Advertising with search engines is known by different names. It is also called sponsored search. Advertising with search engines could be further classified as follows:

Advertising based on a keyword search

Advertising based on a keyword search could take place through a search engine such as google.com, or a search engine partner site, such as shopping.com. For example, Google offers a service called AdWords, which allows companies, for a small fee, to have a link to their website featured when a user searches a specific keyword which the company specified.

Advertising based on content context

Many search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo! Search) have partner websites with specific content. The websites agree to let the search engines place content-specific advertising on their website, in return for a fee. The search engine then finds companies interested in advertising on websites with their desired content. For example, an online dog food retailer might have their advertisement placed on a site about dogs.

Both of these advertising formats allow advertisers to target specific users with certain interests. Generally these advertisements are paid for based on either a pay per click campaign or an impression based campaign.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

On the World Wide Web, a link farm is any group of web pages that all hyperlink to every other page in the group. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine (sometimes called spamdexing).

History

Link farms were developed by search engine optimizers in 1999 to take advantage of the Inktomi search engine’s dependence upon link popularity. Although link popularity is used by some search engines to help establish a ranking order for search results, the Inktomi engine at the time maintained two indexes. Search results were produced from the primary index which was limited to approximately 100,000,000 listings. Pages with few inbound links continually fell out of the Inktomi index on a monthly basis.

Inktomi was targeted for manipulation through link farms because it was then used by several independent but popular search engines, such as HotBot. Yahoo!, then the most popular search service, also used Inktomi results to supplement its directory search feature. The link farms helped stabilize listings for (normally) online business Web sites that had few natural links from larger more stable sites in the Inktomi index.

Link farm exchanges were at first handled on an informal basis, but several service companies were founded to provide automated registration, categorization, and link page updates to member Web sites.

When the Google search engine became popular, search engine optimizers learned that Google’s ranking algorithm depended in part on a link weighting scheme called PageRank. Rather than simply count all inbound links equally, the PageRank algorithm determines that some links may be more valuable than others, and therefore assigns them more weight than others. Link farming was adapted to help increase the PageRank of member pages.

However, even the link farms became susceptible to manipulation by unscrupulous Webmasters who joined the services, received inbound linkage, and then found ways to hide their outbound links or to avoid posting any links on their sites at all. Link farm managers had to implement quality controls and monitor member compliance with their rules to ensure fairness.

Alternative link farm products emerged, particularly link-finding software that identified potential reciprocal link partners, sent them template-based emails offering to exchange links, and create directory-like link pages for Web sites hoping to build their link popularity and PageRank.

Search engines countered the link farm movement by identifying specific attributes associated with link farm pages and filtering those pages from indexing and search results. In some cases, entire domains were removed from the search engine indexes in order to prevent them from influencing search results.

Justification

The justification for link farm-influenced crawling diminished proportionately as the search engines expanded their capacities to index more sites. Once the 500,000,000 listing threshold was crossed, link farms became unnecessary for helping sites stay in primary indexes. Inktomi’s technology, now a part of Yahoo!, now indexes billions of Web pages and uses them to offer its search results.

Where link weighting is still believed by some Webmasters to influence search engine results with Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask (among others), link farms remain a popular tool for increasing PageRank or perceived equivalent values. PageRank-like measurements apply only to the individual pages being linked to (typically the reciprocal linking pages on member sites), so these pages must in turn link out to other pages (such as the main index pages of the member sites) in order for the link weighting to help.

The expression “link farm” is now considered to be pejorative and derogatory. Many reciprocal link management service operators tout the value of their resource management and direct networking relationship building. The reciprocal link management services promote their industry as an alternative to search engines for finding and attracting visitors to Web sites. Their acceptance is by no means universal but the link management services seem to have established a stable customer base.

Guidelines

Google indicates in its Webmaster Guidelines that more than 100 factors are used to determine search results rankings. There is considerable debate in the search engine optimization community regarding the continued value of PageRank. Mike Grehan, a well-known search engine optimization columnist, has publicly quoted engineers from Yahoo! and Ask who say Google never fully implemented their PageRank algorithm.

Search engines such as Google recommend that webmasters request relevant links to their sites (conduct a link campaign), but avoid participating in link farms. According to Google, a site that participates in a link farm may have its search rankings penalized.

Search engines try to identify specific attributes associated with link farm pages and filter those pages from indexing and search results. In some cases, entire domains are removed from the search engine indexes in order to prevent them from influencing search results.

Links

• Google Information for Webmasters, accessed 2005-09-03.
• Yahoo!’s Search Content Quality Guidelines

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two objects, commonly between two websites in order to ensure mutual traffic. Example: Alice and Bob have websites. If Bob’s website links to Alice’s website, and Alice’s website links to Bos’s website, the websites are reciprocally linked.

Website owners often submit their sites to reciprocal link exchange directories in order to achieve higher rankings in the search engines.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Many forms of search engine optimization only amount to ensuring compliance to search engines’ guidelines for inclusion and removing any technical barriers that might keep the website from reaching a proper ranking. However, other methods of search engine optimization such as keyword spamming are often viewed as “gaming the system” and considered unethical.

Displaying advertisements or sponsored results in an area visually separated from the algorithmically determined results is generally considered ethical. However, some search engines allow the ranking of a website to be influenced with a payment and provide little or no indication to the end-user that this has happened. Since the search engines give the impression or claim that the rankings reflect the relevance or popularity of the websites, this is often seen unfair or deceptive.

Search engine advertising products that don’t guarantee a specific ranking or an amount of visibility are seen as unethical by some search engine marketers. The product might provide an unspecified “boost” or the final ranking or visibility might be a result of an auction.

Paid inclusion has not caused much concern. However, it has been suggested that search engines should improve the speed they pick up new websites and that paid inclusion services thus create a conflict of interest that discourages improving service levels across the board.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Link Exchange (“Reciprocal Link Exchange”) is the practice of exchanging links with other websites. There are many different ways to arrange a link exchange with webmasters. The simplest way of doing it is to email another website owner and ask to do a link exchange. Also visiting webmaster discussion boards which offer a dedicated link exchange forum where webmasters can request a link exchange be it of a certain category or open to anybody. You place their link on your site, usually on a links page and the other site in return will place a link back to you.

Link exchange has been a long time practice by website owners since the beginning of the WWW. In the last few years (after year 2000), this practice has gained more popularity as search engines such as Google started favoring sites that had more links in the rankings. This system was very accurate at gauging the importance of a website when it first started, leading to the popularity of Google

However according to experts, search engines no longer place a heavy emphasis on reciprocal links. Instead the popularity or credibility of your site is now gauged by one way incoming links to your site. How than do you go about building one way back links to your site? There are a number of proven techniques you can follow:

1. First and foremost your aim should be to link to sites with a similar theme as your site. For example if you site is about “dogs” than it makes sense that back link from another dog or animal related site would be given a heavier weighting that a link from a casino site. You should start by conducting a search with you keywords on the major search engines (MSN, Yahoo, and Google) to come up with a list of sites which appear for that keyword. Next determine the contact info, ideally an e-mail address. Once you have this information, you can simply contact the webmaster (politely) and ask them if they would be willing to link to your site.

2. Another effective way of increasing your link popularity is to write and submit your articles to sites such as articlecity.com. The importance of this is that when you submit your material there is usually a resource box where you can enter the link information to your site. Every time someone publishes your article, you will have a one way link from their site to yours.

3. Submit to directories under the appropriate category. Many directories and human edited and therefore a link from a directory can instantly add credibility to your site. A major directory is Dmoz. Since site submissions are human reviewed, expect at least 6-8 weeks for any kind of response.

4. Submit your URL to link exchange directories where web users such as your self are actively looking to find new relevant link partners. If you search for google.com, ask.com or msn.com for terms: link exchange or link trade you will be able to find some good ones. Here are few that I have found: linkmarket.net, linkexchagned.com and linkpartners.com.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Advertising with search engines is known by different names. It is also called sponsored search. Advertising with search engines could be further classified as follows:

Advertising based on a keyword search

Advertising based on a keyword search could take place through a search engine such as google.com, or a search engine partner site, such as shopping.com. For example, Google offers a service called AdWords, which allows companies, for a small fee, to have a link to their website featured when a user searches a specific keyword which the company specified.

Advertising based on content context

Many search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo! Search) have partner websites with specific content. The websites agree to let the search engines place content-specific advertising on their website, in return for a fee. The search engine then finds companies interested in advertising on websites with their desired content. For example, an online dog food retailer might have their advertisement placed on a site about dogs.

Both of these advertising formats allow advertisers to target specific users with certain interests. Generally these advertisements are paid for based on either a pay per click campaign or an impression based campaign.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Search engine optimization aims to index and improve rankings for the webpages which are most relevant to the keywords searched for according to the algorithm of each search engine. The relevant pages are returned in search engine result pages (SERPS). Basically this is done by writing a naural copy of each page containing the keywords that genuinely represent the goods and the services described within the corresponding webpages. Keywords are also used in the Title Pages, Meta Tags, Headings within a density of about 6% i.e., about 6 keywords spread over a page containing 100 words.

In order to further fine tune the pages and keep them user and search engine friendly, the architecture of the website, including its internal link structure, navigation etc., are also suitably modified for human beings and search spiders to nevigate through whole wbsite pages. Search spiders then can scan all necessary data about the whole site and store in engines’ data base. A good navigation systems imparts excellent experience to the users and they tend to visit the site again and again. This a sign of good achievement.

Numbers of inbound links to the site and the ‘quality’ of the links determine the Reputation of the website within the industry it belong to. This Reputation is one of the most important criteria for search engines to consider higher levels of rank to the deserving webpages. Algorithms are evolutionary and strives to develop every day in an attempt to provide most relevant & useful pages to the users and strike out the websites that trick them and attain higher positions for a while.

These processes are known as Organic or Algorithmic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of websites. Eventually it is essential for each and every website to get optimized organically, though temprarity they can make use of Pay-per-Click (PPC) to market their website without having to wait for the results of Organic SEO. However, users still prefer Organic Result Pages than Pages for which Advertising charges are paid to search engines. So far for inclusion in Organic Result Pages no fees are prescribed except the high usefulness of the information to the users.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

In the simplest case, relevance can be calculated by examining how many times a query term appears in a document (term frequency), possibly combined with how discriminative that query term is across the searched collection (often called Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency).

Since search engines and other businesses rely upon the accuracy of their results, many additional, more complex algorithms have been developed to estimate result relevance. Many of these algorithms, particularly those used by search engines, are hidden to the public, as a user that knows the details of a search algorithm can artificially boost his own content’s ranking.

Relevance calculation is often misinterpreted by the press. For example, it has often been said that when Google burst onto the scene it was miles ahead of its competitors because it, unlike anyone else, ranked web pages by relevance. This is not true since everyone ranks by relevance. It is just that Google had come up with a fairly new way of estimating relevance, namely PageRank. But even search engines that only use TFIDF rank by relevance.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

In computer science, and particularly in search engines, relevance is a numerical score assigned to a search result, representing how well the result meets the information need of the user that issued the search query. In many cases, a result’s relevance determines the order in which it is presented to the user.

In academic information retrieval, the word relevance has been used in system evaluation for over forty years, going back to the Cranfield Experiments of the early 1960s. In the relatively new commercial search realm, among web search engine companies, search engine optimizers, and in the press, the incorrect relevancy is mistakenly being used more and more instead of the correct relevance. One can often tell from which community an information retrieval practitioner hails, depending on whether he or she uses the correct form of the word. Wikipedia’s search facility is an example of use of the incorrect relevancy.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

A webmaster who wants to maximize the value of a web site can read the guidelines published by the search engines, as well as the coding guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium. If the guidelines are followed, and the site presents frequently updated, useful, original content, and a few meaningful, useful inbound links are established, it is usually possible to obtain a significant amount of organic search traffic.

When a site has useful content, other webmasters will naturally place links to the site, increasing its PageRank and flow of visitors. When visitors discover a useful web site, they tend to refer other visitors by emailing or instant messaging links.

As a result, SEO practices that improve web site quality are likely to outlive short term practices that simply seek to manipulate search rankings. The top SEOs recommend targeting the same thing that search engines seek to promote: relevant, useful content for their users.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.