Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog

No matter what kind of website you may have, your ultimate goal is to bring traffic to it.

Luckily, there are lots of different ways you can achieve this. And search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the many preferred ways.

Well, it's pretty obvious why people like it – it's free traffic from the search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo! etc.

If you decide to use this method, here are three important factors to consider:
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Originally posted 2007-06-11 20:32:37.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Effective navigation should let a user know:

• what site they are on;
• where they are in that site;
• and where they have been.

Navigation and Search Engines

Good navigation helps search engines better understand the site structure as well as helping site users. Typically your most important documents will have the greatest number of inbound links.

Often, people will use tabs or images for their links which have a minimal amount of descriptive text in them. You can offset this by using descriptive text links in the page footer. You can see an example of this technique at http://www.search-marketing.info. It is common to have one set of navigation that is used by site visitors and another that is used by search engine spiders.
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Originally posted 2006-12-12 22:32:41.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Some directories have recently been removed from Google's cache, while others are not crawled very deeply. Additionally, some of them have not had their cache dates updated in a great deal of time. Google might be trying to slow the growth of directories by not counting the links from many of them. Make sure you check the cache before paying for a listing.

Some of the directories will have a greater effect on relevancy in MSN or Yahoo! than they do on Google, so even if a directory is not counted by Google, the link price might still be cheap for its effects on other search relevancy algorithms.

Many directory owners are building multiple related directories. Some search algorithms such as Google Hilltop are likely to automatically filter out some of the relevancy score from a second directory if it is easily identifiable as being related to the first directory.

The one-time listing fees make directories exceptionally appealing, but expect that many directories will eventually be ignored by some of the search engines. In my perspective, that cost is factored into the listing prices. I average out the link costs for links from a number of sites. If I can spend $1,000 and get a dozen or two dozen well-trusted links, then that is going to be a good buy for launching a site.
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Originally posted 2008-02-29 13:15:32.

Popularity: 5% [?]

……continued from PART 1

At the 2004 Las Vegas WebmasterWorld World of Search Conference, Yahoo! stated that they prefer if you have somewhat shallow directory paths of three or so levels deep or less.

example 1:
www.mysite.com/cheese/cheddar/sharp/yummie.html = good

example 2:
www.mysite.com/chs/chd/shrp/eat/now/today/yummie.html = bad
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Originally posted 2008-06-13 23:06:23.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Backlinks is another way of saying "links into a page".

When you check backlinks in Google (link:www.whateversite.com,) it only shows a small sampling of your total backlinks. Many links that do not show up when you use the "link:" function in Google still count for your relevancy scoring. In addition, there is a time delay between when links are created and when they will show up in search results.

To get a more accurate picture of links, you will also want to check backlinks using Yahoo! or MSN. Yahoo! typically shows many more backlinks than Google. The code to check Yahoo! backlinks to a site is "linkdomain:www.site.com."

Originally posted 2008-03-11 02:14:43.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Some people buy a directory script, create a ton of categories, and then only add links if people buy them. The problem with this is that many categories will not have unique content. Many of these same directories will list any business that wants to pay for a link.

If there is no unique content, or if the content is all sponsored links, the site does not add value, and search engines may not want to index it. When looking at a directory, ask yourself, if you were a search engineer, would you want to count links from that site? Would you want to allow that site to influence your search relevancy algorithms?

You can view how many pages Google knows about from a directory by searching Google for "site:www.directory.com".
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Originally posted 2008-02-27 09:55:37.

Popularity: 4% [?]

This post is dedicated to some of the tricks people try to play on search engines. The following are some of the most common current techniques:

• reciprocal link trading, free-for-all link exchanges, and other bottom feeder links arenot effective
• page onload redirects arerisky, but some do well with it short term
• link renting areeffective if you are creative
• interlinking many small sites to gain popularity areeasy to leave footprints unless it is done well
• keyword stuffing and hiding text either on or off the page arenot effective unless intent looks legitimate
• cloaking areeffective until they catch it
• automated content generation aredepends on intent
• cross site scripting errors areeffective short term, but usually solved quickly

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Originally posted 2007-01-12 00:54:16.

Popularity: 11% [?]

I use the free Digital Point keyword ranking tool to determine where I rank in Google. The Digital Point keyword ranking tool also supports Yahoo! and MSN. Tracking various sites helps me determine some of the ways Google may be changing their algorithm.

If you sign up for the Google API service and are doing lots of sketchy stuff, then it makes it easy for Google to cross connect your websites. Google generally is the slowest of the major search engines to trust and rank new websites.

Originally posted 2008-03-08 01:15:46.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Yahoo's patent applications provides a list of 51 web page elements that can be analyzed to determine the clutter of a web page:

• Total number of links
• Total number of words
• Total number of images (non-ad images)
• Image area above the fold (non-ad images)
• Dimensions of page
• Page area (total)
• Page length
• Total number of tables
• Maximum table columns (per table)
• Maximum table rows (per table)
• Total rows
• Total columns
• Total cells
• Average cell padding (per table)
• Average cell spacing (per table)
• Dimensions of fold

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Originally posted 2008-05-09 14:08:10.

Popularity: 3% [?]