Search Engine Optimization
By Lloyd Brown
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It’s no secret that Google modifies their algorithm in what seems to be an effort to fight attempts to “beat the system.” Several years ago Google announced the implementation of their Automatic Filtering. When enabled, one of the effects takes the form of a host crowding penalty — if multiple results come from the same Web host, only the first two are returned.
One suggested solution is to simply disable the filter. But the odds of users doing this, or even knowing how to disable the filter are slim. Therefore, the filter remains active and users are not seeing what are considered duplicate results because of the host crowding penalty. As a result, many companies, whose only sin was having multiple sites all on the same host, lost significant traffic from search engines.
Another solution is to host your websites with multiple hosts. But this forces you to manage multiple control panels, bills and contacts.
If you manage several websites, you may want to consider a better solution — niche Web hosts that provide IP ranges spread out over multiple Class A or C subnets, giving search engines the impression that your sites reside across different hosts. This is important when you have sites that promote similar products, or when you want to interlink the sites you have into your own mini-network — another reason for Google to impose the penalty. Plus, you get the added convenience of one bill, one contact and usually one control panel to manage all of your sites.
Choosing a C-Class HostChoosing a proper host can be difficult. Many know that website owners are seeking SEO-friendly hosting, but do not understand why. As a result, many providers sell hosting plans with multiple Class Cs, but they share IPs with multiple customers — mainly because by not sharing IPs, hosts are limited as to how many customers they can serve. But this can be dangerous for a website owner. If you share an IP with an unseemly website owner you run the risk of having the entire IP banned, instantly losing your search credibility. And some hosts will put upwards of 9,000 different domains on one IP. Like many things, you often get what you pay for.
Bruce Clay observed that although only 3 percent of websites are on dedicated IPs, well over 90 percent of the top-50 results in the search engines are sites having dedicated IP numbers. They confirmed this by moving a site from a shared IP to a dedicated IP and noticed “significant ranking increases.”
Websites live and die with their search rankings. So it’s important to optimize your portfolio of sites, including spreading out your domains through a dedicated, C-Class hosting service. As an added bonus, spreading out your sites over multiple IPs makes it difficult for your competitors to find all of your sites through a simple reverse IP lookup.
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The Web’s growth
continues virtually unabated. Netcraft’s 2007 Web Server Survey
found the Web growing by nearly 50 million sites since December 2006 (19
million new, active sites for annual growth of 38%). While there
continues to be strong growth in traditional hosting, Netcraft reports
the most dramatic growth were sites at blogging services providers
such as MySpace, Live Spaces and Blogger — accounting for approximately
25 million of the more than 155 million sites of which Netcraft received
responses. So what servers are these sites running on? |
About the Author: Lloyd Brown is Director of Business Development for
Got Web Host — a premier provider of Class C hosting and leader in SEO hosting services. Brown’s portfolio includes nearly 10 years of Internet marketing experience.
by Dante Monteverde__________________________________________
Happy New Year! Did you already break some resolutions you set for yourself? Not to worry. Below are some new resolutions, for your SEO New Year. They are easy to follow and while they may not help you lose weight or get a healthier heart, they just might help you trim your
budget and fatten your wallet.
Resolve to complete an SEO audit of your website.Set aside time to review your index page and each of your internal pages. If you have a large site with thousands of pages, first go over the most important pages that need more traffic and work your way down the list.
Your SEO audit can be as simple as making sure your <title> tags matches the content on your pages and implementing the correct alt text on your images. More advanced audits can include completely restructuring a page to target a new set of keyword phrases or editing your entire site to feature more <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags.
Resolve to do more keyword research. Have your products or services changed? If so, what new keywords should you target or omit? Remember, SEO is an ongoing process. Make sure the keywords you initially targeted are still relevant and resolve to perform ongoing research throughout the New Year by following trends and speaking directly with your website visitors. Those pursuing SEO success may also want to resolve to audit their competitors and the search results pages where those competing sites appear.
Resolve to update your content.Set aside at least an hour a week or more to write new content. One idea might be to fill out existing product reviews with new keywords you have identified. An easy way to create content is to start writing a weblog. Topic ideas might include posts about your products or services, feedback you have received from visitors or just something that interests you and is related to your website. Update your weblog frequently (at least once a week) and make sure that it’s easy for your audience to access.
Publicizing the availability of RSS feeds allows for greater exposure and gives your most active customers quick access to content that could compel them to act on your unique offerings.
Resolve to obtain new incoming links.Try to get a few new links from respectable sources every week. There are many ways to do this including making new friends within social networks, deploying widgets, guest blogging for others in your industry and generating media attention. Links to your index (home) page are good but also get links to your sub (secondary) pages — specific product pages for ecommerce stores or your best blog posts. Ideally, try to
vary the anchor text slightly on all incoming links, but too much variance will diminish the overall value.
Resolve to be active in social networks and media sites. Does your website have a LinkedIn, MySpace or Facebook profile? Are there any industry-specific social networks that you should consider?
Social networks continue to gain momentum and attract an even larger audience. This is an easy way to get more exposure for your website and in some ways it’s equivalent to having multiple websites, providing greater exposure and links. In addition, there is tremendous potential for receiving new leads just within your social networks. Social media sites such as Newsvine, Digg, Mixx, Reddit and others are exceptional
places to build links, generate awareness and keep that traffic rolling in throughout the year.
The start of the New Year is an excellent time to evaluate your current SEO strategy. You can be sure that search will change in 2008, so it is important to not only make some new resolutions but to follow through and keep your SEO senses sharp — by reading SEO Corner, networking and following changes in both the search industry and your own.
Happy SEOing, and good luck in 2008.About the Author: Dante A. Monteverde is a Search Strategist specializing in Search Engine Optimization. He founded SpiderBait.com in 1996 and has over 10 years of SEO experience.
By Milind Mody__________________________________________
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The dominance of search
dictates that every successful website must rank highly in the search
engines to prosper. And for those seeking the ultimate success online,
it’s imperative that businesses take advantage of the true essence of
the Web — that it is truly world-wide.
As such, in order to become a global presence your site will need to
rank in multiple regions and countries. But while it’s simple to target
countries and geographies using Google AdWords, how does one target
countries for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes?
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First we must understand how search engines associate a region or country with a website.
For example, Google has roughly 130 country-specific Top Level Domains (TLDs). Google.co.uk, google.com.au and google.co.in denote specific countries — United Kingdom, Australia and India, respectively. However, by default, Google places and ranks websites in Google.com, the default URL for American and international users.
To associate your website with a particular country or region, search engines use some of the following information:
1) Country Coded Top Level Domain (ccTLD) The most obvious and arguably most important method is to look at the ccTLD. For example, a domain ending in .au might be an Australian website targeting Australia. Similarly, a .uk website would target British audience.
2) IP address of your Web hosting company Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur from Google’s Search Quality Team state, “In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the Web server's IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.” So, the IP address of your Web host gives a clue to search engines about your website’s default region. Therefore, it’s important to host your website in the country where you would like your website to rank.
But the above two methods are not foolproof. For instance, many UK website owners have .com domain names and might host their website on US servers, due to better prices or some value-added service.
3) Address informationSearch engines also use postal addresses in the “about” or “contact” page to detect your default country. If you have a Google Map of your business location on your contact page, it can also help with Google Local or regional rankings. Even though the address element technically means “contact info for this Web page,” if you use an address element on your website, like the example below, Google will interpret it as a physical address.
<address>
Business Name
Street Name
City Name
Zip code
Country Name
</address>4) Language informationSearch engines also determine your default country based on the language of your website — especially valid for non-English language websites. The XHTML standard lets you declare language in both the HTML tag and through Meta tags. So, for a website using the French language, the HTML tag might look like this:
<html lang=”fr” xml:lang=”fr”xml ns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"”>The French Meta Tag:
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Content-Language” CONTENT=”fr”>Google Webmaster ToolsRecently Google has come up with a Set Geographic Target feature in Google Webmaster Tools. Using this feature you can map folders or subdomains on your website to specific locations. So, you can structure your website as:
www.mysite.com (Main US website)
uk.mysite.com (UK version)
france.mysite.com (French version)Similarly, you can have sub-folders within your main domain and assign them to specific countries.
However, if you want to target multiple countries, this tool works only for top-level domains (.com, .net, etc). You cannot use a country-specific domain like .co.uk while targeting multiple countries, because any ccTLD is associated to that country by default. And, of course this only applies to Google and not other search engines like Yahoo! and MSN.
Ranking multiple sites in several countries Back to the original question — how do you set up multiple sites in such a way that each ranks in a particular country or region?
One way is to create subdomains on your parent .com or .net website and use Google Webmaster Tools to target these subdomains for particular locations. This is the most cost-effective method.
Perhaps not the cheapest, but best solution is to buy multiple top-level domains and host these websites with regional hosting companies. But use caution — many UK hosting companies have US-based servers and some US hosting companies have Canadian servers, for example. This defeats the purpose of using local hosting. So make sure that your hosting company gives you a server with a regional IP address.
Below are more tips for ranking highly in your specified country or region:- Use address and language information on all of your websites to make the search engines’ jobs easier.
- Use location-specific keywords on all regional websites. Also, one of the best tricks to rank highly in regional search engines is to get links from websites in the same region. If you want to target Google French, make sure your French language website gets links from other French language websites.
- From your main .com or .net site you need to link to your regional
websites. Doing this helps transfer PageRank to those sites. Place
small flag thumbnails on your main .com or .net website and hyperlink
each of these flags to your corresponding regional website. Another
choice is to use keyword-rich anchor texts from your main website
sitemap.
- Each of the regional sites should link back to your parent site. But
avoid excessive interlinking between all of your domains, as it could
do more damage than good.
If you currently run a multi-language or global website, it is a good idea to make sure your site is meeting the standards and practices above. And if you’re considering going global or feel that you’re ready to make a splash in another country or region, these tips will help your site rank higher and could put you a step ahead of your competition and on your way to a true world-wide Web presence.
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About The Author:
Milind Mody is founder CEO of SEO firm eBrandz Inc. |
The following are articles related to search engine optimization (SEO) from the archives of Website Magazine. These articles are ordered by the date they appear in the print edition of Website Magazine (the last article in this list is the most recent). For daily coverage of all things Web related
including SEO, please visit the
Website Magazine Daily Blog.
Recent SEO Articles From the November 2007 Issue:
-
SEO Corner: 3 Tactics: Three SEO tactics that are being used but not
necessarily drawing much attention and what you should know about them.
-
Graphics Optimization: Graphics expert Derek Tonn discusses the great
benefits of optimizing your graphic elements for the Web, including usability,
accessibility and page load times.
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Usability Mistakes: Avoid these seven deadly sins of site usability to
ensure a positive experience for your users, gain repeat visitors and ultimately
increase sales.
Archived SEO Articles
Within every metropolitan city or global community
there exists unique digital markets of
niche websites and digital community sites
serving industries or social groups of people with similar
interests. The activities of these social groups can influence
regional industries to create new growth environments.
Ways to increase your presence within these markets
may be fueled by economic changes in policy or political
electoral agendas, opening new markets unsaturated
with search relevancy. Corresponding national and/or local
events will also increase or decrease the activity level
within these localized markets.
To enter these new digital markets or dominate any search
interest you should understand some common facts about
search marketing that allows a website to achieve first
page rankings in the search engines.
In 2007, search is going through an evolution of complexity
that will shape information gathering for years to come.
local search and industry search will reach new heights
with workable applications to connect the globe without
the barrier of language. topical interests span all countries
and cultures, and people and special interest groups
are getting connected through the evolving intricacies of
search. and topical interests will dominate search
trends in new digital markets, like alternative energy.
Influence and capItalIze on
hIgh-growth search trends
As a search marketing strategy, it is ideal to initiate the
lead in spotting an industry trend and promoting that
search trend publicly. This is especially true when it is
your objective to gain clients within an industry that
will soon be very competitive from an increase in related
search activity.
The opposite or backward approach would be to see a market
grow and then to take months to plan a strategy to
saturate the market as the search trends mature.
The evolution of competition in new digital markets is
slow, in my opinion, and the search trends seem to start
about 1.5 - 3 years ahead of companies ranking for related
revenue terms. take the keyword phrase “solar energy
products,” for example. This phrase was dormant until it
became a derivative of “global warming.”
As a result, heavy shifts in search trends both create and
replace search markets and an organization’s perceived
value to the search market on a national, local or global
scale.
So, if you have the resources to attract industry-specific
business clients who themselves are experiencing high
growth rates because of a national or global trend, then
it is critical that you initiate energetic efforts to saturate
the localized search markets within those high-growth
industries.
As an example: using “energy” as the root word, consider
the relationship between nanofilms, the solar panel industry
and real estate:
Cause: technological advances in nanofilms allow
glass windows the capability to be more energy efficient
than ever before and even convert those windows to solar
energy collectors for cost effective use in residential and
commercial applications.
Effect: Building developers become much more interested
in constructing eco-friendly homes and offices,
as the technology is now more accessible, marketable and
cost-effective. in addition, recent political and policy
changes offer tax breaks to those developers building ecofriendly
structures.
The search effect: new keyword searches will
create search brands in industries and markets spurred by high
growth rates in related searches.
Searches for “green homes” will return results for nanofilm
windows and solar panels. Searches for “nanofilms” will return
results for solar-powered homes, solar panel windows or
eco-friendly buildings. The real estate agent thinking ahead
of the curve will optimize for keywords and phrases related to
nanofilms and solar panels, while the solar panel manufacturer
should optimize for searches for eco-friendly or green homes.
It is important to remember that some search brands are transitional,
as the public’s choice for keyword phrases dominates
searches as trends mature. Your site’s perceived value will depend
on your ability to capitalize on transitional and permanent
digital shifts in search traffic.
The strategy is to create and saturate new online search markets,
influenced by high search-driven social trends at a growth-rate
similar to the increased search activity of the new industry keyword
phrase.
However, if an organization attempts to create and label a new
digital market with their own brand or keyword phrase
to describe the change, they will typically find rejection
for that search term. after all, it’s the public who is doing
all the searching, not the organization. Search history
has shown that it is better to identify the new search
phrases that will soon represent a growing digital market
and create products or services around accepted phrases.
The key is to identify those high growth keyword-driven
markets as early as possible, before complete saturation by
the competition.
in the end, natural search will fortify your brand when
the competition grows. You will benefit from the large,
future budgets spent on the new digital markets and their
chosen keyword phrases. Being first to market will also
deflect the fury of competition and rising ppC prices associated
with growth.
About the Author: Tim Langmeier is founder of The SEO Agency. If you would like more information
on growing Digital Markets and the influence of Search, contact The
SEO Agency at media@theseoagency.com
For many, search engines have come to be the primary source of finding information about both the online and offline world. Google alone claims a rate of one billion searches per day. Simply put, search engines are a part of our daily lives. As such, optimizing your website to reach Web searchers is now a vital part online success.
As a website owner, you should proud of what you’ve created — or paid for. Your site looks great, it’s easy to navigate, user-friendly and loaded with great content. But what good is it if nobody can find you?
(article continued below)
SEO is about removing barriers between the search engines and your content. To do this effectively you must concentrate primarily on your website’s accessibility and content while making an outright commitment to its long-term success. It involves a philosophical shift from the mindset of immediate gratification to a focus on long-term sustainability. You must demonstrate to the search engines that your site content is the most relevant and important to a searcher’s needs. But don’t worry — SEO is not as hard as many would have you believe, and the rewards are immense.
Accessibility: Well-Designed & Thoughtful
There is plenty that goes into the concept of accessibility when it comes to SEO. Great websites feature well-designed and thoughtful arrangements of page components for users while making those same components accessible to search engines. Websites with dated design methods and not employing even the most basic SEO techniques will be relegated to no man’s land — never to be found, much less appreciated by a casual surfer or active consumer.
CSS & Table-less Design
During the long reign of Web 1.0, many designers used graphical tools to create table-based templates. But now we’re firmly entrenched in the Web 2.0 era. Designers are increasingly adopting cascading style sheets (CSS — now in its third iteration) for table-less design. CSS allows far less code to be used, creating a higher content-to-code ratio. Search engines typically use a top-down logic in determining the nature of website content — therefore, by using CSS, webmasters can clean up their code and arrange content at a higher (more accessible) portion of the page.
The end result is that search spiders are able to get through your site quickly, and easily differentiate content from code. Your site is indexed accurately and users get a better representation of site content from search results.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are XML files that list the URLs (Web pages) residing on a domain to provide search engines with easy access to a website’s entire content. XML files also provide additional metadata about the frequency of change, a page’s importance as compared to other pages on the site and when they were last updated. For search engines, in many respects accessibility means “attainability.” Providing these easy-toread and indexable guidelines for search engines ensures your site will be crawled thoroughly and accurately. A uniform standard for
sitemaps has been created (check out sitemaps.org) and is supported by the three major search engines; Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Metadata — Titles, Descriptions & So Much More
Metadata, in the case of websites, is simply information about a specific page — mainly the title, descriptions and defined keywords, although abstracts and site information can also be included. Some search engines factor in various sections of metadata included on a page to determine that page’s relevancy to a search term or phrase. It’s important to keep in mind that metadata serves two purposes — obviously to rank higher (by telling the search engines what your page is about) but also to tell users what they will find at the page they are about to click through to from the search engine results pages (SERPs). When existent or relevant, this data is sometimes what a user sees below each search result listing.
This means that when formulating titles and descriptions for each unique page of your site, it’s important to give equal attention to the density of keywords and phrases as well as how you formulate your text for maximum readability — the user should get a clear description of the page that includes keywords for which they were searching. Best practice has shown that a roughly 75-character title and a description of approximately 170 characters work best.
Shows & Tells — H1, H2 and H3 tags
SEO professionals are known to explore every possible opportunity to get better rankings. Header tags (H1, H2, or H3) appear at several spots on a page, breaking up content and making it easier to read, while also providing clues to search engines about that page’s structure and content. While the degree that header tags play in getting listed higher on search engines is debated, they do provide the ability to create well-formed documents that are both meaningful to search engines and visitors to your site. Header tags provide site optimizers with a place to include descriptive, keyword-rich content and indicate to both parties (search engines and users) the importance of a page section. It’s a good idea to take a little time and include some header tags in your pages.
Breadth of Content
You probably read it all the time, but you’re about to read it again. Content is king. And the presence of quality content or lack thereof will greatly impact any SEO effort. The breadth of content or scope of topics that SEO practitioners consider including on a site is important as it gives search engines the sense that you are as much a destination for information as you are an enterprise trying to sell something. There is a great deal of value assigned to information hubs and not just by search engines — when users like a site and the information it provides they are more willing to share it with others. And that is where the link juice lives.
CMS, Blogs and Forums
Those responsible for SEO as well as site designers and developers have an important consideration to make about how to present content. Content management systems (CMS) can make administering content much easier and are, for many websites, the de facto standard in how users interact with their company and brand online. There is plenty of valuable information in your user forums and blogs — from what you produce to what is penned by your audience. Typically these areas are up-to-date and loaded with relevant information about both your products and industry news. But the manner in which your content is presented is critical. Some forums and blogs are presented in applications like AJAX or JavaScript that, many times, are unable to be indexed by search engines.
Product and Consumer Reviews
One way to build a content site is to publish reviews of products, even if your site sells someone else’s materials. Providing both your own informative review and insightful reviews by other consumers will quickly enable you to add valuable, often keyword-rich content that again is valuable to both of your audiences — search engines and users.
However, don’t take the easy way out by copying and pasting reviews or descriptions from another site. Aside from copyright infringement risks, this can result in duplicate content issues. Plus, creating original content will add value to your site. If a searcher queries a product and finds the same review on 10 different pages, but yours is different, the added value will bring that individual back for further reviews. Not only that, but the search engines will give your review priority over the other sites all using the same material.
Focus Pages (About, Contact, FAQ)
Many site optimizers find that users typically navigate to pages providing information and greater focus on the company behind the website during their initial site visit. Pages that reveal guidance about a company’s mission and objectives often rank highly, as search engines consider that important, relevant information for visitors. But the benefits of focus pages are not only to secure a few additional listings. They also provide access to information about the personnel or employees that support your company, products or brand. Informative pages
about your company, services and people are yet another way to add keyword-rich content for the spiders to crawl.
Media Centers
Every website should have some form of a media center to share information with prospects. But many either do not make an effort to keep this information updated or overlook the value such content can provide. Some forms of media to include are whitepapers, press releases and relevant outbound links about happenings in your industry.
Online media centers not only give your site even more content, but enhance your credibility with search engines. The engines consider who you are linking to (ideally relevant and respected sources) as much as they do who is linking to you. Having a media center on your site also gives you the ability to combat negative press. For example, search McDonald’s on Google and the top results will be the official corporate site, information about Ronald McDonald charities and stock news within Google’s OneBox. But also on the first page are links to the McDonald’s-bashing documentary “Super Size Me” and another site claiming McDonald’s exploitation of animals, people and the environment. This is not to say you should produce misleading or false information but, the more positive press on your site, the more opportunities you have to limit negative results.
A search for McDonald’s also lists separate pages for mcdwireless.com and Ronald McDonald House charities. Both of these supplemental pages support the overall brand and allow for more linking opportunities among all McDonald’s Web pages. More links provides higher rankings and more pages under the McDonald’s umbrella provides further opportunities to dominate the SERPs.
Finally, media centers provide an opportunity to up sell to existing consumers and get that oft-elusive ranking for those reviewing your products and services elsewhere on the Web.
Commitment
The single most important part of any SEO strategy is commitment. This includes a commitment to developing an accessible site, creating content, offering innovative products and services and, of course, testing — plenty of testing. The days of hastily creating sites and generating loads of qualified visitors are over. It takes a great deal of hard work to make a successful SEO campaign happen.
Testing
Exceptional SEO is rarely an accident. While it is certainly plausible that you could have a site ranking well in popular search engines that has been designed with tables and features little to no quality content, it’s not guaranteed to be a real solution until you can prove that your methods work better than the alternatives. Search engines use algorithms to crawl sites and they constantly change. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.
This means that testing your tactics and techniques is imperative to your success. If you don’t know what you did to get a site ranked, then you’ll never know how to do it again, and again, and again.
Innovation
You will quickly notice that leaders in any industry are not content with one product. They continually innovate and improve and you should do the same. Innovation can take many forms — improving an existing product, refining a method of delivery, setting new standards for your industry and developing entirely new products, to name a few. Innovation gains the respect of your consumers and your industry as a whole — leading to brand recognition, more incoming links and better SEO.
Networking
Networking your way into the spotlight is the final but most important ongoing factor in successful SEO. As with innovation, establishing relationships and earning the respect of both consumers and industry experts is crucial. Recognition of your site through incoming links is arguably the biggest factor that makes or breaks SEO campaigns. If content is the king — then incoming links are the blue blood that keeps your site at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).
Networking can be accomplished through a variety of ways, including the upsurge of social networking websites. As more of these sites spring up, it’s important to have a presence in your industry’s social scene.
Know Your ABC’s
Oneupweb, a leading SEO/SEM firm published a 2005 study, finding that only 13 percent of Fortune 100 companies had well-optimized websites. Although this is up from three percent in 2002, the importance of search results positions necessitates much more work. Considering that most of us are not included in the Fortune 100 list and do not have the same brand recognition as those companies, solid SEO strategies are vital to our online enterprises. Understanding and exploring the basics of SEO while making a commitment to accessibility, content and networking will yield results of which you and your company can be proud.