Monday, November 5, 2007

History of the Search Engine - What Came Before Google

Although we credit Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines for giving us the system we use to find the information we seek, the concept of hypertext came to life in 1945 when Vannaver Bush urged scientist to work together to help build a body of knowledge for all man kind. He then proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a memex. But there is a long list of great minds that have given us the information system we now use today. This article illustrates some of them. Here is the History of the Search Engine:

Ted Nelson

Ted Nelson created Project Xanadu in 1960 and coined the term hypertext in 1963. His goal with Project Xanadu was to create a computer network with a simple user interface that solved many social problems like attribution. While Teds project Xandadu, for reasons unknown, never really took off much of the inspiration to create the WWW came from Teds work.

George Salton

George Salton was the father of modern search technology. He died in August of 1995. His teams at Harvard and Cornell developed the Saltons Magic Automatic Retriever of Text otherwise known as the SMART informational retrieval system. It included important concepts like the vector space model, Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), Term Frequency (TF), term discrimination values, and relevancy feedback mechanisms. His book A theory of indexing explains many of his tests. Search today is still based on much of his theories. History of the search engine uses some of the same techniques even today.

Alan Emtage

In 1990 a student at McGill University in Montreal, by the name of Alan Emtage created Archie; the first search engine. It was invented to index FTP archives, allowing people to quickly access specific files. Archie users could utilize Archies services through a variety of methods including e-mail queries, teleneting directly to a server, and eventually through the World Wide Web interfaces. Archie only indexed computer files. With Archie, Alan Emtage helped to solve the data scatter problem. Originally, it was to be named archives but was changed to Archie for short.

Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill

Archie gained such popularity that in 1991 Paul Linder and Mark P. McCahill created a text based information browsing system that uses a menu-driven interface to pull information from across the globe to the users computer. Named for the Golden Gophers mascot at the University of Minnesota, The name is fitting, because Gopher tunnels through other Gophers located in computers around the world, arranging data in a hierarchical series of menus, which users can search for specific topics.

Tim Burners-Lee

Up until 1991 until there was no World Wide Web. The main method of sharing information was via FTP. Tim Berners-Lee wanted to join hypertext with the internet. He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire (a prototype created with help from Robert Cailliau) to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web browser and editor, called WorldWideWeb, and developed on NeXTSTEP. He then created the first Web server called httpd, short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon. The first Web site built was at:




http://www.articleco.com/Article/History-of-the-Search-Engine---What-Came-Before-Google/49778

Internet Marketing is hot and happening

Do you know television took 30 years to reach a mass audience while broadband has taken just three years According to estimates, by 2010 most people will be watching TV via high-speed internet.

Understandably, internet advertising is becoming a preferred marketing tool for companies which have an online presence. Today almost every company worth its salt needs to have a web presence, and if your website doesnt stand out in a crowded market, you wont sell!

As more and more companies jump on to the online marketing bandwagon, this rapidly growing trend has spun two online revolutions:

Online marketing, especially search engine optimisation and pay-per-click campaigns, is giving traditional offline advertising a run for its money.

What you need to keep in mind is: If you dont play your online marketing cards right, you stand to lose out on a huge global market that is within your reach.

A growing number of internet marketing companies are beginning to compete for a share of the huge and rapidly growing online marketing industry.

What you need to keep in mind is: How you succeed in your internet marketing campaign is going to depend to a large extent on how you choose your online marketing company.

Advertisers are increasingly preferring online media over offline media for their advertising and marketing campaigns. The phenomenal success of the search engine Google is evidence of a clear shift from traditional advertising towards online media.

For instance, Google and Yahoos pay per click (PPC) campaigns are becoming the preferred marketing mediums for advertisers, who are now setting aside a significant part of their marketing budgets for online marketing.

Google has rewritten the rules of online marketing and promotions. Other leading search engines such as Yahoo and MSN are also coming up with innovative strategies and technologies to make it easier for users to find what they are searching for.

With competition hotting up between the search engines, companies that have an online presence are competing against each other to gain maximum visibility in these search engines.

The result is that internet marketing has moved on from having merely static websites to highly specialised and competitive strategies and Web 2.0 technologies such as search engine optimisation, PPC campaigns, viral marketing, social networking, internet advertising, tagging, blogging, wikis, and more.

Online media has definite advantages

Online media has some definite advantages over offline media in terms of cost, reach, interactivity, targeting the right markets and measuring responses. For instance, pay per click campaigns provide the most qualified leads and are proven to have highest sales conversion rate.

There are several techniques of search engine promotion such as SEO, PPC, Banner Exchange, Link Building, and so on. Lets have a look at the advantages of online promotions over offline promotions:

1. Online advertising is relatively cheaper. It includes booking ad space in other websites, launching SEO or Pay-Per-Click campaigns, email marketing, viral marketing.

Offline marketing is expensive. It includes printing marketing material, placing print ads in newspapers and magazines, booking ad space in public places, producing and broadcasting television or radio advertisements, dispatching direct mailers.

2. Online advertisements are more interactive and therefore more likely to really connect with consumers.

Offline advertisements are generally not interactive.

3. Online advertisements do not violate the privacy of customers.

Offline advertisements such as cold calling violates your customers privacy.

4. Email marketing enables instant business communication whether the customer or business affiliate is across the street or across the globe.

Offline advertisements have a limited reach in terms of distance.

5. Advertising on the internet is not bound by time limits. Marketing campaigns can continue for as long as you want (often at minimal extra cost).

Offline promotions, be it print ads or radio/TV ads are usually bound by time limits.

6. Customer queries can be solved instantly and very cheaply in online media as visitors can themselves look up the website for further information.

This facility is often lacking in offline media, or would require expensive resources like call centre staff to service customer enquiries.

7. Customers can look up online advertisements at their own convenient time.

In offline determines when a particular advertisement should be broadcast or printed. If you miss it, its gone!

8. Search engine optimisation and pay per click is demand driven, as your companys products and services appear at the exact time when the customer is seeking those services. This means you have a much higher chance of converting a lead into a sale.

Offline promotion is usually interruptive and blanket-targets an audience whether they are seeking your services or not.

9. Online marketing can access millions of potential customers across the globe with just a few clicks.

In offline promotiont it is impossible to reach millions of customers at one go unless you have an exceptionally large budget (e.g. a Superbowl TV spot).

Choosing a good online marketing company



http://www.articleco.com/Article/Internet-Marketing-is-hot-and-happening/50392


A number of highly specialised creative and technical processes are involved in online marketing. You will not achieve the desired result unless you select an internet marketing company that has a thorough knowledge of search engine optimisation, pay per click campaigns, website analysis, web copywriting, keyword analysis, code optimisation, link building, and web analytics.

Before you decide on which internet marketing company to use, make sure the company has a thorough professional and updated knowledge of these specialised skills. Check out their processes, find out how they plan to take on your internet marketing campaign step-by-step, and make sure they give you some form of guarantee for their services.

If you are interested in learning more about the detailed steps in a SEO or PPC campaign, visit www.CleverClicks.com.au, a leading SEO and PPC services provider in Sydney, Australia which has outlined the processes involved in internet marketing in clear and easy-to-understand detail.

How to find an ethical Search Engine Marketing CompanyIts a dog-eat-dog marketplace out there. The web is teeming with millions of websites and yours

Its a dog-eat-dog marketplace out there. The web is teeming with millions of websites and yours is just another one of them. To rise above and ahead of this cut-throat competition, you need to work with an effective search engine marketing company that can put your website up among the top results in relevant keyword searches and help you reach out to your target audience.

Search engine marketing is vital for improving your sites conversion rate, attracting relevant traffic and maximising your Return on Investment (ROI).

Search engine optimisation is not an overnight job. It is a highly specialised and time consuming task. It may take months to get the desired results.
Although search engines issue broad guidelines, no one can say with certainty exactly how search engines rank websites. A professional SEO company has a good understanding of search engine behavior and experience in successfully achieving top ranking websites to advise you about the competition, ingredients, mechanisms and strategies that can be employed to make your website visible, frequently visited and a revenue generator.

The top 3 search engines, Google, Yahoo! and MSN, receive over 1.2 billion searches daily! Unless you use the correct search engine optimisation techniques with your website, you will not rank high with the search engines. Here is where the services of a professional search engine marketing company to handle your SEO campaign may help to deliver the desired results.

Search engines are strict about ethics

Search engines are clear in their guidelines about what they like and what they dont like. A good search engine optimisation company uses the specific sets of criteria laid down by search engines and their expertise gained over the years about what has worked in the past to increase the rankings of your site.

The SEO steps that abide by the search engine guidelines are called ethical and practices that are not approved by search engine guidelines are unethical.

Because search engines operate in an automated way, it is possible for webmasters to use methods not approved by search engines for better ranking. But these unethical attempts are fraught with risks.

Once your site is caught using unethical practices and banned by search engines, it will take a long time and a significant amount of effort to rank high in search engines again. Some SEO companies may use unethical practices to get high rankings of your website, but the results are only temporary. In fact they are devaluing your site.

Unethical search engine marketing companies do not consider the long term and want to show quick results to impress you. Hence, it is important to find an ethical SEO company that will ensure sustainable high search engine rankings.

Unethical SEO Practices

It's disheartening that many companies claim to be in top rankings of search engine but the truth is many of them are hype.
If youre serious about your business, dont try to bluff the search engines. The unethical practices will be caught eventually, leaving your website far behind the competition.

Unethical practices used by search engine optimisation companies include:
Keywords stuffing: Unnecessary repetition of keywords in the content
Page swapping: A highly unethical practice where a webmaster copies a page from a high-ranking website, changes the title and description META tags, then submits this page to the search engines. Once a ranking is obtained, they replace the stolen page with one of their own web pages.
Copyright violation: Copying content of other websites without permission.
Irrelevant link exchange: Establishing reciprocal links with irrelevant websites for the sole purpose of increasing the number of links to your website.

How to select an ethical SEO company

Here are some tips for selecting an ethical SEO services company:

Learn the basics of SEO: Study some basics of website promotion and search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques so that it will not be a new concept to you. These can be accessed easily on internet. Just spend little time to your research.

Does it sound too good Be wary if an SEO company offers ultra quick results. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is unethical. Both time and efforts are involved in the SEO process. There are no short cuts.

Evaluate your needs: Evaluate which SEO program best fits your needs. You can evaluate this by checking sales conversions, log reports, and so on. You must discuss your objectives with the SEO services provider then analyze yourself, how good it would be for serving your purpose.

Guarantee: Make sure that the search engine marketing company gives you some level of guarantee for their services. But, be wary of companies that offer a #1 ranking guarantee. No one has that much control over Google, and it is a sure sign that they may use unethical practices.

Experience: Check the industry experience of the people behind the company and also get feedback from the references given.

Strategies: When you choose to optimise your website, you need to look at the methodology a search engine optimisation company would be using. Ask the SEO company about the strategies they are going to use to optimise your website...

Cost: You usually get what you pay for. An offer for 500 links for $29 is a possible sign of unethical practices.

You need to keep in mind these few points while you research SEO services for your website. Return on investment (ROI) can depend on several factors, such as the size of your market place, geographical target area, the sales value of your products/services and the number of people searching online for your products/services.

Searching for an authentic ethical SEO company is a time consuming task. But remember that its not simply enough to only achieve better search engine rankings. Your website needs to be designed in a way to ensure you convert your visitors into buyers to boost your sales and revenues and increase your brand recognition.

If you are wondering how to find an ethical SEO company, visit, a leading SEO and PPC services provider in Sydney, Australia. It has clearly outlined processes involved in search engine marketing in specific and easy-to-understand detail.




http://www.articleco.com/Article/How-to-find-an-ethical-Search-Engine-Marketing-Company/53247

Sunday, November 4, 2007

Expert Search Engine Optimization

With the huge number of websites that are entering the battlefield, it is difficult to play the number game, that of page ranking. It takes a huge amount of effort and new ideas based on the constantly changing scenario, to win the battle of the ranks.
Search engines index millions of pages for particular keywords and your website could be anywhere in the 10th or 20th page, if not optimized for relevant keywords.

What is expert search engine optimization? SEO or search engine optimization begins with coding, designing, and programming a website to ensure that the website appears at the top of search engines and attracts targeted high quality traffic. If the web pages are not optimized, they will not get high ranking and this leads to no results, and the number of search engines the site has been submitted to does not make any difference. This is where expert search engine optimization professionals come in.

The SEO professional is one who understands the intricacies of how search engines are coded, how they work, and what they expect from websites. With expert search engine optimization, a website can be made visible to visitors querying for various related keywords on the search engines.

Web pages should meet the needs of the visitors in a particular niche. The idea is for the target audience to find the web page information easily through web directories and search engines.

This is a daunting task and expert search engine optimization involves the scientific and artistic skills of a company that has the expertise and the high skill set required to perform and succeed at this task.

Being top ranked on the search engines for a keyword that only brings in about 30 people monthly is not what we are talking about. Just as with any form of marketing, expert search engine optimization providers ensure that the return of investment (ROI) is reasonable. It is the duty of the SEO expert to achieve rankings on search engines that actually bring enough traffic to the website concerned, to offset the money that is paid for his services.

Expert search engine optimization - why do you need them? Why cant this be done by ourselves? Good question. Experience is the keyword here. Because with experience, the expert is able to look into the various nuances of search engine optimization and provide the key to a successful campaign with ease.

When expert search engine optimization services are hired, you must ensue that the company has got a clear picture of the direction to take in order to obtain best results. This intelligence is what creates a miracle on search engines.
Expert search engine optimization professionals have a wide range of skills, such as web designing, copy writing, HTML knowledge, link development, keyword analysis, off page optimization, on page optimization, distribution of press releases etc. Different experts believe in using different methods and while some specialize in result-oriented copy writing, others are more technically savvy and look into things like IP delivery. Whatever the route taken, the goal is positioning and attracting traffic.
When choosing a company that provides expert search engine optimization services, it is important to look into the background of the company. There are hundreds of SEO service providers on the internet today claiming to be experts in search engine optimization. But are they competent enough? Im afraid NOT. It is not a good idea to go by assurances; it is the results that are important.

It is a great idea to check the expertise level of the so called expert search engine optimization providers, by making sure they possess the complete skill set, which includes copy writing skills, ability to write great headlines that are catchy, and most importantly, solid technical skills. The last but certainly not the least is the aspect of looking into the previous work done by the SEO company in order to classify them as an expert search engine optimization company.



http://www.articleco.com/Article/Expert-Search-Engine-Optimization/62043

Correctly Building Backlinks

Getting Backlinks the Natural Way

The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better. But in practice it is not exactly like this. Or at least you cannot always rely on the fact that your contents is good and people will link to you. Yes, if your content is good and relevant you can get a lot of quality backlinks, including from sites with similar topic as yours (and these are the most valuable kind of backlinks, especially if the anchor text contains your keywords) but what you get without efforts could be less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you will have to resort to other ways of acquiring quality backlinks as described next.

Ways to Build Backlinks

Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome and the time you spend building them is not wasted. Among the acceptable ways of building quality backlinks are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories. The unacceptable ways include inter-linking (linking from one site to another site, which is owned by the same owner or exists mainly for the purpose to be a link farm), linking to spam sites or sites that host any kind of illegal content, purchasing links in bulk, linking to link farms, etc.
The first step in building backlinks is to find the places from which you can get quality backlinks. A valuable assistant in this process is the Backlink Builder tool. When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of sites where you can post an article, message, posting, or simply a backlink to your site. After you have the list of potential backlink partners, it is up to you to visit each of the sites and post your content with the backlink to your site in it.
You might wonder why sites as those, listed by the Backlink Builder tool provide such a precious asset as backlinks for free. The answer is simple � they need content for their site. When you post an article, or submit a link to your site, you do not get paid for this. You provide them for free with something they need � content � and in return they also provide you for free with something you need � quality backlinks. It is a free trade, as long as the sites you post your content or links are respected and you don't post fake links or content.

Getting Listed in Directories

If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ and Yahoo is a must � not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

Forums and Article Directories

Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.
While forum postings can be short and do not require much effort, submitting articles to directories can be more time-consuming because generally articles are longer than posts and need careful thinking while writing them. But it is also worth and it is not so difficult to do.

Content Exchange and Affiliate Programs

Content exchange and affiliate programs are similar to the previous method of getting quality backlinks. For instance, you can offer to interested sites RSS feeds for free. When the other site publishes your RSS feed, you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.
Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers) and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

News Announcements and Press Releases

Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites (for instance, here is a list of some of them) that publish for free or for a fee news announcements and press releases. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many, many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Backlink Building Practices to Avoid

One of the practices that is to be avoided is link exchange. There are many programs, which offer to barter links. The principle is simple � you put a link to a site, they put a backlink to your site. There are a couple of important things to consider with link exchange programs. First, take care about the ratio between outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links are times your inbound, this is bad. Second (and more important) is the risk that your link exchange partners are link farms. If this is the case, you could even be banned from search engines, so it is too risky to indulge in link exchange programs.
Linking to suspicious places is something else that you must avoid. While it is true that search engines do not punish you if you have backlinks from such places because it is supposed that you have no control over what bad guys link to, if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. For more details about bad neighbors, check the Bad Neighborhood article. Also, beware of getting tons of links in a short period of time because this still looks artificial and suspicious.


http://www.articleco.com/Article/Correctly-Building-Backlinks/62590

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Making Google Work For You

When you think about search engines, likely the first name that springs to mind is Google. A popular and fast search engine, it has come to be relied upon by many as the first place they head when they want to search the billions of pages of information on the world wide web in order to find the specific information they need. If you have an online business that is represented by a online storefront, then you realize that procuring search engine optimization services can be the key to making Google work for you.

Search engine optimization services can improve both the number and quality of visitors that stop to peruse your website, and take some kind of action you wish of them. Internet marketing services encourage visitors to take action. This might be purchasing something, or downloading some type of information, or filling out some kind of action form. A good seo company can help improve your web business's conversion rate of number of visitors to your site versus the number of visitors who take the action you request.

Google, like most other major search engines, searches the Internet for key words that you have entered, and then they index the specific words and their locations, after which they allow you to search the index for the information you desire. Google was started at Stanford University and originally was used as an academic search engine. Google relies of web robots, called spiders, to search for the keyword you type in, and all pages that link to its initial search findings. Not only do the spiders have to work quickly, but delays must be minimized by having an optimized system for sending information to the spiders. To make this happen, Google utilizes its own domain name server to maximize speed.

Spiders used in Google look for keywords on a webpage and where those keywords are located on the page. The spiders start at the top of the page, moving to the bottom, and also start from left to right. This means that if your keywords are located at the top left side of the page the spider will get to it sooner than if it is located farther down the page. Knowing this, an SEO company can create content for your website so that your specific useful keywords relevant to your website appear in the most strategic places in the content, making it quicker and easier for the spiders to find them.

Optimization helps boost your website in the index listing that you see on your computer screen. Although several pages of index are available, many people confine their search to the first page, and even the top few results on the first page. SEO can help move your website further up the list, improving the chances that a visitor will stop at your site. Google also offers more refined searches, including local searches, product searches, web page translations so that foreign readers can understand your website's content and more that an SEO company can utilize to your advantage.



Source: http://www.a1articles.com/article_234832_62.html

Search Engine Optimizers... Beware!

Search engine optimization is gaining immense popularity as an online marketing service. An increasing number of businesses are getting involved in it, lured by high revenues and maximised returns on investment.

Although the online marketplace is flooded with service providers in this field, very few actually know the dos and don'ts of this process. SEO can be a very rewarding investment for those venturing into web business promotion. However, the use of wrong techniques can get your site supplemented, blacklisted or even banned by search engines.

The following is a list of activities that should be avoided by optimizers in order to be successful with this process:
1) When creating meta tags, do not stuff them with keywords. Your keywords and phrases should be incorporated judiciously and in an acceptable manner. Meta tags should not be created just for the process of optimization; they should have some relevancy too.

2) Avoid the use of keywords in hidden text of your web pages. Even though these words will not be visible to the lay user, search engines do crawl them and index pages for better rankings. This technique is regarded unethical because this text matter usually is not pertinent to the page in question.

3) The keywords of your business should be effortlessly incorporated in the content of your web pages. Do not overdo their usage as the content then looks highly promotional in nature.

4) Link building is one of the main off-page services of search engine optimization. When you set out to link with other websites, avoid being linked to 'bad neighbourhoods' like link farms. You cannot stop any site from linking to you. But, you can regulate the quality of sites you reach out to. If you link your site to a link farm, there are chances that the search engines might ban you.

5) Do not get into link exchange with blacklisted or banned sites. By doing so, you stand the risk of being penalised or even blacklisted by a search engine network.

As an optimizer, you are solely responsible for the 'character' of your website. Even though not everything can be controlled or regulated at your end, you should always tread the acceptable path and do away with the lure of quick traffic or revenues.



Source: http://www.a1articles.com/article_235099_62.html