My SEO Website

Use Keywords In Page Titles

2011-05-15T06:34:00.001-07:00

It is recommended to use keywords in page titles itself. This title tag is different from a Meta tag, but it's worth considering it in relation to them. Whatever text one places in the title tag (between the <title> and </title> portions) will appear in the title bar of browsers when they view the web page. Some browsers also append whatever you put in the title tag by adding their own name, as for example Microsoft's Internet Explorer or OPERA.

The actual text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all major web crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings.

If you have designed your website SEO as a series of websites or linked pages and not just a single Home Page, you must bear in mind that each page of your website must be search engine optimized. The title of each page i.e. the keywords you use on that page and the phrases you use in the content will draw traffic to your site.

The unique combination of these words and phrases and content will draw customers using different search engine terms and techniques, so be sure you capture all the keywords and phrases you need for each product, service or information page.

The most common mistake made by small business owners when they first design their website is to place their business name or firm name in every title of every page. Actually most of your prospective customers do not bother to know the name of your firm until after they have looked at your site and decided it is worth book marking.

So, while you want your business name in the title of the home page, it is probably a waste of valuable keywords and space to put it in the title line of every page on your site. Why not consider putting keywords in the title so that your page will display closer to the top of the search engine listing.

Dedicating first three positions for keywords in title avoiding the stop words like ‘and’, ‘at’ and the like is crucial in search engine optimization.

How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

2011-05-15T06:33:00.003-07:00

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

The Shifting Sands of SEO

2011-05-11T02:10:00.000-07:00

Search engine optimisation used to be a lot simpler than it is today. These days a great many companies feel compelled to enlist the services of qualified and experienced SEO services to give them an edge when it comes to appearing in results pages from search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo! What web publishers did in the past was essentially figure out what words (or ‘keywords’) were being entered into search engine queries most often and put them into titles, text and Meta tags wherever possible on their pages.
If companies wanted to bring people to the site by unscrupulous means they could use spamming to gain a high page ranking with search engines, and this is of course what many of them did. The Internet became a minefield of irrelevant sites trying to market unwanted products to annoyed search engine users. In these dark times you could count on unscrupulous search engine optimisation services to advise on any number of ‘black hat’ methods to bring empty short-term gains in terms of visitors.

Death of Spam

Eventually, search engines got wise to spamming methods and largely expunged many illicit practices through punishing users and developing technologies to combat it. As a web user, you’ll know that it’s somewhat of a surprise to find a high ranking site through Google that is entirely spam.

Google Wins

Much of the combating of poor practice was down to Google, and their sophisticated algorithm for determining page rank. There’s still a great deal of mystery that surrounds page rank, and it’s very easy to spend hours reading about it online without reaching a clear understanding of what it is. But of course that’s its purpose, and any SEO company that tells you it has all the answers is not being entirely truthful.

Page Rank

With the introduction of page rank and its emphasis on inbound links a new form of spamming was born. Buying or trading links in vast amounts became a common practice. The problem with this idea was that search engines paid attention to the validity and relevance of links rather than their numbers. The search engines certainly did take notice of the practice of obtaining non-relevant links though, and implemented penalties for sites employing this new method of spamming. Irrelevant links came to be seen as damaging. This led to climate of suspicion as search engines implemented penalties for what they perceived as spamming. Whereas before it would have been ok to feature an irrelevant link or two, it came to be seen as unacceptable. This search engines exercised their burgeoning power. Advice from them amounted to a decree to pretend they didn’t exist and the web publishing community was forced to think carefully about which strategies they could safely use to bring traffic to their sites.

Conclusions

Most people realized that you couldn’t rely on ignoring search engines to get you onto their results pages. It came to be well known that avoiding Flash, JavaScript and frames on pages would help to get results for sites. HTML files for the easy access of search engines came to be an essential feature of sites.

The overriding principle should now be that you’re not using methods that bring visitors to your site which trick them in any way. If you are then you’re on very thin ice as far as search engines are concerned.

These days the game is changing faster than ever, as technology turns leaps into bounds across the board. While it wouldn’t have been entirely unwise to follow the advice of search engines to pretend they didn’t exist and simply create good sites, we can add some important points to that now. Webmasters need to keep search engines in mind when they design their sites and when they market them.

It’s turned out that advice from search engines was correct and that marketing your site as if they didn’t exist is beneficial after all. All the various factors that make a site interesting seem to help in terms of ranking, as popularity increasingly seems to breed more of the same.
Do not try to fool the search engines as it’s become a kind of a cliché to attempt it. These days, if you’re thinking o getting advice from an SEO company make sure they only advise you on ‘white hat’ ways of improving your status and reputation.

How to Make Your Home Page Work

2011-01-14T08:08:00.001-08:00

There is a lot that your home page has to accomplish when it comes to search engine optimization. In fact, it needs to accomplish an awful lot, considering how small the space is that you have to work with. The home page is used as a kind of intersection and an introduction, an advertisement, an information desk and a news section all in one. A skilful home page can ensure you achieve the conversions you want; a ham-handed one will ensure that they go right back to the search engine results pages.

The danger is that you may expect your home page to do too much. A lot of home pages are too jam-packed with information for any individual item to be really understood. It’s hard for internet users to easily discover the information they need. This is exactly the opposite of what a good home page should be.

It seems like an impossible task to get your home page to do all you need it to do without making it too cluttered. It is indeed a hard task, but the key to a good home page is to keep things straightforward. This might mean some thinning out of information, and some simplification of other information. It also requires really well-thought-out design.

Good home page design requires thought

It can help to picture your home page as a front room for your business. If you fill any room with too much furniture, it not only looks cluttered, it becomes unusable. Similarly, if you fill up your home page with all of your products and services, internet users won’t be able to use it.

A lot of your ideas for your home page will come from its design. Consider the physical limitations of any home page: a computer screen. Many home pages extend beyond this first screen, but anything an internet user has to scroll down for will not get as much attention. It’s important to fit everything essential in that rough few square inches worth of space.

It’s a good idea to think about home pages that have appealed to you personally, and to look at the home pages of the successful sites in your industry. Different industries do tend to develop certain stylistic traits, which are usually worthwhile paying attention to. This can provide you with a good guide for the number of products or services you can comfortably fit on your home page as well.

SEO Success Factors

2011-01-10T19:44:00.000-08:00

I was recently asked about the success factors of an SEO campaign. There are many, but let's take a look at three of what we consider the most important success factors

Knowledge Is Power
It's very important for us to know what prior SEO activities have been conducted on a site. This can make or break the campaign. On a few occasions, our team of site analyzers have uncovered controversial techniques that even our client didn't know had been performed!
It's also very important for us to have access and learn from your web site analytics data. SEO is about getting the right people to your site from search engines. Your analytics data prior to SEO and after SEO is a constant gauge to see if your SEO company is traffic-focused, not just placement-focused.
Finally, the knowledge of understanding how your target audience is searching for your offerings allows an SEO best practices firm to shoot for the bullseye where visitors convert, not the outer rings of the target where visitors are "just browsing". Since the early days of SEO, this has not changed.
Link Popularity
With the significant weighting of link popularity in Google's algorithm, there are very few sites that can ignore link building. Now crucial to your site's success at major search engines is the continual effort of adding quality, relevant third party links to your site. Trust me, most of your competitors are doing just that.
Flexibility To Site Changes
Always make sure to take the temperature of potential clients as to their flexibility to make changes to their site that will make the site more search-engine-friendly.

A Guide to Robots Exclusion Protocol

2011-01-10T19:34:00.000-08:00

Google's Prashanth Koppula wrote a ready-to-bookmark post over at the official Webmaster Tools blog, showing tons of different robots-exclusion protocol (REP) directives that can be implemented in various ways. Following is a listing of directives discussed and the methods of implementation:

Directives for the robots.txt file:

Disallow
Allow
$ Wildcard
* Wildcard
Sitemaps location

Meta tags for insertion into HTML:

NOINDEX
NOFOLLOW
NOSNIPPET
NOARCHIVE
NOODP

Of special note are the two different wildcard uses; the post links to usage models for each. One additional funny bit is in the explanation of NOARCHIVE, in which the post describes the tag's usage as "Do not make available to users a copy of the page from the Search Engine cache." Contrast this with "Do not cache the page," which I believe is most people's idea of the tag's effect. I love little semantic hooks like that.

The post notes that the directives above are observed by Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live, which is a nice bonus. In addition, the post discusses some directives that only Google honors, such as UNAVAILABLE_AFTER (which I discussed about a year ago), NOIMAGEINDEX, and NOTRANSLATE.

The Difference Between Crawling and Indexing

2011-01-10T19:30:00.001-08:00

The terms crawling and indexing (and indexing's cousin, caching) are frequently used together, but you should not consider them synonyms.
Exact definitions probably differ from person to person, but following is how I explain the processes:
Crawling is the process of an engine requesting -- and successfully downloading -- a unique URL. Obstacles to crawling include no links to a URL, server downtime, robots exclusion, or using links (such as some JavaScript links) from which bots cannot find a valid URL.

Indexing is the result of successful crawling. I consider a URL to be indexed (by Google) when an info: or cache: query produces a result, signifying the URL's presence in the Google index. Obstacles to indexing can include duplication (the engine might decide to index only one version of content for which it finds many nearly identical URLs), unreliable server delivery (the engine may decide to not index a page that it can access during only one-third of its attempts), and so on.

What's the difference between crawling and indexing, in terms of time? Here's a recent example. I recently watched a newly introduced URL to see when it would be indexed. I monitored the text cache query of the URL every four hours starting when the URL went live on July 2. (This URL was one of a number of URLs linked to on a new site map.)

On July 17, the text cache showed results and finally stopped saying "Your search - cache:[URL] - did not match any documents." But what was interesting is that the cached file showed the results of the URL "as retrieved on 8 Jul 08." So make special note that the URL was crawled and cached over a week before it appeared in the index.

A better, more comprehensive test would be to watch server logs and see how many times the file was requested, and with what frequency, between the original request date and date at which the cache query showed results. Additional testing would try to detect ways to shorten that time by increasing the number (and prominence) of incoming links and so on.

Link Development Vocabulary

2011-01-10T19:29:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of misconceptions out there about link development. A lot. So, it's probably a good idea to start with some basics and clarify some of the lingo we use in the industry.

Link Popularity
First and foremost, it's a metric. Why do we care? Because Google says it's important, so all professional SEOs and Google-wannabes have followed suit. This measures both the quantity and quality of the links coming into all the pages on a site. Link Popularity is more than just how many links are coming into a page / site. It also measures how good the linking sites are by looking at things like how many links are pointing to that site, the quality of the content, the history of the site online, PageRank, and how often that site is updated, among others. The better the site, the more valuable the link. And these links play into the ever-elusive algorithm of how Google returns search results for keyword searches.
Link Building
In a nutshell, this refers to "getting" more links either through solicitation, submitting to directories, or other various methods. It focuses on only getting new links. In fancier terms it can also called "Link Acquisition." I prefer the latter when referring to this type of link work. It sounds prettier.
Link Development
This is more holistic in its approach. Not only are you building links and getting new links to a site or page, but you are also looking at the links that already exist and identifying ways to improve them. There are lots of ways to do this and it's most often referred to as "Link Reclamation" or reclaiming the links that already exist. It is also called "Link Sculpting." This is what we focus on at Intrapromote.

I'm sure we'll get more into a lot of this as these blog posts continue to roll in, but for now I think that's a good start. Again, I'm excited to be a part of the Intrapromote team and I'm looking forward to the exciting conversations ahead.

How to Evaluate a Link Development Firm

2011-01-10T19:27:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my world! You understand it's critical to your optimization efforts and you're evaluating a firm that offers link development services. For many in the industry, link development is the thorn in the side. Very few people actually like doing it (present company excluded) and I've seen that some companies approach to the process is indicative of how they feel about it.

Here's how to tell if you're getting a good deal whether you're hiring them only for link development or itâ€™s part of the SEO campaign they are executing for you.

Tactics are does the firm offer only tactic (ie directory submissions) or are their campaigns more diversified? The more white hat options that a firm offers, the more keen they are as to how link development works. If a content development strategy is a part of the puzzle, even better.
Communication are how often will they be talking to you about your campaign? Regardless of whether it's by phone or email, regular and thorough communication will make you feel more comfortable about what's going on behind the scenes.
Reporting are how often you get reports and what is detailed in them is important. Are you only getting bare bones information? Like how many links are pointing to your site? Or are they telling you where those links are coming from, what pages on your site those links are pointing to, and what anchor text they used? The more data that is incorporated into a report for you, the more that firm actually cares about your project.
Competitive Information are this goes back to tactics, but if a firm is telling you what the competition is doing (something more substantial than â€œthey have more links than you do they've taken the extra step to dive deep into what's happening online on your behalf.
Analytics are does the firm jump into the analytics fray and tell you what's going on beyond just how many links you've gotten? Do they talk about site referrals, type in traffic metrics, increases or decreases in brand-related searches? All of these and more would tell me that a firm is in tune with all the benefits of link development, not just rankings.

This is just a small sampling of what you can look at in regards to a link development firm and how they will handle your campaign. Other things can include what advanced strategies they offer, results of brainstorm sessions (if they are having them), and industry trend information being sent your way. Be sure you are spending your money (and your time) wisely by choosing a firm that not only does a good job, but actually cares about your links.