Accessibility of your site.

An accessible site is one that ensures delivery of its content successfully as often as possible. The functionality of pages, validity of HTML elements, uptime of the site's server and working status of site coding and components all come under site accessibility. If these features are ignored or faulty, both search engines and users will select other sites to visit.

The following list includes all the factors which affect the accessibility of your site:

• Broken Links : If an HTML link is broken, the contents of the linked-to page may never be found. In addition, some people give a opinion that search engines negatively degrade rankings on sites & pages with many broken links.
• Valid HTML & CSS : Although arguments exist about the necessity for full validation of HTML and CSS in accordance with W3C guidelines, it is generally agreed that code must meet minimum requirements of functionality and successful display so that your site may be spidered and cached properly by the search engines.
• Functionality of Forms and Applications : If select boxes, javascript or other input-required elements block content from being reached via direct hyperlinks, search engines may never find them. Keep the data that you want accessible to search engines on pages that can be directly accessed via a link. Similarlily, the successful functionality and implementation of any of these elements is critical to a site's accessibility for visitors. A non-functioning page, form or code element is unlikely to receive much attention from visitors.
• File Size : With the exception of a select few documents that search engine consider to be of exceptional importance, web pages greater than 150K in size are typically not fully cached. This is done to reduce index size, bandwidth and load on the servers, and is important to anyone building pages with exceptionally large amounts of content. So it is highly recommended that you keep the file size under 150K . Smaller file size also means faster download speed for users.
• Downtime & Server Speed : The performance of your site's server may have an adverse impact on search rankings and visitors if downtime and slow transfer speeds are common. Invest in high quality hosting to prevent this issue.

Can SEO companies guarantee high rankings?

Some SEO companies guarantee that they will get you a special search engine position if you let them do the work for you. Actually, this is not possible. No company can
guarantee search engine listings.

If a company makes such promises, take a closer look at the small print. Generally, the catch is often that the company selects the search terms. You'll be listed for obscure search terms that nobody searches for.

If you have a unique company name or a unique product name, it's relatively easy to get high search engine rankings for that term. Before paying a company to get high search engine rankings for you, have a thorough look at the company profile and also check the sites for which they have done optimisation. See whether they appear on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for the right keywords or not and then take a decision.

What is unethical search engine optimization?

Some search engine optimization companies and software developers use unethical techniques and tricks to artificially boost the search engine rankings of a web site. For this reason, the search engines are continuously trying to counter these techniques by penalizing the webmasters or by banning their sites.
They regularly restructure their algorithms to prevent spammers from flooding the results page with irrelevant or low quality content.

NEVER TRY TO USE UNETHICAL TECHNIQUES OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION.

Search engines consider the following search engine optimization techniques as SPAM:

• automatically generated doorway pages
• cloaking and false redirects
• keyword stuffing
• hidden text or hidden links
• pages loaded with irrelevant words
• duplicated content on multiple pages
• misspelling of well-known web sites
• unrelated and centralized link farms
• other methods that try to trick search engines
  

You might get short term results with these techniques but it's very likely that your site will be banned from search engines .

Are there thousands of search engines?

It might have happened to you that someone has asked you to pay a certain amount and get your site submitted to thousands of serach engines . Don't fall for these traps. There aren't thousands of search engines on the Internet. Most of these so called"search engines" are free for all (FFA) link pages or special interest web pages. Submitting your webpage to thousands of FFA sites means that you'll end up with thousands of spam email messages.

There are four major players.

There are only a handful of search engines that can really bring visitors to your web site. As always, it'squality that matters, not quantity. So,you should concentrate on the important search engines when you submit your web site to search engines.

Currently, there are only four major players: Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask.com. They are responsible for the bigger part of the search engine traffic you can get because they also power othersearch engines, for example the search engine on AOL.com displays Google results. In addition, there are country specific search engines. If you have a Russian web site, you should also submit to the popular Russian search engines.

In general, there aren't more than three or four relevant search engines in a country. The majority of the web surfers uses the same search engines.

Internet directories can be a good addition.

Internet directories are different from search engines because all web site submissions are reviewedby humans. You should also submit to topic specific search engines. Even if they send you only a few visitors,they could improve the link popularity of your web site which helps your ranking in other search engines.

Does Page Length Matters?

Size matters.

And the same is true even in doing search engine optimization services. Too short could make the page wanting is some material respects. To long could make it unappealing. Just by looking at it could lose readers' interest.To remedy the dilemma, it is better to set an ideal page length. SEO experts say each page should have at least 700 words, but no more than 1500 words.

Why should you limit your web pages between 700 and 1500 words?

The reasons for this are simple. Having web pages with content of 700-1500 words will please visitors and search engine spiders. Pleasing both will help your site get significant web traffic and become successful. Anything less than 700 words and search engine spiders might just skip over your web site. Meanwhile, anything more than 1500 and spiders won't take the time to search through the content for keywords.

Is Google the only search engine?

When there were no computers people had basically only three activities – eating , sleeping and working. With the advent of computers and internet we have started to spend a considerable amount of time working in front of the system. Today, computers have so obvious that we cannot imagine our life without computers.

With people spending a considerable amount of time working on the internet, they are rapidly getting accustomed to search engines. Among all the search engines, Google has affected a significant number of Netizens. More than 65% of search engine market is that of Google , Yahoo, AltaVista, MSN etc forming the rest. Unfortunately, most of the SEOs think that Search engine Optimisation starts and ends with Google, but that’s not true.

You might say: “ But Google get the highest traffic”

True , Very True. But then you cannot risk not paying attention to the other key players.
With millions of searches done worldwide even a small share is a huge number.

Two reasons why SEOs should not ignore other search engines are:

Varied Demographics : It might happen that the people in a particular region of the world prefer search engines other than Google

Lesser Competition : On other search engines it might happen that your site is not visible due to heavy competition. So , you can try on optimizing on other search engine to make your site visible on that search engine .

So the next time you start optimizing your or someone else site just keep in mind that search engine optimization is not limited to Google and if you are considering only Google and nothing else while optimizing a site then ,my friend, you are moving in the wrong direction.

-Himanshu Shekhar