SEO & Internet Marketing

It’s no secret that Google has made a number of different changes to their algorithm over the years. Some of these changes have been subtle, and some of them have been incredibly obvious. The latest changes the latter, and it has affected search engine optimization in what many would consider to be a rather negative way. The question however is how it will affect you, or rather how you will be letting it affect you both now and in the future.

It’s no surprise that so many people use SEO techniques, because search engine optimization has been one of the most effective ways to advertise a website and boost its traffic. As a matter of fact, SEO enables many small businesses to have a worldwide impact on their market through helping their websites attain top rankings in Google. Naturally, that’s a great thing for those businesses, but some do try to abuse the system. How does Google Panda affect them?

Content farms full of duplicate content have been spotted around the internet for years now, and they present an interesting problem. This problem of course is the duplicate content and the fact that much of it is produced using article spinners. These spinners take a single article and use it to create a number of different articles. While they might appear to be unique at first glance, those who come across the spun article will recognize it immediately when they see one of it’s many counterparts.

So, what impact has Google Panda had on SEO? Well, Google is now coming down harder on people who use black hat search engine optimization techniques to increase the popularity of their websites, but it also cracking down on those content farms that host duplicate content. Properly written, unique content has not been affected. In fact, websites with informative, unique content are rising in the search rankings and receiving additional traffic.

One suggestion that can help your website attain a ranking at or near the top of the search engine results is to use unique, informative content written by real content writers. It’s not that spun content is terrible, but you do need to ensure that your site’s content meets Internet standards and is well written.

Don’t let Panda’s new policy destroy your website’s rankings. Instead, you can achieve a favorable outcome despite the recent change if you put in some work to learn more about SEO - especially if your site has been using duplicate content. Nobody knows what the future will be, but it should include a better Internet experience for everyone.

Search Engine Optimization

Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, search engine optimization consultants, search marketing, sem, seo

Sometimes referred to as ’spiders’ or crawlers, automated search engine robots seek out web pages for the user. Just how do they accomplish this and is this of importance? What is the real purpose of these robots?

A search engine robot is a very simple program that has some basic functionality to help it understand web pages. However, spiders only have limited functionality to interpret websites: they cannot interpret frames, Flash video, images, or JavaScript; they can’t enter password-protected areas and can’t click buttons; they can be stopped by dynamically-generated URLs and JavaScript navigation. However, within HTML code, they’re able to retrieve data by travelling through the web to find information and links.

The ’submit url’ function places the url into a list of urls the robots are going to explore. Even without submitting your url directly, robots will try to find your site by following links. That’s why building visibility through a web of links is important.

By collecting and following links, robots manage tn transport themselves all over the internet. Think of it as an internet equivalent of the roads we use in our lives. Robots travel on the roads and read the signposts so they know what leads to where.

Once the spider has gathered all the information it needs, and based on how the spider is set up in the search engine, it will index the site information and send it to the search engine database.

A robot ‘reads’ your site by collecting data on any visible text, on tags you may have in the coding of your page, and on any links available. These are the things that determine what the search engines ‘think’ your content is about, so these are the things you really need to pay attention to when building a site that you want to have high visibility in search results.

If you’re interested in seeing which pages the spiders have visited on your website, you can check your server logs or the results from your log statistics. From this information you’ll know which spiders have visited, where they went, when they came, and which pages they crawl most often. Some are easy to identify, such as Google’s ‘Googlebot,’ while others are harder: ‘Slurp’ from Inktomi, for example. In addition to identifying which spiders visit, you can also find if any spiders are draining your bandwidth so that you can block them from your site. The internet has plenty of information on identifying these bad bots. There are also certain things can prevent good spiders from crawling your site, such as the site being down or huge amounts of traffic. This can prevent your site from being re-indexed, though most spiders will eventually come by again to try re-accessing the page.

Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing expert who provides world class Search Engine Optimization to website owners. For more information visit: http://www.seorankings.co.za

Search Engine Optimization

Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, search marketing, seo, seo services