Why are Links so Powerful?

When we write stuff about ourselves, we have a tendency to lie. It is human nature to boost your own worth. This is why meta tags and page copy are nowhere nearas powerful as they once were. They have been used and abused.


Links from other webmasters are viewed by search engines as unbiased, third party
votes.

While Yahoo! tends to put more weight on page copy than Google does, links are the #1 ranking criteria for competitive phrases in all major search engines.

Many people who look for links just think “link,” but often, this is not the most
effective way to do link building.

If you think of the web as a huge social network and think of links as relationships, you have a huge advantage over your competition.

You can do many manipulative things to make your ideas appear better than they
are, but if you can find more natural ways to embed yourself in the social structure of the web, you will likely become extremely successful.

Some Google Tricks

Enter just the word http for your search to find the top 1000 PageRanked sites.Enter only www in your search to see how Google ranks the top 1,000 sites.
Manually type the following prefixes and note their utility:

• link:url Shows other pages with links to that url.
• related:url same as "what's related" on serps.
• site:domain restricts search results to the given domain.
• inurl: like allinurl, but only for the next query word.
• allintitle: shows only results with terms in title.

• intitle: similar to allintitle, but only for the next word. "intitle:seoforgoogle google" finds only pages with seoforgoogle in the title, and google anywhere on the page.
• cache:url will show the Google version of the passed url.
• spell: will spell check your query and search for it.
• stocks: will lookup the search query in a stock index.
• filetype: will restrict searches to that filetype. "-filetype:pdf" to remove Adobe PDF files.

• daterange: is supported in Julian date format only. 2452384 is an example of a Julian date.
• maps: If you enter a street address, a link to Yahoo Maps and to MapBlast will be presented.
• site:www.somesite.net "+www.somesite.+net" - (tells you how many pages of your site are indexed by google).
• allintext: searches only within text of pages, but not in the links or page title
• allinlinks: searches only within links, not text or title

Image optimization

One of the more potentially advantageous yet wholly underused areas for optimization is in image search engines. Yet while site owners and merchants are more often seeing their images show up in the regular search results, few have come to understand the benefits of image search optimization. And for professional optimizers, it requires a much broader understanding and specialization over what traditional search allows.Statistics from Hitwise show it to achieve 90% growth year after year, with over 360,000,000 searches per month across the top search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Ask, MSN, and AOL. All in the "Big 5" have a search vertical dedicated specifically to image results, with 3 of them (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) integrating images into some contextual search results.

"It's a free way of getting even more keyword signals for Google," said Smith. "It may be seen as a fairly authoritative way for image reference and may be ranking well in Google's image search results."

"People love participating in the enhanced image search; we've had great success with it so far," said Vanessa Fox, Product Manager for Google. Smith, however opined that its continued participation may depend on Google's ability to provide added incentives for users."

The panelists offered the following tips for optimizing images for search engines:

• Image originality. The panelists agree that there is a special advantage to taking original photos, even if you are a retailer who already receives photos elsewhere such as from a manufacturer. "The more control you have over the images on your site the better." says Evans. "You can brand them with your logo, url or trademark. It also allows you as the retailer to present the product in the best possible way that will convert with your own audience, not to mention allowing you to present the features in a different way than other competitors.

• Image quality. Start off with good quality pictures, and make necessary resolution adjustments between your full size images and your thumbnails. Smith mentions that pictures with good contrast tend to work better. "When they're reduced down to the thumbnail size, stronger contrast is needed to better discern image, which will lead to more people clicking and linking to image." he says.

• Image naming. "Make the image names of your files match what is actually represented in the file," says Thurow. "The image name will appear beneath the graphic image in search results. It helps to communicate to searchers that they are viewing the desired graphic image. "Do NOT expect your photo editing program's default settings to give you optimized file names," she continued. "Default names communicate nothing to the search engines on their own. Make sure to set up your own file naming structure in advance."

• Expand audience base. Be broad in your subject matter. Image search is not just for retailers directly reaching customers. "There are all sorts of innovative ways you can get people interested in your company and hence build up traffic and conversions. For example, factories might show steps in product manufactures, hotels might show furniture & decorative art in addition to details on their rooms, and restaurants might show picturesque views or special event rooms."

• Optimize the page with the image. Optimize the page the image appears on can be just as important as optimizing the image itself. "Optimizing the actual page for contextual search improves graphic images search," Thurow added. "Search engines also look at text surrounding a graphic image to determine relevancy." says Thurow. "Text within the anchor tag and next to anchor text is especially going to influence image-search rankings," said Thurow. "If you can reasonably put labels and captions on key graphic images, try and do so."

• File organization. Both Evans and Thurow mentioned of crucial importance is creating an image folder on your web server space that's accessible to the search engines. "Do not robots exclude your graphic images directory or limit search engine access to graphic-image files." says Thurow. Another big mistake people make is putting their 'click to see larger image' inside of a JavaScript link. When you do that, you are limiting search engines' access to that image file."

• Freshness. Smith recommends that if you're targeting high popularity keywords, try experimenting with re-uploading your pix, since image freshness is a contextual clue for the search engines and might affect relevancy.

Future of image search

Image search optimizers on the panel expressed their desire to see more opportunities for image search optimizers, such as a keyword research tool specific to image search (like the Overture keyword tool) and the ability to submit image/multimedia specific feeds. "That would allow webmasters to have better control over defining what the image was in relation to content," says Evans.

(refer from searchenginewatch.com)

What is success in SEO?

Kind of a loaded question to ask "what is SEO success" don't you think? I think it's subjective, so you'd have to ask yourself, what are the goals important to you?

In your case, you can say that you've gotten Phase 1 of your SEO goals accomplished - by pushing up SERP positions, indexed pages, etc.

Now you can focus on Phase 2 which is to increase traffic. That can be done in several ways, of which I will name 2: 1- you increase to Page 1 SERP rankings for your keywords and/or 2 - you increase Page 1 SERP rankings for several "longtail" keywords.

By doing it this way, you are thinking like a marketer (business person) where there are certain short-term and long-term goals you want to hit.

But there are some tough questions you have to ask yourself. Are your keywords that you are targeting good at all? Has your market moved or changed the way it searches? Do you need to go back to the drawing board and reevaluate your original SEO plan?

Those are tough questions to answer and tougher still if it means you need to redo everything. But do it - so that you don't continue to struggle with your SEO in the wrong direction.

refer from (forums.searchenginewatch.com)