Dynamic URLs & Search Engines
Most Web sites with a large number of pages are developed using dynamic server-side Web technologies such as Hypertext PreProcessor (.php), Java Server Pages (.jsp), Active Server Pages (.asp), ColdFusion (.cfm) and Perl. These technologies provide programmers with the tools to build sites so that adding product or pages does not require extensive HTML work. In reality, all high volume sites must use one of these technologies in order to maximize efficiency and stay profitable.
The power and flexibility provided by these technologies is outstanding. There are, however, issues that need to be addressed in regards to the way search engines crawl a dynamically driven Web site. These issues do not have to do with the pages that are generated, but with the URLs these technologies generate.
In order to explain search engine optimization technique, let me give you some perspective with a client of RustyBrick, Inc. RustyBrick designed and developed a custom e-commerce site for an undergarment and intimate apparel shop named Freshpair.com. Freshpair.com is built with a PHP dynamic scripting language that helps facilitate the day-to-day operations of the site. After the site was built and running, Freshpair.com participated in many online advertising campaigns, including Overture and Google AdWords.
At some point after sales leveled off and the company was looking for ways to increase revenues, Freshpair came to me at RustyBrick and asked what they can do. Freshpair.com’s COO and I discussed many options; but one thing that stood out was that Freshpair.com was not to be found in the normal search results. We quickly devised a plan on what steps to take in order to make Freshpair.com “search engine friendly”.
We will get back to Freshpair.com shortly; but first let’s continue to discuss the importance of dynamically generated URLs. In order to better understand what a search engine sees, let us take a sample URL and discover it.
A simple standard URL would look something like: http://www.freshpair.com/underwear.html.
A complex URL would look something like: http://www.freshpair.com/catalog.php?formid=4&id=8&brand=&brasize=&ion=women.
The first thing you notice is the .php extension, and you might think that the .php extension is causing the issue. That is not the case. Next you will notice are question marks, equal signs, ampersands within the URL. Is that causing the issues? Kind of… These question marks, equal signs and ampersands are what are commonly referred to as “stop characters” in search engine optimization terms. They are named stop characters because they signal to search engines to stop crawling past a certain point, limiting the number of pages crawled on your site.
Let me present another example of one of the pages from our corporate Web site. The following URL is a page that contains the full RustyBrick client list. The URL reads as follows:
http://www.rustybrick.com/portfolio_client_list_all.php.
We also have enabled the Web visitor to sort the client list by industry. If a Web visitor would like to see all clients that fall within the industry of IT & Communication services they would be shown a URL that reads http://www.rustybrick.com/portfolio_client_list.php?industry=4.
We again see the question marks and equal signs. Now the Web visitor wants to view the client list by the Retail and Wholesale service industry and clicks on that link. The URL now reads
http://www.rustybrick.com/portfolio_client_list.php?industry=6.
As you can see the URLs are exactly the same up until the last digit in the URL where the numbers come in. So if RustyBrick severed 200 industries there would be the same URL except for the last digit.
Now put yourself in the shoes of a search engine. The search engine wants to only put pages into its index that are unique. So the full client list contains the same information that the industry specific URLs contain and search engines do not want repetitive information in their index. Search engines decide to combat this issue by “pruning off” the URLs after a specific number of variable strings (i.e. ?, =. &).
For example, the URL http://www.rustybrick.com/portfolio_client_list.php?industry=6 might be pruned down to http://www.rustybrick.com/portfolio_client_list.php by the search engine in order to limit the number of repeated content.
In a case like Freshpair.com, where there are numerous methods of finding the same product and with an unlimited number of pages, how do we get the search engine to find each product and each method of finding that product? Search engines want to keep the number of pages that a site contains to a minimum in order to (1) eliminate duplicate search results with the same content and (2) to make the crawling of the pages efficient.
The solution we came up with was to program a Mod_Rewrite on the URLs to remove the stop characters from the URLs. We modified a URL that once looked like http://www.freshpair.com/catalog.php?formid=5&query=bra&ion=women to something more like http://www.freshpair.com/catalog_section_women_id_8.html. We replaced all stop characters with underscores and more friendly URL characters and names. Today, Google has indexed over 21,000 pages on Freshpair.com and sales have increased tremendously due to the Mod_Rewrite and other search engine optimization techniques applied to the site.
For more information on Mod_Rewrite please visit the Apache module mod_rewrite page at: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html
Author Bio:
Barry Schwartz is the President of RustyBrick, Inc., a Web services firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is a leading expert in the search engine optimization community. Barry has written and contributed many articles to the SEO community, by publishing in SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization). Barry also gives regular seminars covering the complete spectrum of search engine marketing technology and methods.
Search Engine Marketing Myth
You’ve seen the ads: Guaranteed #1 Ranking! There are no guarantees in search engine marketing and website promotion. If anyone tells you different, you should check quickly to make sure they don’t have their hand in your wallet.
Suppose you sell widgets. You want to sell more widgets, and the way to do that is to make sure that more people know about widgets, and that you are the place to buy their widgets. You might decide to buy a half-page ad in a national magazine to tell your story. When you place that ad, you are “guaranteed” your position.
With a magazine advertisement, you know what the magazine’s circulation is, who reads it, and which page will feature your ad. The magazine can guarantee all that, because they own the medium.
Search engine marketing is qualitatively different. When you work with a search engine marketing firm to promote your website, they cannot guarantee where your listing will appear. Certainly there are types of online ads where there are guarantees in place: banner ads priced at “cost per thousand impressions”, pop-up ads, and so forth. These are like traditional media buys, where you are working directly with the owner of the medium where the ads appear, but this is not search engine marketing.
Even so-called pay-per-click search engines cannot guarantee your position. In Google AdWords, for example, it is not just the price you pay for a given keyword that determines where you will rank. They also bring in other factors, including how often your ad is clicked-on, to determine which ad will be listed first. Just throwing money at them will not necessarily get you into the #1 spot.
The bottom line is this: search engine marketing professionals do not own the search engines. They can tell you that you will achieve #1 ranking on a given search engine, or they can tell you that the moon is made of green cheese, but there is no way they can make either of those happen. When you tell Time magazine you want your ad to be on the back cover, and you pay them enough money, they will guarantee you the back cover. If you tell your search engine marketing people you want to be #1 in AllTheWeb, they cannot guarantee you that result. They can recommend changes to your site that will increase the likelihood of your ranking higher, but that is a long way from a guarantee. If you don’t control the medium, you can’t guarantee the result. Since your search engine consultant doesn’t control the search engine, there is no way they can guarantee your position.
The ranking algorithms of the search engines are a closely-guarded secret. The search engine wants to give top ranking to the site that is the best match to an individual visitor’s search query, not to the site that was able to “beat” the system. That is where the value of real search engine marketing comes in.
While the search engine marketing person cannot guarantee you a position, what they can do is to apply years of experience to tell you what has worked in the past, and to help you make it work today. In many ways, “organic” search engine optimization is really a matter of editing web pages or whole sites to make them the most search engine friendly they can be. Making sure that a given page has just the right combination of keywords, title, links, and so on, is really at its base simply a matter of making that page the best web page it can possibly be. The page that will rank the best in the search engines is also the page that will make the most sense to the human visitor. Rather than relying on tricks to try to make the page rank high, it is a matter of just making the page the most focused and on-message that it can be. The bad news is that this doesn’t guarantee which position in the search engine rankings that page will occupy on a given day. The good news is that the page will always rank well.
The search engines change their algorithms from time to time. If today’s rule, for example, is that just the right combination of text in the title tag will make or break a site, and you know this is true, then all you have to do is to tweak the title tag to fit within that rule, and you will automatically rank very high. Today.
Suppose that tomorrow, however, that rule is changed. Suppose that now the most important factor that the search engines use to rank a site is the content of the META Description tag. All the work you went to yesterday to fix the title is now useless. All of your attention is now focused on fixing that description tag.
Clearly, over time the focus of the search engines will vary. The best way to deal with this is to not deal with it! This means that rather than tweaking a site one way today and another way tomorrow, the best way to approach optimizing a page or a whole site is to not try to beat the system. Instead of trying to “psych-out” the search engines, why not add value to the site? A “common sense” approach to search engine optimization, looking for long term results, is the way to go. When you try to help a site rank better by making it the best it can be, everybody wins.
Author Bio:
Dale Goetsch is the Technical Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing, a Search Engine Promotion company serving small businesses and non-profits. He has over twelve years experience in software development. Along with programming in Perl, JavaScript, ASP and VB, he is a technical writer and editor, with an emphasis on making technical subjects accessible to non-technical readers.
Search Engine Traffic
Most Internet marketing methods are risky and many will not have any affect on traffic to a web site. Some online marketers will sell you anything from banner impressions, to mass email campaigns (spam), to popup ads. All these marketing tools can work, but they are also extremely risky. Some people I know find pop-ups and spam so annoying that they will never purchase anything from a business that uses them. These plans are probably not the best customer acquisition strategies, and more likely they are a total waste of money. So why would anyone bother risking money on marketing strategies that probably will not increase traffic to your website? Why not concentrate on what does work? – The search engines.
Have you ever been contacted by online marketers who promise to deliver a “ton of traffic” to your website”? I get these emails every day. Here’s a quote from one I used to get 10 times a day (until I automatically filtered it to trash):
“Hi I visited www.metamend.com, and noticed that you’re not listed on some search engines! I think we can offer you a service which can help you increase traffic and the number of visitors to your website.
I would like to introduce you to thispromotioncompany.com. We offer a unique technology that will submit your website to over 300,000 search engines and directories every month.
You’ll be surprised by the low cost, and by how effective this website promotion method can be.
To find out more about thispromotioncompany and the cost for submitting your website to over 300,000 search engines and directories, visit www.thispromotioncompany.com. (…)”
Have you ever received one, and wondered why they were contacting you? First off, how did they find your web site? What search engines are they referring to? If they really could deliver on their promise, then they would have so much repeat, and word of mouth business, that they wouldn’t have time to be calling or emailing you. Lastly, how many people actually believe that there are 300,000 search engines?
While it’s true you need traffic from the search engines, you don’t need to use spam techniques to get it. You need real results, and not false hope.
Increase Web Site Traffic,.. Naturally It is true that the best way to obtain lots of targeted traffic (customers) is to acquire it based on relevance, via the search engines. Various studies show that anywhere from 83% to 92% of first time visitors to a web site find it through the search engines. That’s an incredible statistic. If you are not acquiring those customers as a result of a relevant query, then they will be disappointed. They may be disappointed with the search result, but more likely, they will be disappointed with your web site.
In the online world that’s your first impression. We all know how important a first impression is. You can never get a bad one back, and a good one will carry you a long way. You have to make sure that the search engines are sending you visitors that are looking for your products or services. If your web site matches their interests, they will remember it, and come back, even if they do not make a purchase on that visit. If they find it irrelevant, they may have subconsciously formed a negative opinion of your online business, through no fault of your own.
Search engines provide a continuous stream of targeted visitors to your website, and for the most part, it’s free of charge. Some engines do charge a listing fee, but most do not. The only thing the search engine asks is that each web site operator makes an effort to provide relevant and good information to web surfers for a particular search phrase. If a web site does so, the search engines will reward the site with increased good quality traffic.
Search engine traffic is a win-win situation for any online business. It doesn’t take much to improve on most web site’s search engine traffic – it just takes optimization. Did you know that as of January 1 2002, there were 160,000,000 domain hosts in use worldwide? Did you know that 88% of the web pages worldwide are not indexed by the largest search engines? 88% of web pages are not optimized. How can any business survive on the Internet if it is not optimized for the search engines, and thus can never be found? How can they exist if over 83% of first time visitors never find their web site? How much more money could a web site operator earn if they ensured their web site was even partially visible?
If you have an informative web site, the search engines want to send you lots of customers. That’s because the more web surfers find what they want, the more they’ll use a particular search engine and recommend it to their friends. The search engine also benefits, as it becomes known as a resource that gets its clients – the searchers – to their destinations quickly and efficiently. The more people recognize how well the engine works as a resource, the more it gets recommended, and used. As the popularity increases, so do the engine’s revenues from advertising.
What Does Your Web Site Need To Receive Traffic From The Search Engines?
Small web sites with only 1 or 2 pages set themselves up for failure, simply because they usually don’t have enough content of interest. There are of course exceptions, where the 1 or 2 pages are each as long as a book. But these are awfully frustrating to read, and no one will be satisfied with them. Most often 1 or 2 page sites are simply too short to provide any useful information, so the search engines don’t take them seriously. Among other factors, the search engines examine how deep a site is. The more meaningful content present, the more weighty the site is viewed as, and the more importance it is given.
If you are wondering about whether to bother, ask yourself this: Why does your company have a web site? What does the company do with it? Think about it. Most companies today have web sites, and most market the web sites to facilitate customer acquisition, to increase their customer base, and to improve customer retention rates.
There are a number of reasons for having web sites. Many companies use theirs to enhance their customer service. Using a web site as a marketing vehicle is a great way for a company “to put the word out” about products, services, or offerings.
Most importantly, remember that your web site is an online resource that your clients can use to find answers to frequently asked questions, “how to” tips, and to educate themselves. When including content on a web site, always remember that the knowledge shared may be common to you, but it’s likely that you are an expert in the eyes of your clients. People visit your web site for your product or service, but also for information. If they find useful, relevant, information, they will keep coming back, and will likely make purchases. People like to buy from experts.
Instead of thinking of your web site as nothing more than an online billboard or business card, think of it as an online menu, that lets people get an idea of what it is you do, and how you do it. Develop a content rich website, optimize it, and let the search engines increase your website traffic, naturally. If you optimize each major web page within your site, you will increase the rankings in the search engine results and therefore receive targeted traffic for each of those pages.
Doing each of the above – ensuring relevant content is present, and optimizing the pages – will ensure that the search engines have what they need so they can do their work. It will also ensure that they can send you targeted traffic (customers), so that you can get that 83% of first time visitors your online business needs to survive.
Author Bio:
Richard Zwicky is a founder and the CEO of Metamend Software, a Victoria, B.C. based firm whose cutting edge Search Engine Optimization software has been recognized around the world as a leader in its field. Employing a staff of 10, the firm’s business comes from around the world, with clients from every continent. Most recently the company was recognized for their geo-locational, or GIS technology, which correlates online businesses with their physical locations, as well as their cutting edge advances in contextual search algorithms.
Revising Your Site
As of September, Smartads went through what so many have done before. I changed the entire site. I knew what it meant. It means that your search engine placements your probably so proud of are probably going to be lost in the process.
Sad but true. See, search engines are getting smarter, not only are they getting smarter but they do what you do. When you change a design, typically you change it for a couple of reasons.
1) You don’t like the design anymore
2) You’ve learned knew tips on how to optimize your site better for search engine placements.
3) Your revising your services
4) You bought an old domain name
Whatever it may be, you’re changing something. Now it won’t happen right away but eventually, if your site already has a good search engine ranking, then search engines will find out what you’ve done.
But “se’s” aren’t human? That’s correct but they were built by humans. Most se programmers realize that eventually something changes and since they want their search engine to be the best, they try to recognize your changes right away but there’s only one problem.
What do they do with the listings you have right now? Well, let’s say for instance you are attempting to change everything for the better. Now let’s also say that you HAD a page title called “good rank”. Search engine’s previously know and still think that your page is all about “good rank”. Moving along, your new page information is about “Getting a better rank”. Your old placements are now wrong in the eye’s of search engines. They now realize that something has changed. So what are they going to do?
Dump your old listings and start over! Ouch is right. So why would you ever want to change your site if that’s the case?
Well here’s some food for thought: Yes, you may loose your existing rankings but your roots are growing. Your new pages are growing bigger and better than before, it just takes a small transitional period to take effect.
For instance, within Google, Smartads had over 580 pages found when looking at all the links to smartads. Since we changed the whole site, there was a 2 day period were none of them were listed anymore. Normally, I would have gotten scared right away if I didn’t know that my site had changed.
Not 4 days later, not only were my pages back but the old rotten pages that weren’t being used anymore got dumped and the many new pages got listed. All in all around 680 pages now. That was a jump of around 100 pages were added. Cause and effect.
Here’s another example for you. Most of us know about link popularity within Google. You’ve put all your effort into promoting your main page. Within all of the links that you’ve had placed on other sites, you gave your link title “Great Ranking Services”. Once google saw your link, it started looking to see whether your information on your site is relevant to “Great Ranking Services” and awarded you appropriately.
Moving along a little, you’ve not only changed your site but you’ve also changed your link title to better fit the new content on your main page. The new link you now add on other sites reads something like this; “Boost Your Search Engine Rankings”.
Before you changed your site, you got a GREAT rank for “Great Ranking Services” when people searched online.
Here’s the catch. Now that your promoting a new site, a new page, new content within your page, the old content relavance goes straight down the drain. Search engines have recognized that everything has changed and are not paying any attention to your old links anymore. Yes, they still help your link popularity, but they don’t help your content relevance.
See, search engines are consistently trying to improve their content relevance. That’s what people want. If they search “gidgets & widgets”, they expect to get the best results for “gidgets & widgets”.
In Conclusion:
If you plan on changing your site, be prepared to suffer for a small amount of time. Prepare yourself for the worst because the best is yet to arise and prevail.
I understand that we all want better search engine rankings and just be ready to do what ever it takes, even if it means loosing your old se placements for some newer, fresher ones.
I hope you enjoyed my article, for more of my articles, simply follow the link below!
Best of luck to you!
Author Bio:
Martin R. Lemieux Smartads – President Affordable Web Site Design & Web Site Marketing Web Site Awards & Webmasters Playground Food for your mind & Entrepreneur Traits Read over 200 articles on advertising!
Domain Name Selection
If you think the selection process and the name you have chosen for that shiny new domain name won’t make any difference in the search rankings of your new or existing website, think again.
Today more than ever, all search engines do carry a lot of weight to the keywords that are present in your domain name. Ask any SEO professional that has been in this business for at least three or four years and they will tell you that the careful research and the final selection of the domain name you will use can have a tremendous positive impact in the search results pages from Google, AltaVista, Fast-all-the-Web, Yahoo, MSN, Inktomi, DMOZ, etc.
First Things First
When you need to register a new domain name for an existing site or a new site under construction, the first thing you need to do is decide if it will be a .com, a .net or a .ca domain name, or any other variations, as there are many. (Note: .ca domain names are reserved for Canadian companies only). Whether you’re looking to reserve a domain name for use now or at a later date, you should seriously consider doing it now, while a good selection might still be available, although I think the best choices in the .com range have already been taken by now.
I have found and personally registered some good domain names in the .com, .biz, .cc, .ca and .ws category. The choice is yours. Remember that the extension is not important. All search engines today all treat domain names equally, with no preference if they are of the .com, .net, .org, .us, .ca, .biz or any other extension there is. What IS important are the keywords between the venerable ‘www’ and the extension!
Hyphenated Domain Names or Un-hyphenated?
If you really want to score high and closer to the top in the search engines, then try to get a domain name that has one or two (or three) of your most important keywords in it, as it will greatly help you in the results pages when people type in keywords that are closely associated with the theme of your site.
Also, for that extra ‘punch’ in the search engines, I suggest that you put a hyphen in between them, such as this: www.your-main-keywords.com
Most major search engines today treat hyphenated domain names as separate words. If these separate words happen to be your most important keywords, you are ahead of the pact. Since some will tell you that hyphens in domain names look awkward and I fully agree, if you can, try also registering the non-hyphenated version too, such as this one: www.yourmainkeywords.com
On your website, for the search engines, it is best to host the hyphenated version on your server or host provider. On your business cards, brochures or print catalogues, it is best to use the non-hyphenated version. Just make sure you are using a “301 server re-direct” command just for that purpose, since it can be a bit touchy if not done correctly.
Today, some search engines, notably Google, are very critical of server re-direct commands and might penalize a site if not done correctly. The only safe and recommended technique I use is the “301 server re-direct” command, which is a very standard Linux command. Avoid using a Java script. You should consult your Web hosting provider with this if you are uncomfortable in doing it yourself.
If you would like an example of how this is done, look at the search engine I have built at: www.globalbusinesslisting.com. Notice that once you arrive at my search engine, the URL changes to the hyphenated version: www.global-business-listing.com which is a real bonus as far as the search engines are concerned. The added expense is well worth it.
An alternative you can try is to have a domain name registered in the name of your company, such as www.yourcompanyname.com, where you could use on your business cards, your letterhead, etc.
However, as in the example above, you should use a “301 server re-direct” command to www.your-most-important-keywords.com domain name, for added visibility in the search engines. Remember that search engines don’t care much about company names, brand names or trademarks. What they are really looking for are industry keywords and key phrases that people type in their search box. Unless you are a well-known Fortune 500 company that is very popular with a branded trademark that is universally known, I would stick with the above.
Not Ready Yet?
If you aren’t ready to build your website right away, there are also many additional options that can be added to any registered domain name at any time, such as the ability to:
• Set the domain name on a server with a “Coming Soon” page
• Temporarily re-direct the domain name to another of your choice
• Temporarily re-direct to a subdirectory of another domain name
• Start using your new domain name email address (highly recommended)
• Add relevant body text & keywords to your “Coming Soon” page
Your Legal Rights And Proof Of Ownership
From time to time, I hear about some domain names, mistakenly or otherwise, of not having been registered in the name of their rightful owners. Even if it’s just an oversight, rectifying this situation can become time consuming and costly, especially from a legal standpoint. Some domain names can be worth a lot of money. Before finalizing your domain name order, make sure it will be registered in your name or in the name of your company, if that is what you prefer. Better be safe now than sorry later.
Also, the administrative person (normally you), technical contact and billing contacts will be determined by you only at the time you are registering your new domain name (s).
Be sure to own your own domain name because you can have a website without owning your own domain name. Some ISPs and other organizations offer free web addresses for certain websites. Often these are easy to get and use, but there are important benefits to having your own domain name, such as:
1. Branding – Your web site address can be a valuable brand name for you. You want people to remember it and use it on a regular basis, with each use acting as additional brand reinforcement. You lose that strong identity if your visitors have to type something like www.yourcompany.ispname.othername.com
2. Independence – Should your ISP or hosting service provider no longer meet your needs or goes out of business for any reason, you will have to move your site’s URL and traffic along with the physical transfer of your site’s server IP address. After all, you have invested time and money to build traffic, so you shouldn’t have to start all over again simply because your needs change or for whatever other reason. In the Internet world, registered domain names are associated with name servers.
When you decide to change the location of your web site, your new name servers will be updated in the who-is record kept by your domain registrar. As a result, your site visitors will automatically be sent to your new host. The bottom line is that you keep all your traffic and all your sales. If you don’t own your domain name, you will not have the luxury of taking your traffic with you. The many benefits far outweigh the added expense of a domain name. All you need to do to change from one host provider to another is simply to change the name servers at your domain name registrar- a simple, one minute process that is very easy to do at most registrars.
3. Promotion – Your company or business alone gets to enjoy the increased traffic from every dollar spent promoting your site. If you don’t have your own domain name, the company associated with your website name will instead reap the benefits of your promotional efforts.
Conclusion
The careful selection and wording of your domain name is one of the most critical part of the initial steps in setting up any website, old or new. As I have discussed above, it can have a drastic impact in the search engine results pages (SERP’s). In some extreme cases, and depending on the competitiveness of your industry, it could almost mean the difference between success and failure of your site, as far as its visibility in the search engines is concerned.
Once you have a domain name that was correctly chosen, both for your most important keywords and possibly your branding, what’s left is the careful optimization of your site to ensure all that added visibility in the search engines.
Consider a business website just as any other business asset. It is an un-tangible, marketable title of property that can grow considerably in value and it should become an important ally to your business, while at the same time assist you in your long-term promotional efforts.
Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales
Hypertext Links
Search engine robots are not terribly sophisticated. They cannot click a button, submit a form, pull down a menu, or perform any other type of online “user interaction” that might be used by a human visitor. Robots are able to index the text on a page and click through hypertext links. For this reason, adding navigational text links to your web pages (often located at the bottom of the page) provides the search engine robots with another means to click through the links of your web pages when it cannot access these other types of navigation.
No matter how great your JavaScript menu system is, the search engine robots cannot use it. They can follow “plain old” hyperlinks, and that’s about it. Since the ability to move around on your site is vital to the robots’ successful indexing of your content, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to visit all of your pages. Use of text links at the bottom of your pages, while hardly cutting-edge, is one of the best ways to make sure that the search engine robots can move around on your site. Be sure to include links to your site’s principal pages on all the pages in your site. Always remember to put a link to your sitemap page here too.
Sitemaps
A sitemap page is a supercharged version of the bottom-of-the-page hypertext links. The sitemap provides “food” for a hungry search engine robot. A sitemap page will at very least have links to all of the major pages on your site. Depending on the size of your site, it may actually link to all of your pages. This means that once the robot gets to the sitemap page, it can visit every page on your entire site. Having all of the content of your site included in the search engine database is a good thing: you are much more likely to come-up in the search engine results when somebody is performing a search related to your topic.
A good sitemap will:
• Provide text links to at least the most important pages on your site; depending on the size of the site, it may have links to every page
• Give a short explanation of each page on your site, to inform your visitors about your website
• Give your visitors the information they need when lost in your website, and show them how to reach the page they are looking for
• Provide a pathway for the search engine robots to follow in order to reach your most important pages
• Provide important keyword phrases in the sitemap text and hypertext links that help the automated search engine robot “understand” what the page is about
• Help search engine robots find static landing pages that then link to dynamically generated pages they may not otherwise find
Even if your website is small, add a sitemap for your visitors and for the search engine robots.
To make your sitemap most attractive to the search engine robots and your human visitors, be sure to include descriptive text along with the page URLs and links. Use your keywords in that text, including appropriate content for each of the pages to which you link. Be careful not to overuse your keyword phrases, though, or you may be penalized in the rankings. Remember that this is a map that will be used by both search engine robots and your human visitors. If the content of the page makes sense to the people who visit your site, chances are it will make sense to the visiting robots as well.
When you make it easy for your visitors to navigate your site, they will find what they are looking for. When you make it easy to search engine robots to move around on your site, you increase your chances of being favorably listed in their search results.
Author Bio:
Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing (http://www.searchinnovation.com), a Search Engine Promotion company serving small businesses. Besides running her own company, Daria is an associate of WebMama.com, an Internet web marketing strategies company. She has specialized in search engine optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O’Reilly & Associates, a technical book publishing company.
Key Word Optimization Secrets
Judging by the number of websites on the web today, it is becoming harder and harder to find key words for optimization that your competitors are not already using. But finding keywords that your competitors are missing might be easier than imagined. Here we shall have a look at both conventional and unconventional means to overcome the competition in search engine rankings by showing you some effective but often overlooked ways of beating the competition at the SEO race.
Viewing Your Competitors Source Code
This is one of the easiest and most effective ways of learning more about your competition and their SEO strategy. It gives you the opportunity to have a look at some of their keywords, and better still you can get to see what keyword phrases they target in the search engines. Though not as important as they were in the earlier phases of the internet, meta-tags still play a key role in Search Engine Optimization techniques. Create your own keyword phrases by using a combination of some of the keywords targeted in your competitors meta tags. Go through the source code and pay particular attention to headings and titles. The higher up they are in the source code, the easier it will be for search engines to find them and this gives you an edge about where and how to place your keywords on your own page.
Place Yourself In The Search Engine User’s Mindset
Knowing your customers can eliminate a lot of wasted time and effort. If you know the people that you are targeting, you can then be able to customize your efforts to suit them. Think of the terms that you would search for if you were looking for your own site. It is also good to let someone else compile a list of words that they would use to search for your site, two minds are better than one. Search words that may not be obvious to you may be common with a particular group within your targeted clientele. Make sure you focus on the real content on the site, keep the topics in mind when looking for competitive keyword phrases. Even within your targeted group, there are bound to be a few other groups within it. For example, if your site sells second hand blue jeans, there may be people who will look for Edwin’s blue jeans while others may type in Levi’s blue jeans. Knowing these minor details about your customers can improve your site traffic dramatically.
Keyword Tools
Before settling down to the terms that you are going to use for your site optimization, run them through any keyword suggestion tool to see their popularity and any variations that you may have overlooked. Here I would recommend the Overture suggestion tool, it is both free and reliable and thus a perfect fit for an entrepreneur. Use it to edit the list of words and phrases that you prepared for optimization.
Multiple Words And Phrases
Single words are unlikely to bring you any qualified visitors. If you have a site selling homemade butter cookies, having cookies as one of the keywords might generate a million leads but chances are that very few of them are potential customers for your product. Half of them might be computer nerds searching for information about cookies and sessions for all you know. You would be much better off having ‘Homemade Irish Cookies’ or any other descriptive term that will drive specific and qualified customers ready to purchase your
product.
Keyword Variations
As I mentioned in the previous section, optimum results are more likely to be obtained using multiple words than singular words. Adding on to this, it is important that you create as many variations as possible for the selected keywords so that you expand the scope of your reach. For example if you are promoting a site selling second hand magazines, you can have not only ‘second-hand’ but similar words such as ‘Used magazines’, and ‘Last Year’s editions’ and so on that will effectively reach a more far reaching market for you.
For more tips on how to optimize your site and market your effort online, you can access more articles available at http://www.e-gnorance.com.
Author Bio:
Charlz is founder of http://www.e-gnorance.com, a site geared to the provision of information on education and entrepreneurship. Lots of informative content on web marketing, ecommerce and entrepreneurship.
Link Building That Makes Sense: Who To Link To
When you are building links to increase your link popularity, who do you link to? The question of where to link to increase ranking can be confusing. Logical thinking is needed to achieve link popularity in a natural way.
Google PageRank
First and foremost, PageRank is part of the algorithm of Google’s ranking in the search engine results. Other search engines use link popularity in their algorithm to evaluate your website as well. But PageRank is only one of the 100 plus criteria Google uses to evaluate your web pages. Use the idea of PageRank as a “tool” to help make decisions, there’s no need to live and die by the results. Link popularity itself is merely one way to improve your ranking.
Should You Link To Them?
Think about it. You see a quality website, you see good content. The site is a “Mom and Pop” website with little ranking. So what if the Google Toolbar says PageRank 2/10? That 2/10 may one day be 8/10. More importantly, you are linking to it because it is good to link to for your visitors – end of story.
Reciprocal Linking Fears
There is a general fear of reciprocal linking to websites who inadvertently link to a “bad neighborhood” with penalties or PageRank zero, passing on problems to you. Use your common sense. Is this a website you would want to visit or your visitors would want to visit? If the answer is no or you can’t tell what the subject of the site is, make a note of it and keep looking. A website full of links with little content doesn’t “make sense” because what benefit is it to you or your visitors? Of course you are going to link to your partners in business or maybe the small website that is doing a bang up job of selling widgets and providing widget information.
Linking Just To Link
If you are going to link, what purpose does it serve? The idea of acquiring link popularity by linking back and forth to other sites to boost your popularity artificially is a popular method. But is it of value to your website? Ask yourself:
* Would you link to this site if link popularity in the search engines didn’t matter?
* Would your visitor care about this link or find it helpful?
* Does the website have good content?
* Is this an opportunity for you to publicize your website by being listed there?
* Will this link cause you to spend a great deal of time worrying about it?
* Is the link “just a link” or do you want a link from any site whose visitors care about what you have to say
Places To Seek Out Links That Make Sense
It makes sense to list your website in the search engines and directories. In fact, one-way linking, such as listing your site in directories, is a good way to improve your link popularity naturally. Well, you say to yourself, of course I’ve done that. Besides the major directories, what else is out there? You’d be surprised at the amount of good secondary and specialty directories that drive traffic. Some even specialize in a topic – maybe your topic. If you have a product to sell, look at who your competitor is linking to. Search for directories and business sites on your topic. Look for websites that talk about
the widgets you sell and see if they accept submissions to their directory listings in the category for widgets. Do they accept original articles, product reviews, press releases or white papers about widgets? If so, submit your topical articles and watch your link popularity rise naturally. Always include your author bio, website link, reprint and copyright information for your company. With your good content on other websites as well as archived on your own website, there you have it, links pointing back to your website.
Think Like A Search Visitor
You’ve heard about good navigation, website usability and other ways to keep your site visitors interested in your site. Who are the search engines catering to? Webmasters? Search Engine Marketers? Google is a prime example – they want to create the best experience for their search engine users. It all ties in together – good content, good navigation, good usability, validated code, and relevant search engine results – because it makes sense. If Google as the leader in search engines is concerned about the visitor, don’t you think the other search engines following suit?
Hard Work Instead Of Worrying
Focus your time on good content which uses your important keyword phrases. Optimize your web pages using those keywords. Develop your website so once your visitors arrive, they will want to stay. The world wide web uses linking to connect us all. By using hard work to create a quality website and common sense when linking you can stop worrying and start succeeding.
Author Bio:
Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing (http://www.searchinnovation.com), a Search Engine Promotion company serving small businesses. Besides running her own company, Daria is an associate of WebMama.com, an Internet web marketing strategies company. She has specialized in search engine optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O’Reilly & Associates, a technical book publishing company.
Introduction
For many, the value of their websites can be measured in visitors, for others it is the amount of revenue that the site generates. Regardless of how you measure the success of your website, you are going to have to bring visitors to it that are looking for the information, content and/or products that you are providing. So how do you do this?
For many businesses the yellow pages is a first choice for promotions and marketing. A standard yellow page ad runs for about $1,200+/year for a smaller ad and serves only a local market. You further have to consider the cost of ad development, which can often run into the thousands of dollars as well.
While this may be an essential form of advertising for many businesses which serve only local areas, it is certainly not the only one.
On the Internet there are many forms of advertising that have and are being used to bring traffic to websites. From banner ads and sp@m email to PPC and natural search engines there are countless methods for promoting your website online. So how do you choose which marketing tactic to utilize?
One thing to consider is that over 80% of all Internet traffic comes from search engines with Google currently responsible for the vast majority of that. With such an overwhelming amount of traffic coming from a single identifiable source it makes sense to put a lot of weight on what traffic from this source can mean for your website, and for your business.
In this article we will explore the difference between sites that should consider search engine placement as a viable choice in their marketing strategy, and those that would benefit little from top placements. As well we will look at ways to insure that you are maximizing the effect and potential return on investment of your search engine placement campaign should you choose to go that route.
Who Should Consider Search Engine Placement
An ethical search engine placement firm will tell a client honestly if search engine optimization will benefit their website. Of course, not every company is ethical and further, how do you know until you have undergone search engine optimization, whether it will benefit your website? By this point you have paid the firm and they have done their job whether it helped you or not.
There are a few things you should consider before you apply search engine placement tactics to your website, or consider hiring a search engine placement firm. I include “apply search engine placement tactics to your website” as, even though it may be “free” to do it yourself you can detract from the overall visual appeal of your site if not done correctly, and also it is a very time consuming process to both learn and perform.
Questions You Should Ask Yourself
What do I stand to gain from higher search engine traffic? As search engine optimization has a built in cost of either time and resources should you choose to do it yourself, or through the direct cost of money should you hire a search engine placement firm, you have to insure that what you hope to accomplish will be at least equal to and preferably greater than the cost of time and money it will take to do successfully. For more information on this you will want to read the section below “So You’re Going To Market Your Website On The Search Engines, Now What?” for tips on establishing whether there is truly enough traffic to be had to make your efforts worth it.
Can I compete? The short answer to this question is generally always “yes” however there are many factors to consider. While any site, with enough work, can rank well you do have to consider whether the effort will be worth it. For example, if you own a small computer store in Michigan that repairs computers and troubleshoots software issues, it is theoretically possible for you to rank your website well for the term “Microsoft Windows”. To do so would require an ENORMOUS amount of both time and money. And so you have to consider, is it really worth investing years of time and money into this one ranking? The answer is “probably not” but that doesn’t mean that search engine placement would not be beneficial for you, just that those keywords are not worth targeting. There are suggestions for choosing the right keywords below.
Do I make money from my website traffic? This question isn’t the end-all-be-all however it’s certainly relevant if you’re considering hiring a search engine placement firm to optimize your site. If you plan on “going it alone” you may want to put in the effort for no money in return simply for the “fun” of it, however if you’re planning on spending your hard earned money on a search engine placement firm you have to make sure that it is in your economic best interest to do so. This may be from either direct product/services sales or from the sale of advertising on your site.
If, after answering these questions to yourself you have determined that search engine placement is indeed a good choice for your marketing strategy you will now have the task of determining exactly what tactics will produce the greatest Return On Investment for your efforts.
So You’re Going To Market Your Website On The Search Engines � Now What?
Now that you have determined that search engine placement is indeed an avenue of marketing that can produce beneficial results for your site and for your business, you have to decide on a “plan of attack”. Many SEO firms will “help” you determine keywords to target, and some will even build links for you from “valuable” sites. In many case they may be entirely truthful but how do you know?
The choosing of the keywords to target is probably the most crucial step of the entire search engine optimization process. This will determine the success and/or failure of your promotions. Even if you attain all the top placements that were targeted, if you target the wrong terms these rankings will produce little or no results. So how do you determine for yourself which keywords to target?
Without getting into anything too technical there are a couple of great resources out there to help you isolate the keywords that you should target.
The Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool
Advantages – The Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool is free and produces a large number of results for related searches. Disadvantages – There are two main disadvantages to the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool in determining your keywords. The first of these is that it puts everything in terms on the singular and further will correct misspellings where you may want to know how many people searched for a misspelled term. If you run a shopping site that sells gifts you will not be able to determine whether the main searched phrase was “gift” or “gifts”. The second major disadvantage to the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool is that it doesn’t give you alternative search phrases that are related but that you might not have thought to punch in (“presents” for example). Which brings us to the second tool.
WordTracker
Advantages – WordTracker addresses all the disadvantages noted about the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool. It differentiates between singular and plural and will allow you to search for misspellings. Further, it searches a thesaurus and will make a number of suggestions for other terms you may not have thought of but which may be related to your industry. It will then analyze the variety of terms that you have searched and chosen and actually make recommendations on which keywords to target based on the number of competing pages and the specific search engine you are targeting. It will also give you a predicted number of searches per day for each phrase.
Disadvantages – The only real disadvantage to WordTracker is that it has a cost. There is a free trial on the site which you can use though the results it produces are far lower in numbers and it does not give you information on all of the major search engines. Certainly worth checking into even if you only try the demo mode (not a download – this is an online resource).
So You Now Have A List Of Possible Keyword Phrases � Now What?
The next step is to determine whether you can compete with those currently holding the top positions and, more importantly, whether it will be economical to do so. The first place to look when you are trying to determine this is the search engines themselves. Let’s assume for a second that you have determined that there are a good number of searches for your product and that the main keyword phrase you would like to target is “acne cures”. The next step is to run a search for “acne cures”. Most people are interested primarily in their Google rankings and so you would run that search on Google producing the following results:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=acne+cures.
The site currently holding the #4 position is www.approvedcures.com. Take a look at the site. There are two major things that you will first be looking for:
Is this a large site with a lot of content related to the search phrase? In this case the answer is “yes”. They have a very large site and all of it is related to the topic the search was for.
How many incoming links do they have? You will now want to find out what sort of link popularity you will be competing with. Links are not the end-all-be-all of search engine optimization, if fact it is just one of a large number of deciding factors, however the links help determine your Google PageRank and this PageRank is a final multiplier in determining your position. Because the number of incoming links is easily determined it is something you should look into. To determine the number of links simply enter into the Google search bar “link:www.domain-in-question.com”. In this case it would be http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&q=link%3Awww.approvedcures.com. They do not have a large number of incoming links and thus, this is not going to be a significant factor in determining their ranking.
And Now You’re Ready For Search Engine Placement
At this point you should have a pretty good idea as to whether search engine placement is a viable choice for your website promotions, which keywords you should target, and what competition you will be facing.
Assuming that your website needs to be optimized, you will now be faced with the choice of doing it yourself or hiring a search engine placement firm.
If you will be doing your own optimization I would highly recommend reading an article by the CEO of StepForth Search Engine Placement entitled “A 10 Minute Search Engine Optimization”. It can be found on the StepForth website at http://news.stepforth.com/2003-news/ten-minute-optimization.shtml.
If you will be hiring on a search engine placement firm I would recommend first submitting your site for a free website review off of our homepage at http://www.stepforth.com. There is no obligation and it will give you a very good idea of what areas need to be addressed.
Author Bio:
Dave Davies is the marketing manager for StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. Visit them online at http://www.stepforth.com or email him at dave@stepforth.com.
Domain Name Dilemma
It’s a fact. When it comes to Google ranking you don’t have to be a lot better to beat out the competition. So let’s take another dip into the “every little bit helps” pool.
Now believe it or not there are those who like to debate the merits of using dashes or underscores in domain names. Some assert dashes are better. Some have an ongoing love affair with underscores. Others are certain there is no difference.
I agree you do get a bit of a bounce in Google if you do this right. But it’s only marginal. Still let’s end this debate once and for all and PROVE which is better. To sort this out we need to conduct a study. Using the Google search results to test if Google treats dashes or underscores the same or differently. The guinea pig search term I picked is “affordable search engine placement”. There’s nothing special about it. It’s more or less your run-of-the-mill multi-word search term. So let’s get searching.
First, to set a benchmark I cast the broadest net possible by doing a simple search using
affordable search engine placement
Google returned these results:
Searched the web for affordable search engine placement.
Results 1 – 10 of about 78,600
That simply says there were 78,600 pages indexed by Google for ANY of those keywords.
Next I searched on the same phrase only this time I separated the words by dashes like this:
affordable-search-engine-placement
Google turned up these results:
Searched the web for affordable-search-engine-placement.
Results 1 – 10 of about 1,160.
As you can see our term with dashes gave considerably fewer results than the one without.
Then I searched on the same words separated by underscores:
affordable_search_engine_placement
For this one Google didn’t find much:
Searched the web for affordable_search_engine_placement.
Results 1 – 4 of about 6.
Whoa! Next to no pages with underscores, right?
Finally I searched for
“affordable search engine placement”
Note the quotes. Using quotes limits the search results to one specific phrase. Just like you were doing an advanced search for that exact phrase.
In this case Google returned these results:
Searched the web for “affordable search engine placement”.
Results 1 – 10 of about 1,160.
Huh, exactly the same number of pages as with the keyword phrase with dashes. Okay so what do we got?
Let’s see. The first search returns what you could say is a free for all of listings with any of the words in the keyword phrase. That’s why there are so many search results.
SIDEBAR: Reality check time. This is how most search. In fact I saw a stat the said only 3% use the advanced search feature provided by Google. Yet the dramatically bigger number of resulting SERPS explains why it is harder to rank high sometimes. Reason being you are going up against a whole bunch more pages – some unrelated to what is being searched for. So it’s takes more juice, ie on-page optimization, internal links and maybe even in bound links to come out on top.
Now our study also showed the phrase with underscores (which Google treats as any other CHARACTER) produced negligible results. As in next to none. While the keyword phrase with dashes and the exact phrase search turned up the same number of listings. At this point you should be wondering “Why is that?” Glad you asked. Even if you didn’t let me explain. Oh and since this is important engage your brain NOW.
The reason for this apparent match of search results is Google uses the dash to separate the words in the phrase. Programmers call this a “delimiter”. In essence Google sees it as a space or separator between the words. Or in other words Google treats the dash as a spacer. Yet Google does NOT treat the underscore as a delimiter. Again to Google it’s just another character.
Which is proven by the search results. Had Google treated the dash and underscore alike the number of SERPs returned for
affordable_search_engine_placement
or
affordable-search-engine-placement
would be identical. But as you saw they are not. Not even close.
So to answer the original question of which is better dashes or underscores is obvious isn’t it? You want to go with dashes in your domain names, folder names, files names etc. That’s because using dashes to separate the words will give you the biggest Google impact -whatever that impact may be. Since Google can parse the different words. While using underscores won’t help one iota.
Look. This isn’t theory or speculation. It’s fact. And you can repeat the same searches with any keyword phrase you want and you’ll get the same results. In any case let’s be real. Don’t expect some kind of massive boost from this dash trick. Sure it can help at tad as part of an over all optimization scheme. But whether or not you use dashes in a domain, folder or file name is not going to be whatgets you top Google listings. Content and links are.
Still this study settles the debate about dashes and underscores. Giving you yet another little thing you can do to rank well.
Author Bio:
How much is more traffic worth to your business? Take John Gergye’s Search Engine Quiz and get a special report “Coming Out On Top” with 49 tools that make it easy to get more traffic. http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/search-engine-quiz.shtml
