The Key To Success Of A Website!

Marketing your goods or services through the web can be a complete waste of time If you don't know how to do it properly. How many sites have you stumbled upon that look like crap, have a Google PageRank of 2 or less, have features that don’t work, images that are broken, links that lead to no where… Even when a site like that manages to somehow win a search ranking, nobody would buy anything from a site like that.

So, the first step to search engine marketing is to have a professional looking site that people feel comfortable shopping on. Its not a big problem or task to that but making your site attractive to search engines is huge. Search engines don’t like bad code, or code that doesn’t validate. They don’t like question marks in URLs. They don’t like frames. They don’t like a lot of things, and knowing what those are and avoiding them will make the difference in whether the search engines even pay attention to your site, much less rank them highly.

Once you’ve gotten the search engines attention, you have to earn their respect. For this, you need content. Single page, or brochure sites, just don’t cut it anymore. You need to say something about your website, your product, your service, or your industry. You need pictures, videos, sound clips or music, and words. Lots of words. But the words should be related to the keywords you’re trying to win searches for. Posting four or five times to a blog every week is must to make search engines believe that you deserve to be an authority in your industry. Over time, this kind of commitment creates a lot of content, and content is still King.

Finally, you need to prove to the search engines that your site is well liked by other people too. Popular sites have links to them. Lots of links from quality sites and this is the key, especially to Google. If your content is worth able your site automatically get links and you don't need to do all that link building stuff later. All you need is just a good design and REALLY GOOD CONTENT. create a post that people like to linked to, after making a post ask yourself is this article deserves to be mentioned on a blog? If satisfied; post it on some social bookmark sites liek digg, del.icio.us, stumble, etc. If your post is really good than you will be able to see results from next day. So start thinking about ideas for the next Great Post!

Good Luck and Happy Weekend!

Yahoo Is On Move Again!

And Yes, Yahoo is now on move again. According to Sharad Verma Of Yahoo! Search they are rolling out some new features added in their algorithm to rank websites in next coming days. SO be ready to see some changes in your yahoo rankings.

Plus Yahoo announces support for X robot tags in http headers for no index, noindex, nofollow and nosnippet functions. Previously you can use these tags within html only but from now on you can use it in http header which gives you more flexibility to achieve exclusions on PDF, Word documents, PowerPoint, video, and other file types including html files. Here are some examples of using X robot Tags given by yahoo:

• X-Robots-Tag: NOINDEX -- If you don't want to show the URL in the Yahoo! Search results.

Note: We'll still need to crawl the page to see and apply the tag, so if you don't wish to have the page crawled, use robots disallow on robots.txt.

• X-Robots-Tag: NOARCHIVE -- If you don't want to display cache link in the search results page.

• X-Robots-Tag: NOSNIPPET -- If you don't want to display summary in the search results page.

• X-Robots-Tag: NOFOLLOW -- If you don't want Yahoo! to crawl links in the page.

You can read full story here LINK

Most Popular Searches At Google - Yahoo And Some Predcitions!

In past two days both Google and Yahoo has announced the most popluar searches. Both Search engines have separate criteria for selecting the most popular searches.

According To yahoo
"To come up with the Top Trends of 2007, we analyze search queries based on a number of factors, including absolute volume and growth versus previous periods, to see which themes and trends bubble to the surface. And of course, individual users and their searches remain anonymous."

Here are the top searches in yahoo for 2007. They like it in a categorized way LINK

Since Google prefer the Video Way, here are the Google Top Searches as per TechCrunch. You can watch VP of Search and User Experience Marissa Mayer Of Google revealed the “fastest rising U.S. search terms” here. LINK
1. iphone
2. webkinz
3. tmz
4. transformers
5. youtube
6. club penguin
7. myspace
8. heroes
9. facebook
10. anna nicole smith

And here are some Predictions that were made for 2007. Compare them with those trends by yahoo and Google and look for yourself how interesting it is

2007 Predictions by Mashable LINK
2007 Predictions by ReadWriteWeb LINK