SEOmonk

Things Visible to Search Engine Spiders

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:08:52 +0000

Have you ever realized that why at times, even after long and extensive sessions of good search engine optimization, a website fails to rank well on the SERPs? Along with making brilliant SEO efforts and following the appropriate strategy, it is important for you to get to assured that your efforts are being counted by the search engines. Nowadays, intelligent webmasters have discovered a number of techniques to gauge whether their efforts are considered by the search engine spiders or not and one of these are a search engine simulator.

With every search engine, the work principle remains the same. The spiders crawl through the web and index pages that are already stacked in the database and then apply algorithms to analyze and evaluate their relevancy, ranking and etc. Also, the strategy that they follow to index the websites are quite similar to each other. On the contrary, the only thing that differs in this case is the set of algorithms being used by every search engine. Hence, in order to get indexed and ranked most importantly, it is extremely important to understand the things that interest search engine spiders the most.

Search engines spiders are completely mechanical; they have set pre-requisites and will take your website into consideration only if it fulfills that. Do not even try to lure these spiders with spectacular flash designs and JavaScript as they cannot even see it. Let us now take a look at what all things that a website consists of are visible to search engine spiders.

Flash, JavaScript, Image Text or Frames:: Search Engine Spiders go blind when it comes to Flash, JavaScript and image text. Frames, which surely can be a great thing as per the designing and usability terms, but completely useless for availing ranking. In fact, the biggest mistake that a website, aiming for good ranking, can make is having a Flash intro page with the keywords flashing in the animation. In fact, if you happen to analyze a page studded with Flash and images by the help of a Search Engine Spider Simulator tool, the outcome will be a blank page. Spiders like text and hence, if your text is written in an image, then it is useless for proper search engine optimization of your website.; In fact, a smart SEO trick recommended and often used by every SEO company is including a genuine description of the image in the ALT attribute of the tag. However, you need to be very careful with this because too many keywords inclusion in this description may get your website penalized for keyword stuffing.
Visibility of Dynamic Pages:: Dynamic pages are something that do not get proper attention from search engine spiders and hence, can be extremely demanding of your SEO services. Especially, those with question marks face terrible problems. However, it may not be valid to say that they are totally rejected by the spiders because many search engines spot and index dynamic pages quite easily.
Meta Keywords and Meta Description:: As its name signifies, Meta keywords and Meta description are placed in the tag of a HTML page. There were times when Meta keywords and Meta descriptions were the most important element used by the search engines to gauge the relevancy of a particular page but today, alternative mechanisms is used and hence, the requirement of listing keywords and description in Meta tags gets eliminated.
Visibility of Hyperlinks: In order to gauge whether or not your Hyperlinks are pointing in the appropriate direction, it is advised to use the search engine spider simulator. As for instance, you may have noticed many a time that many link exchange websites place fake links to your site with _ javascript, which are not even looked at once by the search engines as the spider simulator does not display such links.

In fact, in place of _javascript based menus, it is better to use tag as all the links placed in _javascript based menus will get ignored as page text. Such a situation is tackled by putting all the menu item links in the tag. Although, the tag has a lot of space, one should avoid doing link stuffing or any other kind of SEO operation there.

It is highly recommended to procure less than 100 hyperlinks on your page. If in case you go beyond that, it would become very difficult for you to check their relevancy. As for instance, if your page shows an error that does not let spiders to go through your page (such as “403 Forbidden”, “404 Page Not Found” or etc) then it gets confirmed that your page will not get indexed.

Keywords:: Keywords are indeed, one of the most likeable features of the website for the spiders. Proper distribution of most sought-after keywords among the text never fails to attract spiders and hence is counted among the prime SEO Services. As far as the positioning of the keywords is concerned, it is recommended that the keywords displayed in the first paragraphs of a page works better than those placed in the middle or at the end. However, more than the outlook, it is the coding that you need to focus on.

Summary: The approach that spiders follow while indexing the websites is very similar to each other. Interestingly, the only dissimilar factor is the algorithms that are used by each search engine. Therefore, to be indexed and secure top ranks, it is must to know the things that attract search engine spiders.

Do Not Let dim Content Problems Sabotage your Web Projects

admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:45:53 +0000

If words can bring a revolution, they may also cause failure. Expressing your ideas and messages, without accompanying any scope for misinterpretation or miscommunication is the benchmark of successful content. Website content should create a marked difference in its capability to bring in traffic. Pioneering design, keyword rich and comprehensible content contributes in making a website attractive and useful. A website is wasted if it does not have the attributes of being interactive yet informative.

A well written and interactive website easily invites and retains more and quality traffic. Mentioned below are some of the key guidelines provided by the experts from the leading Content Writing company.

Focus on customer-oriented words:: And finally, it is not about “our” and “us” but actually about “you” and “yours”. Your target audience is much more interested in knowing what you can provide rather than what you are. While focusing on presenting information regarding your company, you actually tend to prevent your target audience from knowing the benefits that your comp any may provide them with. Therefore, you need to focus more on customer-oriented words rather than beating your own trumpet.
Web design that curtails the content presence:: though it is true that beautiful and intelligent web designs play a vital role attracting more and more visitors but it does not indicate that you are allowed to give more significance to web design in respect to content. Do not forget” content is King” and visitors will get to know about you only if you WRITE about it.
The ‘we-we calculator’:: Get your website checked on the ‘we we calculator’ and find out whether or not, your site is customer oriented. The calculator is basically an analysis tool that is used to count words on your site which may be the key indicators of what your website content is mainly focusing on.
Get rid of ROT:: ROT is redundant, outdated and trivial content that is generally found in first and second generation web sites along with intranets. Your website must have a competent system of reviewing content regularly. Anything which is not useful for your readers anymore should not be a part of your website.
Style, Format, font and structure:: Yes, all these factors make your content presentable and worth reading online. Internet is a lean-forward medium and hence, if your content is difficult to read, the visitor would escape it instantly. Write concise sentences in plain English. Avoid creating underlined text. Use capital letters only for the initial letter of sentence or heading, acronyms and name or tiles of a person or entity.
The summary:: Indeed, the easiest part for most us, writing summary is actually a painstaking job which needs to be highly attractive and informative, After all, it presents whether or not your article is worth a read. However, although there are is no universal formula specified for writing summary, the writer only needs to create short, sensible, clear, simple, search-engine friendly piece of information.

Yahoo Search Marketing- Improve Your Targeted Traffic and Potential Sales

admin — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 07:54:51 +0000

When it comes to website promotion, you spend a lot of money on traditional advertising with all your hope that it will be seen by your targeted visitors and they will take some action. With broadcast and newspaper ad, you cannot be sure that it is been viewed by people who are genuinely looking for your products or services. Sponsored search, an effective internet marketing technique can help online business owners to make the business visible to targeted customers. It is here that with Yahoo Search Marketing you can do all that and even more. They have been improving their search platform for a long time and vary from the work that Google Adword does. It promises to generate a good amount of traffic and is worth spending time on it.

Why should you Select Yahoo Search Marketing?

A pay per click advertising method, Yahoo Search Marketing helps you to choose local visitors easily. You can choose to focus on those people who are great prospects for your business and can actually pay for your services. It is both affordable and easy when it is compared with traditional advertising and offers results that are far superior. You can try and test different ads and analyze the ones that generate more clicks and sales. Based on the reports you can select new ads with different keywords to make your internet marketing campaign successful.

Yahoo search marketing helps you to display your advertisements on the search engine result page, where most of the visitors search for the specified keywords and are in need of some specific information. You can choose better keywords and key phrases that are relevant to your website and can select the maximum bid, maximum cost per click for each keyword. This enables you to have absolute control on your ad and insures that you have to pay for visits that are purely generated from keyword targeted ads. You can set up various ads for different keywords and develop your traffic. It is only when a visitor clicks on the particular ad and they are diverted to your site, that you have to pay. Testing each ad assists you to determine the best one that generates maximum sales and helps you to generate greater revenues. Multiple ads can be set with Yahoo Search Marketing and the best performing ad can help you to fine tune your advertising process.

Based on the analytics, Yahoo Search Marketing provides you the flexible budget option that permits you to remain focused on target audience and equips you with features and tools that manage your account easily. It also proffers sponsored search and submit products like: sponsored search listing, yahoo product submit, content match, travel submit, yahoo express, marketing console, search optimizer and extensive reporting tools. These features of yahoo manage your entire network of portals and websites and are beneficial for those businesses that have a local presence and can quickly catch the users view at an affordable price.

Summary

As a most popular form of internet marketing campaign, yahoo search marketing provides huge details of the traffic coming to the website and this analysis strengthens the further decisions taken to develop a business. If you are looking for an effective advertising campaign, then yahoo search marketing delivers the best targeted audience together with the flexibility of availing the best possible strategies.

The Evolution of Article distribution and Guest Blogging

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:07:15 +0000

The beginning of 1990 introduced the concept of article marketing and brought with itself the many article directories. One of these early inventions was ezines, the email magazine. Initially, these publishers used to create newsletters, but soon they realized that this deal is excessively time-taking and massively laborious, and then came the alternative of writing articles. Immediately, many publishers started to offer collection of recent articles published by others on a specific subject. Considered as the most ideal reservoir of quality content, the popularity of these article directories grew more and more. They opened massive information galore to the collection of relevant articles, which in turn gain a link back to the author’s site. So logically, these articles were created with the motive of imparting relevant, informative content on a matter to readers in the hope that they would support the writer with a click. In addition to these, there are some other benefits as well such as Search Engine Optimization, Massive archiving of resource and material, exposure before new groups of people, internet networking, and quick broadcast throughout the web, free advertising and many more.
With time, web players recognized the value of links and its popularity. They did not take long to understand the fact that the use of keyword-rich anchor text works much more efficiently with engines than simple URL links. However, with time, like any other online marketing methods, in this field too, the typical intrusion of spammers became prominent.

Contemporary approach to Article Marketing

Unfortunately, a demand for quantity rather than quality soon overtook the podium of article distribution concept. New article writing software came into existence to illegally yield snippets of text from already available web content. Further, the arrival of article blaster software all the more accelerated the growth of those looking particularly to distribute what are now termed as “junk articles.” However, irrespective of the chaos and deterioration created in the article marketing concept, many quality links come from the same source.

Guest Blogging:: With the arrival of some fresh concept of blogging and other Social Media Marketing techniques, a new series of opportunities appeared for the web professionals to share their knowledge with others. Most of the advantages that article marketing concept has, is also, seem to work for blogging. This list of benefits broadly includes increase in traffic to your website, zero investment advertising, wider exposure before new groups, Search Engine Optimization, quick circulation through out the web and more.

However, many have predicted that the concept of guest blogging will bring same sort of results as that of article marketing. Unfortunately, this is, indeed, is very much possible and its traces can be already found to an extent. The evil techniques of track backing and ping backing are already used by spammers.

Guest blogging and SEO:

The issues that were prominent in the case of Article Marketing are very much obvious with the concept of blogging as well. Both writers and website owners are required to be extremely cautious with duplicate content or the replication of blogs and articles. Thousands and thousands of cases have been registered where entire blog entries and articles were duplicated on scraper sites just within seconds of the original posts getting published.

Who should be concerned?

Many claim that article market brings no search engine marketing benefits-This is not true! Although the link quality of article directories have decreased with due course of time, they only account for one source of links. This has been stated on the fact that the article directories only work as a transitional points and not the final destination of articles. The main motive still lies with the deed of getting your article picked up from directories and reprinted or republished on authority sites or blogs. Moreover, this is only the source, from where one can reap his/her linking benefits the most.

It is believed that even if an individual does not reap any good straight or materialistic benefits from article marketing or guest blogging, he must keep doing both on regular bases, simply because it is considered as a good marketing option. If at all, it offers nothing, it would still bring good exposure and a way for brand building to you. This tried and test and approved globally method, online as well as offline, will always stand as a valid marketing method in the world of advertising and promotion.

Summary: Irrespective of the benefits you earn from article marketing or guest blogging, it is advised not to stop with these practices. These practices ensure good exposure to a much wider section of web populace. Moreover, it also increases your popularity over the web indirectly.

Social Media Optimization: 6 ‘Must-Avoid’ Things

admin — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 06:21:31 +0000

The platform of Social media encompasses websites and web tools that allow beneficial user communication and interaction. Evolved as a critical aspect to SEO, Social Media Optimization bears the ability of being one-stop instant traffic source. The concept revolves around a number of networking websites such as twitter, facebook, orkut and myspace, Linkedin as well as some other new channels so that a new way than just search-engines can be used to bring in more and more quality traffic.

The wide and highly compatible scope of social media offers you the liberty of trying out almost every possible trick that you have known so far in the world of Internet. But today, in this article we are going to focus on tricks that you must not try, as otherwise, all your positive efforts will go in vain.

6 most common SMO mistakes

Open to everyone:: Well! It is true that direct marketing is a strong hand of Social media, but it will not start working until you build the relationships prior to trying and calling on them. You cannot enter the platform and instantly start selling since no one is going even look at you, or even if they do, they will mark you as a spammer, which in turn will get you negative response, and you will run the risk of permanently ruining your brand.
Making everyone your friend:: Always remember that your profile needs to look genuine and this is why you should be very selective while choosing your friends. Do not add people who you are completely oblivious with or those who do not have any interest or connection with your website
Incomplete profile:: An incomplete profile indicates your obligation of making a profile and not interest. By filling in just obligatory details, you cannot score high on the parameter of earning interest and friends. Especially, when it is not necessary to be present on every social media platform, giving required amount of time to a few is manageable. Remember that information regarding your interest, experience, and such are more useful than your name and location.
No measuring and Tracking:: They say, “You cannot manage what you don’t measure”. If you have not incorporated measures to measure the performance of your SMO strategy then do not even think of practicing it. Deep analysis along with knowing the exact objective of your SMO plan is extremely crucial.
Absence of Five P’s theory:: Profile, propagate, produce, participate and progress. These 5 Ps make a social media campaign successful. Just you need to learn to do right things at the right time.
One strategy For All Sites:: Dangerous! One thing you must get straight and clear is the fact that every social networking website is different and demands a different treatment. Develop a separate social media optimization strategy for each that is customized to that site’s specific rules and code of conduct.

Summary: If practiced appropriately, SMO tactics can result in driving huge amounts of traffic to a website. Also, it may help to determine whether or not, your start up, website or idea will make it big in the internet world. But all this is promised only if it implemented in the apt manner.

Influence the Search Engines with Link Building for Higher Ranking

admin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:08:43 +0000

When it comes to link building that can grab the attention of the search engines, there are no hard and fast rules that can be followed by the SEO experts. If it ever existed, search engines would be in the trouble of ranking all the sites at the top position and it would have been over crowded. What works best in this SEO field is survival for the fittest and one who can implement the latest technologies and techniques to attract the search engines.
If you site is competing to attain a better position that is above low, it is better to adopt two different methods of building links so that you site can endure any sudden changes in the ways links are valued and appreciated. Various methods can be considered while creating links but the two most popular among all should be given greater importance. They are:

Reciprocal Link Building

The single most vital factor while creating reciprocal links is its relevancy. The site that you are linking to should have the same theme as that of yours and people are genuinely interested in that site due to its informative web pages. It is only then, that such a link can be considered a good one. Value of the website that is linked to can also be judged by its Page Rank value and it is obvious that a site with higher page rank will require less links to be created. The position where your link is placed matters a lot. If it is placed at the bottom of the page and contains 100 links above it, it is considered less valuable. The higher the position the greater is its worth. Links that are provided within the content appear to be more natural than the ones that are directory style links.

Non Reciprocal Links

There are various methods with varying success rates that are implemented while building non reciprocal links. The most significant among them are:

Quality Content: Providing good quality content that is relevant and informative helps to attract non-reciprocal links. It is when the content of your website is genuine and original, that people are interested in lining to your site as they believe the fact that reader will be interested to view the content and find it useful.
Directory Submissions: This is considered to be the fastest and the simplest means of link building, though at times it can be costly depending on the type of directories that you are submitting, like DMOZ is free and Yahoo charges a significant amount for a commercial site that is to be submitted in a directory. It might take a few months or sometimes even more to get a listing there. There are various small business directories and topical directories that accept free submissions and they should be considered.
Articles: Article writing is an excellent method of link building and it is by providing relevant and valuable content to other webmasters that you are allowing them to link to your website. The greatest benefit of writing articles is not only in gaining the link value but in attracting actual traffic that you get from the links. When a link created is based on the relevancy of the topic, it helps to increase the ranking of the page with the search engines.

Summary:
If you want to influence the search engines for good rankings, it is imperative to consider the onsite and offsite factors and continue with the link building campaign. Search engines are greatly influenced by the links that are created in the past and also with new links to websites that contain relevant information. In order to insure a top ranking of your website, at least two different methods of creating links should be considered together with some other ethical methods.

Understanding the Tactics Behind On Page and Off Page Optimization

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 07:12:20 +0000

The advent of internet has helped business owners to achieve their online strategies easily and effectively. There are numerous sources available today that educates you how to use the SEO resources to your maximum advantage to increase the site traffic and ranking. You can choose to incorporate a combination of both the optimization strategies, on page and off page to reach your business goals. If properly done, this will help you to bring in more people and find perfect places to promote your business.

Know the Differences

Soon after the website has been designed and initiated, the two vital requirements of the website are its unique content and publicity. SEO methods that are executed on the website pages are known to be on page optimization. Since search engines do not index websites but index web pages, it becomes important to focus on every page as a separate entity with the search engines. Common elements that needs attention for your on page SEO are web content, meta tags, headings and sub headings, design, images, navigation and podcasts. Effortless and a smooth navigation will help the visitors to reach the exact information they are looking for and all such elements play a significant role to reap the greatest benefits of on-page optimization. As far as content of the web page is concerned, the focus should be on good quality content and internal linking. For this, extreme co ordination is required that can get the most traffic to the website.

Off page optimization is the process of building links from other websites to your web-page. Visitors are directed to the landing page of your website whenever they click on these links. It might sound very easy but it is not so as you have to rely on others who can help you to include links on their page and that can be a challenging task. You have to target those websites that are mostly visited by people and ensure that your website is one that others want to be linked to. You should remember that placing thousands of links in a short time span will not be beneficial. It is better to adopt a slow and steady approach and this will help you to sustain the increased traffic. Search engines add great importance to the links that are relevant to the website and for this, links from higher ranking sites should be added into the site.

Summary
A combination of both on page and off page optimization is likely to increase the search engine rankings of your website. For best results it is good to hire professionals from a reputed SEO Company and get updated and fresh content for the website. No matter whatever the optimization strategies are, performing the right keyword search and implementing the best and efficient means of driving quality traffic will definitely prove to be worthy for your business.

How to Avoid the Google Penalty Plan

admin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:43:55 +0000

Every day Google delivers nearly a ton of traffic to millions of websites all over the world in various languages as well as topics. Ranking a site and placing it in the SERP is a difficult task especially when the competition is very high. It is hard to guess the procedure that Google follows to rank a site and even penalize one. But the fact is that Google has to ensure strict policies to identify the unscrupulous sites. The way Google penalizes the sites with paid links and the constant shifting and changing algorithms used to rank the web pages have left the people guessing the game right now.

Google penalty is generally imposed on websites that do not follow quality content and webmaster guidelines that are set by Google. Your website gets temporarily removed from the index for a certain period of time. In this SEO business, website owners need to be careful about not wearing a Google penalty, since it is the biggest search engine and delivers huge traffic to your business. By penalizing the site for certain reasons Google protects itself from perpetrators who produce all kinds of scams. The best method of protecting your site is to use ethical methods to optimize your results in the SERPs.

The webmaster whose livelihood depends on the rankings on Google will definitely feel aggrieved by any sort of penalty that is imposed on them. It would affect the webmasters both large and small but understanding the motivation behind Google’s penalty is important before passing any final judgment. Google is the most popular search engine and it returns the most relevant result for any terms searched by the visitors. When people try to manipulate their search positions by unfair means, it totally disrupts the process followed by Google to rank a page. Google then penalizes the website in defense.

Check your Website for

Hidden Elements:: If you have matched any text with the background color of the web page for a higher ranking then it is better to remove them and not to attempt to trick the search engine.
Inbound links: Instead of building thousand of back links it is advisable to write fresh and relevant content that people will want to link to. Excessive inbound links may get you penalized by Google.
Outbound Links:: While linking yourself to other sites, you need to be meticulous as links to penalized sites will have a negative effect on your site too. This will damage your credibility amongst the Google spiders.
Keyword Stuffing:: Keep a track on the number of times the selected key phrases are used throughout the descriptions, titles, Meta keywords etc. A keyword density checker may help you to assess this and save your site from getting banned.

Summary
It is not just novice website owners who get penalized by Google while trying to promote themselves but also large organizations and even experienced SEO companies who do not act within Google’s terms. So, with precautions and following ethical practices it is possible to enhance the performance of a website and get ahead in the rat race without being penalized.

Concepts of Multivariate Optimization and A/B Testing

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 12:15:58 +0000

While discussing analytical reports of a website’s performance, scientific method, testing and statistics are few very common words that you get to hear. However, before one starts with a testing or optimization strategy, it is important to determine an ideal method. Generally, the two most widely used techniques are A/B Split Testing, and Multivariate Testing.

Split testing lets you test a variant of your running ad, text, background color, headline and etc against existing one and if the new one brings better results than the already running one then it is advised to repeat the process with new variants. However, irrespective of being simple and easy, split testing is no doubt a slow process fore many and this is why multivariate testing is preferred because it can change multiple elements on the page in one run and produce a winning combination in the end by combing the best elements.

It is believed that when multivariate optimization gets coupled with A/B testing, a wide open, elegant and powerful analytics and optimization platform gets formed. With their own set of pros and cons, both multivariate optimization and A/B testing can do bring efficient and productive results. Testing is undoubtedly, one of the most important, exciting and profitable activity need to analyze the effectiveness, performance and influential ability of a web page, and the thrill to get the surprising results from your changes is unparallel. Therefore, both split and multivariate testing should be used as an efficient testing tool as they both have their own times.

One needs to conduct split tests and multivariate tests to basically, draw a comparison between a set of page “recipes” or creative designs. In common language, this set is widely known as the “test battery.”
The Two Techniques: Many records would suggest the use of word ‘testing’ rather than “optimization”, but actually, they are quite different. However, if viewed deeply, the idea of testing is more appropriate for the concept of split testing, whereas optimization on the other hand, is associated with “multivariate optimization.”

Hence, the difference present between the two may not be extremely visible but it is actually significant. Testing is somehow limited to manual interaction, a hypothesis, experiment, and analysis of the results and split testing draw the comparison between two or multiple options of the same variable. Analysis is very simple in this case, it will either be fruitful or not.
On the other hand, optimization is a process that is conducted to find out the most appropriate collection of variables to get the most out of on some output. In case of carrying out a multivariate optimization, it is important to consider to variables with many options as the objective of the process is determining the best array of them. Here, analysis does not give clear results immediately. Instead, the output of the entire experiment will be an “optimized” page design, which is calculated mechanically with the help of mathematical algorithm.

Experts believe that in order to avail best results, one must engage both these techniques of Split Testing and Multivariate optimization as part of their thorough testing campaign. Both tests have their own set of benefits and situations when one is preferred over the other.

Split Testing: Pros & Cons:

A/B spilt testing is best to understand visitors’ behavior and priorities, while they visit your website. As a diagnostic tool, it can also help you locate the most specific problems within your website. Also, it lets you considerably test your assumptions about the “the most ideal” way to design or write a page. The whole process of split testing is considered useful for quick tests, engaging minor changes. They instantaneous and can be launched anytime, as they are totally free from the requirement of substantial creative development to start the test.

As far as the disadvantages are concerned, you may feel little tied up with the pace of the process as it considers only one change at a time. Also, it does not tell you anything about why a particular way is better than the other, irrespective of showing accurate results. Inefficient data collection is another thing that you may avail with A/B split testing process. Having multiple tests incessantly may bring a great deal of information which probably would of no use with other changed variables that you would want to test in future.

Multivariate Optimization: Pros & Cons

The entire process of multivariate optimization is a standalone way that potentially offers you the best result for your testing moolah. The skill to test several thousand or at times a million combination in one go would need extensive duration.

Multivariate algorithms provides sufficient amount of quality information which helps you determine all those positive as well as the negative aspects of your page. It clearly demonstrates the things on your page, bringing the attribute of efficiency and influential information for testing in future. It is believed that the most persuasive benefit that multivariate testing process exhibit is that the algorithm automatically decides the ideal page design for you.

This needs planning and time. Setting up a good multivariate test is a big job that needs time and efforts. As you plan to test a number of variables having multiple options for each, a lot more creative work is needed to be done to initiate the process. Moreover, special considerations should be laid on the design of the test and development of creative options. And finally, although you receive the best possible result of the experiment in the form of a “theoretical” best page design, it may not be ideally perfect and may require a little more tweaking further.

Summary: With the technique of split testing, you can test a variant of your running ad, text, background color, headline and etc against existing one, whereas with multivariate, the option of changing multiple elements on the page is possible. Both techniques have their own set of pros and cons and hence, should be campaign-specific.

Understanding the Concept of Dynamic URL and Static URL

admin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:28:06 +0000

The use of PHP or java script is becoming immensely popular as most of the websites are utilizing databases that can insert the content in the webpage by a dynamic script. Such sites are termed as dynamic websites. On the other hand we have the static websites which are a bunch of related web pages and they can be accessed from the URL called the home page. It is up to the webmasters to choose over dynamic content or static content.

Dynamic URL and static URL are two different types of URL. Dynamic URL is the one that contains user defined variables in the URL and the web page executes specific functions in order to display the information to the user. The information can be the content of the page, images or any other information. Dynamic URLs are chiefly used if the entire content of a website is stored in a database and it is displayed according to the demand of the viewers.

The sites acts more like templates for the content. The biggest advantage of such URLs is that, numerous pages can be created consistently and easily without a large amount of additional coding. Websites having dynamic URLs actually display different content with the same layout and this helps the webmasters save a lot of effort and time that is required to manually code, edit or recreate the pages. They are created by using server side technologies like Asp or Php and a database MYSQL as the backend storage.

Dynamic URLs are not usually preferred by the search engines as they might contain duplicate content, the spiders are not very eager to index the URLs as dynamic pages trap the search engine bots and create endless loops generating lots of pages that are practically of no use to the search engine users. Unique and fresh content is loved by the search engines but dynamic sites may have different URLs pointing to the same content. This is really very irritating to the visitors. Again we can say that the session ids can cause lots of problems with duplicate contents. Session ids are used to identify the visitors and many websites use the login information to allow access to the site. Each time a new session id is generated, it may point to the same page and this will create duplicate pages for the search engines. Dynamic URLs usually do not have highly relevant keywords in them and it is because of few disadvantages that many webmasters prefer static URLs.

Static URLs are not dynamically generated and don’t have variable strings. To add some content to the website, some changes are needed in the HTML coding. Compared to the dynamic URLs they obtain a better ranking in the search engine result pages. This is based on the assumption that search engines find it difficult to crawl and analyze URLs that includes session IDs or any kind of source trackers in them. Achieving a high ranking is the chief aim of webmasters and the nature of your URL play a great role in making your website visible to the searchers. Static URLs don’t change and do not contain any URL parameters. If a visitor finds any URL in the search engine query that matches the description and title, it is more likely that they will click on that URL. Static URLs also have the advantage in terms of click through rates and the users can very easily remember and understand them and that helps in securing the companies brand.

Appropriate URLs should be chosen based on the requirements of the website

1. You can use some URL rewrite scripts that include features called mod rewrite that displays dynamic URLs as static ones. This involves a lot of knowledge and expertise on mod rewrite and apache.

2. It is better to ask the developer to reduce the number of stop variables and characters in the URL when coding.

3. Robot txt can be used in order to block the search engine bots from performing certain actions. These actions are basically created when dynamic URL is created and they create a lot of duplicate content. Blocking the search engine spiders will prevent from following the random links but you must be careful not to block the bots from indexing the important parts of the website. Adopting this method will reduce the problem of dynamic URL and minimize the duplicity of content.

4. Cookies can also be used instead of session ids. Some visitors can disable cookies but mostly wont and it is important to ensure that web page allows requests that are without cookies as search engines do not accept cookies. If the website needs that the user should have cookies, then it would be difficult for the site to get indexed as they won’t be navigated by the search engines.

5. You can take the help of your programmer to write some special codes for the search engines so that when the search engine bots requests a page they will be directed to a different page that has a static URL. This will help you to stop worrying about the session ids that creates problems for the search engines.

It might be a tedious task for the webmasters to update the website pages, especially when the information grows and needs to be frequently updated. Every page has to be hard coded and for sites that deals with online selling, blogs or forum communities, managing the content becomes a great issue. An URL Rewriting Tool can be used to rewrite the single pages or the directories. You need an Apache to rewrite any commands in the htaccess file. This will enable you to provide the static URL links on the website without altering the dynamic URLs manually because the MOD rewrite Rule will do the conversion.

Summary:
Static URLs and dynamic URLs have always been a hot topic of discussion among the webmasters. Both have some advantages and disadvantages and it depends on the type of website that is to be created by the webmasters and that they should chose upon the best option. A site that contains lots of pages and products to display will usually be dynamic and static URLs can be used to gain the benefits in terms of click through rates and in terms of ranking and indexing a website.