Promoting Your Web Site

Promoting Your Web Site__

Can't you just hire an expert to promote your site for you? Certainly. Many people, including the author of this article, offer Web site promotion services for a fee. In fact, having someone help you with your site promotion is not a bad idea, at least if you find the right person. But even if you use a professional submitter, you need to know the basics of site promotion.

The first reason is that there is a lot of misleading, inaccurate and just plain fraudulent information out there. The business of promoting Web sites is as thick with shysters and scam artists as the used car business. Many a Web site owner has paid big money to some sharpie who made wild promises, only to get little or nothing for their money. The sad part is that many of these pigeons never even know they've been taken - their nice new Web sites are simply getting no visitors, and they don't understand why not. To learn how to tell valuable site promotion resources from time-wasting scams, read the article Step Right Up!

The second reason to educate yourself is that site promotion is an ongoing process. To maximize your site traffic, you need to monitor it constantly, and make judgements about what you can do to improve it. If you know at least the basics of how the process works, you'll be in a good position to decide whether it's best for you to hire an outside consultant, train someone in your company, or simply do it yourself.

Before proceeding further, let's define some terms.

Traffic - The number of people who visit your site. The more of this you get, the better. Whether you're selling something online, putting out information about your company, or whatever, more traffic means more potential sales. If you don't promote your Web site, your traffic will probably hover around zero.

Promotion - Anything you do to increase your site traffic. This includes site submission, advertising, sending out press releases, etc.

Submission - The process of notifying the various search engines and related sites about your Web site.

Search Engines - Sites that people use to search for information on the Web. This is the primary way that people find Web sites, so a Web site owner needs to know as much as possible about search engines and how they work. Although some popular sites such as Yahoo are more accurately described as "directories," the term "search engines" is often used to include all sites that act as tools for people to find other sites.

Submitting to Search Engines

What's the first step in promoting your Web site? Submitting to the search engines? Not quite. Good Web site marketing is something that begins with Web site design. Your site should be designed with promotion and marketing in mind. You'll see why, once you understand how search engines work.

There are millions of Web sites out there today, and the total number of pages must be in the billions. How do people find the information they want? By using search engines and directories. True, some people type in URLs they got from a TV or magazine ad, or that some guy whispered to them on a street corner, and quite a few find sites by following links from other sites. But the majority of Web surfers find stuff using one of the most popular search engines: Yahoo, Excite, Altavista, Infoseek, and Lycos (to visit any of these, just stick a ".com" on the end and paste it into your browser).

Each of the search engines is slightly different, and people have their favorites, but they all work in basically the same way. The user types in a word or a phrase, hits "search," and is rewarded with a list of links (the "search results") that hopefully have something to do with what's being looked for. The words the user typed in are called "keywords," and the search engine finds links by matching these keywords to ones found in its database.

Do you suppose the search engine actually visits every site on the Web to see if it can find the keywords, every time someone does a search? Nope. That would be like Santa Claus visiting every house in the world every Christmas Eve. No posible, Señor. No, the way it works is this: a search engine has a database, which lists every Web site that the search engine knows about. When a search is performed, it tries to find matches in the database for the keywords entered.

As a Web site owner, you want search engines to send you as many visitors as possible. Therefore, you want to make sure that you are in the databases of as many search engines as possible. This is pretty simple. All the major search engines allow you to register your site free (Goto.com is the only one of any significance that charges for listings, and it remains to be seen whether this is a viable model for a search engine). You can simply go to each major search site, click on "Add Your Site," "Submit URL," or something similarly worded, and fill in your site information.

As this is a rather tedious process, there are several tools available that will automatically submit your information to several search engines at a time. Instead of visiting all the sites and copying and pasting in the same info a dozen times, you simply enter it once, and the "auto-submitter" sends it to the search engines. Auto-submitters include SubmitIt (submitit.com) and AddIt (addit.com). The best of them all is SelfPromotion.com, which submits to a huge list of engines, keeps track of all the submissions you've made, and includes a wealth of good submission information and advice. All these services offer a basic free service, with additional features available at a small price.

As long as you follow their rules, and don't attempt to "spam" the engines with multiple submissions, most or all of the major search engines will be happy to list your site in their database (although they may be less than punctual about it). So far so good, but this by itself isn't enough to make sure your site gets noticed. Think about what happens when you search for something at a search engine. Unless your search term is something really unusual, the engine will come back with dozens, if not thousands, of links that matched the search term. Of course, they aren't all displayed on one page. Only the top 10 or 20 results will be displayed, with a link at the bottom to click on to see the next 10 or 20 (most search engines allow the user to specify how many results will be displayed on a page). Guess what? Most people seldom or never click on the link to see the second page of results, much less the third page or the thirty-third. If your site doesn't come up near the top of a particular search, then it almost might as well not be in the database at all.

When someone searches for something that has to do with your site, you want your site to come up as near the top of the list as possible. In other words, you want to optimize your ranking with the search engine. This obviously makes the next question "How do search engines determine rankings?" The answer has to do with keywords.

Using Keywords to Maximize Search Engine Positioning

Search engines use the number and relative importance of keywords to determine how a page will rank in a particular search. For example, if someone searches on "butterbeans," then a page which is titled "The Butterbean Bazaar" and has the word "butterbeans" on it in a dozen places is likely to rank near the top of the list. A site that has the word "butterbeans" on it once or twice will rank somewhat lower. A site that has the word "beans" on it will rank near the bottom, and beanless sites will not make it into the search results at all. Every search engine has its own formula for ranking search results, and they're as jealously guarded as secret barbecue sauce formulas. The basic idea, however, is that the more instances of a certain keyword a page has, the higher it will rank in the results of a search for that keyword. Also, greater weight is given to keywords that appear in things like page titles, section headings, and so on.

This well-known fact has led many smart-alecky souls to load their pages down with endless repetitions of words like "sex," "free," and whatever else they think people search for. Every sneaky trick in the book, like invisible text, keywords hidden within HTML tags, etc. has been employed in the mad rush for higher rankings. Such ploys are counter-productive, however. If everyone chose to use excessive and/or inappropriate keywords, then search engines would quickly become useless. Sooner or later, no matter what you searched for, all you would get would be MLM and porno sites. Therefore, the search engines wage an ongoing battle against "keyword stuffers" and "spamdexers." If they suspect you're trying to abuse the system, they can and will bar your site. As just one example, many search engines will disqualify any site that uses invisible text.

The point of all this is twofold - in order to maximize your rankings at the search engines, it's important to be sure that your pages include plenty of appropriate keywords. However, it's also important not to overdo things, and do harm to yourself in your zeal (see How to Avoid Spamming the Search Engines). This is why we said earlier that submitting to search engines is not really the first step in site promotion. The first step is designing your pages to be "search-engine friendly." This means not only using keywords appropriately, but also avoiding certain design techniques that can confuse search engines, such as frames and certain types of dynamic page delivery.

The proper use of keywords can be an arcane subject, and we won't get into the fine points here. Basically, what you need to do is to think of all the words that someone might type into a search engine if they were looking for a site like yours. Visitors who aren't looking for butterbeans (or whatever it is you have) do you no good, so pick only keywords that relate to what your site is about. Normally, most or all of these keywords will be found in the text of your site.

Once you have a list of keywords, you want to craft a site description that uses some of the keywords. This should be a brief (many search engines have a limit of 25 words), readable sentence that sums up what your site has to offer. For example, if you're selling butterbeans, and you've come up with the following list of keywords:

* Butterbeans
* Beans
* Lima beans
* Biscuits
* Southern cooking

Then a good description might look like this:

"We sell butterbeans and lima beans, which taste great with biscuits and other Southern cooking. Free butterbean recipes and a butterbean discussion forum."

Notice how we worked in all the most important keywords (in reality, your list of keywords should probably be longer, perhaps 10 to 20 words or phrases), and we even managed to mention the most important one, "butterbeans," twice. However, the description reads like a normal sentence, not just a list of keywords. Notice also that we mentioned a couple of site features that might entice people to visit.

Craft your site description carefully, because it will be used in several places. When you submit your site to the search engines, you'll be asked for a description. This description will come up when someone finds your site in a search, so make sure that it will make people want to visit (but never use marketing copy like "The leading company…" or "The most useful site…"). This description, or a variation, should also be used in your TITLE tag.

The TITLE tag appears in the HEAD section of your HTML page. When a surfer views a Web page, it is the TITLE that appears in the top bar of the browser. If someone selects your site to be a "bookmark" (Netscape) or "favorite" (MS Explorer) in their browser, the TITLE will appear as the name of the "bookmark" or "favorite." Also, some search engines assign greater weight to keywords that appear in the TITLE tag. Your TITLE tag should begin with the official name of your Web site. It should also include a very brief description of the site. For example:

Resist the temptation to make your TITLE a mindless list of keywords - it will hurt more than it will help. And never include useless verbiage like "Welcome to the Web Site of…" in a TITLE tag. It's a waste of important virtual real estate.

There are two other tags that appear in the HEAD section which are important to site promotion: the META DESCRIPTION and META KEYWORDS tags. Some, but not all, search engines use these tags to determine your ranking. The rules for the META DESCRIPTION tag are basically the same as those for the TITLE tag, although it's fine for the two to be slightly different. The META KEYWORDS tag is basically a list of keywords. There's nothing to be gained by packing this tag with an endless list of words - most experts believe that the search engines don't index more than a certain number. Pick the ones that you really think people are going to use to search for sites like yours. Most of the gurus agree that these keywords should be all in lowercase, separated by commas or spaces.

The most important place to include keywords is in the body text of your pages. Again, don't go wild - write in a normal, readable style. But be sure that your most important keywords are mentioned at least once or twice, and consider using some of them in page headings and subheadings.

Ready to submit?

Well, we've mixed up the order of things a bit, but it's necessary to understand how search engines work in order to realize why keywords are so important. Once you've got your pages nice and optimized, make a final system check before you start submitting. Never submit your site to the search engines until it's 100% ready for the public. See the article Before You Submit for a list of things to check before you submit your site.

As we mentioned earlier, there are actually two different kinds of search site, which are often lumped together under the term "search engine." A search engine proper uses an automatic software agent called a "spider" to search (or "crawl") the Web for sites to index for its database. Theoretically, it's not necessary to submit your site to spider-based search engines, because the spider will sooner or later find your site on its own. Of course, no wise Web owner would leave such a critical matter to chance, so you can and should submit your site to all the major search engines. It's only necessary to submit your home page, however - the spider will automatically find and index all the other pages by following links. Although the search engines hate (and punish) overzealous souls who try to use tricks to get more listings, they have nothing against autosubmitters (at least the major ones), so I recommend using one to save yourself a lot of tedious work.

At the risk (nay, the certainty) of repeating myself, here is a fact that may save you a lot of wasted time. There are not, repeat not, a thousand, or even a hundred, search engines that are worth submitting to. Yes, there are thousands of sites claiming to be, or wishing to be, search engines, but most of them are simply attempts to get your money, or to get your email address so that they can send you spam. Almost all search engine traffic goes to the top twenty or thirty search engines. Submitting to all the piddly little ones is a complete waste of time, and will net you only spam. The exception is specialty search engines, which focus on a particular topic or geographic area. They are well worthwhile, and will be discussed in more detail later.

The most important "search engine" of all is more accurately described as a "directory." This is Yahoo, by far the most popular search site on the Web. A directory does not use an automated spider to find sites to index. Instead, real human beings comb through the trillions of sites submitted to choose which ones are worthy of being listed. For the searcher, this is good, as it means that Yahoo includes far less flotsam and jetsam than search engines do. For the Web site owner, it's not so promising, because Yahoo is very hard to get into. If you do get in, you'll see your traffic climb immediately, so it's well worth putting some time in to try to get listed.

Resist the temptation to submit over and over - it won't work. Submissions are reviewed by real editors, so follow their instructions to the letter, and really try to convince them that your site is a useful resource. Some good tips are to be found on the rather obscure page called "How to Suggest Your Site," and selfpromotion.com also has some good Yahoo tips.

Another directory that's very important is the Open Directory (http://directory.netscape.com/). It's far easier to get into than Yahoo, and unlike Yahoo, it's pretty easy to get listed in multiple categories, or to have several pages from your site listed (assuming that they really have different types of content). You shouldn't use an autosubmitter to submit to Yahoo and Open Directory. Take your time and craft your submissions carefully to these two important sites.

After You Submit

Submitting to search engines is a bit like washing windows - some panes just don't come clean without some extra scrubbing, and they all get dirty again. Getting listed can take anywhere from a few days to a few months. Sometimes a search engine just won't list your site at all, for reasons which elude even the most expert Web promotion gurus. For this reason, it's absolutely essential that you check all the search engines a month or so after you submit. If you're not in there, submit again. Don't forget our warnings against spamming the engines, but resubmitting every month or two is not likely to anger them.

Some search engines may drop your site from their database for reasons unknown, and some place older listings lower in their rankings. Also, if anything changes on your site (as it should), then the search engines should be instructed to reindex your site. For these reasons, it's a good idea to re-submit to the major search engines at least every six months or so, or any time you make a major site revision. Sound like a lot of work? Not really, especially if you use an autosubmitter. Some of them can also automate the process of checking to see if you are listed.

Submitting to search engines is an essential first step, but there are lots of other things you can do to promote your site. The name of the game is to get as much traffic as you can, so you want to get as many links pointing to your site as you can. The Web is so large and complex that there's practically no limit to the amount of time you can spend trying to stir up traffic.

Specialty search engines and directories are well worth investigating. There are lots of sites that feature links to sites about a particular topic, such as travel, investing, food, etc. Some are small search engines, which allow users to search for sites, while others are "links pages," which simply have static lists of links that users can browse. These can be very worthwhile if your site happens to fit into a topic that they cover. Don't forget our caveat about all the marginal sites out there. If a page looks amateurishly done, or appears not to have been updated in a long time, it probably gets little or no traffic.

Link exchanges are very valuable for new and/or smaller sites. These outfits let you submit a banner ad to them in return for placing their ad on your site. Every time someone sees the banner on your site, you earn credit towards displays of your banner on other member sites. The largest of these is the Internet LinkExchange, but there is also the Hyperbanner and several others.

A time-honored and effective way to build traffic is to exchange links with related sites. Your competitors probably won't want to put up a link to your site (then again, they may), but your suppliers, customers and other companies that you work with may do so. Content sites that cover topics related to your site, and sites of companies that make related products, are good candidates for reciprocal links. Most folks will expect you to respond in kind by adding a link to their site. If you like, you can put all these links on a special "links page" so they don't clutter up your home page. If you have lots of useful links, your links page may even become a valuable resource in its own right, building even more traffic for your site.

Email newsletters are terrific traffic-builders. An announcement newsletter, which allows you to send email to visitors who sign up for the list, can be used to notify customers and potential customers of new features on your site, special offers, etc. A discussion list, which allows any list members to post messages, can be a valuable resource for members, and can be used to plug your site. For details of how email lists can be used to build site traffic, see the article, Mailing Lists for Web Sites.

Don't confuse mailing lists with spam. A mailing list consists of people who signed up to receive messages, and who can unsubscribe from the list at any time. Spam is mass email sent to people who never asked to receive it. Don't believe the promises of the scamsters who offer to set you up with spam lists. Spamming will cripple your traffic, and quite possibly put your Web site out of business, as all hosting services have strict anti-spam policies, and will cancel the account of a spammer in a heartbeat.

Whether you have your own mailing list or not, participating in appropriate discussion lists and online forums can be a good way to increase awareness of your site, and build traffic. Be careful to use proper netiquette, and obey all the guidelines of any group that you participate in. Most lists won't tolerate blatant advertising, but see nothing wrong in sneaking in a plug for your site here and there, in the course of contributing meaningfully to the discussion.

What about paid advertising? As an employee of an advertising-supported network of Web sites, I hate to bite the hand that feeds me, but in my experience, buying banner advertising is seldom cost-effective for a small business. To get results from banner ads, you need to spend some serious money, and you need to be prepared to refine both the banners and their placement on an ongoing basis. Mailing list ads, however, are generally far cheaper, and often reach much more finely-targeted audiences, than banner ads. If you can find a mailing list or two that target the type of people you're trying to reach, it might be well worthwhile to try a few ads.

Some more tips on things you can do to promote your Web site can be found in my recent WDVL article, You've submitted to all the search engines. Now what?

Promoting your Web site is an endless task. You could sit at your computer for twelve hours a day for weeks, and still not exhaust all the potential ways to stir up traffic. But don't despair. As with all things, there's a point of diminishing returns - submitting your site to the major search engines carefully and thoroughly, and taking a few of the other steps listed above, should be quite enough to get some traffic rolling your way. After that, the most important thing for Internet success is the same as in any business - sell a quality product or service at a competitive price. If you don't do that, then all the promotion and marketing in the world will be a waste of time.
by, Abhishek SEO

How to add an image to a Web page?

As you've probably noticed by now, a Web page can contain not just text, but pictures as well. Oh, excuse me, they're actually called "images." Now, slapping a few pix on a page is simple enough, but there are a few little twists that are quite important. You need to know about these little gotchas, or else your Web images will loudly scream "Beginner!" to anyone who visits your pages. Of course, a beginner is exactly what you are, or you wouldn't be reading this, the Web design tutorial for clueless newbies. So let's start at the very beginning.

How to add an image to a Web page?

My friends, an image is included in a Web page by means of the IMG (image) tag. In its simplest form, an image tag looks like this:


The SRC (source) attribute specifies the name of the image file to be displayed. Like the HREF in an A (anchor) tag, the SRC statement must specify the appropriate path to the image file. This path can be absolute or relative. An absolute path specifies the complete URL of the image file, for example:

A relative path specifies only the path from the page on which the IMG tag is found to the image file, for example:

In this example, the image file is found in a directory called "images." For convenience, many site builders put all their images in one directory, often called "images," though you may call it whatever you please. The path in this example will only work if the "images" directory is under the directory where the referring page is found. If the referring page and the image file are in two directories at the same level, the tag would be so:


This tells the browser to go up one level, then look for the directory called "images."

If the image can't be found, or can't be displayed for any reason, you will see a little icon that's supposed to look like a "broken image" (in Netscape), or a little square with an X in it (in MS Explorer). If this is the case, it may be that the path specified in your IMG tag is incorrect. Try including the absolute path, and see if that works. Normally, relative paths are used whenever possible, as this reduces load time.

For clarity, I use ALL CAPS for the names of tags and attributes, but it doesn't matter whether you use upper or lower case. Be careful about case in filenames, however. Quite a lot of Web pages are designed on Windows systems, but served by Unix machines. Windows and Unix treat case differently, so always make sure that the filename specified in a tag is exactly the same as the actual name of the file on the server.

Web Image File Formats

At the moment, Web browsers can only display two types of graphic files: GIF and JPG (these are sometimes called JPEG, and have a .jpg or .jpeg file extension). These are both compressed file formats, designed to load fairly quickly in the bandwidth-deprived world of the Web. Both formats have drawbacks, and a newer file format called PNG is in the offing. It's worth reading this recent article about the PNG format, but it probably won't come into widespread use for a while yet, so we beginners will stick with GIFs and JPGs for now.

To create a GIF or JPG, simply save your graphic in the desired format. All the newer graphics software supports both. Which format to use? For technical reasons which we won't get into, JPG tends to look better for photographs, while GIF works better for other graphics. However, only GIF allows you to create transparent and interlaced graphics (details later).

Keep in mind that both GIF and JPG are compressed formats, designed to be used only for the final output of your creative process. Always create your graphics in the native format of your graphics software (.psd if you use Photoshop, for example), and make the conversion to GIF or JPG the very last step. If you need to edit your graphics later, go back to the original files - don't try to edit a GIF or JPG if you can avoid it. Sometimes you can get away with editing these files, but sometimes they come out looking terrible, especially JPGs.

Also keep in mind that even a cheap printer uses a much higher resolution (300 dots per inch or more) than does the (72 dpi) Web. Although it is possible to print a GIF or JPG image, the result will be very low-quality. Always print from the native format of your graphics software, or convert to a high-quality format such as .tif or .bmp. The moral of the story is always to keep your original (native-format) graphics files for future use. If you have a design shop creating graphics for you, make sure they give you the original Photoshop (or whatever) files, not just the GIFs or JPGs.

Graphics Software

Web graphics can be created with any decent graphics editing software, ranging from the humble Paint program included with Windows to big daddy Photoshop. Traditionally, the big distinction in graphics programs is between bitmap-based (Photoshop, Painter, PaintShop Pro) and vector-based (CorelDraw, Illustrator) systems. The former, sometimes called "paint" programs, let you work with photographs, and create graphics by specifying the color value for each pixel (Excuse me, greenies! A pixel is the smallest unit of graphic information - one little dot on your computer screen). Vector graphics programs, on the other hand, let you "draw" stuff using lines, geometric shapes, etc. Either type of software can export files in GIF and JPG format these days, so use the graphic editor of your choice.

Here's a little secret, though - Photoshop may be the industry standard, the cock of the walk, and all that, but it's pricey, and there are several packages out there that are almost as good, with much lower pricetags. Various graphics packages are available for free download in our Web Tools Download Section. One excellent and cheap choice is Paint Shop Pro.

Load Time

The load time of your graphics is of critical importance. The larger the file, the longer it will take to load, and graphics files can be very large indeed. Huge graphics that take forever to load are a sure sign of an amateur site, and they will chase visitors away. Fortunately, there are several things you can do to keep your load times reasonable.

The first is simply to be sparing with graphics. If a picture isn't worth a thousand words, don't use it. And keep them small. Paradoxically, a large image (more than about 300 pixels wide) is more likely to bog things down than several smaller ones. Consider breaking a large image up into smaller ones, and "mortising" them together with a table. Dave Siegel explains how to do this in his fine book, Creating Killer Web Sites.

Another important thing to do is to "optimize" your graphic files. Graphic files include information about the color palette of the image, which can be superfluous. By discarding information about colors that aren't used in the image, the file size can sometimes be greatly reduced, with no loss in quality. In fact, there are a number of little tricks you can use to slim down those bulky images, and several nifty shareware products that automate the process for you.

Another trick is to use the interlaced GIF format. An ordinary GIF (or JPG) loads in discrete chunks, like a carton being filled up with smaller boxes. With an interlaced GIF however, the whole thing loads gradually, a blurry image that becomes sharper and sharper until it's fully loaded. Like a tray of water freezing into ice (although hopefully a bit faster). Although it doesn't really load any faster (a fraction of a second slower, actually), it seems to load faster, and it's more convenient for the user, because they can get an idea of what the image is without waiting for the whole thing.

GIFs may also be made transparent. A transparent GIF allows you to designate one color to be transparent, meaning that the background will show through. Usually, the background color of the image is selected as the transparent color, so the image will seem to "float" over a Web page. A non-transparent GIF however, will seem to have a box around it. Most images will look better transparent. One exception is an ad banner. An ad banner should never be transparent, as it may be displayed on various different sites, and you never know what their background color will be.

Most graphics editing packages can simply save a file as an interlaced (and/or transparent) GIF, and there are also lots of shareware products that can convert existing files. For more on transparent and interlaced GIFs, see Bruce's tutorial on the subject, which also includes links to various graphic software for your downloading pleasure.

Attributes of the IMG Tag

The image tag can take several attributes, and it's important to use them correctly. See the Web Developer's Journal logo to the right?
Unlike our first example, this IMG tag includes lots of attributes. All are optional, but all are highly recommended. Let's look at them one at a time.

First, note that this image is also a hyperlink. To make a graphic a link, just put an A (anchor) tag around it as you would a bit of text. As you would with text, make sure that there is no space between the anchor tag and the image tag, or you'll end up with an ugly little "tick" next to the graphic. Also, make sure that the BORDER attribute is set to "0" or else a border will automatically be added.

WIDTH and HEIGHT Attributes

These tell the browser to set aside a box of the specified size for the graphic, so the browser can go on and continue loading the rest of the page while the graphic loads. If these attributes are not included, then the browser must wait to load the whole graphic before it can go on to the next item, stalling the page load and causing your visitors to mutter "Amateurs!" as they quickly click away to your competitor's site.

Make sure that your WIDTH and HEIGHT values are correct. If they're not, the browser will stretch (or squash) the graphic to the specified values, and it will look abysmal. HTML editors like Homesite can automatically calculate the values for you.

Well, has anybody caught my error yet? In correct HTML 4.0, values of attributes must be set off by quotation marks. Although

WIDTH=134 HEIGHT=28

still works, at some point in the future it may not, so it's better to use the correct form:

WIDTH="134" HEIGHT="28"

BORDER Attribute

This can be used to add a border to your graphic, if desired. If the image is not a hyperlink, the BORDER attribute can be omitted. If it is a link however, BORDER should always be set to "0", or a border will be added.

ALT (Alternate Text) Attribute

Often incorrectly referred to as "alt tags" (ALT is an attribute of the IMG tag), these are very important. The idea is to include a text description of the graphic, so that if the graphic fails to load for some reason, the visitor can get an idea of what it is. In fact, some people surf with images off, and rely on the ALT text to tell them which images they might want to look at. Also, current browsers will make the ALT text pop up whenever the mouse is positioned over the graphic (you can do this with hyperlinks, too - some call these "tool tips"). This can be used to display handy messages for a variety of reasons. Some even advocate including keywords in your ALT text, as some search engines use them to rank pages.

ALIGN Attribute

Notice how the Web Developer's Journal logo nestles there on the right, and the text flows around it? This is done by using the ALIGN attribute, which can have the values:

left
right
top
texttop
middle
absmiddle
baseline
bottom
absbottom

The related HSPACE and VSPACE attributes create a horizontal space and a vertical space, respectively, between the graphic and the surrounding text, with the value specified in pixels.

In fact, the IMG tag can take lots of other attributes, which you can use to do all sorts of nifty things. The ones described here are enough for a beginner to fool with, however. If you want to delve deeper into HTML, check out a good HTML reference book, or consult the help section of a good HTML editor - Homesite has an excellent, comprehensive list of all the HTML 4.0 tags.
Further Reading

* Designing Winning Ad Banners
...in which I tell how to create attractive, appropriate, attention-getting banners, using graphic tools like Photoshop or Paintshop Pro, along with animated GIFs, Java, Shockwave and HTML banners.

* Designing Attractive Web Pages
...in which I expound upon the art of designing attractive Web pages, of which graphic wisdom is no small part.

* Pixel Anatomy 101
...in which Mark Larmand gets down to details about optimizing graphics for the Web. You'll learn which format to choose, as well as how to minimize file sizes and maximize quality. Wondering about the "Web-safe" palette? Here are all the details on how to produce great-looking, fast-loading Gifs and Jpgs.

* Creating Web Animations
A step-by-step tutorial on creating animated images for Web pages. You'll learn how to use the most popular tools, and how to optimize your animations for minimal load time.

* Image Maps
An Image Map is a way of creating interactivity with the end user, but without the use of high-tech plugins or bulky applets. Just one image, a small snippet of HTML code, and the user's mouse are all that's required to turn a standard static graphic into one that can be interactive and even entertaining to Web site visitors.
contributed by, ABHISHEK SEO

Building Web Sites

What's the diff between the Internet and the Web? The Internet refers to the public global network of computers. These computers can exchange any kind of data in one of many different ways. The Web refers to that subset of the Internet which may be accessed using a Web browser, mostly consisting of pages of text and graphics written in HTML. E-mail, newsgroups, and online gaming are examples of Internet applications that aren't necessarily part of the Web (although they can be). In this series, we'll learn how to use the Internet to provide all kinds of services, but the centerpiece of our Internet strategy will be a Web site.

The mother of this particular Web site - What is a Web site? A Web site is nothing more or less than a bunch of files sitting on the hard drive of a Web server. A Web server is simply a computer that's permanently connected to the Internet, and has an application running that allows anyone else connected to the Internet to transfer files from the Web server to their own machine. By the way, the term "Web server" means both the machine itself and the software running on it.

When you visit a Web site, what you are doing is sending a message to a Web server (which could be physically located anywhere from New Jersey to New Delhi), asking it to send you (or serve) a certain set of files, usually text and pictures. These files are displayed by your browser program, but not permanently saved to your computer's hard drive (unless you choose to save them). It would also be correct to say that you are downloading files from the Web server, but that word is usually used to refer to files that you're saving on your hard drive for future use, like a program update or a picture.

So to have a Web site, I gotta have my own Web server? Forget it! A Web server is basically just a computer, but it needs to be a pretty beefy box, with a super-fast (and super-expensive) permanent connection to the Internet. It also needs to be protected against system crashes, power outages, hackers, and land knows what-all. The more visitors your Web site gets, the more powerful Web server(s) you'll need to handle the load. The big sites live on "server farms," huge clusters of computers with all kinds of gadgetry hooked up to them, and a bunch of geeks to keep them fed and watered 24 hours a day.

It should be obvious that running a Web server is a task worth taking on only for sizable companies with a large Web presence, or for nerds who love the scene. The rest of us will "out-source our Web hosting needs," to put it in suit language. In other words, you can simply rent space on a Web server at a "hosting service" or "Internet service provider." You supply the material, and they make it available on the Web, for a monthly fee.

Of course, a lot of consumer-oriented Web outfits, like AOL, Geocities and others, allow you to put up Web sites on their servers at low cost, or even free. However, the services they offer are very basic, designed for people with personal Web pages. They accept your material only subject to their procedures and rules, and the amount of space and bandwidth they offer is limited. If you want a Web site for your small business, you need to go with a proper hosting service.

Hosting services, also called service providers or ISPs, come in all sizes, prices and levels of competence. The ISP that hosts your Web site could be the same ISP that you use to dail in to the Internet, but it need not be. The service you use for dialing in needs to be local, but you can have your Web site hosted at any ISP you choose, anywhere in the world. Of course, if your local ISP offers hosting services that meet your needs, there's little reason to look further. If you want to shop around for a hosting service, check out ISPcheck (http://www.ispcheck.com), or The List (http://www.thelist.com).

Hosting a basic Web site should cost you around 50 bucks a month, and probably a setup fee. A medium-size business that needs some more sophisticated services can expect to pay a couple of hundred a month. How much you pay is determined by how much disk space you need and how much traffic your site gets.

Like many businesses, a lot of ISPs try to capitalize on your ignorance by charging fees for ongoing maintenance that you could learn to do yourself. If you're at all serious about having a Web site, you need to have full, unrestricted access to the files that constitute your site. When you need to make changes to your Web files, you do so by connecting to the Web server via FTP (explained later) and transferring files from your hard drive to the server's hard drive. Don't go for deals that let you make only a certain number of changes per month, or that charge fees for making changes to your site. You're about to learn how to make changes to your files directly, any time you like, so insist that you have full FTP and Telnet access to your server. Sometimes this is called a "virtual server" account, because it appears to you as if you have your very own Web server (although in fact there may be several sites hosted on one physical machine).

To be exact, this often means that you have access only to the directory on the Web server that contains your actual Web documents (HTML files, image files, etc.), usually called the "htdocs" directory. There are lots of other directories on the server, containing files that control the configuration of the server, programs that run on the server, and so on. You won't need access to those directories unless you plan to add more sophisticated programs to your site, such as special CGI programs (more later - some ISPs can be sticky about this).

With the Internet, as you can see, there are always a thousand tangents you can go off on, so let's get back to the matter at hand. You've chosen a service provider to host your site, and you've used an HTML editor to create a few preliminary pages. How do you make them live on the Web?

First we'll connect to the Internet, using our dial-up connection. Next we'll use a software utility called an FTP client to connect to our Web server and transfer files. An FTP client is a simple piece of software that allows you to use File Transfer Protocol (FTP). WS_FTP is a very good one, and it's cheap shareware. Some "all-in-one" design packages like FrontPage or Dreamweaver have FTP clients built in. You can download an FTP client from our Web Tools Download Page.

Open the FTP client, and type in the name of your Web server (myisp.com, or whatever), your login name and your password (the hosting service gave you these when you set up your account). The FTP client will connect to the remote Web server, and you should now see two windowpanes, one showing the files on your local computer, and one showing the files on the remote computer (the Web server). Now it should be obvious what to do. Any files you want to change you simply replace with the new versions by dragging and dropping, or whatever file transfer commands your FTP client uses.

You'll need to keep a complete copy of your Web site on your local hard drive. When you want to make changes to a page (or graphic or whatever), you make changes to your local copy, then log in to the Web server and replace the old files with the new. In case you screw up, it's not a bad idea to keep a second copy of the site on your hard drive too. Be very careful not to get different versions mixed up, especially if more than one person is authorized to make changes.

Remember that you'll be charged for the amount of disk space you use, and avoid cluttering up the Web server with experimental or alternate pages. In fact, since anything on the Web server may be visited by search engine spiders, and added to search engine databases, it's a bad idea to keep anything that you wouldn't want the public to see in the htdocs directory of your Web server. Do your editing on your local system, and upload only finished products to your Web server. If you need to store non-public files on your server for some reason, you'll have to write a robots.txt file to tell spiders to stay out (more on this later).

So, your pages are up on a Web server, for all the world to see. How does the world find them? Well, at the moment, they'll be found at http://www.myisp.net/clients/my_company, or some such, because we haven't yet established our own domain name. If you're at all serious about doing business on the Web, you'll want to register a domain name, which will be the Web address for your site. We'll learn how to do that in the next installment, so y'all come back!

Building Web Sites by, Abhishek SEO - This beginner's tutorial will take the clueless newby through the entire process of building a Web site.

* Chapter 1 - Hosting Your Site
* Chapter 2 - What the Heck is HTML?
* Chapter 3 - The Domain Name Game
* Chapter 4 - Web Graphics Basics
* Chapter 5 - Promoting Your Web Site

SEO and Your Web Site

We all know the importance of having a Web site rank well in search engine results for searches on specific keywords/phrases. If your Web site doesn’t have a page appearing in the top 10 search engine result positions (SERPs) the chances of someone clicking on your listing, and actually visiting your site, drop dramatically. If you’re not in the top 20 you have almost no chance that someone will scan through the SERPs that far to find your page.

Optimizing your site and content for a search engine, for a better ranking in SERPs, is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), yet many Web developers/designers either don’t take time to code a site properly or don’t know how to do proper SEO. The basics of code optimization are just sound HTML coding practices; when followed, they go a long way toward SEO.

There is a lot you can do to optimize your Web site for search engines from the code level. Where you can also affect things, and this is beyond the work of the developer/designer, is in the actual content. Understanding how to tag the content, and where to place it in the HTML, is critical. Here is a basic outline of SEO best practices.

Understand the Search Engines and Search Engine Spiders

So how does your site get into a search engine? A search engine obtains your URL either by you submitting your site directly to the search engine or by others linking to your site. Then, at a time of its choosing, a search engine sends out its spider (or “bot”) to visit your site.

Once there, the spider starts reading all the text in the body of the page, including markup elements, all links to other pages and to external sites, plus elements from the page head including some meta tags (depending on the search engine) and the title tag.

It then copies this information back to its central database for indexing at a later date which can be up to two or three months later.

The spider then follows the links on the page, repeating the same process. Spiders are, for lack of a better term, dumb. They can only follow the most basic HTML code. If you’ve encased a link in a fancy JavaScript that the spider won’t understand, the spider will simply ignore both the JavaScript and the link. The same thing applies to forms; spiders can’t fill out forms and click “submit.”

To get an understanding of what a spider sees, try accessing your site with a Lynx browser from a Unix server. Lynx is non-graphical, does not support JavaScripts, and will display only text and regular a href tags. This is what the spider can see and therefore index. Does your page work without graphics or JavaScript? If no, then the spidering won’t work either and you’d better head back the drawing board.

Once the SE has all your content in its database, it runs an algorithm (a mathematical formula) against the content. These algorithms are unique to each SE and are constantly changing, but, in essence, all the search engines are looking for the important words on your page (based on word density—how often a word or phrase is used in relation to the total amount of text) and they assign a value to these words based on the code surrounding the words.

In addition to content, the search engine looks for what other sites, or pages on the same site, are linking to that page. The more links to a given page, the more important that page is. Getting other sites to link to your site is very important, but not part of optimizing your site and will be covered in a future column. From a site optimization standpoint, make sure you link to your important pages from more than just the index page (e.g., create a primary navigation that appears on all pages.)

Tip 1

The first rule of SEO is not to design your site in such a way that the code prevents a spider from being able to index it. This means avoiding pages which are 100% graphics and no text, such as pages that contain all images, or are Flash-only. Furthermore, if the first thing a user encounters is a log-in page, before being able to see the site’s content, then that’s what a spider will see and it won’t go any further, either.

If you’re planning to build a Web site entirely in Flash, DON’T. If you have no choice, then read my previous column, Search Engine Optimization and Non-HTML Sites.

Tip 2

To find out what a spider sees on your site, run a spider simulator on a given page. The simulator will show you what text the spider sees and what links it finds. There are many good ones on the market at various prices. If you’re looking for something that’s free, I’d suggest Search Engine Spider Simulator.

Tip 3

Each Web site should have a file called robots.txt. This file tells the spiders what directories they should not spider. Make sure this file is present and that it gives the appropriate permissions to the spiders. This includes access to content and to CSS.

For more information on the robot.txt file, see: Guide to the Robots Exclusion Protocol

Page Structure

Once you’ve built an SE-friendly Web site, you then need to be sure each page is also SE-friendly. As I said earlier, good HTML structure is the foundation for building an SEO Web page. There are two primary areas of a Web page. The area contained between the tags and that which is contained between the tags. What information you place in these areas has a huge impact on how a page is indexed and, to a certain degree, what will appear in the SEO results page.

When designing your page, or placing content on your page, remember that spiders read like people. They go from left to right and from top to bottom (though this may be different for other languages.) They also feel that the most important information is located at the top of the page. If it’s important, why would you place it at the bottom? When reading specific tags (title, h1, h2, etc.) search engines value words to the left more highly than words to the right.

The Title Tag

Let’s start at one of the first elements in a Web page—the title tag (). This is one of the, if not the, most important elements for SEO on the entire page. All too often, the information contained in this tag is either left blank, has a default value (e.g. “insert title here”), or is simply the company name.

Why is this tag so important? First of all, it is used by every major search engine as a key indicator of the page’s content, and, second, it used by the search engine as the first line in the SERPs.

Give this tag the consideration it deserves.

Tip 4

Determine the main topic of the page and use it as the title. A page about high-performance running shoes from manufacturer XYZ shouldn’t have the title “XYZ”—it should have a title something like “High-performance Running Shoes.” If the brand is important, then add it to the end of the line like this: “High Performance Running Shoes - XYZ.”

The Meta Tags

Over the years, various meta tags have come in and gone out of favor with search engines. One of those which has lost its value is the “keywords” meta tag. Most search engines say they don’t look at it anymore but if you have time to create one, go ahead and do so. It doesn’t hurt.

The only meta tag that all search engines presently acknowledge is the "description" meta tag. Once again, this tag should be unique to each page and match the content on the page itself.

The proper format for the description meta tag is___
.
Tip 5

Write a unique description for each page. If you use the same meta tag across all pages, the search engine will pick up on this and potentially ignore the content of the meta tag or possibly the entire page.

JavaScript

We’re all familiar with loading the top of the HTML page with all sorts of JavaScript functions that are necessary for various page features. This includes, but is not limited to: mouse-overs, form validators, cookie checkers, etc. To search engine spiders, this is clutter, and, while they ignore it, they still need to wade through all that code to find the real content of the page. Many spiders have timeouts or maximum character counts associated with them—if they have to wade through too much junk, they’ll abandon their spidering and move on to another site. So avoid making your pages too top heavy by placing too much code between the tags.

Tip 6

Put all your JavaScripts in external files and link to them. You’ll be creating an SE-friendly page while also making your markup cleaner and your Web site management easier.

The Page Body

This is the part of the Web page that your visitors will be seeing and yes, you can make pages both eye-pleasing and, at the same time, well-optimized for search engines.

Page Headings and Other Word Graphics

For stylistic reasons, many of us have chosen to display page headings as graphics. By turning to our favorite graphical editor, to create unique and creative headings, we’ve removed important words from our Web pages.

Your Web site users may not really care that it took you four hours to create a groovy page heading that says “Yellow Widgets.” They just want to know that they’re on a page about Yellow Widgets.

From the perspective of a search engine spider, the graphic about yellow widgets is just a graphic and spiders won’t read them. One option is to fill in the "alt" attribute in the "img" tag with the actual words. However, search engines give very little value, if any, to “alt” content these days. This attribute is still a requirement for accessibility, but it won’t do much toward getting your page ranked well in a search engine.

The same thing applies to all those great key words on your site that form your site navigation menu. Perhaps, you’ve created graphics of the words for a mouseover effect, but, once again, they’re graphics and a spider couldn’t care less about them.

Instead of spending all that time creating graphics of words, use real text. They are words, after all. If you must use graphics, consider a form of CSS image replacement; the spider should still be able to access the text of your heading.

Tip 7—Page Titles

Search engines love content that appears in header tags (h1, h2, etc.) yet very few Web sites actually use them. Their original intention was to be the visible title of the page (long before Web browsers actually supported graphics), with the primary title using h1 and subsections of the page encased in h2 tags, and so forth. In the early days of Web design, we had little to no control of these elements and they simply appeared as big black text on your page. This all changed with the introduction of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS.)

Take time to define your header tags in your CSS and use the header tag for the titles and secondary titles of your content.

Sample:

ABHISHEK SEO

seo abhishek

To avoid spamming search engines, a Web page should have only one h1 tag. They can have as many h2 tags as necessary.

Tip 8—Mouseovers

Instead of spending all that time creating mouseovers, trying using the hover feature of CSS.

If, for specific reasons, you can’t use CSS (perhaps you must support really old browsers), then repeat the menu options at the bottom of the page with plain text.

Tables

Graphic designers love using tables to slice and dice a graphical design to use on the Web. Unfortunately, these designers never really understood that the Web is the Web and not a printed page and that designs should be easy to code into Web pages.

The problem with tables is that all the slicing and dicing can create Web pages containing tables embedded four or more deep to accommodate the design—and all the good content ends up inside the inner-most embedded tables.

From a technical perspective, search engine spiders can read tables, and even embedded tables, but once a design gets to be more than about three tables deep, most spiders run into problems. Either it’s simply too much code for them to keep track of, or the search engine thinks you placed that content deep in the page because it’s not important, and so the engine gives it little or no value.

Tip 9

Avoid unnecessary tables where possible. Limit your table embedding to a depth of three.

Where possible avoid the whole table thing and start using XHTML with div tags and CSS to define position. This makes for a much cleaner design and has the bonus of being easier to manage.

Using Bold and Strong

If there is an important phrase in your content, be sure to tag it appropriately. This is good for the user experience—and since you’re telling your users that the words are important, the search engines are likely to think the same way.

Tip 10

Use either or to mark up important words on your page. While most people use bold (), according to the W3C the correct markup is “strong” for important words.

Summary

By following this basic outline, you’ve created search engine-friendly pages. Your pages will be easily indexed by the search engine spiders, and, with important words and phrases appropriately tagged, those words will receive proper valuation by the search engines. All that’s left is to identify the appropriate words in the Web site copy and to find out if they are the words people actually search for—then develop an appropriate linking strategy. by,
Abhishek SEO

Content Optimization and Code Optimization

Content Optimization and Code Optimization
Content optimization or code optimization is a very important part of the SEO process. Optimizing your code involves factors such as meta-tag optimization, HTML streamlining, and anchor tag and image optimization. Content optimization involves creating pages on your website that use keywords with high levels search frequencies and low levels of competition

Meta-tag optimization involves taking advantage of a webpage's title, meta-description & meta-keywords.

HTML optimization involves placing targeted keywords in H1 and H2 tags. It also deals with keyword prominence, keyword proximity, and keyword density.


Anchor tag optimization Anchor tag optimization involves making sure that link text includes targeted keywords.

Image optimization involves placing "ALT" text behind pictures on your website.

Content size management involves making sure that content is not redundant or unfocused.
Abhishek SEO

Basic Steps To Generate Instant Traffic to your Site

Everybody who is having E-business and online trading are always looking for ideas which will generate instant traffic to their site, there primary goal is to design a compelling website that can attract users to sign up or subscribe so they can come back in the future which could engender sales if you are selling something. Once you finally set up a website that you feel would work for your visitors, you are not out of the azure just yet. Since your E-business is brand new, nobody will visit it until you create some knowledge.

You can create alertness by promoting your website. Many beginner internet marketers would spam their website address in all sorts of places even if the advertisement spot is completely unrelated to the one they are promoting. While this will give them free traffic to their site, no sales will be made unless you acquire beleaguered website traffic.

despite of type of online prospect or online service you are promoting, it will always be for a certain assemblage of people. Getting targeted website traffic can be a bit difficult and may take time if you don’t know the secrets on how to do it. Now you can see some basic ideas that can get you targeted website traffic without spending any money.

Create your own Blog

Search engine loves content if you post relevant information on regular basis then definitely it will make your blog seo friendly and your cache will updated on regular basis . A blog lets you to keep your site up-to-date just by posting new entries on a regular basis. This is good if you want to stay in search engines and rise in rank. Visitors can also subscribe to your blog via RSS so they can get instantaneous updates. if your content is related to what you are sponsoring.

Post Articles

Post articles on weekly basis and submit article to article directories it will generate different votes for your website . make sure articles are linked to your service so visitors that are searching online can discover your website through the articles in article directory. The more article directories you submit to, the more targeted website traffic you get. Use of keywords that fit your site can further increase the traffic.

Press release submission

Post information about company profile in as many press release sites as possible and also tell about what , when , why your services are reliable and beneficial to those who are looking for similar services in search engines.

Social media marketing

Create your profile in all social media sites like Twitter, you Tube, Face book, Digg, Stumble Upon, Flicker, Slide share and submit your site description social bookmarking sites.


Participate in Forums

Go for those forum which are having large community follow simple rules in the forum and blend in with the community by posting and replying to topics of interest. Your link will follow wherever you post and that serves as a gateway to targeted website traffic.

Contributed by, Abhishek Mishra

Google Dance

Thousands of Search Engine Optimizers use the Google Dance Tool every day.Now put the Google Dance Tool on your web site. Give your visitors a tool that adds value to your site!
During the month, Google sends out robots (spiders) to crawl the web and archive every website it finds. These archived websites will be presented in the next update of the Google index (database). The update process is initiated every 30 days or so, although on some occasions there have been more than 30 days between updates.

Now if you've been a keen Google fan you'll know that they have 3 main www servers online, which are as follows:

www.google.com - The main address, the true homepage of google.
www2.google.com - Thought to be a test server.
www3.google.com - Thought to be a test server.

Whilst nobody outside of "Google" truly seems to know the purpose of the www2 & www3 servers, many people have come to the assumption that they are test servers. During the update, which takes several days, the 3 Google servers display different results. Whilst the results vary from server to server, they are said to be "dancing", hence the name "Google Dance".

The www2 & www3 servers are the ones most closely observed during the dance, however I have recently found the addresses to all 10 of the Google Datacenters!! I believe that watching this will provide for a slight enhancement in the detection of the "Google Dance".. My tool is the only tool (that I know of) to provide the 10 datacenters option.

ATTENTION: We are in no way affiliated with "Google", nor have I ever made any form of contact with them. The Google logo at the top of this page is only to have a bit of fun with "Google Dancing".

This site is not affiliated with Google Inc. Trademarks remain trademarks of their respective companies.

PLEASE: Remember To Conform To The Google Terms of Use. by, Abhishek SEO

Microsoft’s New Search at Bing.com

ABHISHEK SEO — Microsoft Corp. today unveiled Bing, a new Decision Engine and consumer brand, providing customers with a first step in moving beyond search to help make faster, more informed decisions. Bing is specifically designed to build on the benefits of today’s search engines but begins to move beyond this experience with a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions, focusing initially on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.

The result of this new approach is an important beginning for a new and more powerful kind of search service, which Microsoft is calling a Decision Engine, designed to empower people to gain insight and knowledge from the Web, moving more quickly to important decisions. The new service, located at http://www.Bing.com, will begin to roll out over the coming days and will be fully deployed worldwide on Wednesday, June 3.

The explosive growth of online content has continued unabated, and Bing was developed as a tool to help people more easily navigate through the information overload that has come to characterize many of today’s search experiences. Results from a custom comScore Inc. study across core search engines show that as many as 30 percent of searches are abandoned without a satisfactory result. The data also showed that approximately two-thirds of the remaining searches required a refinement or requery on the search results page.

“Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. “When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.”

What’s New in SEO for 2009?

New in SEO
Let’s start with a “profound statement.” We build websites for two audiences: humans and search engines. Often marketers are only focused on the human audience (after all, they are the buyers). But, it’s important to implement best practices that address the search engine audience. We have to balance the art of addressing both humans and search engines.

Search engines have “eyes.” Their eyes are their algorithm. Google’s algorithm is believed to increased from 130 variables to about 200 variables. Many of the new SEO variables include….

The basic SEO fundamentals are still important including: strong title tags representing the theme of the page, efficient code, well laid out architecture with human readable URLs, great content, link popularity (internal and external) and of course well written meta data including alt tags and title attributes.

Inbound links have always been important to Google. But, outbound links are also important. Google scores your website when they crawl your site. One factor they look for is the extent to which you link to external website to relevant content. You are penalized by not linking to relevant content that gives your visitor a good experience. Not doing so is perceived as selfish.

Webmasters often use a rel=no follow attribute (or tag) for links that don’t go to relevant content so the link doesn’t drain link juice. If you link to your partners and otherwise relevant business associates, you don’t want to use the no-follow tag. Google is looking for you to share the link love with relevant content.

When Google sees many links outgoing from images or bullets they can be perceived as paid links resulting in a scoring penalty. Google wants to see editorial links anchored from a series of two or three words embedded (editorially) in a sentence. Google is programmed to flag and penalize single word links and images.

Google can already index 18 file types. They are looking to see that you offer great experiences for website visitors. It is speculated that Google is giving more scoring to rich media content including photos and soon video. Audio is not yet indexable by search engines. However, video files are believed to soon be indexable by Google. You can submit a video sitemap file through webmaster tools. (though I didn’t refer to the sitemap file submission in the podcast).

Another factor being considered is social attributes. Google Friend Connect was launched in December 2008. It is an indication of how Google wants to see websites offer social attributes.

The complexity of Google’s algorithm is growing and evolving. We believe many new variables will roll out throughout 2009. Stay tuned on this…