Everybody in online marketing is constantly talking about SEO, SEM... and all the nice abreviations, but not SMO. I think this should get more recognition, because more and more companies are also starting to use this feature (they are just not familiar with the official term). I will definately try to convince the company I work for to create, next to our SEM, SEO and Display Advertising, to start using SMO for our blog sub-department and soon also including much more that deals with social media. Hopefully my colleague will soon be promoted to SMO manager !

DaniWeb is an exciting community of 132,552 IT professionals who are devoted to offering technology news and editorial blogs, support forums, tutorials, programming code snippets, and so much more.

As of last week we registered seomagnifier.com at and are very happy with the fast service they deliver. This site will be a continual and public case study on the topic of search engine optimization.

Please not that the forum is not yet open to the public, which will change soon.

We do not offer any paid services at this point, so if you are looking for a company to optimize your site you are looking in the wrong place, for now. We are intending to offer web site optimization services in the future though focusing on close personal contact with our customers.

Do we love sitelinks?

In one word we do, it gives your already top ranking site a very trustworthy feeling. People seem to click a lot more on sites containing the sitelinks than sites that don't posses these links.

Sitelinks bug

It seems that google is failing to remove the second listing of a site just after the sitelink listing. So after the sitelink listing for cnn you still get a regular listing for cnn.com, hopefully this will be removed soon as it makes it look a bit spammy.

Which sites get the sitelinks?

It seems that only searches for trademarks get the sitelinks E.G cnn,hp,ebay,intel.... you get my drift. Do a search for any major online trademark and sitelinks seem to appear out of the gloom. What makes these sites so special that they need to get a sitelink listing? Lets take look into this very interesting topic to see if we can find some clues. Lets start with a quote from the google webmaster help center

The links shown below some sites in our search results, called Sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for.

We only show Sitelinks for results when we think they'll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn't allow our algorithms to find good Sitelinks, or we don't think that the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user's query, we won't show them.

At the moment, Sitelinks are completely automated. We're always working to improve our Sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.
Source:

It seems that google have a nice new algorithm to calculate the site link factor for a site. A few things that I have noticed while working on sitelinked web sites are:

• Sitelinks appear only on the first serp listing.
• Sitelinks appear only for a "trademark" search.
• Sitelinks appear to still be buggy.
• Sitelinks appear only on sites that are very old and have a decent amount of content.
• Sitelinks appear mainly on authority sites.
• Sitelinks are still a mystery!

How does Google calculate Sitelinks?

Google claims that the Sitelinks are created automatically. We have several theories as to how google calculates the sitelinks. These theories are based on my best guess.

• Google might track the number of clicks for different results. If a web site gets a lot of traffic for a special keyword then the web site will get Sitelinks on Google's result page.
  For example, if you use a special trademark term on your web pages that cannot be found on other web sites then many people will click on your web site in Google's results when they search for that search term. It's likely that your web site will get Sitelinks for such a search term.
  
• The link architecture of a web site might help. Links at the top of the HTML source of a web site seem to have a better chance to be included as Sitelinks.
  
• Google might use the Google toolbar to determine Sitelinks. The more often a page is book marked the more likely it is that these pages will be used as Sitelinks. Google's toolbar can collect a lot of information about a web site.
• Google might be able to filter out the "trademark" trademarks seem to have the highest risk of obtaining sitelinks.

Final sitelink thoughts

At the moment spending time in order to obtain sitelinks it time not well spend. Your could better spend time to obtain authority site status which gets you a lot of traffic and might in the end get you a sitelink listing. It is how ever so uncertain how to get these sitelinks that it is not advisable to target your site for them.

Well for me this was a hard one to answer, many other search engines that could deliver you some traffic still use the meta keywords tag to index the pages.
Should we neglect these engines? I think not, but we should stop putting in a lot of hours working for these low traffic engines.

The solution, automatically generate your keywords using php.

It might sound simple and well it is. We can use some of the nifty php functions to extract rate and collect keywords from a web page and put these inside the meta keywords tag. Might not always give the perfect keywords, but at least these keywords are in the content of the page and are relevant to the text.

Introduction generate your keywords using php

The vessie engine uses smarty as a templating engine, a key feature of smarty is that it buffers the output and sends the complete blocks of content when you want it to. This lets you take the completely generated html from a php web page extract its keywords and place them inside the meta keywords tag. Then it lets you send the content to the browser. This article will however not use the smarty engine, but ill be happy to write a smarty version if users require this. Also please note that vessie uses a completely object orientated coding model view controller style. The reason I left this out is that it is simply to complex to cover this. We mainly want to focus on the task at hand. I do however promote the user of object orientated programming using php quite heavily!

Tell php to buffer its output.

The first thing we need to do is tell php to buffer any output, the reason is that we want to count and manipulate this output.
We can do this with this code at the beginning of your script.
<?php
ob_start();
?>
This starts the output buffering but keep in mind that the output buffer will be send automatically to the browser at the end of a script, to counter this we can use ob_get_clean(); So at the end of your script you can add the following code to stop php from sending all the content in the output buffer before we changed some things, like the keywords meta tag.
<?php
$content = ob_get_clean();
?>
What this does is take the contents of the output buffer and puts it inside the variable $content after it has done this the output buffer is cleaned/emptied.

Counting the keywords.

So now we have a page that outputs nothing, great. We also have the entire contents of the page inside the variable $content, so we can count and input the keywords. To count the keywords I have created a nice and simple to use function, you can use, alter and distribute the function as you like. But you must leave the copyright notice in tact. You should put this function after the ob_start(); call and before you call it at the end of your script.

<?php

   /** 

   * Extract the keywords from the content string and return the keywords string 

   * @param string $content 

   * @param int $minLength 

   * @param int $headingWeight 

   * @param int $linksWeight 

   * @param int $numberOfKeywords 

   * @return bool 

   * @copyright remco verton <info@seomagnifier.com>  

   * @copyright Visit http://seomagnifier.com for more free php scripts 

   */ 

  function extractKeywords($content,$minLenght,$headingWeight,$linksWeight,$numberOfKeywords){ 

      // minimum lenght a keyword must have 

      $keywordArray = array(); 

       

      //Count the link keywords 

      $links = array(); 

      preg_match_all('#<a.*?>(.*?)</a.*?>#s',$content,$links);         

      foreach($links[1] as $key =>$value){ 

          $keywords = explode(' ',strip_tags($value)); 

          foreach($keywords as $id => $keyword){ 

              // Get the alpha numeric value for the keyword 

              $keyword = preg_replace('/[^[:alpha:]]/', '', $keyword); 

              if(strlen($keyword) >= $minLenght){ 

                  if(!array_key_exists($keyword,$keywordArray)){ 

                      $keywordArray[$keyword] = $linksWeight; 

                  } 

                  else{ 

                      $keywordArray[$keyword] += $linksWeight; 

                  } 

              } 

          } 

      } 

      //Count the heading keywords 

      $headings = array(); 

      preg_match_all('#<h(.*?)>(.*?)</h.*?>#s',$content,$headings); 

      foreach($headings[2] as $key =>$value){ 

          $keywords = explode(' ',strip_tags($value)); 

          foreach($keywords as $id => $keyword){ 

              // Get the alpha numeric value for the keyword 

              $keyword = preg_replace('/[^[:alpha:]]/', '', $keyword);             

              if(strlen($keyword) >= $minLenght){ 

                  $divider = (int)$headings[1][$key]; 

                  if($headingNumber == 0)$headingNumber = 1; 

                  if(!array_key_exists($keyword,$keywordArray)){ 

                      $keywordArray[$keyword] = $headingWeight/$headingNumber; 

                  } 

                  else{ 

                      $keywordArray[$keyword] += $headingWeight/$headingNumber; 

                  } 

              } 

          } 

      } 

      // Count the text keywords including the heading and link texts! 

      // Meaning these are counted double once with a rating of 1 and once with the rating set for them! 

      $text = str_ireplace(array('/',"\n",'<br />','<br/>'),' ',$content); 

      $text = strip_tags($text); 

      $keywords = explode(' ',$text); 

      foreach($keywords as $key => $keyword){ 

          // Get the alpha numeric value for the keyword 

          $keyword = preg_replace('/[^[:alpha:]]/', '', $keyword); 

          if(strlen($keyword) >= $minLenght){ 

              if(!array_key_exists($keyword,$keywordArray)){ 

                  $keywordArray[$keyword] = 1; 

              } 

              else{ 

                  $keywordArray[$keyword] += 1; 

              } 

          } 

      } 

      // Sort the keywords 

      arsort($keywordArray); 

      // Take only the number of keywords set in the config 

      $keywordArray = array_slice($keywordArray,0,$numberOfKeywords); 

      return strtolower(implode(',',array_keys($keywordArray))); 

  } 

  ?> 

   

What this function does it count the words inside the headings, links and text. It will use a rating for each and return the number of keywords set in the parameters. If you call the function as per the working example code you will get the best possible result. I will not go in depth on the workings of this function. You won't have to learn how to write one, just use this.

Putting the keywords inside the meta tag.

Putting the keywords inside the meta tag simply requires a bit of string replacing, I have placed this code inside my meta keywords tag: {$keywords}. You can choose any code you want but be sure you will never write this as content and make it descriptive. I chose {$keywords} because it's the smarty way of putting data inside templates. This only requires1 line of php code.

<?php
$content = str_replace('{$keywords}',$kewords,$content);
?>

Putting it all together, adding the keywords to your document.

So now that we have a function, and we know how to replace the {$keywords} code with our keywords how do we continue. At the end of you php file you should add the following lines. This takes the content from the output buffer, extracts the keywords and put them inside the meta tag. After all is well it will echo the content to the browser.

<?php
$content = ob_get_clean();
$kewords = extractKeywords($content,5,20,2,10);
$content = str_replace('{$keywords}',$kewords,$content);
echo $content;
?>

A working example that adds it's keywords to the meta tag.

A working example can be found at working example and the source can be seen at code. Feel free to use any part of this example, it would be nice if you kept the copyright notice in place. If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to leave me a note in my profile.

You can decide how much you are willing to spend. Google adwords can be found under , give it a go you will be surprised.

The slogan that Google uses says it all.

Advertise your business on Google. No matter what your budget, you can display your ads on Google and our advertising network. Pay only if people click your ads.

How analytics works.

The basic analytics works really simple, all you need to do is apply for an account and take a bit of javascript code given during the application and put this in the head section of every web page. This should not take long. We did this by adding the javascript code to the canvas template of our site. After that you can validate that the script works.

Google analytics are processed on a daily basis and it might take up to 24 hours for you to be able to view you reports.

It might take some time for them to respond but be patient, you will get an email telling you what to do and why you were banned form the Google index.

• You should not add many keywords to the anchor texts of links
  
• You should not add many keywords to the alt attribute of images
• You should not add many keywords to the title attribute of links
• You should not add the keywords at random places in the text

Take into consideration that a good keyword density is one between 2-4% meaning that your keyword of keyword phrase should not exceed the 2-4% of your pages total page weight/content

In any case automated submissions is an outdated technique and should be steered clear of. 

A nice example is the Google search term , if you enter this text in the search box the top ranking web page is the download page for adobe acrobat reader. The interesting part is that the text is nowhere to be found on their page, they don't use this text as it is considered bad usability. So how come they rank number 1 for . The explanation is as simple as it is interesting. There are so many sites that use click here as the anchor text in the link to download the acrobat reader, that Google rates adobe the number one site. The implication is huge, if you can get tons of links with proper anchor text to your site, you can rank for words that don't even exist on your site. How is that for content is king.... Also note that this adobe page even got site links for this search term, indicating they are the authority site on . We decided to help adobe out and give them a few more backlinks.

Our advice think very carefully when choosing your anchor texts during your link campaigns.

Backlinks in search engines can be counted by using the search command link:yoursite.com where you replace yoursite.com with the URL of your site, duh. Please note that some search engines and the most notre is Google do not show the complete list of backlinks. Google for example displays only a preview of the backlinks for a site, holding of the webmasters trying to 'steal' their way to the top by copying the backlink structure of the top ranking sites.