SEO Advice

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.