In today's competitive world, good search engine ranking spells success for all kinds of business. This has given rise to many SEO companies and SEO consultants. SEO Consultant Pa at Mosaic Services is one such SEO consultants. SEO Consultant Pakistan at Mosaic Services is perhaps the largest SEO services in Pakistan. So for better notice by maximum visitors to your website SEO Consultant Pakistan at Mosaic Services is a must.
A leading company providing Search engine Marketing and Optimization Services, Mosaic Services expertise in Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) based Search Engine Marketing and Optimization Services. It is the largest LSI based SEO company in the world. LSI is the latest Search engine algorithm twist from Google. Mosaic Services is also credited with devising a proprietary SEO methodology called Dartboard Optimization Matrix ( DOM), which ensures rankings for hundreds of themed keywords thereby companies in achieving their marketing objectives.
Strong overall theme of the website gives more online visibility and DOM based search engine optimization services and this is exactly what SEO Consultant Pakistan at Mosaic Services offers. Thus SEO Consultant Pakistan at Mosaic Services is the key to optimize your web ranking. For more information about DOM one can download DOM white paper by visiting http://www.theglobetech.com/.
Other than Search engine optimization services, Mosaic also offers Link building, Web design, Web Copywriting, Web Marketing Consulting services, Pay Per Click Marketing & Advertising services and Online Media Buying and Ad serving. Thus Mosaic Services is a complete solution for SEO services and companies wanting to increase their websites' link popularity and attract more online visitor.
It is not surprising that Mosaic Services has a cutting edge over other consultants in Pakistan in terms of services as well as expertise. It has some of the top companies from US, UK and other English speaking nation as its clients, and it ensure them that a technical partnership with it always translates into success. Its clients also include major international universities, targeted business-to-business marketers, consumer goods manufacturers and distributors, software developers and marketers, apart from a host of small businesses.
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seo services pakistan
What is seo ?
Tough question, "What is SEO?". As with pretty much all internet-related terms, concepts and notions, that of "SEO" does not have a unique definition and it is a blurry concept in most people's mind.
Still, what is SEO? Since there is no ultimate, fully comprehensible definition for "SEO", the only way to go is to take a look at several definitions and try to merge them in order to have the right perspective.
Wikipedia : "Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings. The term also refers to an industry of consultants that carry out optimization projects on behalf of client sites."
Fakezilla : "The changes that are made to the content and code of a web site in order to increase its rankings in the results pages of search engines and directories. These changes may involve rewriting body copy, altering Title or Meta tags, removal of Frames or Flash content, and the seeking of incoming links."
The Web Search Workshop : "The term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a website to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken. A number of factors are important when optimizing a website, including the content and structure of the website's copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process."
6am Media : "The process of improving web pages so that it ranks higher in search engine for targeted keywords with the ultimate goal of generating more revenue from the web site. There are many SEO techniques. In general, these techniques can be categorized as On-Page Optimization, On-Site Optimization, and Off-Site Optimization. There are also two schools of SEO: white hat SEO and black hat SEO. White hat SEOs are those that play by the rule (actually guidelines provided by search engines). Black hat SEOs are those that push the limit of SEOs and employ some questionable or prohibited techniques (according to the guidelines). These black hat SEO techniques are also commonly known as spam."
Website NOVA : "acronym for search engine optimization. This is the process of making a website 'search-engine-friendly. Search engine optimization is primarily used to increase rankings in SERPs, and effective SEO can increase the potential of your website and bring in more traffic."
Thousands more definitions are available, almost as many "SEO guru's" you will find online ("The Guru Problem" is actually the title of another article to be published soon).
As you can see, no definition is like another, but they all tend to converge to a certain common understanding.
There are numerous techniques and tools used to achieve SEO goals, and they should NOT be included within a definition.
Since it is not correct to define a concept through its tools, here is a definition I have come up with after long deliberations. The suggestion is to define SEO as follows:
SEO = abbreviation for "Search Engine Optimization", the process of optimizing and tuning a web site and gaining online awareness for it, in order to deliver targeted visitors and ensure high conversion rates.
When done correctly, SEO activities must:
- make search engines crawl the site;
- make search engines index the site;
- ensure a high ranking among SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for given keywords;
- achieve a high page rank;
- drive targeted traffic;
- achieve high conversion rates among the site's visitors.
Since nothing is definitive and ultimate in the world of SEO, I'd like to receive your feedback and comments: TeaWithEdge.com is a way to contact me and speak up about your Marketing concerns.
Otilia is a young certified professional with expertise in e-Marketing and e-Business, currently working as independent consultant and e-publisher. She developed and teaches Principles of e-Marketing, available at UniversalClass.com and has recently launched Marketing Who.com, a professional Marketing Directory.
Contact Otilia through TeaWithEdge.com, her Marketing and eMarketing articles portal.
SEO Tips and TRICKS
There are some basic SEO tips & tricks for drive traffic your site & building inbound links to your site. The SEO is on going project for your website & it will cost you a fortune & most small websites cannot afford to pay for this service. As you all may know, in any SEO, if the content is king then link is the queen.
The webmasters and website owners are forever looking for links, one-way inbound links are always more valuable than reciprocal links. The one-way or inbound links to your website from other sites will provide higher exposure to your site in SERP (Search Engine Results Page) & Web Traffic to your site as well.
* Benefits of building incoming links -
Increase search engine rankings
Search Engines determines the popularity of your site by the number of sites that link to yours.
The greater the number of incoming links the higher your rankings.
* More web traffic -
Incoming links from sites that already attract a lot of traffic will definitely increase the number of visitors to site compared to sites that are new or have a small amount of traffic.
Here are the some of the top twelve ways to build inbound links to your website are listed below:-
1. Submit your website to as many as free web directories. e.g.:- dmoz.org, dir.yahoo.com etc etc
2. Submit your website to premium & paid web directories. Make sure you submit to the right category.
3. Contribute to articles websites. You can write articles your product & related services.
4. Submit press release about your website & products.
5. Request your website visitors to link to your site.
6. Exchange links with other similar websites if it is necessary.
7. Submit your website for reviews & review other websites with your signature.
8. Offer free web hosting space or any freebies in exchange for links.
9. Participate in award programs.
10. Contribute to forum. You can post in a few forums and put your website in your signature. Forums are a great place to put one way links. And you can help somebody out at the same time.
11. Contribute to blogs. The blogging is becoming most popular marketing & FREE advertising tool.
12. Word of Mouth & "tells a friend" page in your site. It always works. Tell your friends, family, and colleagues about your valuable service & products.
Link exchange tips( Its really works)
Here is some Link exchange tips with we can use and get better result.
These tips are not full and final but because of these uses we can get many things. Like better ranking, Google PR, Alexa ranking and many more .
So let’s start our link exchange tips
Link exchange tips # 1 Use text links, and try to avoid image links.
Link exchange tips #2 anyhow, if you have used image links, then always make sure to put your keywords in the alt tags.
Link exchange tips # 3 Put your prime keywords in text links and always insure to put short descriptions of your website/page in minimum of 20-30 words or more if allowed.
Link exchange tips #4 in text the links if you are not allowed to add descriptions in the links then always try your best to put a short or little bit descriptions in title tag. For example.: title =" Link Exchange Tips, No Tricks ">Link Exchange tips and tricks
Link exchange tips # 5 Avoid duplication of keywords, duplication will lead to low rankings.
Link exchange tips # 6 Always try your best to exchange links from most related websites (For example. If you have a SEO or link exchange website, then a link from other SEO or Link exchange websites will be known as related website links)
Link exchange tips # 7 Never, exchange links with unrelated websites/pages. It will down your ranking
Link exchange tips # 8Always Be ensure that the website that you are exchanging links with, is the well optimized , well indexed , has a good content and have unique content.
Link exchange tips # 9 Never try to exchange links in quick sessions. Since search engines ignores or does not index those sites that gets bundles of links in quick time.
Link exchange tips # 10 Give your link exchange works few hours every day of the day daily , to ensure that you get limited but well quality links.
Link exchange tips # 11 Mainly for new websites, avoid exchanging bundles of links in quick sessions.
Link exchange tips # 12 Avoid creating a link/links.html file, since search-engines do not index link/links.html files, often.
Link exchange tips # 13 Always make a 'resources' (any appropriate name) folder and create an index.html file for that named folder and create appropriate html files for appropriate links going into them. (a sort of web-directory)
Link exchange tips # 14 Never, never exchange links with pages bearing more than 50 Out bound-links. Generally 20 to 25 are appropriate and should not be more than two clicks away from the index/main page.
Link exchange tips # 15 Always ensure yourself that the page/website you are exchanging link is being indexed regularly by the search engines or not.
Link exchange tips # 16 Also ensure on your own that the page/website you are exchanging link with, is not being blocked by any scripts, or disallowed by robots.txt, or disallowed by using no index, no follow on html page. It will not give you benefits .
Link exchange tips # 17 Avoid linking to those tricky and false websites, and if possible inform already linked websites about the matter and ask them for link-exchange, if related to your websites. It’s the best way to don’t get link at there .
Link exchange tips # 18 Links from the main/index page of the related website is the most quality link that a website can get. But, never try to place more than 20 back-links in index/main page. But if there are more than 20 links on the main page than take a look on the page and see that all the links are relevant ? If yes than take link at there but if the links are more than 50 than don’t take in any condition
Link exchange tips # 19 Exchanging links with your competitor's back linking website/pages are also the quality links that a website can get.
Link exchange tips # 20 Never post your website links to FFA, Guestbook, or other unrelated areas. Since search-engines completely ignores such links and may penalize your website.
Link exchange tips # 21 Site bearing good Google page rank are appropriate for link-exchange. Generally 4+ Google page rank is great for link-exchange.
Link exchange tips # 22 Exchanging links with old website is excellent.
Link exchange tips # 23 Link exchanging with new websites, with decent Google ranking at first, but bears quality contents and is well optimized, is also an excellent option for exchanging-links, since new websites bears less outgoing links than the old websites.
Link exchange tips # 24 While exchanging links for homepage of your website, also try to exchange links for sub-pages of it, for better ranking for that particular sub-page.
Link exchange tips # 25 Personal verification of the linking partner's website is recommended.
Link exchange tips # 26 Check for total incoming and outgoing links for whole website or for particular sub-pages of your linking partner's website and off course of your own before getting link exchanged.
A link back to the author's article page Link Exchange Tips, No Tricks is compulsory, in case of publication of this article in featured article websites or others
These tips are not full and final but because of these uses we can get many things. Like better ranking, Google PR, Alexa ranking and many more .
So let’s start our link exchange tips
Link exchange tips # 1 Use text links, and try to avoid image links.
Link exchange tips #2 anyhow, if you have used image links, then always make sure to put your keywords in the alt tags.
Link exchange tips # 3 Put your prime keywords in text links and always insure to put short descriptions of your website/page in minimum of 20-30 words or more if allowed.
Link exchange tips #4 in text the links if you are not allowed to add descriptions in the links then always try your best to put a short or little bit descriptions in title tag. For example.: title =" Link Exchange Tips, No Tricks ">Link Exchange tips and tricks
Link exchange tips # 5 Avoid duplication of keywords, duplication will lead to low rankings.
Link exchange tips # 6 Always try your best to exchange links from most related websites (For example. If you have a SEO or link exchange website, then a link from other SEO or Link exchange websites will be known as related website links)
Link exchange tips # 7 Never, exchange links with unrelated websites/pages. It will down your ranking
Link exchange tips # 8Always Be ensure that the website that you are exchanging links with, is the well optimized , well indexed , has a good content and have unique content.
Link exchange tips # 9 Never try to exchange links in quick sessions. Since search engines ignores or does not index those sites that gets bundles of links in quick time.
Link exchange tips # 10 Give your link exchange works few hours every day of the day daily , to ensure that you get limited but well quality links.
Link exchange tips # 11 Mainly for new websites, avoid exchanging bundles of links in quick sessions.
Link exchange tips # 12 Avoid creating a link/links.html file, since search-engines do not index link/links.html files, often.
Link exchange tips # 13 Always make a 'resources' (any appropriate name) folder and create an index.html file for that named folder and create appropriate html files for appropriate links going into them. (a sort of web-directory)
Link exchange tips # 14 Never, never exchange links with pages bearing more than 50 Out bound-links. Generally 20 to 25 are appropriate and should not be more than two clicks away from the index/main page.
Link exchange tips # 15 Always ensure yourself that the page/website you are exchanging link is being indexed regularly by the search engines or not.
Link exchange tips # 16 Also ensure on your own that the page/website you are exchanging link with, is not being blocked by any scripts, or disallowed by robots.txt, or disallowed by using no index, no follow on html page. It will not give you benefits .
Link exchange tips # 17 Avoid linking to those tricky and false websites, and if possible inform already linked websites about the matter and ask them for link-exchange, if related to your websites. It’s the best way to don’t get link at there .
Link exchange tips # 18 Links from the main/index page of the related website is the most quality link that a website can get. But, never try to place more than 20 back-links in index/main page. But if there are more than 20 links on the main page than take a look on the page and see that all the links are relevant ? If yes than take link at there but if the links are more than 50 than don’t take in any condition
Link exchange tips # 19 Exchanging links with your competitor's back linking website/pages are also the quality links that a website can get.
Link exchange tips # 20 Never post your website links to FFA, Guestbook, or other unrelated areas. Since search-engines completely ignores such links and may penalize your website.
Link exchange tips # 21 Site bearing good Google page rank are appropriate for link-exchange. Generally 4+ Google page rank is great for link-exchange.
Link exchange tips # 22 Exchanging links with old website is excellent.
Link exchange tips # 23 Link exchanging with new websites, with decent Google ranking at first, but bears quality contents and is well optimized, is also an excellent option for exchanging-links, since new websites bears less outgoing links than the old websites.
Link exchange tips # 24 While exchanging links for homepage of your website, also try to exchange links for sub-pages of it, for better ranking for that particular sub-page.
Link exchange tips # 25 Personal verification of the linking partner's website is recommended.
Link exchange tips # 26 Check for total incoming and outgoing links for whole website or for particular sub-pages of your linking partner's website and off course of your own before getting link exchanged.
A link back to the author's article page Link Exchange Tips, No Tricks is compulsory, in case of publication of this article in featured article websites or others
Reciprocal Link Exchange Management Tips
When shopping online over Link Exchanger Software that albatross second drive also automate your links exchange directory, some indispensable outlook that you should beholding since are owing to follows:
The software should,
* Create the links exchange place or page on your Website.
* Allow appendage or removal of links at the wise to of a button also consider the links page rebuilt.
* Allow Link exchange master , SEO's, and Webmasters to proffer their site.
* Notify you when a Link exchange master , SEO's, or Webmasters has submitted their site
* Automatically okay whether mate sect linked tract's to you.
* Help to automate the operation of result amassed partners.
* Be royal to install.
The inception to extension over a website or online functioning is opportune analyze engine ranking. All of the primary explore engines cream coordinate reputation to authenticate how all a locus commit affiliate inasmuch as the additional hysterical quality, due links that bring about to your site, the bounteous valid commit rank.
There are a enter of concrete predetermination (link exchange) software scripts on the peddle but the peerless that I in fact be obliged using is LinkMachine( Link exchange machince) . This is a relatively more fasten rumble predomination software that does not desire an mySQL database besides is surpassingly acutely to install. This software makes it prohibitively straightforward to treasure trove again practice habit append partners, originate habit clamp pages that round your site, also maintenance lane of comparable links. Link Machine( Link exchange machine) automatically updates your conjoin pages the present they're contrary - no uploading required. Link exchanges spreading a site's targeted traffic, test engine ranking, further sales.
Link Machine ( Link exchange machine)finds hundreds of popular, well-timed sites to potentially fracas links with. Invite the webmasters of these sites to duel links, using Link Machine's flying e-mail templates. Generate habit attach pages that in Toto round the glad eye of your site. And keep lane of each congruent coalesce to your site.
Link Machine ( Link exchange machine)is a Php push that runs on your interlacing server. So sound power automatically skyrocket your adhere pages the sway a overcome is mythical - no lasciviousness to upload files each fitness a enhanced put together is added.
There is a gratuitous 10 tempo header besides a 30 go money send guarantee.
The software should,
* Create the links exchange place or page on your Website.
* Allow appendage or removal of links at the wise to of a button also consider the links page rebuilt.
* Allow Link exchange master , SEO's, and Webmasters to proffer their site.
* Notify you when a Link exchange master , SEO's, or Webmasters has submitted their site
* Automatically okay whether mate sect linked tract's to you.
* Help to automate the operation of result amassed partners.
* Be royal to install.
The inception to extension over a website or online functioning is opportune analyze engine ranking. All of the primary explore engines cream coordinate reputation to authenticate how all a locus commit affiliate inasmuch as the additional hysterical quality, due links that bring about to your site, the bounteous valid commit rank.
There are a enter of concrete predetermination (link exchange) software scripts on the peddle but the peerless that I in fact be obliged using is LinkMachine( Link exchange machince) . This is a relatively more fasten rumble predomination software that does not desire an mySQL database besides is surpassingly acutely to install. This software makes it prohibitively straightforward to treasure trove again practice habit append partners, originate habit clamp pages that round your site, also maintenance lane of comparable links. Link Machine( Link exchange machine) automatically updates your conjoin pages the present they're contrary - no uploading required. Link exchanges spreading a site's targeted traffic, test engine ranking, further sales.
Link Machine ( Link exchange machine)finds hundreds of popular, well-timed sites to potentially fracas links with. Invite the webmasters of these sites to duel links, using Link Machine's flying e-mail templates. Generate habit attach pages that in Toto round the glad eye of your site. And keep lane of each congruent coalesce to your site.
Link Machine ( Link exchange machine)is a Php push that runs on your interlacing server. So sound power automatically skyrocket your adhere pages the sway a overcome is mythical - no lasciviousness to upload files each fitness a enhanced put together is added.
There is a gratuitous 10 tempo header besides a 30 go money send guarantee.
Seo tools( Gods Abracadabra)
housands of servers ...billions of web pages.... the possibility of individually sifting through the WWW is null. The search engine gods cull the information you need from the Internet...from tracking down an elusive expert for communication to presenting the most unconventional views on the planet. Name it and click it. Beyond all the hype created about the web heavens they rule, let's attempt to keep the argument balanced. From Google to Voice of the Shuttle (for humanities research) these ubiquitous gods that enrich the net, can be unfair ...and do wear pitfalls. And considering the rate at which the Internet continues to grow, the problems of these gods are only exacerbated further.
Primarily, what you need to digest is the fact that search engines fall short of Mandrake's magic mechanism! They simply don't create URLs out of thin air but instead send their spiders crawling across those sites that have rendered prayers (and expensive offerings!) to them for consideration. Even when sites like Google claim to have a massive 3 billion web pages in its database, a large portion of the web nation is invisible to these spiders. To think they are simply ignorant of the Invisible Web. This invisible web holds that content, normal search engines can't index because the information on many web sites is in databases that are only searchable within that site. Sites like www.imdb.com - The Internet Movie Database , www.incywincy.com - IncyWincy, the invisible web search engine and www.completeplanet.com - The Complete Planet that cover this area are perhaps the only way you can access content from that portion of the Internet, invisible to the search gods. Here, you don't perform a direct content search but search for the resources that may access the content. (Meaning - be sure to set aside considerable time for digging.)
None of the search engines indexes everything on the Web (I mean none). Tried research literature on popular search engines? AltaVista to Yahoo, will list thousands of sources on education, human resource development, etc. etc. but mostly from magazines, newspapers, and various organizations' own Web pages, rather than from research journals and dissertations- the main sources of research literature. That's because most of the journals and dissertations are not yet available publicly on the Web. Thought they'll get you all that's hosted on the web? Think again.
The Web is huge and growing exponentially. Simple searches, using a single word or phrase, will often yield thousands of "hits", most of which will be irrelevant. A layman going in for a piece of info to the internet has to deal with a more severe issue - too much information! And if you don't learn how to control the information overload from these websites, returned by a search result, roll out the red carpet for some frustration. A very common problem results from sites that have a lot of pages with similar content. For e.g., if a discussion thread (in a forum) goes on for a hundred posts there will be a hundred pages all with similar titles, each containing a wee bit of information. Now instead of just one link, all hundred of those darn pages will crop up your search result, crowding out other relevant site. Regardless of all the sophistication technology has brought in, many well thought-out search phrases produce list after list of irrelevant web pages. The typical search still requires sifting through dirt to find the gold. If you are not specific enough, you may get too many irrelevant hits.
As said, these search engines do not actually search the web directly but their centralized server instead. And unless this database is updated continually to index modified, moved, deleted or renamed documents, you will land yourself amidst broken links and stale copies of web pages. So if they inadequately handle dynamic web pages whose content changes frequently, chances are for the information they reference to quickly go out-of-date. After they wage their never ending war with over-zealous promoters (spamdexers rather), where do they have time to keep their databases current and their search algorithms tuned? No surprise if a perfectly worthwhile site may go unlisted!
Similarly, many of the Web search engines are undergoing rapid development and are not well documented. You will have only an approximate idea of how they are working, and unknown shortcomings may cause them to miss desired information. Not to mention, amongst the first class information, the web also houses false, misleading, deceptive and dressed up information actually produced by charlatans. The Web itself is unstable and tomorrow they may not find you the site they found you today. Well if you could predict them, they would not be god!...would they?! The syntax (word order and punctuation) for various types of complex searches varies some from search engine to search engine, and small errors in the syntax can seriously compromise the search. For instance, try the same phrase search on different search engines and you'll know what I mean. Novices... read this line - using search engines does involve a learning curve. Many beginning Internet users, because of these disadvantages, become discouraged and frustrated.
Like a journalist put it, "Not showing favoritism to its business clients is certainly a rare virtue in these times." Search engines have increasingly turned to two significant revenue streams. Paid placement: In addition to the main editorial-driven search results, the search engines display a second - and sometimes third - listing that's usually commercial in nature. The more you pay, the higher you'll appear in the search results. Paid inclusion: An advertiser or content partner pays the search engine to crawl its site and include the results in the main editorial listing. So?...more likely to be in the hit list but then again - no guarantees. Of course those refusing to favor certain devotees are industry leaders like Google that publishes paid listings, but clearly marks them as 'Sponsored Links.'
The possibility of these 'for-profit' search gods (which haven't yet made much profit) for taking fees to skew their searches, can't be ruled out. But as a searcher, the hit list you are provided with by the engine should obviously rank in the order of relevancy and interest. Search command languages can often be complex and confusing and the ranking algorithm is unique to each god based on the number of occurrences of the search phrase in a page, if it appears in the page title, or in a heading, or the URL itself, or the meta tag etc. or on a weighted average of a number of these relevance scores. E.g. Google (www.google.com) uses its patented PageRank TM and ranks the importance of search results by examining the links that lead to a specific site. The more links that lead to a site, the higher the site is ranked. Pop on popularity!
Alta Vista, HotBot, Lycos, Infoseek and MSN Search use keyword indexes - fast access to millions of documents. The lack of an index structure and poor accuracy of the size of the WWW, will not make searching any easier. Large number of sites indexed. Keyword searching can be difficult to get right.
In reality, however, the prevalence of a certain keyword is not always in proportion to the relevance of a page. Take this example. A search on sari - the national costume of India -in a popular search engine, returned among it's top sites, the following links:
?www.scri.sari.ac.uk/- of the Scottish Crop research Institute
?www.ubudsari.com/ -a health resort in Indonesia
?www.sari-energy.org/ - The South Asia Regional Initiative for Energy Cooperation and Development
Pretty useful sites for someone very much interested in knowing how to drape or the tradition of the sari?! (Well, no prayer goes unanswered...whether you like the answer or not!) By using keywords to determine how each page will be ranked in search results and not simply counting the number of instances of a word on a page, search engines are attempting to make the rankings better by assigning more weight to things like titles, subheadings, and so on.
Now, unless you have a clear idea of what you're looking for, it may be difficult or impossible to use a keyword search, especially if the vocabulary of the subject is unfamiliar. Similarly, the concept based search of Excite (instead of individual words, the words that you enter into a search are grouped and attempted to determine the meaning) is a difficult task and yields inconsistent results.
Besides who reviews or evaluates these sites for quality or authority? They are simply compiled by a computer program. These active search engines rely on computerized retrieval mechanisms called "spiders", "crawlers", or "robots", to visit Web sites, on a regular basis and retrieve relevant keywords to index and store in a searchable database. And from this huge database yields often unmanageable and comprehensive results....results whose relevance is determined by their computers. The irrelevant sites (high percentage of noise, as it's called), questionable ranking mechanisms and poor quality control may be the result of less human involvement to weed out junk. Thought human intervention would solve all probes....read on.
From the very first search engine - Yahoo to about.com, Snap.com, Magellan, NetGuide, Go Network, LookSmart, NBCi and Starting Point, all subject directories index and review documents under categories - making them more manageable. Unlike active search engines, these passive or human-selected search engines like don't roam the web directly and are human controlled, relying on individual submissions. Perhaps the easiest to use in town, but the indexing structure these search engines cover only a small portion of the actual number of WWW sites and thus is certainly not your bet if you intend specific, narrow or complex topics.
Subject designations may be arbitrary, confusing or wrong. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted. Never contains full text of the web they link to - you can only search what you see titles, descriptions, subject categories, etc. Human-labor intensive process limits database currency, size, rate of growth and timeliness. You may have to branch through the categories repeatedly before arriving at the right page. They may be several months behind the times because of the need for human organization. Try looking for some obscure topic....chances for the people that maintain the directory to have excluded those pages. Obviously, machines can blindly count keywords but they can't make common-sense judgement as humans can. But then why does human-edited directories respond with all this junk?!
And here's about those meta search engines. A comprehensive search on the entire WWW using The Big Hub, Dogpile, Highway61, Internet Sleuth or Savvysearch , covering as many documents as possible may sound as good an idea as a one stop shopping.Meta search engines do not create their own databases. They rely on existing active and passive search engine indexes to retrieve search results. And the very fact that they access multiple keyword indexes reduces their response time. It sure does save your time by searching several search engines at once but at the expense of redundant, unwanted and overwhelming results....much more - important misses.
The default search mode differs from search site to search site, so the same search is not always appropriate in different search engine software. The quality and size of the databases vary widely.
Weighted Search Engines like Ask Jeeves and RagingSearch allows the user to type queries in plain English without advanced searching knowledge, again at the expense of inaccurate and undetailed searching. Review or Ranking Sources like Argus Clearinghouse (www.clearinghouse.net), eBlast (eblast.com) and Librarian's Index to the Internet (lii.org).
They evaluate website quality from sources they find or accept submissions from but cover a minimal number of sites.
As a webmaster, your site registration with the biggest billboards in Times Square can get you closer to bingo! for the searcher. Those who didn't even know you existed before are in your living room in New York time!
Your URL registration is a no-brainer, considering the generation of flocking traffic to your site. Certainly a quick and inexpensive method, yet is only a component of the overall marketing strategy that in itself offers no guarantees, no instant results and demands continued effort for the webmaster. Commerce rules the web. Like how a notable Internet caveman put it, "Web publishers also find dealing with search engines to be a frustrating pursuit. Everybody wants their pages to be easy for the world to find, but getting your site listed can be tough. Search sites may take a long time to list your site, may never list it at all, and may drop it after a few months for no reason. If you resubmit often, as it is very tempting to do, you may even be branded a spamdexer and barred from a search site. And as for trying to get a good ranking, forget it! You have to keep up with all the arcane and ever-changing rules of a dozen different search engines, and adjust the keywords on your pages just so...all the while fighting against the very plausible theory that in fact none of this stuff matters, and the search sites assign rankings at random or by whim.
"To make the best use of Web search engines--to find what you need and avoid an avalanche of irrelevant hits-- pick search engines that are well suited to your needs. And lest you'd want to cry "Ye immortal gods! where in the world are we?", spend a few hours becoming moderately proficient with each. Each works somewhat differently, most importantly in respect to how you broaden or narrow a search.
Finding the appropriate search engine for your particular information need, can be frustrating. To effectively use these search engines, it is important to understand what they are, how they work, and how they differ. For e.g. while using a meta search engine, remember that each engine has its own methods of displaying and ranking results. Remember, search strategies affect the results. If the user is unaware of basic search strategies, results may be spotty.
Quoting Charlie Morris (the former editor of The Web developer's journal) - "Search engines and directories survive, and indeed flourish, because they're all we've got. If you want to use the wealth of information that is the Web, you've got to be able to find what you want, and search engines and directories are the only way to do that. Getting good search results is a matter of chance. Depending on what you're searching for, you may get a meaty list of good resources, or you may get page after page of irrelevant drivel. By laboriously refining your search, and using several different search engines and directories (and especially by using appropriate specialty directories), you can usually find what you need in the end."
Search engines are very useful, no doubt. Right from getting a quick view of a topic to finding expert contact info...verily certain issues lie in their lap. Now the very reason we bother about these search engines so much is because they're all we've got! Though there sure is a lot of room for improvement, the hour's need is to not get caught in the middle of the road. By simply understanding what, how and where to seek, you'd spare yourself the fate of chanting that old Jewish proverb "If God lived on earth, people would break his windows."
Happy searching!
Liji is a PostGraduate in Software Science, with a flair for writing on anything under the sun. She puts her dexterity to work, writing technical articles in her areas of interest which include Internet programming, web design and development, ecommerce and other related issues.
Primarily, what you need to digest is the fact that search engines fall short of Mandrake's magic mechanism! They simply don't create URLs out of thin air but instead send their spiders crawling across those sites that have rendered prayers (and expensive offerings!) to them for consideration. Even when sites like Google claim to have a massive 3 billion web pages in its database, a large portion of the web nation is invisible to these spiders. To think they are simply ignorant of the Invisible Web. This invisible web holds that content, normal search engines can't index because the information on many web sites is in databases that are only searchable within that site. Sites like www.imdb.com - The Internet Movie Database , www.incywincy.com - IncyWincy, the invisible web search engine and www.completeplanet.com - The Complete Planet that cover this area are perhaps the only way you can access content from that portion of the Internet, invisible to the search gods. Here, you don't perform a direct content search but search for the resources that may access the content. (Meaning - be sure to set aside considerable time for digging.)
None of the search engines indexes everything on the Web (I mean none). Tried research literature on popular search engines? AltaVista to Yahoo, will list thousands of sources on education, human resource development, etc. etc. but mostly from magazines, newspapers, and various organizations' own Web pages, rather than from research journals and dissertations- the main sources of research literature. That's because most of the journals and dissertations are not yet available publicly on the Web. Thought they'll get you all that's hosted on the web? Think again.
The Web is huge and growing exponentially. Simple searches, using a single word or phrase, will often yield thousands of "hits", most of which will be irrelevant. A layman going in for a piece of info to the internet has to deal with a more severe issue - too much information! And if you don't learn how to control the information overload from these websites, returned by a search result, roll out the red carpet for some frustration. A very common problem results from sites that have a lot of pages with similar content. For e.g., if a discussion thread (in a forum) goes on for a hundred posts there will be a hundred pages all with similar titles, each containing a wee bit of information. Now instead of just one link, all hundred of those darn pages will crop up your search result, crowding out other relevant site. Regardless of all the sophistication technology has brought in, many well thought-out search phrases produce list after list of irrelevant web pages. The typical search still requires sifting through dirt to find the gold. If you are not specific enough, you may get too many irrelevant hits.
As said, these search engines do not actually search the web directly but their centralized server instead. And unless this database is updated continually to index modified, moved, deleted or renamed documents, you will land yourself amidst broken links and stale copies of web pages. So if they inadequately handle dynamic web pages whose content changes frequently, chances are for the information they reference to quickly go out-of-date. After they wage their never ending war with over-zealous promoters (spamdexers rather), where do they have time to keep their databases current and their search algorithms tuned? No surprise if a perfectly worthwhile site may go unlisted!
Similarly, many of the Web search engines are undergoing rapid development and are not well documented. You will have only an approximate idea of how they are working, and unknown shortcomings may cause them to miss desired information. Not to mention, amongst the first class information, the web also houses false, misleading, deceptive and dressed up information actually produced by charlatans. The Web itself is unstable and tomorrow they may not find you the site they found you today. Well if you could predict them, they would not be god!...would they?! The syntax (word order and punctuation) for various types of complex searches varies some from search engine to search engine, and small errors in the syntax can seriously compromise the search. For instance, try the same phrase search on different search engines and you'll know what I mean. Novices... read this line - using search engines does involve a learning curve. Many beginning Internet users, because of these disadvantages, become discouraged and frustrated.
Like a journalist put it, "Not showing favoritism to its business clients is certainly a rare virtue in these times." Search engines have increasingly turned to two significant revenue streams. Paid placement: In addition to the main editorial-driven search results, the search engines display a second - and sometimes third - listing that's usually commercial in nature. The more you pay, the higher you'll appear in the search results. Paid inclusion: An advertiser or content partner pays the search engine to crawl its site and include the results in the main editorial listing. So?...more likely to be in the hit list but then again - no guarantees. Of course those refusing to favor certain devotees are industry leaders like Google that publishes paid listings, but clearly marks them as 'Sponsored Links.'
The possibility of these 'for-profit' search gods (which haven't yet made much profit) for taking fees to skew their searches, can't be ruled out. But as a searcher, the hit list you are provided with by the engine should obviously rank in the order of relevancy and interest. Search command languages can often be complex and confusing and the ranking algorithm is unique to each god based on the number of occurrences of the search phrase in a page, if it appears in the page title, or in a heading, or the URL itself, or the meta tag etc. or on a weighted average of a number of these relevance scores. E.g. Google (www.google.com) uses its patented PageRank TM and ranks the importance of search results by examining the links that lead to a specific site. The more links that lead to a site, the higher the site is ranked. Pop on popularity!
Alta Vista, HotBot, Lycos, Infoseek and MSN Search use keyword indexes - fast access to millions of documents. The lack of an index structure and poor accuracy of the size of the WWW, will not make searching any easier. Large number of sites indexed. Keyword searching can be difficult to get right.
In reality, however, the prevalence of a certain keyword is not always in proportion to the relevance of a page. Take this example. A search on sari - the national costume of India -in a popular search engine, returned among it's top sites, the following links:
?www.scri.sari.ac.uk/- of the Scottish Crop research Institute
?www.ubudsari.com/ -a health resort in Indonesia
?www.sari-energy.org/ - The South Asia Regional Initiative for Energy Cooperation and Development
Pretty useful sites for someone very much interested in knowing how to drape or the tradition of the sari?! (Well, no prayer goes unanswered...whether you like the answer or not!) By using keywords to determine how each page will be ranked in search results and not simply counting the number of instances of a word on a page, search engines are attempting to make the rankings better by assigning more weight to things like titles, subheadings, and so on.
Now, unless you have a clear idea of what you're looking for, it may be difficult or impossible to use a keyword search, especially if the vocabulary of the subject is unfamiliar. Similarly, the concept based search of Excite (instead of individual words, the words that you enter into a search are grouped and attempted to determine the meaning) is a difficult task and yields inconsistent results.
Besides who reviews or evaluates these sites for quality or authority? They are simply compiled by a computer program. These active search engines rely on computerized retrieval mechanisms called "spiders", "crawlers", or "robots", to visit Web sites, on a regular basis and retrieve relevant keywords to index and store in a searchable database. And from this huge database yields often unmanageable and comprehensive results....results whose relevance is determined by their computers. The irrelevant sites (high percentage of noise, as it's called), questionable ranking mechanisms and poor quality control may be the result of less human involvement to weed out junk. Thought human intervention would solve all probes....read on.
From the very first search engine - Yahoo to about.com, Snap.com, Magellan, NetGuide, Go Network, LookSmart, NBCi and Starting Point, all subject directories index and review documents under categories - making them more manageable. Unlike active search engines, these passive or human-selected search engines like don't roam the web directly and are human controlled, relying on individual submissions. Perhaps the easiest to use in town, but the indexing structure these search engines cover only a small portion of the actual number of WWW sites and thus is certainly not your bet if you intend specific, narrow or complex topics.
Subject designations may be arbitrary, confusing or wrong. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted. Never contains full text of the web they link to - you can only search what you see titles, descriptions, subject categories, etc. Human-labor intensive process limits database currency, size, rate of growth and timeliness. You may have to branch through the categories repeatedly before arriving at the right page. They may be several months behind the times because of the need for human organization. Try looking for some obscure topic....chances for the people that maintain the directory to have excluded those pages. Obviously, machines can blindly count keywords but they can't make common-sense judgement as humans can. But then why does human-edited directories respond with all this junk?!
And here's about those meta search engines. A comprehensive search on the entire WWW using The Big Hub, Dogpile, Highway61, Internet Sleuth or Savvysearch , covering as many documents as possible may sound as good an idea as a one stop shopping.Meta search engines do not create their own databases. They rely on existing active and passive search engine indexes to retrieve search results. And the very fact that they access multiple keyword indexes reduces their response time. It sure does save your time by searching several search engines at once but at the expense of redundant, unwanted and overwhelming results....much more - important misses.
The default search mode differs from search site to search site, so the same search is not always appropriate in different search engine software. The quality and size of the databases vary widely.
Weighted Search Engines like Ask Jeeves and RagingSearch allows the user to type queries in plain English without advanced searching knowledge, again at the expense of inaccurate and undetailed searching. Review or Ranking Sources like Argus Clearinghouse (www.clearinghouse.net), eBlast (eblast.com) and Librarian's Index to the Internet (lii.org).
They evaluate website quality from sources they find or accept submissions from but cover a minimal number of sites.
As a webmaster, your site registration with the biggest billboards in Times Square can get you closer to bingo! for the searcher. Those who didn't even know you existed before are in your living room in New York time!
Your URL registration is a no-brainer, considering the generation of flocking traffic to your site. Certainly a quick and inexpensive method, yet is only a component of the overall marketing strategy that in itself offers no guarantees, no instant results and demands continued effort for the webmaster. Commerce rules the web. Like how a notable Internet caveman put it, "Web publishers also find dealing with search engines to be a frustrating pursuit. Everybody wants their pages to be easy for the world to find, but getting your site listed can be tough. Search sites may take a long time to list your site, may never list it at all, and may drop it after a few months for no reason. If you resubmit often, as it is very tempting to do, you may even be branded a spamdexer and barred from a search site. And as for trying to get a good ranking, forget it! You have to keep up with all the arcane and ever-changing rules of a dozen different search engines, and adjust the keywords on your pages just so...all the while fighting against the very plausible theory that in fact none of this stuff matters, and the search sites assign rankings at random or by whim.
"To make the best use of Web search engines--to find what you need and avoid an avalanche of irrelevant hits-- pick search engines that are well suited to your needs. And lest you'd want to cry "Ye immortal gods! where in the world are we?", spend a few hours becoming moderately proficient with each. Each works somewhat differently, most importantly in respect to how you broaden or narrow a search.
Finding the appropriate search engine for your particular information need, can be frustrating. To effectively use these search engines, it is important to understand what they are, how they work, and how they differ. For e.g. while using a meta search engine, remember that each engine has its own methods of displaying and ranking results. Remember, search strategies affect the results. If the user is unaware of basic search strategies, results may be spotty.
Quoting Charlie Morris (the former editor of The Web developer's journal) - "Search engines and directories survive, and indeed flourish, because they're all we've got. If you want to use the wealth of information that is the Web, you've got to be able to find what you want, and search engines and directories are the only way to do that. Getting good search results is a matter of chance. Depending on what you're searching for, you may get a meaty list of good resources, or you may get page after page of irrelevant drivel. By laboriously refining your search, and using several different search engines and directories (and especially by using appropriate specialty directories), you can usually find what you need in the end."
Search engines are very useful, no doubt. Right from getting a quick view of a topic to finding expert contact info...verily certain issues lie in their lap. Now the very reason we bother about these search engines so much is because they're all we've got! Though there sure is a lot of room for improvement, the hour's need is to not get caught in the middle of the road. By simply understanding what, how and where to seek, you'd spare yourself the fate of chanting that old Jewish proverb "If God lived on earth, people would break his windows."
Happy searching!
Liji is a PostGraduate in Software Science, with a flair for writing on anything under the sun. She puts her dexterity to work, writing technical articles in her areas of interest which include Internet programming, web design and development, ecommerce and other related issues.