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301 Redirection
Moved Permanently – The file has been moved permanently to a new location. This is the preferred method of redirecting for most pages or websites. If you are going to move an entire site to a new location you may want to test moving a file or folder first, and then if that ranks well you may want to proceed with moving the entire site.

302 Redirection
Found – The file has been found, but is temporarily located at another URI. Generally, as it relates to SEO, it is typically best to avoid using 302 redirects. Some search engines struggle with redirect handling.

What is Canonical URL?
Many content management systems are configured with errors which cause duplicate or exceptionally similar content to get indexed under multiple URLs. Many webmasters use inconsistent link structures throughout their site that cause the exact same content to get indexed under multiple URLs. The canonical version of any URL is the single most authoritative version indexed by major search engines. When linking to the root level of a site or a folder index it is best to end the link location at a / instead of placing the index.html or default.asp filename in the URL.

What is .htaccess file?
Apache directory-level configuration file which can be used to password protect or redirect files. As a note of caution, make sure you copy your current .htaccess file before editing it, and do not edit it on a site that you can’t afford to have go down unless you know what you are doing.

What is Mod_rewrite?
A module or plugin for Apache web servers that can be used to rewrite requested URLs on the fly.

It supports an unlimited number of rules and an unlimited number of attached rule conditions for each rule to provide a flexible and powerful URL manipulation mechanism. Which can be used to offer both search engine friendly URLs, thus increasing indexing chances for a dynamic database driven website.

What are Log Files?
Server files which show you what your leading sources of traffic are and what people are search for to find your website.

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What do you mean by keyword proximity and keywords stemming?
keyword proximity means the how close keywords are to each other. Keyword stemming is a useful tool for web pages and search engine optimization. The process of keyword stemming involves taking a basic but popular keyword pertaining to a particular website and adding a prefix, suffix, or pluralization to make the keyword into a new word.

Which tools one must use these days to analyze keywords?
Google Suggest as it provide the number of searches done on google itself in past month with a given phrase. Adwords External Keywords suggestion tool is also a good tool.

One must use Google Trends to find out seasonal fluctuations in searches of a keyword.

What is Deep Linking?
Deep linking is a tool used by websites to point a visitor directly to a page within the website instead of the landing page or front page of the site. Deep linking allows visitors to go directly to the information they require, which may be available on a certain page of the website, but not on the web page to which the basic link leads.

What is a No Follow Code?
A no follow code, or nofollow, is a code that is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to signify to search engines that when a particular hyperlink is clicked on, it should not affect the ranking of the website in the search engine. The intention of the no follow code is the prevention of spam and spamdexing.

What is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is the text used to describe a link when turning it into a hyperlink using HTML coding. some websites use anchor texts incorrectly. Instead of choosing a phrase or keyword to turn into a hyperlink that is relevant to the landing page content, the website creators choose to make words such as “click here” or “read more” the anchor text. When the anchor text is under these phrases or something similar, they will not rank as well or at all within search engines.

What is the ideal length of a Title & Description Meta Tag ?
65-70 charecters are ideal length for Title tag. While a description shouln’t be more than 2 lines and of around 160 charecters.

What are Doorway Pages?
A doorway page is a web page full of keyword-rich copy that doesn’t deliver any useful information on it other than a link into the site, and whose sole purpose is to be fed to the search engines.

What is Cloaking?
Displaying different content to search engines and searchers. Depending on the intent of the display discrepancy and the strength of the brand of the person / company cloaking it may be considered reasonable or it may get a site banned from a search engine.

What is meant by Breadcrumb Navigation?
Navigational technique used to help search engines and website users understand the relationship between pages.
Example : Home > SEO Tools > SEO for Firefox

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Series I – Search Engines

What is Google PR as shown on Google toolbar?
PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be.

PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page one of the co-founder of Google. The PageRank process has been patented and assigned to Stanford University.

What is Trust Rank?
TrustRank is a link analysis technique described in a paper by Yahoo! Yahoo’s TrustRank method calls for selecting a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once the reputable seed pages are manually identified, a crawl extending outward from the seed set seeks out similarly reliable and trustworthy pages.

What is Search Engine Crawler?
A search engine crawler is a program or automated script that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical manner in order to provide up to date data to the particular search engine. Googlebot is the name of Google crawler. Yahoo! Slurp is a web crawler from Yahoo & MSN Bot is the Web Crawler by MSN.

What is Search Engine Index?
Search engine indexing is the process of a search engine collecting, parses and stores data for use by the search engine. The actual search engine index is the place where all the data the search engine has collected is stored. It is the search engine index that provides the results for search queries, and pages that are stored within the search engine index that appear on the search engine results page.

What is Latent Semantic Indexing used by search engines like Google?
In today´s traditional search approach, when a user types a keyword for searching, the search engine searches through its collection of document for the typed keyword. It checks for the exact typed keyword in all the documents and returns only those documents which contained it and ranks it on some ranking algorithm. Words
which are same in meaning but spelled out differently would be totally ignored in the Search results (SERPs.)
To address this important issue of presenting only relevant search results, Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI was proposed as a new improved method of retrieval system. Latent semantic indexing helps search engines to find out what a web page is all about. It basically means to you that you shouldn’t focus on a single keyword when
optimizing your web pages and when getting links.

What is meant by Everflux?
Major search indexes are constantly updating. Google refers to this continuous refresh as everflux. In the past Google updated their index roughly once a month. Those updates were named Google Dances, but since Google shifted to a constantly updating index Google no longer does what was traditionally called a Google Dance.

What is Google Bowling?
Knocking a competitor out of the search results by pointing hundreds or thousands of low trust low quality links at their website.

What is Google Bombing?
Making a pank rank well for a specific search query by pointing hundreds or thousands of links at it with the keywords in the anchor text.

What is Google Supplemental Index?
Index where pages with lower trust scores are stored. Pages may be placed in Google’s Supplemental Index if they consist largely of duplicate content, if the URLs are excessively complex in nature, or the site which hosts them lacks significant trust.

What are Stop Words?
Common words (ex: a, to, and, is …) which add little relevancy to a search query, and are thus are removed from the search query prior to finding relevant search results. It is both fine and natural to use stop words in your page content.

What is Google Juice?
Internet slang to refer to the substance which flows between web pages via their hyperlinks. Pages with lots of links pointing to them acquire much ‘Google Juice’ and pages which link to highly ‘juicy’ pages acquire some reflected ‘Google Juice’.

What is Googlewhack?
A Google search query consisting of two words, that returns a single result.

What is Grey Hat SEO?
SEO using both Black Hat and White Hat techniques.

What are Hallway pages?
a page that serves as an index to a group of pages that you would like the search engine spiders to find. Once a search engine spider indexes the hallway page, it should also follow all the links on that hallway page and in turn index those pages as well.

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