SEO Advice

I recently launched a new web site that had pre-existing blog software installed on it, similar to this site. After launching this new web site, I noticed Google wasn’t deep spidering the site and after a week, hadn’t indexed any pages other than the home page. My first instinct was that I needed more backlinks pointing to the web site to force Google to do some extensive spidering of the web site. Then I remembered, isn’t this what Sitemaps are for? Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a list of things NOT to do when it comes to search engine optimization:

• Don’t do anything that tries to trick the search engines in ranking your site higher
• Put text in the same color as the background color. Not only does this make your site look like its keyword spamming but search engines can usually pick up on this and will penalize your web site.
• List keywords anywhere but the keywords meta tag. There aren’t very many legitimate reasons to do this and search engines will usually penalize you for doing this.
• Create multiple pages of the same content and try and have this indexed (or manually submit this) in the search engines. Search engines can detect when content matches other pages on your web site.
• Submit a web page more than once to a search engine within 24 hours. If its a directory such as DMOZ, then don’t try and submit your site more than once every 3 or 4 weeks.
• Use keywords that don’t relate to your web site

Google announced yesterday that they have enhanced the Webmaster tools and now allow you to examine internal and external links on your site much more thoroughly than you can with the link: command.

After playing around with the new enhancements, so far I have to give it a thumbs up. The new features allow you to examine every single link to and from your site, not just the links that sometimes show up with the link:command. In addition, you can look at internal and external links to and from specific pages and export any of this data to CSV format.

It was announced earlier this week that Wikipedia has put in place the nofollow tag for all external links in the Wikipedia web site. We did a quick check and yes, the announcement appears to be implemented. Apparantly it was done to combat black hat SEOs who were spamming the directory in order to boost link popularity by placing a link to their web site in related articles on Wikipedia. Bottom line, Wikipedia articles will no longer affect the number of backlinks to your web site and thus will not help you in the ongoing struggle of web site search engine rankings.

Well, its been a while since Google last updated pagerank for web sites. This is a special day where webmasters around the world hold their breath to see what kind of love Google will give to webby creations. Yes, pagerank is really irrelevant when it comes to SEO and rankings but its still one of many indicators and web site owners love the numeric gratification or distress over the lack of it.

Some existing sites are currently showing a pagerank of 0, some new sites are showing an actual pagerank so its pretty clear that Google is in process of updating their data centers. Hold your breath and hopefully the update will be done soon.

Yahoo! Answers celebrated its first birthday yesterday answering any query a web user may have. Over in the Google camp, they recently shut down Google Answers and are no longer accepting questions. I guess Yahoo! can celebrate being top dog for once although I am sure they would prefer it would be a more prestigious tool such as their search.

If you have multiple web sites and domains, consider using domain privacy to hide your contact details. There are several reasons for this:

• Hide information from your competitors and SEOs looking to steal ideas from your network of websites
• Google knows all, they have been a domain registrar since 2005 and have easy access to domain contact information. If you are linking between your multiple domains, don’t let Google know all the sites are the same owner by simply hiding the domain contact information.

You might also consider using different web hosts, dns servers and domain registratrs as well to keep as many of your domains as unique as possible.

If you are looking to start a new site, you may want to investigate purchasing a used domain that already has an existing web site on it. If the web site and domain is more than a year old, you can avoid the dreaded google sandbox and most likely rank quicker for your targeted keyphrases. One large company that sells used domains is sedo.com but there are numerous others as well.

This might not be a startling revelation of any kind, but just revalidates how critical being part of trusted neighborhoods and having strong linking from established, related sites. You can tell how well Google trusts the content of your web site by how deep Google will spider and index your web site.

Check your web logs and see what Googlebot is doing. Is it spidering deep within your site? Does a site:www.yourdomain.com query on Google display only your home page? If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that there is a low trustiness factor from Google and it just doesn’t think your site is very important.

If your site is new, then you probably know why this is happening. Go and get some backlinks to your site. If your site is established, then you probably have a problem some where. Maybe you are involved in some bad neighborhoods that Google has little respect for. Dump your reciprocal link programs, get some good content and start getting legitimate links to your web site. Easier said than done, but this is the foolproof solution.

This tip helps usability for humans and search engine spiders alike: make sure that every web page is no more than 2 clicks deep in your web site. By that I mean, a web page should never be more than two clicks away from every other web page on your web site. This is usually the case for most web sites because they will have a consistent footer with main links and one of those links will be to the site map which has a link to every single page.

One search engine optimization step for web sites that is often overlooked is to use keywords as your anchor text when linking to other pages in your web site. Anchor text are the words are actually linked and you click on when following a link.

For instance, lets say your web site focuses on mortgages. Instead of linking to your home page with the standard “Home” as your anchor text, use “Mortgages” instead. For this tip, its nice to have a text link based footer with no graphics which is usually below the fold and designed more for search engine spiders and not human visitors.

Yahoo announced late last week that they were releasing Yahoo Maps from beta. I assume this means that they have ironed out any and all bugs associated with the service and that it is running smoothly. For those not in know, here are some of the features that Yahoo maps touts:

• Multi-point routing, (from A to B to C)
• A new mini-map which gives you an overview of what you’re looking at
• Satellite and Aerial imagery, wall to wall in the USA, and for over 100 cities internationally
• Full integration with Yahoo! Local, including search and SmartView
• Saved locations and auto-complete against your saved locations, recent locations and Yahoo! Address Book
• The ability to return to the old-style Yahoo! Maps for when you’re on a Dial-Up connection
• Quick access to maps from within Yahoo! Mail using Yahoo! Shortcuts

Yahoo and MSN are now officially supporting the Sitemap XML protocol joining Google who originally released the protocol under the Alike Creative Commons License in hopes that other search engines would adopt it. Sitemaps is a free and easy way for webmasters and site owners to inform search engines about every URL in their web site and which ones they want crawled or spidered.

MSN Live Search appears to be improving its algorithms to be less susceptible to spammy web sites but it still has a long ways to go. Spammy web sites seem to dominate the results especially blogs from free blog providers. It also appears as though inbound links can be of very low quality and Live Search will not discount them. Keyword rich URLs appear to continue to do very well in the search results as well as pages with little content on them or ones that are simply adsense sites. Hopefully, Microsoft will continue to work on their search algorithms and get rid of the spam to make this search engine more useable and compete with Google, if thats even possible.

Recently, the people that brought you Text-Link-Ads.com, a site for buying and selling web site text links, has another site for boosting profits from your blog call reviewme.com. Once approved, your site will be listed in their database of blogs that will review advertiser’s products and services. Price for a review ranges from $40-500 USD and the blogger receives half of the funds. Pricing depends on the popularity of the blog which uses such factors as its Alexa rating, Technorati rating, etc. Advertisers are not guaranteed a positive review and discretion is with the blogger as to the content of the review.

Google announced today that they would not be charging any transaction fees on the shiny new Checkout service, a competitor to Paypal.

With the holiday season quickly approaching, we wanted to do something to say “thank you” to our merchants. To help out during this very busy shopping season, we are processing all of our merchants’ Google Checkout sales for free during the holidays. From November 8 through December 31, 2006, Google Checkout merchants will receive free processing for all of their Checkout sales, regardless of whether or not they use AdWords. If you don’t currently use Checkout, don’t worry—new Checkout merchants are eligible for this offer as well, so sign up now. To all of our merchants: thank you for contributing to the success of Google Checkout and Happy Holidays!

Google has a neat tool that allows you to insert keywords and it will provide keyphrases based on the keywords you entered and tell you the competition for these keyphrases in their AdWords program and the amount of search traffic they can garner. The tool is very useful for finding related keyphrases that aren’t very competitive but are worth targeting because they get a significant number of searches.

Another obvious tip but it never hurts to point out everything. Make sure you assign unique, keyword rich and descriptive title tags for every web page on your site. The title tag content should mimic keywords that actually exist in the web page content.

Google launched a custom search engine this week that allows you to define what web sites you want to have included in the search and some other nifty features. From Google:

• Specify the sites you want to include in searches
• Place a search box and search results on your website
• Customize the look and feel to match your website
• Invite your community to contribute to the search engine
• Make money from relevant ads in your search results

Google accounts for approximately 50-90% of search engine traffic. On sites that I have been involved with, this number seems to average around 75-80% of total search engine traffic. Based on these numbers, I would focus exclusively on optimizing your web site for Google and not pay too much attention to Yahoo or MSN.

Its not like we’ve solved any big mysteries here, it is a well known fact in web development circles that using flash can negatively impact search engine traffic because search engine crawlers cannot read or spider flash content.

If you must use flash, make sure you have a text based navigation if you are using a flash based navigation system. If you have flash based content, create an alternate html version and block the flash version from search engine spiders using your web site’s robots.txt file.

Here is another neato web tool brought to you by Text Link Ads. This serves two purposes, first of all its an interesting tool that shows how your blog ranks to top blogs in your blog category (or a blog you specify). Secondly, its a great example of link baiting in getting other sites to link to you.

As reported by The Register, there is a new worm that infects Yahoo Instant Messanger and causes fraudulent clicks on web sites containing adsense advertisements. The adsense ads focus on mesothelioma, a rare cancer caused by asbestos exposure that also happens to have very high cost per click values. My guess is that its unlikely the worm creators will ever get paid.

During my normal Monday morning surf-a-round I found a great post at TLA that discusses the dreaded Google sandbox and how to climb / crawl / punch your way out of it. As you may have guessed, the article focuses on building trust with backlinks from authority sites, blogs or other sites that you can beg, steal, or cheat your way to getting a link. There is also some good discussion on link baiting; overall a good read.

I was asked the other day for advice for a new web site trying to get established in the search engines. I thought I would share them with you as I think they are valuable for all new web sites:

Focus on great content, less on useability
Don’t get me wrong, useability is important but great web sites that are popular with users and search engines alike are usually because they have good content. You can always tweak and enhance useability later on. Initially, you won’t have many visitors or traffic so it will be important to build out your site with as much targetted keyword content as possible.

Simple and clean, no fancy graphics
Keep the site clean and simple, use the kiss principle. Most successful sites on the web have a simple and clean design.

Lots of internal links
Make sure your web pages are well linked internally; you want to make it as easy as possible for spiders to crawl your web site. As well, a well internally linked web site has a better chance of registering its own pages as backlinks. Make sure you have a site map that includes a link to every page on your site. If you can, link to every single page from each page within your web site.

Register your domain for several years
Not only does an extended registration length protect your brand and identity but its also a positive sign from Google that you are serious about your web site and can improve your Pagerank.

Bribe a webmaster to link to your site who has related content with a good PR (pagerank) and backlinks
OK, we are not actually condoning bribery, but simply making a point (tongue in cheek) that having an established site point to your web site is so important. The link will be followed by all the big search engine spiders and start to index your web site without having to manually add your url to their index. As well, it will count as a vote or the linking web site vouching for your new site and give you some instant credibility.

Remember, making a good site that is ranked well and gets search engine traffic is not easy and doesn’t happen over night. Keep adding great content and continue working at it day in and day out and it will eventually pay off.

Most webmasters know that it’s important to have a text based footer with links to main sections. This is a good idea for a couple reasons: it provides actual text that the search engine spiders such as googlebot can read and associate with the page it links to and also provides a link to your main pages from every single page. Along these lines, its also key to have a site map that includes a link to every page in your site. This is where most sites stop in terms of internal linking but this is just the beginning.

Your site should be well linked internally before you bother spending time on link popularity and backlinks from external web sites. Its a lot easier to make your site well linked internally than it is to get other sites to link to you; start with easy stuff that you have full control over.

If you use blog software, it can be very easy to increase internal linking with a little effort:

• Have a list of popular search keywords or phrases, put these on each page and link to the search results (assuming your blog has a search function)
• Setup tags and/or categories and classify your blog entries - make sure the tag list and categories show up on every page (for an example of tags, look at this site on the right hand navigation)
• Create a “related articles” blurb for each article - most blogs will either support this feature or have a plugin to support it

Not only will these improve your internal linking within your blog but they will also make navigation easier for your readers.

All the ideas suggested here are very simple examples. How you increase your internal site linking depends on your web site and the content. The point is merely to suggest basic ideas that many sites could employ and get you thinking about more complex ways to optimize your site.

This tip applies especially to blogging but also any web site writing. Its a good idea to check the primary subject’s keywords in Overture’s keyword tool to get suggestions of keywords to incorporate into your article. This is particularly effective for high traffic keywords.

For example, let say you are writing on a topic such as poker. Maybe your article is more specific than a general keyword like poker but you are going to type in poker because its broad and will give you the most suggestions. The results will not only show you related keyphrases with the word poker in them but also the keyphrase’s popularity of how many times it was searched for in the last month.

Its a well known fact that Google looks at URLs when determining keyphrase relevance to the web pages in your site. Always use hyphens and not underscores in your URLs. This includes files names and directories. The reason why is because Google disregards underscores (_) but interprets hyphens (-) as a space.

So if you had a web page all about search engine marketing, you would name the file like this:

search-engine-marketing.html

And not

search_engine_marketing.html

The latter example with the underscores is interpreted as searchenginemarketing whereas the example with the hyphens is seen as search engine marketing.

There is a lot of talk about the Google sandbox these days in the blogosphere and various SEO and SEM related web sites. First of all, what is it? Well, quite simply, the Google sandbox is the equivilent of search engine purgatory where new sites exist for up to a year. During their sad existance in the sandbox, they don’t rank (or rank well) for keyphrases that they should. Why does the sandbox exist? Its believed that it’s there to prevent new, mainly spammy sites from popping up and ranking well right away. It forces sites to have to earn their rankings by waiting a while.

The thing about the sandbox is that there is no real way to avoid it. Most sites fall in no matter what kind of quality links they have pointing their way.

There is one loophole: it appears as though keywords or keyphrases that exist in your domain name will rank well even though others do not. This site is a great example. It is new (just over a month old) and and does not rank at all for any seo related keyphrases. Although suprisingly enough, it ranks 11th in Google for seo advice.

A couple quick tips on URLs. According to Matt Cutts blog, you should minimize the number of url querystring parameters to 1 or 2. What is a URL querystring parameter. Well, these are the parameters after the pagename and ? in a URL such as (in bold):

http://www.mydomain.com/mypage.php?cid=234&fid=24334

As well, do not use ID=something as a parameter. I plan on talking about URL rewriting in the near future which is the ideal way to hide all parameters and make your site more search engine friendly.

One way to help increase search engine traffic to your web site is by installing a blog on your web site. Most web site operators are knowledgable about a specific subject associated with their web site. If this scenario applies to you, it may be beneficial to start a blog where you can offer advice, news or tips on your field of interest that is relevant to your web site.

This can be a great way to boost the “keyword fodder” for your site by increasing the number of pages within your website, internal links, and relevant keyword-ed content that your site targets.

Make sure you install the blog within your web site if you want to maximize its impact. For instance, do not create a new hostname for the blog such as “blog.yourdomain.com” but use a subdirectory such as “www.yourdomain.com/blog”. Put a link to your new blog on every page of your web site if you can to make sure the search engines pick it up.

I recently read an interesting article that explains, in lamen terms, SEO and SEM in the Australian. What I found interesting was that one SEO firm actually had a client pay 100,000 dollars, even aussie dollars are valuable, to have a certain press release show lower down in the SERPs when you typed in this fella’s name.

“We have had a couple of individuals who were wealthy who wanted negative references to themselves disappeared, which was an expensive exercise,” he said. “You’ve got to optimise the 20 sites below them so the (negative reference) is moved down. We had one individual pay $100,000 plus because there was a (press release) about him on the Australian Securities and Investments Commission website that ranked No.2 when you searched for his name.'’

Make sure you always take one dose of salt with every Overture keyword suggestion. Remember what the Overture search results come from. Overture search results are displayed on Yahoo and also a network of smaller search engines, portals, etc. Some of these sites will link directly to search results pages; the search terms are not user supplied but merely links to search engine results.

Imagine if I had a popular page with a link to Google for a particular search, in this case we are going to use panda bear poker. Well thats a ridiculous search, no one would type that in. (Even on the interweb.) Now lets say that said page with said link gets some significant traffic, people will start clicking on this link and the keyphrase will gain popularity though not a single person would ever type it in manually. (This is a shitty example but its Friday and all I can think about is 6pm beers.)

Bottom line, verify your keyphrases before you base your marketing program on what Overture keyword suggestion tool tells you. Some of the keyphrase counts can be misleading at best or purely nonsense at worst.

How do you verify? Easy. Open up an Adwords account, setup a test ad and start plugging your keyphrases into your ad that you want to target to. Google will give you estimated traffic numbers for those ads.

There was a great post on Search Rank’s blog, a Search Engine Marketing firm, that lists some good links to several Keyword Research Tools. Definately worth checking out; its a very comprehensive list.

Alexa isn’t overally important in the grand scheme of things but its always good to atleast have an Alexa ranking. If your site is new, install the Alexa toolbar and visit your site. This should be all that’s required for Alexa to recognize and add your web site. If your site doesn’t get very much traffic (as most sites don’t), make sure you visit it every few days with your Alexa installed toolbar to make sure that it’s picked up.

Having an animated under contruction man digging on the front page of your web site is an obvious no-no. Make sure you have some content before telling the world about your new web site or starting a search engine marketing program. Try and fill in your blog with some posts and get some content rolling before you link to your new site or begin promoting it. Remember first impressions are the most important and spiders or real people will not be impressed with your web site skeleton even with a slick design. Content matters, the rest is fluff.

W3 Schools is a simple and comprehensive resource for all things web. The site contains resources on a wide range of WWW topics including html, css, and several programming languages.

A good way to promote your web site, although time consuming, is to post to relevant blogs and forums that are applicable to your web site topic. Most will allow you to put a link to your web site in your forum signature or comment. I never recommend using an automated comment spam application to do this either, I am referrering to the old fashioned way that provides an opinion or information relevant to the forum topic or blog post. Remember good search engine marketing is time consuming (and sometimes hard) work!

I guess it should be no surprise that people don’t take security seriously. This doesn’t really have anything to do with SEO but I am going to share anyways because it was a small source of entertainment this Friday morning.

As reported on The Register, it is very easy to do a search on Google for unprotected web cams using queries such as:

http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3ACgiStart%3Fpage%3DSingle

OR

http://www.google.com/search?q=axis+inurl%3Aview%2Findex.shtml

A lot of people setting up these inexpensive cameras aren’t using the included security features to the delight of so called “video hams”.

From the Register:

IP cameras, widely available from around £70 and not to be confused with web-cams that connect directly into PCs, connect into corporate computer network or domestic broadband systems and are capable of transmitting live footage or individual images across the internet. However these systems are often set up without bothering to configure security settings (such as password protection), an omission that means nominally private cams can be viewed over the net by so-called “video hams”.

By using search engines such as Google, snoopers can locate and view hundreds of unprotected cameras, according to Robert Schifreen, IT security consultant and author of the book Defeating The Hacker. Insecure cameras can be easily located using search strings such as “inurl:CgiStart?page=Single” or “axis inurl:view/index.shtml”, to produce interesting results (as illustrated by Schifreen here).

The problem is compounded by the inclusion in many systems of so-called “PTZ” features, which allow surveillance cameras to be panned, tilted and zoomed remotely so that the operator can focus on a person or activity of particular interest. Wi-Fi versions of video surveillance cams have made it possible to install systems in a wider number of locations, further exacerbating the issue.

There was an interesting article written by Brandt Dainow entitled How accurate is Google Adwords? The article looks at the revenue made by Google with its Adwords CPC engine, accuracy of clickthroughs and click fraud. Definately worth a read.

Unlike Steven Colbert who is well known for his truthiness, I just spotted a small Google fib. I was just playing around with Google Sitemaps and noticed a link saying “How can I improve my site’s ranking?”. I’ll bite.

On the resulting page contains the line “We don’t manually assign keywords to sites, nor do we manipulate the ranking of any site in our search results.” That is interesting because I would call removing a site from its search results a pretty good example of manipulating its ranking (such as what happened with webposition.com and many other documented instances).

Hopefully this site doesn’t not not get “manipulated” for its cheekiness. More on Google Sitemaps later.

This was posted the other day to Google’s webmaster blog regarding how googlebot spiders web sites and the use of robots.txt files:

If my site is down for maintenance, how can I tell Googlebot to come back later rather than to index the “down for maintenance” page?
You should configure your server to return a status of 503 (network unavailable) rather than 200 (successful). That lets Googlebot know to try the pages again later.

What should I do if Googlebot is crawling my site too much?
You can contact us — we’ll work with you to make sure we don’t overwhelm your server’s bandwidth. We’re experimenting with a feature in our webmaster tools for you to provide input on your crawl rate, and have gotten great feedback so far, so we hope to offer it to everyone soon.

Is it better to use the meta robots tag or a robots.txt file?
Googlebot obeys either, but meta tags apply to single pages only. If you have a number of pages you want to exclude from crawling, you can structure your site in such a way that you can easily use a robots.txt file to block those pages (for instance, put the pages into a single directory).

If my robots.txt file contains a directive for all bots as well as a specific directive for Googlebot, how does Googlebot interpret the line addressed to all bots?
If your robots.txt file contains a generic or weak directive plus a directive specifically for Googlebot, Googlebot obeys the lines specifically directed at it.

For instance, for this robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Googlebot will crawl everything in the site other than pages in the cgi-bin directory.

For this robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Googlebot won’t crawl any pages of the site.

Yahoo! is in the process of updating to a new search engine index or have just finished. This means there will be some changes in ranking of where your web site shows up in Yahoo’s SERP. It will also affect what web sites are in Yahoo’s index. So start checking the ranking of your web site for desired keyphrases in Yahoo!

When building your pages, avoid embedding CSS style and javascript in your web pages. Instead, put the CSS and Javascript in an external file.

The reason why you should do this is because search engines tend to give more weight to content at the top of the page than to text that appears further down on a page. By removing CSS or javascript content and putting it into an external file, you are effectively moving your content to more prominent placement.

If you don’t want Google or other search engines to count outbound links, use the nofollow tag in the html of your link. Here is an excerpt from Google’s blog:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

Google Blog Post

Calgary based Cambrian House performs publicity stunt by delivering 1000 pizzas to Google’s headquarters. Read their press release or watch the video.

A lot of webmasters use Yahoo! Search to get page and inlink data about their site, using ’site:’, ‘link:’, ‘linkdomain:’ queries. Beginning a few days ago, Yahoo is redirecting all queries of this nature to the Site Explorer results pages, so that you can benefit from this tool’s additional features.

To reiterate, the following types of queries will be redirected:

• site:ysearchblog.com
• link:http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000341.html
• linkdomain:ysearchblog.com

All other queries, such as the ones below, will not be redirected:

• ysearchblog.com
• ysearchblog
• site:ysearchblog.com webmasters (looking for ysearchblog posts mentioning webmasters)
• link:http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000341.html Danny Sullivan (looking for links to the article mentioning Danny Sullivan)
• linkdomain:ysearchblog.com site:yahoo.com (looking for links to ysearchblog from within yahoo.com)

Overture has two handy tools that can give you an idea of how competive keywords are based on the max bid being paid for them and the amount of searches the keyword receives. The second tool will also give you suggestions for other keywords based on the keyphrase you enter.

Max Bid Tool

Keyword Selector Tool

Google SOAP Search API (beta) has serious problems with accuracy. If you compare the results returned from the API to results from manually searching on Google, they are rarely the same. The is a serious problem.

It is against the Google terms of service to scrape the search engine results to obtain keyword positions for your web site. Unfortunately, this is the only accurate method of obtaining this information. Scraping search engine results takes up precious server bandwidth and resources that from Google’s perspective they want to be used for actual surfers searching for web pages and not for your web site analysis that earns them zero advertising revenue.

Bottom line is that SEO firms and many others use web page scraping as it is the only method of getting an accurate picture of whats happening on Google. Until Google fixes their API, expect this to continue.

I recently came across a web site that I remembered from way back in the day (in Internet years one year equals one month) that used to sell a html editor called Coffee Cup. Anyways, they have some free web site templates that could be a good starting point for designing a web site, especially for those aspiring or uninspired designers. You must register to dowload the templates but it was relatively painless.