top 10 Optimizer to optimize your web pages for both Google and Yahoo so that your web site gets as many targeted visitors as possible.

Source...

7 Simple Steps to an Optimized Website

One of the priorities of any online business owner should be to look for resources that provide web site traffic help. Good ideas and good intentions aren't enough. Without targeted audience, nothing can be accomplished, and there are a few good ways of achieving it.

SUBMIT YOUR WEBSITE TO THE SEARCH ENGINES
Although it seems like a thing that every webmaster should do, there are many who don't. And that is a big mistake. Why not submitting your website to the major search engines? It only costs you a bit of your time. Search engines are the most used sites out there, and there is a much greater possibility that people will find you if you are registered in their database.

KEEP A CUSTOMER DATABASE UP AND RUNNING
Your customers are your main source of money. If you don't keep them satisfied, there's a big chance you're going to lose them.

Attract visitors by doing marketing campaigns like discounts or things you can give away for free. Then, make your visitors subscribe to your newsletter. Keep them posted and up to date with everything that's new and interesting on your website. In turn, if they are satisfied, they may even refer you to their acquaintances which will bring you more targeted traffic.

HAVE HIGH QUALITY CONTENT ON YOUR WEBSITE
Many internet surfers look for quality content they can use in their everyday lives. Aside from the commercial aspect of your site, you can provide them useful pieces of information. This way, they can see more easily where you're coming from and relate to you.

This not only will increase your traffic, but it will increase your sales. You will be like a professional in their eyes and they will really consider buying from you.

EXCHANGE LINKS WITH OTHER RELATED WEBSITES
Try to convince other webmasters to exchange links with you. This is always going to be a win-win situation because generally speaking, more exposure means more traffic and more traffic usually means more sales.

A word of caution though: try to exchange links with sites that meet your professional demands and always verify that your link is still there. If you exchange links with a site that's not even close to your professional requirements, you put yourself in a bad light.

PARTICIPTATE IN FORUMS AND DISCUSSION BOARDS
Even though it is going to take you some time, it's worth it. Don't try to spam a particular forum's users with your links.

Try to create bonds with them, act like a professional and provide them with useful pieces of information. They will see you more or less like their mentor, and giving your website's address will come naturally at one point in time. Have patience, act professionally, and all your efforts will be worth the time you put in.

MAINTAIN A STRONG CONNECTION WITH YOUR BUYERS EVEN AFTER THEY MADE PURCHASE FROM YOU
You know, a person who already said "yes" to your proposal and, of course, has been satisfied by what you had to offer, will most likely do the same next time when your next revolutionary product comes out. They will even recommend you to their friends. So don't forget about your won battles, they can be your source of success in the future also.

REDUCE THE LOADING TIME OF YOUR PAGE
Unless you're running a site about funny cartoons, don't put flash animations on your site. They will slow it down and visitors don't have the patience for that.

Try to keep it simple, professional and clear. Beauty by simplicity is the hardest one to achieve, and that's the one which attracts the most. Try not to forget that in your page's design.

If you are serious about your online business and want to make a decent living, implement these techniques because they are the web site traffic help that you really need.

Source: http://www.articlecrash.com

Tips to a perfectly optimized web page

There are two steps which we have to consider while optimizing our site:

On-page SEO Tips

Search Engine Friendly URLs: Use Search Engine Friendly URLs.A way to know whether a URL is search engine friendly is to see if it is a readable.

Keywords: Keywords are the ‘key’ to get a high ranking in major search engines. Use keywords that are not competitive and that a normal person can think of while searching for services or content you are offering to the visitors. Use simple keywords and one important thing is when you are registering for a domain name try incorporating a keyword in the URL.

Key Phrases: key phrases are necessary to differentiate your website from other websites out there because searches normally consist of a combination of words. Its depend on the combination of words that you use; you will be able to narrow in on the people you are trying to target. Whereas keywords will help you to get your site in the ranking process, keyphrase will put you ahead of others. Discuss with your friends and make a list of keywords that is related to your website content.

Emphasize Keywords: Keywords should be Bold, italicize or underlined.

Sentence Structure: Sentence should be short and to the point in order to avoid useless words or complicated sentence structure. you have to reach a balance between relevant content and search engine optimization. If your website is user friendly then visitors will come back to your site and will spend more time on it.Thats what every webmaster wants for their site.

Page Structure: Web page should be design properly in order to position Keywords and Key Phrases correctly. Generally it is called Keyword positioning. Major Search engines make a difference between a keyword that is used higher on the web page versus a keyword that is used at the bottom of the page. This is meant to check the importance of the keyword as a reflection of the content on the web page. If you have images, charts or tables on your web page try to put them in a bottom of the page.

In order to optimize your search engine ranking, your web page structure is like this:

Titles and subtitles: Try to have keywords and key phrases in your title and subtitles. It should have subtitles. In addition to improve site ranking this make web page more reader-friendly.

Links: Instead of using general words for links modify your links by incorporating keywords. Instead of writing “click here” for your link, have the description be your link. For example instead of “To have More links, click here.” Use “More Links”.

Keyword and key Phrase Density: “Keyword density” means that how many times a keyword is coming on a web page. Keyword density is one of the important parts of search engines because it is used as an indicator to find out the relevance of the web page for the search that is being made. If there are more keywords in a web page it means that the page is relevant.

Website Content: The above points are worthless if there would be no content on a site. Content should be short and crisp. It should be not copy pasted.

Off-page SEO Tips

Internal Linking: It is necessary to place text links at the bottom of your home page that will connect to your main pages. There should be a “Sitemap” web page with links to all the other pages to your website. This will tell that your website’s structure is consistent, for search engines as well as for web users.

Outside Linking: Search engines give more importance to those sites which is having there links on other sites. This feature is enhance when the links pointing to your site come from the sites that are popular. This gives the indication to the search engines that your site is not ‘fake’.

Meta Tags: Its one of the important part of your web page. To know if your site is having a ‘meta tags’ click ‘view source’ at the top of your internet browser.

For description metas: Give the short description of the site content. It should be accurate. It’s important to add some keywords in a description.

For Keyword metas: Use keywords that comes in the body of the web page. It should be non competitive.

Importance and Need of content - one of the key factors for SEO

The information on a website is its content. If the content on a website is good and interesting it would be more successful and more and more people will visit your sites again & again. Quality content with best suited keywords is a great way to generate traffic and backlinks to your site. The content developer should be a skillful writer

So that he/she may cover all the targeted keywords. It should be content rich not overlapped with keywords Overlap. Since Search Engine Optimization is now a growing part of the main marketing objectives for companies of all sizes and search engine optimized sites are more content concentrated. An extra attention must be paid while evaluating the volume and formatting of content.

It is very Important that an article is written well, because it is the content that owners grab, which contains a link to your website, and uses it on their web site. When other website owners place your article on their website, you will be generating incoming links all over the internet without any effort. This will not only give high traffic but also increase the value of your web site to the search engines with better rankings. Even web crawlers like spiders or bots take hell lot of time in going through and indexing these content rich sites. A spider reads as much as content as possible on the website and sends it back to the search engine’s main database. When people search for the things it is this database that is checked. Spiders also collect data about the internal and external links. So, it becomes necessary for a site to be spider-friendly, and make sure as much addition of your website content as possible.

Your visitor will probably decide whether he wants to spend any time on your site in the first few moments. It is a matter of seconds before you lose a precious visitor, customer, potential client and so on.
This is the key towards building an effective web site that would get a lot of hits and visitors. A web site that nobody visits is useless so the challenge lies in leading Internet users to visit your web site. Thus, your web site need to be "found" when users type in keywords in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, AOL and others.
Once a keyword relating to the products or services that you offer is keyed into a search engine, a direct link to your web site should emerge on top of the list.

Here are some tips:

• Never use abstract language on your website unless you are talking about such a subject.
• Be concise in your writing, positive and to the point
• Use appropriate links from your content, wherever required. For instance, a person may be interested in learning about natural stones and gem resources in India, from a section talking about types of gems available.
• Put your self in the visitors shoes to present the right information at every step.
• Do not cram loads of information in a single page and one heading: If possible, use subheads and divide your topics. What is the purpose of the site? Your subject and target should determine the word limit. Generally, 400-500 word write-ups are ideal. For more informative subjects, a volume of 1000-1200 words should be the upper limits.
• Know who your target audience is and aim for them. If you are in the manufacturing industry and a user types in your product in a search engine, then you would immediately have your target right in front of you.

Good content can be a major tool to getting any of your sites listed quickly on the search engines. With a proper keyword contents you could very well be on you way to getting your site indexed and listed fast, within hours.

WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING?

Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective and powerful ways of earning some money online. Affiliate marketing is a cooperative effort between merchant and an affiliate’s website. It is a method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided. Affiliate marketing is a cooperative effort between merchant and an affiliate's website.
This program gives everybody a chance to make a profit through the Internet.The term Affiliate describes the strategy in which a relationship between a merchant and an Affiliate is formed in which a merchant pays commissions to Affiliates for referring sales, leads, subscribers or other desired results. It is a kind of marketing in which one merchant induces others to place banners and buttons on their websites in return for a commission on purchases made by their customers.

BENEFITS OF AFFILIATE MARKETING

• It is more cost effective.
• It will increase your brand recognition.
• It gives a broader market to sell product.
• Finding a fit for their merchandise would be the key to more generated income.
• Affiliate Marketing can be used by just about any company or organization on the planet.
• For consumers - online shopping provides a single source in finding great products, services and bargains. It eliminates the going about a shopping centers area to look for preferences and savings.
• For the marketing affiliate - it could provide a steady source of additional income, sometimes, even a career.
• It will allow you to try out your promotional material on your target audience and pay for it only if it works.
• It offers direct targeting - If you’re marketing food products you can be sure that sites that promote beauty products, office supplies, car parts etc. won’t be signing up for your program because they are not reaching your target market. Only those sites that are reaching or have the potential to reach your target market will be signing up for your Affiliate Program. So, you can be sure that you are reaching your direct target market through your Affiliates.
• Affiliate Marketing can open the door to International marketing and recognition. International Affiliates can introduce and market your products and services to a market that you may have otherwise missed.
• Affiliate Marketing is based on several different tracking features. It is meant to track leads, sales, click-throughs, impressions, page views and so on. It is mainly used to track Affiliate activity, but it can also be used to track your CPM buys. This means that you can track the effectiveness of the banner ads, ezine ads, directory ads and other paid-for placements you have purchased. Your Affiliate Tracking mechanisms will help you determine how effective your placements are – or aren’t. So, not only is it a great marketing technique on its own – it can also help you streamline your other efforts.

COMPENSATION MODELS:

The following compensation models are relevant for affiliate marketing.

Pay-per-click (PPC) / Cost-per-click (CPC)
Advertiser pays publisher money, every time a visitor clicks on the advertiser's Ad. It is irrelevant for the compensation how often an Ad is displayed. commission is only due when the Ad is clicked.

Cost-per-sale (CPS) / Pay-per-sale (PPS)
This model is by far the most common compensation model used by online retailers that have an affiliate program. Advertiser pays the publisher a percentage of the order amount (sale) that was created by a customer who was referred by the publisher.

Pay-per-impression (PPI) / Cost-per-thousand(CPM)
Publisher gets from Advertiser an amount of money for every 1000 impressions (page views/displays) of the Ad. The Ad can be text (AdSense), banner image or rich media.

Pay-per-lead (PPL) / Cost-per-action/acquisition (CPA) / Cost-per-lead CPL)
Advertiser pays publisher in commission for every visitor that was referred by the publisher to the advertiser (web site) and performs a desired action, such as filling out a form, creating an account or signing up for a newsletter. This compensation model is very popular with online services from internet service providers, cell phone providers, banks (loans, mortgages, credit cards) and subscription services.

Pay-per-call
This is a new compensation model. Advertiser pays publisher a cmmission for phone calls received from potential prospects as response to a specific publisher Ad.

Google Dance - An Index Update

Around once a month, Google update their index by recalculating the Pageranks of each of the web pages that they have crawled. The update, now widely know as the "Google Dance," has become a monthly online event. In this updation period webmasters strongly watch as Google's new index regularly comes online and either celebrate or dejection over their new rankings. The period during the update is known as the Google dance.

During the Google Dance, new URL’s ( the `address’ of a web page) will make their appearance, old ones will be removed, perhaps to reappear later, while others still, shift around in their ranking positions in the Google index that decides how high up on the results pages they appear for particular search queries.

Update does not proceed as a switch from one index to another at one point in time. In fact, it takes several days to complete the index update. During this period, the old and the new index alternate on www.google.com.

Some Technical Backgrounds

Google's search engine structure has over 10,000 servers that operate on Linux. The computers are divided to a great number of Data Center and each Data center has its own IP. So, an index update cannot be proceed on all those servers at the same time. One server after the other has to be updated with the new index.

When you type the Google address in browser, the address is translated by the DNS server of your service provider to an IP address. Keeping Google's IP address is permitted for 5 minutes only, as a result after every five minutes the DNS server of your service company has to search for Google's updated IP address.

Every time that a DNS server checks Google's IP address, Google returns an IP address of a different data center, so that for every search performed, the search will reach a different data center. This way Google scatters the required search power on many computers.

Google has two other searchable servers apart from www.google.com. They are www2.google.com and www3.google.com. Most of the time, the results on all 3 servers are the same, but during the dance, they are different.

The rankings that can be seen on www2 and www3 are the new rankings that will transfer to www when the dance is over. During the dance, the results from www2 and www3 will sometimes show on the www server, but only briefly. Also, new results on www2 and www3 can disappear for short periods. At the end of the dance, the results on www will match those on www2 and www3.

Google Dance and DNS

Data transfers always take place in-between IP addresses on internets. The information is provided by the name servers of the DNS. When we enters a domain into browser, a locally configured name server gets the IP address for that domain by contacting the name server which is responsible for that domain and is cached by the name server, so that it is not necessary to contact the responsible name server each time a connection is built up to a domain.

The records for a domain at the responsible name server constitute for how long the record may be cached by a caching name server. This is the Time To Live (TTL) of a domain. As soon as the TTL expires, the caching name server has to fetch the record for a domain again from the responsible name server. Quite often, the TTL is set to one or more days. In contrast, the Time To Live of the domain www.google.com is only five minutes. So, a name server may only cache Google's IP address for five minutes and has then to look up the IP address again.

So when ever Google's name server is contacted, it sends back the IP address of only one data center. In this way, Google queries are always directed to different data centers by changing DNS records. On the one hand, the DNS records may be based on the load of the single data centers. In this way, Google would conduct a simple form of load balancing by its use of the DNS. On the other hand, the geographical location of a caching name server may influence how often it receives the single data centers' IP addresses. So, the distance for data transmissions can be reduced.

Some of the IP Addresses and Domains of Google's Data Centers:
Google has domains which resolve to the single data centers' IP addresses. These domains as well as their IP addresses are shown in the following list.

Data centers
216.239.33.100 :: www-ex.google.com
216.239.35.100 :: www-sj.google.com
216.239.37.100 :: www-va.google.com
216.239.39.100 :: www-dc.google.com
216.239.41.100 :: www-fi.google.com
216.239.51.100 :: www-ab.google.com
216.239.53.100 :: www-in.google.com
216.239.55.100 :: www-zu.google.com
216.239.57.100 :: www-cw.google.com
216.239.59.100 :: www-gv.google.com
66.102.11.100 :: www-kr.google.com
66.102.7.100 :: www-mc.google.com

For every domain www-xx.google.com, there is an additional domain www-xx2.google.com. The IP address of such a domain ends on .101 instead of .100. These pairs of domains and IP addresses belong to the same data center and, hence, the same index is searched by queries on them.

Querying the data centers

For this, it is necessary to have the Google Toolbar installed and the PageRank indicator on. Every time a page is received by the browser, the Toolbar requests its PageRank from one of Google's data centers. The information is returned as a one-line text file and stored in the Temporary Internet Files folder.

The Toolbar's request URL includes the URL of the page that it wants the PageRank for (the target page), and a checksum that matches that URL.

A fat URL for a typical Toolbar request :-
http://216.239.33.102/search
?client=navclient-auto
&ch=5150615727
&features=Rank:FVN
&q=info:http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eexampledomain%2Ecom%2F

If you copy and paste that fat URL into your browser, you will get Google's "forbidden" page back. That's because the target page and checksum don't match - it's just an example of the request URL.

Notice that the target page is in escaped format - some of the characters are represented by hexadecimal codes (e.g. %2F).

To get the new PageRank for a particular page, you need to make the same request that the Toolbar makes for it. I.e. you need the fat URL that the Toolbar uses. And you need to request the PageRank from all of Google's data centers. The method is a bit long-winded but it works.

Importance of Keyword and Keyword Phrases

Keyword Research is the most important feature in any Search Engine Optimization initiative and the most significant step to identifying your target audience. You may have put many efforts on improvement of your web pages for a better ranking in the major search engines but it become not enough if the right keyword phrases are not targeted. Its like, "Success may stop for a while even after running your best race and yet not being able to reach your destination, just to realize after words that the road you opted was a wrong one". Even if you achieve high search engine rankings, you may not get significant traffic if you select the wrong keywords. Consequently, the most important step in any SEO campaign is identifying your target audience and researching what keyword phrases they might be searching or data that people are actually searching.
Certain focus is obligatory which could be location specific, region or country specific, product specific, business specific, service specific. For this try to get the essentials about a particular search term with the help of keyword research tools that offer data related to your search term. The keyword search tools help you to get seize on target audience.

You can help visitors to find your site using Keyword Phrase Research process of selecting the most favorable keyword phrases.

Keyword Research Process:

Keywords and key phrases are the prime mechanisms by which the search engine will select your site, so it is essential that the correct keywords are used and that they are located to best advantage. Keyword Research process involves the following four important steps:

Step 1: Discovering Keyword Phrases

Starting out Keywords

Focus on finding more and more possible keywords related to your website and target audience. Identify good 15 - 20 initial keywords, strongly focused on your business. You can come up with your colleagues and clients to identify search phrases that are most acceptable to get qualified traffic to your site. You will get better results if you have one or two keywords rather than longer phrases. Try to attempt each aspect of your services while selecting your key phrases. Use different keyword on each pages related to page content. You should place unique and appropriate key phrases on each page.

Keyword Research tools

Keyword Research tools like Wordtracker and Overture can be used to increase your initial list of keywords. These tools allow you to find the number of searches being made on a particular term and also all related terms that include your search term.

Step 2: Analyzing Keyword Phrases

The keywords for each page would be different too, depending on which you should try and place unique and relevant key phrases on each page because each page on your website could be dealing with a different product or service.

Analyzing keywords means how many pages are indexed in a search engine like Google. This gives you an idea of how many pages are competing for the top spot.

Probability of high ranking based on page rank method. The on-page factors address your optimization efforts while the off-page factors like Page Rank affect ranking in a major way. Page Rank is an important parameter in keyword analysis. Choose your keywords keeping your site's Page Rank in mind.

Step 3: Selection of Keyword Phrases

Selection of keyword phrases pertains to finding the most valuable keyword phrases that most precisely describe specific qualities of your website. Focused key phrases not only give your site a better chance to rank, it gets highly targeted traffic resulting in higher traffic.

Make final selection of most appropriate keywords as follows:

• Eliminate very low popularity Keywords where the search traffic for the terms is very low.
• Out of the balance keywords that qualify for ranking with your site's current Page Ranking, select the most popular keywords, which have the right focus for your site.
• Eliminate the keywords, which are difficult to rank with considering Page Ranking vs. Competition.

It is important to include both the singular and plural versions of your keywords as most search engines return different sets of results for plural and singular forms of the same word.

Major search engines like Google are not case sensitive. So upper and lower cases makes no difference in your search engine rankings.

Try to include all different forms of the same word that can be spelled differently or commonly misspell. For e.g. site, sight etc.

Step 4: Deploying Keyword Phrases

It is about making feasible use of your selected keywords in your website content, HTML code and tags.Try to use most relevant and important keyword in different part of website. It is not necessary to use all your keywords on all the pages. A good way to use the selected keywords on your site is to divide them into groups of keywords. Each group should have closely related keyword-forming themes. Identify various sections of your website that closely match with the keyword group themes and optimize your pages using these themes.

Search engines give higher significance to certain words and phrases within HTML documents so it's necessary that you put your keyword phrases in the correct places.
Some of the best places are:

• In title: A Title Tag of about 90 characters. The title is a short description for the hyperlinks telling the users about the content of the landing page. Use important keywords here.
• In headings : Header tags are used to write Keyword rich headlines and sub-headings.
• META tags: You should write a Meta Description Tag of about 250 characters with your important keywords. Don’t try to repeat the words.
• Body Text: Headlines in Header Tags followed by keyword rich body text can improve your ranking chances.
• Alt text / Alt Tag: The ALT text is meant to provide alternative or substitute text, primarily for use when the image is not being displayed.
• Anchor Text: Anchor text is the hyperlinked portion of the text gives visitors useful information about the content of the page you're linking to. Keywords appearing in the Anchor Text have a high importance in Search Engines.
• Table Summary: The table summary in HTML code describes the content of each HTML table in your code. Though not visible to a user, it is important for people with disabilities and text to speech applications. It is an important place to use your keyword phrases.
• In bold text
• In the file name (i.e. the URL)
• In the first 25 words on the page

Keywords per Page

Place your keywords throughout the page.
We recommend using your keywords 2-4 times per page. Over-repetition of keywords on a page might be interpreted as spam by the search engines. Make sure you don't put all your keywords on one page.Google read your website from top left to right bottom so try and ensure your keyword is used in the upper left hand corner and the bottom right hand side of your page.

The whole idea behind the Keyword Research exercise is traffic optimization, not traffic maximization. A good Keyword Research helps in bringing qualified traffic to your site that leads to high sales conversions.