How To Fine Tune Your Website For Search Engines?
1.10 The Right Text Usage
1.10.1 Full Body Text
Most Search Engines scan and index all of the text in a web page. However, some Search Engines ignore certain text known as Stop Words, which is explained below. Apart from this, almost all Search Engines ignore spam.
1.10.2 Stop Words
Stop words are common words that are ignored by search engines at the time of searching a key phrase. This is done in order to save space on their server, and also to accelerate the search process.
When a search is conducted in a search engine, it will exclude the stop words from the search query, and will use the query by replacing all the stop words with a marker. A marker is a symbol that is substituted with the stop words. The intention is to save space. This way, the search engines are able to save more web pages in that extra space, as well as retain the relevancy of the search query.
Besides, omitting a few words also speeds up the search process. For instance, if a query consists of three words. The Search Engine would generally make three runs for each of the words and display the listings. However, if one of the words is such that omitting it does not make a difference to search results, it can be excluded from the query and consequently the search process becomes faster.
Some commonly excluded "stop words" are:
after, also, an, and, as, at, be, because, before, between, but, before, for, from, however, if, in, into, of, or, other, out, since, such, than, that, the, these, there, this, those, to, under, upon, when, where, whether, which, with, within, without.
1.10.3 ALT Text / Comments
Search engines are unable to view graphics or distinguish text that might be contained within them. For this reason, most engines will read the content of the image ALT tags to determine the purpose of a graphic. By taking the time to craft relevant, yet keyword rich ALT tags for the images on your web site, you increase the keyword density of your site.
Although many search engines read and index the text contained within ALT tags, it's important NOT to go overboard in using these tags as part of your SEO campaign. Most engines will not give this text any more weight than the text within the body of your site.
1.10.4 Invisible Text
Invisible text is content on a web site that is coded in a manner that makes it invisible to human visitors, but readable by search engine spiders. This is done in order to artificially inflate the keyword density of a web site without affecting the visual appearance of it. Hidden text is a recognized spam tactic and nearly all of the major search engines recognize and penalize sites that use this tactic.
1.10.5 Tiny Text
This is the technique of placing text on a page in a small font size. Pages that are predominantly heavy in tiny text may be dismissed as spam. Or, the tiny text may not be indexed. As a general guideline, try to avoid pages where the font size is predominantly smaller than normal. Make sure that you're not spamming the engine by using keyword after keyword in a very small font size. Your tiny text may be a copyright notice at the very bottom of the page, or even your contact information. If so, that's fine
1.11 Search Engine Regionalization
Almost all Search Engines serve different countries. Search Engines do list content from other countries but most of the content that is listed is either US or UK dominated content.
With this in mind, most popular Search Engines have started deploying regional editions that serve only a specific country. For instance, Google has an Indian edition (http://www.google.co.in) that caters to the Indian audience.
Given below are some of the types of Search Engine Regional Editions.
1.11.1 Regional Interface
Regional Interface is nothing but a translated version of the main Search Engine. Many Search Engines have interfaces in different languages such as French, German, Spanish, Japanese etc. However, the only difference between these regional interfaces and the main version of the Search Engine is that the language used on the interface is not English. In other words, if you search using a keyword on both the interfaces, the listings are exactly the same.
Regional Interfaces are aimed at an audience that does not understand English.
1.11.2 Human Categorization
Human Categorization, as the name suggests, is categorization of websites by human beings. Search Engine employees categorize different websites into regional listings. Websites that are more relevant to a specific country are listed in that edition of the Search Engine. Hence, for a French edition a search would mainly list documents from France. This eliminates the problem mentioned above. The only caveat being that the whole process is manual.
Directories such as Yahoo, LookSmart, and Open Directory make use of this process.
1.11.3 Domain Filtering
Domain Filtering automatically segregates websites from different countries into their respective regional editions. This segregation is done on the basis of domain names. For instance a website from Australia would generally have a domain .au. The Domain filtering mechanism looks at the domains of all websites and creates a country specific edition listing.
Some Search Engines also have region specific editions which contain listings from the whole of that region. As an example: A French edition of Google may also return German or Spanish websites in some cases.
Domain Filtering has a drawback though. This mechanism can only filter out websites based on the domain name, and hence .com is always considered to be a United States website. This is obviously not true. Many websites from other countries also have .com domains.
1.11.4 Domain Crawling
Domain crawling is probably the best solution for maintaining both a main site and a regional version. With domain crawling the regional listing is far more comprehensive as compared to the other mechanisms explained above. Some pages, although regional may be listed in the main listing as well.
1.12 Spamming – A Definite No-No
A couple of years ago spamming may have worked wonders for your website. However, with sophisticated algorithms being developed by all popular search engines, spamming can only backfire. Algorithms, these days, can easily detect spam and not only ignore your website but also ban your website.
Besides, instead of spending considerable time and effort on spamming you can always follow other proven strategies and have a higher rank with most search engines. Spamming can also easily irritate readers. Think about it – if your homepage has unnecessary repetitions of a particular keyword, it is bound to frustrate a reader. Consequently your site, instead of being content rich, would be junk rich. This can have nothing but a negative impact on your business.
1.13 Search Engine Cloaking explained
Search engine cloaking is a technique used by webmasters to enable them to get an advantage over other websites. It works on the idea that one page is delivered to the various search engine spiders and robots, while the real page is delivered to real people. In other words, browsers such as Netscape and MSIE are served one page, and spiders visiting the same address are served a different page.
The page the spider will see is a bare bones HTML page optimized for the search engines. It won't look pretty but it will be configured exactly the way the search engines want it to be for it to be ranked high. These 'ghost pages' are never actually seen by any real person except for the webmasters that created it of course.
When real people visit a site using cloaking, the cloaking technology (which is usually based on Perl/CGI) will send them the real page, that look's good and is just a regular HTML page.
The cloaking technology is able to tell the difference between a human and spider because it knows the spiders IP address, no IP address in the same, so when an IP address visits a site which is using cloaking the script will compare the IP address with the IP addresses in its list of search engine IP's, if there's a match, the script knows that it's a search engine visiting and sends out the bare bones HTML page setup for nothing but high rankings.
There are two types of cloaking. The first is called User Agent Cloaking and the second
is called IP Based Cloaking. IP based cloaking is the best method as IP addresses are very hard to fake, so your competition won't be able to pretend to be any of the search engines in order to steal your code.
User Agent Cloaking is similar to IP cloaking, in that the cloaking script compares the User Agent text string which is sent when a page is requested with it's list of search engine names (user agent = name) and then serves the appropriate page.
The problem with User Agent cloaking is that Agent names can be easily faked. Search Engines can easily formulate a new anti-spam method to beat cloakers, all they need to do is fake their name and pretend they are a normal person using Internet explorer or Netscape, the cloaking software will take Search Engine spiders to the non - optimized page and hence your search engine rankings will suffer.
To sum up, Search engine cloaking is not as effective as it used to be, this is because the search engines are becoming increasingly aware of the different cloaking techniques being used be webmasters and they are gradually introducing more sophisticated technology to combat them. It may be considered as unethical by Search Engines if not used properly.
1.14 Does separating Domain Name Keywords with hyphens affect rankings?
Domain Names play a huge role in search engine optimization for obtaining high search engine ranking. Type in any keyword into Google for example, and the chances are high that you will find that more than 80% of the first 10 sites contain that particular keyword in their domain names. Thus, domain name is one area that can be fully utilized (obviously taking into consideration that you are optimizing a brand new site from scratch and not an existing one).
It is also a good idea to include hyphens (-) between each of the keywords within your domain name. This tells a search engine spider that each word is a separate word, not one continuous word. The search engines which use keywords in the domain name as a part of their ranking formula will not be able to recognize keywords unless they are separated by a hyphen (or a slash or underscore for sub-directories). Search Engines prefer the use of hyphens in domain names because they can produce more accurate search results by being able to recognize specified key words in your URL.
Keep in mind that a domain with words separated by hyphens will be harder for users to remember (and may also decrease the value of the domain). However, if keywords are used with hyphens the keywords may be interpreted as such by search engines thereby helping rank a site higher. If at all possible, try to register both forms of the name for example, websitemarketing.com and web-site-marketing.com.
1.15 Taking advantage of Alphanumeric Search Engine listings
To have a good web site marketing plan, you must realize alphabetical priority of domain names is still used by some search engines as a key factor in their ranking formula. Alphabetical hierarchy is even more important to web site marketing, because this method is used by directories, which strictly list sites in alphabetical order based on the results of the keyword(s) search.
Your web site marketing plan must acknowledge Yahoo!. Yahoo! is the number one directory and search site with 52.7 million different visitors each month, accounting for 69.1 percent of all Internet surfers. An astounding 53.4 percent of all search-related traffic comes from Yahoo!, or as much as half the traffic received to many sites. Many prefer to use Yahoo! because each site submitted to Yahoo! is human-reviewed, delivering more accurate search results for their visitors.
To include alphabetical hierarchy in your web site marketing strategy, realize that alphabetical priority does not only consist of letters, it includes numbers that can rank higher than an "A".
This is the order:
- 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
This means that the domain "www.1-800-ABC-NEWS.com" will rank higher with the search sites that use alphabetical priority in their ranking formula, than just "www.ABC.com"
1.16 Click Popularity
We discussed about Link Popularity. Another factor influencing search engine placement in some search engines is Click Popularity. The number of users clicking on links to your page from the search results is counted. Pages that are frequently clicked will get a popularity boost.
Your site is awarded a certain number of points each time someone clicks your link from the search results. If your Web site already has a high ranking you will get fewer points compared to a low ranking site. This way all sites have an equal chance to get click through points awarded.
Don't be tempted to click your own link over and over again. Repeated clicks from the same IP will be detected. Clicking on your link and quickly returning to the search engine again might actually hurt your rank. The search engines will believe you did not find anything interesting at the page. That is not a good search engine optimization strategy.
How can you influence click popularity then? By putting some work into your page title and description Meta tag. These are the main factors influencing people's decision to click your link. High quality content will make visitors stay at your search engine optimized web site, and will stop them from quickly returning to the search engine.
1.17 Registering a keyword rich domain
Domain name registration is one of the most important things to consider when you are designing a site for high search engine placement. Here are some dos and don’ts of domain name registration.
Some Webmasters use shared domains or sub-domains available for free from popular Web hosting services, or some kind of free domain name redirect service. This might be cheap, but if you want a good search engine placement, it's not an option.
• Some search engines do ban free Web hosts because search engine spammers frequently use them for hosting duplicate sites (mirrors) and doorway pages.
• Sharing domains or IP addresses with spammers can get your search engine
position penalized or your entire site banned. Note this statement from AltaVista:
"You could wind up being penalized or excluded simply because the underlying IP address for that service is the same for all the virtual domains it includes."
• Most search engines limit the number of submissions or number of listings for each domain. This will make it very hard to get your site indexed. Other sites on the same domain might already take all the available spots.
• If you do manage to get your site indexed, the search engine will have a hard time finding the “theme” for your site if you are sharing a domain with other sites on many different subjects. Pages are no longer ranked one by one, all content within the domain is considered.
• Without your own domain, you will be forced to start working from scratch again if the host goes out of business or if he decides to change your URL. Many Webmasters have lost their search engine positions, link popularity and Web traffic because of this.
Keywords in the domain name are crucial. It makes sense to put your primary keywords into your domain name.
- Separate multiple keywords like my-keywords-phrase.com instead of typing it all in one word: mykeywordphrase.com. This will make it possible for the search engines to understand your keyword phrases correctly.
- Keep in mind that Yahoo and some other search engines reject domain submissions with URL's in excess of 54 characters. You would be wise to stay under the 55 character limit when choosing a domain name.
- Directories like Yahoo, LookSmart and ODP will not look for keywords in the text of your page, and editors will often edit keywords out of your title and description. This leaves your internet domain name as the single most important place to put keywords for your site.
- Too many dashes in a domain name might trigger the spam filters of some search engines.
- Yet another benefit of keyword rich domain names is in reciprocal linking. If the domain name keywords appear within the text of incoming links, you will get a major boost in ranking, especially in Google.
1.18 Web Hosting
Choosing a Web host provider for your site is no small decision. When you make a choice of a Web page host, you are actually placing your Internet business in the hands of your Web host provider. Choosing the wrong Web page hosting plan can cause permanent damage to your search engine placement.
Selecting a Web page host is like renting an office. You want to get it right the first time. It is always possible to move somewhere else, but it's no easy task to move your entire business - not to mention the damage that already could be caused by then.
We are going to look at some little known facts about Web page hosting and how it can effect your search engine placement.
Did you submit your site over and over again without ever getting it indexed in the search engines? Or was your site indexed, but is nowhere to be found when you type your search terms into the engines? Your Web host provider might be the cause of that. As AltaVista states:
"If being found via search engines is important to your business, be very careful about where you have your pages hosted. If the hosting service also hosts spammers and pornographers, you could wind up being penalized or excluded."
AltaVista is not the only search engine enforcing this policy against certain Web Hosting services. This is a common practice causing many sites to lose their rank. Choosing the right host for your Web hosting needs is of great importance if you really care about your search engine position.
Here is a short list of things to watch out for
Shared IP hosting
Many Web hosting services do not give out unique IP addresses to customers. The name- based system of virtual Web hosting allows multiple domains to be hosted by a single IP. This means several hundred domain names could all be using the same IP address. Are you sharing an IP address with people you don't even know?
If someone else, who is hosted on the same server as your site, gets banned on a search engine, then your Web site will be caught and banned as well. This happens on a regular basis causing serious problems for those who are affected.
Downtime
If your Web host provider cannot keep servers up and running 24/7, people will not be able to find your site. The search engine spiders won't find it either. They will assume your site is gone and remove it from the search engine index. You will have to resubmit and wait weeks or months for the spider to re-index your site. If your site already is indexed and ranking well, it might lose its position altogether.
No matter what web host provider you use, it is highly recommended that you sign up for a free site monitoring service like EasyMonitor. This guarantees that you're alerted within minutes when your site goes down. This enables you to get to work immediately to solve the problem and dramatically increase the time your site is up and running.
The speed and reliability of your Web host provider will depend on several factors.
Look for a web page host with
• A T3 connection (or better) close to a primary Internet backbone
• Safeguards against systems, network or power failure
• Several connections to the Internet (in case one goes down)
• Backup power supplies and
• "Uptime guarantee" with at least 95% uptime
No logs
Access to raw web log files is one feature often missing with low quality Web hosting services. Some Web host providers provide logs, but do not include referrer information. Others delete logs frequently, making it impossible to use them effectively. Make sure your Web hosting service gives you access to raw server logs, preferably in "Extended Common Log File Format", a standard that can be understood by most log analyzers.
The server logs will give you some valuable information for your search engine optimization work, including what search engines people are using to find your site, exactly which keywords do they type into the search box, and when the search engine spiders visit your site. This is crucial information. You cannot properly optimize your site without it.
Other features include daily back up of your data, high bandwidth and, of course, the quality of their support services. In addition, you must consider the features offered by the Web page host. Some features to consider are
• The space available for your site
• Monthly transfer limits
• POP mail server availability
• Support for CGI, SSI, Perl, databases and FrontPage 2000 extensions
• Secure server access (SSL)
• Anonymous FTP and
• Shopping Cart Software.
1.19 Caps or no caps?
Some Search Engines are case sensitive. This gives rise to a new dilemma for webmasters. Should they include keywords in both lower case as well as upper case, especially in Meta tags? Most webmasters actually do so. For instance, they would list the keywords as a set of all possible combinations of upper and lower case.
Webmasters may feel that this is the safest technique to avoid losing potential visitors. However, such repetition may be considered by the Search Engine to be Spam! After all, higher the number of words, higher the combinations.
The best way to get around this problem is to list keywords in lower case only. Most surfers always search in lower case. There are very few cases where surfers use capitals even if the word is a proper name. Of course, you may run a very small risk of losing a few visitors who use upper case, but this risk is minimal. Besides, you do not want to be banned for Spam.
1.20 A few Search Engine myths
There is an abundance of search engine information available on the web- some of it valuable, much of it contradictory. Throughout the years some prevailing search engine myths have developed. Some of these myths are still encouraged. Others are based upon techniques that were effective years ago but no longer work. Still others come from simple misunderstandings that inevitably come with a relatively new medium. Here is a discussion on some of the most common myths around
Myth: Meta tags are the most important factor in search engine rankings.
Fact: Many search engines (most notably Google) ignore meta tags completely due to constant abuse by webmasters. The only importance placed on meta tags these days is actually the meta description tag, which will appear as the description for the corresponding page on engines that use inktomi data (such as MSN). Meta tags are
virtually irrelevant in the ranking algorithms of the top engines- but many people continue to believe that they are the only optimization strategy that they need.
Myth: It's impossible to do search engine optimization in-house.
Fact: It often is done in house, and done effectively. This is typically when a large corporation hires in-house talent that is largely devoted exclusively to promoting the website. However, it is unrealistic to expect someone with many other job functions to do a credible job of SEO. Much of the skills are acquired through experience- and it isn't usually desirable to have someone "experimenting" with the company website (especially considering that certain techniques can get sites penalized on engines or banned outright).
SEO isn't rocket science, but it also isn't something that can be learned overnight. When deciding whether to outsource SEO or do it in house, it is important to consider the actual costs involved. Often, when the necessary hours it takes to pay someone to learn on the job are taken into account, it is cheaper to outsource (and the results are almost always better). Only a careful evaluation of your goals and resources can determine the best course of action for your company.
Myth: Sites must be constantly resubmitted to retain rankings.
Fact: This is a scare tactic popularized by various submission services and software companies. In fact, it is a waste of money to pay to have your site resubmitted once it is already listed in an engine's database. It will not hurt your rankings to constantly submit (or else people would submit their competitor's sites to get them penalized), but it will not help, either.
Myth: Search engine optimization is not as effective as "traditional" marketing.
Fact: In many ways, it is more effective. Companies often spend countless dollars on direct mail, television and radio advertising, and bulk email without a second thought. The common thread with each of these strategies is that the prospect is "approached" by the company, and that the company must reach a great number of people to find a few motivated prospects. On the other hand, search engines can deliver highly motivated prospects directly to your website- people who have already demonstrated, through their use of particular key phrases, an interest in your products or services.
1.21 Things to Avoid
Doorway or Gateway pages
Doorway pages are pages that have been designed for one purpose only, to rank high in the search engines for a particular keyword and then direct the arriving visitors further into the site. Usually their design is relatively simplistic and includes a lot of text, but contains very little graphics or other fancy effects.
Doorway pages focus on particular keywords and phrases targeted for search engines and serve as an entry page to visitors. These used to be a popular means to achieve high rankings with Search Engines, but recently, many Search Engines have started completely ignoring websites with doorway pages.
Because creating doorway pages used to be so easy, especially when using programs that can automatically generate hundreds or thousands of pages in a heartbeat by using a simple template and merely placing the keywords in the right places, many sites lost control and created enormous amounts of them.
The search engines initially tolerated this behavior, but as their databases started being filled with doorway pages they soon realized that these pages would quickly conquer the top ranking spots from normal content-rich pages. This would reduce the quality of their indices and lower the value of the search results, resulting in users abandoning the search engine.
Search Engines such as AltaVista began removing doorway pages from its index and in some cases even banning the sites that were using them. Other engines followed suit and soon it was safe to say that the age of doorway pages, at least in the form we used to know them, had passed.
Instead of focusing on doorway pages, you should focus on optimizing your actual content pages.
Keyword stuffing and spamming
Important keywords and descriptions should be used in your content in visible Meta tags and you should choose the words carefully and position them near the top and have proper frequency for such words. However it is very important to adopt moderation in this. Keyword stuffing or spamming is a No-No today. Most search engine algorithms can spot this, bypass the spam and some may even penalize it.
Dynamic URLs
Several pages in e-commerce and other functional sites are generated dynamically and have? or & sign in their dynamic URLs. These signs separate the CGI variables. While Google will crawl these pages, many other engines will not. One inconvenient solution is to develop static equivalent of the dynamic pages and have them on your site. Another way to avoid such dynamic URLs is to rewrite these URLs using a syntax that is accepted by the crawler and also understood as equivalent to the dynamic URL by the application server. The Amazon site shows dynamic URLs in such syntax. If you are using Apache webserver, you can use Apache rewrite rules to enable this conversion.
Re-direct pages
Sometimes pages have a Meta refresh tag that redirects any visitor automatically to another page. Some search engines refuse to index a page that has a high refresh rate. The meta refresh tag however does not affect Google.
Image maps without alt text
Avoid image maps without text or with links. Image maps should have alt text (as also required under the American Disabilities Act, for public websites) and the home page should not have images as links. Instead HTML links should be used. This is because search engines would not read image links and the linked pages may not get crawled.
Frames
There are some engines whose spiders won’t work with frames on your site. A web page that is built using frames is actually a combination of content from separate “pages” that have been blended into a single page through a ‘frameset’ instruction page. The frameset page does not have any content or links that would have promoted spidering. The frameset page could block the spider’s movement. The workaround is by placing a summary of the page content and relevant description in the frameset page and also by placing a link to the home page on it.
Tables
When you use tables on the key pages and if some columns have descriptions while others have numbers, it is possible that this may push your keywords down the page. Search engines break up the table and read them for the content the columns have. The first column is read first, then the next and so on. Thus if the first column had numbers, and the next one had useful descriptions, the positioning of these descriptions will suffer. The strategy is to avoid using such tables near the top of the key pages. Large sections of Javascripts also will have the same effect on the search engines. The HTML part will be pushed down. Thus again, place your long Javascripts lower down on key pages.
Link spamming
Realizing the importance of links and link analysis in search engine results, several link farms and Free for All sites have appeared that offer to provide links to your site. This is also referred to as link spamming. Most search engines are smarter to this obvious tactic and know how to spot this. Such FFA sites, as they are known, do not provide link quality or link context, two factors that are important in link analysis. Thus the correct strategy is to avoid link spamming and not get carried away by what seems to be too simple a solution.
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