Website Marketing Resource

In a perfect world, everyone would be honest.

In a perfect world, no one would violate search engine policies to try get a better listing.

They’d respect the terms set out by the search engines. It’s not a perfect world. And especially not when it comes to the highly competitive search engine optimization industry. Prime example;

1) Here is a quote taken from a “search engine optimization” website;

“Sophisticated doorway pages (those that contain unique optimized text) are still an excellent way to rank with the search engines.”

2) Here is a quote taken from Google’s Webmaster Guide;

“Another illicit practice is to place “doorway” pages loaded with keywords on the client’s site… The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant…”

When I was in the sandbox (and I don’t mean the Google Sandbox) my mother taught me to be sure my information comes from the horse’s mouth. That’s still good advice today.

Which are lies and which are misconceptions?

Who knows? Did the SEO (search engine optimizer) actually read Google’s Guidelines? Is it old advice that hasn’t been updated for years?

Google Sitemaps is a new tool for website owners and publishers, released by Google themselves. It allows you to submit a sitemap (a document that contains links to every page of your site) from your own homepage in .XML or in plain .TXT format that will help Google to spider your pages. This again should result in a faster indexing process of your site and could therefore even result in better search engine placements. You can learn more about the program and sign up for a free account here.

Create A Sitemap For WordPress Blogs

If your site or weblog is published with WordPress you are very lucky because it didn’t take long until the first Google Sitemaps plugin for it was released. The tool, that you can find on the website of the creator, Arne Brachhold, does not only create your xml sitemap totally automatically and update it every time you add new content to your site but does then also ping Google directly to tell them that there are new pages to spider.

Create A Sitemap For Every Other Site

You can rank number one (Or at least in the top ten) for just about any search phrase by just buying text link ads, even if the web site isn’t related to the search phrase in anyway, it can still rank in the top ten of the search results. Some web site owners see this as the only true way to the top ten. So, should you buy your way to the top? Or should you play it safe?

Some say it’s better to be safe than sorry. While others say if you play it safe and never make it to the top ten of the search results, your losing anyway. So, it must be much better not to play by the rules and get a top ten ranking and make a little money before you get banned from the search engines. Well, it’s not that easy and you can see the cons and pros in both ways.

First let’s look at the pros of playing it safe. The first one is obvious and it’s that you have a lot less chance of getting banned and much safer. At the same time you can peacefully sleep at night without worrying whether you’ll be banned the next day you wake up. It also allows you to save money and spend it else where, such as PPC (Pay Per Click) search engines, banner advertisement, mailing list and offline advertising.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is modification done in the web site design, coding, content and/or structure of a web site in an effort to achieve the higher ranking within search engines. Search Engine Optimization are done to attend the highest ranking in the search engine results for some targeted keywords or key phrases.

Search engine optimization can be enforced on the website while designing it or can be performed after a website is designed. It is a technique that can be used to develop a website, which is search engine friendly. Most of the search engine uses a software called “crawlers” or “spider”. The main motive of these software are to check the website create their index (search engine index).

The method of getting search result is different for each search engines. Search engine applies many techniques to index the web pages and include into its directory. So the next time if your web page ranking high within one search engine and not in another then do not bother, it’s because of different method used by these search engines. To rank higher in all the search engine you can do the things which is used by all search engines. You have to track all the changes happened in the search engine operation or method of spider software for getting search results and accordingly modify your web sites.

I was recently contacted by one of my best clients who asked me what I thought of his decision to make a major change to one of his highly ranked pages. His initial concern was that visitor sales conversion ratio was low. At almost one percent, it was just below normal, but I’m always happy when a client wants to improve. Conversion and rankings though, are very different beasts and his concern was overly focused on the former to the total exclusion of the latter.

As his SEO I should have realized that the top rankings of this already optimized page were in danger when his first sentence referred to the existing “Dusty, tired old page, that just isn’t getting enough sales.” That page had just been optimized for search engines about 6 months previously, and went from page 10 (invisible) or so of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) to the top three on the first pages of all three major search engines virtually overnight after a few tweaks to gain traction from a popular movie reference to his product.

We’ve all heard about it-it seems like all the buzz right now in the search engine marketing industry is RSS. If you’re a website owner, than there are two ways your website can benefit from using RSS on your website-you can provide an RSS feed or, for the not-so-technically-inclined folks like me, you can use an RSS feed to keep your site’s content fresh.

RSS is a way to syndicate website content. According to Wikipedia, “RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by (amongst other things) news websites and weblogs…the RSS formats provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data.” Wikipedia goes on to say that “A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled web pages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is now common to find RSS feeds on major web sites, as well as many smaller ones.”

If you have questions about whether or not the Over-Optimization Penalty (OOP) exists or not, then you obviously haven’t pushed the limits enough with your own website optimization or organic SEO efforts to have experienced the joys of running into the OOP (Over-Optimization Penalty).

I’m sure you’re probably thinking: “prove it”. If that’s what you’re thinking, let me tell you about a specific example of what I call the Over-Optimization Penalty, or OOP:

Over-Optimization penalty because of too much anchor text. You decide that your site is not ranking well. So, you change the navigation on your site so that all the home page links say “keyword keyword home” instead of “home”. A few days later you lose your rankings, which is a serious blow to your traffic. Since that was the only thing you changed on your site you change those links to your home page back so it says, “home” instead of “keyword keyword home”. BINGO! All of your lost rankings and your lost traffic comes back a few days later.

If that’s not proof of an over-optimization penalty then I don’t know what is–I would call that an OOP: you do something to try to boost your rankings by over optimizing some element of your website, something that backfires and causes a loss of rankings.

Anchor Text (also called phrase linking) can significantly improve your web pages relevance in the search engines. Optimized or keyword rich anchor text can help your web site gain positioning in the search engines as well as help drive better targeted search traffic.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor Text is the visible hyperlinked text that you see on the page, here is an example:

To read more about search engine optimization techniques, check out my Search Engine Optimization blog.

Here the words "search engine optimization" are hyperlinked to the hidden URL of http://seogirl.blogspot.com/. The words, visible, "search engine marketing blog" is the anchor text.

Anchor text should be used to indicate the subject matter of the page that it links to. If you use the example above, "Search Engine Optimization Blog" indicates to visitors that they can expect to find information pertaining to search engine optimization if they click on that link.

Why is Anchor Text Important?

Anchor text is one of the more important elements in influencing a Web site’s position in search engine result pages (SERPS). Your anchor text should include important keywords.

Extra, Extra Google Now Gives you feedback. By Creating a Google Sitemap using free online tools you can get Google to crawl your site within 24 Hours. As an Added bonus after Google Crawls your site they give you feedback about any problems they encountered. To take advantage of this amazing service from yahoo just follow these 4 simple steps.

Step 1 Get a Google Site Map Account

In order to create a Google Sitemap account just cut and paste the below URL in your browser and follow the simple directions

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login)

Step 2 Create Your Site map

You can create your Sitemap either as an XML file or a TXT file. XML is the PPreferred method since you can give Google more information about your Web Site. You do not need to know XML to create a Google Sitemap. Not with this free web based tool. Simply go to the below web site type in your domain and it will automatically spider your site and create a Google Site Map for you. http://www.sitemapspal.com/

If You prefer to use a text file simply following the below direction taken directly from the Google Help File (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/other.html)

It is no secret that Google and Yahoo are on a continuous battle to win our hearts and get everyone to convert, but is converting someone really a matter of the quantity or the quality?

Let’s take a look at some top key searches and compare them with some search engines online. I will outline a few things for each search result:

1) Search Engine
2) Number of results found
3) Quality & content of the top 10 sites
4) What you find going beyond the first 10 pages

Each section will get ranked out of 10 points for quality (information taken on August 26,2005).

Starting with my all-time favorite search term: “INTERNET MARKETING”

Google.com
- 99,000,000 results
- 10/10 on quality
- 10/10 Past 10 pages still delivers top quality results

Yahoo.com
- 281,000,000 results
- 7/10 on quality. There’s no reason to list a “Hotel Marketing Firm” & “Building websites”. The #1 spot was reserved for Yahoo marketing.
- 9/10 Past 10 pages, it is very generic for business, not specific.

MSN.com
- 93,661,176 results
- 10/10 on quality
- 10/10 Past 10 pages still delivers high quality results. I am surprised and give MSN two thumbs up for their attention to detail.