Archive for July, 2008
« Previous EntriesWhy Content is King.
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008You have heard it time and time again: ‘Content is King’. Yet still people ignore the truth of this common-sense phrase. People use the web to find information – it’s the content of a page that is important to them, because that’s why they’re there.
The content of a page is the primary thing that a search engine will look at when considering your site. The meta tags and the hidden text that many people like to place on their pages in order to draw search engines to their sites is much less important to the search engine. Many search engines don’t even consider meta tags any more. Don’t get me wrong, meta tags are a necessity when optimizing, but they are much less important than content.
Hidden text is not only skipped over by most search engines, it can give you serious problems with search engines. The king of search engines, Google, will remove sites from its index if they utilize hidden text. Hidden text is categorized as text that is the same color (or similar color to) the background or text that is the set as transparent using CSS.
When people arrive at your site, one of two things will happen. They will either find something of interest and stay, or they’ll turn around and leave. They make this decision within seconds. You need to have things that people want to read, or all your precious click-throughs will be for nothing. If you can’t come up with something to put on the front page of your site, hire a writer. Writers are there to create reasons for people to stay. They get paid for a reason, they are worth while.
You can never have too much information – it’s a fact that people want information. The web is great for information because you can find so much out there with so little effort. Hidden somewhere in all that information, you can be sure there’s something that you’d love to find. Search engines are there to help you uncover it.
You could take some of this information and tailor it to your website’s needs, using bits and pieces that will be easy to read and useful to your visitors. The more interested in your website a visitor is, the more likely that they’ll stay a while, and come back some other time. You might even see some money from them, sooner or later.
‘Borrowing’ content word-for-word isn’t the way to go, though, because of copyright laws – but you can always create your own content. Remember that the most valuable web content is unique information that no-one can find elsewhere.
Another great method for delivering content is to provide RSS feeds from other sites straight onto your site. Many sites i.e. the New York Times site will allow you to put their RSS feeds onto your site. An RSS feed is basically an online news bulletin. If you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 or lower you probably haven’t encountered RSS. If you use FireFox or Opera for your web browser, you probably already know how great RSS can be for personal use. Imagine having all of that content available on your web site without having to pay a writer!
When selling products and services, make sure that you have enough information about your product’s features. Include everything anyone could ever want to know about your product. If you are running an affiliate site, buy a few of the products that you are selling and use them on a regular basis. This will give you the opportunity to find out what their major selling points are and allow you to make them into featured products and provide high quality reviews.
Think of it as leading your reader for a walk through your mind – arrange the site to help your readers see what you see.
For example: a page on music, could lead to a page on rock music, which in turn leads to one about the various forms of music, which leads to a page on equipment, and so on and on. Each page on the site can lead into the next, in a reasonable progression of thought. Your content becomes not only new but also fun to experience, as you make it easy for the reader to understand where you’re coming from. Tell a story with your pages.
Warning! You Can’t Fool Google.
Sunday, July 20th, 2008Almost daily, I see a report about a company or individuals who is trying to fool Google through SEO. When are they going to learn that you just can’t fool Google? Why would you even want to try it, with when you risk being banned from the biggest search engine in the world? Many people seem to try just because they wonder if it could ever be done. As a general rule of thumb: it can't!
There are some instances in which people think that they have tricked google. They believe that something that they have done has rocketed their site to the top of Google's listings and they truly believe that they have managed to "stick it to the man." Nine times out of ten when this happens they either performed an SEO procedure that Google allows or even endorses or they just happened to fill Google's criteria better than other sites in their category without even realizing it.
Once in a while someone will actually come up with a way to fool Goggle. They will be enjoy a nice high spot on google's listings for maybe even several months, but then the end comes for these proud sites. As soon as Goggle notices that it has been cheated, these sites are removed from the index; sometimes permanently.
The fact is that these people don’t understand the power that Goggle has. Anyone with a real interest in making money from the web should consider that getting banned from the search engines effectively removes your site from the web. They don’t have to let you back in, and they don’t have to give you any right to respond – you’re entirely at their mercy. You don’t want to get in their bad books.
Aside from the fact that Goggle will remove you from its listings, there is another incentive against trying to fool Goggle. If you fool Goggle, you are fooling your clients. There is no reason to try to lure visitors onto your page expecting to get something and really giving them something else. This is a poor way to conduct business and more often than not it will chase the customer away for good.
If you want your website to be found in categories that don’t apply to it, try purchasing ads on pages that are listed towards the top of the Goggle listings in these categories. You can actually increase your sites reputation in Google’s eyes rather than hurting it by adding another link to your site. This is an excellent form of marketing because it allows you to reach out beyond your market simply by dishing out a few dollars a month.
Some of the most popular methods of trying to fool Google's PageRank system are link farms and link exchanges. Link farms are basically websites that exist only to get links to specific sites counted by the search engines. Link exchanges are groups of websites that each pay a monthly fee to link to each other – like link farms, only more expensive and dodgy. In both cases, the websites involved are attempting to climb the ranks of Google's search results through the sheer quantity of links to them –this is known as Googlebombing. But it doesn’t always work.
Goggle knows that cheaters can ruin their search engine for the rest of us. After all, if link farms inflate the rankings of less-useful Websites, then we’ll all start seeing worse search results. That’s why Goggle constantly updates PageRank to keep those kinds of sites away. The Page Rank formula that Goggle implements is mysterious and ever changing. This is the primary reason that Goggle cannot be fooled.
It has been found recently that Goggle is now sending out ‘cloak bots’, disobeying robots.txt to find out whether sites are ‘cloaking’ – serving a different page to search engines than what visitors see. These ‘cloak bots’ are controversial but seem to have some positive effects on the Google’s results.
Unethical methods make it difficult for people who are trying to do SEO the proper way, which is one of the reasons why it needs to be monitored so carefully. If people stopped trying to find ways to manipulate the system, it would be much easier to keep up with what’s going on.
As you may already know, Goggle publishes a list of guidelines suggesting legitimate ways to improve a site's ranking, by making it more accessible and better. One of the tips is to make pages for users and not for search engines. You’d do well to listen to their advice.
Theme Directory
Friday, July 18th, 2008It’s been a long time since themes.wordpress.net stopped accepting new themes. Since then most theme authors have been distributing their themes from their own sites, without a good centralized place for people to browse, search, comment on, and rate themes. With the success of the plugins directory, we’ve wanted to have those same [...]
Using RSS to Increase Your PageRank.
Friday, July 18th, 2008There are millions of dollars and multiple hours spent every day trying to increase website traffic, by both ethical and unethical means. There is so much demand for traffic solutions that people will go to any lengths to get ranked higher in the search engines. But did you know that you could increase your traffic by about 20% right now, with virtually no effort?
Most times when you hear something like this I suggest that you turn tail and run as it will normally lead to your site’s ranking demise. This particular method of boosting traffic, however, is not a scam; it’s not an unethical ploy; it is a genuine method of increasing traffic via a future internet standard. The reason that you can increase your traffic so vastly is because you are getting in on the ground floor of a new technology which will revolutionize the internet and the way that traffic is distributed.
To understand what we’re about to tell you, you need to understand what an RSS feed is. Put simply, it’s a standard format for sharing your content instantly with users and other websites. People can quickly get access to ‘teasers’ for your latest newsletters, articles, blogs, content and more, and click through to see the full version. This method of distributing your information is very helpful because it basically generates dynamic newsletters without spamming and without causing your visitor any grief at all. In fact, many users find RSS to be their preferred way to hear about updates as RSS is so fast, user-friendly, and (most importantly) dynamic.
RSS feeds are often used by news sites or blogs, as the content changes often enough to make it worth while. By using highly targeted RSS feeds, you can improve your site's web content without having to write it on your own – if someone offers you an RSS feed of their site, you can add it to your site easily. This provides you with a good content base which will keep visitors coming back. The more information that people associate your site with the more important they consider your site. The more important they consider your site, the more important search engines will consider your site. Providing RSS yourself will get lots of people to link to you and so potentially improve your search engine rankings. Why?
1. RSS feeds can provide good, relevant content for your website – there are plenty of RSS publishers with themed content for you to choose from. These highly-targeted feeds will often contain your keywords, and so increase the keyword relevancy of your website. This helps even more than you may think as the key words will be within link or “anchor” tags. Search engines value anchor tags almost as much (if not more than) header tags (h1-h6).
2. RSS feeds can provide new, fresh content. When new content is added to them, the old content drops off, making sure that your website’s content doesn’t go stale. Most of your visitors will not visit your site if they find that there is nothing new between the first and second time that they visit it. If you want to keep your visitors where they belong, you have to have a good selection of content that is updated on a regular basis.
3. RSS feeds can get search engines to crawl your site more frequently – daily in some cases. This helps your site to rank higher in the search engines, and gives you an advantage over your competition. Your RSS feed can do your SEO work for you.
RSS feeds can be great for getting your newsletter, articles, or blog onto other people's sites, and that’s very powerful, as long as you make sure that your RSS feed is adding more to your business than it takes. In some situations, you might find that including RSS on your page makes visitors click away from your site, as they find that site’s content more interesting than you – and people who click on RSS links might be less likely to click on ads. Use caution with RSS feeds, or you could be in for a shock.
Understanding the Google Dance.
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008What’s the Google dance? Well, it’s really just a fun phrase for when Google updates its index. This occurs regularly, once a month, and can cause a lot of movement in rankings, meaning that it’s come to be feared by many in the SEO industry and anticipated by others. The update isn’t just one sudden switch, though, as each index update takes several days to complete. During this update the searches seem to ‘dance’ between the old index and new index – that’s the Google dance.
So why does it happen? Well, Google pulls its results from over ten thousand servers, and they can’t all be updated at once – Google would have to go down for the update. Instead, each server is updated with the new index, one at a time. This can cause very strange behavior in the page rank process if two major sites located on separate servers happen to have a close linking bond. These sorts of separations are interesting and can contribute to a great deal of change and motion in page ranks. The most important thing to keep in mind is that eventually Google will get you into your proper place.
Generally, if you behave, you will not be thrown down for long by the odd activity that can occur when Google is in the process of updating its index for your server (or for the servers of your favorite link partners.
One common misunderstanding is the idea that Google controls which server each kind of information is coming from, and so stores similar information on the same server. Google’s index doesn’t work this way – it’s a big, disorganized mass of information that Google searches very quickly.
This is a blessing in disguise because it allows your site to remain reachable via other sites that are related to it when the index is taking place. Your site generally won’t suffer for too long when an update is taking place anyway, but if you are heavily dependent on Google results, you will see a slight drop for a short period of time. This drop is often followed by a slight spike especially if your page rank has increased since the last index.
The 10,000 servers that Google uses are distributed between seven datacenters all over the world. Google doesn’t keep all of those eggs in one basket – they want to be able to lose one datacenter and have the rest survive. If part of Google goes down, people can still use the search engine and as I said before, this allows your site to be accessed via related sites if the server holding your sites index happens to go down.
The datacenters that Google has put into play are enormous in comparison to most datacenters around the world. Google rivals some of the largest datacenters in the world with each of its datacenters and is probably the largest in the world if all were combined into one.
You see, the ‘time-to-live’ for www.google.com is only five minutes – that means that Google’s IP address can change every five minutes. This allows them to switch between their datacenters regularly, spreading the search load between them intelligently and routing around any damage. If you constantly entered the same datacenter with every search that you placed it would almost certainly fry within twenty four hours. Considering the number of users on Google each and every day, it is surprising that ten thousand servers is enough. A server can only handle so much traffic in a day and Google insures that it can hold more than any other service on the internet.
The datacenters updating their indexes at different times causes Google to do its dance. Unless you’re looking for your website’s ranking, you’d never notice this as your site is normally available at all times. The unfortunate bit is that often times you will lose your page ranking for a short period of time or your site will seem to have a lower number of pages indexed by Google. If you insure that you have several hundred pages available on Google at all times you will most likely be able to provide all of your content at all times either directly or indirectly.
WordPress 2.6
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever [...]
Understanding Stop Words, and How to Avoid Them.
Monday, July 14th, 2008To understand how to avoid stop words, you first have to understand what stop words are. Search engines have words or phrases that are considered ‘stop words’. When a spider or crawler encounters one of these stop words, they will immediately leave your website and any information they gathered from it will not be saved in their database. This means that your website will not be indexed. If your website is already indexed in a searched engine, the crawler will come back to see if there are updates — and if it finds stop words when it does this, then your site could get banned from the search engine. You will not be allowed to remove the words and re-submit: it’s too late.
Different search engines have different lists, but some are nearly universal – usually words that refer to sites with graphic sexual content, or other ‘adult’ material. We can’t really put a list here, or you’d never find this page! You should be able to tell what they are for the most part, but remember, pornographic web sites will often get indexed as well.
The norm for search engines is that they will attempt to avoid content that is illegal. When they encounter adult oriented sites, they will generally only ban sites that contain especially vulgar or illegal materials. The problem being that many of these sorts of sites will use “gateway” pages that have no content other than “click here to enter.” These sites are less likely to be caught with the stop word censors.
These aren’t the only stop words, however. Some search engines create different lists of stop words for each different kind of website. What does this mean? Well, the algorithms which rank the pages determine how many times on a page a keyword is listed. Keep in mind that there are people trying to keyword stuff their pages to improve their ranking. If a word is not relevant to your site, don’t list it in your key words. This is one easy way to avoid losing your index privileges. There is no reason to try to lure people into your site on key words that don’t apply as they will not stick around long enough to provide you with revenue anyway.
Now you might be asking what keyword stuffing is. Keyword stuffing is when someone uses the same keywords over and over again in the meta tags and the content of the web page. If you’re searching the web and you come across a website that seems to be ranked far too highly, then keyword stuffing is usually to blame. The search engines work hard to stop people from using these kinds of tactics, and usually de-list sites that they find to be using them. That’s why some sites can be listed near the top for a while, before one day seemingly disappearing altogether.
Some sites, however, get ejected for repeated keywords, even though these sites aren’t trying to keyword stuff. This is where keyword analysis comes into play. To avoid repeating the same word or phrase too many times, you need to analyze your pages before you submit them – you wouldn’t want your efforts at finding good keywords to go to waste.
Although search engine optimization is a long-term effort, the processes and rules change frequently, without any warning. There are, however, tools available that will help you to stay on top of what’s going on in SEO. Many tools can be tried out at no cost, letting you try before you buy. There are so many to choose from that you can’t just start downloading them – you will want to read the information on each tool before you make a decision.
By using these tools before you submit your pages to any search engines, you will fully understand "stop words" and how to avoid them! You need to keep in mind, though, that different search engines have different stop word lists, so words that don’t matter to one search engine can stop your site from being listed on another.
There are also some words that aren’t included in searches, such as ‘and’, ‘of’, ‘the’, and other small words. You should keep these words out of your meta tags, as they’re just a waste of space.
10 Tips for Raising Your Search Engine Rankings.
Saturday, July 12th, 2008Search engine rankings are an important factor to consider when you have a website that needs more traffic. If your website doesn’t have a good position in the rankings then no-one will find it, so you need to make sure that your website is ranked highly enough to be seen. The other important quality to getting high traffic to your site is having a nice arsenal of links. The more links that you have to your site the more traffic you will get, but also, the more links to your site the more search engines like your site. Keeping a nice supply of links pointing at your site requires similar precautions and practices as getting high search engine listings.
Although no SEO company can guarantee a high ranking for your site, here are some tips for raising your search engine ranking. Using these tips will not get you to the top unless your site is the best out there, but they will at least put you into the positioning that you truly deserve. After all, the internet is basically a free market. You will naturally flow into the place that you deserve and many search engines try to insure that you do not rise above or fall below this position. This is why they are so strict, and this is why you must keep yourself on good terms with them.
1) Content is an important factor in high search engine rankings. Make sure that you have plenty of content throughout your site with your target keywords in the articles. It’s also worth doing a search for websites similar to yours and taking a look at their articles for ideas. The more content you have the better. It is generally a good idea to have between three hundred and five hundred words per page, but more important than a quantity of content is the quality of the content that you are providing. You cannot just put out three hundred words of jargon and expect your visitors to find it interesting and stick around for the long haul.
2) Your website’s URL can help you rank higher with the search engines if it contains your keywords. However, don’t think that naming your site after your keywords will always help your rankings – you need to do more than just that.
3) Search terms should be written out in text, instead of graphics. If you do use pictures, be sure to give them alt tags. The alt tags in your pictures are almost as important as text. It’s also a good idea to put some of your key words in links to other pages. In the eyes of a search engine it is almost as good to have a link to a page full of the content that the visitor is looking for as it is to have the content that the visitor is looking for on your page. If a visitor is looking for something that you are linking to and he or she finds your page, they may look around your site on the way through.
4) The title of your page is very important, and making sure that you choose it wisely will make a big difference. Terms such ‘free article on safe children's toys’, or ‘contact the children's toy expert today’ are good to use as titles, for example – they would get you a high ranking. The title area is the most important place to include your keyword phrases, so make sure that you put them all in.
5) The navigation menu that appears on each page of your website should include your page’s title.
6) Don’t just use the most popular keyword phrases – the market is so competitive that you should be sure to include some niche keywords too.
7) Make sure that you don’t have a lot of irrelevant links on your site. The more closely related to your site your links are, the better your chances of being ranked in a higher position.
You need to periodically update the content of your website, even if it’s only a slight change, as websites like sites that are kept updated.
9) You need to consider the fact most search engines don’t like automatic submissions or multiple submissions – submit once, manually.
10) Always be on the look out for SEO news – staying up to date and using the latest techniques will help you stay one step ahead of your competition.
The Value of Niche Markets
Thursday, July 10th, 2008If you are attempting to start a business online or if you are simply trying to increase your traffic and revenue, focusing on a niche market can give you the edge that you need in order to reach the high goals that you have most assuredly set for yourself. There are so many different niches in the overall market that any web site on any topic can find a niche and fill it. When you specialize, you are more likely to succeed.
The most powerful tactic in the history of warfare is the classic divide and conquer routine. You can make an obscene amount of money if you can take over one niche market and then another and another. Focusing on smaller groups of people and dominating their needs in a particular area is the best way to effectively spend your resources.
When you attempt to evaluate your market keep in mind that there are people in your market that you wouldn’t normally associate with it. There are a small number of people who live in the suburbs who would like to wear cowboy boots. If you can target your products at groups such as these you are more likely to sell to them than someone who would target the cowboy boots to… well.. cowboys.
Finding niche markets can be a daunting task. Basically, you can ask yourself a few questions that will assist you in finding the niche market that is right for you.
1. What experience do you have with the products that you are selling? If you are an expert in the field of your sales, you are more likely to succeed than most. Try to come up with the reason that you got interested in the products that you sell. Figure out what kind of people are most likely to be interested in your products and then try to come up with some groups that aren’t so quickly thought of but that may find it fashionable or interesting to purchase your products.
2. Who was the product that you are selling designed for? Cowboy boots were designed for cowboys. There are people who have never stepped foot on a farm who will wear cowboy boots, but they were designed for cowboys. Try to think of what group of people the product was designed for and what other groups can be cut out of the same mold. I.E. country folks, suburbanites, city dwellers, inter-city dwellers. You are not as likely to sell cowboy boots to inter-city people as you are to suburbanites.
3. Are any of these groups already targeted for your product? If somebody is already targeting the niche that you came up with, you may be able to decipher whether or not there is still room in that market for you. If your competition has been selling the cowboy boots like hot cakes in the suburbs there may still be time for you to make some money off of them.
4. Can you target your niche better than anyone else? If there are already companies selling your product to the group that you wanted to select as your niche market, you still may be able to be the most successful. Just because you are not the first doesn’t mean that you can’t be the best. If you can target a group of people better than anyone else due to some experience, tendency, or inborn characteristic, go for it. Competition is important, without competition nobody would ever become successful.
5. How well can you optimize your niche for search engines? You may be able to come up with an excellent niche market that you can provide for better than anyone else. This niche may be completely original, and you may have the resources necessary to really get it off the ground. But does it have the potential to top any search result sheet? Will anyone ever come looking for it? If not you may have to start off by advertising on pay per click advertising services such as adwords before you get a chance to really thrive on your fresh new niche market.
If your niche market can fill up a few slots for key words you are in better shape than most. It is normally very difficult to come up with good, comprehensive key words for your web pages. The best situation that you can encounter is one in which your key words are more or less laid out for you. If you have a catchy little gimmick or a highly targeted niche market you should be able to come up with a good set of relevant key words. Having relevant key words is most of the battle in the whole SEO game. Any SEO that can come up with a good, comprehensive list of key words will probably do quite well in the world of business.
The Value of Good Link Partners.
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008As you already know, good link partners are vital to the growth of your website. Without good link partners you won’t be ranked highly in the search engines, and you won’t receive the traffic you need to gain new customers and make new sales. Building high-quality links to your website helps it to succeed.
Websites that maintain good incoming links will get many targeted visitors from their link partners. These link partners are also a good source of information and can offer value for the visitors that come to your website more often. The idea behind link partners is to find web sites with complementary content so that you enhance your web site. For example, if you sell computers, it wouldn't be a bad idea to link to a site that sells printers.
Linking to your competitors is much more dangerous. The fact of the matter is that when you link to your competitors you are handing them your business. They may be handing some of theirs back to you, but the trade off simply isn't worth it. If you are in a situation where it is your product or theirs, do not link to them. Aside from the obvious issue of losing business to their site, you may even lose the returning link if you don't keep an eye on it.
When dealing with link partners, there’s virtually no point unless you get reciprocal links. These links make your website look good, as well as getting you targeted traffic from users clicking on the links. When you are optimizing your site for key words, however, it is important to link to sites that provide more information regarding the content that you have provided. In cases like this, the link is already helping you. If you get a returning link in addition it's like killing two birds with one stone.
With good-quality incoming links, you will benefit greatly from the increased traffic to your site. Most major search engines’ rankings are at least partly based on the number of quality links pointing to your website. Google, HotBot, AltaVista, MSN, Inktomi and more all use link popularity in their formula for calculating rankings.
The value of your link partner's sites will be very important, as many of the search engines use this in determining how relevant your site is to the terms that are being searched on.A site with a page rank below three generally isn’t worth exchanging links with. Then again, if the site is on its way up, it might be a good idea to get in on the ground floor. If you are curious as to whether a site is going to be accumulating a higher page rank in a short period of time try going to http://www.iwebtool.com/rank and punching the site’s URL into the “backlink” tool or the “page rank predictor.” These will show you how many links the site has going to them and will let you know what the page rank could be within the next three months.
You must always keep an eye on the value, and use value-for-value exchanges only. Make sure that your link doesn’t get removed from any sites you link to, and remove your own link to them if it does. Many people will agree to link with you and then remove your link after a week or two. If you leave your site linked to them, then they’re the only one benefiting.
Good link partners are hard to find, and it will take some time for them to respond. You may have to contact them more than once, and probably won’t take you seriously if you just ask them to trade you links. It is important to provide them with information relating to your company and let them know why your link will be worth while to them. If you are serious about SEO, you will be able to let them know that you expect your page rank to explode within the next few months and you may be able to accumulate links this way.
It’s important for to make sure that you links are checked on a regular basis. Of course you don’t have much control over the incoming links, but you can still do whatever you want with the outgoing ones. You should immediately remove any links that don’t work, as they can and will bring your search engine rankings down.
By understanding how link partnering works and maintaining good quality links on your website, you can increase your targeted traffic and improve your sales. After all, isn’t that the whole point of having an online business? Just remember that your website, like any other business, takes time and effort to make it succeed, and any little way you can speed up the process is good – as long as it’s not against the rules, of course.