Four Essential SEO Factors to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a vital part of website design and marketing. A properly optimized website will allow web crawlers to properly index your website for search engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and Bing) so that your site appears prominently in the search engine results pages, or SERPs. Four of the primary areas of consideration for SEO are:
1. The Appearance and Usability of Your Website for Visitors
Search engines can track how many visitors your site has, how long they stay on your site before clicking elsewhere, and how often they return. All of these play a role in how well your website performs in search results.
Considering this, it is essential that your site be optimized not only for search engine web crawlers but also for human visitors. If your visitors find that your site is easy to navigate, contains useful content, and can provide value on an ongoing basis, that will be reflected positively in the SERPs.
This also means that you must keep your site active. If a search engine discovers that your website is neglected for long periods of time and grows stale – especially in comparison to other sites offering similar content – visitors will stop returning and your site will sink in the SERPs. Regularly updating your site with new content, on the other hand, can enable your site to ascend the rankings.
2. The Quality of the Content Contained on Your Website
More and more, search engines are attempting to direct searchers to websites that contain quality content. Providing good content optimized with the keywords and phrases that searchers might use can boost your site’s performance in the SERPs and draw more visitors. If your site is filled with advertising or riddled with spelling or grammatical errors, however, it will negatively impact your site’s performance.
The uniqueness of your content is also an important factor. This is true now more than ever, and continues to grow in importance with every update to search engine search results ranking algorithms. If your site is found to contain duplicate, near-duplicate, or spun content when compared to other websites, it will lessen your site’s value, at least in the judgment of the dominant search engines. Whether you create your own original content or hire others to do it for you, it is a SEO necessity that your site be unique.
Additionally, considering the problem of content scrapers (which will steal your content to use it on other sites), it is recommended that you regularly post new content. You should also take precautions to limit those who might steal your content. For example, you can limit the amount of content contained in your RSS feed. You can also file a DMCA complaint whenever you discover a content thief.
3. The Traffic Your Website Attracts and Maintains
A well optimized website will entice visitors to revisit your site periodically. This can be a signal to search engines that your site has been deemed useful by its users. If these users add links to your site from their own websites, that will also add weight to your site’s importance.
You can increase your website’s traffic and the number of links to it in a variety of ways:
• First, you can include your URL in any comments you make on blogs. If the blog applies a “no follow” tag to its comments, however, it will not be counted as a link to your site.
• Second, you can submit articles as an “expert” to be posted on another reputable website. Typically, sites will permit you to include a short bio containing a link to your site.
• Third, you can submit your URL for inclusion in relevant online directories.
Beware, however, of unethical link exchanges or purchases, as these will harm your ranking, possibly even resulting in a ban from selected search engines.
4. The Technical Elements of Your Website
In contrast to the early days of SEO, search engines today want to see sites that are designed more for the user than for web crawlers. Thus, the usability and quality of your site are of primary importance. There are, however, some SEO elements that remain a bit more technical. While these elements do contain value for visitors, they are generally intended more for the benefit of web crawlers. These elements include:
• An XML Sitemap and robots.txt file. These can each assist web crawlers as they index your site.
• Page titles containing keywords. These are the titles that are inserted into the HTML code and appear in the bar or tab at the top of your Internet browser.
• Effective text formatting that incorporates heading tags. The formatting you use, which can also enhance your user’s experience, can emphasize your keywords to search engines.
• Alternate descriptions for images and videos. Though many users will never even notice your alternate descriptions contained within your HTML code, they can reap rewards in terms of SEO.
• URLs containing recognizable and relevant words for searchers. Using real words rather than codes or non-descriptive terms will make your URLs more memorable and can also be another way to incorporate keywords.
• A custom 404 “page not found” error page. This will show that you are concerned about your visitors experience with your website. The 404 page should be consistent with the rest of your site and can provide a link to your root page, an HTML Sitemap, and other important sections of your site.
Invest the time and effort to apply SEO to your website. It can make the difference between your site’s success and failure. Though there are no guarantees, an optimized site has the potential to climb the SERPs and achieve a prominent position at or near the top. This greater visibility typically translates into a greater number of visitors, which in turn enables you to market your product, promote your message, and share your opinions more effectively.
resource:http://www.seo-news.com/four-essential-seo-factors-to-optimize-your-website-for-search-engines/

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Welcome to 404 Error Pages,See error details

Overview

The Error 404 "Page not found" is the error page displayed whenever someone asks for a page that’s simply not available on your site. The reason for this is that there may be a link on your site that was wrong or the page might have been recently removed from the site. As there is no web page to display, the web server sends a page that simply says "404 Page not found".
The 404 error message is an HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) standard status code. This "Not Found" response code indicates that although the client could communicate to the server, the server could not find what was requested or it was configured not to fulfill the request.
The 404 "Not Found" error is not the same as the "Server Not Found" error which you see whenever a connection to the destination server could not be established at all.
The default 404 error page as shown on Internet Explorer is given below.

HTTP Status Code

Whenever you visit a web page, your computer will request data from a server through HTTP. Even before the requested page is displayed in your browser, the web server will send the HTTP header that has the status code. The status code provides information about the status of the request. A normal web page gets the status code as 200. But we do not see this as the server proceeds to send the contents of the page. It’s only when there is an error, we see the status code 404 Not Found.

Origin of Status Codes

As a part of the HTTP 0.9 specifications, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) established HTTP status codes in 1992. Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web and the first web browser in 1990, defined the status codes.

List of Status Codes

A brief overview of HTTP status codes is given below.

Code	Meaning	Description
100	Continue	Confirms the client about the arrival of the first part of the request and informs to continue with the rest of the request or ignore if the request has been fulfilled
101	Switching Protocols	Informs the client about the server switching the protocols to that specified in the Upgrade message header field during the current connection.
200	OK	Standard response for successful requests
201	Created	Request fulfilled and new resource created
202	Accepted	Request accepted, but not yet processed
203	Non-Authoritative Information	Returned meta information was not the definitive set from the origin server.
204	No Content	Request succeeded without requiring the return of an entity-body
205	Reset Content	Request succeeded but require resetting of the document view that caused the request
206	Partial Content	Partial GET request was successful
300	Multiple Choices	Requested resource has multiple choices at different locations.
301	Moved Permanently	Resource permanently moved to a different URL.
302	Found	Requested resource was found under a different URL but the client should continue to use the original URL.
303	See Other	Requested response is at a different URL and can be accessed only through a GET command.
304	Not Modified	Resource not modified since the last request.
305	Use Proxy	Requested resource should be accessed through the proxy specified in the location field.
306	No Longer Used	Reserved for future use
307	Temporary Redirect	Resource has been moved temporarily to a different URL.
400	Bad Request	Syntax of the request not understood by the server.
401	Not Authorized	Request requires user authentication
402	Payment Required	Reserved for future use.
403	Forbidden	Server refuses to fulfill the request.
404	Not Found	Document or file requested by the client was not found.
405	Method Not Allowed	Method specified in the Request-Line was not allowed for the specified resource.
406	Not Acceptable	Resource requested generates response entities that has content characteristics not specified in the accept headers.
407	Proxy Authentication Required	Request requires the authentication with the proxy.
408	Request Timeout	Client fails to send a request in the time allowed by the server.
409	Conflict	Request was unsuccessful due to a conflict in the state of the resource.
410	Gone	Resource requested is no longer available with no forwarding address
411	Length Required	Server doesn’t accept the request without a valid Content-Length header field.
412	Precondition Failed	Precondition specified in the Request-Header field returns false.
413	Request Entity Too Large	Request unsuccessful as the request entity is larger than that allowed by the server
414	Request URL Too Long	Request unsuccessful as the URL specified is longer than the one, the server is willing to process.
415	Unsupported Media Type	Request unsuccessful as the entity of the request is in a format not supported by the requested resource
416	Requested Range Not Satisfiable	Request included a Range request-header field without any range-specifier value
417	Expectation Failed	Expectation given in the Expect request-header was not fulfilled by the server.
422	Unprocessable Entity	Request well-formed but unable to process because of semantic errors
423	Locked	Resource accessed was locked
424	Failed Dependency	Request failed because of the failure of a previous request
426	Upgrade Required	Client should switch to Transport Layer Security
500	Internal Server Error	Request unsuccessful because of an unexpected condition encountered by the server.
501	Not Implemented	Request unsuccessful as the server could not support the functionality needed to fulfill the request.
502	Bad Gateway	Server received an invalid response from the upstream server while trying to fulfill the request.
503	Service Unavailable	Request unsuccessful to the server being down or overloaded.
504	Gateway Timeout	Upstream server failed to send a request in the time allowed by the server.
505	HTTP Version Not Supported	Server does not support the HTTP version specified in the request.

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Google Panda Update vs. Google Penguin Updates

The SEO community has been a buzz this past week with the latest update from Google, named Penguin. Penguin came down the pipeline last week, right on the tail of the latest Panda update. Since most of the big updates in the past year have been focused on Panda, many site owners are left wondering what the real differences between Panda and Penguin are. Here is a breakdown:

Google Panda Update Overview:

According to Google’s official blog post when Panda launched,
This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.
Basically, Panda updates are designed to target pages that aren’t necessarily spam but aren’t great quality. This was the first ever penalty that went after “thin content,” and the sites that were hit hardest by the first Panda update were content farms (hence why it was originally called the Farmer update), where users could publish dozens of low-quality, keyword stuffed articles that offered little to no real value for the reader. Many publishers would submit the same article to a bunch of these content farms just to get extra links.

Panda is a site wide penalty, which means that if “enough” (no specific number) pages of your site were flagged for having thin content, your entire site could be penalized. Panda was also intended to stop scrappers (sites that would republish other company’s content) from outranking the original author’s content.
Here is a breakdown of all the Panda updates and their release dates. If your site’s traffic took a major hit around one of these times there is a good chance it was flagged by Panda
1. Panda 1.0 (aka the Farmer Update) on February 24^th 2011
2. Panda 2.0 on April 11th 2011. (Panda impacts all English speaking countries)
3. Panda 2.1 on May 9th 2011 or so
4. Panda 2.2 on June 18th 2011 or so.
5. Panda 2.3 on around July 22nd 2011.
6. Panda 2.4 in August 2011(Panda goes international)
7. Panda 2.5 on September 28^th 2011
8. Panda 2.5.1 on October 9^{th 2011}
9. Panda 2.5.2 on October 13^{th 2011}
10. Panda 2.5.3 on October 19/20th 2011
11. Panda 3.1 on November 18^{th 2011}
12. Panda 3.2 on about January 15th 2012
13. Panda 3.3 on about February 26th 2012
14. Panda 3.4 on March 23rd 2012
15. Panda 3.5 on April 19th 2012

Search Engine Land recently created this great Google Panda update infographic to help walk site owners through the many versions of the Google Panda updates.
Many site owners complained that even after they made changes to their sites in order to be more “Panda friendly,” their sites didn’t automatically recover. Panda updates do not happen at regular intervals, and Google doesn’t re-index every site each time, so some site owners were forced to deal with low traffic for several months until Google got around to re-crawling their website and taking note of any positive changes.

Google Penguin Update Overview:

The Google Penguin Update launched on April 24. According to the Google blog, Penguin is an “important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.” Google mentions that typical black hat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing (long considered webspam) would get a site in trouble, but less obvious tactics (link incorporating irrelevant outgoing links into a page of content) would also cause Penguin to flag your site. Says Google,
Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.
Site owners should be sure to check their Google Webmaster accounts for any messages from Google warning about your past spam activity and a potential penalty. Google says that Penguin has impacted about 3.1% of queries (compared to Panda 1.0’s 12%). If you saw major traffic losses between April 24th and April 25th, chances are Penguin is the culprit, even though Panda 3.5 came out around the same time.
Unfortunately, Google has yet to outline exactly what signals Penguin is picking up on, so many site owners that were negatively impacted are in the dark as to where they want wrong with their onsite SEO. Many in the SEO community have speculated that some contributing factors to Penguin might be things like:
1. Aggressive exact-match anchor text
2. Overuse of exact-match domains
3. Low-quality article marketing & blog spam
4. Keyword stuffing in internal/outbound links
It’s important to remember that Panda is an algorithm update, not a manual penalty. A reconsideration request to Google won’t make much a difference–you’ll have to repair your site and wait for a refresh before your site will recover.  As always do not panic if you are seeing a down turn in traffic, in the past when there is a major Google update like this things often rebound.  If you do think you have some sort of SEO penalty as a result of either the Google Panda or Google Penguin updates, please contact your SEO service provider to help or start trouble shooting.
resource: http://www.brickmarketing.com/blog/panda-penguin-updates.htm

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