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There are many website owners who would like to bump up performance of their websites but don’t have resources to hire an SEO expert.  I know that they are looking for a free SEO advice and SEO tips.  It could be that I am preaching to the choir but here is a simple list of what could negatively impact their chance for higher search engine ranking and prevent spiders from properly crawling their websites. This Top 10 list of no-no’s has been created, according to our web analytics company SEO experience. Here is what our web analysts and SEO professionals think website owner should not do:

  1. Never participate in any kind of link schemes. Don’t buy or sell links
  2. Find a reliable web hosting service, so your site will be up most of the time. The greatest SEO web design won’t save you if your server is down
  3. If you host your own site,  make your server response as fast as possible. Purchase the fastest Internet connection you can
  4. Don’t duplicate existing content off Internet. This won’t get you great ranks in search engine list
  5. Each web page should have its own title and meta tags.
  6. Never engage in keyword stuffing or any other on-page spamming techniques
  7. Avoid having outbound links from spam or low quality sites
  8. Avoid getting inbound links from spam sites
  9. Don’t use frames for the root structure of your site
  10. Don’t make your site mostly from Flash

Naturally,  being compliant  with Top 10 list will still not replace the need for advanced SEO services and search engine marketing services. It also won’t help you with web usability issues and professional web analytics. It might help you to boost a little your website performance as I mentioned in the beginning of this blog entry.

I remember when splash pages first appeared. It was in the first half of the nineties soon after Flash just entered into our virtual lives.  SEO web design was rudimentary at those times. I was an old school webmaster and, probably, the only SEO expert in a branch of a gigantic transnational corporation.  Splash screen loading when somebody typed URL of my company, was the favorite page of the executives.  And this was the design for which they truly paid a hefty price in dollars and cents. There had been no sign “Skip Intro” or music loop yet, but these elements soon would follow. My constant SEO advice to remove the splash screen usually passed unnoticed: after all, this is how big shots wanted to see their web pages. They wished all of them would be filled with splash screens. All my arguments and even detailed web usability analysis and presentations were in vain.

For those SEO professionals, who don’t know what splash page is (although, I doubt that such people exist), I will gladly explain. It is a graphically rich page designed with the sole intention to impress website visitors and sometimes to direct them to alternative views of content. This web page is, basically, useless and unimportant for the content of the website, which is reminded to a visitor with the “Skip Intro” link. Programmers and web designers tried to modify splash screen dropping cookies into clients browsers, so this page would appear only during the first visit only. But this did not make splash screen page more vital to the structure of the website.

So, even only from the web usability point, creation of the splash screen was always a bad idea.  Dumb slider “Loaded” and searches for a “Skip Intro” on a wide monitor screen were simply not helpful. Website visitors who paid return visits  were extremely annoyed - even if splash screen looked like fun the first time, on the tenth visit it was very aggravating. All these factors will definitely have negative impact on site’s search engine ranking.

That is why I was astonished to see that on certain websites there is a comeback of splash screens. The practice considered harmful in the Stone Age of the World Wide Web did not die, even as we are approaching the end of the first decade of XXI century.  The problem is not related to web usability error anymore, it is also a big obstacle for search engine optimization.

Here is what happens. Splash screens reside at the top of a website hierarchy. And it turns out that website owner prevents visitors to get directly to the home page which is the most important page of the site. If a spash page is higher on the root level than a home page, then the latter will get less inbound links and less traffic as it is lower in the website structure.  Home page should always be the default index page, but the splash page takes away this. Crawlers also will get confused and assign to the home page less important which, for example, may end with lower PageRank.

And the last but not the least problem occurs when you start some kind of viral marketing campaign and direct your visitors to your site. Reports in my web analytics company show that getting to splash page instead of a home page, where visitors  get needed information, can be a major turn-off.  With current marketing trends, one can easily lose the majority of customers after spending a lot of time and money advertising the website in question.

For several months I’ve been reading online complaints that top search engines are punishing websites for paid links. I was a little bit astonished to hear that kind of statements from some serious SEO experts and prominent bloggers.  There were also very bizarre claims that paid links are part of SEO technology environment, that search engines are policing the Net unfairly diminishing web site traffic.

After reading all the comments I had an impression that those SEO companies who were complaining on the Net about top search engines “bad” policy towards paid links, in fact, were engaged in selling paid links themselves.  It seems that after their clients lost a bunch of links that they paid for, they demanded some sort of restitution.

Our web analytics company never bought or sold any inbound links. We are not judging anybody who did this, but somehow another explanation comes to mind.

On-page spamming, keywords stuffing, meta tags disruption led to the reason why now 75% of optimization is happening off-page. Search engines had to find some type of equivalent for judging the quality and popularity of the web pages.  That is why they came up with this online voting system where each inbound link became as a vote of confidence.

Unfortunately, this good intention did not work either. Link farms and all kind of automatic generation of inbound links made top search engines tune up their algorithms accordingly. Google started attaching more value to so called trusted inbound links from web pages that had certain relevant to the site they connected to.

This is my theory about the fall of the paid links.  What we are observing now is that a lot of those paid links turned out to be no-good, or of little relevance.  I can’t imagine web site owners buying only 3-5 links. they’d rather go after a big amount that would make them look more popular than their competitors. Alas, clients paid for huge amounts of links that had no value.

Unjustifiably, some web sites started getting higher search engine rankings and beneficial search engine positioning and in its turn increasing search engine traffic.  This was duly noted by Google.

Naturally, Google was not standing still. It is of vital importance for this leading search engine to maintain its #1 spot among its own competitors. It had to rectify the situation somehow.  Thus, another change of the algorithm and the melt down of useless inbound links.

There is so much fuss about Cuil search engine in the media and some SEO experts, that it makes our web analytics company wonder whether our press ran out of topics.  There are completely unfounded statements all over the Net too, telling up that this start up search engine is going to beat Google right out of the search engine market! But there is more. Other rumors are circulating as well claiming that Cuil is going to be the best search engine ever. I guess, media got excited about Cuil because some of the guys there used to work for Google. So now journalists try to read between the lines and pass us a thought: “Hey these guys know all Google secrets. They may succeed…”

Honestly, haven’t we heard that story before? Each time when a new search engine jumps out of nowhere, its first statement is about pushing Google out of top ten search engines.  It became like some sort of nasty ritual for newbie Internet search engines - an attempt to dethrone a king. Great notion, but now if you look at search engine list, it is growing really fast, but nobody on that list managed even to take away an inch of Google superiority.

Google is not sitting quietly waiting for some pretender to come and take away its reins from it. It is building up, expanding its services, buying off influential players like YouTube. Its advertising programs with all their imperfections are way ahead of any other competitors. It is not simply a search engine any more, or Microsoft would not feel so uneasy because of Google online productivity suite that is absolutely free and Gmail moving out of the way spammers heaven Hotmail.

So, don’t worry, my fellow SEO contractors, web analysts and  search engine marketing consultants. Rest your tired heads on the pillows after hard work’s day. Cuil will not wake you in the middle of the night.  I just don’t envision a streaming line of advertisers running from Google anywhere else either.  I would even go further by saying that nothing will change in the search engine marketing or search engine optimization game even throughout the year 2010.  One can’t stop the progress, of course, but we are present just at the beginning of the game.  After all, we still don’t even have true search engine marketing definition or advanced and precise SEO tools.

I find more interesting that MSN search engine is catching up slowly but surely with Yahoo search engine.  Even united these two search engines will not beat Google anyways. But it will be easier for search engine optimization companies in regards of those search engine rankings.  They will have to cite only two major search engines to clients instead of three.

It is always such a hard task for any SEO contractor to explain to the website owners why on earth they need his services. If he is just a lone search engine optimization specialist or a web analyst he has to go out there and pitch something. Naturally, if his sales pitch is too technical, there is a huge chance that our abstract professional SEO consultant will not close the deal no matter how great his SEO expertise is.

Of course, not everybody is going to agree with my step-by-step SEO approach, but let me tell you something. It goes without saying that sometimes small business owners are not very Internet savvy, no pun intended. Some of them started websites only because their competitors have one. Some small businesses are not 100% Internet-driven companies at all. Small business owners can be PC power users, manage their own accounting and have shrewd business sense. All these factors don’t make them experienced in search engine optimization techniques or search engine marketing services.

 I think, at first an SEO professional  should explain that there is a big global shift of businesses today to Internet. Then he should provide polite SEO monologue on why website owner needs his search engine optimization services. SEO expert should definitely mention that the vast majority of websites remain invisible. He should also add that when someone searches for these websites, they do not appear on the first three pages of leading search engines results.

It is always a great idea to show some persuasive stats and facts during SEO presentation. From my web analytics observations I noticed that small business owners like business analytics and conversion analytics figures.. For example, you can have a smart businessman at hello if you say that currently about 85% of all business-to-business transactions begin with the search on the web.

 Only after presenting the current situation of a global Internet shift, an SEO consultant should switch to expanded explanations about existing search engines. He does not have to present a complete search engine list, but he should definitely emphasize the facts. For example, there are hundreds of search engines on Internet today, but the majority of searches go through only 3 most popular search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN.

 For demonstration purposes, search engine optimization specialist can provide latest data as proof. For example, In June 2008, according to Nielsen Net Ratings, 4.7 billion searches were conducted at Google search representing 59 % of all search queries for that month. Yahoo and MSN have 16.6% and 14.1% percent of the global share of all searches.

Our web analytics company experience shows, that the toughest part will highly likely be an SEO presentation part on PageRank, Keywords and 3 result pages of a popular search engine.One can compare this part of the SEO monologue as walking through a mine field. One wrong “step” and the confused business owner may show you the door. So, how should you point out these important features?

 Probably, good SEO strategy would be to point out at the short attention span of Internet visitors. This will give you a chance to say that few people who search for something online go beyond three result pages of web search engines. It will be much easier to understand that in order to be successful, small business website has to appear there when someone is searching for the products or services it offers.

 If all this goes smoothly, this is when you mention the Keywords. For example, you may say that for all this to happen, the keywords on the web pages must match those entered by a person who performs the search.  

These are the first steps of an SEO consultant presentation. I will continue in my following blog entries with this simplified SEO script. Read on.

SEO Testimonials

I find the whole WordPress venture including its templates and plug ins extremely useful for search engine marketing specialists and SEO contractors. It is a great SEO tool that one can install anywhere and without any hassle commence to blogging. If one is try to thyself, then the content will always be fresh. If the content is interesting, then the owner will experience combined pleasure from steady increase of search engine traffic and higher search engine rankings.

After a short while WordPress became a part of real affordable SEO, and search engine statistics confirm this.  It is really simple and does not require an special SEO tips or participation in special SEO forums. If you are good at writing, you will even have a chance to earn great money through blogging and get recognition you deserve. If you are not good at blogging, your blog will remain in obscurity with thousands of other blogs that have a road to nowhere.

There are several search engine strategies that one may utilize while blogging. In the end,  all the rules that apply to regular SEO websites can be used in blogging as well.  A lot of things depend on blogger’s intentions and audience that he appeals to, and ethical search engine optimization road that he chooses (without keyword stuffing, paid links and other black hat techniques).

Blogger should also be prepared that some nasty people would try to steal his articles and use them on Internet as their own. There will also be nasty spam comments with intention to insert junk links serving spammers’ interests. Luckily, there are useful options that can be activated in WordPress as well as various useful plug ins like Akismet and permalinks which establish the priority of publishing and other techniques.

As of now, it is hard to find a good WordPress template that would serve great for professional SEO services.  One can’t have much control over SEO options, if he is not savvy in PHP and JavaScript programming.  There is also an issue with auto generation of meta description and titles for all articles. But the situation is improving. For example, the number of WordPress blog crashes is steadily diminishing, the updates and upgrades are pretty consistent and very timely.

In our web analytics company we consider WordPress venture great tool for organice seo campaign management. But there is more to it, judging from our employees SEO testimonials. Our search engine marketing consultants and web analysts use WordPress blogs not just for search engine placement strategies but also for sharing their hobbies and interests with Internet visitors or for providing free search engine optimization tips.

Sometimes search engine optimization specialists and web analysts can go overboard when they advise you to choose carefully file names for your website. They come up with the whole system of file naming, for example, telling website owner to use hyphens for the page name because this aids “readability”. They also claim that search engines and visitors associate the name of the page with the content on it.

Here comes a free SEO tip for website owners. I met sites on the Net with the pages  called page1.html or page2.html some ten years ago.  And, if by any chance you observed something like that recently, my first guess would be that the owner of the site is not after getting high search engine rankings or increase search engine traffic.

Second, I don’t recall any active Internet visitor who keeps in mind the name of the web page. We should consider ourselves lucky if he or she remembers the domain name. Current web analytics tests and surveys show that Internet visitor has short attention span and very little patience.

As for using hyphens in file naming, I would recommend website owners to be extremely careful. Search engines have a dim view on hyphens not only in the file names but also in the domain names, especially if you use more than three. In fact, some consider this as evidence of spamming technique.

Overall, I have a nagging suspicion that file naming has little or no impact on search engine positioning or seo web design.  I already mentioned this fact in my blog entry about mod_rewrite. Personally, our web analytics company never observed any negative consequences of regular file naming.

If your page is about services that you provide but you name it picasso.html, that would be plain wrong.  This is not what your page is about.

My first guess is that you would highly likely name that page services.html and you would be absolutely right. It would look much worse if you would name it something like my-great-seo-services.html.

Yet, if you really itch to use hyphens while naming your web page, please, don’t overuse it and stick to at most two hyphens. This will keep you from trouble.

Professional SEO consultant is always a loner. It really does not matter whether he works as an in-house search engine optimization specialist or just a regular SEO contractor. No matter what his SEO job is,  his assignments are perfectly clear - improve search engine rankings and increase search engine traffic.

Depending on his search engine optimization company or  his employer, the responsibilities of a professional SEO specialist usually grow and rarely shrink. On his path to become an SEO expert, he may also provide general search engine marketing services, web usability analysis, generate web analytics reports and sometimes even add SEO web design under his belt.

He may and may not deal with product managers, sales teams, IT people, sysadmins. And as his ass is always on the line, he, naturally, must establish good relations with bosses.

It has never been a 9-to-5 job. It is more like 24/7 work. Search engine algorithms change all the time,  top keywords positions need to be constantly maintained, unless he is in such a niche market that nobody heard of.

There is also a lot of reading and learning involved. I don’t know about you, guys, but, personally, I have to read online materials weekly that in the old times would amount to 200-300 pages.  A lot of these materials is useless junk, but one has to gather pearls of wisdom in this garbage, getting free SEO tips, news about search engine optimization tools, SEO blogging software and the like.

As your SEO expertise and knowledge are exponentially growing,  you get editors, copywriters and technicians that you need to manage. And they are not easy people to deal either because they may easily get carried away and lose focus,  so your task is to guide them in the proper direction.

I could go on like that til the cows come home, but I have to stop somewhere, my dear SEO colleagues. To sum it up, all I can say is that it is impossible to handle all these task if you don’t like your job.

Our field of industry grows, and as it usually happens, there is a bunch of people and organizations that try to sell you, my dear SEO contractor anything.  Usually, they call themselves SEO specialists too (go figure!).  They invite you to “conferences” promising more exposure and networking. But, in fact, they are just trying to get a couple of grand out of your pocket. There are membership “organizations” that promise you more opportunities if you pay 300 bucks to get listed in useless SEO directories.  They pour marketing marketing barrage of fake promotions on these hard working SEO people.

My advice is to keep steady and develop your own SEO know-how which will allow you to prosper. There is something in our occupation that does prevent us from getting unionized. If you look at the past you will see that all attempts to create a union of programmers failed too. There has to be a reason behind it.  I just drew a picture of a real life guy the way I see it. I hope you see it too.

If you are in the beginning of your road in the role of an SEO contractor or buy books and read magazines on the related subject,  you will get one and the same annoying SEO, web analytics and web usability advice.  It is the following piece of SEO wisdom: “your website should always have fresh content”.

Nobody is going to go into details of this advice to you. Web analysts who like to get published in the online magazines will provide you with all kinds of “solutions” on how to keep your content fresh. Yet, there will be no perfect explanation why you should do that. The only answer you can get from them will be something like “search engine spiders and crawlers like fresh content and hate stale content”.

After all this song and dance you will be left on your own to decide what exactly is “fresh content”.  No SEO specialist or web analyst is going to define any certain time interval when you need to “refresh” your website content.  They just simply don’t have a clue. That is why their response to this question will simply be - “the more often you do it, the merrier”.

Having said that, I must admit that crawlers and spiders do like text. They thrive in it. Yet, the problem lies in the fact, that each website has its own dynamics. Sometimes you don’t feel the need to refresh the content of your site for a while, and you are probably right. You like SEO approach you’ve taken and you don’t want to invent a bicycle each time when you already said everything that you could on you web pages. And you are not the writer, you are a businessman.

Personally, I think that crawlers’ demand for fresh content is one of the significant drawbacks of artificial intelligence software (which is what the spiders are).  Yet, there is a dirty secret behind all this.

There are many sites that don’t have any significant content changes or little text but they still get great rankings. No spider considers their pages stale.
And here is the simple explanation. As the time goes by, the tendencies of SEO optimization are shifting from off-site to on-site.

If your site is popular with Internet users and you get a great web traffic,  I can bet that your content will not be considered “stale”. In addition, if you have a lot of great back links from relevant website, they also serve as votes of confidence for the content of your site.

And the opposite is also true. If you don’t get web traffic and you are not visible on Internet, then eventually your Internet site rankings will go down, no matter how often you change your web pages content.

And as I already mentioned, there is another hidden threat. If you suddenly take off the old content and replace it with a new one on any give web page, your web page may lose its PageRank for some time or even for much longer period, if you removed all optimized keywords with the old content.

So, the rule of the thumb here is the same golden middle.  Tweaking the old content and making small changes here and there is not good for your web page either. Adding more content after the old one is generally a better idea.
But then you will be facing another web usability dilemma - how to keep all important information above the fold if you have endless content (which is by the way is annoying to spiders and crawlers too).

Once in a while I review online articles dedicated to ongoing web analytics and SEO issues. So with great surprise I noticed that there was still ongoing discussions about the value and validity of long-tail keywords. One of the articles really attracted my attention. It was very bizarre and full of contradictions.  Some certain web analyst with a well-known name was telling that it was wrong to chase long-tail keywords. Then for some unknown reason he blasted PPC campaigns administrators and managers.  He did not like that they were proud to carry over fifty thousand words in their campaigns and tell others about it. He went on and on like that but in the second part of the article he switched to something like  “You know, maybe long-tail keywords are not that bad, if you gather them in separate ad groups”.

First of all, I must say that these PPC managers should be proud. If their clients entrust them management of big campaigns, it means that these guys are trustworthy. I know many SEO contractors who never get to do that limiting their work only to organic listings manipulations. Second, I doubt that PPC administrators discuss openly with this guy their sponsored links or paid keywords - after all, they are in very competitive business, so they should keep their mouths shut. And, the last, but not the last, what is this obsession with long-tail keywords about?

I always preach balance approach towards any SEO concepts, especially if they are relatively new.  Obsession in our business spells disaster. Great SEO contractor should never be carried away because he has responsibilities and trust of the client, whose money he is spending. There are no really quick solutions for white-hat specialists, but a lot of long hours in front of a computer.

So, here is what I think about long-tail keywords. I believe that the whole hype about long-tail keywords began a year and a half ago in some SEO and SEM outsourcing agencies, when they understood that it was getting harder and harder to promise clients to go through with acquisition of lucrative category words. Yet, they needed to make money somehow.

And I believe, that their thinking behind this was the following: “if a client sells on his web site Nike shoes, we will never be able to get him a keyword Nike shoes for the money he is paying us. Let’s get him the keyword Nike shoes look cool on people of all ages .  Then we still will be able to easily earn our fees and have a satisfied customer, whom we will convince that the goals have been achieved.”

Yes, it is true that category words are very hard to get. It is getting more and more difficult to get to this #1 spot on Google. Yet, we need to try, anyways. And I know not from rumors but from web analytics tests that when you have #1 spot on Google and #1 text ad in the sponsored link on the same page - the effect is staggering. This combination has deep psychological effect on Internet searchers and they stream to the web site. You don’t have to take my word for granted: you need to achieve this ranking combination and then check weekly your Google Analytics or any other tracking software for confirmation of what I just said.

Pay per click campaigns are conducted not because somebody had nothing else to do but for certain business reasons and targets. But not all keywords are equal.  And this is true also when we speak about long-tail keywords. Some are worth going after, but a lot of them is just useless junk. There is no reason to speak hypothetically about it, if you check your tracking software you will see that some queries look quite strange.

It does not surprise me because Internet searchers are ordinary people, some of  them are still learning how to use search engines. Keywords that they use at random should not be taken as a gospel truth. Each case must be analyzed and tested separately and see what results it will bring.

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