Barefoot SEO

Getting Online - Free

2012-01-20T00:44:00.000-08:00

Well well well... wonders never cease, so here goes. Google have now offered free websites to those in South Africa under the Wozaonline domain.

For those that don't know, Woza is a local term that means essentiall "come", so it's an invite for business to get online. For gratis! Oh, that's for free.

So... obviously I had to try and jump on the band wagon and include mine. I've claimed to be The Google Whisperer so we'll see how that goes down over time. I've oficially opened it to public, but there's little content on there as of yet.

Did Google Steal My Soul?

2010-03-04T22:01:00.000-08:00

I came across this interesting write up on Site Reference and figured I would share it.

I wasn't looking for Google... but Google was looking for me.

Google seemed very austere. No flashing banners, no blinking buttons, no prettiness at all in fact, but very COOL non-the-less. Less is more. Clothed in simple green and blue, I liked Google right away.

Google said that I could search all of the world's information that was currently online. Google said that one day, in the near future, the sum of all human experience, the totality of all knowledge would be safely stored, managed and maintained by Google.

Wow! I said. What do you want in return? Nothing said Google. Google love is yours for FREE.

Later Google said to me that I could use a new 'threaded' email system that would give me 2Gb of web memory space so that I need never ever delete another email. All of my emails could be kept for the record, on the record forever.

Wow! I said. What do you want in return? Nothing said Google. Google love is yours for FREE.

Still later Google said to me that I was so cherished that I could have a calendar in which I could input all of my appointments and tasks and all of my contacts of friends, family and associates. I could access this information from any computer, anywhere in the world at any time.

Wow! I said. What do you want in return? Nothing said Google. Google love is yours for FREE.

Soon Google gave me Docs for me to write, analyse, plan and present with complete ease and accessible by anyone whom I authorised. My friend and I could collaborate and work on the same document together even if he was in Tokyo and I am in London.

Wow! I said. What do you want in return? Nothing said Google. Google love is yours for FREE.

Google encouraged me to use Chrome as my browser of choice as all other browsers are... so steam-aged. Google convinced me that I needed speed in my browsing experience. This is the fastest loading browser on God's Green Earth they said. I hate Redmond so I was cool with that.

Wow! I said. What do you want in return? Nothing said Google. Google love is yours for FREE.

Over the years Google has given me Alerts, Books, Blogger, Checkout, Custom Search, Desktop, Earth, Finance, iGoogle, Images, Maps, News, Product Search, Scholar, Toolbar, YouTube and also Groups, Picassa, Reader, Sites, SketchUp, Translate and more...

Wow! I said. What do you want in return? Nothing said Google. Google love is yours for FREE.

Google just kept on giving and giving and giving...

Over the years Google and I have become very close, so close that Google now knows more about me than I probably do myself.

Who I am, who my friends and family are: Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, Checkout, Streetview. Google has a record of all of my personal information including banking and financial affairs. My calendar holds up to date contact information on all of my family, friends and business associates. It knows where they all live and what their houses and streets look like.

My financial affairs: AdSense, AdWords, Checkout, Streetview. Google knows where I work, what I do and how much money I make, where that money comes from and why. Google knows where I work, from which office and what it looks like.

Where I am, what time, with whom, for how long: Calendar, Latitude, Maps, Gmail, Earth, Search. Google knows where I am from my calendar but also from the computer I am using it can tell which city I'm in, how I got there, which websites I visit, how long I stayed there and which language I read in.

What I read and talk about: Google News, Gmail, Blogger, Search, GTalk, Voice. Google knows what type of news I am interested in. It knows what subjects I read about. It knows and has back ups of every single email that I have sent or was sent to me and by whom at what time and what the content was. These are packaged in 'conversations' so are all related to each other.

What my interests are: Search, Blogger, Voice, Picassa, Gmail, Chrome, Docs, Checkout. Google tracks every search I make and which links I click to and for how long. Google knows my shopping habits, what I buy, where they are delivered to and how much it cost. It deduces my spending budget and financial thresholds.

What I watch and when I watch: YouTube, Search, Chrome. Google notes what I look at on YouTube and how many similar videos I watch. It can deduce from this what kind of TV and movie shows I would be interested in and when they should be promoted to me. Every search is logged and recorded.

Cross-referenced and cross-correlated Google can infer from this arsenal of digital information my complete make-up as a person and a Google user.

The listing above is not exhaustive and I'm sure you can point out other areas of Google dominance. Hint: Google Health, Google Mobile, Google Wave, Chrome OS... get my drift?

You might think that, knowing all of the above as I do, I am against Google but you'd be wrong. Apart from the China censorship scandal, I actually believe that, on balance, Google is a worthy entity and on the whole makes life easier for most. Right now, it is a benevolent power.

I'll panic when the Google board members consider changing the name to SkyNet.

Okay, so call me paranoid but I still don't believe that Google is all that "not being evil". I honestly believe that they know too much and am a little concerned with what they may do with that info - not so much on a personal level but as a whole.

Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean that they're not all coming for me!

SEO for Dummies

2010-03-01T05:45:00.000-08:00

I don't usually scrape content, but I'll at least offer some link love - SEO for Dummies from Hobo SEO Company.

I actually hate talking to customers about technical SEO. It’s fairly simple stuff but I always feel as if the technical bits get in the way sometimes.

I wanted to share some thoughts about SEO and how I think about it. A lot of it comes down to trust in my book.

* Use common sense – Google is a search engine – it is looking for pages to give searchers results, 90% of it’s users are looking for information. Almost all websites will link to relevant information content so content rich websites get a lot of links – especially quality links. Google ranks websites with a lot of links (especially quality links) at he top of it’s search engines so the obvious thing you need to do is ADD A LOT INFORMATIONAL CONTENT TO YOUR WEBSITE.

* I think ranking in organic listings is a lot about trusted links making trusted pages rank, making trusted links making trusted pages rank ad nauseum for various keywords. Some pages can pass trust to another site, some pages cannot. Some links can. Some cannot. Some links are trusted to pass ranking ability to another page. Some are not. YOU NEED LINKS FROM TRUSTED PAGES

* Google engineers are building an AI – but it’s all based on simple human desires to make something happen or indeed to prevent something. You can work with Google engineers or against them. They need to make money for Google but unfortunately for them they need to make the best search engine in the world for us humans as part of the deal. Build a site that takes advantage of this. What is a Google engineer trying to achieve with an algorithm – it was an idea first. What was that idea? Think like a Google engineers and give Google what it wants. What is Google trying to give it’’s users? Align with that. What does Google not want to give it’s users? Don’t look anything like that. THINK LIKE A GOOGLE ENGINEER & BUILD A SITE THEY WANT TO GIVE TOP RANKINGS.

* Googe is a links based search engine. Google doesn’t need content to rank pages but it needs content to give to users. Google needs to find content and it finds content by following links just like you do when clicking on a link. So you need to first make sure you tell the world about your site so other sites link to yours. ACCEPT LINKS FROM ANYWHERE – JUST DON'T RECIPROCATE JUST ANY. But don’t worry about reciprocating to more powerful sites or even real sites – I think this adds to your domain authority – which is actually better to have than ranking for just a few narrow keyterms.

* Everything has limits. Google has limits. What are they? How would you go about observing them or even testing, breaking them or benefiting from them or being penalised by them? It’s not a lab setting – you can’t test much, if anything, 100% accurately, but you can hypothisise based on the sensible approach bearing in mind what a Google engineer would do, and what you would do if Google was yours.

* The best way for Google to keep rankings secret ultimately is to have a randomness to it while keeping somethings stable – surely the easiest way for it to prevent a seo finding out how it works. Well I think that anyway. And I think this randomness manifests itself in many ways. What will work for some sites might not necessarily work for your sites – not exactly the same anyway. Perhaps no two sites are the same (the conditions are different for a start for any two sites) and I’m actually thinking about how to test this for a bit of fun.

* Google may play dice with the Google multi-verse so be ware of that. It uses multiple results and rotates them and serves different results to different machines and browsers even on the same computer. Google results are constantly shifting – some pages rank at the top constantly because they are giving Google what it wants in a number of areas or they might just have a greater number and diversity of more trusted links than your do.

* Google has a long memory when it comes to links and pages and associations for you site – perhaps an infinite memory profile of your site. Perhaps it can forgive but never forget. Perhaps it can forget too, just like us, and so previous penalties or bans can be lifted. I think (spending on the site because Google can work out if you have a blog or a e-commerce site) Google probably also looks at different history versions of particular pages even on single sites WHAT RELATIONSHIP DO YOU WANT TO HAVE WITH GOOGLE? Onsite, don’t try and fool Google – we’re not smart enough. Be squeaky clean onsite and make Google think twice about bumping you for discrepancies in your link profile.

* Earn Google’s trust. Most of our more lucrative accounts come from referrals from clients who trust us. Before clients told them of us, they didn’t know about us. ok, they might have heard about us from people in turn they didn't trust that much. Upon the clients testimonial, the referral now trusts us a lot more. These referrals automatically trusts us to some extent. That trust grows when we deliver. The referral now trusts us very much. But it’s an uphill struggle from that point on to continue to deliver that trust and earn even more trust because you don’t want to dip in trust – it’s nice to get even more and more trusted. Google works the exactly the same way as this human emotion, and search engines have tried for years to deliver a trusted set sites based on human desire and need. MAKE FRIENDS WITH GOOGLE

* Don’t break Google’s trust – if you’re friend betrays you, depending on what they’ve done, they’ve lost trust. sometimes that trust has been lost altogether. If you do something Google doesn’t like like manipulate it in a way it doesnt want, you will lose trust, and in come cases, lose all trust (in some areas). For instance, your pages might be able to rank, but your links might not be trusted enough to vouch for another site. DON”T FALL OUT WITH GOOGLE OVER SOMETHING STUPID

* YOU NEED TO MAKE MORE FRIENDS AND ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO ARE FRIENDS WITH GOOGLE.

* When Google trusts you it’s because you’ve earned it’s trust to help it carry out what it needs to carry out in the quickest and most profitable way. You’ve helped Google achieve it’s goals. It trusts you and it will reward you by listing your contribution in order of the sites it trusts the most. It will list friends it trusts the most who it knows to be educated in a particular area at the top of these areas. IF GOOGLE TRUSTS YOU IT WILL LET YOUR PAGES RANK AND IN TURN VOUCH FOR OTHER FRIENDS GOOGLE MIGHT WANT INFORMATION ON.

* Google can be fooled and manipulated just like you can but it will probably kick you in the gonads if you break it’s trust – as I probably would. Treat Google as you would have it treat you. REMEMBER IT TAKES TIME TO BUILD TRUST

I of course might be reading far too much into Google and trust….I consider trust to be a psychological emotion Google is trying to emulate using algorithms based on human ideas.

If you do all the above, you’ll get more and more traffic from Google over time.

If you want to rank for specific keywords, you’ll need to be a big brand, be picked out by a big brand and linked to, or buy links to fake that trust, or get spammy with it in an intelligent way you won’t get caught.

I suppose Google is open to the con just as any human is, if it’s based on human traits...

Simply put, so bloody well said mate!

Bill Gates on Google in China

2010-01-25T22:18:00.000-08:00

I love some of the comments on the whole Google vs China standoff. Actually can you even call it a standoff? As Bill quite rightly points out, Google have yet to actually do anything. So they've said a lot, taken a moral stand... and, haven't actually followed anything through. Hey, way to go Google! Or not!

Bill Gates doesn’t get the fuss everyone’s making over Google’s recent threat to stop censoring search results in China.

“They’ve done nothing and gotten a lot of credit for it,” Gates said Monday during a visit at The New York Times.

“What point are they making?” Mr. Gates asked. “Now, if Google ever chooses to pull out of the United States, then I’d give them credit.”

Gates’ comments come just days after current Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was also critical of Google’s stance. Both Gates and Ballmer pointed out that many countries have questionable laws and policies.

Lest Sergey Brin and Larry Page are losing sleep over these verbal jabs, let’s point out that Gates also defended Google when asked if he considered them a monopoly: “I wouldn’t call anyone a monopolist.” (searchengineland.com)

Really I'm just waiting for Google to actually pull out of China, they won't because they're still making money. Will they un-censor their results? Nope because then China will simply block them anyhow. Lets face it, while Google may have an economy that many countries just couldn't refuse, China aren't really that concerned. Well that's just my $0.02.

The Curious Case of Argleton

2009-11-03T04:47:00.000-08:00

Tin Foil Hat Time!!!

The curious case of "Argleton, Lancashire". Is it or isn't it? That seems to be the question on everyone's lips right about now. According to Google Maps Argleton does exist. Pity it looks like it's just a field in the middle of nowhere - or more accurately the middle of Aughton and Aughton Park.

Could this be Google trying to catch potential spammers by having anyone advertising at this location immediately flagged? Could this have simply been an error by those at Tele Atlas? I think there may be more to this than meets the eye.

But regardless, I tend to get a little nervous when Google starts to do strange things. What really is their motive. What really is their ultimate goal. I've got my tin foil hat, do you?

Halloween

2009-10-30T01:12:00.000-07:00

Well no doubt the various search providers will update their search pages to reflect the Halloween theme in the near future. Yahoo! seem to be the first to have done so with a link to http://events.yahoo.com/halloween/2009/index.php already listed on the home page.

No doubt the others will follow in the coming hours. Wonder who'll be next?

Multiple Sites, Bad? Good?

2009-10-27T23:33:00.000-07:00

I came across this nice write up on multiple sites by Michael Martinez. Because I wasn't logged in, thought I'd add my own $0.02 over here.

I agree 100%!

Okay, I'll go back a bit. Is having multiple sites for a business a bad thing or a good thing? Well many would argue off the bat that multiple sites instantly equal blackhat tactics. That multiple domains are a spammers delight.

I argue that point, and think Michael does a good job of pointing out why, once again, it's not what you do but how you do it. There are always bad ways of doing anything. Cloaking, is it good? Bad? How about IP delivery? That good or bad? It's the implementation and intent that's really the question.

I've often suggested several smaller sites instead of one site for new clients. The benefits of properly interlinking these sites is immediately noticeable. In addition sometimes you can really break a service, or group of services into separate sites. Each then becoming more focused while adding the the value of a whole.

While generally I'd only suggest this to new sites/clients while avoiding it with older more established sites, it's certainly a tactic that works.

Google Are Hiring

2009-09-22T02:42:00.000-07:00

It would seem that Google are once again hiring and looking for the brightest and talented individuals to join their company. While they claim to be the greatest company to work for, I'll reserve judgment for when I have the chance...

So according to the Ads placed at M.I.T, the image posted contains a phone number to call. If you can crack it... let me know ;)

No, Your Website Should Not Be Number One!

2009-09-02T06:30:00.000-07:00

How many times have you been asked why a website is not at, "number one in Google?" Only to have a look at it and very quickly realise that the site has some very simple yet huge flaws. I guess the easiest answer to this one is, "while your product may be the best (or at least you think it is), if you don't explain this to Google (I'll include the other engines too) it'll never know."

If the site is made up entirely of flash (and no it's still not being indexed properly), even if it is beautiful, you'll not be found. If the search engines aren't able to find the individual pages... you'll not be found. If you think you've been clever and copied a competitor - because they're number one... you'll not be found, ever!

Ah, so this brings me to the next question how do I get to number one in Google? My stock standard answer to this one is, "If I knew that answer Google would pay me an awful lot to say nothing!"

But the reality is the answer is much longer. We do know how to get to the top of Google. It's the sum of several factors and then some. But while some still punt the magic bullet that is search engine submissions and guaranteed number one spots the rest of us will just have to keep on telling folk that their site simply doesn't deserve to be number one in Google.

But... I'll can certainly show you how you can get a lot closer.

Google and More Antitrust Issues

2009-08-28T02:12:00.000-07:00

The Italian government is currently checking Google for antitrust violations. Several newspapers in Italy are claiming that when they told Google not to list their content on Google News, Google also delisted their results from the rest of the Google search engine.

Google have been called a scraper among other things. But looks like the news industry have had a lot more to say on the matter than many other industries. But could that be because print media is dying off? It seems that they won't go with out a fight.

While it hasn't been proven that Google did actually delist these sites I don't see what the problem is really. Much like Microsoft having to remove IE from Windows. Why? Don't get me wrong, I'm really not a fan of either of these companies, but it's their index/OS, so let them do what they want. If you don't like it, don't support them. As an end user it's that simple. If they really are a monopoly, then let the government take care of it... (yeah, I know can't really rely on them)

While I don't really see the problem, I'm going to hope that Google do feel the hard end of that stick. If only to feel what it's like when everyone want's your blood - kinda like they did to Microsoft (payback's a bitch - ain't it?).

Content is Dead... Long live Content!!

2009-08-25T06:18:00.000-07:00

Well the saying has all but been worn out now - Content is King! Okay, so there I've said it. But, it remains as true today as ever... if not more so (yes, you can have truer statements).

While previously the actual content had to be very keyword focused this is not quite the case any more. Sure the content needs to be good, but no longer do you have to focus on keyword density, stuffing your page until it read like a badly translated DIY instruction document.

SEO is Rocket Science hits on the fact contextual links are the best. We already knew that (well, we did, didn't we?), proving that while links are important it's the context or the content that surrounds them that is really important.

Some may argue that links are the most important ranking feature. Others the content of a website. I would say that they are as reliant on each other as they are important. Good quality content will generate links and links to useless content won't guarantee rankings.

Google OS

2009-07-07T23:43:00.000-07:00

Well it's hot news right now, trending at Number 1 on Twitter, Google have announced that they are going to be introducing the Google Chrome OS. Yay... or perhaps not?

*Okay, a quick disclaimer, I'm not a Google Fanboy. I do believe them to be evil and slowly we're all letting them take over the world.*

Okay, so that said. This is fantastic news for those in the netbook industry. Not only do these products need to be cheaper, the need to be running on fewer resources. In theory then, why not simply build a system that requires most of the hard processing to be done by another machine? The internet allows exactly that to happen. With the multitude of other free offerings from Google (like Maps, Docs and Gmail to name a few) you already have a good deal of what you already need by simply logging into your Google account. Could this be an on boot setting?

Okay, all that excitement. Should Microsoft be worried? I wouldn't think so right now. While they've not exactly set the world alight with their netbook offerings (I believe this to be the most competitive market at this time) I think they're more interested in what Google will offer than fear what they will offer at this time.

One part that kind of makes me wonder however is, "How will Google make money out of this deal?" Well if you're doing all of your computing online then you'll need to have a steady stream of ads, right? Google are an advertising company the bottom line is how they show a profit.

I'd turn this about and argue that they can't really create a true OS. If they did, they would once again offer choices to the user. Choice of programs they run, perhaps Open Office? Choice of Browser, perhaps Internet Explorer. But more importantly and even while you have a browser you'll always (we hope) have this choice, the choice in search engine, perhaps Ask.com. You see, if you automatically log into Google, all of those products offered by Google offer Google Search (that's a lot of Google).

Oh... and isn't locking your browser into your OS a bit of a problem? Okay, I know that there are many legal points there that I no doubt just don't get... and personally I think Microsoft should have won that one. I don't see Google offering a full OS for that reason.

There are tons of pro's and con's at this time for both Windows (Gasp! yes... that's right pro's too) and another type of OS. But if I were Microsoft I would simply keep working on Windows7 and IE8. Bing has already impressed me, so I'm really expecting much from them this time round - the first time in a very, very... long time!

The battle may not yet have begun, but have the Chrome Wars just started?

What's in a Name?

2009-07-06T00:40:00.000-07:00

So much of SEO is about targeting the right keywords. This holds true for any form of marketing be it online or offline.

Russia's Gazprom and Nigeria's state-operated NNPC formed the company - pronounced "nye-gaz"

Then I came across an Epic FAIL. What happens when you mix Russian and Nigerian companies to supply Europe with gas? Nigerian Gas? Nope. Lets all welcome in Nigaz. Does nobody do homework? Did the Nigerian folk approve of that? Doesn't Russia have a single person with some American slang? Perhaps they should bring back the KGB? At least they would have avoided this one.

Well... I think we've all heard the old saying, "there's no such thing as bad publicity." But I think in this case we'll find an exception. While negative publicity has built brands like Ozzy Osbourne and Marilyn Manson it all but ended Michael Jackson (yes all you hating hypocrites who are now his fans once again!). Sometimes you want to be seen as corporate, business like, simple. I think Nigaz were trying for that but failed miserably.

Well there's not that much online for Nigaz at this time. Although most references are negative and on news sites at this time. This leads to so many other questions about Reputation management (but that's a whole series of posts).

The lesson in this one? Research is key, know your market. Always make sure that the keywords you are chasing are going to draw positive traffic.

Blog Spam

2009-07-01T02:30:00.000-07:00

I could have gone on for ages about those SEO India posters but why do the hard leg work when someone already has?

Check out Ninja Commenting on Hobo. I think that post pretty much says it all.

Generally the blog is a good combination of sarcasm and info.

Cuil, Remember Them?

2009-06-24T23:52:00.000-07:00

Hey, finally some news on Cuil, you remember Cuil don't you? The Google killers with the largest database of indexed pages in the world. Oh... not? Don't worry, I'd forgotten about them entirely too. Especially after the recent re-branding of MSN and Live search to Bing (which I'm am quite fond of).

Well it seems that Cuil have decided that it's time to innovate. As reported by Matt McGee on Search Engine Land - it would seem that Cuil have now added Maplines to their search results. This makes for a much more interesting results page as displayed in a search for George Orwell.

While Google keep the monopoly on simple search, could it be that the other providers have decided that if you can't beat them, start a new game? Ask.com brought out their 3D search (which has faded away), Microsoft eventually consolidated everything into Bing which is a lot more interactive, even offering a blurb on sites and now Cuil change it up a little. I can't help but feel sorry for Yahoo! as they really are lagging now (dead duck or just lame I wonder). I don't see people changing their search habits anytime soon, but the internet changes pretty quickly, what will Google do to counter this?

PageRank Update?

2009-06-24T06:04:00.000-07:00

SEO Crowd: "Hey there's a PageRank update!!!"
Me: "Like I care!"

hehehehe... yeah, okay so it's always amusing to see the freak out and the absolute fascination with PageRank. God forbid someone's rank drops...

All for a digit between 1 and ten... but what about that grey bar?!

Anyhow... we'll see the outcries later this week no doubt.

Outlook 2010 to be Broken?

2009-06-24T01:49:00.000-07:00

Now this is an interesting turn of events. While I've never been much of a fan of Outlook (I've preferred the express version - it's less, but less clutter as well) but it looks like they're changing it up all over again. Microsoft are due to change from rendering emails in HTML format to Word. This will basically break HTML email in Outlook. I imagine this will keep the absolute end user more than pleased with the product (lets face it, they don't care what's under the hood) as they won't really notice a difference - 'cept perhaps download speeds. Word does tend to make things a little bulkier.

I heard designers and developers that have become dependent on HTML format for email groaning in the background cursing Microsoft once again for making their lives difficult.

I'm really not a Microsoft fan, but I've come to accept that most people use their products so they <rant rel="for another day">are THE standard </rant>. That said I feel that these developers that have been moaning for so long about standards and the fact that IE is bundled into their OS are really the ones to blame. Microsoft are slowly being forced to remove IE from their offerings, in this case Windows7 (yeah, I know they could offer multiple browsers, but do you advertise for your competition? didn't think so!)

Basically Microsoft have been forced to change how they make use of their software. So if you can't use something that's built into the OS (because now there is NO browser) you have to use something that's shipped with the package. Office, I believe, ships with Outlook and Word. Word allows formatting, so use it as your base editor. Will this affect their customer loyalty? No... most end users have no idea that there are other options than MS Office or IE (believe it or not), so while the masses continue to use Microsoft products it is the rest of us that have to adapt and conform.

Anyone who ever insisted that Microsoft remove IE from their OS take a bow.

Well done moaning developers and designers... Congrats to all you in the EU forcing the anti-trust issue. You've finally got what you want. If anything this will simply boost sales of Word (and subsequently Office). While I hear so many moans and groans I can't help but think you all got just what you deserve.

Online Publications

2009-06-22T04:20:00.000-07:00

While advertising was always the bread and butter for the newspapers, it would seem that these bells and whistles are now the focus of online publications. The accompanying diagram best outlines this. Perhaps newspapers aren't dying as many seem to be pointing out, perhaps they are literally selling their existence. I know that far too many pages these days are nothing more than ads. The recent upgrade of News24 has gone a long way to reinforce this thought.

What ever happened to the "sponsored by" with a logo? Too many banners have caused banner blindness. What is an optimal click through rate on these banner ads? You have to stop and wonder. With fewer click throughs the advertiser is paying more and more for a lesser result. I wonder if any of these publications would ever (could ever) move over to a cost per click model. This would surely offer best value, or would it go to prove that their over stock of ads simply don't work - in this case for the publisher?

I say put the shoe on the other foot.

Social Media: Twitter

2009-06-18T22:33:00.000-07:00

Tired of spammers? Tired of the get rich schemes? Well it seems that these tactics continue to work, after all, if they didn't they would stop doing it right?

I found this on twitter SEOSumo: Social Media Douchebag.

It begs the question though, just how many people are out there pushing their secret to success on the numerous social platforms? How often are we hit with the twitter follower that is just a pretty girl (thanks Zaibatsu) punting their get 2,516 twitter followers in just 2 days tweet and nothing else? The whole debate on whether to use the long sales letter or even video. Don't we all just hate that automated direct messages?

I guess it's nice to find something with a little bit of humor on a Friday morning. Oh well... in the meantime I think I'll just refer these folk to www.socialmediadoucebag.net

SEO Glossary

2009-06-14T23:13:00.000-07:00

Age - First appearance of site in Archive.org, or first appearance in search engines. Not to be confused with domain age, which is the registration date of the domain name. Older sites have more credibility, but for SEO purposes the "age" clock starts when a site is cached by a search engine.

Algorithm - A very complex series of rules used by a search engine to determine rankings. The Google Algorithm uses up to 200 different factors to determine web rankings.

Analytics - Most often, this is a reference to Google Analytics, a free way to measure your site traffic. Other analytics programs include ClickTracks, WebTrends, and Omniture.

Anchor Text - Linked text on a web page. Example: This is anchor text. Anchor text is important because search engines use it to determine what the destination page is about. Therefore, anchor text must be topical and relevant.

Backlinks - The number of links from other websites to your website. Google Webmaster Tools will give you the most accurate picture of your own links, and a search in Yahoo under link:yourcompetitorsitehere.com will tell you how many links Yahoo is listing for that site.

Ban - A severe search engine penalty that takes you completely out of the index. Normally caused by using black hat techniques.

Black Hat - In reference to search engine optimization, a technique that is unethical in the eyes of a search engine, and can get you de-listed.

Bounce Rate - The number of people who come to a web page from another site (or search engine) and leave without visiting any other pages. A high bounce rate is believed to negatively affect search engine rankings over time. Most often measured using Google Analytics.

Cache - The search engine's stored data about your site. This information can be weeks or months out of date, depending on your crawl rate. When you make SEO changes to your site, it won't be applied until the site gets re-cached and re-indexed. To see your cache in Google, type in cache: followed by your website.

Content - All text on your website readable to the search engine. Usually this is in reference to the body text on your pages.

Conversion - A visit to your site that results in an action being completed by the user. This can be a form fill-out, purchase, or phone call.

Conversion Rate - The number of conversions divided by the number of visitors. Higher conversion rates are always preferred. In Google Analytics, this can be considered "Goal" conversion.

Crawl Rate (Frequency) - The interval between search engine robot visits to your site. Generally, sites with frequent changes and more interesting (to a robot) content get visited more often. Pages with higher PageRank also get visited more often.

Description - A metatag that allows for a brief description of the page's content. All description tags on a site should be unique, and less than 256 characters.

Directory - A website that lists other websites in categories.

Duplicate Content - Content that is substantially similar to content on other sites or on multiple pages of your own site. Non-original content is generally ignored by search engines, and referred to as a "duplicate content penalty" when it impacts your site. Duplicate content is often cached but not presented in normal search results.

External Link - A link to another site or online resource from your site.

Google Sitemap - An XML sitemap that lists pages on your website that you want Google to find. The same protocol is used by Yahoo and MSN. Several sources online will create a sitemap for you. Not to be confused with a sitemap that lists all the pages on your website.

Filter - A reduction in search engine ranking for a number of possible reasons. Filters are different than penalties, in that when the item tripping the "filter" is removed, then results should bounce back.

Indexing - When a search engine applies your site results and links to its current index. Web pages can be cached for some time before the cached results are applied to the index.

Internal Link - Links from pages on your site to other pages on your site. How pages link to each other is known as Navigation.

Keyword Blurring - Using the same keywords on multiple web pages. This keeps the search engine from picking a "best" page for the keyword, so multiple pages may have lower positions that a single page devoted to the topic.

Keyword Stuffing - Using multiple keyword repetition on a web page. Search engines prefer text and keyword use that is more readable and user-friendly.

Keyword Tool - Any tool that helps determine keyword demand. Wordtracker and the Google Keyword Tool are two popular sources.

Keyword Research - Strategic research into the demand for keywords relevant to a website's topic. Good keyword research also uncovers synonyms and search terms that may improve site traffic.

Link Juice - A way of explaining the relative power of any link to another page on the same site or external web page, based on the power of the referring page and the number of other links on that page. For example, a powerful page with a single outbound link to your site would have more "link juice" than the same page a link to you among 49 other links. Link Juice Illustrated.

Links - In the world of SEO, "links" is most commonly a way of referring to inbound links to your website, given that Google bases a great deal of its rankings on other sites that link to yours. The value of links is highly variable, and links from sites trusted by search engines are more powerful than links from low quality sites.

Link Popularity - An overall measurement of a website or web page's link value, as determined by links from outside sources and links form other pages, which may themselves be getting good inbound links.

Long Tail - A keyword that contains a long search phrase. Long tail keywords usually have a lower search volume but a higher conversion rate, because the people who type them in have a very specific idea about what they want.

Metatags - Page code not normally visible to a site visitor which describes the content of the page. The Meta Title, Keywords, and Description tags are the most common, but metatags can contain many different fields of data not important to search engines.

Navigation - The way links are configured on a website to allow people to get to other pages. Search engines like to follow navigation and use it to determine the relative importance of pages on a site.

PageRank - (1) a numerical representation applied by Google showing the link value of any given page. This is completely determined by links from other websites and internal links. It is not a representation of the relevance of the site. There is a logarithmic scale of 1 to ten for PageRank, and higher numbers may require millions of links. This can be found using the Google Toolbar. (2) The algorithm at Google, not completely known to the public, that determines part of how links impact rankings.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) - Paid search engine advertisements that appear next to search results. PPC can be very expensive, but can be executed within hours, while SEO can take months.

Penalty - A change in search engine rankings caused by breaking one or more "rules" of search engine ethics. A search engine "filter" is a less strict penalty, but a "penalty" can be applied for a longer time period and is generally a sign that you are believed to be deliberately violating webmaster guidelines for search engines.

Ranking - A keyword position on a search engine, anywhere from #1 to somewhere in the billions. Usually you want your site to show on the first page for your keywords.

Ranking Report - A listing that shows positions on search engines (usually Google, MSN/Bing, and Yahoo) for a list of preferred keywords. Monthly ranking reports will show you your progress over time.

Reinclusion Request - A request to a search engine that a site be reexamined for inclusion back into listings. This is most commonly done when a site has been penalized or banned.

Relevance - The key to good SEO. More relevant sites are preferred by search engines because they confirm the search engine user's trust in the ability of the engine to deliver results. SEO practices help format a site in such a way that the engine can understand its relevance.

Robot - An automated program that visits your website.

Robots.txt - A file on your website that can either allow robots or restrict them. Robots files can be useful when you want duplicate pages to be ignored, or search engines are crawling unnecessary pages.

Sandbox (AKA Sandbox Penalty or Google Sandbox) - An artificially low ranking due to having a new website. The existence of the sandbox penalty is debated, but generally a new site will get lower rankings. Search engines use this to prevent junk sites from getting rankings. There are ways to get out of the "sandbox" by being relevant, but customers with new sites are still advised that search engines may take some time to show good rankings.

Search Volume - How many times (usually per month) that a keyword search is made in a given search engine, or all engines. High search volume indicates a competitive keyword which may be more profitable.

Short Tail - A one or two word search term like "auto parts" that gets a high search volume, but is not very specific. A "long tail" version of the same term would be "used auto parts free shipping."

Spider - Essentially a search engine robot that "crawls" your website for information.

SEM - Search Engine Marketing. This most often refers to Pay-Per-Click initiatives, but can also include SEO as part of an online marketing strategy.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization, or the practice of getting websites ranked on search engines through a variety of specialized methods.

SERP - Search Engine Results Page. The list of websites that you get when you make a search on a search engine.

Silo - A way of structuring categories on your website and individual web pages. Normally all the pages and navigation links in a silo are relevant to each other, and the "silo" structure helps improve rankings by structuring similar items into easily navigated categories. This benefits search engines and site users.

SPAM - In search engine parlance, Spam is not junk email but site content and linking practices that are keyword stuffed, automated, or created to get undeserved rankings for search terms.

Submission - The act of submitting a site to search engines or directories. For new sites, submission is still useful, but any site cached in a search engine would not need to be re-submitted.

Title - Also known as the meta title, the title of each web page appears at the top of the browser window. It tells search engines about the topic of each page. A well written title can have the fastest impact on search engine rankings if all other factors are good.

Webmaster Tools - Google Webmaster Tools is a free program that will help the average user understand how Google sees the website, if there are any problems, and if the site is penalized. Highly recommended to any webmaster.

White Hat - Search Engine Optimization techniques that are approved by search engines.

XML Sitemap - A "Google Sitemap" or a list of pages that you want search engines to find. This normally gets placed in your root directory in an XML format and named "sitemap.xml." The sitemap contains information about pages, their relative priority, and how often they are updated.

Borrowed from WebProNews. I really wish that it didn't take so long to load a single page.

Is Google Evil?

2009-06-03T03:00:00.000-07:00

"Do no evil"

"In business, evil refers to unfair or unethical business practices. Firms that have a monopoly are often able to maintain the monopoly using tactics that are deemed unfair, and monopolies have the power to set prices at levels which are not socially efficient. Some people therefore consider monopolies to be evil. Economists do not generally consider monopolies to be 'evil' though they recognize that certain business practices by monopolies are often not in the public interest." - Wikipedia

Are Google a monopoly? I'd say yes. By definition (on Wikipedia - so take it with a pinch of salt) that would mean that Google are indeed Evil.

Google have often been said to "do no evil". Promoting free access to information for all. Arguing that ISP's shouldn't limit access to information. While I'm all for a free and fair internet and information at my fingertips, I am concerned at what the cost of "free" is. Power corrupts... absolute power corrupts absolutely.

"There are no free lunches!"

Or so I'm told. So if they aren't charging me money for this service what is the cost really? I came across an interesting article on "The Plot to Kill Google" - the real Google killers (so much for cuil - anyone heard of them since their launch?). However many do have compelling arguments as to why Google shouldn't be trusted.

While all of that is a good decent argument, I guess one should be pleased that someone is trying to monitor Google's activities.

On the other hand, it could be worse: Google Press Release
Okay so those are just for humor's sake. But imagine if they were actually true. Which is more evil. I guess we'll just have to keep an eye on the almighty Google for now.

By the way, all information was found searching with Ask.com

(Google) Bombing the Presidents

2009-06-02T01:06:00.000-07:00

Well Google may have diffused that bomb, but looks like bing.com are more than happy to keep it locked and loaded. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land pointed out that for some reason the "miserable failure" bomb seems to be live and well (or is that lit and fused?) in recent times.

Google run their algorithms from time to time to locate and diffuse these bombs, but what of the other engines? Yahoo! never seemed to really get rid of it entirely and MSN was pretty much on the same path. At present a search for "miserable failure" on Ask.com reveals George Bush to be the number one contender while surprisingly his right hand man is now Barack Obama (does Ask know something we don't?). Okay, so there is more to this than meets the eye.

The White House implemented 301 redirects a little while ago to send most of that failure link-love back to its intended destination (that of past President GW Bush). It seems that Google have managed to once again find and block this bomb. MSN (now combined with Live as Bing.com) seem to have re-indexed the site and are now reporting the GW Bush bio as a "miserable failure", followed by the Wikipedia report on this event and surprisingly the new (and only one that I know of) bio for B Obama. Yahoo!'s results match those of Ask.com (although they have indexed the new URL). Interestingly enough Ask.com still list the old gwbbio.html file as the URL for GW Bush despite the site having implemented 301 redirects (clicking on the link takes you to /georgewbush/).

Okay, so what does this really tell us? That GW Bush and Obama are miserable failures? Well, that will forever remain a long debate.

From an observation point I'd say that this would suggest that the miserable failures in this case are the search engines. Agreed, they may simply be returning facts based on what the public perceive, however this simply goes to prove how easily these giants can be manipulated to this day.

Google seem to have worked around this one and I have a sneaky suspicion that when Matt Cutts moved from the domain www.mattcutts.com to www.dullest.com he was testing just how well they handle the 301. Perhaps Obama and Bush both owe Matt and his team a thanks on that one. On the other side of this we can gather that most of the search engines still need to work on how they deal with 301's.

Could this leave a door open to spammers to "Google bomb" a page, then simply 301 the link love to another page?

Sub-Domains or Directories?

2009-05-27T23:38:00.000-07:00

Many have asked the question, "Which is better for indexing or ranking, a directory tree or sub-domains?"

Well Matt Cutts of Google put in his 2c worth. It would seem that he generally prefers the use of directories. Personally I would agree. While I believe that much of ranking does include the reading from left to right of most factors (so starting at the beginning of the domain) I think it is just simpler to work with directories. In addition much of what we do in the development phase of a website is done using relative links making sub-directories even more difficult to manage.

From a end user or marketing side I might be tempted to run sub-domains, much like Google does with http://maps.google.com by doing this you clearly state that this is a particular product offered by the company. The joy of this is that even the developers may be restricted to only working on one project without having an impact on the rest of the site.

I believe that for ranking purposes sub-domains have had their fair share of success in the past, but as with all things Spammers arrived and ruined that. I imagine that these days the major search engines most likely run somewhat of a mash-up stemmed version of the URL for x number of characters to determine validity. Looking for one or two keywords that relate to form some kind of relevancy. Yes, the URL is important but most likely no more so than many other factors.

Anyhow, I guess this will remain a debate for quite some time. Which do you go for? I guess really it's all preference or need. I still opt for the Directory structure myself, mostly as I can almost form sentences as I go along making sense to humans and bot alike.

New Developments

2009-05-26T01:11:00.000-07:00

Well some would argue that one site is better than 2 (or 3 or 4... etc). I lean the other way more often than not arguing that each keyword should have it's own website. You can't really get any more focused than that, but at what point does it become overkill?

We recently broke one of our larger clients websites into 3 distinct divisions. This generally would have made fantastic sense, but it seems that while 2 of the new sites are working well (the previous domain and the smallest domain). This kind of hampers the last site. Unfortunately the old domain still ranks for those phrases that are now on another site. The redirect seems to be working at this time so perhaps it is just a case of having Google follow and re-index the new domain. Time will tell I suppose.

I'll keep monitoring the progress and report back. I guess this is why this should have been the plan from the get-go.

SEO Since 1999

2009-04-29T02:55:00.000-07:00

While I'm not usually one to scrape content from another site, simply linking to this wouldn't do. So, here's a fantastic personal take on SEO and I guess the internet in general since 1999. Enjoy...

Written by James Svoboda of Realicity Search Marketing

Monday, April 20th, 2009: Today I celebrate the completion of my first decade in search. I have been waiting for this day with some trepidation for the past 6 months or so. I am not really sure why or even what this anniversary really means. Does it mean that I am some sort of expert? Well, anything is possible. Or does it mean that I have wasted the past decade with little to show in an industry that my friends and family can hardly even understand? Hmm, I hope not. In truth, it means I not only have a job that I like, but a career that I love.

I represent one of a hundred or maybe even a thousand tenured SEO professionals in the world who have spent their time doing and not blogging about doing. The only notoriety that we typically gain is the word of mouth referrals from our happy clients. To some of us, these clients have become more like friends. These friends make what we do just that much more rewarding. I cannot even imagine doing anything else and came to the realization several years ago that I am going to spend the rest of my life with a career centered around the web. I guess only time will tell what that Tuesday morning in 1999 really started.

History & Change

I had a great history teacher in the 7th grade who regularly told us that “we need to learn from our past so we do not repeat our mistakes in the future.” I am sure he was not the first, or the last, to use a saying like this, but remembering it makes me wonder if someday public schools will teach students about the history of the internet along with the European Renaissance and Industrial Revolution. And since you can now earn a degree in internet marketing from several accredited universities and colleges like Rasmussen or Full Sail, it might only be a matter of time before someone like Rand or Danny starts teaching a course on the History of SEO at U DUB.

In the past few months I have been doing a lot of thinking about the changes that have occurred on the web since I started. I managed to get some of them down in a list and looking it over reminds me of so much, probably in the same way as cracking open an old high school yearbook or visiting with an old lifelong friend who you have not seen in years. Maybe it will invoke some old memories and you can reminisce too.

Search Engines

AltaVista had been the Google of that era. There were other somewhat popular search portals like Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit, Northern Light, Excite, and of course Yahoo, AOL and MSN had their loyal following. I guess AltaVista’s popularity is why Overture/Yahoo eventually bought it. I just don’t know why they ruined it.

I can even remember when we would resubmit each of our client’s pages to MSN every month because their submission page fed into Inktomi (which provided the search results for MSN, Yahoo, HotBot, Lycos and a few others) and you would receive a rankings boost for “New Pages.” Inktomi was great for us for a while. They eventually came out with a Paid Inclusion that you could purchase for a yearly inclusion for each page. No more resubmitting each month, yea! You received such a ranking and traffic boost that we started purchasing inclusion for all of our clients without charging them because it produced such better results that made us look great, and our clients loved us for it. That program was great until Yahoo bought Inktomi and changed the paid inclusion program from a yearly fee to its current a yearly fee plus a PPC fee called Search Submit. We pretty much had to drop all of our clients from the program at the time, which resulted in all of the pages that paid for inclusion getting dropped from their index (and along with them traffic, rankings and sales).

In those days the search engines were spending tons on TV commercials in order to capture a larger search share. There were the Lycos Dog commercials, AltaVista had Pamela Anderson, the Excite ads were kind of edgy, and Yahoo had some good ones like the Comb Over and Raise the Dead. However, my all time favorites were the HotBot Investment Tips and Political Scandals commercials in what I call the “Old Links” series. I think I found this series particularly funny because I am an SEO and can remember when you could do a search and within the first 3 pages find a listing or two that would lead to a 404 page. Also, the distinguished gentlemen they used were great! The staff at Search Engine Land also put together a search engine commercial montage that you should check out.

Eventually, many of the original search engines failed to turn a profit and were slowly being purchased for their search market share, mostly by Yahoo, CMGI or InterActiveCorp. The Searching Graveyard also has a few interesting tidbits on some oldies like Magellan, Deja and OpenText.

Meta Search

DogPile, MetaCrawler and WebCrawler were the three that I was first introduced to, and in fact all are still online today. What I really loved about Meta Search Engines was not their ability to pull results from a dozen different engines at the same time, but just the fact that their entire premise was based on how bad each individual search engine’s results could be. Even search results for top keywords were hit and miss, and quite often we were forced to jump from one engine to another in order to find relevancy. I think this was primarily due to the fact that algorithms of the day were heavily based on on-page factors like keyword density, and links were not a major ranking factor in most of the popular engines.

Web Directories

Wow, have these changed! We used to make getting listed in the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory - DMOZ a priority because of the traffic they generated. Now any actual visitors that originate from them are probably either a link builder, a competitor or an editor.

Disney-owned Go.com, originally called Infoseek, launched a directory called the GoGuides that was pretty popular. You could join to become an editor and then list your clients that were sorted alphabetically and ranked by 1, 2 or 3 stars. When Disney shut down this directory, a few of the editors spun off a directory of their own called, of course, GoGuides. GoGuides.org is still online today with pretty much the same format that they brought with them from the original Go.com directory.

At one point Looksmart.com was a valuable directory that powered some results for MSN, Inktomi and several others. You could initially pay a $199 review fee for a permanent lifetime listing. This was something that we only did sometimes for our clients because the traffic coming out of Looksmart was not always enough to warrant the one time fee. They eventually changed their ad model to a Pay Per Click format and at the same time informed all of their previous customers who had purchased a lifetime listing that they were converting all of them to the new PPC program. They then funded your account with your original submission fee and you were charged a $0.15 per visitor fee until your account reached zero and you were de-listed. A class action law suit was brought against them and I believe they settled out of court. MSN was their big distribution partner at the beginning of their PPC/directory end. Once they lost MSN their stock dropped, their directory was eventually taken down, and they were never really the same again.

The original Snap.com portal also built a web directory that was of brief significance and provided good traffic. This one was probably around the shortest amount of time of any of the Dot Com directories.

Pay Per Click

The first PPC search engine that I managed a campaign for was GoTo.com. They were simple, with a “Visible” bidding process that could let you bid based on current bids without a quality score algorithm to consider. Originally you could only bid on each keyword by itself, or what is today called Exact Match. You always knew which keywords your traffic was coming from. The only downside for some is that you had to do some really deep and creative keyword research to reach your PPC potential. The GoTo search term suggestion tool (keyword research) was the best and most reliable keyword tool I have ever come across. You could punch in any term and know that you were going to get 50 results that were a derivative of your words. No synonyms or related terms to confuse you and make you wonder what keyword you actually just searched for. If you were given less than 50 results on the page, then you had reached the end of that search and it was time to try a different version. They only showed you results that had 25 or more searches from the previous month, and if you were given any results that did not end at or close to 25, you had to keep searching for additional derivatives. It was also very easy to find more versions as each keyword result was linked so you could click on it and run another search.

The GoTo tool only had 2 little drawbacks. The first was that it combined singular and plural versions of most keywords except a few like link & links, service & services, company & companies, and a few others. At one point I think I had a list of about a dozen versions that would need to be checked individually. The second was that it was not an intuitive tool to use if you were researching keywords for a campaign about a topic that you did not really know anything about, like a few software and business consulting clients I worked with early on. I owe much of my keyword research skillz to GoTo. Thanks.

At one point GoTo.com sued Go.com for infringement based on Go’s logo looking too similar to theirs. Go had a green stop light logo and GoTo had the full green, red and yellow light. GoTo won a bunch of money and made some big headlines as the then little engine that sued Disney and won. Eventually GoTo changed their name to Overture and then Yahoo bought them up and changed their name again by rebranding them as Yahoo Search Marketing. All of those name and logo changes must have really pissed off the legal staff at Disney that lost the infringement case!

There once was another little PPC engine that started out by providing ads for About.com. It was called Sprinks. That current version of Sprinks did not last very long, as Google soon bought them up in order to compete with Yahoo/Overture. They were quickly absorbed into Google and either stripped of its PPC technology or rebranded as Google AdWords.

There were also several other little PPC engines that tried to make it, like FindWhat - now Miva, Bay9, Kanoodle, 7Search.com, and I even remember one called 3Apes.com. Some of these are still around, some have been rebranded or bought by a more profitable company, and some have died and gone to PPC heaven. I hear it is nice there, with absolutely no click fraud to speak of. Of all these, only 2 have so completely rubbed me the wrong way that today I have to check myself before I getting into a profanity laced tirade when I hear their names. Bay9.com was a company that shorted an affiliate payment on a site that I placed their ads on. Their rep was great and said all the nice things and then never would answer or return calls again. This might be one of the many reasons why Bay9 is no longer in business. FindWhat (now Miva) is the other one. They were the first PPC engine where I could pinpoint click fraud, call my rep, get the run around about adding funds back into my account from the “bad” partners account, and have it happen again and again. That is another one that refused to return my calls after a while.

Before GoTo there was... I am not sure, as I can’t recall their name now. During my first year I spent a good amount of time doing keyword research based on GoTo.com keyword traffic stats. I remember my first introduction to GoTo when I was told their short history. It was also during this conversation that I remember hearing about a PPC predecessor to GoTo. Not a large one, but a predecessor nonetheless. I do not remember much about this site/engine/platform, so if you have any additional bytes of knowledge, feel free to share them. I only really remember that they did not last long. They were not perceived very well because they were charging for something that people thought should be free, and at that time the internet was free and nobody should cage it or have to pay for it!

Things were much different back then. The DOT COM had not yet bubbled or burst, banner ads were the main way to pay for search traffic, and I am pretty sure most people still thought the World Wide Web was flat and could only be accessed through a phone line.

Oh, and MSN eventually created their own PPC platform called adCenter.

Affiliate Programs

The first affiliate program to generate real buzz online was the Amazon.com associate program. They had a product to match just about every website out there. If you were a dog breeder, you could link to Amazon pages about books on dog training, breeding, or just about anything else you could think of. I remember seeing Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, on the Tonight Show when he explained how he originally boxed books for shipment while kneeling on the floor. His story was about investing in how they did things like buying tables so they did not have to kneel any longer. Up until that point Amazon had yet to turn a profit, and he did not shy away from talking about how they were continually reinvesting profits back into the company. At the time I kept thinking that they were either going to crash so hard that many of the Amazon staff would end up jumping out of windows, or they were going to become an amazing success story. I was actually very happy for them when they reported their first quarter of profit.

After Amazon came Commission Junction. CJ was an affiliate marketplace that, like Amazon, had just about something for every website. If you were a dog breeder, you could probably find a few pet supply stores to link to and make some commissions. The great thing about them was that their affiliates paid much better than Amazon. The biggest drawback that I saw with Commission Junction was the fees that they charged for being the broker were pretty high. This eventually led to lower commission rates for the affiliates as the web stores and CJ tried to maintain their revenue. I am not sure where they stand in today’s affiliate world because I left Commission Junction as soon as Google launched AdSense and have had no reason to return.

Google AdSense has not changed much over the years. They are still easy for publishers to use, pay very well for each visitor, and they still have very few ad formats for being such an advertising powerhouse.

UGC & Social

At times I have a tendency to group these two together, mostly because in the early days websites that allowed User Generated Content or User Edited Content (UEC) also included some form of a social experience and community. Back then directories were my UGC & social experience. I was an editor at DMOZ and both versions of GoGuides. I added and edited directory content, read the newsletters and the editor forums, and made an effort to better my “community.” There were several Webmaster and SEO forums, but I did not spend too much time in them as they seemed to be filled with hacks that passed misinformation. I was never interested in chat or IM, and I don’t even know what ICQ stands for. (Well, now I do.)

I remember when About.com first became popular. They had just changed their name from The Mining Co. and there was a buss around it in a similar fashion to Wikipedia when it first hit the scene. I once checked out the available topics section and then decided not to try and join. I just didn’t see how I could find enough time to develop that much content. I guess About didn’t see how they could either, and that is why they opened it up to Guides.

CitySearch has been around for a while and I once used them religiously, but they are now a sinking ship. Yelp discovered the true value in UGC that CitySearch had discarded in favor of advertising revenue: free business listings. It's a simple platform for reviews that is open to almost anyone, and they encourage offline community involvement and have user profiles with photos for recognition, community status, list building and bookmarking, review tracking and a way for people to connect with each other. They really have thought of just about everything that CitySearch chose not to.

Analytics & Reporting

Webtrends log file analyzer was the first program that I ever used for client reports. Its reports were similar to some of the free solutions around, like Webalizer and AWStats. It was great for identifying the search engines and keywords that we were generating traffic from, and it also provided a little bit of data like browsers and operating systems.

We eventually gave in to client requests for ranking reports and started using WebPosition Gold. We knew that traffic was what really mattered, but we found by providing these reports that our clients rarely questioned campaign progress and traffic numbers. I think it was because they had a little easier time understanding a top 10 position as a measurement as compared to a report with hundreds of different keywords and visits. WebPosition is now owned by Webtrends and has remained mostly unchanged for years.

Google Analytics became a mainstay of client reports. Its reporting features, conversion tracking and visual elements are great, especially for the price! I still run a ranking report once a month just to save time of checking top keywords myself and to help watch for movement on whole keyword segments. Like almost all of Google’s non-search technology, GA was once part of another company called Urchin and was absorbed into the Google collective.

Algorithms & Updates

AltaVista’s Black Monday happened only 6 short months after I started in SEO. I came into the office on what seemed like an ordinary Monday to what eerily felt like the first day of the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression. Most of our clients' traffic had disappeared from our biggest source at the time. We normally would check a few client log files to see how traffic went over the weekend, but that day we checked all of them. There was a tiny hint or feeling of doom in the room. We were almost panicked. What would our clients do if we could not figure this out soon? Would they leave us? What about company revenue? Had it tanked enough to affect me? Eventually it all worked out, but what an ordeal!

Google’s Florida was another tough one. It happened right before the main holidays. It really screwed most of our clients, many of whom had ecommerce sites that really needed to sell over the holiday season. Florida took longer to overcome than AltaVista’s Black Monday and not just from a ranking and traffic standpoint, but from the loss of clients as well.

It was not long after Florida that Yahoo decided to change their Paid Inclusion program from the yearly fee to the yearly fee plus cost per visit. I guess since Google’s updates were given names in alphabetical order just like hurricanes, it is only fitting that we were hit hard by those two in succession and felt like we living through hurricane season.
See You in 10

Now that I have spent a little time looking back, pondering search, my career and how the internet has evolved, I can’t help but wonder as to the changes that are coming up and in particular what’s next for search. Maybe in another 10 years or so I will write a follow up and take an even longer stroll down search memory lane. I plan on being around then. SEOmoz will probably still be here. Hopefully you will too.

Cheers!

Jeeves Returns

2009-04-20T04:12:00.000-07:00

Well at least to Ask in the UK. Okay, so I wasn't ever the biggest fan of the butler, mostly because I thought it was a poor way to promote a search engine. From a marketing perspective, why ask Jeeves if you could simply "Ask it!" Doesn't it make more sense to "ask it" rather than "google it"? Well it would have a good few years back.

Well I guess that's why Ask never got me to do their marketing. Here in South Africa half the searching public don't even know that there ever was a Jeeves, for others Google is the internet (much like that blue icon is the internet). While still no fan of the Jeeves concept I have to admit it's a blast from the past to see an "old friend."

Will Jeeves make a real return? I don't know, but I'd doubt it right now. While he might work for the British public, I don't see him making full time return to the US, or even the rest of the world for that matter. Jeeves was retired for a good few reasons, I don't know what has changed since then and now. But then again, perhaps the public really are wanting to put a real face to search? Would newer users prefer to have a familiar face to credit their answers?

Google AdWords

2009-04-16T23:48:00.000-07:00

Well, Google have done it again. Upgraded another great service. Only problem I see however is that with each and every update the service comes to a crawl.

Google AdWords have now had yet another update. The interface while more appealing and easier on the eye has gone the same way of the Analytics. Only problem is now it takes about 5 times longer for me to load. I think Google have forgotten that we in South Africa just don't have the connection speeds that Europe or North America do. A pity because when running multiple accounts it seems that things simply aren't working at times.

Okay the "previous interface" is available, for now. And while the "New Interface(Beta)" is still in Beta, why do they default to it. I guess with the enforced changes and updates of other popular sites such as Facebook. But possibly the most annoying thing for me at this time... the horizontal scroll! I've always hated it, always will! Okay so it overlaps just slightly, I still need to scroll to confirm the average position of the ads.

Google please offer those of us that have poor connections to view the older versions of these services. Yes, I know that we may even be missing out on some functionality, but at the end of the day I'd rather have limited functionality than none at all.

PageRank Update!!!

2009-04-06T01:00:00.000-07:00

Like I care...

hehehehe...

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the PageRank craze. It looks like Google have run out another PageRank update. So far it would seem that many of our sites have seen a bump up in PageRank, and none come down as of yet. Guess from a cosmetic view I'm doing something right.

Moving a Home / Website

2009-04-02T23:17:00.000-07:00

I've been in the process of packing up to move for the last few weeks. Personally I hate moving I've done it so many times and it's rarely, if ever, an easy exercise. This got me thinking. Moving home and moving a website are both equally difficult or cumbersome at best.

Depending on the move you plan, you may have to pack everything up and transport it to a new location. When moving home you need to make sure that all your furniture and other valuables are safely stored for easy transport. When moving a site you'd need to make sure that you've backed up your site correctly (with a second backup just in case) so that you can easily load it to a new server.

Then there's the unpacking stage. Is your new home big enough for all your furniture? Will you struggle to fit all of your furniture into the rooms? Are there more rooms that will allow growth - if that is your desired plan? In much the same way, assuming that you don't simply have flat static HTML files, does your new host support the language that your site has been written in? Do you have any server specific scripts that will need additional server support, or would you have to rewrite a few scripts (mail scripts tend to be the bane of my life on this one).

Usually when moving location specific information about you will change. Details such as your mailing address, home phone number and actual physical address will change. When moving a website this also holds true. While many details will remain the same, do you plan to update the website? Possibly change URL structure? Or even the programming language of your website? If so this will leave the older pages lost in cyber space. If your domain name has changed, and you still own the old domain name, redirect traffic to the relevant page on your new site. If you've kept the old domain but have decided to change the URL structure, redirect the old pages to the relevant new one - in much the same way that you would do for your snail-mail postage.

As you would (and should) let authorities, banks and others that need to be able to find you by updating your personal info, let the search bots find your new pages and domain by alerting them to the move. This will speed up an re-indexing that will need to take place as well as preserve any link strength that you may have earned so far.

April Fools

2009-04-02T06:33:00.000-07:00

Well the 1st of April has come and gone. Many tried to play pranks, some tried to avoid them and no doubt many are still claiming that they weren't fooled but were simply playing along ;) right...

Sometimes however fact really is stranger than fiction. But not with the addition of CADIE. This Panda was going to revolutionize many Google products by quietly doing all the mundane chores that you don't like. Removing red-eye from Picassa or answering email on your behalf. The actual homepage for CADIE was amusing, it looked like something from GeoCities, or pretty much anything designed (if you call it that?) in the late 90's early 2000's. Bright, in your face and flashing every little available pixel.

On the flip side... Google now announce that they are due to cut some 200 jobs. I guess it's not always fun and games - even at Google.

Barry Schwartz, an avid Mac fan, of Search Engine Round Table even found time to set up the BSOD for Windows visitors. Ha... Although I can say I've been working on this machine for almost 2 years and never had a BSOD - I can't believe it myself ;)

Loved this SEO Quiz

2009-04-01T05:45:00.000-07:00

I just loved this SEO quiz. You can't help but pick the funny answers... which as it would seem tend to be the correct ones ;)

What Stage of SEO Career Are You at?

My Result: Expert

Robert

You can't afford reading each message in your email box. You can't remember who 25% of your Facebook friends are. You don't comment at SEO blogs as often as you used to - you can hardly manage to read them now.

You have a strange feeling you have no time for anything. No, you still don't understand how the heck Tamar is doing that and you start secretly suspect there are several Tamars out there.

You read SEJ daily :)

Quiz School

Take this quiz & get your result

What Stage of SEO Career Are You at? » Make Your Own Quiz

Yeah, I'm sending the link love back too :P

Social Media

2009-03-30T01:12:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I was eventually going to get round to this one at some time. Here's the real twist... I know nothing about social media. Okay, that's a bit of a lie/exaggeration, I know enough to know that I don't really have a clue. So I did what everyone else would do in my shoes... called a consultant.

I guess this post really starts some two years ago when I first joined Prop Data. Online marketing has come a long way from simply calling yourself an SEO by stuffing keywords, these days it's a full time commitment to the betterment of the internet (yeah, I'm fighting the crusade for the good guy). Okay, so I admit to spamming on occasion, but who hasn't? When I joined the company I knew that many things were changing online, web 2.0 wasn't just making websites easier to maintain and update but also making them a lot more interactive. While visitors could interact with the site, it's still just code, visitors needed interaction to work back to them. Enter the age of blogs and social media in general.

This brings us back to last Friday. Having joined Twitter a good long while ago I've been closely following other folk in the SEO, SEM and Social Media circles. While there are precious few in South Africa that claim to follow these trends, one chap Mike Stopforth has put himself out there. Replying to a Tweet he sent out a few months back offering a free consultation he agreed to join us and speak to us. Being Prop Data, the team were all over worked, understaffed - the usual. We changed the format up a little and it became a open discussion between Mike, the sales guys and myself.

The discussion was great. Broken down into some very simple points Mike did a great job of highlighting the points to consider and questions to ask before venturing forward on any social project. I guess many of these points we already knew, it was just a case of putting them into perspective. After all, there rarely is a point in doing something simply for the sake of doing it. Focus and result is the main point, as it always should be. Sometimes having a blog isn't a good idea when a fan page would make a lot more sense. Not everybody likes a particular product, but it may have many fans. Simple point, but I'd never thought of it that way. What can I say, I don't know social media.

I guess like so many other things IRL (that's "In Real Life" ;) it's not what you do, but how you do it. Social Media is an animal. You have to feed it and nurture it, if you don't it will turn and bite you. Those wishing to engage in Social Media, "Are you ready for that kind of commitment?"

Arrrgh... It's a Treasure, uh, Sitemap

2009-03-27T00:29:00.000-07:00

There are two types of sitemaps that you might employ on a website. First the HTML version which is intended to offer the average visitor to the website an overview of your website. The second is a machine readable XML sitemap (commonly referred to as a Google Sitemap) intended to inform a search bot of the pages found on your website. I'd always recommend the use of both - in various forms.

HTML sitemaps are a wonderful resource. If a visitor to the website can't find what they are looking for this is the easiest way to point it out. In addition many fail to realise that his is a prime spot to put text links to pages with your keywords as the anchor text. In addition why not add a little additional information next to the link. Suddenly the whole page becomes a fantastic resource for both human and bot.

XML sitemaps a great for dynamic websites. Many of the websites we have worked on include many products or other kind of items listed. Scripts can be run to dynamically generate this sitemap as listings are changed or updated. These sitemaps can be submitted directly to the search engines informing them that this is a true reflection of your site.

I've tended to break my XML sitemaps down into smaller maps. Often breaking down static pages and separating them from the dynamic pages. On our really large sites I have even broken the dynamic sitemaps into categories. Mostly you don't want to offer a sitemap of thousands of pages to the search engines at a time. A thousand pages or so may be the limit.

Submit your XML sitemaps to the search engines and be sure to link to your HTML sitemap from your homepage, this will ensure that the sitemap is easily crawled by the search engines and will subsequently lead to the other pages being easily indexed.

Google Code

2009-03-24T23:37:00.000-07:00

Telling Google what to index might not be a figment of webmasters imagination for that much longer. I recently came across a few lines of code explaining that you can tell Google not to index parts of your page. This could prove to be quite useful.

Don't index word:
fish shark
mackerel

Don't use link text to describe target page:
<A href=sharks_rugby.html>
shark </A> 

Don't use for snippet:
Come to the fair!


Don't index any:
Come to the fair!


Now I'm not sure if any of this works just yet. I'm still testing, but I imagine that Google will for the most part ignore these comments. We know that the Google bot pretty much tries to read all the code on a page including scripts. But if the snippet comment works at least we might be able to use a description that might be useful.

Watch this space...

Too Cuil for You

2009-03-24T00:55:00.000-07:00

Well it's been some time since the Google killer Cuil was launched and I've not heard much since. Launched to much fanfare and expectation I think this has to be the largest flop seen in years. I wonder just how much was put into this development in time and money? I wonder if any of the investors would be getting anything back?

As I've not used this search engine (mostly as I found it to be useless at launch) I can't comment too much on the accuracy of the search results but do know that the images displayed still don't quite match up. Nice try though. I think Google, Ask and even Live have better image results blended into their universal search.

Perhaps in time they will be able to make sense of "the largest directory of indexed pages". But for now the results seem to be outdated, irrelevant and at times just wrong. Was this what we expected of the ex-Googlers? Perhaps this is a prime example of why they are Ex Google folk?

What's in a Name

2009-03-22T22:27:00.000-07:00

The title tag has to be, in my humble opinion, the most important on-page factor when it comes to high rankings in the search engine results pages. Found in the head tag of a standard HTML page, the title is the first place that you can start placing your keywords. Surprisingly some pages don’t define this tag. Worse yet, some overlook it and omit it altogether. Here is a basic example of where the title tag fits into an average HTML page.

<html>
<head>
<title> The title goes here</title>
</head>
<body>
Web page content goes here.
</body>
</html>

Here are five points I always consider when constructing a title.

Limit the length of the title.
Google currently displays approximately 63 characters of a title. The total number of characters displayed varies from engine to engine. While it is not the end of the world to exceed this by a slight margin, (I don’t believe there are any penalties for having a long title) remember that the search engines will cut off anything that goes beyond that which they display. This would leave you with a “…” instead of a complete title.

The title tag can be useful for branding your traffic.
By adding your website or company name to the title tag you can build brand awareness and increase returning direct traffic. While many suggest doing this I would only recommend adding your company or website name to the end of your title tag. While I don’t think it makes much difference to the order, your keywords are placed in the title tag, I suggest that you ensure your keywords are towards the beginning of the tag as it reads easier. Once again don’t forget that the title tag is the first thing that is displayed from each site by the search engines.

Divide your title tag.
When branding your site, break the title tag so that it becomes obvious which is the page title and which is the site name/title. I find that by using the pipe break “|” (that’s the funny symbol above the “\” key) I am able to do this quite neatly. This is also a great way keep your titles consistent. For example:
<title>Keyword Phrase Goes Here | Some Company</title>
Instead of:
<title>Keyword Phrase Goes Here and Blends into the Name of the Company</title>
As you can see it makes it a lot clearer when considering which part of the title labels the page and which part labels the website.

NEVER, I repeat never, repeat your title.
Each page should have a unique title. By giving each page a unique title you are telling the search engines that each page is indeed unique. For exactly the same reason that you don’t name every file the same, (Well, apart from the most obvious reason which is that you just can’t!) as it is easy to distinguish the contents of a file by simply scanning the title. The same principal applies to web pages. This also goes a long way to indexing the priority of each page. If every page had the same title, which page would be ranked more relevant than the next?

Keywords in the title.
I have spent a lot of time optimising websites for real estate agents. While their stock standard pages have targeted keywords in the title, headings and content, it becomes a little more challenging to do the same for each listing. This is usually where the developers come into play. With a little effort the Title can be dynamically created. In my case, it drastically changed the titles I could offer from something such as:
<title>Property Listed for sale or to let by Estate Agent</title>
To a far more specific title that really does describe the listing perfectly:
<title>House for Sale in Suburb, Area | Estate Agent</title>
Okay, so I usually go a little further than that, but as you can see the title not only makes perfect sense and describes the page but also is keyword rich for the search phrase “house for sale in suburb” or even area in this case. While this works well for this kind of website, the principles can be applied to any other dynamically created web page.

I have noticed that time and time again the search engines return results with the search phrase in the title. I think we can all agree that if a web page has been titled correctly then the page will be accurately described. However search engines will discount a title that is no more than a list of spammed keywords. I think we’ve all heard the mantra, create pages for real people not robots, too many times. I would prefer to change that statement:
Make well structured, informative web pages that are relevant to what you are doing.

When you apply the above, search engines have little option but to regard each page highly and rank it accordingly. While there are so many other factors to consider when optimising a page I believe the title to be a crucial element.

The Theory of Relative URL's

2009-03-19T22:57:00.000-07:00

E=mc² or e=mc2 ?

Have you ever tried to type E=mc²? Notice how difficult it is to find the funny little 2. In fact how many people even know how to go about finding that ²? Similarly while Pi can be rounded to 3.14 the number is infinitely long and trying to remember it rounded to two decimal points is hard enough. However, this is not a science or maths lesson. The point I’m trying to make here is that Pi is easier to remember than 3.14… or how to find the ².

Similarly we can compare the following URL’s:

www.widgets.com/purple-widgets.htm
www.widgets.com/itempage.htm?id=123

At first glance we would assume that one is a static URL and the other a dynamic URL. Both of these URL’s could be the exact same item, but which one are you more likely to remember? Already, by looking at the above mentioned URL’s you would be able to guess which one of those pages may relate to purple widgets.

We know that the anchor text in a link carries much weight when it comes to gaining a top rank for a specific keyword. Indeed anchor text alone can get a site ranked for a search term that is never mentioned on that page. This has been used and abused in the past. Link bombs, such as the “miserable failure” Google Bomb, serve to prove just how valuable anchor text in a link can be. While many links created on websites are displayed as “widgets.com” you can already see the benefit of having keywords in your URL.

The search engines continue to preach how you should be optimising your site for real people and not the bots that visit the website. With this in mind I wouldn’t be surprised to find that www.widgets.com/purple-widgets.htm would be ranked higher simply because it is simpler URL and surely a lot easer to remember than a messy dynamic URL. This could just be wishful thinking on my part, or is it? When running a few searches I found that 7 out of the top 10 results all had keywords in the URL.

Search engines prefer the use of hyphens in domain names because they can produce more accurate search results by being able to divide and recognize specified keywords in your URL. After all if it’s easier for us to read purple-widgets than it is to read purplewidgets why shouldn’t it be the same for a bot?

Many would then assume that the underscore “_” would be the same as a hyphen. This is not true. I would appear that as the underscore character is often used in programming languages it is treated as a whole other character of its own. As we all know a hyphen simply adds words together it is read as a simple join between two words, nothing more.

It is also be worth mentioning that the URL is listed in the actual search results themselves. While just a small single text entry the URL may give the searcher a little more faith that the page listed is actually what they are looking for. So with a neatly put together Title, gripping description and a URL that matches both you might just find that the URL could even aid in generating traffic.

Useful Tips:

1. When picking a domain name that people will link to, use your targeted search phrase.
2. When creating directories and files use your targeted keywords.
3. Individual words in the URL should be separated as the search engines might not recognize then when joined (although stemming seems to have seriously improved in the major search engines - Smaller Engines still look for exact matches), i.e. purplewidget.htm should be purple-widget.htm
4. When separating words in a file or directory, use a hyphen rather than an underscore (this is easier to see as an underscore can’t be seen if the link is underlined).

As you can see, the search engines and visitors alike have very similar needs when it comes to making sense of your website. Google have been on a crusade for as long as I can remember, trying to get webmasters to design websites that are aimed at a human audience. Perhaps this is prime example of good structures that work for both human and bot. Perhaps this is just a coincidence. But while we hope that the search engines return more accurate search results, this could indeed be a step in the right direction.

Which brings me back to the original question: E=mc² or e=mc2 ?
Remember to always pick one that will easier for the end user to understand be it human or robot. As it would appear that they are a lot closer than many may think.

Is Your Website a Unicycle?

2009-03-17T22:49:00.000-07:00

Is your website a unicycle, a vehicle that requires much training and skill before it can be used? While there are so many “beautiful” websites online, some simply don’t make sense. Have you ever found yourself on a website that seems quite impossible to use? Even worse, landed on a website after doing a search only to wonder why you are there at all?

Site usability is possibly one of the more important factors of a top performing website. While so many will argue that the site is nothing without a genuine web presence, I will argue that some websites rely purely on offline marketing. At the end of the day, if your website is impossible to use, nobody will be able to (or even want to) use it. Points to ponder when designing your website:

1. Navigation
2. Login/Signup
3. Onsite search
4. Flash and other multimedia
5. Bookmarks/Favourites
6. Contact

1. Navigation
This may seem like an obvious point but as most visitors are more likely to find your homepage, are they able to navigate to the section of the website that best relates to their needs? Simple text navigation will also make it easier for the search engines to index the individual pages of your website (where have you heard the design the website for a human visitor before?).

2. Login and Signup’s
Does your website require that visitor’s to login; do you want new visitors to signup for your newsletter (or other services)? If so, is it possible to do so from the homepage? While you may not want to place a login on the homepage, a link to a login page will suffice. Again the key is to keep it simple and clear as to what you expect of the visitor.

3. Onsite Search
This is crucial for any website that offers a large quantity of information or products. Can you imagine trying to find an item among 2,000 by going through a product list 10 items at a time? I didn’t think so. Offer you visitors what they are looking for by adding a simple search to your website. This should help speed things along. Many websites have a quick search option towards the top right-hand corner of the homepage (sometimes this spans the entire website in all the headers). Keep it simple, visible and obvious. Make sure that the average visitor knows that this is a search function.

4. Flash and other Multimedia
Okay so Flash is a pet hate of mine. But the same could be said of all multimedia that simply clutters a website. Remember that while multimedia and other interactive agents can at times seem really cool or even a good idea, some visitors don’t have advanced updated browsers. That said, sometimes the best way of doing something is through the use of these tools. Make sure that these are placed on well marked pages with an explanation of what they are about. This way, if the visitor is unable to view the contents the at least know what it is about and why they can’t view it. Otherwise they will simply think that the website doesn’t work and leave. After all, what use is a website that is broken?

5. Bookmarks and Favourites
If you want returning visitors (who doesn’t?) then it is usually a very good idea to offer a “bookmark this page” or “add to favourites” button. I’m pretty sure we are all in agreement that traffic is valuable so there is no excuse for letting it get away. The “favicon” is a useful way of separating your website from the others. Once made a favourite this icon will be found next to your websites name. This is an ideal spot to promote your logo and brand.

6. Contact
Even after making the site as foolproof as possible there will still be occasions where even will all that planning something will come along that you hadn’t factored. When this occurs make it as easy as possible for the visitor to contact you. Be it by making your contact details (phone, email and fax) available on each page, or by placing a quick contact us form that is accessible from each page. Again, you’ve worked hard to drive the traffic to your website; don’t let it simply get away.

Remember simple is best, leave no room for mistaken functions. Signups, Logins and searches should be clearly marked so as not to confuse the visitor. Make it as easy as possible for your visitors to find what they are looking for. With a well structured website you will notice that the conversion from visitor to customer will increase. At worst the few questions on where to find something or how to use the website will decrease. Your website is after all supposed to make your life easier as well as save you time.

SEO Design

2009-03-17T00:27:00.000-07:00

There are many aspects to consider when putting a design together, most of which are either second nature to the seasoned developer or overlooked completely by the novice. Although as we all know, what looks good doesn’t necessarily work well and vice versa.

Neatness of Code:
Code should be neat. Simple. No, it doesn't have to conform to W3C standards (Google doesn't even conform and it is estimated that only 3% of all sites actually do - side note that half the sites that do claim to conform don't either). With so few sites conforming to these standards how can Google (or any other engine for that matter) offer decent results if they negate 97% of the internet? Keeping code clean includes keeping all generic information such as style sheets and scripts in separate files.

Robot Tags and Text File:
Often you may not wish for the search engine bots to index certain pages. You can easily add the NoIndex attribute to this page. For whole directories you can simply add them into your robots.txt file located in the root of your website (http://www.website.com/robots.txt). Why is this important for design? Well the crawl rate and indexing is a concern for all departments. Remember I mentioned that all generic information should be kept separate? Well this way you can simply block those directories with the robots.txt file. This way the search engines will be forced to index your actual content pages before attempting to read your styling code.

Content:
Do not replicate content on multiple pages, it's a waste of time, effort and dilutes keyword value. While the duplicate “penalty” is a myth it does confuse the search engine as to which page is more important or even which page was first. Imagine someone giving you the key to a Ferrari and then telling you it was the key to the red Ferrari parked outside? Now imagine there are 10 red Ferrari’s parked outside! Which one does the key fit? If there is only one Ferrari the choice is easy. Usually the page which is indexed first is the one that is credited with being unique. The other pages are simply diluting their keywords and purpose. Personally I've always tried to aim one keyword per page this does lend itself to long tail combinations working on a single page as well.

While it is commonly accepted that the major search engines ignore boilerplate content (such as standard navigation, headers and footers), it has since been suggested that you can point out which sections Google should ignore. This doesn't seem to be in mainstream use just yet and I am sure that this won't make much of a difference as it remains open to abuse - as with so many other on-page factors.

URLS:
URL’s, or URI’s, can make a difference when it comes to ranking. As mentioned before people may link to the page (home or internal) with the actual URL. As mentioned before anchor text is vital for ranking a page so it makes sense then to include keywords in your URL. Long gone are the days when URL’s were dynamic and half the URL’s had strange characters and session ID’s (a massive source of duplicated pages).

www.website.com/page?ID=123
www.website.com/location/
www.website.com/Town-Name/

In addition to duplicating pages session ID’s and multiple variables can also cause a search engine spider to become trapped in deep pages. Once trapped a spider will leave the website this may result in your more important pages not being indexed. We can now specify the URL of a page through the use of a specific tag in the page header. In this instance the search engines (Google & Ask.com) will ignore session variables (or others you may have generated) and only index the page as you specify.

Links:
The easiest way for human and bot to get from page to page is through links. Not all links were created equal. Links hidden in flash, images or scripts may look good to the human but be impossible for the search engine bot to read. Content remains king and while community (social media) has recently been crowned queen but it is the text link that remains everyone’s servant. On your own website you can use desired anchor text to describe the page you are linking to.

From another website, if a link to a website is a vote, then the anchor text tells you what they are voting for. Because so many webmasters, bloggers and publishers link to pages using the URL as the link text it becomes quite clear as to just how valuable it can be to include your desired keywords in your URL. However, no matter how hard you try you will always have broken links to your site. This could be due to a typo or because you've moved the page (or restructured the website) in which case a custom 404 page is crucial. When rebuilding a website and changing your URL structure, it is advisable to 301 (permanent redirect) the old URL to the corresponding new one.

Forms and Restricted Pages:
Don’t hide your great content behind forms and other forms of logins. Robots can’t fill these in and won’t be able to reach these pages. Simply put they won’t know that it exists. There are ways around this, but why make it difficult of the Robots or even Humans who are now becoming more and more reluctant to part with personal info on the web.

Sitemaps:
XML sitemap for robots (often simply referred to as a Google Sitemap). If you have many pages, consider breaking these down into themes. At present I prefer to set up a static XML sitemap for the pages that won't change and a dynamic XML sitemap for listings, products, etc that will change on a regular basis.
HTML or plain text sitemap for humans can be a perfect place to get all those keywords in either the link itself or next to it. This is also an easy way for a visitor to find something listed on the website. Make sure that this page is easily accessible from the homepage.

Summary
It is reported that Google has over 200 criteria points when it comes to ranking a website. Many of those aren’t part of the design. But a few that are include:

Keep code to the minimal required

Minimise the use of code that search engines can’t read (hide it when possible)

Unique content - keep navigation consistent

Use descriptive URL’s

Keep unique URL's

Descriptive internal linking

Use text links to reach all of your pages

Custom 404 page

Don’t hide great content behind forms and login pages

Use XML Sitemaps for the search engines

Use a descriptive HTML sitemap

A Design for AI

2009-03-15T22:50:00.001-07:00

While creating a website can either be a simple or complex procedure it is always advised that you start simple and add on from there. Once you have a basic design it is a lot easier to add in advanced functionality.

Create a standard design that runs through the website, this is usually done by using base templates or include files. The search engines will read each file once per visit. What this does mean is that once the bot has cached the file it won’t need to reload it each time it views a page. More importantly this will also prevent these lines of code being replicated and taking up a good percentage of unique content on each page. Although it is now suggested that the major search engines can now recognise boilerplate content and filter it out for the most part.

CSS while being valuable to human visitors as it quickly styles a page with quicker load speeds this advantage can also be carried over to the bots. It has long been speculated that the quicker a page loads the more likely the bot is to continue indexing your website. It would almost seem that a time limit is posed on each visit, the more pages the bot can index in that time frame, the better for the site.

CSS has also widely taken over from the old frameset style of design used in what seems a totally different age. Frames are a bad way to design as the frameset page only holds details for where the how the frames are applied – there is no useful content. CSS enables you to place what you want exactly where you want it, no frames required.

Navigation is crucial for deep indexing. The search engines love text, they can follow a hyperlink to any page, but the anchor text in these links gives a very quick title of the page it links to. Use the anchor text wisely, if you are linking to a page about koalas, let the anchor text say “koala”. By following this format you will help identify the page as being about koalas.

Many people like to use flash for navigation. While this often looks pretty the search engines are unable to follow objects embedded in flash files. More often than not it would seem you could create a very similar effect by using CSS.

Links, links, links… This seems to be one of those things that everyone has on their mind constantly. From a design point it is important to remember a few simple things:

Don’t put too many links on a single page as this weakens the links strength.

Make sure that the links are text based and are clearly labelled; this will let the search engine know about the page it is linking to.

Try to link to all important pages from your homepage as this will help the bot create a hierarchy. If at all possible try to make each page accessible in just 2 clicks from the homepage.

Link to a static text sitemap from the homepage – This will help link each page just 2 clicks from the homepage. Also remember that when the bot finds this page it also finds every page on your website.

There is a lot more to linking but this is keeping it simple.

Breadcrumbs (No, I’m still not talking about the type that Hansel and Gretel used – but close enough) are useful once again to create a link to a page with related text as an anchor. In the case of our koala the pages that most likely lead them to where they are would be something like: animals – marsupials – koala. While we find ourselves on the koala page there is no need to link back to this page but you can link “animals” to the animal’s page and “marsupials” to the marsupial’s page. Again you get to make best use of anchor text.

Keep your pages uncluttered. This not only refers to the content but code of a page. By keeping the number of lines of code to a minimum you will be able to increase the download speed of the page. By doing this you will also prevent your content being diluted with what the bot may find to be little more than garble.

The content on your pages should be unique and specific. Going back to our friend the koala, many will know that koala’s eat eucalyptus. But it would be more beneficial to make short reference to this and then create a separate page for each of these related topics. While it won’t do any harm to mention eucalyptus on the page try to keep the info on that page predominantly about the koala. If the visitor is looking for koala’s then give them koala’s but by all means link to the eucalyptus page. Again you can make use of anchor text to link to eucalyptus.

As you can see by keeping it simple you can present the website in a manner that bot would really eat up and one that should also be focused on an exceptional visitor experience. The search engine engineers have tried their best to create a bot that will spot a website or page that is the most relevant for a particular search based on what would be best for a human visitor. As you can see in many cases the benefits of doing this is beneficial for both parties.

A Design for Life

2009-03-10T22:39:00.000-07:00

Creating a website is a fairly simple or very complex exercise depending on your needs. The best way to start is always go simple. Create a standard design that you will use to run throughout the website. The reason for creating a stock standard look and feel is so that the visitor very quickly gets used to navigation on your website and is able to find exactly what it is they are looking for. With a standard design it is also a lot easier to help drive home the branding of your service or product.

CSS, that’s Cascading Style Sheets, is a great way to keep a constant look and feel of a website consistent. Even better than including style to each page you can create individual files and simply include them in your pages. While the benefits are too many to remember at the moment, I see the greatest benefit of using CSS being the fact that you can make a single change to a single file and the changes will be global. You update one page and all your pages are updated in a single move.

Include files are wonderful. Depending on the language you are using to create your website much of the boilerplate design can be set in a single file and simply included. Much like CSS the biggest benefit from doing this is being able to make a single change and it updating every page on your website. These files could be the search function or a sign up script. They needn’t be full pages of information but rather standard snippets of code. Imagine you changed the subscription email address and had to update a script on 1000 pages? When you could simply update one include file and every page is instantly updated.

Navigation is vital. While it may seem sensible to categorise things the way that you have, remember that not everybody knows the finer details of your business. Imagine you had a website that was about mammals, separated into distinct sections (such as feline, canine, bears and so on). Not everyone would know that a koala is in fact not a bear despite often being referred to as a koala bear. For the record it’s a marsupial.

If you have many products or articles that people may need to look through then a search function is crucial. Even if I couldn’t find koala under bear if I used the search it would eventually bring up a link to the koala page.

Returning to the concept of keeping things simple it is notable that all of this could be incorporated into a single page.

Links, links, links… This seems to be one of those things that everyone has on their mind constantly. From a design point it is important to remember a few simple things:

Don’t put too many links on a single page.

Make sure that the links are clear and indicate where they lead to.

Try to link to all important pages from your homepage.

Link to a sitemap from the homepage – one that visitors can easily navigate to where they need to be.

There is a lot more to linking but this is keeping it simple.

Breadcrumbs (I’m not talking about the type that Hansel and Gretel used – but close enough) are very useful in letting the visitor know where they are and how they got there. In the case of our koala the pages that most likely lead them to where they are would be something like: animals – marsupials – koala

It is useful to link each of those back to the page that they represent (koala need not as they are already there) so link marsupials to the marsupials page and animals to the animals page.

Keep your pages uncluttered. This not only refers to the content but code of a page. By keeping the number of lines of code to a minimum you will be able to increase the download speed of the page. This includes optimising the images on your web pages for optimal display but also for the smallest possible files size. Again this will help speed up download times.

The content on your pages should make sense. Going back to our friend the koala, many will know that koala’s eat eucalyptus. But wouldn’t it make more sense to create a separate page for each of these topics. While it won’t do any harm to mention eucalyptus on the page try to keep the info on that page predominantly about the koala. If the visitor is looking for koala’s then give them koala’s but by all means link to the eucalyptus page.

As you can tell by keeping it simple you can give the average visitor a pleasing browsing experience. By building a good solid page the visitor will know where they are as well as why they are there.

Sick Websites

2009-03-09T22:48:00.000-07:00

It seems that no matter the time of year, someone is just getting over what ever bug it was that was doing it’s rounds (nothing worse than a summer cold). But I have been thinking how it is a good idea to have an annual check-up for your website. How often does your website get sick? When was the last time you checked for broken links? While the list could be endless here are a few things to check up on:

The Home Page
While this may seem like a no brainer it should always be your first stop. Does your homepage correctly describe your business, services or products? Often as time passes so to does the nature of your business and the home page needs to reflect your business accurately. Just recently we had a client inform us that the products on his website were a little outdated. As it turns out most of those products are no longer on offer, but more than this it would seem that they have changed the entire direction of their business – the website (and importantly the home page) needs to reflect this.

The main title of your website should always describe your services and products or at least grab the attention of your targeted audience. Many visitors sum up their interest in your website in the first few seconds so be sure to reassure them that they are at the right spot.

Navigation
As with the home page, many things change over time. Is navigation effective, quick, simple and easy to follow? Many websites are continually being updated; can these updates be reached from the homepage? Are internal pages correctly linked and grouped together? Have any of your pages been moved or removed? If so, has this resulted in any broken links?

While quick navigation is important to your visitors it is also vital for those search engine bots. The easier it is for the visitor to find your pages the easier it will be for the search engines to reach your pages. I always suggest a plain text sitemap for websites as this is ideal fodder for the search engines and requires no more than a simple text link from the home page.

Outdated and Up to Date
Is any part of your website outdated? While it is easy enough to explain face to face with other people what you many offer in terms of products and services (okay, so not always that easy – I used to sell rocks!) it’s often not that easy to convey this online. When was the last time you checked your website for industry updates or product updates. Is your latest news still current? While we all know that bad dress sense makes a comeback every 20 years or so, do you really want your website to have to wait that long before it is seen as current?

When adding pages did you make use of a template page? If so, have you modified the title and description tags?

User Friendliness
While navigation is possibly the first place to start on this one, a few other points to consider would be:

Email subscriptions, useful links and other end user products you may offer. Do all those documents you uploaded still exist? Are they compatible with the majority of browsers/readers that your end user may be using? Do you offer links to useful resources such as a document reader? If so, it may be helpful to offer installation tips or a how-to guide. Does your website encourage visitors to sign up to your mailing list? Equally important do you also have an unsubscribe option? And often overlooked does this work? So many websites have an automated mailing service and often the unsubscribe option is also automated – does this still work? I have had dealings with web hosts in the past that changed operating systems or scripting resources that left some of my code useless. I only found out once the complaints started rolling in. Keep checking that that scripts work. While an annoyance to you it could be the reason you lose a potential client.

Do you link to other resources? If so, you may wish to check that they are still there or that they are still the kind of resource you would like to link to. Sometimes websites like people can be struck down by disease. Be sure to remove links to any infected websites as this will reflect upon you and your website.

While design and overall content are vital factors in the functioning of a website these are often too large to be overlooked once they become a problem for one reason or another. Put together your own check-up list and check these factors every week/month/year depending on your needs. The real point here is that you should never assume that once it’s healthy up and running it will remain so without a little boost now and then – we all get sick from time to time.

If you have a few checks that you run regularly let me know.

Search the Final Fontier

2009-03-08T22:56:00.000-07:00

Second star to the right and straight on till morning. – James T. Kirk

I am still amazed on a daily basis just how many people don’t know, don’t realize or simply don’t care just how powerful the average internet browser can be. It almost seems as though the average user either has their browser homepage set to their own website homepage (usually by the technician that set the network up) or to a search engine or directory of preference.

I have seen some people enter email addresses into the web address bar or even a full URL’s into the search bar. Some would even argue that entering the URL into the search bar and hitting the infamous I’m Feeling Lucky button is quicker than having to move the mouse to the address bar and typing it in. While this may be true, I’m still not buying it. But after looking into our larger client’s websites it would seem that the company name is more often one of the top 10 keywords. I would imagine that many fail to bookmark or add the website to favourites.

While it is very easy to gain a top ranking for your company name, especially if your domain name matches, how many know how much potential traffic (good qualified traffic) is lost by not ranking first for your own company’s name. Some marketers even bid on their own name in paid ads simply so that nobody else can rank higher for searches. Sometimes your domain name won’t match your company name; perhaps you’ve opted for a slogan or keyword phrase as a domain name. Will your website still be returned at number 1 for your company name?

Consider the following: You have spent thousands (insert any currency here) of your hard earned pennies into offline marketing. Slowly over the years you have created a good well established brand. A neighbourhood brand if you wish. Then, as time passed, you decide that you would move with the times and seek the additional benefits of online marketing. After having a website created, you just sit back and wait for the traffic. After all having a website guarantees you success online, doesn’t it? Surely you will be successful online, especially if you already have an established market?

Sometimes with a bit of luck you websites can indeed rank well for good converting keywords. This usually requires a lot more work. But surely your website will rank top for your company’s name? This may come as a shock, but, “NO!” Quite often you will find an article or a page of information that may actually rank higher for your company’s name than your very own website. This won’t come as a surprise to any seasoned SEO consultant.

“Okay, so what does this Matter?" Some may ask. Well while the search may lead to another website that endorses yours, many times it does not. Can you imagine the damage that could occur if someone searched your company name, only to find that some blogger had taken your entire customer support department to task. Even worse than that would be if you didn’t even know. Imagine losing all those years of building a good solid, respected brand name only to have it ruined in moment because of a careless search.

Going back to my original point you can see how valuable it is that you have a top ranking for your company name. This is just one incident where the variations of how people search, and more importantly what they can find, that you should consider when marketing your website.

Some web browsers have a built in default search function that will return a search results page should a URL not be found. Even if the searcher was to put in a correct URL it may occur at times that either the site or the network are simply too busy to return the correct results. If these search results are returned, will your website have the number one ranking?

As any marketer would suggest, study your market. Learn the search techniques of those that you expect to be searching for you online. By doing this you will pick up those points that are often overlooked. While the goal remains a number 1 ranking for you key search phrases sometimes you can harvest a lot more traffic by just getting the smaller details right.

Paid/Sold Links

2009-03-05T22:57:00.000-08:00

Links… aren’t we all a little tired about hearing about links? Don’t link to bad neighbourhoods, don’t link to link farms… don’t get links from bad neighbourhoods; don’t get links from link farms. Don’t buy links. Don’t sell links. Don’t have too many links on one page. Don’t let all the links pointing to your website have the same anchor text.

Actually that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But I think we should go back to the beginning of all of the fuss. PageRank (my pet hate) seems to have started this. A long time ago Google (I’ll assume the other search engines figured this out too) learned that many webmasters were sneakily modifying their websites to gain high rankings. So they reverted to the voice of the people. By counting links and more importantly the text within those links they felt they could better rank a web page. The problem with this is that for some reason they decided to release the Google Toolbar with the PageRank value in it. This surely changed SEO forever. Well done Google, take a bow. *note the sarcasm* While they won’t let us in on any of their algorithm they will happily allocate out a very random value for the uneducated to obsess over.

So armed with a few green pixels, usually a few more than another website, webmasters suddenly had a tangible commodity to offer other webmasters. After all, everybody wants to rank highly on Google, don’t they? So if I have a website that is ranked 7/10 by Google surely that is worth selling a piece of? So that’s exactly what webmasters did. It’s a standard marketing tactic. If I have a publication that’s seen to have some worth, be it number of subscribers or area of distribution, then the space on my publication is seen to be valuable. Eventually that’s exactly what webmasters were doing. Selling a piece of Google worth became a thriving business. It was more than just SEO which is something you sell someone based on an idea and projected results. This was something you could actually see.

This was suddenly a major headache for Google who realised that yet again their system was being gamed by sharp webmasters/brokers and other advertising agents. So then we had the announcement that paid links were bad. But how would Google know that links were paid? Well they seemed to think that the algorithm could recognise that external links near the word sponsor or paid or even ads were paid links and discounted those links. Again, great announcement to webmasters everywhere as they removed these statements off of their websites.

I have to point out that at this point I don’t see what the problem is. If someone has a high valued website then surely selling advertising on these pages should be standard practice. More often than not these links were marked as being sponsors. This added prestige to these links as well as clearly informing visitors that these were sponsored links. The fact that the search engines didn’t like this practice… oh well, so be it.

So right about now Google came out with their own standard, breaking every W3C law out there by adding the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the link tag. As the search engine could no longer tell the difference between paid and legitimate links Google insisted that the webmasters flag these links. Great going Google! Was this a public admission that the googlebot just wasn’t able to tell the difference? So now webmasters had to either mark their links so that the algorithm would recognise it as a link to discount (because it wasn’t valid – despite being a genuine sponsor) or they would have to hide the link in a script of some kind (usually Java Script).

But as not all webmasters are honest this wasn’t going to be a foolproof plan. So Google did the next thing they could think of, as webmasters to report paid links. This turned any webmaster into a possible snitch. Great for the very ethical Google, right? After all, why would you let someone get away with cheating you? Then again if it’s not hurting traffic/rankings then why not just copy what the offending webmaster is doing?

Google started visibly lowering the Toolbar PageRank that was visible to the masses on the websites that were identified as link sellers, threatening many others with a similar penalty. However it is worth while noting that rankings haven’t been affected by these toolbar changes. I guess the ranking algorithm doesn’t work off of the same algorithm as the PageRank one does. Who really knows? Matt Cutts? Right now, I wouldn’t bet on that.

So it comes back down to a simple decision, do you buy/sell links or not. If you buy links for the sole purpose of increasing PageRank then expect a penalty. If you sell links watch out for a penalty.

However it surely is very difficult to truly monitor this one. Some would argue that relevant links would carry more weight and that non related links won’t be counted as they would be seen as possible paid links. But then it would be unfair for someone who is usually an SEO blogger to not be able to pass on any link strength to a website that sells a gadget that the blogger finds useful – even if it’s not SEO related?

What this all boils down to is one simple thing. Google created a PageRank monster which fed off of all of these links. Yet again we see a perfectly normal tactic used the past become branded black hat simply because the big boy(s) doesn’t like it. While we watch the success of paid links and other shady SEO techniques you can’t help but wonder what Google (and let’s not forget the other search engines) will try next to keep the internet a free and fair space.

I would say, Keep watching this space. I think things are due for a big shake-up in the near future. When this does happen the paid links hysteria may seem like a storm in a teacup.

PageRank the next Y2K?

2009-03-04T22:17:00.000-08:00

PageRank… or is it really just a few green pixels? Every so often we hear of a new PR update and the craze that follows it. Has this addiction finally reached a pinnacle or has the worst yet to come? I shudder to think.

Funny enough, the name PageRank has little to do with actual web pages. The name is derived from Google founder and developer Larry Page, hence the name Page-Rank.

PageRank is defined by Google as: PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

This translates into a democratic internet where the sites with more links are deemed more important, but that links from these important sites are deemed to be more important too.

I am sure that anyone who has an email listed somewhere in cyberspace has had a link request that has included the: …please put a link to our site on a PR2+ page. Possibly the most concerning is that nobody really knows what the PageRank of any page truly is, so how can anyone really verify this? With the current PageRank updates coming out so very slowly, about 4 times a year, how would a young website ever be able to compete with an established website?

Most web users, with the Google Toolbar installed, assume that PageRank goes from one to ten. This is little more than a very (and I do mean VERY) rough guide as to the popularity of the page. In this case the 1 really represents something silly like 0.000001 and the 10 virtually immeasurable. This all remains very subjective to the number of pages and the number of links on indexed pages and which of them Google gives weight to or ranks highly. As you can tell quite quickly, that value of 1 to 10 really could represent anything.

Now I say it: I’m so very much over this PageRank craze!

Okay, now that that has been said. Links are important. Links are possibly the most important attribute when trying to rank a webpage for a particular search term. You need only have a look back upon all the Link Bombs from the past to see that by simply adding links to a site you can rank it for virtually any search phrase. The terms find chuck norris and miserable failure come to mind. It must be said however that while many of these tactics do work, they often don’t last for very long.

PageRank is indeed a very valuable concern when trying to rank for competitive phrases. And as the PageRank description points out that the more links the better, the more popular the website sending the link even better still. But I think we can all appreciate that the true nature of this recipe is as closely guarded as the Coca-Cola or KFC recipe – perhaps even more so.

But perhaps it is the next level of the PageRank that really makes the most difference – Trust Rank. As mentioned before PageRank is calculated by the number of incoming links and from which site these links are from. A newly created website has little weight when it comes to casting a “vote” to another website. A site that has been online and active for the past 5-10 years would pass a lot more weight along. Usually you will see that these older sites do indeed have a good few green pixels in that toolbar. But possibly the most important factor here would be the age and traffic Google themselves have passed on over time. This would go some way to establishing trust. If Google has never blacklisted a URL and it has remained active and current throughout all those years then perhaps it is very much trusted. This TrustRank could indeed prove to be the real PageRank over time.

While it may be difficult to evaluate the true trust value of a website, especially a new website, there are a few tell tale signs to look out for:

Look for a security certificate; this is usually a good sign that someone else has already done the fine-tooth comb job for you.

Check the websites back links. Remember trust is often created by links themselves; these links will indirectly be linking you to the rest of the internet.

Check for indexed pages; this is where the green pixels do come in handy, if it has a visible PageRank then chances are that Google has ranked the page. It never hurts to use the site:www.domain-here.com command.

These are normally the easiest ways to establish the authenticity of website.

Links are very important in speeding up the indexing process to any new website as the more links that are incoming the more likely Google will notice your website. The weight of those links are more important than bulk. After all a site that has a high Trust Rank will pass on more weight to another page than a page that has 1000 links from spam websites.

As for right now, I believe that little green bar to be nothing but a big hoax as it is out dated, rarely updated and so far pretty meaningless, I wouldn’t give it any more credit than the Y2K bug. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google were to announce that its PageRank toolbar is little more than smoke and mirrors. If so, Larry Page is surely a better illusionist than David Copperfield.

Men (and Women) with Hats

2009-03-03T23:19:00.000-08:00

SEO is so easily divided into two categories, the good and the bad, the yin and the yang… the light side the dark side. Okay so it’s not all a battle between good and evil, but the Star Wars analogy is closer to the mark. SEO is often broken into two camps those that practice safe optimisation (White Hat) and those that prefer to break the rules for immediate results (Black Hat).

Much like Darth Vader, a black hat SEO will use all possible weapons at their disposal, often sacrificing a ship (site) or two on the way to gaining victory (top ranking). This dark side of SEO breaks the terms of service set out by the search engines by any means they deem necessary. The only thought is immediate results. Sometimes these sites may show lasting results, but this is rarely the case.

On the other hand the white had SEO is more like Obi-Wan. Controlled, directed, methodical and with a much better staying power. Okay so I know that Obi-Wan Kenobi was struck down by Darth Vader in Episode IV, but he made an awesome apparition guide. There are guidelines put down by the search engines and the white hat SEO does their best to stick to the rules knowing that deviating from this could lead to penalties which would quickly undo all the good work done up to this point.

Most SEO consultants know how difficult it can be to explain to a prospective or new client that results may take time. Very much like a Jedi this can sometimes sway an SEO to offer quicker less than ideal solution. Once you start down this path it is often difficult to turn back. Sometimes it is impossible. The rewards can be great but if caught out the penalty could lead to the end with a very dead website.

Okay, so that’s very much a black and white or light side, dark side take on it. Lets face it, few things are that clear cut and simple. White hat is only white hat for as long as the powers that be say it is – or until they catch on and ban a technique. I guess I would say, White Hat SEO is an oxymoron to some degree. You aren’t supposed to game the search engines but surely optimisation to some degree is gaming the system?

Going back to the Star Wars Universe I would say that most SEO folk fall into a third category: Han Solo. This is more a greyish kind of hat. This is where you go with your “gut feeling” on what is possibly right. If optimising a site for a client you certainly would keep well clear of anything that would get their website banned. But you would also be looking to rank as highly as possible so would be willing to “bend” a few of the rules.

By going through most of those points I think most people would realise that the simple act of optimising a website IS gaming the system. Okay, so many do try their best to keep within the webmaster guidelines. But an attempt to gain a favourable ranking is in some way an attempt to skew the results, in your favour. While sticking to the webmaster guidelines one could call this technique white hat. Although I would say a true white hat SEO is one that does nothing. They simply build a perfect website never considering a search engine for a single moment. Black hat SEO would be the exact opposite, building a website for a search engine, never considering the user for a moment.

Personally I think we are all pretty much like Han Solo, we know where the boundaries lie and we stick to our side of it… well as much as possible. However as the boundary keeps changing, what is right today is outlawed tomorrow, it does become difficult to maintain a perfect score. Fortunately the powers that be are quite forgiving as long as it’s not blatant over the top Black Hat you’ll usually not be in too much hot water.

Black hat? White hat? Grey hat? Which one do you wear? Personally I don’t like wearing hats. Mostly as I’ve got quite a bit of hair and usually end up with terrible hat-hair. But I do think that it’s time we got over the idea of SEO being a shade of black/white it’s so much more than that.

Local Search and Optimisation

2009-03-02T22:34:00.000-08:00

Recently I was reading yet another article about the trouble in Zimbabwe and how it affected South Africa. I was surprised to find that many people didn’t realize that South Africa was a country in its own right, but most thought that Zimbabwe was a country in South Africa or were all part of one and the same. While I find this amusing (as both South Africa and Zimbabwe are very much individual independent countries) I did realise that not everybody is 100% clued up on their geography.

Okay so what does this have to do with search? As many small businesses are unable to supply the entire world with their product or service many try to localise their client base. This is carried over into their website. It’s not easy for a plumber in London to be making call-outs to China. While this is an extreme example I think you get the point.

When it comes to optimising websites for local searches it is important to always include the area name in your key phrases. So instead of optimising your website for say experienced plumber after hours you might optimise it for experienced plumber after hours in London. But as you may have guessed that while the tail grows longer you are expected to have fewer visitors. Don’t forget that long tail keywords do convert better though. However at this point you may also have noticed that you could start to shorten your key phrase. Now it would be easier to obtain top rakings for the phrase experienced plumber in London or even at a push simply plumber in London.

However remember that while local search is intended for localised visitors not all qualified visitors will be locals. Okay, so that sounds a little confusing but consider the fact that not everyone searching for your services will be in the same town while doing the searching. Sometimes people need to do a search of a location and services that they may need while away on holiday, business or even for someone else. Imagine a chronic diabetes sufferer needing to know of the nearest doctor while on vacation or someone needing to know where the nearest laundromat is while on vacation in a small seaside town. Both of these searches may be done with only a little information on the actual location of where they may be.

I have often gone on vacation to small towns where many of the nearest services were in the next town. Often people won’t even know which suburb of a town your business may be located in. I think of Johannesburg and while I know that there are literally thousands of tiny suburbs, many people (and yes, even I am guilty of this) simply lump them all together as Johannesburg.

So what does this all mean for localised search?

Never assume that the visitors know exactly where you are. If your town only has a population of 75 and has never been a hot spot of any kind, then chances are nobody will know your town off hand. In these instances go bigger, optimise for the larger geographical area or town as well as the suburb. I know that this certainly has worked for smaller estate agent websites we have worked on based in a small suburb of a major South African city. While they rank highly for variations of their keywords for their specific town and suburb, the bulk of all traffic comes from the very broad searches as this makes a great starting point. While this traffic doesn’t convert as well, it certainly means that you won’t be missing a potential lead.

Always include area info. Once again as many visitors may not know the area very well it may prove very useful to supply a map of the greater area with a breakdown town by town. As mentioned earlier with many of the small towns that dot the map, many of the service providers may supply more than a single town due to supply and demand. This should help with two things. Firstly, it will help put distance and location of your business into some perspective in relation to where they will be. Secondly, this certainly won’t hurt in the search engines. Always remember relevant information is always welcome; just don’t cram it full of useless information.

Going back to the opening paragraph we must remember that not everyone knows their geography that well, and fewer still are masters of localised geography. Keep this in mind when optimising your website. Always try to think like an out-of-towner. Keep it specific, going broad when you must but always make sure that you have your bases covered for your local searches (although if you’ve done your offline marketing well this shouldn’t be a problem).

SEO the Game

2009-03-02T01:50:00.000-08:00

A while back the question came by as to what it was that I wanted to when I grew up. I just laughed and replied, I’m most likely never going to grow up, so there is no need to think about it! Going back to my first childhood though, I can recall wanting to play computer games for a living – didn’t we all? This got me thinking which, as most know, is quite a rare occurrence.

Remember those classic old arcade games? I’m talking long before anyone even knew what a CD was let alone a DVD, so PlayStation is out the equation. I’m talking about the likes of Space Invaders and Packman. These were games that never ended; you kept playing until you finally lost. The ultimate goal was to aim for a score you knew that nobody could ever beat or at least one that wouldn’t be beaten anytime soon.

I always wanted to be the guy that set those scores. I always wanted to see my name at the top so that when you started the game for the first time it would be my name that was automatically on top.

After some thought, I came to the realisation that I am now doing exactly that. I spend my days playing on the biggest game system known to man, the Internet. My job is just like those games from my youth where I tried to get the highest score that I possibly could. We all want that number one ranking. While top 10 positions are notable, places 2 and 3 out of 30,098,293 are still a good score, but that number 1 is the most coveted of prizes.

While the older titles of Packman and Space Invaders have faded away, we have now replaced them with titles such as Ask, Yahoo!, MSN and the most popular one of this generation Google. Each title has its own set of rules but the game play is very similar. Build a well structured website, build good solid content, create something unique and useful and then tell the world about it. If done right you could be climbing up that leader board. If not, nobody will even notice that you bothered to play the game.

But by now you are asking yourself, How does this help me with SEO? SEO is the game. Never forget that while you may be top today there could be someone else who’s just managed to work the system, learned the sequence just that bit quicker or better than you have. Never become complacent with a top spot, keep playing. While we will never know just how close the next player’s score is to ours, the prize of Number 1 Player is never to be taken lightly.

SEO is a game; it requires know-how, skill and a bit of luck now and then to master this art. The best tip I can give anyone however is not about linking, optimising content or working on title tags. I won’t tell you about analytics or how to set up paid ads. I won’t try to add how valuable social media can be to your business. The most valuable piece of advice I can offer is simply this, Enjoy the game! It’s that simple.

I’ve always been best at the games I’ve enjoyed the most, hasn’t everyone?

Longtail Keywords Convert Better

2009-03-02T00:53:00.000-08:00

You’ve built a state-of-the-art website expecting it to be your little nest egg. But the thought that runs through your mind now is how you are going to get people to see it. The first thought that comes to mind is to gain top rakings with major search engines and anyone else for that matter. This leads you to the next question, which is What keywords are you going to target?

This can be a tricky obstacle at the best of times. You expend countless hours into researching the keywords and phrases with the highest level of popularity. Now, with the hard work done, sleepless nights and agonising wait over, you finally see your website rank for these keywords and phrases. While this does start to generate quite a bit of traffic you notice that it hasn’t made that much impact on the bottom line. Why aren’t they buying, signing up or downloading your product or service?

Even after doing all your homework, identifying what were money maker keywords you simply aren’t making any. Could it be that you aren’t bringing in the best-qualified visitors?

As a web design, hosting and marketing company, we at PropData based in South Africa, undertake the promotion and maintenance of all of our clients’ websites. The better the website performs, the happier our clients are and in tern, the happier our clients the more likely they are to refer us to other interested or needing parties.

Recently we made changes to one of our largest clients’ websites and it was decided that rather than try and hit generic search terms that we would prefer to target longer tail keywords. The reasoning here was that while searching for real estate online, the average search would include both location and dwelling type (apartment, house, etc). The results were astounding! When comparing the statistics against a previous record month (a month in the past 6 months that had recorded the highest number of visits) we noticed a few very interesting points:

Traffic had increased considerably, while number of pages per visitor decreased.

Enquiries on listed property had increased.

Mailing list subscriptions had doubled!

It would seem that while going broad and targeting generic search terms we had missed the most important factor; that the average searcher is looking for something specific.

While in this particular case there was a noticeable increase in visitors, the number of page views didn’t grow in accordance. While many might be concerned that we had lost traffic, and targeted traffic at that, the increase in mailing subscriptions as well as enquiries would suggest something better. We no longer simply had the random visitor having a look about but that the average visitor was now someone who was actually looking for a specific listing. They were going straight to the listings that met their needs. But most important - this visitor was now converting.

The client was very happy to see such positive results. With a constantly growing mailing list of prospective clients, their latest listings are being viewed by an ever growing audience. This in turn can only result in further business. While in real estate it is difficult to make a sale through a website, we consider a direct enquiry on a listing a success.

The same principle and model applies to all websites. If you sell mobile phones from a single manufacturer then don’t try and target mobile phones as a key phrase. Rather if you are selling Nokia phones target Nokia mobile phones or better yet even target each listing by model too. At the end of the day, someone searching for mobile phones is simply going to look through your website, possibly enquire on a few listings but will have very little commitment. However someone who is searching for a Nokia communicator 9300i mobile phone is in a much better position to make an impulse purchase when they find your website. At this point they are specifically seeking that which you have to offer.

I would like to add that while your meta description tag won’t aid you in rankings this can be crucial when it comes to making that conversion. A well thought up and informative description tag can often in itself convert a good search engine ranking into a click through. Once again it comes down to being precise rather than just having a standard generic site description.

While many webmasters and website owners congratulate themselves on gaining a high ranking or high volumes of traffic, it is always important to remember the purpose of the website. For most of us a website is a means to make sales or gain further interest in our services. Either way this translates into us wanting more business. If your traffic isn’t converting then it is really the same as owning a shop in the busiest mall with nobody ever stepping through your door.

Linking Practices Part 4 of 3: The Unconfirmed

2009-02-27T00:45:00.000-08:00

Here in part four of “Linking Practices” we will cover how to maximise the benefits of those links we discussed previously (check out part 1: “Links Defined”, part 2: “Links Applied” and part 3: “Link Tricks”).

Okay, so you’ve already noticed that this is part 3 of 4 (you did notice, didn’t you?). After all it is commonly known that the best trilogies come in fours. These are unconfirmed ideas. I don’t think anything can really be classed as a myth or truth in SEO simply because what holds true today may not hold true tomorrow or vice versa. That’s why I refer to these as ideas and not myths. I guess that’s what makes it all so very exciting.

Link Juice:
Ah, link juice. What exactly is it? How much does a page have? How is it lost? It is suggested that the total link juice that each page has is a result of the number of links going into a page. Of course if you wanted to be able to measure that one accurately you would need a base page to work from. So for now we will simply say that a page with many links has a lot more link juice than a page with few links (assuming all links are equal). I don’t believe that link juice can be lost. It simply becomes more diluted at more links are added. Sometimes some of this juice can be given up by having too many links. Imagine a page with 1000 links; do you think that Google will actually follow each of those? I doubt it. I would venture to guess that when encountering a page with an excessive number of links our friend the Google Bot would simply ignore the whole page.

PageRank Shaping:
“Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google” – Matt Cutts. Okay so purposefully nofollowing your own pages is a confirmed way of promoting some pages of your website a little more than others. After all, who would want to rank for the phrase “contact me” when you are trying to sell kites? This brings us back to the first topic, Link Juice. Each page has X amount of juice or link love to spend. This is relative to many different factors, but we’ll just say that it’s due to just inbound links at this point. Each link from that page shares some of that X. If you only have 2 links from a page, each link is worth ½ of X. If you have 4 links then each link is worth ¼ of X and so on. Internal PageRank can be shaped by nofollowing some of the pages you don’t desire or need to rank – the privacy policy or terms and conditions come to mind here. By nofollowing these pages you don’t have to share the juice. In this case the pages that do get the juice will be getting more.

Think of it as follows, you and 5 friends (that’s 6 of you) share a six pack and you each get a beer. But if three of your friends are teetotallers, then those of you that do indulge in alcohol each get 2 beers, getting you just that little bit drunker in the process. By nofollowing you can do exactly the same thing to each of your pages. Although I would suggest that you don’t drink while writing your copy.

Buying/Selling Links:
While Google have come right out and said “do not buy text links” (for PageRank purposes that is). However it can be very difficult at times to spot a paid link. While many publishers mark their “sponsored” links accordingly there are no doubt a few that won’t. While the PageRank craze does seem to be dying down a little many still believe that any page’s worth is proportional to the toolbar PageRank – something that we know is inaccurate at best. I would bet that if you had a site or page with a high PageRank you wouldn’t have to look too long or hard to find a willing buyer for a link to two. Will Google ever find out? Who knows just how good they are at detecting bought links? And regardless of how good they are there will always be a few that manage to get away with it. So far it would seem that the only real penalty for buying or selling links is a decrease in toolbar PageRank – is that really so bad?

While there are many ways to try and cheat the system by weighting some links, negating others and even blatant cheating (by buying links) sooner or later you will get caught or worse you may end up nofollowing your more important pages by accident. It is vital to remember that the darker the hat you are wearing the shorter your success periods tend to be.

After all the changes in algorithm, the war on paid links… the list really does go on. There will never be a substitute for a well designed site with unique content as this will gain links naturally.

Linking Practices Part 3 of 3: Link Tricks

2009-02-25T22:46:00.000-08:00

Here in part three of “Linking Practices” we will cover how to maximise the benefits of those links we discussed previously (check out part 1: “Links Defined” and part 2: “Links Applied”).

This section could also be classified as: Tips, Hints and Cheats. While I recommend and try at all times to adhere to ethical and honest practices there are many webmasters out there that do not. While PageRank still remains a prize in eyes of many webmasters there will always be a handful that will do anything to try and game the system. These are some of the usual ways in which they do this:

Robots.txt
The robots file is a little plain text file that resides in the root directory of a website. The purpose of this file is to notify the search engine spider of which pages should be indexed and which should not. After all you wouldn’t want the backend to your website indexed in the search results. This file stands alone and you cannot know its contents by looking at a standard webpage on that site. I know many webmasters have now started using the robots.txt file to exclude their link pages from the search engine spiders. By doing this they are effectively preventing the search engine from seeing the link to your page. This in turn makes your link back to them seem like a valuable one way link.

An easy way to search for this would be to type the link to the robots file directly into the address bar: “http://www.dodgywebmaster.com/robots.txt”

This will return the contents of the robots file. Check that the directory or page that your link is listed on isn’t listed in this file. If it is, then you may indeed be dealing with a dodgy webmaster.

Meta Tags
By simply adding the robots Meta tag to the page that has your link on it, webmasters can still have the page indexed but none of the links followed.

<meta name=”robots” content=”index,nofollow” />

While it may seem like the page has been indexed the search engines will ignore your link. This will once again make it appear that their link on your website is one of those much coveted one way links.

An easy way to determine if the webmaster in question is using these tactics would be to visit the page that has your link and view the source code. This is easily done by going to “view” on the menu bar and selecting “view source” (Firefox) or “source” (Internet Explorer) - this may vary slightly from browser to browser. You will find the robots tag somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags.

Again, if you find that the robots tag has the nofollow attribute, you know that the webmaster is not letting the search engines find their way to your website.

NoFollow
The no follow attribute is one that Google has pushed for and it would seem that the other major search engines are now starting to accept. This attribute is added into the anchor tag to prevent the search engine from following that link.

<a href=”www.yourwebsite.com” rel=”nofollow”>

This was an answer to paid text links. Google insisted that all paid links should not pass on PageRank and that webmasters selling links should mark them appropriately. This has been applied to most blogs in an attempt to combat spam. After all, spammers leave pointless comments on your website with the hope of gaining a link back to their site. The Google bot no longer follows these links rendering them useless when it comes to influencing the search engine results.

However once again this can be used for the wrong reasons. Some webmasters “no follow” all links from their site so as to hold as much PageRank as possible. There is even a school of thought that believe that if you used this attribute you actually give the other site a “bad vote” however I have yet to find any evidence to support this.

In order to find out if a webmaster is using this technique, search the source code of the page with your link for this tag. The easiest way to do this is to run a search on the source code of this page for the link text or website URL. The anchor tag will be near these.

Java Script
Search engines still have trouble reading java script if at all. By embedding your link in a short script the search engines will not be able follow your link or even recognise it as a link for that matter.

Normally the easiest way to spot this is by running your mouse over the link. If the destination URL in the status bar doesn’t match your URL but when you click on the link it takes you to your website it might be a script running. The only real way to know is by checking the source code. In this case you need to know what you are looking for.

By checking for these simple tricks you can ensure that your link is indeed pointing to your website and that the search engines will be able to find your site. Often paid links will have a script or a no follow attribute, this is good practice from the webmasters side as the search engines could penalise them for not marking paid links. Always remember that each circumstance has its own set of rules.

Also I would urge you not to try and use these methods to game other webmasters and cheat them out of potential link-love. If you are linking to and from good reliable, related websites then you would want the search engines to pick up and follow each and every link.

Linking Practices Part 2 of 3: Links Applied

2009-02-24T23:03:00.000-08:00

Here in part two of “Linking Practices” we will cover the application of those links we discussed previously (check out part 1: “Links Defined”).

As with all marketing practices the best place to start is always with a plan. In this case we will need to establish what the purpose is of building these links. With links being a major factor when ranking a website many webmasters use links to try and gain higher rankings in search engine results. Sometimes links are valuable simply as they drive traffic to your website. As we all know traffic is very blood that powers your online business. Consider links the veins.

Reciprocal Links:
These links often offer very little aid when it comes to ranking highly in the search engines. While these links usually reside on a page that is no more than a long list of URL’s occasionally these can be of great benefit. A reciprocal link simply means a link exchanged. Usually you can request the anchor text and description you wish the link to display as well as the URL this points to. This makes sense as this is supposed to be a beneficial exchange for both parties.

While finding your link on a page with a thousand other links won’t be worth much at all, exchanging exclusive links can make the world of difference. For instance if I was a small independent car dealership, it would make sense to team up with a local insurance provider. In this case I could offer a direct link exchange straight from even my homepage to theirs and vice versa. If either I or they were running a special, why not point that link directly to that special.

With this kind of link you could drive direct, targeted traffic to your website from a related site.

One Way Links:
These are usually generated by previous visitors to your website with little coercion from your side. The best way to gain these links is by offering good solid content on your website. This is always a lot easier said than done. But by offering content people would want to share with others or be able to easily revisit themselves, visitors would add links elsewhere on the net and usually with good keyword rich phrases. It makes sense to title a link to another webpage with a relevant phrase. This is why your content is so important.

The second benefit of this type of link is that it is usually linked to an individual page. Couple this with a keyword rich anchor text and suddenly your website has a lot more credibility.

These are very difficult to come by. So many webmasters seem to be afraid of spreading a little link-love in the fear that they may lose some precious PageRank.

Three Way Links:
This practice is still practiced by many, in exactly the same fashion as reciprocal links. More often than not with poor or no results at all. Again the reason is that so many webmasters while trying to dupe the search engines simply add the link onto a link heavy page. As we all know by now, the more links on a page, the less valuable each one becomes.

This can however be a good way to have a new website indexed. By offering another website a link from an already establish website if they link out to a new website you can help speed the indexing and ranking of the new website.

siteA –> siteB –> SiteC

In this case the goal was to have site C indexed without using site A to do so (what ever that reason may have been) so there may be no need for Site C to link back to Site A.

This will only work if you can get a valuable link from that website (Site B in this case), being added to that dreaded “links” page just won’t cut it.

Deep Links:
These are the best (in my opinion) as they are usually far more specific and aid with the deep indexing of your website. These can be a result of any of the link building techniques. As mentioned above, these link to an individual page.

By gaining a link directly to an internal page of the website you have the potential of driving traffic to a specific page and usually with a specific reason in mind. If you are selling goods many people might link to your specials page, if you are a blogger this may be a link to a popular post, or if you offer a service of some kind this could be a link to a bio page.

Again, if I owned a small car dealership I would want to offer my visitors an insurance option. But if the site I was linking to offered various forms of insurance I would want to link directly to their motor insurance page.

Apart from driving traffic to a specific point on your website, these links will also aid rankings. In this case it makes sense that a link from a car dealership to a page on an insurance website would in some way be related to motor insurance. Especially if the anchor text said motor insurance. I am sure you can see the real benefit here.

Paid Links:
Paid links have a very bad name at the moment. This has been used mostly to game the search engines of late. But it looks as though the major search engines may be getting on top of this one. While it is seriously frowned upon to buy text links for search engine purposes, there are still valid forms of paid links.

Visitors to your website are valuable, but targeted visitors are even more valuable as they are your business’s lifeblood. It is often feasible to buy links (or traffic) to your website. Possibly the most popular way of doing so is the Google AdWords program, where a link to your website is displayed for specified search terms. Here you only pay once someone clicks on your link.

But sometimes you have to pay a fixed fee for a permanent link from a website to yours. This could be a simple text link to a flashy flash banner. The aim here is to drive targeted traffic to your website. If my business offered motor insurance then it would be viable to buy a link on a car dealer’s website – provided they had the traffic to justify it. A paid link becomes more valuable as the traffic to a website increases. After all there is no point in running a billboard ad in Antarctica where only a handful may see it; you would want to run it on the main highway (where all the traffic is).

This can be a very valuable but always make sure that you are able to keep records as to how many times your ad has been seen, the number of visitors that have clicked on the ad and so on. After all, you want your ad to be profitable, if the ad costs you $20 a month you want to be able to at least cover your costs if nothing else.

Internal Links:
This is the simplest form of linking. Simply link from one page of your website to another. That said there are a few simple rules that you should adhere to, these apply to the search engines and human visitors alike.

Make sure that all your important pages can be found within two clicks of your home page. This makes it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for. We are all in agreement that nothing is more frustrating than finding a website and going round in circles trying to find something. The same holds true for the search engines, unless your website is an authority website there is little need for the search engines to go deep into your website.

Text links! The search engines love text. They follow text links easily with the added benefit of having had a title to that link (the anchor text). While most human visitors have the ability to read graphics, JavaScript and flash some may have had this functions disabled. For these visitors simple text navigation is a must.

This is just a brief overview of how these links can and should be applied. Always remember that a link for a page is a vote, always try to make the link as relevant as possible, this includes the source, destination and content of the link.

I will offer a few tips on how to maximise the benefits of these links in part 3.

Linking Practices Part 1 of 3: Links Defined

2009-02-23T22:14:00.000-08:00

This is a trilogy of links... told in four parts.

Here in part one of “Linking Practices” I will run through and explain in a little detail. While each method of linking has its benefits it also often has disadvantages. More often the advantages outweigh the disadvantages – if done correctly.

Reciprocal Links:
While many believe reciprocal links to be dead, these links have the potential to be either very useful or very useless; it all depends on the source for this one. A reciprocal link is a link swapped with another website. While the search engines don’t really give these all that much weight (unless from an authority site) these can be useful in driving traffic to your website from related websites. With enough of these links each driving small amounts of traffic to your website the increase in traffic can be quite noticeable.

A reciprocal link from an industry leader or a related industry leader can often lead to good volumes of traffic to your website. The greatest benefit here is that these are visitors that are already interested in your product or service. The disadvantage of running reciprocal links is that you get the world and his brother wanting to swap links with you, usually with absolutely no relevancy at all.

One Way Links:
These are the most valuable links when considering the search engines. A direct or one way link is a link to your website that is not reciprocated. The reason that this is so much more valuable is because in this case it a website that has linked back to yours without any solicitation (or at least that is how the search engines see it). The theory behind this and the PageRank algorithm is that every link to a website counts as a vote. Obviously the more votes you have the move important you site is seen to be. However it is also believed that every vote that you have to send out weakens your importance. Kind of like if you had a group of 10 people that all gave you $10, you would be up $100, but if you also had to give out $10 to each of them, then you simply break even. In the same way, the more votes that you are able to "bank" (not handed back) in this case the better off you are.

The problem with this form of linking is that it can often be very difficult to get this kind of link. With everyone so afraid of losing out on link juice many have become paranoid about linking out without any form of reciprocation.

Three Way Links:
Three way linking was originally a practice created to try and game the search engines. Basically it was a way of trying to create perceived one way links to websites but by giving out links in return. Sound confusing? Many people were confused and many to this day fear it will harm your search engine rankings. I don’t think this has ever been the case.

Described simply this would be a set of 3 sites that each link out to the next website until the last website links back to the first, or Site A links to Site B which links to Site C which in turn links back to Site A.

siteA –> siteB –> siteC –> siteA

I think most of the search engines have caught on to this practice and now treat these links in small clusters as no more than reciprocal links.

Deep Links:
Deep linking is the practice of building links to individual pages of your website. Again this can be crucial for gaining favour with the search engines. While your website may offer a multitude of products, it will be very difficult to rank the homepage for each and every product you offer simply because it isn’t the most relevant page for that product. Sense would say that one of your website’s deeper pages is more relevant, and therefore a competitor’s optimised page will be a lot more relevant than your homepage.

This kind of link usually comes from a previous visitor that found that particular page useful for what ever reason. This is also often a one way link to your website with related anchor text. By finding these individual pages through other websites most search engine bots place more value on these pages. The downside of this kind of linking is that it can be very difficult to obtain (without simply paying for it that is).

Paid Links:
Just don’t do it! Okay, so you can do it, just don’t do it to try and increase PageRank or influence the search engine results. Or even more specifically don’t buy text links where you can specify the kind of anchor text that links back to your website.

Even if you stick to the rules and don’t buy text links to manipulate PageRank or the search engine results you can still gain great benefit for paid links. Very much like paying for an advertisement in high profile magazine, top radio station or prime time TV, you pay for the link because the site is popular (in this case it has large traffic volumes). This in turn should help drive large volumes of traffic to your website.

Internal Links:
While all of the other methods of linking mentioned here come from external sources this one is equally important and will be mentioned in greater detail in part 2.

But unless the internal linking of the website is easily crawled by the search engines many of your pages can’t be indexed and will seriously harm chances of performing well in the search engine search results.

This is a brief summary of the type of links to a website. I will explain how to put these in practice in part 2.

Doorway and Landing Pages

2009-02-22T22:09:00.000-08:00

When somebody mentions something about a landing page or even a doorway page you immediately dismiss that as an archaic practice. But today with the search engines indexing almost every page of a website, Every page of a site indexed by search engines is a potential landing page.

In years past it was sometimes a tactic to create a single page for each search engine in the hope of winning top spot for a particular search phrase. This now heavily penalised practice of creating gateway pages was one of the earlier ways webmasters gamed the system.

But by landing page I’m not referring to a page that has been optimised for one specific keyword which would then lead you onto another webpage or even website, but rather a page that could possibly generate traffic to your website or even convert traffic. With so many pages including dynamically generated pages now ranking for search terms, each page is now a possible entry point for a search.

An important point to always remember is that each page is indexed by the search engines (or at least you hope it is if you’ve done your homework correctly). This would mean that each product in your catalogue has been indexed. While some websites simply put lists of products together many have pages dedicated to individual products. Each of these individual product pages could be a landing page for a search for that particular item.

While someone searching for “t-shirts” may find the home page of a multitude of suppliers, how many of those same sites would rank for the search “britney spears t-shirt”? This is where the optimisation of each page would come in handy. After all if your pages were optimised for their specific product they would be easier to find (and longer tail keywords do convert better). By the time the visitor reaches your website they are not only keenly looking for your product but are able to instantly find it at the page they find themselves on.

While this may seem logical to many webmasters you may be amazed at how few put this into practice. I have actually searched for a “britney spears t-shirt” and was unable to find anything that lead me to the actual product. In most cases I found a website that promised t-shirts but Britney Spears was related to their other merchandise. It would appear that many webmasters have overlooked the value of turning a simple search into an instant sale.

In this case a simple page optimised for exactly what it sells (a particular t-shirt in this case) would draw a visitor, confirm that it is exactly what the visitor is looking for and hopefully make the sale. In doing so this may have bypassed the homepage as well as other pages usually credited with generating quality traffic.

Unlike landing pages of the past where the page was rarely valuable to the visitor, these pages need to provide the visitor with a reason as to why they are there while at the same time reassuring them that not only is the page is legit but that the whole website is reputable.

Make sure that on these pages you have:

State clearly what the page is about or offering.

Links to privacy and security policies

If the purpose of the site is to make sales, assure the visitor that payment is secure.

Links to the about us/contact us pages. The visitor will be able to either contact you directly with any questions or will get a better feel for your company.

Possibly the most powerful use of a landing page is for competitions or other special offers. This is a single page, often not even linked into the rest of the website that serves a single purpose – to capture info or make an instant sale. This page is usually linked to from a specific source such as an email or a preferred partner. These are usually run in the form of competitions or special offers. The reasoning behind this is that you already have an interested party and you will be making them a unique offer where they will either say yes (and sign up or buy), or no and simply not visit the page.

These are a sales person’s dream. While having a specific audience already targeted it is often easy to style and word a page for optimum conversions. Needless to say that the conversion rate from visitor to sale should be relatively high or the campaign simply wasn’t put together correctly.

While gateway pages are a thing of the past the value and benefits of a well structured landing page are immense. While making special deals available to only a select few or trying to generate added sales through better optimisation of individual pages remember that every page should benefit the visitor. If you landing page is serving only to rank highly in the search engine results the visitors may not see the benefits and your number one ranking would be for nothing.

Oh, and for those who are interested, I did eventually find a Britney Spears t-shirt after a lengthy search.

Flashing your Wears

2009-02-12T22:12:00.001-08:00

Mostly because Corrine wanted to know…

When I think of flash I immediately think of Flash Gordon or simply “The Flash” himself. While growing up these genres of demigods were heroes of mine. Even now as an adult and I use that term very loosely as all it really means is that I can buy beer and am allowed to vote, I still think back on how cool they were, particularly Flash Gordon* who went on to save the world.

These days when people speak of Flash they are referring mostly to Macromedia and the impressive interactive designs that adorn many of the top websites today. Initially, Flash was a pet hate of mine, I just couldn’t see it working for an e-commerce website. The splash pages that so many websites had were for the most part poorly designed, the files were well oversized and they were devoid of any accompanying text. It succeeded in slowing down entry into the website and leaving the page impossible for the spiders to index. It would seem that these days many of the splash pages have been replaced (thank goodness), although recently there has been an increase in the number of sites that do have a Flash Intro.

As with so many good things Flash has been brutally abused. It seems that for such a long time Flash was seen as a massive cool factor. The biggest disadvantage for me has always been the size of the file. While navigation files may be quite small the splash pages and, often headers were just way too big. While many people have dedicated digital lines at work they often only have access to dial up connectivity at home. I am sure that everybody knows how frustrating it can be trying to browse a website that has large images and other multimedia files with a mere dial up connection. Beyond this frustration there are a number of reasons why Flash is just a bad idea, these include:

Flash breaks the back button. If you navigate within a flash object and you hit the “Back” button it takes you back to a previously viewed page and not back within the flash object itself.

The standard link colours do not apply. This can lead to confusion as to which pages have been viewed and which ones have not.

Flash integrates badly with search functions. More of this will be explained later.

The design is set. Text can not be enlarged for people with limited vision. The view can’t be changed to suit the end users needs.

Flash in general is difficult to access by visitors with disabilities.

Recently Google has announced that it can indeed read .swf files looking for text. According to Dave Taylor of askdavetaylor.com, “Google can parse through the text contained within a .swf file and present that information in a Google search. But due to the fact that an entire website can be contained in a single .swf file, whereas a traditional HTML site may consist of hundreds of individual pages, the weightings and rankings given to certain pages may not be accurately portrayed in Google's results.”

This would mean that Flash still comes up short when it comes to ranking favourably in the search engine results. While I don’t see this hurting major household name brands (such as Coca-Cola or Pepsi), it certainly means that the smaller emerging business with a total Flash website is going to struggle to rank well.

As mentioned earlier, Flash integrates badly with search functions. This is mostly due to the fact that the flash file itself can’t be indexed in the same manner as plain text. While Google has managed to index the plain text within an .swf file it has become plain that from a search point of view, the Flash file is treated in much the same way as an image. The ability to read the text in these files would seem to have little more than benefit than using an “Alt” or “Title” tag. However this may change in the near future.

Perhaps in time the search engines will be able to index Flash files correctly, perhaps not. Personally I would prefer it if they don’t. Some things really should be discouraged from corporate websites. While Flash is a great way to build a site with all the bells and whistles, it also removes some of the functionality. I imagine that a website for Ozzy Osbourne could easily include Flash as fans are more than happy to sit and wait for the objects to download. But what works for Ozzy might not work for your business. As with all website additions, the main thought should always be, “will it improve the average visitor’s experience?” If not then it shouldn’t be used.

For now, I’ll just keep thinking of Flash (Gordon) as a hero. I know my brother does and, believe it or not, even plans to name his child “Flash”. I think that’s how things should stay.

*Flash Gordon - Flash Gordon the Film

Facts are Meaningless

2009-02-12T05:58:00.000-08:00

“Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true!” I think Homer Simpson really hit the nail on the head with this one. We are told that analytics are the way to go, time and time again. But what exactly does that mean? What exactly do you measure? What is a good measurement? What would are you really measuring to begin with?

Right now it would seem that the most popular form of analytics would be Urchin, now owned by Google. “Urchin 5 analyzes traffic for one or more websites and provides accurate and easy-to-understand reports on your visitors - where they come from, how they use your site, what converts them into customers, and much more.” But while giving you a multitude of numbers what does this really tell us?

So we are still at the very beginning. Before even thinking about running any kind of analytics you first need to define your objective. While this can be a lot easier if you are selling a tangible product, it is not always a clear cut decision. While a quick sale is almost always a good thing, many would agree that the effort made to make that sale far outweighs the profit you may have made. More often than not when dealing with sales you are looking for returning customers. So in this case it’s not a sale you are after but a returning customer.

If this is the scenario that you are finding yourself in, then you would definitely prefer to have a lower number of unique visitors to overall visitors. If however you were providing a newsletter subscription service, then you would want as many unique visitors as possible. With your product being a one-time sale option, the more readers who see your site the more possible subscriptions you are likely to make.

The point here is that the same metric could mean two different things to two different businesses. Here are a few points to ponder:

A high percentage of your traffic is generated by search engines

A high percentage of your traffic is generated through direct traffic

A high percentage of your traffic is generated by referring sites

Each of those could either be a good or a bad sign. If the search engines drive a majority of your traffic to your site this could indicate that many visitors don’t return. On the one hand, this could indicate that visitors do not bookmark your site, or even that the targeted keywords or phrases are driving the wrong kind of traffic to your website. On the other hand this could be an indication that traffic is on the rise or that newly targeted keywords are now generating more traffic than before.

If most of your traffic is direct traffic, this could indicate that many visitors have bookmarked your website and return often, newsletters are driving visitors to your website or that off-line marketing is working for you. This could also be a sign that you are slipping in search engine rankings or that visitors simply aren’t searching for your services/products.

While gaining traffic of any kind is rarely a bad thing, too much traffic generated from other websites could be an indication, that while many need your service or product, they simply aren’t finding your site the first time. This means you are losing out on a lot of first time traffic and that you are probably just getting the scraps. However, this could also be a positive sign; if you are selling a product or service in a highly competitive market this indicates that you have managed to form some very valuable alliances.

There are always two sides to this coin (if not more). Rather than read too much into a single point you really need to sit down and go through everything with a fine toothcomb. You might be surprised at what you find.

A little while back we ran a Google AdWord campaign for a client. It was found that during this period that the bulk of the traffic was coming from direct traffic. While this seemed to prove that the AdWord campaign was failing horribly it would seem that rather than a failure it was actually driving a much better targeted visitor to the website. During this period the number of visits per visitor suddenly climbed. Then another interesting point came up, while initially the page views per visit had increased they were now on the decline. As our client’s website contained many, and frequently updated, listings, once a visitor had seen a listing they often didn’t view it again.

In conclusion it would seem that the AdWord campaign had done its job. Which was that targeted traffic had been directed to the website, these visitors continued to return to the site (often signing up for the newsletter) but often only browsing the newer listings. This would then appear as though they weren’t interested, while in actual fact were dedicated visitors.

While looking as though the AdWords were having little to no affect it actually turned out to be a very profitable exercise. In this case returning visitors are highly sought after as if they don’t find what they are looking for the first time, they might find it on a return visit.

Then again, if Homer is correct, then facts really could prove anything.

Faceless Communication

2009-02-05T23:53:00.000-08:00

“If you can't stand in front of your target, reading what you've written aloud, you have no right to it.” – Frank Watson

After reading countless articles on social media, and sadly more recently of the tale of Megan Meier, it would seem that the bad element of society thrives on the safety of being anonymous. So often I’ve looked at blog postings, or more specifically the comments left by unnamed visitors, and wondered if those people would actually be able to say what they do to someone else face to face.

While some people are quite blunt while conversing face to face most are not. So how is it that they can go about posting comments like these? Simple, it is because nobody knows who they are and they are not likely to be held accountable. While we all know how difficult it can be to tell a mother-in-law that the dinner she just spend 2 hours preparing is terrible, it is so much easier to simply grin and get on chewing. On the other hand it takes 5 seconds to blog about it later, especially if you know for a fact that the said mother-in-law is never going to read your blog.

These are things that must always be considered when dealing with people in any form online. In a world that has quickly moved from posted letters that could take weeks to get from one place to another to airmail to email and now text messages so much can be lost in translation or even the lack of it. Twitter another step in that direction. While it can quite easily be possible to convey a solid point or idea across in just 140 characters many people can’t. Let’s face it, there really is an art to getting a wide audience to understand your idea or drive home an idea with little more than a few written words. I guess that’s why writers, good writers mind you, have always been in great demand.

Points to remember when dealing with people online, netiquette if you like:

Sometimes visitors to your website or blog are really just looking for a spot to vent. Moderation can be a friend here, but why not contact them and politely ask why they want to leave such harsh comments.

With email and other simple text message systems out there, if someone seems upset with you it could be that they misinterpreted the tone of your message.

Sometimes email or other messages genuinely do get lost somewhere along the line in cyberspace. This can and does happen quite regularly. Don’t assume that someone is fully clued up on all correspondence unless they actually agree that they are – or at least think they are.

Don’t take everything at face value, just because it is online doesn’t make it true. Think to all those hoax virus emails we get regularly. Take it with a pinch of salt and move on.

Don’t take it personally. Okay, so if someone has had a real go at your name or business reputation it’s kind of personal but don’t resort to similar retorts. Rather turn it about and give a civil helpful reply. You might just be able to convert them into a glowing reference.

While it’s not always easy to deal with people face to face it’s sometimes a lot more difficult to deal with anonymous entities. Try to get to know who it is that regularly posts comments on your blog or replies to your emails with scathing remarks. You might just find that it’s little more than miscommunication.

Sometimes however you do have those that wish to incite or mislead others for whatever their reasons may be. The best answer at these times is no answer at all. Some things simply do not require an answer, but if you feel you simply must answer remember - “If you can't stand in front of your target, reading what you've written aloud, you have no right to it.” Always be accountable for what you post, this is the easiest and quickest way to gain respect online. Once you’ve got that, others will simply ignore unsubstantiated comments left by the anonymous posters.

Meta Tags Reach Undead Status

2009-02-04T22:11:00.000-08:00

I’ve heard time and time again that “Meta Tags are Dead!” While this may ring true when it comes to gaining a good rank in the SERPs there are always two sides to every story. While it is accepted that this tag certainly isn’t going to aid your rankings, it could make a massive difference when it comes to searchers clicking through to your website.

<meta name=”description” content=”your descriptive description here” />

The description meta tag is possibly the most overlooked marketing tool available to all webmasters and online marketers. Behind the title tag, which is displayed as your listing title in the search engine results page, the description is the first real taste of your website. Does this snippet best describe your flavour?

While many search engines can and do pull snippets from a variety of sources to describe your website/webpage they often fail to present a compelling reason to visit that page. These snippets often come from other directories that your website may be listed on, such as the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org) or Yahoo!

In order to get the search engines to ignore the snippets from those directories, you will need to add the following line of code to your webpage, between the and tags:

<meta name="”robots”" content="”noodp,noydir”">

The noodp command will stop the engine from returning the snippet from the Open Directory Project and the noydir command will stop the engine from returning the Yahoo! snippet.

Now the search engines should ignore these snippets and return the title and description as described on your webpage. Many overlook the true value of this. As many of our websites are real estate based, I’ll show you how this tag has been used to our benefit:

Previously:
<meta name="description" content="Exceptional Experienced Realtors with the Best Listings in the County">

Updated:
<meta name="description" content="Townhouse For Sale in Suburb, City | USD 11 000 000 | as listed by Our Realtors">

As you can see this will make a considerable difference to someone who is searching for “townhouse for sale in suburb” or even “house for sale in city.” This will assure the searcher that this page is indeed what they are looking for. In this case we’ve included the price but other information can be added such as the number of rooms or bathrooms. But I think you get the idea here.

Things to remember when writing a description:
1. Keep the tag short, the engines will cut it off if it’s too long;
2. Make sure the description actually matches the page content;
3. Make sure that each page has a unique description;
4. Try to include your keywords in the snippet. (This will increase the likeliness of Google returning your description as the snippet.)

A useful tip to remember is that the description doesn’t have to be a perfectly formatted sentence. As you can see from the example given I included the pipe break to break the description into different segments of information. This is where the savvy online marketers can really go to town. Include information relating to a special deal or any other compelling call to action. Often you can instill trust and even conclude a sale purely based on the value of that snippet. This is especially the case when the snippet is on a product page. By simply scanning the snippet, the visitor knows exactly what is listed, the price as well as any shipping conditions which may arise.

There are times when using a description is not advised. Such a case would be on large blogs, or any other page that contains long lists of unrelated topics. In this case it would be better to ignore the description tag. The reasoning behind this is that when returning the search results, the search engine will return a snippet from somewhere on the page that best relates to the search query. The drawback for this kind of search result however is that while the description may meet the query it may be difficult for the visitor to locate this snippet on the actual page. This may lead the visitor to conclude that the page is not relevant to their search.

Looking back on the subject topic, you may be surprised or even confused at my statement “Meta Tags Reach Zombie Mode.” While the description tag (or any other meta tag for that matter) might be dead when it comes to search engine rankings it can still be of great value when converting those rankings into a visit or sale. This may very well prove to be the next stage in the life cycle of meta tags – Zombie.

Duplicate Content

2009-02-03T23:17:00.000-08:00

Is duplicate content penalty a myth or a reality? Well I would say that it’s a bit of both. Many folk have been terrorised into paranoia over duplicate content, but here are the facts.

“Duplicate content is bad.”
Okay, so I said it. But please note that I didn’t say that it’s evil or that your web pages are certainly heading to supplemental hell. But duplicate content can be bad for the following reasons.

1. Multiple copies of the same content are not useful to the internet as a whole
2. Multiple copies of the same content on your website could dilute your “link juice”
3. Multiple copies of the same content can hamper effective indexing of your website.
4. Multiple copies of the same content will confuse the search engines as to which copy may be the original.

Multiple copies are not useful to the internet. Okay so we often turn on the TV only to find that while there are over 100 channels on offer there’s still nothing on. But imagine if out of the 100 channels there were only really 8 to choose from, the others were simply showing the same thing as on the others. Duplicate content works in the same way. It serves us the same content on all the channels. The search engines quickly realised that good content ranks but that the same content shouldn’t fill all choices. This is the real penalty of duplicate content. The same content shouldn’t rank over and over because if it doesn’t meet the searcher’s needs then they wouldn’t have another option.

From the average webmaster’s point of view I would say that point 2 is the most important. Can you imagine having 3 or 4 pages all with great content, but the same content, being indexed and linked to from related websites? Sounds great, but if it is the same content then you have effectively shared the full linking power of that content over multiple pages. So in this case instead of having one page showing up on the first page of the search results, you now have 2 on the second. I know which scenario I would prefer. The other side of the coin is with dynamic URLs you may find that several different dynamic formulas may take you to the same product page. Again this could be seen as duplicate content by the search engines and with this may come the uncertainty as to which one to rank. Quite often this will result in the relegation of both of those URLs to a lower rank. Although I have a sneaky suspicion that the search engines are catching onto the dynamic URL problem and now will rank one page from a website and simply ignore the others.

Should you have multiple versions of the same content on your website as can often be the case of dynamic URLs then this may prevent the search engines from indexing your whole website. Imagine once again you are searching through the TV channels and the first 10 are all the same, you may continue searching and reach channel 20. If by this time you’re still searching then you must be really bored. The Bots don’t have time to get bored, if it reaches page 10 and all the content seems the same it will assume that the rest aren’t worth indexing. This could be a problem. Added to this if it deems none of your pages worth indexing you could face a massive uphill battle to have your pages indexed, never mind ranking highly.

Originality is a difficult one because with no way of being able to certify that you were the first to post the content the search engines rely on the speed with which it was indexed. Indexing of websites takes place at different rates. Blogs generally are crawled and indexed a lot more frequently than a website that shows updates once a month on average. In this case if you had added great quality content to your website only to have a blogger scrape it, you might lose the full benefit of this content as the blog may be indexed and be recognised as having first published it. While this is an extreme example it is a good reason to regularly update your website to keep the search bots coming back regularly.

As you can see from the points above there is no definite penalty for duplicate content. But for reasons that make good logical sense many times these pages simply don’t cut it at the highest level. The question you should always be asking is, “will this benefit my visitors?” or even, “Will this impact negatively on my visitors?” The answer to that question should quickly send you in the right direction and keep you from possible pitfalls.

Ironically this article is a duplicate of one posted on SiteProNews that I submitted some time ago.

Bad SEO Practices

2009-02-02T04:24:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, many webmasters abused the system. The system now abuses the webmasters (okay perhaps not, but these tricks no longer work).

While many of the articles written on good SEO techniques I’ve decided to turn things around and look at a few of the sure-win techniques of the past. The point is to make sure that you are no longer making use of any of techniques.

Hidden Text:
This is one of my favourites. A long time ago I even tried this one, and it worked! You picked a background colour and matched the text colour to it. Very quickly the search engines caught onto this one and simply marked the sites for spam. But that wasn’t the end however. By creating a background image of a particular colour and then making the text the same colour, you could once again benefit from hidden text. Again, it wasn’t long before the search engines caught onto this one and penalized the offenders. While webmasters continue to find ways to add hidden content to web pages the search engines will continue to find ways of exposing this and you will be penalised.

Keywords:
I think this was the first bit of code to be totally discarded by the search engines. Gone were the days of simply putting any old keyword into the meta keyword tag and hey presto, there you are. Keyword stuffing was the norm and has thankfully slowly become a thing of the past. However, many designers still seem to think that you need to fill this tag with as much as possible. Google have time and time again stated that they simply do not use this tag for anything.

Description Tag:
The description tag was abused in much the same way as the keyword tag was. Webmasters everywhere stuffed as many keywords into the description tag as possible. Because of this, the search engines no longer use this as a ranking tool. Although a well written description may not gain you rankings anymore, this can still be useful in promoting a click through by working as a sales pitch.

Gateway Pages (Landing Pages):
When mentioning gateway pages I’m not referring to those pages that you have optimised for a particular search, but rather those rubbish pages that have no value, no real content and redirect a visitor before they know what is happening. While many SEO’s still believe this is the way to go, the search engines frown on these pages as they offer the visitor little to nothing of any value.

Links:
Links are good. Links from just anybody, are bad. Gone is the day where a link from a Free For All (FFA) is worth anything (then again, was it really ever worth anything?). All those links from reciprocal link pages are now worth very little if anything at all anymore.

Cloaking:
As much as I like breaking the rules, I’ve never actually done this personally. Cloaking is as the name suggests hiding one version of a webpage from either the visitor or the robot. This was usually done by returning a specific super optimised page to the robot and then a pretty design to the visitor. While there may be the occasion where many feel this is a valid technique (returning text to the robot, flash to a visitor) it is still a massive “No-No”.

While each of these techniques has been used, abused and banned over time it is useful to remember the following:

While hidden text is very much frowned upon it is good practice to keep active code off of the webpage. By adding all of this code into a separate file and included later the search engines have less code per page to spider and this should translate into a higher text/code ratio. This should aid with text/page density, adding value to the text content.

Keywords are no longer used by the majority of search engines. Many SEO experts now even suggest leaving out the keywords tag so that you don’t alert your competitors to which keywords you are targeting. That said, as a few search engines still use keywords (although with minimum weight) it can’t hurt to add them, sparingly.

The description tag is one of my favourites. As mentioned above, it won’t aid with your search engine rankings, but it can add value to a page. If you have optimised your page to rank highly for “search term” then make sure that your description compels the searcher to click on your link. This is a short description of what the page is all about. If this tag is used as it was originally intended it can be very valuable.

Gateway pages spammed to death in the hope of tricking a visitor into visiting an unrelated website are a thing of the past. You can bet on being permanently banned for this one. However a properly optimised landing page for a particular special offer or product is still very useful. Remember that this page should offer something of value to a visitor or it still is just spam.

Links are one of the most important factors when trying to rank highly for a search phrase. While the old adage “content is king” has been worn out, the content of an anchor link is now king. So much so that a website can rank for a phrase that does not exist on its site purely from the sheer weight of links (this can be done for malicious reasons too however, often referred to as a Google Bomb).

Cloaking is still a bad idea in any form. Instant redirects are pretty much instantly banned by Google if not heavily penalized. But should you have moved a page be sure to put a 301 redirect in place. This will pass on any link strength to the new pages.

While the use of these techniques has been discouraged and outlawed over time their use can usually still be applied in some form or other. As a friend of mine always says, “It’s not what you do, but how you do it!” How very true.

-Previously Published on SiteProNews.

SEO in a Nutshell

2009-01-27T03:41:00.000-08:00

SEO in a Nutshell... an optimised website aimed at pleasing the search engines to gain the best possible placing in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages)for relevant and often searched words and phrases.

Go on, read that again...

According to Wikipedia:
(SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the higher a site's "page rank" (i.e, the earlier it comes in the search results list), the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.

Okay firstly never confuse that "page rank" with PageRank. Confused already? Don't worry, if you hear of anyone talking of PageRank (named after Larry Page Google co-founder) just ignore them. The only one who knows the true PageRank of any page (yes each page of a website gets its own PageRank) is the Googlebot. What is important is your position in the SERP's, to a degree.

As the search engines continue to try to provide the best possible (read most relevant) search results to each visitor, many searches using the same phrases may actually result in different results. This is usually due to geo-location, after all, if I were looking for my nearest fish and chip shop I would hope the search engine realises that I'm searching for a fish and chip shop in Westville, South Africa. Google have done a fantastic job with this by pretty much offering every country out there their very own version of Google. Often the searcher won't even realise that they are being routed to Google.co.za or Google.co.uk instead of Google.com. All 3 of those will return different results for the same search. It is now possible and quite probable that searches in the same country will return different results.

Enter SEO. While the goal remains to rank well and be found. The difficult part is ranking well for often searched terms that will actually lead to conversion. This means that the website needs to not only rank well but actually generate traffic that will eventually result in a sale, lead, sign up... or what ever the purpose of your website may be. With this in mind 10 converting visitors from 100 in total is better than 1 converting visitor from 1000 visitors. Quality is more important than the quantity of traffic.

Redefined: SEO is the practice of generating quality traffic to a website to increase business.

My First Post

2009-01-26T05:10:00.000-08:00

Well this is my first post on my new blog. I've done quite a bit of writing up on another blog but it's been mainly dedicated to linking out to other websites. In someways purely for SEO, in others it's a fantastic resource of work that has been done.

The name, "Barefoot SEO" may leave most a little puzzled. It's simple really - I hate wearing shoes. Thankfully here in KwaZulu Natal it is usually warm enough that you can get away with not wearing footwear of any kind. While it may seem kind of menial at this time my long term goal is that I will be able to attend corporate meetings in a professional capacity and be able to do so wearing no shoes. Why some might ask... well when you reach a point where people will accept your eccentricities it's also a milestone that signifies that you can pretty much do what you want because you're that good. Oh well we can dream can't we? :)

So this will be my blog, dedicated to SEO, the trends, the fads. I'll try my best to point out good practices as well as point out fallacies. While so many points are debatable at the best of times if you have anything to add please feel free to do so.