Search Engine Optimization In the last couple of decades, organizations creating their own ecommerce internet sites to conduct

company activities online have increased tremendously. To aid them undertake the numerous business operations on-line world wide web marketing firms or online advertising companies in India give their services with focus on producing profitable results. These organizations aim at promoting their items or services on the internet by means of offering various services like SEO services, Social bookmarking service, PPC service etc. SEO services offer the much better visibility and increases the traffic on a web site by placing it on the initial pages of the search engines. Now the question arises how exactly it accomplishes that ? SEO assists in achieving the higher rankings of a web page utilizing certain tactics. Some of these tactics are easy which any person can understand as well as master although others are quite hard and only a experienced SEO professional can execute them correctly. Some of the important processes that come under SEO services are onpage optimization and offpage optimization. In onpage optimization formatting of the web page layout, its code, its data, its meta tags and different other things takes place. This makes the web site a lot more search engine and visitor friendly, whereas Offpage optimization assists a lot in terms of attracting visitors & offering quality traffic to a website. Offpage optimization uses techniques like link submission, link exchange, forum postings, write-up submission etc. to increase the ranking of a site on the search engines. With the assist of much better linking and back links, this process supplies your internet site a distinguished presence on-line. Both of these processes are critical and if conducted successfully can assist your organization to reach the new heights of success. Question is how to really optimize the website for particularly on different keywords on Google ? As the world wide web has matured, search engines have occupied an increasingly powerful position, by both channeling the attention of millions of users, and generating revenue for web sites through contextual advertising programmes, such as Googles AdSense (Google, 2005). The search engine companies are in a powerful position in the online world. Indeed, such is the popularity of the search engine that over half of all visitors to a web site now come from a search engine rather than from a direct link on another web page (McCarthy, 2006). With search engines collectively handling over 4.5 billion user queries a month (Nielsen-NetRatings, 2005), there is fierce competition amongst competing web sites to attract those users to their site at the expense of their competitors. However, the competition is made even more ferocious by the searching behavior of the user. Search engines may return many millions of documents for each user query, but the user only looks at a select few. Indeed, according to Jansen and Spink (2006), 73 percent of search engine users never look beyond the first page of returned results. Accordingly, the competition for a high ranking for popular user queries is now extremely intense. Understanding which factors can influence a pages ranking in a search engine is

therefore crucial for any web site that wishes to attract large numbers of users (in particular, e-commerce sites). This paper therefore sets out to identify the most effective techniques that can be used. In order to do this, I present the results from an analysis of the most successful pages that were created as part of a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) competition (SEO is the process of trying to rank highly a given web page or domain for specific keywords). Because all of these pages are highly optimized, the resultant set of data represents an aggregation of the most popular (and thus implicitly, the most effective) techniques used by the most successful Search Engine Optimizers in operation today. Issues with inferring search engine-ranking factors From the literature (see, for example, Moran and Hunt (2006), Fortunato et al. (2006), Bifet et al. (2005)), the web factors that could potentially influence a search engines ranking of a web site can be classified according to two distinct categories: Query-Factors, which rely on the content of a web page, such as the existence and frequency of keywords; and Query-Independent Factors, which rely on information from external web pages that link to a web page under consideration. However, both types of factor are notoriously difficult to enumerate as the search engines do not reveal which particular ones they use when determining a web sites ranking. Worse, the problem is compounded by the following issues: . There are over 200 different factors (or signals) used by Google to calculate a pages rank. . What these factors are is unknown, as is the weighting of each factor towards the final rank. . The weighting of each factor used to determine the top ten results may be different from the weighting used for the remainder. . Different query terms may employ different ranking factors and/or different weights (Bifet et al., 2005). . Google has multiple data-centres distributed across the world, not all of which are in sync at any one time. Thus the ranking algorithm used in one data-centre may change subtly from the ranking algorithm used in another (Cutts, 2006). This makes identifying the factors involved in a search engines ranking algorithm extremely difficult without a large dataset of millions of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and extremely sophisticated data-mining techniques. The web is an enormous set of documents connected through hypertext links created by designers of web sites. Publishing on the web is more than just setting up a page on a site; it also usually involves linking to other pages on the web. The increasing amount of data available on the web provides a huge amount of useful information that can be processed to discover useful knowledge from the web (Roussinov and Zhao, 2003). This trend has conducted to web mining as a new emerging discipline. Broadly speaking, web mining can be defined as the discovery and analysis of useful information from the world wide web (Abedin and Sohrabi, 2009). It is a very active

research field that involves the application of data mining techniques to the content, structure and usage of web resources. Although it derives from data mining, web mining has many unique characteristics (Fayyad et al., 1996). For instance, the sources of web mining are web documents, which can be represented as a directed graph consisting of document nodes and hyperlinks. While the source of data mining is confined to the structural data in database, different kind of patterns can be identified in web mining considering the content of documents, the structure given by hyperlinks, or the way in which web pages are browsed (Jicheng et al., 1999). Basically, three areas of web mining are commonly distinguished, as shown in Figure 1: content mining, structure mining, and usage mining (Stumme et al., 2006): (1) Web content mining (WCM) deals with knowledge discovery in the web contents, including text, hypertext, images, audio and video. Recent advances in multimedia data mining promise to widen access also to image, sound, video, etc. content of web resources. (2) Web structure mining (WSM) usually operates on the hyperlink structure of web pages. WSM focuses on sets of pages, ranging from a single web site to the web as a whole. WSM exploits the additional information that is (often implicitly) contained in the structure of hypertext. Therefore, an important application area is the identification of the relative relevance of different pages that appear equally pertinent when analyzed with respect to their content in isolation (Chakrabarti, 2003). (3) Web usage mining (WUM) focuses on records of the requests made by visitors to a web site, most often collected in a web server log (Arotaritei and Mitra, 2004). The content and structure of web pages, and in particular those of one web site, reflect the intentions of the authors and designers of the pages, and the underlying information architecture.

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