Web Concepts

There has been a lot of talk about social media and social book marking as taking over the tradition SEO industry. While it is true that some of the major social media sites are taking over the top listings in Google.

These days it isn’t unheard of to see multiple listings for the same content that has been linked to from the various sites like Digg and Boxxet. Sure these sites will help you get your content spread all over the search engines but is it the same as getting your page to rank high in the search engines? The short answer is no.

You see the reality is this; your content will rise to the top of the engines quite quickly but not for your site, it will be for the social sites that are hosting the snippets of content from your site. Good for the social site and if anybody actually visits those links, it could be good for your site as well.

Another way that this is different is in the amount of time that your content stays at the top of the search engines. At the time of this writing these social sites usually were ranking for about 2 weeks before they disappeared from any meaningful rankings. This is not too bad for content that has a short shelf life but what about content that has a longer shelf life… not so good.

Also, how long do you really think it will be before Google steps in to the fray to deal with what in essence is nothing more than duplicate content diluting their so called “quality results”? Does anybody truly need 20 or 30 listings to the same story spread over just as many social domains? I think not. Do I take advantage of it? I sure do!

Now what about SEO – is that going to disappear as a marketing tool? The quick answer is hell no. If you were given a choice on getting your site/pages to rank at the top of Google for years or weeks I am pretty sure which of way you would go.

Back in 2004 I obtained top 3 rankings for some fairly competitive gambling related terms in Google and those sites have had almost no updating or link building since then and yet they remain at the top of Google. You are not going to get that kind of sustained ranking with social book marking.

At this time the best thing one can do is to use the social book marking while it still works, to help your sites gain some ground in the search engines by combining it with solid SEO tactics.

Social Media is the buzz right now but it can’t last as it is way too easy to exploit just like some of the other techniques of old – can you say keyword stuffing? Use it while it lasts but trust me – it ain’t going to replace solid SEO tactics. That will come later when there is a breakthrough in artificial intelligence brought on by semantic search but that is for another rant.

All the effort needed to optimise every page is only useful if the pages can be crawled successfully but a robot spider. Dynamic sites producing “id=?” with large query strings are generally not easily penetrated. In situations like this you may need to consider URL rewriting.

At best this means that the migration of PageRank (Google’s measure of a pages importance) is poor.

Text navigation is preferred by most engines. A search engine spider can understand a link that is text. Image links are generally not so well understood although alttags are helpful.

The use of java navigation, flash or other more adventurous navigation systems are often completely invisible to spiders.

To humans they look great but to Search engines Macromedia Flash, frames and JavaScript are meaningless. In fact, some of the robots and spiders stop completely when they encounter script on a page. But look at the source of the majority of Web pages and where do you find the JavaScript? If you construct your header to impart the maximum of information then spider will have found enough useful material ahead of the script to give you a meaningful entry.

So you now have your header, but still if your body text does not reinforce your header it is very likely that your page may still be ignored.

One way the spiders can tell how closely your page matches the needs of the searcher is to examine how many times your page contains the keyword or keyword phrase entered by the searcher. Great, so we just put in lots of repetition and the job’s finished isn’t it? No, but your search engine listings may be.

Spiders love to find lots of text, so give them plenty of reading material. the key to a good keyword listing is how many times the page contains the phrase in relation to the total number of words on the page. keyword packing is most definitely not the answer as having too high a keyword density can be as damaging as too low, and each search engine works differently.

The biggest problem is that getting keyword density often makes a page unattractive to humans, so there’s a delicate balance to be achived.

Take a look at the tags at the top of this page:

Add symbols <> before and after each tag:
html
head

meta name=”description” content=”advice on search engine positioning, being positioned on the wrong keywords is a bad as being not positioned at all.”
meta name=”keywords” content=”search engine positioning, site optimizing, web site optimising, site optimizing”
meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″
/head

Remember that most search engines give more weight to words found in the TITLE, especially if those words are also found in the body of the text. The TITLE is much more informative and likely to generate more solid keywords in the search engines, especially if the keywords appear in the body of the page.

However, we know that some search engines do not read META.

Now the search engines know what to say about the site, but we still want to tell them what keywords we would like to be found under. Only use relevant keywords, do not put keywords in here just to get traffic. Think what you’re hoping to achive from your site, be it sales, enquiries or whatever. Measure your success by those results, not by head counting the visitors you con into arriving here.

You’ll hear conflicting opinions on the importance of Meta tags - contained in the heading of an HTML page. While meta tags aren’t the answer to why your site isn’t being listed, they are an essential part of a well-designed web site promotion programme. Remember that search engine operators are trying to offer relevant hits. It’s easy to insert hidden text in Meta tags that has no relevance to the actual page content, and thus attempt to fool the search engine. But how does the spider know what’s important on the page? One significant clue would be to read the Meta Tags and then look for corresponding visible text on the page; if the same words occur in both then there’s a very good chance that the tag is for real and worthy of a high relevancy score.

The key is to use a carefully judged mix of the Meta tags and title.

Most searh engines give additional weight to words found in the Title tag if those words are also found in the body text. In many cases, the Meta description is the text that is presented by the search engine following the site’s listing. It describes your site to the people reading the search results. It’s your opportunity to persuade them that the search is relevant and that they should click on your site - not the one above or below.

The “Header Tag” is situated at the top of the source code in a webpage. The header tag is usually made up of three components the “Title tag”, the “Description tag” and the “Meta tag(s)”.

Modern browsers are very tolerant of your internal page layout, so if you miss out tags like , and , along with their associated cloding tags, you’re unlikely to see a problem with the layout of your page.

So why bother putting them the header tags in? Different spiders read different parts of the Header tags, currently we know that Google give a high priority to the “Title” and “Description” tags. Whilst Yahoo also gives additionsl consideration to the “Meta” tags.

The first item in the toolbox is a Search Term Suggestion Tool. It helps you to choose search phrases that are actually being used. One of your favourites for non-specialists is Overture, a great free tool that deserves the exposure we’re giving it here. So the URL where you can find specific keywords is:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Once you have the keyword or phrase you want, go to Google, Yahoo or MSN and search for the term. Somewhere on the page usually at the top there will be a piece of text that says “results out of…”. This does not signify how many companies are competing with you, what it does signify is how many pages the search engine understands to have some relevancy to the search term. As a general rule the higher the number the more difficult top placing will be.

Having familiarised yourself with the two tools above, it’s critical that you now use them to identify the keywords that are going to generate the best traffic, not necessary the most traffic.

Using a spread sheet program like Excel, tabulate your findings number of searches against the number of competitive pages. This should be enough information for you to be able to make a decision on which keywords are likely to be successful, along with the chances of gaining a good position compared with the competition.

There will be search terms that have a reasonable number of searches each month but some will have a much lower competition, making them a far easier option for early success in search engine positioning.

Judgin your keywords correctly is a major hurdle. Time spent getting them right will do more for your ultimate success than just about any other element of the optimisation process.

Without the right keywords, nothing else matters. The trick with keyword selection is not what most people think, which is to use the most popular words in your category. Instead you want your keywords and keyword phrases to be focused on the exact words your prospective customers are most likely to use.

Here’s an example to illustrate the point:

Words like cars and vehicles are just popular to pursue. Typing these into a search at Lycos produses results something like this: a search for cars gave me more than 6 million pages…and for vehicles more than 5 millions. It would be difficult to get to the top using these keywords, although given time, not impossible.

But it’s better to be smart than ambitious. You’re much better off going after a less popular, more specific keyword phrase such as “used car price”. This would attract people looking for a specific keyword, which is more closely related to your actual product or service. So when someone finds you with one of these highly specific keywords, they’re much more likely to buy form you.

Choosing the wrong keyword - say “car buying advice”, whilst catching the small number that do use it as a search keyword, would reduce the number of potential hits dramatically. In this case “car buying guide” and “car loan” have every little competition but quite a lot of searches.

Another point to be aware of can be demonstrated by looking at a recent example. A client sold Siemens Domestic Appliances, in his innocence they were insisting of being optimised for “Siemens”. Whilst the word “Siemens” is a vary popular word, the fact that most “Siemens” searches are mobile phone related only goes to confirm the need to research properly. If indeed the site had been optimised for the word “Siemens” not only would have the project have been significantly more expensive, but it would not have fulfilled the user experience resulting in the next click being on the back button.

At this point you will no doubt have an idea as what keywords are appropriate to your site. But before you adopt these keywords it would be preferable to ensure the words are actually used in searches, and then assess how achievable they are.

There are broadly two types of search engine/directory services on the WEB. The term “search engine” is often used to describe both types. But crawler-based search engines and human-powered directories gather their listings in significantly different ways.

Crawler-based search engines such as HotBot.com, Google.com MSN and nowadays Yahoo, crawl the web by means of a “web spider”. The spider is a powerful computer program that access thousands of Web pages and records what it finds. It possesses a level of intelligence, allowing it to make fairly sophisticated judgments on relevancy and store the information in its database. When you search one of these systems, you’re actually searching the records in the spider’s database.

The spiders operate an a sort of milk round. Once your site is on a spider’s list it will recieve periodic re-cisits, and so changes to your site get recorded on the search engine. Page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role in how the page is given relevancy.

Crawler-based search engines have three major elements. We’ve already mentioned the spider. it visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. It then returns to the site on a regular basis to identify site changes.

The information the spider finds goes into the index. The Index is a huge electronic list containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. the time between being spidered and indexed can be several months. until a site is indexed it’s not available to searchers; this is why you can submit a site to a search engine and see no apparent results for an extended period.

The third part of a search engine is the search program, it sifts through the millions of pages in the index to identify relevant matches to a search. There are three main crawler based engines Google, MSN and YAHOO between them having approximately 80-90%.

A human-powered directory, such DMOZ and YAhoo directory, depends on human editors for its listing. During submission you submit a short description to the directory for youe entire site, the editors may take this description or write one for the sites under review. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted.

Changing your web pages has no effect on your listing. Things that are useful for improving a listing with a crawler-based search engine have no impact on improving a listing in a directory. However a good site, with good content, is more likely to get reviewed for three that a poor site.

Times have changed, it used to be that a search engine either presented crawler-based results or human-powered listings. It is now extremely common for both types of results to be used for Website listing. A hybrid search engine will usually favour one type of listing over the other. For example, Yahoo is a human-powered search engine, however it also presents crawler-based results provided by its own engine spider.