Calculating PageRank
Google uses an equation to calculate PageRank. This equation is as below:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn)

In that equation, the values t1 and tn are pages that are linked to the page whose rank is being calculated. The value C represents all outbound links on that page while‘d’ is the damping factor. This is normally calculated as a standard 0.85. Google also uses the term ‘share’ to calculate the final PageRank of a page. This is done by dividing the PageRank value by the outbound links that are on that page. This is the ‘vote’ that other pages have helped cast on the page to increase the rank. Therefore, Google shares out the number of ‘votes’ on that page for all pages that have ‘voted’ for that page so that they all get a point towards their PageRank. Therefore, the less outbound links there are on a page the higher that page will rank and that ‘vote’ will be valued more when linked to other pages.

According to many experts, Google uses an algorithm to calculate PageRank. This algorithm is not known by people other than Google. Like all algorithms, moving from level 1 to 2 will be much easier than moving from level 2 to 3. When calculating PageRank, previous positions do not count in that all other information is discarded and PageRank calculated afresh. If two pages without any other links ‘vote’ for each other, their PageRank values will be calculated based on each others PageRanks. Therefore, one of them will have inaccurate information as it was calculated based on the other’s PageRank, which had not been calculated yet. This will consequently lead to the second one having inaccurate information because it will also be calculated based on inaccurate data.

In order to get to a more accurate PageRank value, Google uses the newly calculated PageRank values to calculate slightly more accurate PageRank values. After repeating the calculations about fifty times, the difference between the results starts becoming negligible and Google gets its values at that point. However, based on this algorithm, it is almost impossible to have 100% accuracy rates for PageRank values. This is because the initial information used was not accurate and subsequent calculations were based on that information. This long process is the reason why PageRank updates take as long as they do.

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Search engine marketing involves all activities that can be used to promote a website, a business or earn a website owner income. SEM involves activities such as paid inclusions, which involves paying search engines to make it easier for a website to be found by internet users. For some search engines, this is the only way that websites can get listed. Most website owners prefer paying because it means their sites will be listed sooner than others and internet users will be able to keep track of changes being made on the site. Another aspect of SEM is placing advertisements on the website to market a product or website. Pay per click is another SEM technique used by search engines and website owners to generate traffic for websites. In this case, payment is made per every click of the advertisement.

Both SEO and SEM techniques are drawn towards generating traffic to a website, promoting a product and bringing up profits. One of the biggest differences in these two techniques is the SEM is almost guaranteed and takes place immediately but SEO requires more work, monitoring and patience to yield results. SEM is more expensive because it is a fast and reliable way of promoting a website. SEM mainly gets people to click on a website link. After that website users have a little time to convince users that they can find what they are looking for on that website. This is where SEO comes in. SEO techniques have to be applied to make sure that users get what they are looking for and will come back to that site to look for further information in the future.

The purpose of SEO is to make a website more usable by search engines and internet users. SEO is directly related to SEM because without it, the marketing techniques will not be implemented to achieve the final desired goal. In addition, without SEM, a website would probably never be viewed and that would make all SEO attempts futile. Search engine optimization can be termed as a cheaper and long term answer to increase traffic generation and promote a website. SEM includes the efforts put in to ensure that the website is actually visible to internet users. SEO is a free technique that consumes much more time than SEM and does not offer any guarantees to promote a website.

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This information retrieval system is used mainly to capture spam documents that contain many repetitive key phrases but very little useful content. Such pages stuffed with keywords can easily be eliminated this way. This technique has been helpful when searching websites that contain many ‘honeypots’. These are phrases that advertisers use frequently and therefore pay website owners to incorporate in their pages. A page with too much of this offers no real information to internet users and is therefore considered as spam. The phrase based indexing and retrieval system has also been used to detect duplicate content, identify spam and rank pages in terms of popularity hence make more use of pages that users want to use.

Another important role played by phrase based indexing and retrieval system is exploring documents that are on the internet and put together the phrases that appear in the same documents. It searches for the exact keyword and any other common phrases that appear on both or all documents. This technique ensures that search results yielded put together these documents because they more likely than not have related information that users can use. It also determines in what order documents should appear on the results page.

Phrase based indexing and retrieval system may sometimes get mixed up when a term is common in two or more different scenarios. In this case, the search engine will create clusters or groups of documents that are related and will all appear on the search results page although the order in which they appear will be based on the most common context. The system will create different clusters and give them individual cluster names and the documents with the most used phrase in each cluster are displayed on the results page. Google will then determine how the results will be presented and show those in the results page. This gives the internet users a broader results page and ensures that they get what they are looking for. Google’s aim at designing this system was to identify and deal with spam documents as well as ensure users get the most out of their search results.

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Choosing the Niche
One way to do this is using the flagship technique. This technique requires users to put in much time to ensure that it works. It entails focusing on a selected number of blogs from a certain niche. This means putting as much time as possible to ensure that the blog is popular and generates as much traffic as possible. This technique attracts direct advertisers to the site because they know that their products will be viewed by internet users. Flagship technique works for people who have the niche knowledge, networking ability and the patience to ensure a blog is well-fed.

Pay Per Post
Another way people can make money from blogging is by using the pay per post technique. It involves creating individual blog pages and building up their PageRank values then submitting them on blog websites that pay users for every blog they post. The amount paid per post will be based on the popularity of the blog and its PageRank value.

Automated Blogging
Automated blogging is another way people use to make money. This involves creating blogs that automatically get content from news sources, search engines and RSS feeds and uses that as content for the blog. Users can include a link back to the original content to avoid infringing copyrights. Website owners make money from Google AdSense and other affiliate programs and should have as many blogs as possible to capitalize on income.

Selling Text Links
Bloggers can also make money by selling text links to websites that are trying to build their Google PageRank. When using this technique, Bloggers need to focus on a particular niche to ensure that building PageRank is the priority. Bloggers can either buy pre-existing links that already have high PageRank to resell or they can build their own PageRank and sell the links. This technique works best for people who have already built their PageRank and have focused on one particular niche and therefore have a reliable and guaranteed audience.

Focus on High Paying Keywords/Topics
Other Bloggers create blogs using expensive keywords and then set up affiliate programs or Google AdSense and lets the blog generate the income automatically. Expensive keywords are not very popularly used but when used, they more often than not generate into sales. In order to get keyword rich content, most Bloggers sub-contract professional writers to provide them with content and therefore reduces the amount of work required to make money on the blog.

Most techniques used to make money on blogs can be used together with others and therefore capitalize on this. However, Bloggers should be careful not to venture into too many money-making techniques as they may lose focus on all of them and therefore make little or no money.

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Title and Meta Tags

1. Ignoring the Title Tag
2. Duplicate title tags
3. Auto generated title tags
4. Improper use of Meta Tags or Site without Meta Tags
5. Same/similar meta description on more than one pages

Linking Strategy

1. Links to and from Bad Sites
2. Link Acquisition Speed
3. Broken links
4. Mismanaged internal link juice
5. Exchanging links (if you are not cautious)
6. Poor Use of Internal Anchor Text
7. Similar Anchor Text

URL Structure

1. No Canonical Redirect
2. Page Cloaking
3. Ignoring URLs
4. Bad redirects
5. Dynamic URL

Content

1. Pseudo Duplicate Content
2. Duplicate Content Pages
3. Thin Content Pages
4. Poorly written of Content
5. Content getting buried over time

Design and Usability

1. Invisible Text & Links
2. Invalid HTML
3. Use Crawler Unfriendly Development Methods
4. Ignoring Images
5. Using framesets
6. Picking a Poor Content Management System
7. Poor site usability
8. Having too much Graphics in your page
9. Incorrectly Designed Websites
10. alt tags

Keywords

1. Stuffing Keywords in the content
2. Use of Untargeted Keywords and Phrases
3. Focus on more then 2-3 keywords in a page

Others but important elements

1. Not Starting Early Enough
2. Traffic Generation
3. Shadow Domains
4. robots.txt oops
5. Over-Optimized Pages
6. Neglecting a site map
7. Not Investing in Site Promotion

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A simple example of this can be described when reading segments such as ‘privacy policy’ and ‘about us’ on a website. Such sections do not really determine what a page is about and are therefore irrelevant according to search engines. Website owners can reduce the noise levels by reducing content that is not relevant and will therefore not contribute towards a better rankings. Search engines use page segmentation to determine just how much of the content on a page is relevant and how much is merely for generating traffic. However, this task can be very daunting because not many pages can be described as being focused on just one topic. In addition, page segmentation sometimes will not tell advertisements apart from the content itself. Advertisements and search results for 3rd parties can increase the noise level of a page erroneously.

To ensure that page segmentation helps web users as opposed to increasing their noise levels, search engines pair up this analysis with behavioral metrics and link analysis. This can help website owners achieve their desired ranking and reduce their noise levels. Page segmentation analysis treats a page as one regardless of the links that are in it. The links may be to content that is either related or completely irrelevant to the search query. If page segmentation included both internal and external links, page owners could achieve their rankings by linking their pages to other pages that have related content.

Another factor would be enabling website owners to build links towards a page with related content. This page will have many different anchor texts and will therefore reduce noise levels. Many search engines have a problem determining if a page is SEO ready or whether it is good for business. Page segmentation enables users to build their links towards a provided main category page that contains related content. Page segmentation also calculates relevance based on the content in one particular block in relation to the entire page. If it was determined from one page to another, users would have higher chances of being ranked as relevant. The impact of page segmentation on SEO is not clear. Content providers should therefore focus their most relevant content and keywords in their title tags to ensure that their sites are not termed irrelevant.

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Hilltop Google Algorithm Update:
These are algorithms that are used by Google. Hilltop involves creating ways where search engines can use professional content to ensure calculate the relevance of content to a site. This professional paper is referred to as an expert document and it links to many different sources that have related content but is not affiliated to any of them. This algorithm also uses titles, page titles and headings when calculating the relevance of content to the page. According to this system, the title page and title heading add more value to documents than external or internal links. Although Hilltop and PageRank work in almost the same ways, Hilltop calculates based on context and the topic and is therefore harder to influence as it is with links. Hilltop is also much cheaper to use and calculates results faster while yielding much broader and accurate results. If the number of expert or professional sites is limited, Google automatically turns off Hilltop algorithm.

Florida Google Algorithm Update:
The Florida algorithm is also referred to as Florida Google Dance. It was implemented in November of 2003 and was responsible for many people who ranked high in search engines to drop very low or completely out. Not many people understand how this algorithm works but there are many speculations based on the sites that were ousted and those that ranked high in that period. Most online marketers believe that the system was put in place to ensure that they used Google’s AdWords PPC technique and therefore increase income for Google. This is being done by filtering all commercial sites and leaving research sites to rank higher. To maintain their initial PageRank levels, commercial sites would have to pay Google to use their PPC techniques. This claim, however, was not validated as Google keeps algorithm systems as secrets to avoid spamming and PageRank manipulation techniques.

Big Daddy Google Algorithm Update:
The Big Daddy update is a change in the way Google stores its network of data. It uses these networks to yield search query results by indexing websites and therefore sharing the work that could have been left to one server. The Big Daddy update has new codes that it uses to calculate relevance of web pages. This update focuses more on data centers than it does on rankings and therefore has very little effect on a website’s PageRank. This update mainly focuses on detecting spam and getting rid of it. It also paves way for Google to advance their algorithms and expand their databases. Big Daddy also makes it possible for Google to categorize documents based on context to yield better and related search results. It provides users with a broader base of results that are more related to each other and therefore reduces their search times by nearly half.

Hilltop, Florida and Big Daddy have all been implemented by Google to ensure that website owners channel their content to users as opposed to search engines. This means that internet users do not have to search for too long before they find what they are looking for.

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LSI system categorizes all words with similarities into groups and ensures that the ones placed together actually have some form of common ground. It takes into account the keyword and looks for content that contains that keyword and categorizes them in terms of relevance based on the number of times that keyword appears. However, all documents are examined individually then ranked in order of which contains the most keywords and therefore most likely more relevant to the topic. LSI also puts together documents that contain a specific word to make searching for them easier. This systems ranks documents with similar keywords as related because they share the same keyword and the consistency is related. This method relates to how humans classify content as well based on the keyword and how many times it has appeared. However, the LSI algorithm does not distinguish the meanings of words and can therefore not take synonyms as related words. It takes words as they are and categorizes them based on usage.

Relevance to SEO
When internet users enter a search query on search engines, the results displayed are normally all geared towards the keyword searched. Search engines make use of LSI and LSA technologies to ensure that the search results produced are as closely related to the searched term as possible. The simple fact that humans would categorize based on theme or context distinguishes these algorithms as more accurate because they match keywords to the exact word in other web pages. LSI therefore does more than examine the keywords but also looks at how the keyword has been used and gets a feel of the context between one document and many others.

Before using these algorithms, documents were crammed with a specific word and that would automatically rank a page higher. LSA and LSI ensure that it is not just keyword density that counts towards ranking. LSI results are said to give more accurate search results because pages that ranked very high simply because they had optimized the keyword now rank low based on content and relevance. It ensures that internet users get what they are looking for and a much broader base of the keyword they are looking for.

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1. Page Title Element
2. Page Name (url)
3. Keyword prominence
4. Keyword proximity
5. Keyword density
6. Location of Keywords on the Page (beginning to end, keywords in links, location of keywords in paragraph, footer, sidebar, header etc)
7. Number of occurrences of keyword
8. Heading Tags (h1-h3)
9. Text Type (bold, italic)
10. Links(Anchor text, location of links(header/footer..), title tag, inbound links, outbound links)
11. Images(file name, title element, alt attribute, location of image in the page, links on image)
12. Number of words in a page
13. Page layout (css errors, html errors, xhtml compliant)
14. Meta Tags (description, keywords, robots, content type)
15. Lower and Upper case letters in words
16. Use of stop words
17. Comment tags

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<head>
<title> Your title tag/Element </title>
</head>

Title tag is short 60-100 character ad copy of a webpage. You have to use title tag in order to sell your webpage to search engines and users where former is more important. Select the most important keyword phrases for your title tag where it explains the content of the webpage and brings traffic from search engines.

How many characters should be there in the title tag?
Believe me, this is one of the most common question asked in the SEO interviews (entry level ). I would say that there is no limit to that. 60 – 70 characters is what you could mention as it is the number of characters Google displays in their search results. But, once again let me tell you that this is not the rule. However, the rule is that you should have a title which explains your webpage with collection of 2-3 most important keyword phrases.

How to write a title tag?
There are several ways in which one could write a title tag. One of the most popular of them is using pipe-sign. For example:

Primary Keyword | Secondary Keyword 1 | Secondary Keyword 2

I am personally not a very big fan of this method. The other methods seos follow are:

1. Primary Keyword: Secondary Keyword 1, Secondary Keyword 2
2. Primary Keyword < Secondary Keyword 1 , Secondary Keyword 2
3. Primary Keyword, Secondary Keyword 1, Secondary Keyword 2
4. Primary Keyword | Secondary Keyword 1 , Secondary Keyword 2
5. Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword 1, Secondary Keyword 2
6. Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword 1 – Secondary Keyword 2

My personal favorite is number 5 and 6. The most important factor which is often ignored while writing a title tag is that it should be clickable. The title tag should be designed while keeping click behavior of the users in mind.

How many keywords one could have?
In my opinion 2 keywords in title is great but 3 is doable and 4 is a no no..

Should I include brand name?
I think you should do that only if you are amazon.com.

Can I use same keyword twice?
Once again there is no rule for that. In my opinion only use if it is necessary. Remember, frame a title tag which is easy to read.

Do not forget to consider these points before you plan to start your title tag optimization:

• Make your title tag easy to read
• Stimulate a click or call for action.
• Explain your webpage/content of your webpage with your title.
• Do not ever keep it blank or ‘Untitled’.
• Search engine would compare your title tags with the content of your webpage. Frame words that is relevant to the content of your webpage
• Do not repeat the keywords.
• Place your brand name at the end if necessary.
• Avoid using one words and try to use longer phrases.
• Be consistent in using the style for the tag.
• Your title tag should be unique.

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