How 3 Lines of Code Can Improve Your Rankings

"... different versions of the same pages can get indexed in search engines. ...
...
You should be in control of what versions of your site and pages get indexed, and not leave it up to search engines to decide."

Here is a good description of a tip that we have mentioned in class for years.

The issue described here has to do with different configurations of your URL that other sites might link to. For example,

• http://samplesite.com
• http://www.samplesite.com
• http://samplesite.com/default.php
• http://www.samplesite.com/index.html

all refer to different pages, at least as far as the search engines are concerned. If your site can be reached in various ways, like these, you may be losing some "oomph" in your ranking power.

A simple test will show you whether you have a problem or not. Type your URL into the address bar in each of the several configurations that might be relevant, then observe the actual URL that you land on. If different configurations result in your landing on the exact same URL, you are probably all right. If not, then you need to look into the advice provided in this article. The author tells you what you need to do to clear up the problem. Caution: if you are not a web developer, this is a little technical, but your web hosting company or web developer should be able to take care of it for you with no difficulty. If not, you have a bigger problem!

Attention to detail is very important in achieving optimal results with your Internet Marketing strategy, and this is one of those details that is easily overlooked, but can be very beneficial to get right!

Google: The Search Party

"the idea is to anticipate a user’s intent in a search query."

I just watched the author, Ken Auletta, at the New Yorker magazine, talk about Google with Charlie Rose, and a thought came to me about this concept. It seemed more obvious in the show than it does in this article, but the question is, "With Google customizing searches based on what it knows about different searchers, are we coming to a point where different searchers will get different results on the exact same search?" And, if the answer to that is "yes", what does it mean to web masters who are trying to optimize sites for the broadest possible reach? I don't have an answer to that question, but will certainly be thinking about it.

This article makes very interesting reading for general information about Google, how important it is, and where it is going. For example, it reports that Google has a market value of just over two hundred billion dollars. By comparison, ExxonMobil, the richest corporation, has a value just under five hundred billion. Google is only about ten years old!

This year, 2008, their ad revenues are expected to reach sixteen billion dollars, close to the combined revenues of the four top television broadcast networks. Google's ad revenues are increasing, while revenues for other players is declining.

Andy Grove, the former chairman and C.E.O. of Intel,says, “Google’s power is shaping what’s happening to other industries.” According to ComScore, Google does an estimated four hundred billion searches a year, which amounts to about sixty percent of the searches worldwide.

One other interesting point in the article is that "Americans spend the same number of hours a week online as they do watching television—fourteen..."

What does this mean to those of us who are working in the SEO field? For one thing, it emphasizes the absolute dominance of Google on our results, and suggests that this will not change in the immediate future, but, in fact, will probably become more pronounced! It says that we have to stay on our toes with the way Google rates our work, because that rating is constantly changing, with possibly serious impact on our results. And, finally, it illustrates the importance that the Internet has taken on in everyone's lives, and how that presence will likely become more significant rather than less significant, as we tie in more devices to the Internet (cell phones, for example!) Our field, while continually challenging, is only beginning to become what it will be in the future!

Enhancements to Sitemaps!

"... webmasters could notify the search engines of the URLs on their site that they wanted crawled.

Sitemaps are an extremely useful tool provided by the search engines to make it easier to ensure that the pages of your web site get crawled effectively. Recently, the search engines established a standard protocol so that different engines would use the same technique for indexing a site. Now, the engines have simplified the process even further by providing a means of referring the crawlers to the location of the site map on the site.

In simple terms, they have just provided a line of code within the robots.txt file to point to the sitemap for the site. Since all search engine crawlers check this file when visiting a site, it is a simple way to inform them of where to find the sitemap.

The code line is:
Sitemap: http://www.mysitename.com/sitemap.xml

All you have to do is add this line to your robots.txt file in the root directory of your website.

What could be simpler?

Link Building is Hard Work!

"This post will talk about the process for getting a link from site by using a relationship building process. This post will talk about the process for getting a link from site by using a relationship building process. "

Everyone agrees that links are a very important element in achieving high ranking for your site, and it is clear that authoritative links mean much more than links from less influential sites. This article describes a process for getting good links that makes it clear why so few people ever achieve the kinds of inbound link relationships that can be solid gold to your site.

The author describes a nine step process, but what it amounts to, in short, is cultivating a relationship with the site owner you have identified as a good link before ever attempting to obtain a link. Think about the effort involved and you will understand why so few people ever do it!

SEO Site Analysis: Knowing the Score, Part 1

"... prepare a report card for your current Web site. Think of the process as a scorecard of sorts, though the analysis could become a blueprint for any online marketing project.prepare a report card for your current Web site. Think of the process as a scorecard of sorts, though the analysis could become a blueprint for any online marketing project."

The author of this article provides an outline for evaluating the effectiveness of your web site. In the process, she describes, or mentions, many of the points that we regularly stress in our Internet Marketing Clinic in teaching how to create a powerful web site from scratch.

Two of her points that I found particularly interesting were, "If you don't have access to any information about your site, give your site a zero for Web metrics ..." and "... if you site is entirely Flash- or AJAX-based and doesn't produce an alternative site for non-JavaScript users, give your site a zero." She was unequivocal about these points, making it clear how important it is to avoid the mistake of Flash style sites, and how important it is to have statistics that your regularly utilize to understand what is going on with your site.

Some of the evaluation she recommends will require some tools that go beyond site statistics, but she offers some suggestions and links to places where they can be obtained. Some of the analysis may also go beyond the capability of many site owners, but we offer help on those points through our free internet marketing classes.

Check Your Google Links Now!

"You can view the links to your site by selecting a verified site in your webmaster tools account and clicking on the new Links tab at the top."

Finally, we have a way to get a good count of what Google knows about pages linking to our sites! Many of the tools I have tried recently that count external links to sites simply do not report much information about Google links. Even the Google "backward links" tool on the toolbar does not provide satisfying results. This uses the "links:..." operator that works for other search engines, such as Yahoo.

Now, Google has offered the ability to check on your own links through the Webmaster Tools interface. Too bad, this will not help in checking Google back links to other sites (unless you own them, or at least, have access to the sites). but it is a big step forward in helping to collect information about sites that you do control.

To use it, you have to get into the Webmaster Tools site, which requires registering, but it is free, so, no worries. Once there, you must set up the site(s) you want to check. This will require posting a file or some code to the site to verify that you have that kind of access, so there are several steps involved the first time you go in. After that, you have access to a nice set of tools to explore and analyze various aspects of your site operation.

This is also where you register sitemaps for your site, another Google supported tool for helping you to improve your site performance.

If you have not done so yet, you must go to the Webmaster Tools site and get yourself established and begin using this toolkit to help you manage your site

Optimized Pageload Time Increased CTR & Income

Here is a post describing an improvement in site performance related to speeding up load times for the site pages. In this posting, the speed increase is related to moving to a different server, but other comments in the thread refer to page size. Our recommendation in the clinic has always been to keep your total page sizes below the 65k limit, but holding your size below that can pay benefits. A later post in this thread refers to page sizes as low as 10k! This places a real premium on keeping pages clear of unnecessary graphics and other "appearance-enhancing" effects! Also, any graphics that are used should be analyzed for what they contribute to the page message, and optimized effectively before posting to the page. (Viewing this thread will require login to Webmaster World,a free registration.)

"I've been around Adsense, and here long enough to know that fluctuations in clicks, ctr etc can be caused by almost anything, and jumping to conclusions is a pointless excercise.
However, I have made one change to my website that seems to have made a difference to all of the above, and a subsequent rise in income.
Most of my site visitors are in the US, but as I'm located in the UK so was my web hosting. I figured it didn't really matter where the host was. I have recently moved hosting to the US for a variety of reasons including the fact that most of my visitors are there, and it just might give them a faster load time to the pages. I guess that the pages load faster in the US now - they are certainly loading faster here.
Interestingly enough, the effect was immediate once the domain had transferred. ctr and clicks went up. I've always kept the pages minimalist so as to provide faster loading times - especially the main index page. If the assumptions are correct, then it would appear that the load times are pretty crucial to if a visitor stays, and if they click or not! "

MSN Rolls out new search interface / algorithm

Here is a little insight from a forum post regarding what is happening with the MSN search ranking algorithm. This reading is consistent with the approach that we constantly emphasize in our weekly clinic, which is, "content is king!" Do your pages properly to be useful to the reader first, then pay attention to the parameters that search engines pay attention to, and you will do well in the rankings over the longer term!

"While MSN has been a little volatile lately, for the past year or so they have been the SE where I've seen the most consistency with maintaining my results. From what I've tracked, here is where I focus my efforts to maintain and improve rankings:
1. Title tags - MSN is bigger on titles than any other SE imho. The order of your keyword phrases matters.
2. Content - FYI: They are pretty swift to drop your rankings for dup. content
3. Affiliate Links - MSN seems to be going the way of DMOZ regarding affiliate sites. If they see too many OBAL's it will definitely hold you back a bit. For instance, I have an affiliate site that from the get go was doing very well in MSN right from the get-go. I noticed about a week into it that my affiliate tracking links were wrong. Once I fixed the links, my site was not only dropped from the first page, but out of their index altogether. (I can show an example for those that PM me) I'm not saying you can't get ranked with them if you have an affiliate site, as I have many others that are doing alright, but it seems to me they are tinkering with something resembling an affiliate site penalty. Again, just my opinion from my own experience.
4. Meta Data - Unlike the other 'majors', MSN seems to still be placing some importance on this. Meta Description tends to attract the most attention on my sites.

I hope that helped a bit. The main thing for MSN (and most other SE's) is to have your site appear as 'natural' or 'non-optimized' as possible - of course that is the key to good SEO anyway, imo"

Search Engines Have More Than Twice the Conversion Rate of Other Acquisition Sources, According to WebSideStory

A new report confirms the importance of creating your community for your web site. This article cites a conversion rate of 2.3 percent for sites found through search engines, compared to a rate of 0.96 percent for othersources such as banner ads, affiliate marketing links, shopping search engines and other referring links.

However, direct navigation achieves a conversion rate of 4.23 percent. Direct navigation basically means boookmarks, which reflects good old fashioned branding and customer loyalty.

See our materials from our clinic for more thoughts on community management and what it can do for your business.

Google Offers Web Analytics for Free

"Webmasters can get free, sophisticated tools to determine how many people are visiting their sites, and what they're clicking on, causing suffering among pricey competitors."

Major good news for small web site owners! Google has made Urchin statistics available for free in a script-driven application. All you have to do is paste a small piece of script into every page on your web site (that you want tracked, you can skip pages that you do not want statistics on!), and go into the reporting application to see the results. The only limitation I have seen so far on the application is that it is limited to 5M pageviews per month for non AdWords advertisers. This will not be a problem for most small sites. Larger sites can always initiate a small AdWords campaign to qualify.

Our classes have always emphasized the importance of comprehensive, thorough site statistics to enable site operators to manage their site performance. The Urchin reporting package is one of the better packages available and will easily meet the needs of most site owners.

For more information, go to the Google Web Analytics page. Thanks to Bob Tchoryk, one of our class participants, for the "heads-up" on this news!

Just Googling It Is Striking Fear Into Companies - New York Times

"'Google is the realization of everything that we thought the Internet was going to be about but really wasn't until Google,'..."

The New York Times writes about the impact that Google is having on all businesses, and how Wal-Mart, the country's largest company registers concern about the threat that Google poses to their business.

What does this mean to us, webmasters and small business owners who are working to make the Internet an effective marketing tool for our businesses? It means that the tools we are attempting to utilize for the expansion and growth of our businesses are becoming more and more powerful and significant for all businesses. It means that the techniques we learn in improving our own sites, and those of our clients, have a broader and broader reach and impact every day, and that the trend will continue for the foreseeablee future.

It means that the time we spend learning to improve our web sites will pay us great dividends if we do the job right. Learn the lessons well, and be persistent in your application of them.

Business that works on the web!

"A clever little business that provides a useful product in an efficient manner to the widest possible variety of potential customers. "

The editor of SmartComputing describes a small business that is successful on the Internet, and sums up the principle concepts very nicely. Note the terms he used; "useful", "efficient", "widest possible variety". These are the elements of successful businesses anywhere, and even more so on the web.

His editorial is titled, "Building The Digital Cottage", as in "cottage industry". Most of us who are working on our businesses should relate to this description. We are all cottage industries. We are niche players, looking for the niches in the environment that we can exploit to produce an income for our businesses. We are not the people who have big budgets to create elaborate web sites. We are always looking for those opportunities to benefit by utilizing the techniques that bigger companies overlook. The size and continuing growth of the Internet as a phenomenon in today's world provides many such opportunities for those of us who are quick enough and energetic enough to capitalize on them.

Common Sense Search Engine Optimization Article

"Common sense tells me that most people would rather be presented with information on the types of products or services offered in clear, concise language, right on the main page of the site they're visiting. Luckily for us, that's exactly what the search engines want to see also!"

Search Engine specialist Jill Whalen writes a good article debunking several common myths about effective marketing on the web.

Number one is pointing out the absence of any need for Flash and other fancy graphics on a web site. She also emphasizes the value of good content on your pages, pointing out that the reason people will come to your site is because they see something there of value to them!

Another myth is that a webmaster has to keep changing pages to keep up with changes to the search engine algorithms. Jill points out that the search engines are always attempting to solve the same problem, which is delivering good content to their users. If you stick with that approach (putting good content on your site), you will be a winner over the long term

I have a summary of the elements of good web page design making much the same points.

Jill's report is one of the places on the web that I review regularly. I have found her advice to always be reliable and sound.

Google Sends Warning to Sites & Webmasters?

"While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: [link]"

An article in the SearchEngineJournal describes a new program from Google (now in beta) that will warn webmasters that they are inviolation of practices that Google approves of.

This could be a great boon to webmasters who are attempting to be as aggressive as possible in promoting their sites, but want to avoid problems like getting thrown out of the listings entirely.

It could possibly be a good thing for people who hire outside search engine marketers who employ "bad practices", but I have to wonder whether those site owners would ever see any such warning issued by Google. If they did, it should be a real wake-up call to get another webmaster, but, in most cases, I suspect the webmaster would receive the notice. It seems unlikely that they will pass along this kind of information to their clients, since it points out that they are potentially contributing to harm to their clients.

In any event, it is another indication of change and growth in the search engine field. I have provided a short description of "good practices" in creating a web site for those interested.

Microsoft, Time Warner discuss online partnerships

"The AOL executive said one aspect of the talks originally centered on using Microsoft's new MSN search engine on AOL, replacing AOL's current relationship with Google.
More recently, the executive said, the two companies have been talking about the possibility of deeper relationships, such as collaborating in the lucrative market of selling advertising online.
Such a collaboration could allow the two companies to benefit from growing interest in search-based advertising, helping them better compete against search leaders Google and Yahoo.
But, the executive said, 'the discussions are not advanced.'
The person familiar with Microsoft's thinking said the company's MSN unit has always been interested in striking a deal that would allow it to benefit from AOL's market-leading instant messenger program.
AOL's instant-messaging product, AIM, had more than 53 million unique users in August compared to about 29 million for the competing MSN Messenger, according to Nielsen/NetRatings."

The Business Section of the Houston Chronicle reported on this news today. We have been talking in our classes for some time about moves that MSN is making and the impact that it will have on our activities. This is another indication of the serious interest that MicroSoft has in the search field.

Think how your efforts will be effected by AOL dropping Google as its search engine!

Using CSS in web site development

Last week we discussed using CSS in web site development. There was some discussion in the class about sources for learning more about CSS, and one of the class members sent me this email message, which I post for the benefit of all class participants, quote:

"At the Internet Marketing clinic last Wednesday I referenced some books on Cascading Style Sheets.

To me, the best to start with is "Eric Meyer on CSS" by Eric Meyer. Each chapter goes through a project, starting with one on converting a page to the use of CSS. All of the code is available for downloading.

Eric Meyer also wrote "Cascading Style Sheets, The Definitive Guide" published by O'Reilly. This is an excellent reference. After going through "Eric Meyer on CSS" I could get much more out of The Definitive Guide.

After some experience with Front Page, I found I could do very well with Notepad. I open one Notepad for html and one for css. I then bring up IE and do File>Open to open my Notepad html in IE. I can then edit both the html and css and do a refresh to see the results in IE. I do the same with FireFox. IE is the most widely used browser, but it is quite lenient when it comes to standards. FireFox is much more demanding on standards and thus makes for better code.

I haven't used Dreamweaver, but I understand it is very good as well.

A very effective diagnostic tool is the W3C validation service. It can be found at http://www.w3schools.com/site/site_validate.asp. This service can be used to validate both html and css."

Thanks to Don Healy for this contribution!

The Spamming Of Web Search

"A byproduct of search-engine optimization is low-value Web content that's filled with keywords targeted at search engines, not people."

This article is talking about what we as Internet marketers work on every day. It is a threat to the business, and it is real.

I had a personal experience just a day or two before reading this that makes it resonate with me.

My Mother lives in a different city, and has arthritis and back problems. She likes to work on her computer, but can't now because of the pain. I suggested she get an ergonomic chair instead of using the straight-back chairs that she uses now, but she needs to try the chair before buying it, because it may not work for her. These chairs are not cheap (for a good one!)

I thought it would be easy to find a store near her. I would just go to Google and search for "ergonomic chairs hometown" (where she lives). I got lots of results, but after much searching on that and other terms, and on different search engines, I found nothing!

There were lots of results for the search. I found a highly promoted site that sells the chairs, and listed a product with the name of her home town in the name, and I found many hotels in the area touting the availability of ergonomic chairs in their rooms (which surprised me!) I could not find the one thing I wanted, even though I have no doubt that there are office and furniture stores near her that feature these products.

I have seen much talk about local search being the coming thing, and I can see the need for it in this experience.

Half Of Top Advertiser Web Sites Don't Fully Optimize!

"The role of the Internet in business-to-business sales and communications continues to expand. According to eMarketer, 71 percent of business leaders use the Internet to gain information about industry sectors. As part of the study, Oneupweb listed four key trends it believes will compel these companies to use search engine optimization. These are: the growth of business-to-business online shopping; the role played by search engines in research-driven business-to-business purchases; the overall growth of the online marketplace; and the growth of search engine optimization itself, which will make optimization all the more important as businesses jockey for position in certain sectors. "

In an article that points out the deficiencies in optimization for major web sites, the author closes with encouraging news about the importance of optimization to the marketplace.

What this report seems to indicate is that the top sites are spending their money on PPC ("Pay Per Click") marketing instead of on site optimization. This is great news for us because it means that we can compete effectively with the big sites for positions in the organic results listings. As we have cited in other reports, searchers exhibit a 60-40% preference overall for what they find in the organic listings! This preference shifts to 70% for users of Google!