SEO Consulting Company, SEO Experts, SEO Services for IMS

Search engine guys are thinking to reduce rank or ban certain links of a website which has their site search results crawled by them be it Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask etc.,

You can check in the search engine by using site:pagerank0.com (replace with your site name) and see whether the user search results are crawled.

To remove them from getting crawled in your robots.txt file just add:

Disallow: /?s=

In my case it was ?s, if your site is search, then you have to replace s with search. Additionaly if you are using google webmaster tool, you can submit that url to remove it from their index.

1. How important is a domain name to a business?

A domain name plays a critical role in Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking. The question is whether you want to establish your company name (brand value) or acquire a keyword which relates to the business that the companyinvolve.

2. Length of a domain name affects SEO/Pagerank?

Yes and No. As a rule of thumb - a short domain has more value - which inturn has some meaning to it. It could be an acronym or a word by itself. There are various domain names which are very popular that is extremely popular and they have better search ranking too (the reason because of the keywords that exist in the domain name). But what are my chances of winning and retaining the audience if I have a site like wearetheoriginalgoogle.com? So, it purely depens on what you want to do with the domain name, whether it is a throwaway or whether you are going to do something with that.

3. Sub-domains has value or not?

Yes and No again. I can create any and n number of sub-domains (amazon, msn, yahoo, google, business, etc.,) but it is based on the external links and the popularity among the internet world. mail.google.com is one good example, or del.icio.us : even delicious.com is available. So it does add weightage in some algorithms - provided it has audience in net world.

4. In What priority should onego for choosing adomain extension?

.com, .net, .org and then the rest. Each extension has a purpose - whether it is commercial or non-profit organization domain. But it is better to get all or most important extensions for your website, if you plan BIG.

5. Is it important to acquire related business domains to build traffic?

Not for a multi-billion dollar corporation, but for a small to mid-size, it is better to invest on keyphrase related domains as well to pull the traffic and to avoid competitors at later stages.

Cheers,
Shiva

1. What is an SEO, SEM and how important are they for an organization? Explain briefly.

By not being able to answer the acronym and explanation - you can decide whether you can proceed further or not. This question saves lot of time for the interviewer as well the candidate.

2. What is google spamdexing?
3. Could you briefly explain pagerank algorithm?
4. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
5. Ask questions on advance HTML (like why not to use nested tables, what is light weight html, what is image alternate attribute is used for, META tags purpose) and how important the site needs to be w3c compliant.
6. Who are the two key people - who started Google?
7. How and what does msn, yahoo and google search looks for in a website?
8. What are all the different ways to do marketing for a website? (PPC, Ads, Backlinks, etc.,)
9. What is an Organic search?
10. What is Web2, give few examples.
11. Name few popular sites and how do you think they become popular?
12. Why google ranks Wikipedia for most of the topics?
13. Are you aware of Signals, Classifiers and Topicality?
14. How much are they technically strong? (.NET, Java, etc.,)
15. How does a search engine work and what is the future?
16. Can you get “xyz” company listed for the keyword “google” in the first page?
Tricky question though, he can say “Yes” only if he mentions that the company “xyz” should discuss about “google” in their website only if it is related to google in someway - person had to say “No” otherwise - providing the same explanation. This will give a clue that the person is aware of spamming as well and does not want to do that.

… more questions to come

But if you are recruiting a senior person, after initial interview you can ask him/her to give a half an hour seminar on the topic. This will give freedom for that person to give his perspective and for others to ask questions on the spot. As for an SEO manager - he have to discuss with clients, give seminars, etc., - so making a person talk for half an hour will bring a lot of great qualities in him and real chance to prove himself - rather asking few questions and making decision on that.

What is SEO/SEM and why do my website needs it?

SEO stands for Search engine optimization and SEM for Search engine marketing. SEO is one of the method in SEM and rest SEM methods are paid links, paid ads in search engines and other websites. For personal or business you would like a lot of traffic, especially if its business site you would love to have more number of unique visitors coming into your site. The more the people - the more your revenue. In order to increase traffic, you have to get listed in top pages in search engines for certain keywords, say for example if you have a travel site, and your site is good when only if it gets listed when people search for “buy air tickets”, “cheap air tickets”, “cheap air fares”, etc.,

So in order for that to happen, your site should have those keywords in site or in meta tags or both. Also you need to use lots of tools to find synonyms, KEI tools and alternative words to get wide audience of searchers.

Now - I am going to try to get this post listed in search engines when people use “SEO”, “seo tips”, “seo example”. So far http://www.pagerank0.com/ is not listed for any seo related keyphrases. For this to happen - I need your assistance as well.

Kindly give a link back to this article in your site with anchor links as seo or seo tips or seo example. You can copy the below code and paste in your site and I will identify your site within a week and post myself, if not you can comment it here.

Cheers,
Shiva

 <a href="http://www.pagerank0.com/index.php/pagerank-0-10/search-engine-optimization-seo/" mce_href="http://www.pagerank0.com/index.php/pagerank-0-10/search-engine-optimization-seo/">SEO</a>

or  

 <a href="http://www.pagerank0.com/index.php/pagerank-0-10/search-engine-optimization-seo/" mce_href="http://www.pagerank0.com/index.php/pagerank-0-10/search-engine-optimization-seo/">SEO tips</a>

or 

 <a href="http://www.pagerank0.com/index.php/pagerank-0-10/search-engine-optimization-seo/" mce_href="http://www.pagerank0.com/index.php/pagerank-0-10/search-engine-optimization-seo/">SEO example</a> 

Added on 06/26/07
Those of you who noted that Seek Engine Optimal is wrong acronym - please read this post to understand why it was like that in first place.
SEO acronym spam - Suffering Engine Optimization

Hi Everyone,

   I am going to provide some useful links on concepts as well various useful links that could help you to determine and improve your website.

Where and how to submit my url to search engines and directories?

Search engines & Directories:

For google: http://www.google.com/addurl/

Dmoz - Google and many other search engine uses dmoz directory or weigh their pagerank more if it gets listed
in dmoz.
http://dmoz.org/add.html

Yahoo directory:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/dir/suggest/suggest-01.html

MSN:
http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm
http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx

If you have a blog site apart from the above you can visit
http://www.technorati.com/ to join and visit
http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=addblog to add your blog

http://www.submitexpress.com/

How search engines work:

How MSN Search engine work:
http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/help.aspx?t=SEARCH_CONC_HowSearchWorks.htm

Google pagerank search technology
http://www.google.com/technology/

Anatomy of search engine - google concept by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (founders)
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Pagerank prediction tool
http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_prediction

How to use HTML Meta tags?
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167931

Cheers,

Shiva

Visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html and you will get to know how to add site map for your site so that google can crawl your site.

Web crawler - Robots - Bot - Spiders are all one and the same. Every search engine have their own crawler, it is a software application or agent, they visit the web sites in periodical manner. Most legitimate bots crawl the website meta tags, keywords, description, content as well the url’s and store it in their database (local store). So whenever you do google/msn/yahoo it is not just a live search - whatever data they have collected, they index it in their storage and use their own logics and algorithm to determine which site to show for which specific “searched keywords”.

The crawler cannot see an image (It crawls and store it in a binary format). That is the reason why you have to provide an alternate tag for an image, img alt=”award winner” so if you have an image in your website, check whether you see a tooltip when you mouse over on that image. If you do not have an alternate text for an image it is not XHTML compliant web site. The SE might not punish the site for it, but you may not get brownie points. And if you have certain words like “blog” repeated in your site for thousand times (spaced next to each other) and wonder why it is not showing up in search engines -  then they have penalized for Keyword Stuffing.

Did I get deviated from the answer? I think little bit, okay, so a bot is nothing but a tool, pre-written by search engines, they collect links from sites and then visits them, grabs the url’s, images, content, etc., and visit the other sites that is mentioned in your web site and goes like a chain roll. And robot does visits your website back and checks if there are any changes done in your site, if there is no change for a long time then the frequency of its visit slows down.

Last but not least, make sure you/your webhosting company has the if-modified-since HTTP header is enabled on your webserver, that is the way the bots gets to know whether anything latest is going on in your site or not. Got questions? Have doubts? Write to us.

There are various reasons why a website’s PageRank is Zero, the least rank provided by Google is 0 and maximum is 10.

1. Website is relevantly new.
2. Check with your web hosting provider and see the statistical reports for downtime of your website. (If you have configured your website in webmaster tools in google, check for URL Not found - that will give you an idea, whether the site was down or that particular page does not exist)
3. Content is key - The choice of words (keywords) that are used in a site must be appropriate and detailed to what the site is all about.
4. Make sure you have META tags, META Keywords and META description in your HTML of any particular url of the web site.
5. Revist your web pages and update the content of the site as required.
6. It also depends on how many sites are linking to your site and their rank and as well the sites that you link outside from your web site. (inbound and outbound links)
7. Keyword stuffing, intentionally/unintentionally, i.e., keyword stuffing on META tags, in content for a specific word. Google penalizes if their algorithm thinks that you are misusing your site to cheat google crawler.
8. Website points to an external link that has been banned/penalized by Google/MSN/Yahoo/Any search engines.

I have been providing SEO Consulting for various sites, you can submit your request in the Consulting page for your specific questions.

You might be interested in checking the other article of us on Reason why pagerank goes down