The following are a list of mistakes can ensure that your site maintains a low ranking with the search engines. Avoid at all costs.
* Specifying no title for your page *
I cannot stress how important the title of a web page is. Failing to specify a descriptive, keyword optimized title will do untold damage to your ranking with the search engines. It is the equivalent to owning a shop and boarding up its windows. Ideally each page on your site should have a unique, content-specific title.
* Excessive use of images or Flash animation on a page *
If your web page has plenty of nice-looking graphics and eye-popping Flash animation and not a lot of textual content it may indeed look nice but have you ever considered what how the search engines might see it.
Search engines thrive on textual content, scavenging as much text as they can but unfortunately they cannot understand images or Flash animations like we can and so will find nothing of real value on your page. Try to balance your page so that the textual content is given priority and that any images or animations are used only when needed. Also it is a good idea to attach some text to an image by using its ALT tag as search engines use this text when determining rank.
* Complicated menu systems *
Search engines spiders that crawl through our pages are a relatively primitive bunch. They find in hard to navigate complicated menu systems implemented for example in JavaScript or as a Java applet. Just because it is easy for a human to navigate through the site never assume it will be as easy for a search engine spider. A menu system using simple textual links will be easier for a spider to understand and it will be able to successfully navigate your site. A lot of the time complicated menu systems can be replicated using textual links and CSS.
If you must use a complicated menu system be sure to provide a site map that is clearly accessible from the homepage of your site and contains only textual links to your pages. This ensures that even if the spider cannot understand your menu system that it will be able to find the pages on your site.
By Frank Kilkelly
30.6.08
SEO Deadly Sins - Mistakes That Hurt Web Page Ranking
META Tags Explained and How To Use Them For Ranking
The META tags are used to provide extra information about a web page. There was once a time where a good search engine ranking could be achieved by simply changing the value of the META tags. However these days are long gone. Nowadays the META Tags are decreasing in importance in the eyes of the search engines who are using more sophisticated methods of ranking pages (namely link popularity, optimized anchor text).
There are many different types of META tags but the one that can affect ranking are the Keywords META tag and the Description META tag.
Keywords META tag:
This tag contains keywords relevant to a page. In the past search engines referenced this to determine how to rank a particular page. However many people started to abuse this and stuffed the tag with keywords that were not relevant to the content of the page. This confused search engines and subsequently returned weaker search results. To combat this less and less emphasis has been placed on the Keywords META tag. However this does not mean that it is entirely useless. Here are some reasons to still include it:
* Some search engines still use it
Although most search engines do not use the tag there are undoubtedly still some that do. For this reason place around 15-20 keywords relevant to your site or page into the tag. Do not attempt to cheat the search engines by repeating keywords as this is considered spamming and they may look unfavourably on this.
* Account for misspellings of keyphrases
People can misspell certain keyphrases that you may be optimizing for so it is common to place these misspellings into the Keywords META tag. This allows you to rank in search engine results for misspellings without having to represent them on the actual content of your page.
Description META tag:
In the past this tag was used to specify the text that would appear in search engine results alongside the link to your site. Keywords could be placed into this text to influence ranking. However it was abused similar to the Keywords META tag and has befallen the same fate, meaning it is not as useful as it once was. Some search engines do not display it in their results (most notably Google, which retrieves the text from content on your page) and do not use it to rank a site. Having said that some search engines do still use it so again it is a mistake to ignore it completely.
Descriptions placed into this tag should, strangely enough, be very descriptive of the page or site they reside in. Include a few relevant keywords/keyphrases that you are optimizing for in the description and try to limit its length to 25-30 words. Also try to use no more than two sentences.
Summary:
Although not as important as they once where, the META tags can still influence a search engine when it comes to deciding whether your web page is relevant or not.
Keywords META tag:
15-20 keywords, include misspellings of keywords/keyphrases
Description META tag:
Include keywords/keyphrases, 25-30 words, no more than two sentences.
By Frank Kilkelly
Do Not Drop Your Web Site Off the Search Engine Cliff
If you've been feeling like Tom Cruise climbing up the side of some remote jagged mountain in the blazing hot sun and concerned you're facing "mission impossible", chances are you own a web site.
Adding to the intense thrill of web site ownership are keyword comparisons and bidding for good keyword positions in search engines. You might hire a search engine optimization specialist who can track elusive algorithm clues and is unfazed by page rank drama. Your programmers and designers insist they get along. The marketing department actually believes deadlines are met. The new bank account is waiting for fresh revenue. And oh yes, it's assumed someone will come looking for your web site and wants to use it.
You did build it for them, right?
For every search result, there is the possibility that:
a. The engine will display a description that makes sense. Or not.
b. The page the search engine refers to does what the description said it would do and is about what the search engine said it would cover. Or not.
Your SEO/SEM, if you hired a good one, helped you write your title tag statement and Meta page description and structured it so it makes sense in SERPs (search engine results pages).
Your Usability professional, if you hired one, evaluated the page to make sure it would meet customer expectations and convince visitors there are other hot pages inside the web site to look at too. Without call to action prompts, well displayed, logically labeled navigation links and credible content, the chance of someone remaining on that page is pretty slim.
Says Gordon Hotchkiss, President and CEO of Enquiro Search Solutions, Inc., in a recent Search Day article written by Shari Thurow, called Creating Compelling Search Engine Ads and Landing Pages, "Once searchers arrive on your landing pages, you have 13.2 seconds to convince visitors that they are on the right site."
Impossible Mission?
Had enough of web page abandonment? Are those cost per click fees putting you further in credit card debt and not producing any bang for your buck? Which part of "understand your web site visitor" didn't make it to the drawing board?
I know this is hard. You're not a mind reader. Unless you have access to costly studies and data about who to build your web site for and their computer usage habits, chances are you simply wanted a web site and hoped people would find it and use it. By incorporating the skills and expertise of an SEO/SEM along with a user centered design specialist, you will not be wastefully tossing your web site off the search engine cliff. Rather, your adoring fans will clamor up the cliff to get to it.
Sometimes a web designer is also trained in these fields or is partnered with people who are. This is something to consider when shopping around for web site assistance.
Here are some things to keep in mind when studying your web site. You can also ask your team to consider these points.
1. What happens after your site reaches top rank? It's lonely up there, if nobody notices your page or understands the page description. How effective is high rank? Do people really click on "sponsored" pages vs. natural results?
2. Pay attention to inside "landing" pages. Optimize them for easy indexing and point visitors to your homepage, sale products or free stuff.
3. Be wise about what you invest. Every cost per click must be productive. If not, a usability web site review can locate roadblocks.
4. It's about the user experience. Really. It's a common habit for web site owners to create the site for themselves based on what they like and want. When you receive a complaint, consider it a favor. Yes, some people are mean and critical. But, enhancements are improvements that sometimes benefit a lot of people, and you too, in the long run.
5. Don't settle for minimum effort. One of your goals is to reach potential customers and readers. Your optimized pages reach people looking for them. Your user centered pages reach people wanting to use them and will refer them to friends.
6. Your competition does it better. Not by packing hidden keywords and buying links, but by carefully targeting keywords, providing cleverly written content and delivering user centered design.
7. Think sustainability. If you plan on your web site being around for a while, make this a checkpoint for every future decision related to your site. If someone has an idea that won't impact the long-term sustainability of the site, the site may disappear out of sheer user boredom. And search do engines notice.
8. Understanding your visitors and customers allows for more creative keyword combinations. Put a feedback form on your web site. Ask them how they found your web site. Ask them what keywords they used. Ask them why they came or what they wanted to find. Ask them if they found what they were looking for and if not, provide room for comments so they can explain what happened. This information is a gold mine for you.
9. Never mislead your visitors. Be accurate with what you say a site or page is about. Search results relevancy establishes trust from the start.
10. The elegance of action. The act of landing on a relevant, accurate, persuasive, interesting page leads to the fluid, unencumbered desire to know more and click deeper. Aim for this.
Do not drop your web site over the search engine cliff without considering the usability effect. Design it to be productive and user centered. This will pay off in many ways. Remember your original requirements and goals and trace back every dollar you spend to meeting them. Marketing efforts are strengthened when you make your visitors feel welcome, informed and productive once they arrive at your web site.
By Kimberly Krause Berg
Finding the Right SEO Company
I often talk to people who have lost faith in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firms because of bad experiences. Either they saw no results, felt that they were tricked into subscribing to a service that could not work, or that they wasted money on a firm that did them no good. Although I agree that there are bad SEO firms out there, I know that there are also many good ones. It's your job to make sure you find an SEO firm that will work for you.
Search engines are the basis of Internet existence and survival. Recent studies have concluded that over 90 percent of all web surfers use search engines to find what they are looking for. Thus, in order to be successful on the Internet, your website must be search engine friendly. If people who search the Internet for your products or services are not finding your Web site, you need search engine optimization (SEO).
Now some of you may take on the task of optimizing your own sites. For those people, there are plenty of "how to" articles on the Internet that can help you. If you need more help, drop me an email and I'll give you some ideas. However, many webmasters decide instead to let an SEO company handle their marketing. Search Engine Optimization is a full time job, and many companies need to hire someone to do it for them. If this is your intent, you should know what to look for, and what to watch for, when selecting the right SEO company.
1. Make Sure They, and Their Clients, are Successful and Well Optimized
If your SEO company does not rank high on most major search engines under their specific services, then they probably won't have the ability to get you high ranking on yours. For example, if you're located in Boston, your SEO company should at least rank on the first page in Google, Yahoo, and MSN under such search terms as "Boston SEO," "Boston Internet Marketing," "Boston Web Marketing," or even "Boston Web Design." If you found them through pay-per-click or sponsored listings, this only means that they do not have the ability to optimize their own websites and are forced to pay for their clientele.
In addition, it is a good idea to check the success of their clients. All SEO companies have a client listing, if for no other reason than to offer front page links to their big spenders. Take a good look at these clients' sites. Check for quality of content and keywords. View the source and see how well the meta tags are structured and how well they apply to the content given. And most importantly, go to the major search engines and find where these clients land on the search terms they are targeting. If the SEO company has created a successful marketing campaign for each of its clients, chances are you're looking at a good SEO firm. However, if neither the SEO company or its listed clients have high rankings, I would recommend you find a firm that does.
2. Make Sure Someone Answers the Phone or Responds to Email
Although this may sound funny, I can't stress how important it is to find a SEO company that will be there when you need them. Before choosing an SEO company, call them. If they pick up, you're in good shape. If they don't pick up, but call back within 2 hours, you're still looking pretty good. If it takes you a handful of phone calls and emails, or a number of days to get a response, you might be in bad shape.
Say you've just received a new product that you would like to market. Say that product is seasonal, only for the holiday season, and your ability to sell it relies on the timeliness with which you can get it seen on the search engines. You need a company that you can contact to put immediate marketing efforts to your new pages and products. If it takes 3 to 4 weeks for your SEO firm to make changes and improvements, you might want to look for a company that can keep up with your fast-paced business and demanding customers.
3. Make Sure They Understand How Search Engines Work
Keeping a website at the top of the search engines has become a science. The best search engines frequently modify the way their databases list Web sites, and constantly change the search criteria used to find and present web pages.
To understand the quality of a company's search engine optimization services, you must first understand how search engines work. Search engines list websites in two distinct manners: pay per click listings and organically optimized listings.
Pay per click listings are the listings that appear on the top or right side of most search engines under the heading "Sponsored Links", or some related term. This type of listing is paid for. Web sites that wish to get top search engine placement without optimization can pay a certain cost that is charged to their search engine accounts every time their sponsored link is clicked on by a prospective client. Cost per click rates range anywhere between $0.10 and $10.00 per search. Some bigger-budget eCommerce businesses can spend up to $50,000 a month on pay per click marketing.
Organically optimized listings are the listings that appear at the top of search engine pages without having to pay for these listings. This type of listing is free. However, your website must be properly optimized to appear at the top of all search engines using organic optimization. Search engines use unique programs which send agents referred to as "spiders" and "robots" to your Web site to collect data. Your website must be structured properly to aid these robots in their search for information.
A quality SEO firm will know how to properly structure your website for top organic optimization and, ultimately, top search engine placement. Watch out for SEO firms that take your money and invest in pay-per-click marketing. Although this will get you immediate results, it does nothing to optimize your site in the long run, will not be as profitable as an organic marketing campaign, and will keep you dependent on SEO companies for your success. And pay-per-click marketing is something you can easily do yourself; if that's the route you wish to take.
4. Make Sure They Follow-Up with Internet Research
In addition to knowing how to optimize correctly, an SEO firm should be constantly investigating the Internet's most popular search engines in order to stay aware of the latest techniques for promoting a Web site on the Internet. If they are not giving you monthly reports on the status of your listings, the increasing quantity of your links, and the number of unique visitors to your site, you might not be working with the right SEO company. These reports should not only show where your site is ranked on each of the major search engines for each of the major terms you target, but also show you how you have improved from the previous month and where your competitors stand.
5. Make Sure You Constantly Know What They're Doing
The major problem most people have with internet marketing guys is that they don't see them everyday. It's not like these guys come into the office everyday, or even sit down with the boss for a daily conference call. Most of them work out of their homes, spending 12 hours a day on the computer. Now I'm not saying that they will take your money and do nothing for you, but it's good to keep your eyes on them like you would any employee. On the days that they work for you, have them send you day-end reports detailing the pages they optimized, the content they added, the keywords they marketed, and the links they added. This will allow you a better understanding of what they do on your clock, and allow you to keep your eye on their progress and effectiveness.
Overall, you can find a good SEO company. There are hundreds out there. But it is your responsibility to make sure you find the right one. Don't just pick the first firm you find, then complain when you see no results. Find your results before you hire any SEO company, and you will put your business on the right track for Internet success.
By Nathaniel Long
Google Love - Five Top Tips To Make Google Love Your Site
1. Google love ...
Google and all its programming is not some form of enemy - unless you are a piece of web scum, that is.
Google is based on the idea that it should help people FIND WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR.
That's all.
Sit with the statement above. Meditate upon it if necessary. Use EFT.
But UNDERSTAND that a pointless site that has no unique content will NEVER get ANYWHERE with Googly or any other outfit that is using their techniques and methods.
You can buy books and ebooks until your wallet bleeds on "how to trick Google" this and that - just forget it.
Unless you have SOME THING that SOME PEOPLE will HONESTLY WANT and be grateful for when they find it, there is no hope and there is no point in reading any further.
Also, trying to fight Google or be cleverer somehow is pointless, distructive and the wrong attitude.
Learn to LOVE Google and work WITH IT.
If you have the contents, and you follow the most simplest common spider robot courtesy protocols, then it will come and it will index you.
It will be that mystical bridge between YOUR (customers, people, communities, friends) and your site.
That's what it does, that's what it is, that's it's nature and if you know that, then all is well.
You will get good results following the rest of this.
2. Dressing For Google ...
So now, let's have a DECENT website with DECENT content.
A decent website means:
- All the pages and directories have links that work properly and allow Google to slide with immense ease from one place to the other, without ever hitting an annoying dead end;
- All the pages are cleaned up so that you have the absolute MINIMUM of html instructions and nothing that doesn't need to be there, such as vast and pointless java scripts or the truly appalling "mso" instructions;
- All the pages have the right meta tags which ACCURATELY REFLECT what's on them, and including title, content, description, keywords at the very minimum;
- All your pages have proper headings and descriptions and content WHICH MATCHES your meta tags to a T;
- All your images are title and alt tagged CORRECTLY and resident on your own site.
Decent content means:
- Whatever you've got, it is USEFUL. If it is UNIQUE, so much the better, and that's not hard. All you need to is to be yourself and use your own words, even if you are affiliate - write your own reviews, put your own dog's picture on it, be unique, be YOURSELF.
- Whatever you've got, I'm sure there's some people who want to look at it, read it, do something with it. There's billions of people out there. Just make sure YOU KNOW WHO YOUR PEOPLE ARE and write to THEM.
- Decent content also means that what you've got is presented so that both Google and a human being get it what that is all about.
When your website is up and running, test, test and test again. Try every single hyperlink on your own computer, on someone else's and on all manner of different browsers.
Only when you are happy that it all works as it should, we go to Step 3.
3. Let Google SEE You
You need a minimum of 35 decent links going to your site for Google to take any notice of you and start paying attention.
Please be aware that "one link" is just that - www.snark.net is NOT the same as http://www.snark.net, which is not the same as http://snark.net, nor even remotely similar to any variation including http://snark.net/index.php
All, each and every ONE is viewed as a single separate link - when you need 35 ALL GOING TO ONE SINGLE ADDRESS to do the magic.
So now, to the "decent links" part.
A site that isn't indexed much by Google or doesn't turn up until page 1,993,990 on a Google search for its kind is WORTHLESS to you.
Find HIGH RANKED directory listings for your site and list your site THERE. This goes for any of the many variations on getting a link from another site, be it a guestbook signed or an article placed. Don't waste your time with anything that itself doesn't turn up on Google's own top ten.
Now, you've got a date with Google.
What we need to do next is to BUILD A RELATIONSHIP - prove our value and worth over time, in other words.
That's the next of our Google top tips - seniority and reliability.
4. Be THERE When Google Calls!
Make sure you've got a decent ISP with 99% uptime or better - that's of course elementary.
Don't ever take your site down for whatever reason and make any changes gradually.
Most importantly, get the best tracking software you can afford and find out who is already coming, and what they are coming for.
That's the key to long term success - to find what you're doing well and then expanding on it. For example, if one person came from Google (or any other search engine) for the term "snark", then build on that. Write more articles about snarks, what to do with them and without them, collect snark images - in other words, become the first port of call for any snark enquiry.
Build on your speciality some more with a web directory, guest articles, reviews and then we're more than 3/4 the way to a real web presence and Google responding to changes in your site near instantly, which is what we want.
5. Keep Improving ALL THE TIME.
The final success tip is to keep improving ALL THE TIME.
Pull up the html or php you wrote a year ago - I bet you can do better now.
Review your meta tags and your site copy and improve on both.
Name your pages, images and directories better. Improve the content, structure, navigation of your site.
Keep at it with directory listings and submissions - directories come and go, you need to be always there with the "state of the art".
Keep doing useful link exchanges with matching high ranked sites too and keep adding VALUE and UNIQUE CONTENT to your clean and well presented pages.
That's the most important thing of all - to keep at it with continuous improvement.
Follow these steps EXACTLY with a well named new site with decent content - and you WILL see immediate improvement in your Google rankings.
Good Luck and Good Spirits always,
By Silvia Hartmann
The Top 3 Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Websites Search Engine Rankings- and How to Fix Them!
Getting your website up and running is hard enough. After spending hours getting the HTML code just right and trying to make sure that you provide a great user experience, the last thing you want to do is change everything around in order to get your site ranked higher on the search engines. Follow these tips from the beginning and you'll see the benefits.
1) Not changing the title tag from page to page. A lot of people realize the importance of the title tag. But few sites change the title tag from page to page. If you have a large site with a lot of different pages targeting different keywords, then change the title tag to reflect the keywords of the particular page. Keeping the title tag the same throughout the site may optimize the site as a whole, but you are limiting the amount of search terms that you can use. The shorter the title the better, you don't want to get caught stuffing the title tag with too many terms. Just change it from page to page.
2) Not using a H1 tag. Use a H1 tag. Really. No, it's no 1996, but search engine bots love the H1 tag. They view it as "hey, this is so important, it's in the H1 tag." Everybody got carried away with putting neat graphics and flash on their site and have neglected this tag. In fact a lot of sites use a graphical banner where their H1 should be. While these certainly look good, search engine bots can't read graphics, they are just bots. Use the H1 tag and use your keywords in it. It will help the visiting Search Engine bot determine what your site or page is about.
3) Using "Home" as a link text. Everyone uses "home" as the text to link back to their index page. However, this might not be the best choice. After all, it is a link. We all know how important links are in search engine rankings. When you use the word "home", the search engine bot will chalk up another point to "home" for your site. Why not use a keyword as this text? If your site is about hubcaps...why not use "hubcaps" for the link text? This will help you in that it a)adds a link within your site using "hubcaps" and b) help the search engine bot figure out a little better what your site has to offer.
You may reproduce this article on your website. We would appreciate a link back to our site lawyer listings from you. This article may not be altered and links should be kept live.
By Richard Martin
Search Engine Optimization for Beginners
If you are confused about terms like "search engine optimization" or having a "search engine friendly" site, then listen up! I am here to help.
Depending on how long you have had, or considered having, a website online, you have heard terms thrown around like the above or even worse, acronyms! SEO comes to mind.
Really there is not that much to fear even if you have no idea right now what is really meant by having a search engine friendly site.
Here is what search engines like to have in their results when people type in keywords:
1. A site with lots of content.
2. A site with UNIQUE content (Original - meaning you wrote it or you paid someone to write it for you.)
3. Sites that are well organized link-wise (meaning simple navigation from the main page of your site to every other page of your site.)
4. Sites that have links pointing to them from other popular, relevant sites. (sites that are similar in content to yours but that are not in direct competition with yours in content)
5. Sites that change regularly (not static but always growing with new content on a regular basis)
6. Sites they can read. (search engine robots cannot read javascript for instance and therefore you get no credit for whatever content is in that application on your site)
7. Tightly themed sites. It is easier for an engine to rank your site properly (where you want it to be) if you are not all over the map in content.
Exception: Portal sites or directories. But this is an item for another article all together
What About The Complicated Stuff?
There really isn't anything complicated about what the search engines want. But if you have stumbled into a search engine forum you were likely blown away with comments and tips that were completely over your head.
There is a difference between basic, standard optimization and the stuff they talk about in those forums. While visting SEO forums is good to keep up on new things as you go along, many people get confused and the forums are the breeding grounds for confusion when you are a beginner.
Try to learn advanced SEO from noted experts in the field rather than taking anything in chats or forums as gospel. A lot more people THINK they know what they are doing than actually do.
Remember that anything someone is willing to give away for free which, if it works, could be worth tens of thousands of dollars in high rankings resulting in high sales, is probably something that is old hat and not effective anymore.
But for now, you have a lot of work to do on the basics. The advanced stuff can come later. Relative to the advanced SEO, getting the basics right is the most powerful move you can make because you are going from zero to moving up in rankings by, many times, tens of thousands of spaces in a relatively short time.
Advanced SEO focuses on moving your site from high rankings slightly higher rankings.
Keywords
Your content is the most important thing about a website. It must be friendly to the search engines meaning no special java script or other stuff. Just good old fashioned HTML. You will do fine with PHP, SHTML, and other things, but for the purpose of this article, HTML is the way most people construct their sites.
You should use a good density of your main keyword phrase for each page of your site within the content. If you are going after a high ranking for the phrase "dog leashes" you need to have that phrase in the title of the page and throughout the content.
Programs that are great for analyzing your site and giving feedback on how to improve your rankings don't come any more highly recommended that Internet Business Promoter from Axandra.
More Info: http://www.Axandra.com/go.to/jdh358
Nice thing about the software above is that it teaches you search engine optimization while it works on your site. So having it is like having a course on optimization while your site is altered for the best placement in the search engines at the same time.
The main recommendation I have for people starting to deal with optimizing their sites for the engines is to take things one at a time and get the basics down before you start messing with advanced strategies.
And when you start down that road, information you pay for is usually more accurate and more valuable than hanging around in forums. High rankings are worth a LOT of money and people don't work hard to become experts just to give that information away.
Good luck and get to work!
By Jack Humphrey
10 Basic Rules for Where to Place Your Keywords
First of all, Google and most other search engines do NOT look at the META keyword tag. Many people say not to bother with it, but I use the META keyword tag and I place my keyword phrases in it. Here's why. I use this tag to help me remember what keyword phrases I am optimizing the page for. You'll find this to be a big help later when you have a lot of pages and have forgotten what keyword phrases you were trying to optimize the page for in the first place.
For the META description tag, keep your most important keyword phrase near the beginning of the sentence and make this tag a full sentence.
Do NOT use bold or italic keyword phrases in the first sentence on the page, but DO use your most important keyword phrase in the first sentence, but not the first word.
By all means, use your keyword phrases in your headings, (H1, H2 and H3).
Start putting keyword phrases in bold in the second paragraph.
Put your keywords or keyword phrases in italics a few times AFTER the first usage of the keyword. Never let the first usage of your keyword phrases be in Italics.
Use keywords in ALT tags.
It's very important to get other sites to use your most important keyword phase for your page in any inbound links. Of course, you are not in control of how other sites link to you, but work hard to get them to use your keyword phrase. Most sites will link to your home page, so give them the most important keyword phrase you are optimizing your home page for.
When you are linking from any page back to your home page, use your most important keyword phrase in the link. When your home page is linking to any other page, use the keyword phrase in that link that the other page is being optimized for.
Don't plan on getting much (if any) help by putting keywords or keyword phrases in your left Nav panel. Google likes keywords in full sentences. Putting the sentence in a paragraph is even better. By the way, a sentence according to Google is three or more words starting with a capital letter and ending with a period or other punctuation. Stop words such as:
"I," "a," "the," and "of" do NOT count as one of your three words.
Follow these rules and your Web site will make a big jump in its relevancy for your keyword phrases. Following these rules will NOT boost your PageRank.
To be #1 or even in the top 10 on the search engines your relevance for a given keyword phrase is much more important than your PageRank.
For example, you could have a PageRank of 10 and still not show up in the top 100 sites when someone is searching for "peanut butter sandwiches" unless of course, your page is optimized for (and has a high relevance for) the phrase "peanut butter sandwiches."
One final point: Use your keyword phrase in an H1, H2 or H3 headline followed by a keyword-rich paragraph and then repeat this with another H1, H2 or H3 headline and another keyword-rich paragraph. And of course repeat this again.
Use this format in addition following the 10 rules above and you will have a page with a high relevance for your keyword phrases.
Don't try to optimize a page for more that two or three keyword phrases and always optimize for keyword phrases and NOT keywords. After all, the keyword is included within the keyword phrase. Most people don't search for just one word any more anyway.
I have seen pages rank #1 with keyword densities form 1% to 20%, but I usually try to have a keyword phrase density of between 2% to 6%. Sometimes I go up to 10%.
By Craige Stacey
Black Hat SEO and the Sneaky Redirect
Are shades of grey SEO really Black Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is a strategy which gets a web page or entire site banned from a search engine.
A shade of grey is when you use a black hat strategy but your site has not been banned yet. Remember the acronym for YET: You're Entitled Too!
There are many different opinions on the subject of Search Engine Optimization. Many folks will deliver advice which will work to get you top 10 rankings but what is really the difference between Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO?
There has been many good attempts to define Black Hat SEO. All are relevant and an example can be found at http://www.blackhatseo.com. The site contains a page of example Black Hat SEO and a directory of not recommended products and services.
But is there more to it than just keyword stuffing, hidden text and spamming image alt tags?
If you read the the Webmaster guidelines at Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html, you'll notice that sneaky Redirection pages are not welcome. (This does not include the 301 redirect.)
What are Sneaky Redirection Pages?
Sneaky redirection pages are set up in in groups of 10 or 20. They all target similar and related keywords or phrases. The only links on these pages are links to other pages in the same family creating a false sense of related linking.
They do not contain content that any human would be interested in. These pages show up high in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). When you click on one of these pages from a search engine result, you will be redirected to another page. (Usually a high pressure sales page.)
Is this misleading? You bet. Why? Because the page you click on from the serps is not the page you actually get to read.
Can Sneaky Redirects be considered as a Black Hat SEO tactic?
I think so. The reason being is that if your page is discovered, it does get banned. These pages are smart when it comes to getting a higher search engine position but they will vanish if another marketer reports your page.
What SEO Strategy Should You Use?
All SEO strategies have value. I think that the focus of attention should be to avoid Black Hat SEO if your intention is to keep your site from being banned.
7 Free Search Engine Resources You Should be Using Now
Ask any business person who's website is at the top of the search engines if his/her site is making money, and the answer is almost always "yes".
An example is Glenn Canady, the author of "Gorilla Marketing" who employed only one of these strategies, and it made him over $1 million dollars.
The fact is, search engines can get you an enormous amount of traffic, and it's traffic to your sites that's free. However, in order to ethically and effectively market in the search engines, you need to use strategies that actually work.
Below are three different ways to effectively, and ethically, raise your rankings in the search engines. I've included seven different resources that you can use that will help you implement these strategies, and do it quickly and easily so that you can begin to see an increase in your traffic almost immediately.
1. Optimize your site.
To make sure that you are properly targeting your market, you need to make sure that you are marketing using the right keywords. This means optimizing your site to make sure that the keywords you have on your site are the keywords that your site is actually optimized for.
There are two tools that you can use to help you with search engine optimization:
a. Search Engine Optimization Fast Start Ebook -
http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/seo-book.php - will teach you simple and effective techniques for optimmizing your site. This ebook is now in its 4th edition, is completely up to date, and is one of the best ebooks I've seen on search engine optimization.
b. Web CEO - http://www.smallbusinesshowto.com/search-engine-optimization-software.html - This is a complete search engine optimization suite that offers 10 different tools to help you optimize your site for the search engines. It offers the most comprehensive, and step by step, set of instructions I've ever seen with any software package. According to the instructions, you can get started in one hour. The free version of this software will work for most, and it also includes a $97 search engine optimization course as part of the package.
2. Develop a linking strategy.
One factor that influences how well you are ranked in the search engines is linking. The more inbound links that you have pointing to your site, the higher you will be ranked in the search engines.
For each link that you have pointing back to you, that's another opportunity for your potential customer to find you. With credibility being such a big problem on the internet, to have someone recommend you increases your chance of making the sale.
To help you develop an effective strategy, I recommend that you read "Linking Matters" - http://www.linkingmatters.com/. This ebook shows you how to develop an effective linking strategy for your site, and do it very quickly.
3. Develop a content strategy.
The truth is, "Content is King". Most people online are looking for information. The more information that you provide for your customers, and the more valuable it is, the more likely you will make the sale.
Below are three different ways to develop content for your site.
The first and most effective strategy are articles.
Articles actually work for you in several ways.
a. Brands you as an expert so that customers come to you.
b. Provides valuable content to your potential customers.
c. Builds a relationship between you and your potential customers.
d. Creates a viral marketing strategy for your site.
e. Builds a linking strategy for you every time a webmaster publishes one of your articles.
No other strategy that I have employed has brought me more business than this one.
To find sites that accept articles, go here: http://www.jogena.com. This is one of the sites that I use because it's one of the oldest, and most reputable sites online for finding information on ezines. Unfortunately, there's no search, but everything is done by category, and the information is comprehensive, so you will locate rather quickly what you are looking for.
However, if the thought of writing your own content gives you nightmares, there's a way around this.
You can use public domain information. Public domain information is information that is free to use because it's in the public arena, or the copyright has expired.
To help you easily locate this information, I recommend that you download the public domain toolbar. You can get it at the Public Domain Forum - http://www.publicdomainforum.com/forum. You have to register for an account to get the toolbar, but both the forum account and the toolbar are free. The toolbar is a very comprehensive resource of public domain sources.
The third content strategy you need to consider is blogging.
What a blog does is allows you to create search engine friendly content on your topic of interest. Combine this with an RSS feed, which the search engines love, and you have a winning strategy.
Not only will it help you build content for the search engines, but it can also help you raise your traffic and sales.
Here is a comprehensive ecourse that you can take that will drastically reduce your learning curve, as well as provide you with the resources you need to implement this strategy.
http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/blogging-course.htm
Finally, to keep abreast of what's happening with search engines, you need to subscribe to Search Engine Watch - http://www.searchenginewatch.com. This site offers tons of resources, news, and a newsletter on search engine optimization.
Apply one, or all, of these search engine resources to your search engine strategy, and you can expect a major increase in your traffic and sales to your site.
By Jinger Jarrett
16.6.08
Using Blogs for SEO
Why Start A Blog?
I knew about blogging and blogs for years before I actually started my first blog... So this begs the question... "Why did it take me over 4 years to start my 1st blog?"
Well, why would I want a blog? After all, blogs are just for geeks, self opinionated left or right wing zealots pushing some obscure political agenda, teenage school kids waffling on about their zits and boyfriends or technical journals full of terms and jargon only a rocket scientist could understand.
And I never bothered with blogs or the development of the "blogosphere" again.
Then something changed the way I viewed blogging about July 2004. I was introduced to using a blog as a tool for SEO - Search Engine Optimization. In the crudest form it was almost spamming, but done properly, it will get your website pages spidered almost immediately and indexed in less than a week.
Blog and Ping
The crude method involved first setting up both a blogger (.blogspot) blog and a free myYahoo page. You add the RSS or Atom link from your blog to your myYahoo page, so that your blog feeds into your myYahoo website.
You then write a page into your blog with links to webpages that you want Google and Yahoo to find and index. After posting your new blog entry, you then ping your myYahoo page to tell it that there's a new entry at your blog. Then you go to Yahoo, open your myYahoo page, and the blog headline should be there.
The assumption is that Yahoo would spider all feeds going into it's myYahoo pages and because Google owns Blogger.com they would spider all new blog entries at Blogger.com ... and in fact this is indeed what happens. Start a blog, add entry's to it every day, and in less than a week it will be spidered as soon almost as you post to it. But you must post daily.
By Russell Savige
The Other Side of the Search Gods Abracadabra!
Thousands of servers ...billions of web pages.... the possibility of individually sifting through the WWW is null. The search engine gods cull the information you need from the Internet...from tracking down an elusive expert for communication to presenting the most unconventional views on the planet. Name it and click it. Beyond all the hype created about the web heavens they rule, let's attempt to keep the argument balanced. From Google to Voice of the Shuttle (for humanities research) these ubiquitous gods that enrich the net, can be unfair ...and do wear pitfalls. And considering the rate at which the Internet continues to grow, the problems of these gods are only exacerbated further.
Primarily, what you need to digest is the fact that search engines fall short of Mandrake's magic mechanism! They simply don't create URLs out of thin air but instead send their spiders crawling across those sites that have rendered prayers (and expensive offerings!) to them for consideration. Even when sites like Google claim to have a massive 3 billion web pages in its database, a large portion of the web nation is invisible to these spiders. To think they are simply ignorant of the Invisible Web. This invisible web holds that content, normal search engines can't index because the information on many web sites is in databases that are only searchable within that site. Sites like www.imdb.com - The Internet Movie Database , www.incywincy.com - IncyWincy, the invisible web search engine and www.completeplanet.com - The Complete Planet that cover this area are perhaps the only way you can access content from that portion of the Internet, invisible to the search gods. Here, you don't perform a direct content search but search for the resources that may access the content. (Meaning - be sure to set aside considerable time for digging.)
None of the search engines indexes everything on the Web (I mean none). Tried research literature on popular search engines? AltaVista to Yahoo, will list thousands of sources on education, human resource development, etc. etc. but mostly from magazines, newspapers, and various organizations' own Web pages, rather than from research journals and dissertations- the main sources of research literature. That's because most of the journals and dissertations are not yet available publicly on the Web. Thought they'll get you all that's hosted on the web? Think again.
The Web is huge and growing exponentially. Simple searches, using a single word or phrase, will often yield thousands of "hits", most of which will be irrelevant. A layman going in for a piece of info to the internet has to deal with a more severe issue - too much information! And if you don't learn how to control the information overload from these websites, returned by a search result, roll out the red carpet for some frustration. A very common problem results from sites that have a lot of pages with similar content. For e.g., if a discussion thread (in a forum) goes on for a hundred posts there will be a hundred pages all with similar titles, each containing a wee bit of information. Now instead of just one link, all hundred of those darn pages will crop up your search result, crowding out other relevant site. Regardless of all the sophistication technology has brought in, many well thought-out search phrases produce list after list of irrelevant web pages. The typical search still requires sifting through dirt to find the gold. If you are not specific enough, you may get too many irrelevant hits.
As said, these search engines do not actually search the web directly but their centralized server instead. And unless this database is updated continually to index modified, moved, deleted or renamed documents, you will land yourself amidst broken links and stale copies of web pages. So if they inadequately handle dynamic web pages whose content changes frequently, chances are for the information they reference to quickly go out-of-date. After they wage their never ending war with over-zealous promoters (spamdexers rather), where do they have time to keep their databases current and their search algorithms tuned? No surprise if a perfectly worthwhile site may go unlisted!
Similarly, many of the Web search engines are undergoing rapid development and are not well documented. You will have only an approximate idea of how they are working, and unknown shortcomings may cause them to miss desired information. Not to mention, amongst the first class information, the web also houses false, misleading, deceptive and dressed up information actually produced by charlatans. The Web itself is unstable and tomorrow they may not find you the site they found you today. Well if you could predict them, they would not be god!...would they?! The syntax (word order and punctuation) for various types of complex searches varies some from search engine to search engine, and small errors in the syntax can seriously compromise the search. For instance, try the same phrase search on different search engines and you'll know what I mean. Novices... read this line - using search engines does involve a learning curve. Many beginning Internet users, because of these disadvantages, become discouraged and frustrated.
Like a journalist put it, "Not showing favoritism to its business clients is certainly a rare virtue in these times." Search engines have increasingly turned to two significant revenue streams. Paid placement: In addition to the main editorial-driven search results, the search engines display a second - and sometimes third - listing that's usually commercial in nature. The more you pay, the higher you'll appear in the search results. Paid inclusion: An advertiser or content partner pays the search engine to crawl its site and include the results in the main editorial listing. So?...more likely to be in the hit list but then again - no guarantees. Of course those refusing to favor certain devotees are industry leaders like Google that publishes paid listings, but clearly marks them as 'Sponsored Links.'
The possibility of these 'for-profit' search gods (which haven't yet made much profit) for taking fees to skew their searches, can't be ruled out. But as a searcher, the hit list you are provided with by the engine should obviously rank in the order of relevancy and interest. Search command languages can often be complex and confusing and the ranking algorithm is unique to each god based on the number of occurrences of the search phrase in a page, if it appears in the page title, or in a heading, or the URL itself, or the meta tag etc. or on a weighted average of a number of these relevance scores. E.g. Google (www.google.com) uses its patented PageRank TM and ranks the importance of search results by examining the links that lead to a specific site. The more links that lead to a site, the higher the site is ranked. Pop on popularity!
Alta Vista, HotBot, Lycos, Infoseek and MSN Search use keyword indexes - fast access to millions of documents. The lack of an index structure and poor accuracy of the size of the WWW, will not make searching any easier. Large number of sites indexed. Keyword searching can be difficult to get right.
In reality, however, the prevalence of a certain keyword is not always in proportion to the relevance of a page. Take this example. A search on sari - the national costume of India -in a popular search engine, returned among it's top sites, the following links:
?www.scri.sari.ac.uk/- of the Scottish Crop research Institute
?www.ubudsari.com/ -a health resort in Indonesia
?www.sari-energy.org/ - The South Asia Regional Initiative for Energy Cooperation and Development
Pretty useful sites for someone very much interested in knowing how to drape or the tradition of the sari?! (Well, no prayer goes unanswered...whether you like the answer or not!) By using keywords to determine how each page will be ranked in search results and not simply counting the number of instances of a word on a page, search engines are attempting to make the rankings better by assigning more weight to things like titles, subheadings, and so on.
Now, unless you have a clear idea of what you're looking for, it may be difficult or impossible to use a keyword search, especially if the vocabulary of the subject is unfamiliar. Similarly, the concept based search of Excite (instead of individual words, the words that you enter into a search are grouped and attempted to determine the meaning) is a difficult task and yields inconsistent results.
Besides who reviews or evaluates these sites for quality or authority? They are simply compiled by a computer program. These active search engines rely on computerized retrieval mechanisms called "spiders", "crawlers", or "robots", to visit Web sites, on a regular basis and retrieve relevant keywords to index and store in a searchable database. And from this huge database yields often unmanageable and comprehensive results....results whose relevance is determined by their computers. The irrelevant sites (high percentage of noise, as it's called), questionable ranking mechanisms and poor quality control may be the result of less human involvement to weed out junk. Thought human intervention would solve all probes....read on.
From the very first search engine - Yahoo to about.com, Snap.com, Magellan, NetGuide, Go Network, LookSmart, NBCi and Starting Point, all subject directories index and review documents under categories - making them more manageable. Unlike active search engines, these passive or human-selected search engines like don't roam the web directly and are human controlled, relying on individual submissions. Perhaps the easiest to use in town, but the indexing structure these search engines cover only a small portion of the actual number of WWW sites and thus is certainly not your bet if you intend specific, narrow or complex topics.
Subject designations may be arbitrary, confusing or wrong. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted. Never contains full text of the web they link to - you can only search what you see titles, descriptions, subject categories, etc. Human-labor intensive process limits database currency, size, rate of growth and timeliness. You may have to branch through the categories repeatedly before arriving at the right page. They may be several months behind the times because of the need for human organization. Try looking for some obscure topic....chances for the people that maintain the directory to have excluded those pages. Obviously, machines can blindly count keywords but they can't make common-sense judgement as humans can. But then why does human-edited directories respond with all this junk?!
And here's about those meta search engines. A comprehensive search on the entire WWW using The Big Hub, Dogpile, Highway61, Internet Sleuth or Savvysearch , covering as many documents as possible may sound as good an idea as a one stop shopping.Meta search engines do not create their own databases. They rely on existing active and passive search engine indexes to retrieve search results. And the very fact that they access multiple keyword indexes reduces their response time. It sure does save your time by searching several search engines at once but at the expense of redundant, unwanted and overwhelming results....much more - important misses. The default search mode differs from search site to search site, so the same search is not always appropriate in different search engine software. The quality and size of the databases vary widely.
Weighted Search Engines like Ask Jeeves and RagingSearch allows the user to type queries in plain English without advanced searching knowledge, again at the expense of inaccurate and undetailed searching. Review or Ranking Sources like Argus Clearinghouse (www.clearinghouse.net),
eBlast (eblast.com) and Librarian's Index to the Internet (lii.org). They evaluate website quality from sources they find or accept submissions from but cover a minimal number of sites.
As a webmaster, your site registration with the biggest billboards in Times Square can get you closer to bingo! for the searcher. Those who didn't even know you existed before are in your living room in New York time!
Your URL registration is a no-brainer, considering the generation of flocking traffic to your site. Certainly a quick and inexpensive method, yet is only a component of the overall marketing strategy that in itself offers no guarantees, no instant results and demands continued effort for the webmaster. Commerce rules the web. Like how a notable Internet caveman put it, "Web publishers also find dealing with search engines to be a frustrating pursuit. Everybody wants their pages to be easy for the world to find, but getting your site listed can be tough. Search sites may take a long time to list your site, may never list it at all, and may drop it after a few months for no reason. If you resubmit often, as it is very tempting to do, you may even be branded a spamdexer and barred from a search site. And as for trying to get a good ranking, forget it! You have to keep up with all the arcane and ever-changing rules of a dozen different search engines, and adjust the keywords on your pages just so...all the while fighting against the very plausible theory that in fact none of this stuff matters, and the search sites assign rankings at random or by whim.
"To make the best use of Web search engines--to find what you need and avoid an avalanche of irrelevant hits-- pick search engines that are well suited to your needs. And lest you'd want to cry "Ye immortal gods! where in the world are we?", spend a few hours becoming moderately proficient with each. Each works somewhat differently, most importantly in respect to how you broaden or narrow a search.
Finding the appropriate search engine for your particular information need, can be frustrating. To effectively use these search engines, it is important to understand what they are, how they work, and how they differ. For e.g. while using a meta search engine, remember that each engine has its own methods of displaying and ranking results. Remember, search strategies affect the results. If the user is unaware of basic search strategies, results may be spotty.
Quoting Charlie Morris (the former editor of The Web developer's journal) - "Search engines and directories survive, and indeed flourish, because they're all we've got. If you want to use the wealth of information that is the Web, you've got to be able to find what you want, and search engines and directories are the only way to do that. Getting good search results is a matter of chance. Depending on what you're searching for, you may get a meaty list of good resources, or you may get page after page of irrelevant drivel. By laboriously refining your search, and using several different search engines and directories (and especially by using appropriate specialty directories), you can usually find what you need in the end."
Search engines are very useful, no doubt. Right from getting a quick view of a topic to finding expert contact info...verily certain issues lie in their lap. Now the very reason we bother about these search engines so much is because they're all we've got! Though there sure is a lot of room for improvement, the hour's need is to not get caught in the middle of the road. By simply understanding what, how and where to seek, you'd spare yourself the fate of chanting that old Jewish proverb "If God lived on earth, people would break his windows."
Happy searching!
By Liji
Are Search Engines Worth It Any More?
The "Number One" Question - the question that I (and probably every other Internet marketing expert on the planet) am most frequently asked:
"How do I get to be Number One in the search engines for widgets? After all, my company is the world's leading provider of widgets - it's ridiculous that these other nobody companies are coming up in search engines ahead of us . . . "
My response is almost always along the lines of:
"Forget that right now, and get a life!"
OK, so I am a little more tactful than that - and I do occasionally encourage an in-depth search engine optimization strategy, but usually I'll encourage clients to spend their website promotional budget in other ways.
Here are the main reasons why I'm not generally enthusiastic about free search engines:
1. You have to be really careful in choosing keywords
Many people make the mistake of focusing on very generic keywords. Not only are these even more difficult to get top placement in, but they also won't generate you targeted traffic.
A prospect approached me recently for help with a coaching site. This site promotes teleseminars to help clients implement life changes described in various motivational books. This prospect initially said that he wanted to be "Number One" on a search for "books".
I'd suggest this would be a virtually impossible challenge for any search engine optimizer. But in addition, someone searching for "books" is probably really looking for Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, and not my client's teleclasses. He could spend a lot of money for very few qualified leads.
2. You need to speak the language of your visitors
We all talk "geekspeak" - it's often second nature to us within our industry or area of expertise. And it's easy to forget that our prospects don't always use the same terminology. One of the most difficult areas in copywriting that I see is when technology sales people are trying to describe their products to a non-technical market - the result is usually incomprehensible!
But there's also the jargon that we use as a matter of pride, or because we've lost touch with how our markets think of us.
I worked recently with an association of plastic surgeons. They had their member database on their Web site, and wanted to attract visitors there to find a local practitioner.
Their "Number One" target keyword for the search engines was "rhinoplasty". Well, I can only spell this because I just looked it up for this article - but usually you and I in the general public would never think of that - of course, we'd be searching for . . . "nose jobs"!
The surgeons didn't like this at all from an academic standpoint. But they had to concede the point when I presented evidence on most common searches from Overture's very handy Search Term Suggestion Tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion.
3. It's very passive marketing . . .
My most pressing argument for not spending too much time on free search engines is that it's a very passive form of marketing. You're relying on a prospective visitor waking up in the morning, and realizing that they need something that you might provide. Then, you're relying on them choosing the precise keywords that you've targeted for search engine optimization. It's a fairly hit or miss business.
When do I disagree with myself?
There are some exceptions to all this. I do believe that search engines are well worth it when you have a niche product or service with extremely unambiguous and well-defined keywords.
For example, an audience member in one of my recent programs was working on a Web site to sell some incredibly advanced yoyos. I did recommend a search engine strategy to him - after all, if someone puts in "yoyo" as a search term, they'd almost certainly be a qualified lead!
What do I do instead?
That's the subject of numerous other articles. To get you started, you can find twenty-three of my favourite techniques in my free tipsheet.
But in short, I much prefer aggressively seeking out sites where your target markets are likely to be reading, or searching for information. That way, you can proactively bring your ideas, products and services to them, in places where they are much more likely to be receptive and interested. And there are so many options for different budgets and campaign sizes, both online and offline.
So, are search engines worth it any more?
I'm not advocating ignoring search engines. And I do like the better paid models, such as Overture.
But I do suggest that you should be very clear about how much passive marketing you want to undertake, and whether the product or service that you're offering lends itself to this.
And if you do decide to optimize your site for search engines, pick the keywords that will be in the mindset of your customers . . . and be willing to settle for "Number Two" sometimes!
By Philippa Gamse
Beyond Hits!
Your Website visitor reports are a goldmine of information. If you don't review these on a regular basis, you can't fully evaluate the return on your Web investment. And, you could miss critical clues as to how user-friendly your site is, how effectively your message reaches your visitors, and what unmet needs they may have.
But the reports can be overwhelming - a confusing mass of graphs, numbers and URL's. How can you find the information that you really need, how do you know what to look for, and how do you make strategic decisions using the answers that you obtain?
Step 1: Knowing your markets
First, identify all the different types of visitor to your site, together with the reasons that they might be coming to you.
This may sound obvious, but in my experience there are nearly always visitor segments that are overlooked. Here are my starting suggestions for an association site:
* Current and prospective members
* Board members and staff
* Current and potential vendors, advertisers and sponsors
* Media
* Content seekers
* Job seekers
* Your competition!
If you don't have a press center on your site, you should consider it if you're interested in publicity. Reporters are increasingly looking for information online, and appreciate ready access to press releases, sample interview questions, and downloadable photographs of your key spokespeople.
The content seekers category describes visitors looking for content that you provide, but who are not prospective members. They might be searching your member database for a referral, or they might be interested in your information products - and so they're great prospects for non-dues revenue.
Step 2: Knowing your goals
It's also key to know the required outcomes, not only for your overall site, but also for each individual section and page.
I have a mantra in my speaking programs:
"Every page of your site should have a strategy".
Too many pages on the Web give great information, and then tail off, with no clear call to action. They expect visitors to go back to the navigational elements, and decide what to do next - but instead, many of them will leave.
You should be absolutely clear about the outcomes you expect from each page - event registrations, newsletter sign-ups, product sales, etc. Or perhaps you want the visitor to go to another page - you'll be able to track this as well.
Step 3: Asking the right questions
Now that you have the audiences and outcomes for your site, you can start to make sense of all those numbers and graphs.
Based on what should be happening, you can formulate questions with which to approach the traffic reports to measure your site's effectiveness.
Here are some ideas:
Are your long pages effective?
Often, I see long pages with key content "below the fold" - below the first screenful of information. Many visitors won't scroll down the page if they're not immediately engaged by it; therefore they'll miss the lower elements.
Is this happening on your site? Look for clicks on the links that are further down the page - are you getting an appropriate amount of traffic to the inside sections that these lead to? How much time is the average visitor spending on your long page - are they clicking off to the first thing that catches their eye - if so, is this really where you want them to go?
Can you measure member benefits?
If you provide an online database for prospective customers to find a supplier, track how many searches are done, and how many click-thru's your members receive. This can give you some powerful statements for your member benefits material.
What are the hot content areas?
Knowing your "Most Requested Pages" gives you some key clues about what's hot - and from that, which content might be worth developing further, either as a member benefit, or for non-dues income.
It can be helpful to design your site to delineate this. For example, instead of having a long page of different pamphlets, show each product on a separate page. Now you can track which ones are most sought after, and perhaps consider offering these as online, instantly downloadable e-books.
What are your conversion rates?
If there's a hot content area - a highly requested page that doesn't translate into its required outcome, something's wrong.
Possibilities include:
* You believe you have an exciting offering, but your visitors don't - so perhaps you should rethink your content or product
* You do have an exciting offering, but the page copy isn't reflecting that effectively, or perhaps the price is too high
* Something else is stopping visitors from completing the transaction - perhaps you're asking for too much information, or the shopping cart isn't working
Your traffic reports may not tell you what the solution is - but they should give you a pretty clear idea of where your problems lie.
Step 5: Tweaking and testing
The good news about the Web is that it's a great testing ground for new products and ideas. When you find an area on your site that isn't performing optimally, you can make small incremental changes, and immediately see the results reflected in your traffic reports. So you can keep tweaking until you hit the winning formula for each page.
Step 6: Don't forget your internal search engine
Your internal search engine allows you to track the keyword searches that visitors perform once they're on your site. This also has some valuable clues:
* You'll almost certainly see searches for content that should be obviously apparent. This proves that visitors won't work to find anything - but it can also give indications as to the usability of your structure and navigation.
* Lots of searches for content that you don't currently provide will give you ideas for developing future products or services, based on visitor demand.
I think of Web traffic reports as "market research that cannot lie". They represent what your visitors do, unprompted, and really can contain some gold nuggets. Happy Mining!
By Philippa Gamse
Search Engine Optimization With Sitemaps
I just wanted to share a little Search Engine Optimization experiment I ran to confirm the theory that Google likes content rich sitemap pages rather than just a bunch of links pointing to different pages on your site. I also wanted to look at a way of funnelling Google page rank to all the internal pages on my site as quickly as possible
I have heard from a few search engine optimization companies that sitemaps are good ways of helping search engine spiders find all the pages on your site but have you every thought that using good quality sitemaps can also help your internal pages attain a very high Google page rank very quickly
I was reading a Search Engine Optimization article about how Google likes pages with good quality relevant content and how they wanted to serve this quality content to their surfers. I decided to run a little experiment with sitemaps. I build two types of sitemap, one with just links to my article pages and the other with the same links but these links were also surrounded with relevant search engine optimized content.
Sitemap without search engine optimized content
http://search.freefind.com/find.html?id=85113844&m=0&p=0
Sitemap with search engine optimized content
http://www.search-engine-optimization-review.com/seo-sitemap-11.html
I created content rich sitemap with a neat bit of sitemap generating software that generates pages by using the title and description of your internal pages.
http://www.search-engine-optimization-review.com/sitemap.html
I started an aggressive reciprocal link campaign and my index page shot up to a PR 5 within 60 days.
http://www.search-engine-optimization-review.com Google page rank 5
Both types of sitemap pages gained a PR 4 but the funny thing was the pages that were linked from my content rich sitemap pages gained a PR3 but the sitemap pages with just text links to my internal pages were only a PR 1.
Six months after creating these sitemap pages the article pages linked from the content rich sitemap pages had attained a PR 5 but the article pages linked from sitemap pages that had just text links with no content had attained at the very best a PR 2.
I have come the conclusion that Google does like quality search engine optimized content rich pages and using these sitemap pages to funnel Google page rank to your important internal pages is a wise thing to do.
My advice is to build your sitemap pages with content surrounding the links to all your internal pages so they are only two clicks away from your home page.
Example Home page - Good content sitemap page - internal pages
If you have a lot of sitemap pages (I had over 20 with 100 links per page) create links from your home page using text links. For example instead of creating a link like Sitemap and sitemap2, sitemap3 etc Use keyword links to your sitemap pages like
Seo l Seo firm l Seo company l Seo New York l etc
One last thing, use RSS to feed up to date relevant content to your pages to keep the search engine coming back to gobble up your web sites pages.
Check out my spider page.
http://www.search-engine-optimization-review.com/cgi-bin/spider/spyderview.cgi
This software tells you when and where the search engines have visited your site
By Keith Mallinson
Abandoned by Google! Googlebot, Wherefore Art Thou Googlebot?
As a search engine optimization specialist I often optimize existing web pages for small business clients, upload them to the site and see pages re-indexed by Google within a week. This only happens with existing business sites that have been online for a few years. Google seems to be updating their index as often as every other week at this point and older established sites that are already indexed seem to be re- crawled on that twice a month schedule on a fairly routine basis.
Two clients that hired me for recent work saw their rankings shoot to the top for a newly targeted search phrase in a weekend when I did optimization on a Thursday and they were ranked instantly by Saturday. Now keep in mind that this doesn't happen for everyone, only those that have been online for some period and already have significant content that simply needs tweaking and proper title and metatag information added. They usually have relatively good existing PageRank and do well for other RELEVANT search phrases already. I offer that warning only to avoid instilling false hopes in anyone hoping to achieve the same instant ranking boost overnight.
Those clients that do succeed in this way are often thrilled with the results accomplished in such short order. I'd love to be able to offer that type of ranking boosts to everyone, but some are more equal than others when it comes to easy, inexpensive SEO tune-ups that rev up your rankings overnight. Your mileage may vary.
WHY DO NEW SITES SUFFER?
What is going on with newer sites that don't get crawled for months? I've got a client, a newer attorney directory that offers tons of great information in the form of articles on specific areas of law, links to incredibly valuable and relevant legal sites and over 600,000 attorneys listed by practice area and state. Yet the site has not been re-crawled by Google for over 3 months! Now this would not be such a big issue for many sites, but this site is relatively new and we've optimized all the titles, tags & page text, created a complete site map and placed links to all these resources on the front page.
I know that the site is not being crawled because Google's cached copy of the front page shows it before we did the work four months ago, without the new links and without title tags. We've submitted the site by hand, (manually) once a month for three months via the Google Add URL page. http://www.google.com/addurl.html When the hand submission failed to get it re-indexed for four months, we submitted the sitemap page, which has not been crawled at all. Google shows only ONE page on this site, when in fact it has thousands of pages, a sitemap and dozens static pages!
Part of the problem is that this site must be dynamic, since a database of over 632,000 attorneys must be accessed, retrieved and served for any of those law firms searched for to be returned to the site visitor. Google warns owners of dynamic sites that Googlebot may not crawl dynamically generated pages with "?"" question marks in the URL. This is to avoid crashing the server with too many concurrent page requests from Google's spider. http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html#A1
The solution to this dynamic URL problem has been discussed widely in search engine forums and solutions have been bandied about including software provided by SEO's, URL re-write techniques for dynamic pages on APACHE servers http://www.alistapart.com/articles/urls/ and PHP pages http://www.stargeek.com/php-seo.php to generate search engine friendly URL's. Others recommend simply adding static HTML sitemap pages as alternatives for the search engine spiders. In this instance the client's developer simply said "I can't do that (PHP solution) on this server". So we resorted to putting up the static HTML sitemap pages with hard-coded
URLS to the main 54 pages of the site at http://lawfirm411.com/Law-Firm-411-sitemap.html This should get at least those fifty pages crawled by Googlebot, but Googles' spider appears not to be crawling this site at all. How do we know this? See for yourself by using the following query in the search box at Google: allinurl:www.lawfirm411.com where the result page shows ONE page in the results. If you try that query on your own site (replace your own domain name for lawfirm411.com), you'll see the results lists ALL your pages.
The site home page was crawled by Google four months ago, when they took their "Cached Snapshot" of the page. You can see this by visiting the Google cached page here: http://66.102.7.104/search?sourceid=navclient&;ie=UTF-8&q=cache:www.lawfirm411.com where the date of this snapshot is "Apr 20, 2004 07:42:19 GMT" and they haven't been back since. The page in that snapshot has none of the newly added links, an outdated title tag, and old content.
This problem is not unique to this site. One client we worked with two years ago had a dynamically generated, framed site! Those two site structures have always given search engines trouble. Their site was not crawled at all and only the front page showed up. Our solution was to create a second domain (owned by the client), which had static HTML pages that precisely mirrored the content of the client's framed, dynamically generated site. Guess what happened after Googlebot crawled the static site? Google indexed the framed site in full and then banned the static site from the index! Not an approach we advocate, but the one that worked for this client.
We're still searching for ways to get Googlebot back to LawFirm411.com before creating that new static site, but decided to share this odd experience with the SEO community before going to any extremes. Google provides over 70% of most search engine referred traffic to ALL of our clients and we realized we can't site idly by and see a major client languish because Googlebot didn't like what it found at the client site on the first visit four months ago. This issue dogs newer sites in other places as well. The Open Directory Project has also become notoriously slow in adding new sites to the directory and in this case, has not picked up this site even after 6 regular monthly submissions. The web playing field may have begun tilting toward older, established sites and away from new ones.
By Mike Banks Valentine
The First Search Engine Marketing Method: Content That Meets Customers Needs
For your business web site, good search engine rankings and high user traffic depend on relevant content. More user traffic will mean more sales leads and then more sales. Beyond any technical tricks, content that meets the users' need for three types of information is the best guarantee that search engines and users will find your site. The Google and Yahoo page rankings favor sites that have articles of about 1000 words and that use keywords relevant to the user's search.
Once they find your site with a search engine, web users spend more time on sites where their needs are met. To understand why users come back to content rich sites, lets look at the ways that a successful website, like DVInfo, fills the three most important information needs of the website user.
The DVInfo.net online community boasts over thirteen thousand members and a quarter million posts. What makes users of DVInfo Community come back to the site on a regular basis? The users come back for relevant content that meets their needs.
Here everyone from Hollywood cameramen to new DV camera owners in Alaska meet to discuss digital video. Online communities can build powerful loyalty in users. Some unpaid users at DVInfo.net are posting their stories and answering other forum user's questions nearly every day. What would happen to your sales if users were so loyal to your brand and your web site that they showed up every day to read new content?
At the Digital Video website (DVInfo.net), the presence of experienced video creators who can offer detailed explanations gives the site credibility. In this forum a rookie video camera user can learn from an experienced Director of Photography like Charles Papert, who has worked on TV shows like "The West Wing" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". Because of its highly relevant content and numerous links from other Digital Video content sites, the DVInfo.net site has a Google page rank of 6 out of 10.
For your business web site, the presence of reliable, helpful content builds the user's confidence that they can trust your business. Reliable content and links from other relevant content sites also build the page rank of your business web site.
Now let's look at what this means to a business web site that also wants to build more user traffic. Users have three major tasks they perform when using a content rich site like DVInfo.net Community or your business website.
Customer Need 1: Learn Enough About the Topic to Identify Needs
How does a new video camera user approach the DV INFO web site? A beginning video camera user may not even realize that the video he shoots can be edited to remove bad video shots, or tell a story. The new video camera user reads about the way more experienced users shoot video and edit video. Gradually he realizes that he can do more than just shoot home movies. He begins to want a PC that can edit his video. He learns because the web site community has rich content.
At first, your business web site customer may not even know he has a need for your service, or may not understand that need. Your website content should first focus on helping people understand their need without pushing a particular product at this point.
Customer Need 2: Learn About Alternative Solutions
Next, the DV INFO user studies the different ways to edit video. Should he get a PC or a Mac? He learns about video edit software by reading about other users and their experience with different brands of edit software.
During this middle stage, web site customers look for possible solutions and then narrow these down to make a decision. Website users need both rational and emotional reasons to make their decision, but content at this stage generally shows the benefits of a solution or compares it to other solutions. Many websites focus on the rational, technical description of a solution, although a study of Amazon.com's product reviews found that the more subjective product reviews were as helpful to customers as the more objective reviews. This testimonial-style content helps alleviate fear and lets customers learn from other peoples' experience with your product.
Commercial web sites, like Amazon.com, have User Reviews to allow purchasers to see how others liked a certain book. This reduces the customer's fear of the unknown. The buyer at Amazon.com feels more confident buying a book about cave exploring, by Michael Ray Taylor, if 30 other users also liked the book. Good reviews or testimonials on a business web site overcome the buyer's fear of the unknown.
Customer Need 3: Choose the Best Solution and Feel Comfortable
The DV INFO user settles on 1 or 2 video edit solutions and needs to learn more. If other users write about good experiences with the same hardware and software choice, the aspiring video editor starts to feel more comfortable. Especially if the cost is great, the good experiences of others reduce the user's fear about making the wrong choice.
Finally, your business website customer chooses a solution, by purchasing a product, or choosing a service. Content at this stage helps people learn about their chosen solution and adapt to working with it. Technical support or sharing experiences and advice with other people who have also chosen this solution can help the customer use the product successfully. Good content at this stage strengthens the relationship with customers. This stage is ongoing and sometimes leads to more questions. This may mean additional sales for your web site.
This understanding of content could be the guiding force in creating different parts of your web site. Your website selling business services could have a web page that educates clients about the different problems that they may have in their business. Your second web page could offer several possible solutions to these problems. Finally, you could build consumer confidence in your services by showing user testimonials or case studies.
By writing your website content from these three client viewpoints your web site meets the three most crucial information needs of clients. This is the first step to earning good Search Engine rankings for relevant content.
By Ed Hill
Using Blogs for SEO
Why Start A Blog?
I knew about blogging and blogs for years before I actually started my first blog... So this begs the question... "Why did it take me over 4 years to start my 1st blog?"
Well, why would I want a blog? After all, blogs are just for geeks, self opinionated left or right wing zealots pushing some obscure political agenda, teenage school kids waffling on about their zits and boyfriends or technical journals full of terms and jargon only a rocket scientist could understand.
And I never bothered with blogs or the development of the "blogosphere" again.
Then something changed the way I viewed blogging about July 2004. I was introduced to using a blog as a tool for SEO - Search Engine Optimization. In the crudest form it was almost spamming, but done properly, it will get your website pages spidered almost immediately and indexed in less than a week.
Blog and Ping
The crude method involved first setting up both a blogger (.blogspot) blog and a free myYahoo page. You add the RSS or Atom link from your blog to your myYahoo page, so that your blog feeds into your myYahoo website.
You then write a page into your blog with links to webpages that you want Google and Yahoo to find and index. After posting your new blog entry, you then ping your myYahoo page to tell it that there's a new entry at your blog. Then you go to Yahoo, open your myYahoo page, and the blog headline should be there.
The assumption is that Yahoo would spider all feeds going into it's myYahoo pages and because Google owns Blogger.com they would spider all new blog entries at Blogger.com ... and in fact this is indeed what happens. Start a blog, add entry's to it every day, and in less than a week it will be spidered as soon almost as you post to it. But you must post daily.
By Russell Savige
The Life Blood of Internet-Based Home Businesses...Search Engines
Anyone involved in an Internet-based home business will soon come to recognize the importance of search engines as a vehicle to attract potential customers.
Since the inception of Google in 1998, the popularity of using search engines has increased dramatically. Nielsen NetRatings reports that about 114.5 million Americans, or a whopping 39 percent of the US population, currently use search engines.
Through February of 2004, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN ranked as the two favorite spots on the Internet with 87.3 million and 86.2 million unique monthly visitors, respectively, according to figures produced by Nielsen NetRatings.
Microsoft.com, ranked third, with 64.2 million visitors, but this figure is somewhat misleading because this site attracts much of its traffic by repairing flaws in the Windows operating system. Google was the fourth most popular site with 60.8 million visitors.
The market shares of MSN and Yahoo haven't changed much in the past three years while Google has emerged as a powerhouse without spending much of anything on advertising. Google's audience is now approximately six times larger than it was in early 2001, when it was the 26th most popular destination on the Internet.
As they vie for position, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft plan to continue upgrading their services - healthy competition that can only serve to improve the search experiences of Internet users in the future.
According to comScore Networks, an estimated 3.5 billion online searches are performed in the United States each month, making searching the second most popular online activity, ranking behind only e-mail.
In 2003, businesses spent an estimated $2 billion on advertising related to searches and some knowledgeable sources expect the search-related advertising market to triple during the next three years.
There are various search engine formats including natural search, pay for inclusion (PFI), pay per click (PPC), and hybrid approaches which combine both PFI and PPC characteristics. Because of the immense and growing popularity of search engines, their effective utilization is the life blood of Internet-based home businesses.
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By Kirk Bannerman
Your Online Home-Based Business Can Lead To Search Engine Stress
As a member of several search engine optimization forums, I have recently noticed (especially since Yahoo recently decided to try their hand at competing with Google) that the stress level of many webmasters has gone way up. This applies not only to webmasters involved in Internet-based home businesses, but to webmasters in general.
Additionally, it seems that many people that are in the business of search engine optimization (SEO) are, with good reason, going completely bonkers. As Google came on the scene in 1998 and quickly dominated the search business, website optimization became largely a game of shooting at a single target, namely, pleasing Google...for all intents and purposes, Google became the "800 pound gorilla" of the search engine business.
Since the advent of search engines (particularly Google) spawned the whole SEO business, I guess its only fair that the search engine industry can once again turn the SEO business on its ear, and it seems now to be sort of a cat and mouse (not desktop) relationship that can get really interesting as we move forward.
Not only are there now several viable players (most notably Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask Jeeves) in the search engine business, but they are all adopting different and frequently changing algorithms for determining the ranking positions for websites.
The current game is that webmasters are trying to figure out how the various search engines perform the rankings and, on the flip side, the search engines are striving to be unpredictable to those webmasters and SEO firms.
For those people using websites to promote home-based businesses, it can be stressful constantly trying to determine "what the search engines want" and agonizing over every downward fluctuation in rankings that their website may experience.
Looking forward in time, I think we can expect that rankings will fluctuate frequently and will not be at all consistent from one search engine to another. It will be quite common that for a particular search term a website might suffer a drop in position ranking for search engine "A" and an increase position ranking for search engine "B" at essentially the same point in time.
Rather than stressing out over every position ranking "wiggle", a better approach might be to just focus on "what do visitors to my site want?". The search engines are striving to give their users a quality (relevant) search experience and if you are focused in giving visitors to your website what they are looking for, these paths will meet somewhere down the road.
You can save yourself alot of consternation by focusing upon the needs of the website visitors you are seeking to attract, rather than chasing the frequently changing ranking algorithms of several search engines. Focus on a single target instead of chasing several moving targets at the same time.
This article pertains to natural searches only, as paid search engine advertising is a completely different situation.
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By Kirk Bannerman