SEO or Search Engine Optimization

This term describes a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. The three more popular search engine are currently Google, Yahoo and MSN search. These methods are seaking to improve the search rankings of a website.
The websites have different goals for search optimization. Some sites are seeking highly traffic, highly rank for common search phrases or keywords, or simply a good Google page rank (PR).

Concept of PageRank

PageRank is a concept to evaluating web pages, which relies heavily on inbound link (IBL) and uses the logic that each link to a page is a vote for that page's value. It allows to judge the importance and relevance of a page. The more incoming links a page had the more "worthy" it is. The value of each inbound link itself varies directly based on the PageRank of the page it comes from and inversely on the number of outbound links (OBL) on that page. Based on this calculation and other secret factors, it decides where to place any page on the search engine results page (SERP). With help from PageRank, Google became the most popular and successful search engine. PageRank is only one of more than 100 factors that Google considers in ranking pages. Most search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret.

Manage your PageRank

One fact is clear, no need to submit a new website to a search engine to be listed. A simple link from an established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and spider its contents. So the quality of new site indexing depends on your link exchange strategy.

Google uses the number of inbound links (IBL) to a page to judge the importance of that page. This relevance is evaluated thanks to a scale of measurement for PageRank from 1 to 10. PR0 indicates only no PageRank. Each link to a page carries with it and passes PR value to the target page. The calculation of the PR remains a Google secret but it is generally agreed that a page will only pass about 85% of its value to the page it links to. This value of 85% of the PR is divided by the total number of outbound and internal links. The relationship between PR levels is logarithmic and not linear. That is to say you need between 5 ou 10 times more inbound links to up of one level at each step. In the same way, you need 5 to 10 PR4 incoming links to have the result of a single PR5 IBL. To increase the complexity of the calculation, all PR4 haven't got the same value. PR value is not a single number, but is a range of values. So not all PR5 ranked pages are equal. A PR5 maybe just on the upper boundary of a PR4 or it maybe just short of the entry point for a PR6.

Accumulate Backlinks

The best solution to improve the PageRank of a web page is the accumulation of inbound links or Backlinks and the minimization of outbound links. The quality of these Backlinks is essential. Usually some SEO experts estimate you need 100 PR5 to get a PR6 or only one PR7 to obtain the same result. A PR7 page with many outbound links will devide its intrinsec PageRank value and reduce the benefic effect for each link.

There are a lot of ways to accumulate IBL or backlinks, the four most common are:

         - list your site in as many Directories as possible,
         - engage in a reciprocal linking campaign,
         - buy backlinks,
         - write articles and try to publish them on other sites or on your own.

A lookup of the number of Backlinks that Google reports for a specific page can be viewed in the browser, by simply typing "link:http://www.yourdomainname.com" into the Google search box. The one trick to this link search is that Google does not display all backlinks. No explanation is available.

Use anchor text

To optimize a Backlink you have to use your prime keyword phrases as anchor text in all your IBL. This practice should even be employed with internal links. Try to exchange link with sites that are related in content and theme to your own site. The relevance of contents is one of the considerations search engines into their algorithms.

The keywords in anchor text enhance the relevance of the target page. The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages. All search engines give significant weight to the anchor text. Indeed Google even has a special operator "allinanchor:keyword" which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages.

Anchor text optimization can be deployed throughout your site to enhance the relevance of most of the web pages based on individual page content. For instance for linking to internal pages, it is better to use the following format:

         - our tool is available to exchange your e-gold.

<a href="http://www.goldtotem.com/">exchange your e-gold</a>

Instead of:

         - our tool is available to exchange your e-gold here.

And a better html code is:

<a href="http://www.goldtotem.com/" title="e-gold ecurrency exchanger">exchange your e-gold</a>

The above example shows that you can leverage the hyperlinking of important keyword phrases instead of hyperlinking unrelated text wherever possible. You can restructure sentences if keywords don't fit in anchor text.

For the optimization of outbound links, the title which is usually used as the hyperlinked text, should contain your important keywords: