Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to earn revenue and generate income from your website on the Internet. It works well for people who don’t even have any products to sell! All you have to do is refer other websites that sell products, and you can make money on that. Affiliate marketing is an inexpensive way in which webmasters can make money by directing traffic to an online merchant’s website. If this leads to actual sales in the online merchant’s website, then the webmaster is paid a fixed amount or a percentage based commission.

Affiliate marketing helps in generating more targeted leads, contributes in increasing traffic which eventually leads to greater sales. All in all it increases online exposure of the merchant site which in turn helps the affiliate.

So basically, in layman’s term, what is affiliate marketing? It is basically a process, in which you use your website to refer other websites, i.e., you become their affiliate. In the online world, affiliate marketing works due to the technology involved. The referrals you send to the website you are affiliated can be tracked by online merchants through a special link. And if something is actually purchased through the referral, then you are adequately compensated by it.

Ads of merchant websites are placed on your site when you become their affiliate. A tracking code or number is assigned to you. This is known as the affiliate ID. This is a unique number meant only for you. This ID has to be included in the link that you create from an ad in your website that redirects to the merchant site.

Most merchants allow links to their page in the form of text, images, text ads, banners or a combination of all of these. Some even supply you with advanced forms of linking such as search boxes, virtual stores, storefronts, and data feeds etc.

Affiliate programs can be categorized into three types:

PPC or Pay-Per-Click – Here, a fixed amount is earned by the affiliate every time a potential customer clicks on the merchant site’s link from the affiliate site.

PPL or Pay-Per-Lead – In this, the affiliate is paid even when referrals do not necessarily become customers, but just join a program, request information or fill up questionnaires on the merchant website.

PPS or Pay-Per-Sale – The affiliate earns every time the merchant website earns through the sale made to referrals from the affiliate website. The payment is either a fixed amount monthly or commission basis.

There are lots of advantages and benefits of affiliate marketing.

It does not take a huge capital to join an affiliate program. All you need to set up is a website. You can join the affiliate program for free.
You will get a passive form of income 24×7.
You can mange the work yourself without the need to hire employees. This means that you do not have to spend extra capital on employees.
There is absolutely no need for product shipping, order processing or inventory. So you save up on all this.
You do not need a merchant account in order to become an affiliate.
In fact, there are hardly any risks involved with affiliate marketing.  And at the same time it gives you the potential to earn a large amount of money!

Let’s look at the ways you can get started on affiliate marketing.

The first step would be identification of merchants who deal in similar products as yours and who offer affiliate marketing programs. You should sign up for these programs. Signing up for continuity programs is a great option too. Here, payments are on a monthly basis on referring someone.
Instead of becoming affiliate to a particular website, you could join an affiliate network that is similar to your industry. These networks are basically amalgamations of hundreds of merchants in one network. Therefore, it is easier to manage links as well as join the programs.
You can create a website to put up product reviews. You could link these reviews to the affiliate websites.
Merchant affiliate marketing tools can be used to create links to specific sites or products. These links can they be placed on your social networking sites, email newsletter, your website etc.
One important thing that you must keep in mind is that you should not try to spam social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. It is a better option to post an affiliate link only once in a while.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn money online, especially if you want to start a home internet business. It works for all the people involved, the consumers, internet marketers, online merchants and of course you. So go ahead and join an affiliate program, and let the money begin to roll in!

The process of search engine optimization involves tweaking various aspects of your website and deals only with the organic search results. It has nothing to do with paid search also known as inorganic search or PPC. In order to improve your positioning in the organic search results, these guidelines will point out the tactics on how you can improve the visibility of your website.

Page Title:
Page title also referred to as the ‘title tag’ needs to be unique for each page of your website. This tag tells search engines and also the visitors what that particular webpage is all about. The title tag of each page should contain the business/website name followed with important information that relates to the webpage. One must avoid the following:

Recording a title tag that is not relevant to the information present on the webpage. Recording the same title tag across all the pages of the website. Recording long title tags.

Meta Description:
The Meta description tag gives both the search engines and also the visitors who perform a search on the search engine an idea on what the web page is all about. That’s why it’s important to precisely summarize the content of your webpage. It’s always safe to keep the meta description tag within 160 characters (including spaces), as the rest of it gets truncated. One must avoid the following:

Writing a meta description that is not relevant to the information presented on the webpage. Recording the same meta description across all the web pages of the website. Recording the meta description with only keywords.

URL Structure:
It’s important to create a URL structure that is friendly to the search engines as this will help in better indexing of your website. For this reason, it is essential to create appropriate filenames and expressive categories on your website. One must avoid the following:

Recording long URLs Recording the same URL across all the web pages. Recording deep nested subdirectories Recording irrelevant directory names.

Website Navigation:
A website that is easy to navigate can help the visitors to find the information they are looking for. It also helps the search engines in indexing the pages appropriately. It is important to ensure that all the web pages of your website are interlinked properly and also show the correct page when clicked on. The use of sitemaps both HTML and XML help the spiders to crawl the website easily and also index it. One must avoid the following:

Creating complex websites that are difficult to navigate. Creating drop-down menus. Developing a HTML sitemap in which the pages are not organized. Indexing the 404 page in the search engine.

Unique Content:
The content that is hosted on your webpage needs to be informative, such that it can elicit action. Ensure that the content is not copied and is 100% your own creativity. Keep the content focused around your primary keywords and ensure that the keyword density is around 2.75% to 3.21%. It is also good to keep changing the content on your website so that the visitors can see that the site is not static but dynamic with its content. One must avoid the following:

Using images that serve as textual content. Using long sentences. Incorrect grammar and spelling mistakes. Duplicate content on the web pages of your website. Stuffing keywords unnecessarily.

Anchor Text:
Anchor texts are links that direct visitors to the internal pages of the website or to an external page/website. Anchor text helps the users to easily navigate between pages and also helps the spiders to understand what the page is all about, that it is linked to. One must avoid the following:

Using general anchor texts. Using anchor text that is not related to the content of the webpage or is off topic. Using long sentences. Creating unnecessary links.

Heading Tags:
Heading tags are used to represent the heading of the content of the webpage. Heading tags range in 6 sizes – h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6. These tags should only be used at the appropriate places. One must avoid the following:

Using one heading tag for the entire content of the webpage. Using too many heading tags throughout the content of the webpage.

Alt Tag Optimization:
Images can’t be read by a spider when they crawl on the website. Therefore, it is important to use alt tags for the images. It is best suggested to use the primary keyword as the alt tag following the contents that describe the page. One must avoid the following:

Using long filenames. Stuffing excess of keywords in the alt tags.

Robots.txt File:
A robots.txt file is used to prohibit the robots to crawl a particular page based on the nature and content of information that is available. This file must be placed in the root directory of your site and also named as robots.txt. One must avoid the following:

Search result pages to be crawled.

Website Promotion:
You can promote your website using offline promotion, online promotion, social media sites, AdWords optimization, Google’s Local Business Center, forming groups, forums etc.

Once you have implemented or taken note of all these tactics, do use the Google Webmaster Tools that will help you in solving many of the issues that are related to your website. You can also monitor the performance of your website by using Google Analytics.

Social media optimization or SMO is yet another method for search engine optimization of your site. As the name implies, you optimize your site by advertising it through the social media sites, online communities and community websites such as blog sites, message boards, podcasts, wikis and vlogs.

The methods for social media optimization involve the use of RSS feeds, social bookmarking, video and photo sharing, social news buttons and blogging etc. The basic idea is to drive traffic to your site without spending money on search engine advertising.

The concept of social media optimization was introduced by Rohit Bhargawa of Ogilivy Public Relations. Originally, he enunciated five rules for social media optimization, but the list was expanded by other contributors.

According to Rohit Bhargawa, “The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”

In actual practice, social media optimization seeks to create links to the site by making it more visible through the social networking sites like Squidoo, Blogger, Hubpages, Face Book, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, My Space or search engines like Technorati.

How does one go about social media optimization?

Getting links for your website

The number of links your site manages to pull through decides its popularity with the search engines. It is like deciding the popularity of the leader through the votes he gets. In case of a website its popularity index is the number of links it gets from other websites.

Tagging and bookmarking

Tagging and bookmarking can be made easier by inducting content features such as buttons like “add to delicious” and other bookmarking sites. In addition to this, you can also include relevant tags to your pages besides the home page for the popular social bookmarking sites.

Create inbound links

Inbound links are considered important for the popularity of the site and its content in searching engine ranking. You should create links to the blogs or sites that contain back links to your site and increase its visibility.

Make your content travel

Make some changes in your site to enable your content to travel far and wide in your niche area. This can be done by including portable content such as PDFs, video and audio files and submitting them to your list members as well as sites related to your niche. This will help you to create back links for your site.

Allow others to use your content

A glaring example of this practice is YouTube. You can download its videos to your sites to illustrate your content and make it more interesting. Another example is to use RSS feeds to syndicate your content so that others can use it for their benefit. This can help you to drive traffic to your website.

Pros and cons of social media optimization

As with other methods of driving traffic, social media optimization has become victim of spamming or link farming. While the noble idea behind social bookmarking is to include links to informative, useful and interesting sites, people bookmark – syndicate – their own sites in numerous bookmarking sites unmindful of the quality of their content which can be pirated, duplicate and cheap. It simply eats into the web space of the bookmarking site and creates a kind of content garbage making it difficult to sift grains from the chaff.

It is really difficult to define spam. But generally speaking, spam is unsolicited information, which is forced upon the reader and is purported to advertise some service or product. The unsolicited information is not provided just once or twice; the reader is, in fact, so much bombarded with the same kind of information that he gets exasperated.

Here are some of the important features of spam.

Spamming through emails

The spammers consider email as the best medium for sending spam. They try to remain anonymous and send mails in massive quantities. The sender addresses are generally spoofed or harvested to conceal the identity of the real senders.

You may also receive political messages, appeals for charities, chain letters and spam to spread malware.

All unsolicited mails are not spam. For example, you have given your email id with a permission to receive messages, newsletters and business proposals. If the sender also sends legitimate business proposals, charity appeals, invitation to seminars, e-books through his emails, they are not considered spam. The reason is that the sender has already sought your permission to send you mails.

Sometimes the unsolicited messages of genuine nature may come from senders who have not sought your permission. Let us say you have only one supplier of certain product that you are trading. You wish you could know some other supplier for a competitive buying.  Suppose you get a message from an Asian producer of the same product who quotes lower rates, then you would not consider this unsolicited message as a spam.

The key word for spam is ‘bombardment’ with unsolicited messages. Spam has spread its tentacles in other forms of internet marketing especially article marketing.

Most article writers tend to cater to the search engines rather than the searchers of information through search engines. Search engines accord prominent display to popular websites on their first pages. Their criterion for popularity of a website is the number of links that connect to that website.

So the article marketers fill up their articles with large number of links to their websites to hoodwink the search engine robots called crawlers.  Not only that, they submit the same articles to hundreds of article directories through automatic submission software. The strategy is to create a deluge of links to fool the search engines.

Since their only objective is to create links, the articles mostly contain duplicate or copied content. Though prominent article directories such as Ezine Articles discourage such articles, there are numerous other article directories that turn a blind eye to such submissions. This type of spamming is called link spamming through articles.

How to treat the spam?

Though you cannot stop the link spamming through articles, as it is for the article directories and search engine robots to devise methods to discourage their submissions, there are several ways you can stop spam in your emails to some extent.

Do not post your email ids on the public forums, newsgroups, chat rooms or websites.

Do not open messages that appear spam

Email service providers usually offer effective tools and filters to stop the spam mail. Yahoo, probably the most popular email service, provides options to do so. You can select all the messages that appear spam and click on the Spam button. They will stop appearing in your inbox. Yahoo also offers spam filters. You should add the spam mail’s id in the prescribed filter box and you will stop receiving mails from that sender.

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and also sometimes Rich Site Summary. The word syndication indicates that the content, which may be in form of blogs, articles, news headlines, audio or videos, is submitted to several recipients  in form of  web feed formats. An RSS document is, in fact, called a feed or a web feed. It is like article syndication where the same article is submitted to several article directories for publication.

Its other full form, Rich Site Summary indicates that usually the feed is submitted in form of a summarized text. The whole process of submission of content takes place automatically. Usually website content or blogs are updated to keep the content fresh and up-to-date, so, as soon as the content is updated, it reaches the audience instantly. Sometimes some subscribers to the RSS feed avidly wait for latest updates on their niches; they get it immediately without having to make enquiries about it.

RSS feeds can be read with the help of a special kind of software called RSS reader, feed reader or an aggregator. RSS reader can be read through the desktops or mobile devices.  The information is published through a standardized XML file format and can be read through several different programs.

Any person can start subscribing to an RSS feed by entering the URL of the feed into the feed reader or by just clicking on RSS icon in the browser that starts the subscription process by  asking for his name and email id. The RSS reader keeps checks on the updates in the content subscribed to by the user and provides an interface to monitor and read the feeds.

There are several advantages of RSS feeds both for the content creators as well as the subscribers.

Content creators can share their content online with thousands of subscribers almost free of cost. Once you create your content, it is automatically broadcasted to the subscribers. It is not like articles which you need to submit manually to scores of article directories. The whole process is very tiring, monotonous and time consuming.

It is an ingenious way of getting back links to your websites and promoting your products and services. RSS feeds are, therefore, a very useful platform for search engine optimization of your website.

No website can survive in the present scenario, if the content in it is not updated frequently to keep up with times. Quite often the webmasters are not good at creating the content. Hiring ghost authors proves costly. The best way for them, therefore, is to subscribe to RSS feeds of the niche of their sites. They can get content on regular basis.

If Adsense ads are the main source of revenue from your website, RSS feeds can come as boon. You get the content relevant to the subject of your site on regular basis. Google keeps inducting the Adsense ads while you continue to make money.

If you are running an online blog, magazine, newsletter or a newspaper, you do not need to run after the authors for writing content for you. You only need to subscribe to different RSS feeds connected with the content of your site.

You can be notified of the fresh arrivals in the shopping malls or stores of your choice. You do not have to log on the website of the store or the shopping mall. You can also receive weather alerts and news about other changing weather conditions.

Today there are several SEO techniques that help you to optimize your site, but one trick whose importance is undervalued at times is a Sitemap. A Sitemap is a page on your website that indicates the entire structure of your site including different sections, links between them, and so on. In short it gives a detailed listing of your website layout. Sitemaps are very helpful as they make site navigation easy for the visitors and also help search engines index the site.

Sitemaps generally fall into two categories. One is a HTML version which is for human visitors and helps them navigate through the entire site and find the information they are looking for. The other Sitemap is an XML version which is meant for the search engine to know about all the pages on the website including all the URLs that may go unnoticed by the search engine spidering the site.

Sitemap Benefits
There are many advantages of using sitemaps which are listed below:

Easy Navigation
A sitemap helps a visitor know where to find particular information he is looking for on the site. It acts as a guide to enable easy navigation through the site without wasting time to find information.

Search Engine Indexing
Sitemaps help search engines know about any updates that you make on your site. It is not guaranteed that the search engine bot will immediately index the updated pages, but, the changes will surely be indexed much faster compared to when there isn’t any sitemap.

New Site
If you have a new site with very few links in it, sitemaps can be very helpful. This is because the search engine spider crawls through documents by following links from one page to another and if your site does not contain proper links, it would be difficult for the bots to index them.

Broken Links
If you have a site that contains a lot of content pages which are not properly linked to each other or have broken links then using sitemaps will help search engine bots to index your pages better.

Dynamic Content on Site
Sitemaps are also very helpful if you have a site where your content is updated or changed frequently. The search engines can be immediately informed of this change through your sitemap. However, this will not assure you that your changed pages will be indexed right away.

Sitemap Process
To create a Sitemap for your website there are a few simple steps that you need to follow. First, a Sitemap has to be generated after which it needs to be uploaded to the site and then finally Google needs to be notified about it.

Sitemap Generation
A sitemap can be generated in two ways. One is by using an online tool that can help you generate the sitemap and the other is by downloading and installing a sitemap generator.

The first option is much easier compared to the second one as there are several online sitemap generation tools available free of cost that make your work simpler. The second option of downloading and installing a sitemap generator is a little difficult but enables you to gain a better control of the output.

Uploading and Submitting Your Sitemap
Once your sitemap is created, it has to be uploaded to your website and Google needs to be notified about it. In order to notify Google you have to add your site to your Google Sitemap account. However, if you don’t already have a Google Sitemap account, this is the time for you to create one. Also, it is important to know that adding a sitemap to your account requires a verification indicating you are the legal owner of the website.

It is also important to know that Google does not guarantee that all the URLs in your sitemap will be spidered and indexed. For instance, if there are any image URLs in your sitemap, these will not be crawled and indexed. However, your sitemap can help the search engine to know more about your site layout which will help it to crawl your site better and faster when compared to not having a sitemap. Webmasters usually benefit from submitting sitemaps and will not be penalized for it.

In the last couple of days many Google AdWords accounts have been suspended. Most of the AdWords customers are wondering as to why their accounts are suspended. All that the Google’s AdWords customer receives is an email from the Google AdWords Team stating that your account has been suspended and your advertisements will not run in Google. The reason being non compliance with Google’s terms of service and advertising policies. Have you received one such email from the Google’s Team?

These accounts that are suspended are mostly from customers who are either new to AdWords or have outsourced their AdWords Optimization to third parties to do so.

The problem faced in such situations creates a bad experience for the AdWords customers and an additional burden to Google AdWords reviewers. However, who is responsible for such things. Let’s take a closer look at each of these 2 cases and understand what happens and how problems can be prevented.

Many customers who are new to AdWords are unaware of Google’s Policies and Terms and Conditions that they need to adhere to while setting up their accounts. Google’s Help Center does provide all the necessary information for the new customers but many of them ignore it and just get started right away. They start with the AdWords account creation by creating the new campaigns, ad groups, and stuffing a huge list of keywords. The next thing that happens is a good amount of money is spent as a daily budget and then one fine day one is shocked with an email that their account is suspended.

On the other hand, many customers who want to use AdWords and do not know how to use it outsource it to third party providers. These providers are contacted through any project bidding site. There these customers post their requirements and set a budget that they think they can afford. Many of the providers bid on those projects. Some providers bid as low as $50 for a project that is worth $500. Looking at the affordable price many customers award these AdWords projects to these providers. End result, in most cases dissatisfaction!

After a few days the AdWords customer gets very disappointed and posts a negative remark against the provider in the project bidding system. And then after a few days their account also gets suspended.

So what would be the solution to prevent such situations from occurring? The solution lies in searching for a good provider who has the necessary credentials for optimizing an AdWords account.

Ask your provider if they are GAP certified? GAP stands for Google AdWords Professional. This certification is only awarded when a person writes an online exam and is well versed with the Google Policies and Terms and Conditions? Find out if your provider has any hands on experience in optimizing Google AdWords accounts? For how long has your provider been optimizing Google AdWords accounts? Has your provider hired any staff from Google? How will they go about optimizing the Google AdWords account? Most important of all is whether the provider offers to take a look at your account to understand what needs to be optimized or just jumps into the project to earn money regardless of the fact that the account needs an initial diagnosis and study.

You may also come across instances where your account is permanently suspended and even if you try opening a new account with different information, you are likely to get suspended again. The reason being Google having a well built out system to track the advertiser through various means.

So, in this scenario you will not be able to use Google paid advertising which could have got you that instant traffic and conversions. But don’t let this disappoint you. You still stand a good chance to advertise on Google – but this time it’s not AdWords but through organic search. Yes, this is one area where you can promote your website through SEO (search engine optimization) and show on top of the search results of Google.

There are unlimited opportunities waiting for you and it is up to you to decide if you want to cry over lost AdWords opportunity or to venture out for more opportunities using SEO and hitting on top of the search engines.

Most of us will always like to make the optimum use of our hard-earned money. But what is the use if you can’t reap the benefits of your investment. In most cases, low priced services do not offer the best quality. They are low priced because the quality is compromised. Hire the right person and pay the right price for your Google AdWords optimization and prevent your account from being suspended or if you are unable to advertise through AdWords, then have the best SEO Company to promote your website and rank you on top in the search engines.

The choice is now in your hands!

Today everyone wants a website and for that a web designing company is the best place to make one. However, do web designing companies make a website that is good in all terms like structure, color, programming, etc? Some would surely say yes, but I do not agree with that. I would say, web designers just create a website, but there is more to that for a client to look into while getting the website built.

The following article describes the points that one must keep in mind when contracting with a web designing company to develop a website.

Website Structure and Placement:
What kind of a website are you looking for? How many columns do you want the website to have? Where do you want to place what and why? What kind of programming do you want to have for the website? What kind of technology do you want the website to be built on? For example: HTML, Drupal, PHP, Dot Net, Joomla, etc.

W3C Validation:
In most cases the client only sees if the website is running well, all the pages are opening correctly, and the content is correctly placed on each page. Very often the client and the web designer neglect the number of errors that are present on the website. With W3C validation, you will know exactly how many errors are there on each page. Besides the errors, you will also see the number of warnings for each page of your website. This is extremely important from an SEO perspective.

Tip: Ask the web designer to show a few websites they have built and check them for any errors and warnings. This is the best way to ascertain the quality of work of a web designer or a web designing company.

On Page Optimization:
When a website is built by the web designer, it is important that the client gives specifications regarding on page optimization. On Page Optimization refers to the meta description, meta keywords, meta title, alt tags, and header tags. There are so many websites that are built where these points are ignored. If these points are kept in mind, you can save a good amount of money that would actually be spent towards On Page Optimization. Additionally, it will also help the spiders to crawl your website and also index the pages properly.

Now that we have the 3 main elements in our control, we need to look at another element that plays an important role towards the success of a website. Multi-variant testing is an essential element to know which pages are preferred best by the visitors and what is not preferred.

This technique is used to determine which creative variation or content creates the finest perfection in the defined objectives of a website design. This could be focused on either the home page (index page) or all of the internal pages of the website. If implemented correctly, you will see a phenomenal increase in the number of conversions, traffic and also ROI by testing the different elements like layout, background colors, copy text and landing page images.

An important point to note is that all elements may not generate the same increase in conversions. It’s through conducting different tests it would be possible to ascertain the elements that generate the rise in conversions!

To put in a layman’s terms, latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a technique of indexing— analyzing, listing or categorizing certain keywords or phrases in the contents of various websites, books or documents in such a way that they have contextually and conceptually the same or related intent and meaning despite the different words used in them.

The technique used in latent semantic indexing aims at finding the keywords in the text that carry a latent relationship in structure and usage. The idea behind the concept of LSI is to collect data that is conceptually akin in meaning and context to the search queries entered by the searchers in the search engines. The search results may, therefore not share the specific words or phrases entered by the searcher.

For example, if you use the word ‘Saddam Hussein’, the search engine may return articles about the Gulf War, situation in Kuwait or Iran, the elite force of the Iraqi despot, UN sanctions, oil fields in Iraq and much more without even mentioning the search word ‘Saddam Hussein’.

The technique of LSI automates the process of categorizing the documents almost the way the human beings do. The text selected may not have the same words or sentences. The results returned may have lists, free notes, web content or even emails.

Advantages of latent semantic indexing

Sometimes the web searcher is conscious that he is not using the right keywords or phrases due to the lack of knowledge of appropriate vocabulary. He, therefore, uses only approximate words which may not return the desired information if the search process follows the Boolean pattern. Latent semantic index technique facilitates the retrieval of the related conceptual content even if the search queries do not use the ‘correct’ words.

Latent or true information

LSI technique returns information in its true conceptual representation, which is not easily possible through the traditional search approach. It uses synonymy that can bring forth the underlying concept even if the searcher uses different words or phrases. The traditional retrieval process does not always discover the right content on the same topic that uses different vocabulary.

Polysemy

A large number of words have multiple meanings. So, if a searcher uses numerous polysemous words, they may reduce the chances of getting the precise information. LSI helps to weed out the unnecessary words from the data and tries to arrive at the average meaning, which is close to the real meaning of the search queries.

Sifting close and distant words

LSI examines the contents of the different websites or documents and tries to find out which of these contain semantically common words, similar words, closer words or distant words. This is almost working like a human being. Although LSI does not understand the meanings of the words, its algorithm does notice the word patterns and indexes them accordingly. This process proves the astonishing intelligence of the LSI technique.

How should one use latent semantic indexing?

Latent semantic indexing is a very useful tool for search engine optimization of your website or copywriting.  You should, therefore, use the keywords and phrases very carefully. For example, if you are using the keyword or phrase ‘buy jaguar’ you should explain what the word ‘jaguar’ stands for since it is a polysemous word. It may mean a cat, a car or an aircraft. It may also be a brand name of some sanitary product.  Using the word ‘jaguar’ in isolation may confuse the LSI tool. You should, therefore, clarify what your ‘jaguar’ stands for. Otherwise, you will defeat the very purpose of launching your website.

You should also be careful in the use of synonyms so that they convey the meaning that you exactly want to communicate. Synonyms are very helpful in clarifying the meanings of the words. But stuffing keywords for making the site SEO compliant may also defeat the purpose and your site may be blacklisted for spamming.

What happens if one does not use latent semantic indexing?

The search engine spiders or the software is making a paradigm shift in selecting the sites for front-page ranking. Google and many other search engines use LSI to determine the relevancy of your keywords and phrases in context of the subject matter of the site’s content. If you do not use the keywords and phrases judiciously, you may not be able to optimize your site for high ranking. Not using the synonyms or theme related words may not help the LSI tool to identify your site’s relevance to the search queries. If your website is about barbeques, you should use words such as grill, patio, sauce, charcoal, recipe, etc which are related to the main keyword. If you do not use LSI, your site is doomed to stay unnoticed.

One of the facts about search engines is that they utilize software programs known as bots or spiders that crawl the web and build their database. These spiders are sent to view and index pages which are later processed and retrieved from the database. If ranking on top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) is crucial for you, then it is important you understand the basics of creating a search engine friendly website.

Below it is explained in detail as to how a search engine works.

Crawling
Firstly, search engines crawl the web to gather information and build their database. This is done by an automated software called a search engine crawler or spider or a bot. These spiders crawl through a site and look at the content (mainly text) to know what the site is about and then start collecting, parsing and storing the data so that it can be easily be retrieved from its database.

However, since there are over billion pages on the web, it is practically impossible for a spider to revisit a site on a daily basis only to see if a new page has been added or an existing page has gone through any modification. Many times the spider may not visit your website for a month or more also, therefore, the true impact of SEO efforts cannot be known immediately.

It is also good to know that search engines are mainly text driven and are oblivious to images, sounds, flash movies, javascript, frames, directories, and similar stuff. Therefore having lots of these on your website may not be very helpful from the SEO point of view as these will not be crawled and indexed for further processing.

Search Engine Indexing
Once a page is crawled, the next step involves indexing the content. This process entails finding those words that can best describe the webpage content and then assigning the webpage to specific keywords. The indexed page is then stored in the huge database for retrieval later. At times, the search engine may not be able to correctly identify the meaning of the page and in such a case optimization of the page can help it classify it rightly and achieve a better ranking for you.

Processing
This is done when a user enters a search query – in simple terms, the search engine analyses the information it has indexed in relation to the search request. Since there will be millions of pages containing the same search term, the search engine calculates the relevance of each page in its database to the search query.

The relevancy of a page is calculated based on various algorithms. These algorithms assign different weights for general aspects like Meta Tags, Keyword Density, and Links. However, one basic truth that you need to know is that all major search engines regularly change their algorithms and if you want to continue to appear on the top of the search results, you need to keep your pages up to date. Also, it would be a wise decision to think about SEO to rank on the top and also gain an edge over your competitors.

Retrieving
This is the last step in the process where the search engine retrieves the results, that is, it throws up all the relevant results before the user. The uses can see a vast pool of information related to their search query.

There may be questions regarding how differently each search engine functions. However, one basic thing that you need to know is that there are differences in the manner various search engines function but at the end of the day they all perform three fundamental tasks:

* Searching the Internet based on the search query entered by the user.
* Maintaining an index of all the information that gather from various pages.
* Permit users to search for words available in that index.