Web users are more interactive and faster. Web users in average wait 8-10 seconds for a page to load and most of them will leave if the page does not load in 8-10 seconds.

Artistic website or website with specific purpose may have flash intro that takes longer to load or more images and graphic. In general, we suggest having a fast website with fast webpages.

It is the website owner or administrator to make a choice about speed or flashy, lot images and slower webpages.

To find out is your website is fat enough for your audience you need to have traffic analytic monitoring in your website like Urchin or Google Analytics.

Traffic with higher bounce rate represent less quality traffic, design and navigation issue or page speed.

We suggest to speed up your pages as fast is possible if your audiences have the speed issue and if they do not, still it is base on good practices to speed up your webpages.

Page Optimizer Overview

Page optimizer process is critical and essential for some websites. You may take your side and answer “is my website needs to speed up and how?” and answer to “What is the bottom line for my business?” There are ten steps as page optimizer process, which is list below:

1. Page Size Under 100K
2. Object in Page -20
3. External Script Size -20K
4. Multimedia -10K
5. Cache Control
6. Minimize HTTP Request
7. Gzip
8. Multi-Threading
9. Image Optimization
10. CSS Optimization

Page Size Under 100K

Page size is new ranking factor

Matt Cutts from Google said there is strong lobbying in Google to introduce a new ranking factor into the algorithm. The new ranking factor has to do with how fast a site or page loads.

Matt described this as one of his ’what to expect in 2010’ bullet points.

Less than 40K Page Size Even Better

We suggest trying to keep your page size less than 100K or even less than 40K to improve your ranking and give your visitors better experience and offer faster web surf experience to them.

Try to not have a page more than 150K

100K page size before CSS, image and other external file is good, 40K page size even better but if you have a page up to 150K it is not bad but try to not exceed this limit.

Object in Page -20

Above 20 objects per page the overhead from dealing with the real objects.

Consider reducing CSS to one or two external files. Combine, refine, and optimize your external CSS files.

Ideally you should have one JavaScript file (or even embed scripts for high-traffic pages) on your pages and keep the JavaScript size under 20K.

External Script Size -20K

Ideally you should have one JavaScript file (or even embed scripts for high-traffic pages) on your pages and keep the JavaScript size under 20K.

Multimedia -10K

Try to keep your multi-media total file size under 10k.

Cache Control

• HTTP 1.1. Allowed values are:
• PUBLIC – may be cached in public shared caches
• PRIVATE: may only be cached in private cache
• NO-CACHE: may not be cached
• NO-STORE: may be cached but not archived

Note: It may be better to specify cache commands in HTTP than in META statements, where they can influence more than the browser, but proxies and other intermediaries that may cache information.

Example:

<META HTTP-EQUIV=”CACHE-CONTROL” CONTENT=”PUBLIC”>

Minimize HTTP Request

Minimizing HTTP requests is key for web site optimization.

Placing external JavaScript files at the bottom of your BODY, and CSS files in the HEAD enables progressive display in XHTML web pages.

Finally, consider optimizing parallel downloads by using different hostname to reduce the object overhead, activate cache control and compression.

Gzip

gzip is a software application used for file compression, it usually means the GNU Project’s implementation of compression/decompression tool using Lempel-Ziv coding (LZ77), where gzip is short for GNU zip; as the program was created a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, intended for use by the GNU Project.

Multi-Threading

Parallel Download Default Throttles Browsers

The HTTP 1.1 specification, circa 1999, recommends that browsers and servers limit parallel requests to the same hostname to two (Fielding et al. 1999). Written before broadband was widely adopted, this specification was designed for narrowband connections. Most browsers comply with the multithreading recommendation of the specification, although downgrading to HTTP 1.0 boosts parallel downloads to four. So most web browsers are effectively throttled by this limit on parallel downloads if the objects in the web page they download are hosted on one hostname. There are two ways around this limitation:

• Serve your objects from multiple servers
• Create multiple subdomains to serve from multiple hostname

Using Multiple Servers

You can set up multiple object or image-hosting servers to boost the number of parallel downloads. For example:

• images1.domain.com
• images2.domain.com
• images3.domain.com

Each of these subdomains does not have to be on a separate server, however.

Using Multiple hostname on the Same Server

A more elegant solution is to set up multiple subdomains that point to the same server. This technique fools browsers into believing objects are being served from different hostname, thereby allowing more than two-threads per server. For example you can set:

• images1.domain.com
• images2.domain.com
• domain.com images3.domain.com

Within your DNS zone record. Now you can refer to different objects using different hostname, even though they are on the same server! For example:

<img src=”images1.domain.com/i/balloon.png” alt=”balloon”>

All of these URLs point back to:

domain.com/i/

Image Optimization

Assuming that you specify the HEIGHT and WIDTH of your images, this size allows your HTML to display content in less than 10 seconds, the average time users are willing to wait for a page to display without feedback.

Try to keep your total image size under 100K. Consider switch graphic formats to meet smaller file sizes (from JPEG to PNG). Finally, substitute CSS techniques for graphics techniques to create colored borders, backgrounds, and spacing.

CSS Optimization

CSS Optimization is a way to remove repetitive CSS codes and clean unused CSS rules.

In addition, you may clear extra spaces and compress your CSS to decrease you CSS file size. You can save you original CSS, upload your clean and compress CSS version to your site.

For next update you can update your original CSS then compress, clean it, and upload the compressed one and keep the original separated for further updating purpose.

Level 6 Page Optimizer Highlights

In this chapter, we describe the good things for having them to improve your website ranking in SERP.

We describe some bad things to avoid them. In addition, the ugly things, which may cause you serious trouble or even ban to being in the search engine result page.

Good: sitemap.html

We suggest having sitemap page for your visitors and putting a link to your sitemap page in bottom of the all pages. By doing so your visitors can refer to it and find what they are looking for it.

Sitemap page for your visitors is different from sitemap.xml that is for search engine usage and help search engine know about your website. Sitemap sample

We suggest having sitemap.xml for crawler and searching engine bots, in addition, having a document sitemap for your users like HTML.

Sitemap

Sitemap is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users.

It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.

Good: 2 to 3 Click Away

We suggest having 2-3 clicks away all pages from your home page except you have e-commerce website or you have different category and subcategories.

Three clicks away means the entire website is reachable by 3 clicks from your home page.

Three clicks away rule has benefit for you and your visitors. Your entire website is reachable by three or fewer clicks for your visitors.

Good: Incoming/Outgoing Links Validity

We suggest link to working and validate link. By the other hand, make sure all links are valid inside your website.

You may have incoming links from other websites, make sure those links pointing to a valid address and working properly.

We suggest to have a custom 404 error page and give your visitors information to what to do next if they are looking for a link is not existed.

Context Link

We suggest adding context to your link by using title and alt tag even for your text links. As instance consider a gardening tool seller the buying page or product page may name like “product.html”, we suggest to name the page more meaningful like “gardening-tools.html”,  in addition, add alt tag and title tag to this anchor or link like below example:

• alt=”Gardening Tools Index”
• title=”Buy Gardening Tools”

You may name your page as “Gardening Tools” or “Buy Gardening Tools”, in this case your anchor or link code would be:

<a href=”gardening-tools.html” alt=”Gardening Tools Index” title=”Buy Gardening Tools”>Gardening Tools</a>

Or simply you can have:

<a href=”gardening-tools.html>Gardening Tools</a>

Context in Target page Title

We suggest having related title for you “gardening-tools.html” in above instance. In this case, you may use one of below title in your header of your page:

• <title>Gardening Tools | My Company</title>
• <title>Buy Gardening Tools | My Company</title>

Links in or In-bound links

Link from other websites to your website known as in-bound or incoming links, counts as a vote to your website.

Incoming links from relevant website as the subject or content to the page they linked to it has greater value.

Incoming links from authority website or website with higher Google Page Rank has greater impact to your website ranking in search and in your Google Page Rank.

We have a different level for link building and the best practices strategy to do it in the effective way and do it in the right ways.

In-bound links or incoming links also may call as backlinks. Back link is the link from another webpage to your webpage . By the other hand, they link back to you or they have a link to your website.

Good Canonical Home page

Consider your domain name is domian.com but people may type different form and we suggest making sure all of your homepage address point to the unique URI or web address. Consider your domain is domain.cim and your home page is index.htm, in this case other possible address for your home page will be:

• www.domain.com
• http://www.domain.com
• http://doamin.com
• http://www.domain.com/index.htm
• http://domain.com/index.htm

We suggest to forward all below addresses to http://www.domain.com or www.domain.com and stick to just one of them.

This approach has two benefits. First, you eliminate duplicate contents and secondly all links to different form of your home page counts as a visit to a unique web address, which is your website home page.

Bad: Dynamic Pages, Duplicate Content

Dynamic pages or duplicate content has less value to compare to old days but still does. We suggest having canonical Meta tag to define the original content.

The canonical Meta tag for “order.htm” webpage must be inside the header of your html code and must be like:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.domain.com/order.html” />

The above Meta tag tell the search engines to consider all duplicate and dynamic webpages or “order.html” as “order.html” page and prevent to generate duplicate content.

Bad: Reciprocal Link

Reciprocal or two-way linking is a link from website A to website B and vice versa.  There are lot of debate about having reciprocal link, but if you want use it for two of your website it is fine but if you have many reciprocal links they do not improve your ranking and even may be penalized your website.

Google guideline is simple “you are responsible for all your website outgoing links” or link to other websites. We suggest not having reciprocal or two-way links.

Bad: Freshness of Anchor Text

Anchor text starts with “a” tag and ends with “/a” tag. Having fresh anchor text translate for search engine as a updated page and has more value than old Anchor text. We suggest updating your anchor text seasonally if it is essential but keep them updated and valid. Fresh anchor text in an old webpage is even better.

Anchor Text

The anchor text, link label or link title is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines. Since 1998, some web browsers  have added the ability to show a tooltip for a hyperlink before it is selected. Not all links have anchor texts because it may be obvious where the link will lead due to the context in which it is used. Anchor texts normally remain below 60 characters. Different browsers will display anchor texts differently.

Anchor text usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link’s destination. The anchor text may or may not be related to the actual text of the URL of the link. For example, a hyperlink to the English-language Wikipedia’s homepage might take this form:

<a href=”http://www.mydomain/my-page.html”>My Tools</a>

The anchor text in this example is “My Tools”; the unwieldy URL http://www.mydomain/my-page.html displays on the web page as My tools, contributing to clean, easy-to-read text.

Bad: More Than 100 Out-bound Links

More than 100 outgoing links in a webpage is a red flag for most search engines. They do not like it because it is more likely a webpage selling links, which is forbidden or is more like spammy webpage. We suggest to keep your outgoing links fairly short and relative to your webpage topic.

Ugly: Link Farm

A link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine (sometimes called spamdexing or spamexing). Other link exchange systems are designed to allow individual websites to selectively exchange links with other relevant websites and are not considered a form of spamdexing.

Search engines require ways to confirm page relevancy. A known method is to examine for one-way links coming directly from relevant websites. The process of building links should not be confused with being listed on link farms, as the latter requires reciprocal return links, which often renders the overall backlink advantage useless. This is due to oscillation, causing confusion over which is the vendor site and which is the promoting site.

According to Google, a site that participates in a link farm may have its search rankings penalized.

Ugly: Cloaking, Google Promises to Ban!

Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user’s browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed.

Cloaking will take seriously by Google and the cloaked site will be ban from search engine result page.

Ugly: Black Hat SEO Techniques

Search engine optimization has two types of techniques. White hat techniques are base on search engine guideline and best practices. Black hat optimization techniques are some optimization techniques to cheat and make search engine fool to improve the ranking or traffic. Black hat techniques may work for a while but soon or later will find by search engine and the website will be penalize by banning from search result.

What are Good, Bad & Ugly?

In this chapter, we describe the good things for having them to improve your website ranking in SERP.

We describe some bad things to avoid them. In addition, the ugly things, which may cause you serious trouble or even ban to being in the search engine result page.

Good: sitemap.html

We suggest having sitemap page for your visitors and putting a link to your sitemap page in bottom of the all pages. By doing so your visitors can refer to it and find what they are looking for it.

Sitemap page for your visitors is different from sitemap.xml that is for search engine usage and help search engine know about your website. Sitemap sample

We suggest having sitemap.xml for crawler and searching engine bots, in addition, having a document sitemap for your users like HTML.

Sitemap

Sitemap is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users.

It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.

Good: 2 to 3 Click Away

We suggest having 2-3 clicks away all pages from your home page except you have e-commerce website or you have different category and subcategories.

Three clicks away means the entire website is reachable by 3 clicks from your home page.

Three clicks away rule has benefit for you and your visitors. Your entire website is reachable by three or fewer clicks for your visitors.

Good: Incoming/Outgoing Links Validity

We suggest link to working and validate link. By the other hand, make sure all links are valid inside your website.

You may have incoming links from other websites, make sure those links pointing to a valid address and working properly.

We suggest to have a custom 404 error page and give your visitors information to what to do next if they are looking for a link is not existed.

Context Link

We suggest adding context to your link by using title and alt tag even for your text links. As instance consider a gardening tool seller the buying page or product page may name like “product.html”, we suggest to name the page more meaningful like “gardening-tools.html”,  in addition, add alt tag and title tag to this anchor or link like below example:

• alt=”Gardening Tools Index”
• title=”Buy Gardening Tools”

You may name your page as “Gardening Tools” or “Buy Gardening Tools”, in this case your anchor or link code would be:

<a href=”gardening-tools.html” alt=”Gardening Tools Index” title=”Buy Gardening Tools”>Gardening Tools</a>

Or simply you can have:

<a href=”gardening-tools.html>Gardening Tools</a>

Context in Target page Title

We suggest having related title for you “gardening-tools.html” in above instance. In this case, you may use one of below title in your header of your page:

• <title>Gardening Tools | My Company</title>
• <title>Buy Gardening Tools | My Company</title>

Links in or In-bound links

Link from other websites to your website known as in-bound or incoming links, counts as a vote to your website.

Incoming links from relevant website as the subject or content to the page they linked to it has greater value.

Incoming links from authority website or website with higher Google Page Rank has greater impact to your website ranking in search and in your Google Page Rank.

We have a different level for link building and the best practices strategy to do it in the effective way and do it in the right ways.

In-bound links or incoming links also may call as backlinks. Back link is the link from another webpage to your webpage . By the other hand, they link back to you or they have a link to your website.

Good Canonical Home page

Consider your domain name is domian.com but people may type different form and we suggest making sure all of your homepage address point to the unique URI or web address. Consider your domain is domain.cim and your home page is index.htm, in this case other possible address for your home page will be:

• www.domain.com
• http://www.domain.com
• http://doamin.com
• http://www.domain.com/index.htm
• http://domain.com/index.htm

We suggest to forward all below addresses to http://www.domain.com or www.domain.com and stick to just one of them.

This approach has two benefits. First, you eliminate duplicate contents and secondly all links to different form of your home page counts as a visit to a unique web address, which is your website home page.

Bad: Dynamic Pages, Duplicate Content

Dynamic pages or duplicate content has less value to compare to old days but still does. We suggest having canonical Meta tag to define the original content.

The canonical Meta tag for “order.htm” webpage must be inside the header of your html code and must be like:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.domain.com/order.html” />

The above Meta tag tell the search engines to consider all duplicate and dynamic webpages or “order.html” as “order.html” page and prevent to generate duplicate content.

Bad: Reciprocal Link

Reciprocal or two-way linking is a link from website A to website B and vice versa.  There are lot of debate about having reciprocal link, but if you want use it for two of your website it is fine but if you have many reciprocal links they do not improve your ranking and even may be penalized your website.

Google guideline is simple “you are responsible for all your website outgoing links” or link to other websites. We suggest not having reciprocal or two-way links.

Bad: Freshness of Anchor Text

Anchor text starts with “a” tag and ends with “/a” tag. Having fresh anchor text translate for search engine as a updated page and has more value than old Anchor text. We suggest updating your anchor text seasonally if it is essential but keep them updated and valid. Fresh anchor text in an old webpage is even better.

Anchor Text

The anchor text, link label or link title is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines. Since 1998, some web browsers  have added the ability to show a tooltip for a hyperlink before it is selected. Not all links have anchor texts because it may be obvious where the link will lead due to the context in which it is used. Anchor texts normally remain below 60 characters. Different browsers will display anchor texts differently.

Anchor text usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link’s destination. The anchor text may or may not be related to the actual text of the URL of the link. For example, a hyperlink to the English-language Wikipedia’s homepage might take this form:

<a href=”http://www.mydomain/my-page.html”>My Tools</a>

The anchor text in this example is “My Tools”; the unwieldy URL http://www.mydomain/my-page.html displays on the web page as My tools, contributing to clean, easy-to-read text.

Bad: More Than 100 Out-bound Links

More than 100 outgoing links in a webpage is a red flag for most search engines. They do not like it because it is more likely a webpage selling links, which is forbidden or is more like spammy webpage. We suggest to keep your outgoing links fairly short and relative to your webpage topic.

Ugly: Link Farm

A link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine (sometimes called spamdexing or spamexing). Other link exchange systems are designed to allow individual websites to selectively exchange links with other relevant websites and are not considered a form of spamdexing.

Search engines require ways to confirm page relevancy. A known method is to examine for one-way links coming directly from relevant websites. The process of building links should not be confused with being listed on link farms, as the latter requires reciprocal return links, which often renders the overall backlink advantage useless. This is due to oscillation, causing confusion over which is the vendor site and which is the promoting site.

According to Google, a site that participates in a link farm may have its search rankings penalized.

Ugly:  Cloaking, Google Promises to Ban!

Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user’s browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed.

Cloaking will take seriously by Google and the cloaked site will be ban from search engine result page.

Ugly: Black Hat SEO Techniques

Search engine optimization has two types of techniques. White hat techniques are base on search engine guideline and best practices. Black hat optimization techniques are some optimization techniques to cheat and make search engine fool to improve the ranking or traffic. Black hat techniques may work for a while but soon or later will find by search engine and the website will be penalize by banning from search result.

Level 5 Good, Bad & ugly Highlights

Search optimization drive traffic to your site but you need to convert this traffic to your business goals and increase your customer satisfaction or simply be usable for them.

Usability Segments

Your most important page is your homepage. You need to make your choice what do you want to say in your homepage. You need to know what to say, how to say it with how much detail in your homepage.

In addition, you must have proper navigation and link to the other segment of your website in your home page.

Call to Action

We suggest using strong and clear call to action sentence like:

• Call now
• Subscribe now
• Buy now
• Register now
• Donate now

Or create a sense of urgency such as:

• Offer expires July 31^st
• Limited time Offer
• Order now and receive a free gift

More information as Option

Explain in detail about everything in your homepage is not a good idea. You may consider your homepage as a newspaper front page with headlines and a short version for each headline.

At the end of each section, you may add:

• Read more »
• More information »
• Read how »

By doing so you have your highlighted information in your homepage, you organize them with headings and brief info an option to read the complete version.

Having Plan for your Audience

Think as your audience or your customers. Try to know them and define different scenarios of what they may look for. Then, what is your plan to give them what they want. Make questionnaire and answer them then check them and ask what are missing. You may start from simple list like:

• Where is more information
• Where is price list
• Why there is no price
• What is the product/services page
• What do they offer
• How can I buy them
• How can I contact them
• How can I ask for more information

However, any other questions you think your on-line visitors may have and you want to answer those. Then you can find more information about your audience and you plan to discuss your audience needs.

Having Price List

Having price list is a good idea but nor having a price list is good in other way. It really depends on your market, your offer, your customers and your competitors.

This is your choice but you need to know why you need to list your prices or why you do not want to have price list.

Service in Detail

Try to explain your service or product briefly and short but you may consider read more option to give extra information to your audience. You need to know what to say, how to say it and how much to say.

You may prefer not to give full information and convince your audience to make a phone call or send a web form and asking for more information. It depends on your market and your strategy.

Competitor Watch

Try to review your competitor’s websites. What they do and why then make your decision to be more like them or be different.

Conversion Rate

Usability goal is to improve your website conversion rate to the max. Let us say you are selling flower. If each 1000 visitors place 5 orders with 200$ total, your conversion rate will be:

5 orders / 1000 visitors x 100 = 0.5% Conversion rate

You conversion value will be:

200$ / 1000 visitors = 0.2$ value of each visit

You have two options to improve your sales and benefit in your website:

1. Increase conversion rate
2. Increase value of each visit

Increase Conversion rate

You need to answer what can I do if I want more than 5 orders in 1000 visits. Here are brief lists of question you need to answer first:

• Is our price competitive
• Is our flower quality is acceptable
• DO we have straight process to placing order
• Is our shipping options fair
• Are people can find everything easily
• Do we have analytic traffic monitoring

Increase value of each Visit

People want to buy flower may interested about something else too, like bucket or delivery to other place. If you can give more related offer to your audience, you have more opportunity to increase value of each visitor each order.

Page speed

Faster web pages generate more revenue. Internet users are not patient and they are active. They decide to stay on a page or leave it in less than 8 seconds. You have a choice to ignore this rule or be prepare to take advantage of it.

Webpages which downloading faster than 8 seconds has less abandon visitors. By the other hand, they have better chance to grab visitor attentions.

Context

It is very important how you organize your page. What context are highlight and why. How your context distributed to the page and do you have a good design in your webpages or not.

Brief and easy to read context, simple and straightforward navigation are two other important factor to make your webpages more profitable.

Page speed – Image Size

Smaller image and having fewer amounts of images are better. Try to use CSS to combine your images menu and other icons, backgrounds and optimize them fairly.

Page Context – Alt Tag

Use alt tag for your images to give more contexts about an image to search engines. In addition, use title tag in images as a brief explanation or name. As instance, do not leave a red rose as “img0001.jpg” instead rename it to “red_rose.jpg”, also, in alt tag put “Red Rose”, and add title as “Red Rose”.

Page Speed – Image Count

Fewer amount of images load faster and improve your page speed. Try to keep your images amount low. If you think all images is essential and you have reason for keeping all of them then it is better do not do this in your home page or other landing pages, instead distribute them in sub group pages like rose section and so on.

Page Context – Readability

Readability has some automated and standard tests. More readable context will be easier to read and understand.

Try to use proper punctuation, emphasize title with brief and contextual text. Use short sentence and keep your paragraphs short.

If you have audience with English as second language it is more essential than websites just have native audience and more technical.

Page Navigation – Text Navigation

Text navigation has more advantage than text, JavaScript or other form of navigations.

Your visitors and search engines can understand your text navigation in the same way. However, if you like to have other navigation you need to consider search engine and people to understand them easily.

Try to use proper font, font size, font color and background to help your audience read your navigation easily and more important put them in the top or at the left side.

People expect navigation in the top or in the left. By putting your navigation in different areas, some people get confused and cannot use your navigation properly, because they are not used to it.

Use context in your navigation. For instance if you are selling flower do not name your products such as product or flower instead use “Buy Flower” or “Order Flower”. This type of context navigation generates more conversion instead of general or broad text.

Page Navigation – Image Navigation

Image navigations are prettier but there are downsides. Image navigations are not readable by search engine so you need to add extra information on any image to be readable for search engine. Always add alt tag with related context. Use title tag for all images. Make sure your images are optimum or combine them together to improve their download speed.

JavaScript Navigation

JavaScript navigations are invisible for search engine and try not to use them as much as possible. Some search engine has difficulty with JavaScript navigation and if it is possible not use them.

Other Navigation

Flash Navigation

Flash navigation is the most difficult navigation for search engines. They have no clue about links or other information about your links except you add your links outside the flash file. We suggest to not use them or at least do not add links in flash file, simply add link to each menu item as an image link with alt and title tag.

Quick Text Links

Add quick links in the bottom of all pages. This helps your user find your important pages and if you ing image navigation, JavaScript or flash navigation the quick text links help search engine know about your important web pages.

W3C validation

We suggest validating your webpages and your CSS files and making your code more readable and standard. Read more why »

Level 4 Usability Highlights

Evaluation process defines the status of the web site. Evaluation result may show some major concern like web host quality.

SEO evaluation gives you an overview about your web site search engine visibility and your web site ranking listed as below steps:

• PageRank
• Alexa Rank
• DMOZ Listing
• Site Age
• Domain Expiration Date
• Web Host Quality & Uptime
• Freshness of Page
• Broken Link Analysis
• Single Pixel Link
• Others

Google PageRank™

The name “PageRank” is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank™ process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999).

Google Describes PageRank:

PageRank™ relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

PageRank™ Vs. SERP Rank

PageRank™ is a good reason for popularity and authority of the website or web page. PageRank™ is a logarithmic scale, by the other hand PageRank 1 to 2 is very shorter than PageRank 2 to 3.

Google describe PageRank™ is not a good metrics for optimization purpose but still it can be as a shortcut but less meaningful and goal oriented.

Improving the SERP rank is most important reason in search engine optimization but some people prefer to focus on PageRank™ instead of SERP rank but you need to know these two ranking have different meaning and different result.

SERP Rank

SERP Rank is ranking in the search engine result page for search term.

People use keywords combination as search term.  Search Engine optimization covers the techniques to improve ranking in search results.

PageRank™ Range

PageRank™ is a number in range of 0- 10 and describe the website authority or may consider as brand management criteria.

PageRank™ Improvement

PageRank™ improvement is a mid to long-term commitment and improving is by having a lot back links in short-term is not a good idea and it may caused be banned your site by Google because if you are building your back link rapidly search engine consider it as link buying or other not ethical practices.

Focus on SERP Rank instead of PageRank™

We suggest focusing on other SEO metrics and PageRank™ will be increase during the time but you need to be patient and do not focus on PageRank™ too much.
PageRank™ is an off-page optimization process and drives by quality one-way back link or inbound links to your site.
SERP rank is on-page optimization process and is create with on-page SEO process. It is possible to having a good PageRank™ but not a good SERP rank and vice versa.
Better ranking in search results is more fair for most business but still PageRank is important too.
We suggest to keeping eye on your search engine ranking for wisely choose keywords. You may see the result faster in the easier way and measurable by focusing on your ranking in search result page.

Alexa Traffic Rank

Alexa Rank is more starlight than PageRank and is more meaning full. Rank #1 in Alexa means rank #1.

Alexa Rank may be use as comparison metrics for two web sites in the same industry or different industries with some considerations.

DMOZ Listing or ODP

DMOZ is open directory whit manually added data. Adding to DMOZ is not an easy task like submitting to search engines and you may have to wait for their review for a long time. They call themselves as republic of the web:
Instead of fighting the explosive growth of the Internet, the Open Directory provides the means for the Internet to organize itself. As the Internet grows, so do the number of net-citizens. These citizens can each organize a small portion of the web and present it back to the rest of the population, culling out the bad and useless and keeping only the best content.

Site Age

Site age is one of the most important factor for PageRank and less important for SERP ranking.
Some brand new website owners may consider buying old web sites to improve their ranking. Search engines consider site age as stability in business.
Site age has more effect on PageRank. However, site age has less effect on ranking in search result pages.

Domain Expiration

Like site age, longer expiration date is better. For brand new website, we recommend registering your domain for five or more years, 10 years registration is even better.
Shorter domain expiration may consider as the web site owner is not serious to continuing the business and is not a good sign for search engines.

Web Host Quality & Uptime

This is important to make sure your web site is up and running. S engines consider this as a factor in your ranking. However, if your web host has downtime your visitors receive an error message, which obviously you do not like it.
Quality is another important factor. Web hosts share the space and their bandwidth for their clients. Space is not the issue because in most cases it is unlimited because their limitation is base on bandwidth.
Bandwidth define how much data can be transfer from your web site in a month and when you exceed the limitation you need to upgrade your service.
Share bandwidth cannot dedicate the promised bandwidth. By the other hand in the peak time of the traffic, your web site may be load slower and in the less traffic your web site load faster.
Check your web host uptime and try to use caching to use less bandwidth.
Bad neighborhood is another issue on shared hosting service, in this case you may penalize by search engine because of your bad neighborhood.

Freshness of Page

Fresh and frequently updated page are favorable for most search engines, but too frequent is not good sign for them. The best combination is old web site but fresh web pages.
It is great when you constantly add new content but it is not so great when you only make small updates to existing content.
You may consider quarterly or monthly update if the content really needs revision. We recommend to start with your pages which is important but they do not have rich content.
Text content is one of type of the content. You may have image content with descriptive title and alt tag, multi-media content and video content.

Broken Link Analysis

Broken link or dead links are linked to an address that is not exist. It happens because of file rename, remove, relocation, or typo.
Broken links have negative impact in your optimization campaign.
Page with broken link generate bad experience for you visitors and worse than that if you do not have custom “not found page”.
Clicking on a broken link generates a web page with 404 error page that says “the page cannot be found”. You may consider another web page for case the requested page cannot be found.
By adding custom not found page you can give your visitors better experience or maybe you want to add your sitemap or some links to other pages for your visitors and explain them the requested page is not exist.

Single Pixel Link

When you have a link, that is a pixel or so wide it is invisible for humans, so nobody will click on it and it is obvious that this link is trying to manipulate search engines.
As best practice, you must avoid of having any single pixel link.

Others

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content has less negative impact to compare with the past but still does. Duplicate content from your content decrease the quality of your content as search engine point of view.
Duplicate content from other web pages may arise copyright complain and search engines has a simple rule for this kind of duplication, they consider the older one as original and because you copied from another web page your copy will be ignored in most of the cases.
Dynamic web pages may generate duplicate content due by having the same content but with small difference and different URI. You can prevent this by adding a meta tag and define what is the original content and the all version consider as a one page in search engine.

People type keywords in search engines or simply they Google it.

People start their search by type the search term in search engine. You need to target your audience by having great ranking for their search terms. They search by keyword so you need to optimize your content for related keyword by having good rank for those keywords. Keyword analysis gives you an overview about keywords you are using in your web page.

People doing the search by entering search term or keywords in search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and so on so you need to optimize your web site and web pages for relevant keywords.

Structural optimize web site will rank for all keywords in their home page but here is the question, what is their rank? Before any action, you need to analyze it first.

Analysis your webpage by free SEO Tools

Keyword & Ranking

Broad Keywords

Broad Keywords are more competitive, it is tough to optimize a web page for broad keywords like flower, travel, Hotel, TV, and so on.

However, by doing so they will drive a huge traffic to the web site but you need more than keyword and web page optimization. You need other technique to boost into the first page of search engine result.

Traffic is going to high by conversion rate will drops or it is not boost alongside of traffic growth here is why? Flower as search term is not clear to say what was search for sure. Buying flower, delivering to someone, book about flower and flowering or could be something else because the search term is not clear.

If you don’t know what people searching for how you can offer them something except you want to take a chance and offer them flower ,  flower seed, glove, gardening tools, or any related products.

Long Tail Keywords

Long Tail keywords are the best approach for targeting broad keywords and more related keywords to the broad term.

Consider you own a business that exports flower seed then you can choose your keywords as:

• Export Flower Seed
• Import Flower Seed
• Flower Seed Wholesale

Long Tail means phrases with 3 or more words in them and generates more conversion rate than broad keywords also they will rank for broad keywords too.

Keyword Research

Before any keyword optimization, you need to find the right keywords to drive most quality traffic to your web page. In addition, you must choose expandable keywords. Google search-based keyword tool is free and powerful tool for keyword research.

By using of search-based keyword tool, you will find useful detail about keywords. You can analyze your competitor web site to know what keywords they are using and then choose to compete in the same keywords or try different less competitive keywords.

Keywords in the Page

We suggest using your keywords in 10 categories related to each other and use your keyword in context as listed below:

• Title Tag 1-6 words up to 80 characters
• Description Tag up to 200 characters
• Keyword Tag 5-20
• Keyword Density
• Heading Tag
• Keyword Font Style
• Keyword Proximity
• Keyword Prominence
• Alt, Image & Title
• Keyword in Link

Keywords List

Now you have your keywords list and you need to do the same research for your important web pages.

Again, do not use them for sake of having keywords and do not repeat them just try to keep an eye on using keywords to add more context to your content, tags and links.

Choose 10-20 keywords for each page. You can start from your home page. Do not over optimize your tags it has negative effect and do not write for search engine write your content and your tag for people.

Keyword Weight

We suggest to not repeating your keywords more than 2 times in your title. In addition, we suggest not repeat your keywords too much or carelessly and when it is not needed.

Content

Let us start with your content. It must contextual, well written and well-organized. Read your content and re-write it. Your content must easy to read and easy to understand for your audience. Try to avoid having long paragraphs they are hard to read and understand.

Emphasize your keywords with bold, strong, italic or bold italic but do not over do it.

Remember search engines love long content but as long as needed not too short nor too long descriptive, informative and again write your content for people not for search engines.

Title

Your content must have relevant title, which we suggest to keep it up to 80 characters with spaces. Choose the most relevant and contextual title. Contextual title must describe the page content, as former example of export flower seed business you may write your title as:

Export Flower Seed | your business name

Alternatively, you may say:

Export Flower Seed Company | your business name

This is an effective and good practice of choosing relevant contextual title for your homepage. Your title describes your business in this case an export company. In addition, your title describes your business as an exclusive business in flower seed exporting. Later on, you may change your title to target another keyword but still contextual and relevant.

Description

We suggest using up to 200 characters include spaces as brief description about your page in description tag. Must search engines grab your version of description as a sample of your page and show it to searchers in their search result page right after your title.

We suggest using some keywords in your description but it must contextual and readable otherwise you may penalize by showing up like spammer. As instance of the worse description could be like:

Export Flower Seed, Export Flower Seed, Export Flower Seed, Export Flower Seed, Export Flower Seed …

In addition, a good description could be:

…  established since … We are an export Flower Seed Company in … and export flower seed to … we deliver best quality flower seed with best competitive price.

Obviously, you must fill … with your information.

Description is not visible for visitors but it is visible for search engines but if you are, having description not related to your content search engines may ignore your description and grab a part of your content as your page description or even worse, they may penalize you because they think you want to fool them.

Keyword tag

You already has some keywords in your title, description and all of them or most of them in your content now you can give the search engines a better guideline about your keywords list and let them know which keywords is more important to you just by listing your keywords in keyword tag and separate them by comma. We suggest having 10-20 keywords and up to 200 characters include spaces.

We suggest to have enough content related to all keywords that you listed in your keyword tag. Some search engines ignore your keywords in your keyword tag but some rely on your keywords list and deny your content.

Major and reputable search engines will rank your web site based on keywords. Keywords are important in your title, description, content and everywhere. Search engines have very smart automated algorithms to check the keywords relativity and readability and may randomly read your content by human to make sure their algorithms doing well and you are doing the right job in your optimization and in your Meta tag declaration.

Keywords list are visible to search engines but invisible for your visitors.

Keyword Density

Search engines measure your keyword density to improve their ranking algorithm quality. Search engines measure your content ratio to your code. Your content is visible for people but your code is not and it is useful for your web browser. If you have a long code and a short content, it may describe a web page with some functionality but no content.

Search engines measure keyword density for each keyword and if you repeat a keyword 100 times in a 300 words, content obviously this is spamming or keyword stuffing then they penalize you.

Very low keyword density represent less  important or less related keyword and too high keyword density represent keyword staffing so try to not over optimize your content and do not repeat your keywords. Write for people not search engines.

Heading Tag

You have three important heading tags, which are h1, h2 and h3. H1 or heading 1 is your heading for your content. It is good to have in top of your content after menu or header image but you can use it after some paragraphs. Heading tag must contextual and related to the content after it, we suggest keeping it short and keeping in mind, it is heading, and it must look like heading as well.

Provide enough content for each heading and try to have one heading 1 and organize different headings as heading 2 or 3.

H1 or heading 1 is the upper level of headings then all heading 2 describe as headings with second priority and all heading 3 define as third priority headings.

Keyword font Style

You can emphasize your keywords by font styling like bold, italic or bolditalic. Search engines pay attention to the emphasized keywords but if you overdo it some of them ignoring them.

We suggest emphasizing your important keywords but carefully and observing.

Keyword Proximity

Keyword Proximity measures how close in the text the keywords. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words.

By the other hand, it is criteria for search engines to find out the relevancy of the keywords to the content even the keywords are not right after each others.

Keyword Prominence

Keyword Prominence also counts, though not as much as anchor text, title tag or headings. However, have in mind that the beginning of a document does not necessarily mean the first paragraph.

Image & Alt

Alt tag is an alternative description for image. Image is not readable by search engines but image alt text is readable and we recommend filling it with relevant short description. We recommend add context to your images by using keyword in your image filename and separate keywords with dash.

Alt tag is readable by search engines and page readers. Try to use contextual and descriptive name in you alt tag.

e.g.
<img src=”keyword.jpg” alt=”keyword” />

Keyword in Anchor

Anchor defines by the <a> tag. Many of the search engines considered the context of a link as a ranking factor. Based on best practices separate keywords by hyphen in links.

An anchor may use in two ways:

To create a link to another document, by using the href attribute

To create a bookmark inside a document, by using the name attribute

The a element is usually called a link or a hyperlink.

The most important attribute of the a element is the href attribute, which indicates the link’s destination.

By default, links will appear as follows in all browsers:

Link or href:
<a href=”http://www.mysite.com/category-keyword.html” title=”keyword”>Keyword in Anchor Text</a>

Title Text:
<a href=”http://www.mysite.com/category-keyword.html” title=”keyword”>Keyword in Anchor Text</a>

Anchor Text:
<a href=”http://www.mysite.com/category-keyword.html” title=”keyword”>Keyword in Anchor Text</a>

Level 02 Page & Keywords Highlights

Optimization means:

• Drive more traffic to your website.
• Convert more visits to your business goals.
• Have better ranking in search results.

Who can use it?

Simple answer everyone, from novice to experts. As much as knowledge you have, you can drill-down the reports to find more detail and technical information.

The information you may never know even if you are a geek, web developer or webmaster.

Because it is very time consuming and almost it is impossible to generate these kinds of reports periodically without using specific SEO analytic service and tools.

Webmasters can take advantage of Master Optimizer SEO Platform to schedule the proper report to people needs these reports.

It work as set it and forget. In addition, you may set it for report scheduling and monitors it from time to time as an SEO evaluation platform.

How Do Start SEO?

SEO services are hundreds up to thousands of dollars. SEO companies offer tons of SEO free Tools or low budget tools but you need the knowledge to use those tools. In addition, you need to know which tool is more effective and which is not.

Search Engine Optimization is too tricky and challenging because there are a tons of things you need to taking care of. You need to have SEO knowledge to know what to do first and what to do next and on and on … then how to monitor your overall improvement.

Optimization Process

We start with your website structure followed by web page and keywords optimization. Then we evaluate your website presence in the web and optimize it systematically.
Here are 10 levels of your optimization process:

• Level 1: Visible & Friendly
• Level 2: Page & Keywords
• Level 3: Evaluation
• Level 4: Usability
• Level 5: Good, Bad, Ugly
• Level 6: Page Optimization
• Level 7: Site Optimization
• Level 8: Social Media Optimization
• Level 9: Conversion Optimization
• Level 10: Link Building

Usability Optimization will improve your website usability for your audience to convert more visits to your business goals.

Good, Bad and Ugly covers search engine optimization overall factors to improve the good ones, evaluate for bad ones and taking care of them if exist and make sure there is no ugly things in your website structure and content.

Page Optimization and Site Optimization are advanced optimization process for growth and maximize the growth during the time. After graduating of these levels your website and web pages will load faster, rank faster and brings you more attention and traffic.

In page optimization and site optimization, we focus on advanced level of optimization factors in detail.

After website and web page optimization, you need more traffic and popularity to take advantage of your website optimization process.

Social Media Optimization adds more channels through social media to your on-line presence and boosts your popularity. The outcome will be increasing of your website visits and driving more audience for your website.

Conversion Optimization is advanced optimization process to convert more visitors to your business goals like sending a web-form, making a phone call, buy or order or any other goal you want as your conversion.

Link Building is an ongoing optimization process and there is no end for this level. In Link Building, we are going to generate more links to your website to improve your ranking, boost your authority and add more value and audience to your on-line presence.

You need to have search engine friendly website also you need to submit your brand new web site to major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. At this level, we evaluate and optimize your web site for below 10 steps:

1. 200 OK
2. Canonical Check
3. Create robots.txt file
4. Create your xml Sitemap
5. Submit your web site to Google
6. Submit your web site to Yahoo
7. Submit your web site to Bing
8. One Back link Rule
9. Create sitemap.html
10. Site map in robots.txt

Analysis your website by free SEO Tools

200 OK

In English: your web site is up and running and all request of visit to your web site returns OK code. You don’t need to worry about this but it is important to make sure your web site or home page is up and running and then it is important to make sure all your web pages are up and running.

Canonical Check

Do you know how many names your web site has? You do not know and you think it is fine. OK but make sure you pay enough attention to this part later because it is confusing, technical and you need to solve it one time forever. Bottom line you are visible but search engines and folks are confused about your formal name so just make your choice and stick to it or later on, you can translate all your other names to one consistent name.

Simple rule: try to stick to http://www.domain.com form.

Consider your home page is index.htm so you have couple of addresses and you need to forward them to one location to take benefit of all visitors and have a search engine friendly web site. Here are possible addresses or URL of your web site home page:

• domain.com
• domain.com/index.htm
• www.domain.com
• www.domain.com/index.htm
• http://domain.com
• http://domain.com/index.htm
• http://www.domain.com/index.htm
• http://domain.com/
• http://www.domain.com/

Tip 1: forward not all of them to http://www.domain.com/ but you need to do anything for http://www.domain.com/ because all other addresses forwarded to this one.

Tip 2: Later on you can forward same web page with different name to one place to prevent having duplicate content because different addresses with the same content consider as duplicate content not one content with duplicate addresses or URLs. We explain this part later.

Create robots.txt file

Web site owners use the /robots.txt file to give instructions about their site to web robots; AKA The Robots Exclusion Protocol.

It works like this:

A robot wants to visits a Website URL, say http://www.example.com/welcome.html. Before it does so, it firsts checks for http://www.example.com/robots.txt

Below is sample of robots.txt for NOT visit any page by any crawler or search engine bot:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

The User-agent: * means this section applies to all robots. The Disallow: / tells the robot that it should not visit any pages on the site.

There are two important considerations when using /robots.txt:

• Robots may ignore your robots.txt especially malware robots that scan the web for security vulnerabilities, and email address harvesters used by spammers will pay no attention.
• The robots.txt file is a publicly available file. Anyone can see what sections of your server you do not want robots to use.

So do not try to use robots.txt to hide information.

Sample of robots.txt to visit ALL pages EXCEPT everything in /cgi-bin/ or /app/ folders:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /app/

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

This is a sample robots.txt file for example.com web site. The robots.txt file URL is: http://www.example.com/robots.txt

Note: robots.txt filename and extension is all lower case and other capitalization is not allowed. Also, remember it is robots.txt NOT robot.txt. Therefore, here are some invalid forms:

• Robots.txt
• ROBOTS.TXT
• robots.TXT

Create your xml Sitemap

Google’s new site map protocol developed in response to the increasing size and complexity of web sites. Business web sites often contained hundreds of products in their catalogues; while the popularity of blogging led to webmasters updating their material at least once a day, not to mention popular community-building tools like forums and message boards.

As web sites got bigger and bigger, it was difficult for search engines to keep track of all this material, sometimes “skipping” information as it crawled through these rapidly changing pages.

Link to XML sitemap Creator

Submit your web site to Google

Google add and update new sites to Google index each time Google crawl the web. Google do not add all submitted URLs to Google index, and Google cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.

Link to Google URL Submission

Submit your web site to Yahoo

Yahoo Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page.

Link to Yahoo URL Submission

Submit your web site to Bing

Generally, Bing web crawler, MSNBot, can find most pages on the Internet. However if your site does not appear on Bing, you can send them the address (URL).

Link to Bing URL submission

Claim Your Site in Alexa

Alexa is a useful resource for people to discover information about websites. You can use Alexa to discover how popular a site is, to find new sites, to learn who owns a site and a lot more.

Link to Alexa Site Owner Tools

Alexa Site Information

Size up your competition on the Web! The Alexa Traffic Rank will show how popular the site is compared to yours, including Reach, Pageviews and more. Get your website traffic data, contact.

Link to Alexa Site Info Tools

One Back-link Rule

Back-links are incoming links to a web site or web page. Inbound links were originally important as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO).

The number of back-links is one indication of the popularity or importance of that web site or page. Outside of SEO, the back links of a web page may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.

In basic link terminology, a back-link is any link received by a web node from another web node.

Back-links are also known as incoming links, inbound links, in-links, and inward links.

Create sitemap.html

This is another version of your web site sitemap for your visitors. It is good to have a sitemap.html and put a link to every web page in your site to help other people find the web page their looking for.

Sitemap in robots.txt

This is a good idea to have sitemap address in your robots.txt file. By doing so you let the robots know where your sitemap located. Here is a sample:

User-Agent: *

Allow: /

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /images/

sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

Level 01 Visible & Friendly Highlights

* Rank is Master Optimizer importance rank of the step.

Referral and direct traffic to your site are other sources of traffic also your blog traffic categorize as referral traffic but your blog may have traffic from search engine so indirectly drive traffic to your site.

Search Engine Traffic – Content Network

Google says, “Google content network reaches 80% of global internet users …” this is Google AdWord page description. Read more about Google content network

Content network is be any site with any content like text, picture, video, multi-media or any other form of the content. Your blog is a sample of content network. Content network may use as advertising channel with content Ad or text ad or they may use as promotional channel by decreasing more awareness to generate more traffic and drive it to target site.

Content network with generate more powerful traffic with better conversion rate if they have related content about targeted site.

People read news, blogs or other websites. You can use of these traffic as a source of traffic to drive your desired traffic to your site.

Search Engine Traffic – Direct Search

People are searching for information by using search engines like Google, Bing, Ask, Yahoo, AOL and so on.

People do search by entering the search term in the search engines. Search term may have one or more keywords. Search engine generate a result page for any individual search and show the result to them.

SERP

SERP stand for “Search Engine Result Page”. SERP is the result page generated by search engine to response to the search.

SERP Rank

Rank in Search Engine Result Page is a strong traffic source and this is the major goal of the most search engine optimization projects. Every one loves to have rank #1 in SERP but still is not clear how much does it cost? Moreover, how much does it worth?

Keyword Ranking

People search by keyword query then search engine rank the result based on the keyword query and generates the result page as text results. Keywords are the great game player in the search industry but the optimization techniques for the keywords are going to be more difficult.

Conclusion

Do not obsess with ranking. Ranking must show you the measurable result and must be translate to your business goals or objectives. As long-term strategy, better ranking or even rank #1 is perfect but ranking is just a goal in the short and mid-term optimization projects. By targeting the right keywords, you can stay on the top of the search results, improve your results, and drive more traffic to your site.

Ranking – Google PageRank™

“The basis of Google’s search technology is called PageRank™, and assigns an “importance” value to each page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that’s not why it’s called PageRank. It’s actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.” Read more in Google

Google PageRank™ is one of the confusing terms in the optimization, process people use it in many ways, everyone explains it in different way, and many business owners think it has highly value.

PageRank™ is one of the 200 signals in the Google ranking algorithm on search ranking and it is important to consider it is one part of the system not all of it. Read more in Google

Google PageRank™ is a metrics describe how your page is important as the Google point of view. Google describe it is not a good metric to focus on it as an overall result.

Google PageRank™ is from 0-10 and it is logarithmic scale, let’s say PR2 is 10 times more than PR1 and PR3 is 10 times more than PR2. 10 is the highest Google PageRank™.

Do not obsess with Google PageRank™ there are another simpler metrics to focus on and understand it better.

Ranking – Alexa Traffic Rank

“Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is known for its toolbar and website.”

“Alexa ranks sites based on tracking information of users of its Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer and from integrated sidebars in Mozilla and Netscape.”

There is some controversy over how representative Alexa’s user base is of typical Internet behavior, especially for less trafficked sites. On 2008, Alexa announce that they had released the new Alexa ranking system, claiming that they now take into account more data sources “beyond Alexa Toolbar users”. Read more in WikiPedia

Alexa Ranking is linear and 1 is highest rank. Alexa is good to compare same company in the same industry and it works better for high traffic sites, Low traffic sites may have less useful information in their Alexa ranking.

Alexa Site Information can size up your competitors and your site.

Ranking – Technorati Authority Rank

“Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs. By June 2008, Technorati was indexing 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. The name Technorati is a blend of the words technology and literati, which invokes the notion of technological intelligence or intellectualism.” Read more in WikiPedia

“Technorati is an authority calculation website to measures site’s standing & influence in the blogosphere.”

“Technorati Rank is a site’s rank among the Technorati Authority of all sites. 1 is the highest Technorati rank.” Technorati Rank is linear and simpler to understand and easier to compare sites among each other. Read more in Technorati

Conclusion

Brand management or being an authority in your industry may measure by Google PageRank™, Alexa Traffic Ranking or Technorati Authority Rank, which are good, but it more likely consider as long-term commitment or optimization strategy.

Why Optimization

The web site is the online presence of your B2B, B2C or C2C relationship. You offer content, product or service for people as business-to-business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C) or consumer-to-consumer (C2C) relationship. You need audience for your content or customer for your product or service or affiliate. You need to have perfect on-line presence. You need to promote your on-line presence. In addition, you need to drive more traffic, more leads, more sales and more audience to run a successful business. But how?

What is in it for me?

Small business web site optimization is tricky and catchy.

• Why do we need optimization at all?
• Is it worth it?
• What is in it for my business?

Why do we need optimization at all?

Optimum means the best value and we all know value comes with the price. However, what is the optimum price obviously as much as lower it is better. However, what is the optimum outcome, again obviously more outcome is better with lower cost. You may notice but here is a catch and here is the hard part.

Optimization project must be best for client, best for contractor and best for audience or end users.

I am saying we need best of business process, best investment, best outcome, best sales, best of everything and the optimization is the key but optimization project must have optimum outcome with best cost and it must be measurable.

Is it worth it?

If it is not worth, it or the outcome is fuzzy not it is not. It is worth it if it can show the result or can prove the progress. Optimization project goals in short-term, let’s say in 3 months is different from mid-term or let’s say in a year and optimization goals and objective for long-term is different too but all these terms must be combine together and support together as a path with different strategy but different perspective and approach.

What is in it for my business?

Honestly, with undefined goals and objective, with the wrong person and with the undesirables result it is headache and wasting your time and your money. You need to ask yourself at the first step, what do I need for my business? How much does it cost? How long does it take? Alternatively, simply what is in it for my business?

You may consider doing it by yourself, someone does it in-house, or someone does it outside of your company as a firm, company or individual.  You need to have all the answers and clear, measurable result with report but there are some bad short cut, and it raises a lot of confusion. You need to know how to translate your goals to your optimization process and how to measure them.