Articles on search engine positioning

Here are some older, but still relevant articles, on search engines and search engine positioning.

See also our page on more recent SEO articles.

See also our reviews of books and ebooks on search engine positioning and our Search Engine Marketing 101 tutorial.

Pandia Articles

Hiring a search engine optimization and submission company. Pandia takes a look on what it takes to hire a search engine positioning company.

Using meta tags in search engine optimization gives you tips on how to write your keywords and description meta tags.

Optimizing webpage elements. A Pandia Post article on where to put your keyword phrases on webpages in order to get good search engine rankings.

What Ever Happened to Free Search Listings? Paul J. Bruemmer takes a look at search engines and directories that continue to accept free listings.

Preparing Your Site for the Search Directories. Yahoo! and the Open Directory are edited by human beings that have the power to decide whether to include your site or not. They have to be convinced that your site is professional, useful and informative. The Pandia Post teaches you how to think like a search directory editor.

Optimizing Webpage Elements. Pandia Post takes a look at all the tags and webpage elements that should include relevant keyword phrases.

Finding the right keywords. A content-rich high quality site will probably not be found by searchers unless you have optimized the pages for the right search queries. Pandia tells you how to find the right keyword combinations.

Drive Holiday Sales With Search Engine Marketing. Paul Breummer looks at how to ensure that your website ranks well in major search engines and directories before the holiday season.

Search engine damage control. Google and other search engines will boot anyone using spam tactics to get high rankings. Should Web masters fear these threats? You better believe it! Paul J. Bruemmer takes a look at spamming and how to get back into the search engines when booted.

Copywriting: Key to Search Engine Visibility and Conversions. High rankings in search engines can bring you lots of targeted traffic, but will you be ready to convert those leads when they get there? Paul J. Bruemmer takes a look at search engine and visitor friendly copywriting.

How to integrate keywords into your Web site copy. Kalena Jordan gives you the basics of how to write search engine friendly Web page copy.

Guest writer Steve Winkler gives advice on what to look for when buying search engine marketing (SEM) services.

See also our latest search engine news articles.

Articles by Jono Craig and Michelle Stoltz, Craig Media

Jono Craig & Michelle Stoltz are search engine optimization consultants in pursuit of conversion marketing. Viewing Web design as a holistic process, they underline the need to understand the relationships between SEO, usability, design and ultimately conversion.

Building a search engine optimized Website (On Pandia) This is a general introduction to the art of search engine optimization.

Meta Tag Myths (On Pandia) There are those that belive meta tags will solve everything. Far from it, Craig argues.

Further search engine optimization myths & mysteries dispelled (On Pandia) Craig look at more SEO myths, including spamming techniques that will get you banned from the search engines.

Helping Jane. Craig would like to see more interaction between user/searcher groups, search engine developers, cognitive engineers and search engine optimizers (Search Engine Guide).

Michelleís SEO diaries (Part 1) Confession time; when I first met an SEO, I was too embarrassed to ask exactly his job description entailed. Yet when I was offered the chance to learn Web developmentÖ

Articles by Sumantra Roy, 1st Search Ranking

Sumantra Roy, the president of the search engine optimization company 1st Search Ranking, has written several useful articles on search engine positioning.

Choosing the correct keywords for your site. Tells you how you can choose the keywords for which you should optimize your site for the search engines.

The importance of having your own domain name. Tells you why you need to have your own domain name in order to get a good positioning in the search engines.

How to choose domain names. Tells you how you should name your web site with an eye on the search engines and directories.

Creating Keyword Rich Pages. Tells you how you can create pages which are designed to rank highly in all the search engines.

Creating a robots.txt file. How you can create a robots.txt file in order to prevent your site from being penalized for spamming by the search engines.

Software to help you create a robots.txt file. Describes a software which will automate the task of creating a robots.txt file.

Measuring Link Popularity. Tells you how you can measure the link popularity of your web site in the major search engines.

Improving the Link Popularity of your site - Link popularity is becoming an increasingly important factor in search engine positioning. Find out the methods you can use to improve the link popularity of your site, and know which methods you should not use. 

Submitting your site to the Open Directory. Discover how you should submit your site to the Open Directory in order to get a high ranking in many of the major search engines.

Becoming an Open Directory Project Editor. Can't get your site listed in the Open Directory, no matter how hard you try? Find out how you can become an editor of the Open Directory and get your site an optimum listing in it.

Submitting your site to Yahoo! - Find out the secrets behind getting your site an optimum listing in Yahoo!.

Frames and Search Engines - Find out how to get good search engine positioning even if your site uses frames.

Page Cloaking - To Cloak or Not to Cloak - Find out what is page cloaking, how it is implemented, and whether or not you should actually use page cloaking.

Top 10 Search Engine Positioning Mistakes - The top mistakes that people make when they try to optimize their sites for the search engines. Avoid these mistakes to save yourself a lot of anguish and frustration in the long run.

more...

Articles by Jill Whalen and Heather Lloyd-Martin

Jill Whalen and Heather Lloyd-Martin of the Rank Write Roundtable have written several good introductory articles on search engine positioning and optimization.

Like Pandia, they belong to the "pragmatic" camp of search engine positioning, meaning that they believe in optimizing webpages for search engines in general, not trying to guess the algorithms of each and every one of the big search engines

Their home page has an updated list of the recent articles..

Making Keyphrases Work for Your Site and the Search Engines. Does your site rank highly for keyphrases that no one searches on? If no one is searching on your keyphrases, it won't matter how highly your site is ranked. Here's a technique for securing just the right keywords.

Link Popularity and its Effect on Search Engine Rankings. These days, "link popularity" is the talk of the town in the search engine positioning community. However, the definition of link popularity, and how much effect it actually has on search engine positioning, is often misunderstood.

How to Submit Your Site to Directories such as Yahoo! and LookSmart. Once your site is listed with the human-edited Directories the site description is nearly written in stone. Learn how to submit it right the first time!

Getting Framed Sites Listed With Search Engines. Everyone has read a million times how you can't get a framed site listed in the search engines. Jill Whalen explains why you shouldn't believe everything you read!

Search Engine Watch on search engine positioning

Search engine guru Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch has also written a lot of very valuable articles on search engine positioning.

Go to his Search Engine Positioning Tips page for more information.

Introduction to search engine positioning. Everyone wants that good listing. Unfortunately, many web sites appear poorly in search engine rankings or may not be listed at all because they fail to consider how search engines work.

Buying your way in. Can you buy your way to the top of a search engine? Until the year 2000, this was almost inconceivable at any search engine other that GoTo.com. Now, it's commonplace.

Checking your URL. Some search engines make it easy to confirm that your web page is in their catalogs. With others, it can be more difficult. Sullivan takes a look at an important part of search engine positioning.

The search engine spam police. A special report from the Search Engine Strategies 2001 Conference, November 14-15 2001, Dallas, by Shari Thurow. The article describes what the search engines consider to be spam.

Articles from Planet Ocean

Planet Ocean publishes one of the very best newsletters on search engine optimization, called Search Engine News. You will have to pay for the newsletter, but the company has made two useful articles available for free:

Recovering your lost 404 traffic. Every time someone misspells one of your URLs or click on a dead link at your site, the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser will redirect the surfer to their site. This article tells you how to keep these visitors.

How To Optimize HTML Tables for Search Engines. If you look at the lay out of this Pandia page, you will see that the navigational tools are put into the left hand column of the HTML table. Normally, this would mean that the search engine spider will read the content of that column first. This may be a problem, as the search engines tend to believe that what is placed near the top of the page is more important than what comes further down. This article tells you how to code your pages so that the content of the left column is placed after the main centre column in the HTML code.

Search Engine Secrets.net

Our fellow Norwegian Ronny Skog of has written several useful and to the point articles on search engine optimization. Among these are:

• Selecting effective keywords
• Why use HTML meta tags? (with automatic meta tag generator)
• What is search engine spam?
• Search engine ranking

Visit his site Search Engine Secrets.net for more.

Brett Tabke

NEW! Brett Tabke of Webmaster World has written an excellent introduction to how to get a Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone. The article is also published as 26 steps to 15K a day at Search Engine World.

Other articles by Tabke:

Selecting Keyword Ranking Gold, on -- ah, well -- selecting keywords for optimization

Analysis and Dissection of the Theme Based Search Engine is another useful article by Brett Tabke. Theme engines determine a sites' "themes" by indexing the entire site as a whole. As a page is added to a search engine, it goes back to its database, pulls out all pages from that domain and indexes the entire set of pages as one.

Traffick - on portals

Traffic without trying - 5 Principles for Smarter Search Engine Marketing. Andrew Goodman on the creation of a "spontaneously reputable and popular" Web presence.

Slashdot

Craig Silverstein answers your Google questions. On June 20 2002, Slashdot requested questions to submit to Google Director of Technology Craig Silverstein. These are his answers.

Other sources

Daniel Bazac, a Search Engine Marketer located in New York, has written a useful beginner's guide to search engines and spam. It's quite possible to get high rankings without using dubious techniques, he argues, and we agree.

Google a go-go. Interview with Monika Henzinger, Google's director of research (from Salon.com). She tells you a lot about Googles way of ranking results. By Salon.com. (By the way, Henziger has published some of her own material on the Net.)

Search Engine Ethics has written a popular and easy to read beginner's introduction to search engine postitioning called Search engine optimization strategy

Andrew Gerhart has written a very useful summary of various search engine optimization techniques titled Search Engine Optimization Strategies. Gerhart is Director of SEO operations at Obidex.

See also Gerhart's article on Understanding and Building Google PageRank. One important point is that you should mind your internal linking as much as the external.

Designing for Search Engines and Stars, tutorial on search engines and Web design by Shirley E. Kaiser (Digital Web Magazine). Great search engine positioning doesn't require you to sacrifice appealing design, Kaiser argues. While "content is king" for high search engine rankings as well as overall site popularity, your imagination and creativity with designs can still reach for the stars.

Preparing your pages for the search engines, by Robert Woodhead, Selfpromotion.com. Woodhead discusses how you can make your website more search engine friendly. A good introduction to search engine positioning.

Search Engine Optimization, by Yelena Shapiro and Etelka Lehoczky (Searchengines.com), is a must-read on search engine positioning. Includes the Search Engines 101 tutorial.

White Paper : Relevancy, Spam, Technology, Cloaking and Ranking : The Ethical Guide, from e-brand Management.

The State of Search Engine Optimization, interview with Fredrick Marckini, Founder & CEO of iProspect, one of the largest SEO companies in the world. Marckini is author of the very readable book Search Engine Positioning. In this avant|marketer interview he comments on search engine optimization from a marketing strategy standpoint.

Chris' list of possible search engine ranking factors. Chris of Search Engine Optimization Support Forums has put of a list of all the possible factors influencing ranking he can think of. The list is not for the beginner, but can function as a useful reminder for the rest of us.

More recent articles.

See also our list of scientific papers on search engine development and ranking.