August 26, 2010
I usually illustrate the problem with Google sitemaps by comparing with this situation: Let’s say that you are so afraid to feel pain that you start your day with a little bowl of aspirin with milk. You couldin theorybe walking around with a boil on the bum without noticing it. That is not healthy.
This is the same with Google sitemaps. Using one can give you serious problems with the link structure on your website, and you may not know about it. I will clarify this further, in order for it to make sense: Imagine you have a website without Google sitemaps; it has been running for a couple of years and is performing fine in the search engines. Now you have created a new page on the website, but cannot get it to rank in the search engines. It turns out that Googlebot hasn’t found it, which only means that Googlebot cannot follow the link you’ve made to the page from your menu, or wherever you made it.
Then you understand the problem, and known problems can be solved. You figure out what you have done wrong, correct it and then it is taken care of. The new page that you just added to your website will automatically be added to your Google sitemap if you have a one connected to your website; this mean that Googlebot find the page through Google sitemap, and then crawl, index and rank it. But probably not very well, because the page will look like a “Pharisee” in the eye of Google, since there are no links (which Google can locate) to the page from the rest of your website. A website like Concept-i has no XML sitemap e.g.
The only thing is that you will never detect the problem, just like with the boil on the bum. My advice is that you should only use Google sitemap if you are absolutely certain that your internal link structure is infallible; if you are certain of this, then there is no reason to use Google sitemap.This is yet another great advice from the best SEO Book in the market.
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July 10, 2010
High-quality in-bound links is said to be the most vital aspect that helps search engines like Google and Yahoo to verify the bearing of a website for a definite search phrase. There are also chances of other internet websites eager to link to your subject matter because it is so very good. Then again, you can enhance your odds of getting quality links by rising the number of people and web channels that stumble upon your subject matter.
Get going with you
Consider in relation to the places that you can actually with no trouble provide a link into your item. Do you have an internet site for your business? Do you have profiles on social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn? Do you write for a weblog? A positive practice of driving visibility to your write-up can be by eminent in-bound links that are significant to SEO. Moreover, because value and number of these in-bound links increases, the value of the link from your “learn how to” article to your web site will become more effective.
Tip: College and university alumni sites can be influential places to position links to your content. Engines like Google and Yahoo will by and large grant additional credibility to links from “.edu” web sites since they are a lot more credible than “.com” web sites. If you have a profile page on your college alumni web site, position selected links to your content there. Your place of graduation may just be the entrance of getting some prospective clientele.
Reciprocal Links
A fantastic means of encouraging the links to your site is to discover link partners with whom you’ll do a reciprocal link exchange. This entails you in favor with another webmaster to each put a link to the other’s internet site resting on your domain, hence both receiving a free backlink to your site because of this mutual link swap. Make certain to only execute a reciprocal link exchange with web sites which are applicable to yours however, and which your visitors will find convenient.
Tip: Make a lot of friends on social networking or bookmarking web sites. Even though it will insist on an investment of time to find varied people who share your interests and views, friends on these websites can pay huge dividends in driving publicity to your content and consequently your business.
Act upon a link pursuit
Look for in Google for the search phrase for which you’ll like to rank. What internet sites are at this time on page one? Are any of them close rivals of your business activity? If there are few close rivals, note down the URLs for those internet sites, head to Yahoo Site Explorer and type in one of the URLs. Right away click the tag which affirms “inlinks”. This will bare all of the pages Yahoo has found which link to that URL. Because the internet sites in this record have already linked to one of your rivals, you ought to stand a logical probability of getting them to link to you.
Tip: Exceptional consideration should be paid to inlinks to your rivals with web-sites ending in “.edu” or “.org”. Typically, these are more helpful links than those from “.com” addresses. Place those websites at the top of your record for link requests.
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November 10, 2009
Optimizing web pages for high rankings in the search engines involved two main processes. Firstly there is the on-page factors which include what keywords you place where on the page itself. The second, and more important process is getting the off-page factors right - incoming links.
This article explores mainly the on-page factors. As the competition for a keyword phrase increases, off-page factors become more important to good rankings and these often mask the effects of on-page factors making it impossible to see what on-page factors are important. For this reason, I am going to look at a high ranking page with low levels of competition in Google.
First, let’s consider what we mean by competition.
There are two ways to look at competition in Google. There is the competition a page has when you type the phrase with quotes, and the competition when you type the words without quotes. The number of results returned by Google in each case is YOUR competition.
The main differences between these two types of search are as follows:
Search with Quotes - this returns only those pages that have been “optimized” for the exact phrase.
Search without Quotes - this returns all pages that have been “optimized” for the words making up the phrase.
e.g. (in simple terms)
a) If you search Google for
alsatian dog
Google returns 41,000 competing pages.
b) If you search Google for
“alsatian dog”
Google returns 6,390 competing pages.
In (a) above, there are 41,000 pages that refer to alsatian AND dog, but not necessarily to alsatian dog.
In (b) above, there are 6,390 pages that refer to the exact phrase alsatian dog.
Now, if you want to rank well for the term “alsatian dog” on Google, you only have to compete with 6,390 other pages for this exact term.
However, there are 41,000 - 6,390 = 34,610 other pages that are related to this search, and might still beat you if Google sees them as more relevant than your page.
We have discussed before the importance of link reputation and PR in ranking. It is possible for a high PR page to rank well for a term like alsatian dog, even if it does not have the exact phrase on the page.
This fact clouds the issue somewhat, and so although I recommend searching with quotes to find the real competition, I also recommend that you look at the top few results in Google (as searched without quotes) to determine how important those “partial match” pages are.
A quick search at:
http://www.prsearch.net/
for alsatian dog, shows me that the top pages for this search without quotes have a low PR (0-3) and many of those pages have 0 incoming links.
The same search at PRSearch.net using quotes around the phrase show very similar results. The competing pages for the exact term have low PR and low incoming links.
This phrase should be easy to target and get top rankings if done properly.
A word of warning: Because the PR reported on the Google toolbar is out of date (see earlier), you cannot be 100% sure of the PR of the pages, even using a site like PRSearch. They will use the same formula that the toolbar uses, and so will be equally out of date. Only Google knows the exact PR it is using in its ranking for any one page.
A second check I often do is to check what the PR of the homepage of the site that is ranking well, as this gives me an indication of how important the site as a whole is. For the phrase alsatian dog (with or without quotes), the top page is:
http://www.castleofspirits.com/stories02/alsatian.html
The homepage
http://www.castleofspirits.com
has a PR of 6 - quite an important site.
However, there is no link to the alsatian page on the homepage, so the PR 6 homepage wont directly help towards the high ranking of the alsatian dog web page.
Doing a backward links check on Google does not help since there are no backlinks listed for this top ranking page.
OK, putting on my detective hat, I see a link at the bottom of the Alsatian page called “March 02 Ghost Stories”. There is another link to “Ghost Story Page”.
Clicking on the link to Ghost Story Page, I am taken to a PR 5 page:
http://www.castleofspirits.com/storypg.html
where I find a link to March 2002 Ghost Stories. Clicking that link takes me to a PR 3 page:
http://www.castleofspirits.com/stories02/mch2002.html
And on this page I find a link to Ghostly Alsatian dog.
So, the top ranking alsatian dog page has one link I know of from a PR 3 page. I might assume that this site also has a sitemap (although I cannot find one) where it contains a second link to the alsatian dog page. That means a total of 2 links, both internal.
I can assume from this that the alsatian page with a PR 2 is probably the correct PR, and the page itself has very few incoming links. I am confident that if I targeted the phrase alsatian dog, I would easily get a top ranking.
The phrase alsatian dog is therefore an EASY phrase to target.
As a final check I went to the searchguild difficulty tool mentioned in section 6 of this newsletter and typed my phrase into that. The Search Guild rates this term as EASY.
With relatively few off-page factors contributing to the high ranking of this page, I can only assume that the on-page factors are what makes this page stand out from the rest and rank at number 1 on Google.
There are a variety of tools available for calculating density, but I use a tool I wrote for myself and is not available for purchase.
Running this URL through my tool tells me a lot of useful information.
Density of the phrase “alsatian dog” on the page is 0.49%
The keyword is found ONCE in the title (11.11%), and TWICE in the main text on the page (a density of just 0.34%).
The keyword is not found in any header or meta tag!
As a second check I always look at what I call the partial density. That is the sum of the densities of all words that make up the phrase.
e.g. the phrase “alsatian dog” is made up of two words - alsatian AND dog. I look at the density of alsatian, and the density of dog, and combine the two densities.
This is useful because it tells me the density on the page of the words that make up the phrase (remember it is possible to rank well without the exact phrase on the page) - a kind of simplified page reputation.
The partial density of this page is 3.09%, made up of 7 occurrences of alsatian, and 12 occurrences of dog. This page is obviously about alsatians and dogs!
Let’s look at the prominence of this phrase on the page. First an explanation of what prominence means.
Prominence is a measure of where on the page a word exists.
A prominence of 100 would mean it was the first word on the page.
A prominence of 1 would indicate it was the last word on the page.
A prominence of 50% would indicate it was the middle word on the page.
If the phrase was the first word (100% prominence) and the last word (1% prominence) on the page, the average prominence on the page would be about 50%. That means the keywords are well spread out on the page. As prominence increases, the keyword is found higher up the page, as it decreases, it is found lower down the page.
For analysis of top ranking pages, I look at not only the average prominence of ALL occurrences of the phrase on my page
i.e. how the keywords are spaced out on the page,
but also the prominence of the first occurrence on the page.
i.e. how close to the start of the document is the phrase first found?
The prominence of the first occurrence of the phrase alsatian dog is 99.67%. That means it is almost the first phrase on the page (only the word ghost comes before it).
The average prominence of the whole page for this term is 62.62%. That means that the keywords are distributed more in the upper portion of the page. Haven’t I always told you that it was important to get your main keyword in the top one-third of the page?.
This page is a good one to study. It shows a top ranking page for a low competitive keyword phrase. Because of the low competition, incoming links and PR are less important (though if you have both, you could dominate this phrase), while on-page factors will make or break the ranking.
Even though the exact phrase is only found 3 times on the page, the fact that the phrase is in the title of the document and in the body text seems to be enough. This low density is backed up by using the words that make up the phrase several times on the page. Google will be in no doubt what this page is about.
A final help to the ranking of this page is the filename. Notice that part of the keyword phrase is found in the filename - alsatian.html
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Andy Williams is author of the free, ezSEO
internet
marketing newsletter, offering subscribers up-to-date
information on all aspects of internet marketing.
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June 8, 2009
One of the most pivotal aspects of any web marketing strategy is how do I deliver the goods in the major search engines. How do I get my site to rank easily in Google?
One of the most critical facets of doing better in the search engines (forgetting the fundamental principles like killer content are taken care of) is gaining links aimed at your business. You can garner this a lots of different ways, some viewed positively by the engines and some not so favorably.
A reliable methods, that the search engine engineers think is okay is link building with articles.
Essentially this calls for writing a positive article, preferably about something from your area of expertise, and then sending it to a free article directory.
You really cannot underestimate the importance of link building. If there is one indicator that takes precedence to the search engines, by and large, it is links. Fine, there are truck loads of other signals, for example the domain name, but you are deluding yourself if you conceive you are going to be listed well, and easily seen, if you do not get any links.
Building links with articles is easy. It is something the search engines say is okay. And, it adds value to the web, by providing valuable content that might be interesting or useful to users. The real question is what are you waiting for?
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January 7, 2009
A simple search online for website design firms will result in thousands of ads by firms that offer high search engine rankings. These firms offer services ranging from top ten placements to expedited submissions. What is changing is the manner that these firms achieve their results through.
Search engines are simply online yellow pages which match sites with searches conducted by users. The search engines will then display their results, or site listings, according to the relevancy between the site, or the page on the site, and the search term searched for by the user.
While search engines keep their selection process a closely held secret, many search engine ranking firms spend thousands of dollars and countless hours trying to crack the code.
Some search engine ranking firms will place hidden text on their customers’ sites hoping that the search engines will pick up that text, and give the sites a higher ranking in the search engine results.
Other tactics include increasing the relevant content on a site, obtaining links from other sites, and creating mini sites that lead a user to the main site.
But as the number of pages online exponentially grows, the search engine themselves have started changing their methods for ranking sites. In the past there was more attention to site by site inspection, while today search engine robots and search engine programs inspect the sites.
In response many site designers who offer search engine ranking services have now started to use automated software programs that seek to match the needs of the search engine robots that will be visiting their clients’ sites.
Automated programs seek to create content and modify web pages for sites according to the requirements of the search engines. This is similar to a property owner remodeling a house so that it will pass inspection.
Sites like www.websitevisitorscenter.com offer programs that automate this process for site owners looking to increase their search engine rankings.
“Site owners need to understand that the services they are paying for, can often be accomplished by utilizing available software,” said Donny Lowy, the author of Selling Online: Beyond eBay.
Donny Lowy, the CEO of http://www.closeoutexplosion.com, an online wholesale and closeout business, and http://www.wholesalecloseoutforum.com, launched http://www.websitevisitorscenter.com to help online businesses attain higher search engine rankings.
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October 7, 2008
Are You Really Measuring for Return on Investment (ROI) with Search Engine Optimization?
Puzzling studies and reports suggest that businesses are missing out when it comes to ROI, including a whole host of metrics that should confirm or shape search engine marketing strategies.
You can’t accomplish much if you’re not even implementing SEO the right way. We’ve seen web site after web site that includes scores of individual keywords in the META keyword set (that many search engines ignore anyway). The SEO team not only used the wrong individual keywords (search phrases are better), but they didn’t bother to include keywords in the page title or description. And, of course, they didn’t think it was worth their time to focus on multiple pages- not just the homepage.
Hint: If you’re selling dinnerware, “laundry” probably shouldn’t be one of your keywords.
A WebTrends report cited in an eMarketer in 2004 showed the following ROI:
Using Complete ROI analysis 35.4%
Click-through rates only 24.2%
Conversion metrics 18.7%
Don’t measure 21.7%
Barely one third figured a thorough ROI analysis was worth the effort.
More than 80% of companies surveyed are dissatisfied with their “ability to benchmark their marketing programs,” according to “Measures + Metrics: Assessing Marketing Value + Impact,” a stunning report based on a 2004 survey by the CMO Council, a Palo Alto, California-based organization. The CMO Council represents senior marketing and brand decision-makers in the global technology industry.
“Less than 20% have developed any meaningful and comprehensive measures and metrics for their marketing organizations,” the report said.
It’s possible, Fathom SEO believes, that companies just settle for what’s easiest. If getting high rankings offers enough satisfaction, that’s where the measurement ends. Or, maybe a business will look at total traffic (maybe even unique visitor trends). With PPC, they’re apt to take up Google’s offer and post an ad within 15 minutes, cranking out the common reports Google offers.
Businesses have a whole host of metrics that can serve them as long as the data doesn’t fly over their heads.
Aligning SEM with Corporate Marketing Strategies
You should start by knowing how your SEM goals relate to your corporate marketing strategy. Which of the following (or more) do you want to accomplish?
• Generate leads
• Sell online
• Build brands
• Grab more market share
Conversions
You absolutely must track pages that allow visitors to take some kind of action, including:
• Requesting a quote
• Filling out a contact form
• Placing an order
• Registering for a newsletter
• Ordering a catalog
Establishing Your Metrics
Determine which of the following will be the metrics that will mean the most to you:
• Online sales (broken down by category)
• Repeat visits
• Profits on sales
• Customer satisfaction
• Length of visits
• Cost per click (CPC)
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Cost per conversion (CPC).
Get plugged into online consumers’ behavior patterns.
For example, studies show that consumers start researching products online several weeks (12 weeks in some business-to business scenarios) before they make a purchase - often offline. Enquiro, based in Kelowna, BC, Canada, in 2004 found that 68.3% of those surveyed used search engines for “consideration or research.” The results are detailed in Enquiro’s “Inside the Mind of a Searcher” research report that looks at issues including four distinct types of searchers and the frequency with which people search during the buying process.
ROI should be an integral part of any search engine optimization strategy, not something that sounds foreign. Make it work for your business.
Michael Murray is vice president of Fathom SEO, an Ohio-based SEO firm. A member of Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), he also authored the white paper, “Search Engine Marketing: Get in the Game.”
michael@fathomseo.com
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