Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

Are you planning to revamp your website? Are your business development managers complain that your current website is too dull and you need to make your website more dynamic and more interactive to increase the conversion rates? Are you at the verge of buying their suggestion in making your website into a completely flash based website? Don’t proceed further until you read this post fully!

It is true that Flash websites are more interactive, dynamic and that it captures the attention of your visitors and retains them for a longer period of time in your website. There is also an unspoken theory business development theory that if you retain your website visitors for long enough you can increase conversion rate. I am not sure that whether there are any supporting stats for this theory. However common sense would say that if the visitor finds all the information that they need in your website they will leave your website as satisfied visitors and they are more likely to return to your website sooner or later. This is just one side of the coin; there is another side to it, all your revamping efforts to convert your website to Flash based website also should take into consideration how search engines are going to welcome that change.

Search engines do not favor flash websites and they find it rather difficult to crawl your website completely because of the unsupported Flash format of your website. However, recently there has been some improvement from the part of the search engines in this regard to index Flash sites that are optimized correctly, it has to be admitted that these there is no complete solace for Flash websites yet. We are not talking here about HTML websites that have flash elements such as Flash headers or other interactive Flash elements. It is those websites that are built completely used Flash that suffers. When you build your website completely using Flash, you minimize the number of doorways to your website for search engines to enter. There will be only one page through which search engines can enter whereas if you have an HTML website each page serves as a potential entry point for the search engine spiders. Optimization of your website for multiple keywords too becomes rather complicated which will undoubtedly push your website to a disadvantaged position in terms of SEO.

So it is always advisable to look for alternative ways of making your website more impressive rather than by converting it to a completely Flash based website. Moreover, building a Flash based website is all the more expensive when compared to building an HTML website, even if you can afford the cost you will hurt your search engine results very badly. Rather than improving your business, your revamping efforts should not subject your business to unnecessary risks. Consult a good SEO company before making any changes to your website so that you can build on what you already have and take advantage of the existing ranking of your website.

In all the SEO support forums, SEO blogs we see that the website should be search engine friendly to get good rankings in the search engines. What do they really mean by search engine friendly website?

When you design your website it is not sufficient that your website looks attractive it should also serve the sole purpose for which you have launched your website, which I presume is to increase visibility so that you can reach out to more people through your website. In order to reach out to more people, your website should feature in the search results when people search for your service. One of the factors that you need to remember when you want to make your website into a search engine friendly website is keep your website’s content unique and fresh. Add fresh content as often as possible. Let the content target specific keywords.

Instead of using too much of graphic representations in your website use text forms for menus instead of images because search engines cannot read images. Avoid using drop down menus. Make your site as light as possible by reducing the usage of heavy flash elements and heavy graphics. If you review the business websites of top rated companies that have good ranking, you will be able to see that the websites of these companies will rather be very simple. Search engines love fast loading websites so try to optimize your website for fast loading by shedding away high resolution images.

Let the URLs have meaningful names and keywords rather than naming all the pages as index 1, index 2, index 3 etc. URLs that have keywords that are specific to a particular page are more effective. Keep all the pages close to the home page or root directory rather than having them in different directories. While registering your domain, select your domain name is such a way that it has one of your keywords.

Name all the images using keywords that are specific to each page rather than naming as img1, img2 etc. Use alt tags and tool tip text for your website. Make sure that there are no broken links in your website. Provide right titles for your web pages. Right combination of keywords and page titles will often bring the desired results. Make sure to provide footer links to all the pages of your website this will help the search engine spiders to crawl deep into the pages. When you include head data don’t stuff too many keywords use few focused keywords for better results. Provide good number of anchor text within your website. A clear navigation helps both visitors and search engines to crawl your website fully. Avoid all possible black hat tricks. Never use content scrapped from other websites. Have your website hosted with a reliable hosting service provider because if your site is down when the indexing takes place your site will not get indexed and you may have to wait until the search engine spider visits your website.

By following all the above tips you can make your website search engine friendly.

If someone says that they like to have their website optimized, we immediately think of Google and the ways of getting a good position in the search results pages of Google. Whether we like it or not Google Rules! So if we like to be successful online, we need to make sure that we please Google and its search engine algorithm. One of the areas that is unique to Google is the importance it offers to the sitemaps. They recommend the webmasters to provide a good sitemap in their websites with links to all the important parts of the website.

Sitemaps are nothing but a webpage that is an integral part of your website which presents the structure of the website and how the navigation moves in your website. It is basically a useful resource for your website users especially when you have a very complicated website structure with a lot of pages.

I have come across a number of websites which are so complicated to navigate and confuse the users because of lack of proper hierarchical structure. Navigation in such websites becomes real complicated and it can frustrate the user. I try to rush to the sitemap page of the website presuming that there will be one, but they do not have a sitemap page in place either; but by looking at the site we will be able to make out that the webmaster has spent a lot of time and money in having the website designed with lots of bells and whistles. At the same time absence of a sitemap also indicates that they did not get proper SEO guidance when they built their website or sometimes they may be having a sitemap but it may not have a good representation of the website’s structure.

Sitemaps are not only important for the human users but it is also important for the search engines. Sitemaps will guide the search engine spiders in their crawling; if you have a good sitemap then you will have all the pages of your website crawled including the deepest pages. If you are targeting Google, which I am sure you will, you should have special sitemaps in XML format along with the regular sitemaps you present for your human users. Though only Google expects XML sitemaps now, it may not be surprising to see all the other search engines join Google shortly.

If you have a dynamic website and if most of the pages can be reached only via search forms then your site will certainly need an XML sitemap. By creating an XML sitemap and submitting to the search engine you will be able to help the spiders to crawl your website in its entirety. Through your XML sitemap you also supply the search engine with lot of other useful information such as how often the content in your website changes, it can be on daily, monthly or weekly basis and by using the right operator you will be able to invite the spiders to your website as frequently as required.

A resourceful webmaster always makes sure that he feeds the search engine with the food the search engines love so as to stay on top of the competition.

If you are in a highly competitive field, your keywords will be being shared by a large number of people all competing for a large amount of traffic. Whoever ends up on the front page of the SERPs is going to get most of it, with the number one spot garnering a lion’s share and a trickle down effect occurring as you progress through the list.

However, for specific searches that use specify a term or attribute of their desired result, there is often less competition. True the herd of consumers is smaller too, but a lion’s share is much easier to come by, and could amount to more than the jackal’s or even vulture’s share you could hope to acquire from the larger feeding ground.

For example, if you do a search for ‘ferns’, the first page is devoted to documentation of scientific information about ferns, with one country store and a bar & grill thrown in the mix. Down at the bottom of the page, however, is a clue.

Google offers a more specific search results based on a multiple keyword search. Prominent are ‘fern care’, ‘fern facts’, ‘fern types’ and ‘growing ferns’. These are keyword phrases you can optimize for to catch the more particular traffic. Even more specialized terms might include a geographic area (Boston) or a query (how…?).

Suppose you have a site devoted to ferns. I don’t know why - maybe you think everyone should be a fern enthusiast, and you offer a lot of tips about ferns and how to grow them. Perhaps you sell specialty ferns and fern food.

Here is your chance to grab some of this traffic from people who take the time to be a little more specific about their needs. Probably a lot of the people who simply type ferns are looking up something for science class, in which case you really don’t want them anyway.

Try ‘fern care’. Now this is interesting. If we simply click on fern care at the bottom of our original page, we get one set of results. If we type in ‘fern care’ and search, we get a different set - mostly the same sites, but sorted differently.

The organic search turns up at #1 a result labeled (you guessed it) ‘fern care’. It leads to a site for the San Diego Fern Society. Very relevant.

The #2 spot goes to the DIY network, featuring one Walter Reeves with tips on fern care. Also very good. From there we sift down through a variety of gardening and flower sites mingled with articles from ‘ezine’, ‘ehow’, and ‘essortment’.

Now we go back to our original search for ferns, and scroll to the bottom to click on the ‘fern care’ link. Well, well. Solidly at #1 is the DIY link. Then comes the San Diego fern care, and after that a shuffle of the same sites from the organic search.

Why? The same top ten for sure, and close, but definitely not in the same order. What makes Google’s click through link serve up different results than if I just type it in?

When I look at the url, I notice something. My search, when I typed in fern care, starts out ‘search?sourceid=navclient…fern+care’.

The click through from the bottom of the ‘fern’ search page serves up ‘search?hl=en&rlz=…fern+care&revid=…revisions_inline&resnum=0&ct=broad-revision&cd=3’.

Obviously Google assigns a different ranking if you arrive at the same search terms from different sources. I went looking for a reason, and sure enough, I found what appeared to be one…there’s a little problem, though.

I’m not quite smart enough to understand it! I tend to glaze over when confronted by sentences like ” Concatenated correlations use picks or queries, rather than users, to form the links between other picks and queries. In general, therefore, the more correlations concatenated, the farther afield from the initial pick or query the results will be. Thus, in many cases, concatenating the fewest correlations to effect the desired result will be the optimal approach.”

You too, huh? Yeah, that’s what I thought. It boils down to something like this.

Google looks at my typed search for ‘fern care’ as an original search, with no intervening data. The results are straight from the fern farm, so to speak. However, in the case of the click through results, the original search for ‘ferns’ is taken into account as a precursor to the search for ‘fern care’, and the resulting page is skewed just a hair.

If I go down about three pages deep in the original ‘ferns’ SERPs I start finding familiar links. First to catch my eye is the San Diego link, than a page later I see the DIY one.

Why Google serves up the DIY link first in the click through can only be explained by the assumption that at one point someone ( or several someones) scrolled through results for ‘ferns’ and picked the DIY selection over the San Diego link.

This tips the balance just enough in favor of DIY that it comes out ahead if you arrive at search results from the ‘fern care’ link on the ‘ferns’ search results page rather than by typing ‘fern care’ directly into the engine.

By now you are wondering what difference it makes. A lot, if you are the San Diego Fern Society. They know #2 just means ‘first loser’. However, the number of people likely to refine their search to ‘fern care’ themselves rather than scrolling past the fold and clicking on the proffered link is probably in the majority, so San Diego is doing fine.

They might want to tweak their link on the ‘ferns’ SERP though - it’s not nearly as informative as the one that comes up under ‘fern care.’ This could increase their clicks from that particular search, and bump them back on top in both sets of results.

Well, folks, I know you missed my cheery repartee yesterday, but that’s the long post I’ve been researching, prompted by a question I saw posted in Yahoo Answers that hadn’t been answered. It took me two days to run my tests (ferns wasn’t the only one!) and track down an answer as to the ‘why?’ - but I hope you found it informative and worth waiting for!

A common trend is to register as many alternate domains as possible, and ‘park’ them just so no-one else can use them in competition with you.

Google has a way you can monetize these parked domains, by allowing ad placement. A disgruntled advertiser says it did him no good at all!

I was aware that you could use parked domains for advertising, but hadn’t done a lot of research into how it worked. Actually, Google has two programs for alternate ad revenue, so we will take a look at both of them. Neither one seems to be worth much!

The program for parked domains is rather annoying. Both the domain owners and the advertisers really get the short end of the deal. The idea is that when a person ends up at a parked domain, the search is redirected to a page where Google matches ads to an analysis of the domain name and displays these ads in formatted HTML.

This is called AdSense for Domains, and Google presumably has been making money off of it since it has been around for three years. Another program, called AdSense for Error Pages, displays ads on returned 404s.

This is where the disgruntled advertiser comes in. A lawyer paid around $130 for an ad campaign that garnered him less than a hundred clicks and zero conversions in two and a half months - out of nearly a quarter million views! He claims to have been swindled by Google.

Going by these numbers, it’s no surprise domain owners aren’t raking it in over clicks on ads either. The error pages do better when it comes to clicks - the advertiser’s campaign in that department still yielded zero conversions, but had 25 clicks out of 1,009 impressions.

So is Google out for themselves, or what? The concept behind the whole idea seems flawed to me - I barely look at the page when I hit a parked domain myself. My attitude ( and a lot of other people’s, obviously) is “Whoops, nothing helpful here…”

Fortunately, if you are an advertiser, you CAN opt out of having your ad show on parked domains and error pages. This will save you money and ensure your ads are being utilized in a more lucrative fashion.

I’m not sure who wouldn’t want to opt out, but I guess there’s a sucker born every minute! May as well take advantage of it, if it earns Google a few extra bucks.

Interestingly enough, the numbers on Google earnings as relate specifically to these programs are obscure. I would definitely be interested in seeing the ratio between how much these campaigns make Google, VS the amount they make domain owners and what really ends up in the advertisers’ pockets.

Moral of the story… beware when deciding how to spend your ad dollars - and don’t let Google sweet talk you into hundreds of views available on parked domains. It’s not worth it.

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