The Jeffrey And Tracey Info Emporium

Back in 1997 I did some research in an attempt to reverse-engineer algorithms used by search engines. In that year, the big ones included AltaVista, Webcralwer, Lycos, Infoseek, and a few others.

I was able to largely declare my research a success. In fact, it was so accurate that in one case I was able to write a program that produced the exact same search results as one of the search engines. This article explains how I did it, and how it is still beneficial today.

Step 1: Determine Rankable Traits

The first thing to do is make a list of what you want to measure. I came up with about 15 different possible ways to rank a web page. They included things like:

- keywords in title
- keyword density

- keyword frequency

- keyword in header
- keyword in ALT tags
- keyword emphasis (bold, strong, italics)
- keyword in body
- keyword in url
- keyword in domain or sub-domain
- criteria by location (density in title, header, body, or tail) etc

Step 2: Invent a New Keyword

The second step is to determine which keyword to test with. The key is to choose a word that does not exist in any language on Earth. Otherwise, you will not be able to isolate your variables for this study.

I used to work at a company called Interactive Imaginations, and our site was Riddler.com and the Commonwealth Network. At the time, Riddler was the largest entertainment web site, and CWN was one of the top trafficed sites on the net (in the top 3). I turned to my co-worker Carol and mentioned I needed a fake word. She gave me “oofness”. I did a quick search and it was not found on any search engine.

Note that a unique word can also be used to see who has copied content from your web sites onto their own. Since all of my test pages are gone (for many years now), a search on Google shows some sites that did copy my pages.

Step 3: Create Test Pages

The next thing to do was to create test pages. I took my home page for my now defunct Amiga search engine “Amicrawler.com” and made about 75 copies of it. I then numbered each file 1.html, 2.html… 75.html.

For each measurement criteria, I made at least 3 html files. For example, to measure keyword density in title, I modified the html titles of the first 3 files to look like this:

1.html:

The html files of course contained the rest of my home page. I then logged in my notebook that files 1 - 3 were keyword density in title files.

I repeated this type of html editing for about 75 or so files, until I had every criteria covered. The files where then uploaded to my web server and placed in the same directoty so that search engines can find them.

Step 4: Wait for Search Engines to Index Test Pages

Over the next few days, some of the pages started appearing in search engines. However a site like AltaVista might only show 2 or 3 pages. Infoseek / Ultraseek at the time was doing real time indexing so I got to test everything right away. In some cases, I had to wait a few weeks or months for the pages to get indexed.

Simply typing the keyword “oofness” would bring up all pages indexed that had that keyword, in the order ranked by the search engine. Since only my pages contained that word, I would not have competing pages to confuse me.

Step 5: Study Results

To my surprise, most search engines had very poor ranking methodology. Webcrawler used a very simple word density scoring system. In fact, I was able to write a program that gave the exact same search engine results as Webcrawler. That’s right, just give it a list of 10 urls, and it will rank them in the exact same order as Webcrawler. Using this program I would make any of my pages rank #1 if I wanted to. Problem is of course that Webcrawler did not generate any traffic even if I was listed number 1, so I did not bother with it.

AltaVista responded best with the most number of keywords in the title of the html. It ranked a few pages way at the bottom, but I don’t recall which criteria performed worst. And the rest of the pages ranked somewhere in the middle. All in all, AltaVista only cared about keywords in the title. Everything else didn’t seem to matter.

A few years later, I repeated this test with AltaVista and found it was giving high preference to domain names. So I added a wildcard to my DNS and web server, and put keywords in the sub-domain. Voila! All of my pages had #1 ranking for any keyword I chose. This of course led to one problem… Competiting web sites don’t like losing their top positions and will do anything to protect their rankings when it costs them traffic.

Other Methods of Testing Search Engines

I am going to quickly list some other things that can be done to test search engines algorithms. But these are all lengthy topics to discuss.

I tested some search engines by uploading large copies of the dictionary, and redirecting any traffic to a safe page. I also tested them by indexing massive quantities of documents (in the millions) under hundreds of domain names. I found in general that there are very few magic keywords found in most documents. The fact still remains that a few keyword search times like “sex”, “britney spears”, etc brought in traffic but most do not. Hence, most pages never saw any people traffic.

Drawbacks

Unfortunately there were some drawbacks to getting listed #1 for a lot of keywords. I found that it ticked off a lot of people who had competing web sites. They would usually start by copying my winning methodology (like placing keywords in the sub-domain), and then repeat the process themselves, and flood the search engines with 100 times more pages than the 1 page I had made. It made it worthless to compete for prime keywords.

And second, certain data cannot be measured. You can use tools like Alexa to determine traffic or Google’s site:domain.com to find out how many listings a domain has, but unless you have a lot of this data to measure, you won’t get any useable readings. What good is it for you to try and beat a major web site for a major keyword if they already have millions of visitors per day, you don’t, and it is part of the search engine ranking?

Bandwidth and resources can become a problem. I have had web sites where 75% of my traffic was search engine spiders. And they slammed my sites every second of every day for months. I would literally get 30,000 hits from the Google spider every day, in addition to other spiders. And contrary to what THEY believe, they aren’t as friendly as they claim.

Another drawback is that if you are doing this for a corporate web site, it might not look so good.

For example, you might recall a few weeks ago when Google was caught using shadow pages, and of course claimed they were only “test” pages. Right. Does Google have no dev servers? No staging servers? Are they smart enough to make shadow pages hidden from normal users but not smart enough to hide dev or test pages from normal users? Have they not figured out how a URL or IP filter works? Those pages must have served a purpose, and they didn’t want most people to know about it. Maybe they were just weather balloon pages?

I recall discovering some pages that were placed by a hot online & print tech magazine (that wired us into the digital world) on search engines. They had placed numerous blank landing pages using font colors matching the background, which contained large quantities of keywords for their largest competitor. Perhaps they wanted to pay digital homage to CNET? Again, this was probably back in 1998. In fact, they were running articles at the time about how it is wrong to try and trick search engines, yet they were doing it themselves.

Conclusion

While this methodology is good for learning a few things about search engines, on the whole I would not recommend making this the basis for your web site promotion. The quantity of pages to compete against, the quality of your visitors, the shoot-first mentality of search engines, and many other factors will prove that there are better ways to do web site promotion.

This methodology can be used for reverse engineering other products. For example, when I worked at Agency.com doing stats, we used a product made by a major micro software company (you might be using one of their fine operating system products right now) to analyze web server logs. The problem was that it took more than 24 hours to analyze 1 days worth of logs, so it was never up to date. A little bit of magic and a little bit of perl was able to generate the same reports in 45 minutes simply by feeding the same logs into both systems until the results came out the same and every condition was accounted for.

Copyright 2005 CheapBooks.com. All Rights Reserved. CheapBooks.com is a book price comparison shopping engine, allowing you to locate the cheapest prices on millions of books and ebooks.

As you know, every year is always rocked by a plethora of
changes in the search engine marketing world. The acquisition of
smaller companies by the Big 3 changes the marketing landscape
as we know it every month and with every update to the index
that is made, we hold our breath and hope that we come out
better (if not, the same) in the end. So when it comes to the
new year, there are many things that we should look out for to
stay on top of the rankings.

1. Quality Content: I say this so often and I cannot
overemphasize this enough: Content is KING! Search engine
spiders, crawl the net to find what? Content! Your site has
information (hopefully) that you want the spiders to see and
include in their index. By the creation and publication of
quality content, you give the search engines more reason to
return. You are feeding them what they want. In 2006, you should
be finding creative ways to get your content noticed and viewed
as well as finding creative ways to publish fresh content on a
regular basis. A very good way this is done is through the use
of message boards (hosted on your site) and by blogs (enabling
you to publish more frequently).

2. Don’t Overextend Your Link Exchange Structure: Backlinks were
a popular way to increase your rankings fast in the search
engines. The tradition holds: find a PR7 website and trade
backlinks and you’ll be indexed in Google within 24 hours. That
strategy still holds true and is beneficial for new websites.

But in my opinion the days of tremendous link-swapping are
coming to an end. Many websites have been founded with the
purpose of allowing you to exchange links with other websites.
This has caused a massive influx of webmasters who want to
exchange a ton of links with the hope that it will help them in
the search engines.

But what really matters when it comes to links is the amount of
quality one-way backlinks that direct users to your website. You
want the balance of links to be in your favor, that is what
leads to success.

Also, there has been talk of search engines taking notice of
these “link-farms” and penalizing those who take part in them.
So if you do take part in link exchanges, please be moderate in
respect to the number of exchanges you take part in.

3. RSS and XML: Two new technologies that have begun to take
center stage especially in 2005 include a programming language
that has been around for several years called XML. XML is shorth
for extensible markup language and is a derivative from HTML.
The main difference is your ability to create descriptive tags
for your data.

This has led to the advent of RSS or real simple syndication.
RSS is a way for you to publish your data to an XML file hosted
on your site. Users subscribe to your RSS feed via the XML file
and whenever you make a changes to your XML file they are
notified. It’s become a major technology used by news agencies
and bloggers alike as a simple method of publishing your
information across a wide variety of platforms.

XML has also proved useful with the Google Sitemaps program,
newly released in 2005. The optional tags available with the XML
sitemap allow you to be descriptive about the individual pages
on your site including dates the individual pages were modified.
There are some small things you need to pay attention to when
creating this: namely you have to follow the Google xml schema,
and you have to be diligent about tracking and fixing errors in
the code. But if used correctly, it is a great way to help
Google index the hidden pages of your website due to javascript
or flash.

4. Stay away from Flash and Javascript for the time being: Flash
and Javascript are very powerful tools for creating dynamic and
eye catching websites. The most prominent problem with the two
technologies is that the spiders can’t index through them (at
least not yet). This limits your ability to have the search
engines index portions of your site. Many have speculated that
the Big 3 are working on solving this problem, but for the time
being, avoid or limit your use of these technologies.

5. Avoid Unethical SEO: There are a lot of programs out there
that help you to acheive maxmum linkback ratios in a very short
amount of time. Some of them are good; some are bad. In fact,
some of them will waste your effort trying to post trivial
comments on blogs or trying to maximize your link exchanges. In
my opinion, you should seek success in SEM the right, ethical
way. Seek out honest web companies to exchange a moderate amount
of links with. Post only relevant comments to forums and blogs
because that behavior leads to lasting link backs. Also, don’t
try to manipulate your website to make it appear to have a
higher PR than you really do. Google sees that one!

6. Last, but not least, Articles: There is a little bit of
controversial talk about whether it is right to post articles
for free use in directories. In my opinion, you are providing a
well needed service to webmasters and I don’t see this one as a
potential loss for 2006. Information is valuable. And websites
that need content (especially fresh content) desire what you do
to make their efforts a success. So it is natural for your
website rankings to benefit through backlinks from those
articles. It’s a win-win situation.

One other thought on this subject. Right now, the search engines
can punish websites for having duplicate content, and that is an
argument that many will propose. But, the search engines will
usually only punish you if the html format of a web site is
similar, not a couple of articles. So posting articles is safe
for now.

But be cautious. Many lucrative methods of ethical SEO can be
turned into a problem when too many people attempt to abuse the
technology.

So that’s it. Short, but informative. SEO is both an art and a
technology that we have to use correctly for the right type of
success. Who knows what the year ahead may bring, but playing
your cards right, you can acheive success and avoid any pitfalls
that may come.

Building links is one of the necessary tasks of a webmaster.
This task can be done in much way, but not all ways work the
same way or are effective as it should be.

Wrong Way #2: Using automatic submitter tools to build links

I know you’ve seen them. Those software programs sold by the
so-called “SEO gurus” that promise you the world all for one low
price or a small monthly fee.

It’s so tempting to use these types of programs, because they
promise to increase your link popularity, and skyrocket your web
traffic overnight with only minimal effort required.

Maybe you’ve seen the blog submitters, which automatically post
your message to the “comment” section of people’s blogs. Or
perhaps you’ve seen the directory blasters, the press release
announcers, or another program out of the myriad of “white hat”
and “black hat” SEO software.

Here are the problems that ALL of those programs have in common.
First, they typically post your links to the types of pages you
don’t want to be focusing on in your linking campaigns. If a
page accepts user-submitted posts (regardless of whether it’s
moderated or unmoderated), the search engine probably KNOWS that!

Which kind of pages do you think the seach engines will favor
when considering the value of your links: a page where anyone
can post their link, or a page where a webmaster took the time
to add it manually?

Second, no matter how much “customization” the program allows,
it can never match the quality or value of human contact. In
some cases, the information submitted by these auto-submit
programs will even get you accused of spamming.

In other cases, it will just make you look stupid. In the case
of blog-submitters, your comments will end up looking foolish a
huge percentage of the time, no matter how much you customize
and tailor those comments to ma tch the content of the blog. Do
you really want to put your reputation on the line like that?

There may be a few programs that can be used responsibly and
very sparingly to create links, but before you even think about
trying it, you need to have the vast majority of your links
coming from manually created sources in order to balance out the
automated ones–otherwise you’ll be at big risk with the search
engines.

KEY POINT: The majority of your inbound links need to be built
through human contact.

On the internet, competition is stronger than ever. There was a time where paying a few bucks to get in Yahoo was enough to generate substantial traffic but marketing websites on the internet got much more complex since. Google is now a major player in the search engine industry and any serious internet marketing specialist and seo expert knows how important it is to get a good website ranking in that popular search engine. Understanding Google’s algorythm along with having good html and writing skills can often make the difference between being an amateur or a good internet marketing specialist. Although, many other aspects that we will cover here should be taken into consideration when comes the time to find the right internet marketing specialist for your website.

To start with, you need to define your goals. Are you planning on building a new website or improving an existing one? To get straight to the point, it is a known fact that an internet marketing specialist will have much more to work with if building a new website than if only improving the search engine ranking of an old one. Look at it as if it was a house. Wouldn’t it be better if you had a strong foundation? In other words, you can expect better results from your internet marketing specialist when building a new website from scratch. In the other hand, it will also cost you more. Of course, you want to know if the investment would be worth it. The truth is that it depends on the products and services you are offering and any serious internet marketing specialist should be able to give you a clear and realistic portrait of the situation. Try avoiding those internet marketing companies offering guaranteed website ranking cause that could be tricky. Unless the guaranty includes keywords of your choice, which would be very surprising, you could end up with keywords such as “upper ny marketing firm” ranking on the first page of Google’s results but who would really search for that exact term? You could also rank well with a decent keyword such as “marketing techniques” and get some traffic from it but sincerely, would you get customers this way or a bunch of students and people trying to learn about marketing techniques?

As mentioned, it is important to first define your goals and evaluate the potential of your website. A good internet marketing specialist should be able to help you go through this process and elaborate a solid strategy. He is the expert, your consultant. This is why you are investing in him. Although, some companies will offer keyword analysis services as a seperate service. There is nothing wrong with this practice and it can actually give you more flexibility in the development of your website. Not having the service at all would be something to worry about!

After elaborating a strategy, your internet marketing specialist will get into the development process. Can he actually build a nice looking website or will he just put a bunch of keywords together along with some html code in order to improve your website ranking? This is an important thing to know before hiring an internet marketing specialist since many of them calling themselves seo (search engine optimizer) don’t have any design skills. In addition to your internet marketing specialist, would you also need to hire a web developper and add this to your bill?

Those are just some basic things you need to know before hiring an internet marketing specialist. After optimizing your website for search engines, many other actions can be taken. Can your internet marketing specialist perform those for you? Developping partnerships and content pages, submitting your url to search engines and directories, trading links, writing articles and advertising on the internet are all among other marketing actions that would help improve your online presence and website ranking. It’s now up to you to find an internet marketing specialist that could work within your budget!

About The Author

Frank Levert is a graphic/web designer, multimedia artist, copywriter and marketing professional with over 10 years of experience in the industry. He is now the owner of Netmar Solutions, a company offering a whole spectrum of internet and marketing services for small and medium size businesses.

Search Engine traffic accounts for nearly 80% of the Internet traffic. It is no wonder all website owners want their pages appear in the first 3 pages of the Search engine Results Pages ( SERPS). Getting there by itself is one tough job, and sustaining your place there is another day to day tussle. Unless most of the mundane tasks are automated the life of an SEO is going to be miserable. We constantly see new webmasters are clueless about the tools of the trade. Let’s see a few main one’s in this article.

Keywords describe the content to the search bots, they guide the search engine to decipher the theme of a webpage. These keywords should be employed in specific ways to acheive optimal results. The first thing to note is the keyword density, SE’s still use the density to validate whether they are being guided towards relevant content as suggested by keywords. Keyword Density Analyzer is one important tool that should be employed to check the usage of keywords and phrases in each of your webpage.

Keyword Research tools are really godsend. In this competitive space, if everyone starts targeting the same phrase then you are going into a virtual stalemate. That is why we should find relevant phrases and target them rather than highly competitive keywords. It is better to be listed in page one of a relevant keyword than on page 6 of the main keyword. There are many tools out there that can provide you a list of keywords based on the popular searches, with cue from the SE’s themselves. These are typically based on the current search terms employed the netizens.

Keywords are just one part of the SEO puzzle, there is a good tool to prepare your website for SE’s. Checkout the resource box for the website with all the tools described in here, they are free to use. The search engine preparation tool helps analyze your website against many criterion. Another popular tool that is a must have is the position checker. The search engine index is really dynamic and hence keeping up with your position manually and that too twice a day is a redundant task that is best left to a script.

The pro tool that is employed by SEO’s is the saturation tool that finds how many pages have been indexed and figures out your presence in the top search engines. This is really helpul because as you know each page in the website is indexed separately and seen as one individual entity in the web. This tool figures out which one’s got indexed and which did not and you can further analyze the reasons and try to enhance the optimization. The free SEO tools can found in http://www.web-inspect.com.

Author freelances for many great web companies and can be found in Aplora Web Solutions and No Fee Free Freelance.

As the Internet becomes even more pervasive, the importance of
search engine optimization continues to grow.You can make the
most of your Internet marketing efforts by following the same
steps that top ranking sites do for improvinge their
rankings.You may think that top ranking sites have to spend lots
of money to get there.The truth is that sites who come out on
top, follow some basic search engine optimization
guidelines.These guidelines are easy to follow and often cost
little or nothing to put into practice.

1. Manually register your site with DMOZ, also known as the Open
Directory Project.The Open Directory Project is the largest,
most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is
constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of
volunteer editors and feeds other leading web directories.

2. Manually submit your site to Google.If you’d like to wait,
Google will eventually spider your site and return it in search
result listings related to your site name and keywords.However,
this may take some time.For faster inclusion, visit Google and
submit your site manually.

3. Purchase a listing with Yahoo! Directory Submit.Yahoo! like
Google provides many search products.However, Directory Submit
is essential for any business on the web. For a fee of $299
Yahoo! will include your web site in their directory that fuels
websites like Yahoo!, MSN and AltaVista.

4. Make sure you are using keywords with a high KEI.This measure
takes into consideration both the popularity and competitiveness
of your keywords.By focusing on keywords with a higher KEI, you
can optimize your chance for search engines to select your site
for keywords at little or no expense.

5. Engage in a link building campaign.The more links you have to
your site, especially if they have a high Google Page Rank, will
signal Google and other search engines that your site is
important.A great way to do this is through article submission
or affiliate programs.

6. Make your site easily to crawl.Search engine do not like
dynamic pages.Although this is changing with the advent of
Google Site Maps, it is still important to ensure that all
search engines can easily traverse your website.Make sure to use
HTML coding and avoid dynamically created pages.

7. Be patient.Once you follow these suggestions, allow search
engines time to re-index your site.In the Internet age, we’re
looking for instant results.However, it does take some time for
all of your search engine optimization techniques to take hold.

By implementing the suggestions we’ve discussed in this article,
your search engine optimization efforts can generate positive
returns.As the world of search engines continue to evolve, it’s
important to learn about the latest techniques and requirements
for improving search engine results.Continue to focus on SEO.If
you do, you’ll find yourself at the top of the rankings!

Your Website visitor reports are a goldmine of information.  If you don’t review these on a regular basis, you can’t fully evaluate the return on your Web investment.  And, you could miss critical clues as to how user-friendly your site is, how effectively your message reaches your visitors, and what unmet needs they may have.

But the reports can be overwhelming - a confusing mass of graphs, numbers and URL’s.  How can you find the information that you really need, how do you know what to look for, and how do you make strategic decisions using the answers that you obtain?

Step 1:  Knowing your markets

First, identify all the different types of visitor to your site, together with the reasons that they might be coming to you.

This may sound obvious, but in my experience there are nearly always visitor segments that are overlooked.  Here are my starting suggestions for an association site:

* Current and prospective members
* Board members and staff
* Current and potential vendors, advertisers and sponsors
* Media
* Content seekers
* Job seekers
* Your competition!

If you don’t have a press center on your site, you should consider it if you’re interested in publicity.  Reporters are increasingly looking for information online, and appreciate ready access to press releases, sample interview questions, and downloadable photographs of your key spokespeople.

The content seekers category describes visitors looking for content that you provide, but who are not prospective members.  They might be searching your member database for a referral, or they might be interested in your information products - and so they’re great prospects for non-dues revenue.

Step 2:  Knowing your goals

It’s also key to know the required outcomes, not only for your overall site, but also for each individual section and page.

I have a mantra in my speaking programs:

“Every page of your site should have a strategy”.

Too many pages on the Web give great information, and then tail off, with no clear call to action.  They expect visitors to go back to the navigational elements, and decide what to do next - but instead, many of them will leave.
You should be absolutely clear about the outcomes you expect from each page - event registrations, newsletter sign-ups, product sales, etc.  Or perhaps you want the visitor to go to another page - you’ll be able to track this as well.

Step 3:  Asking the right questions

Now that you have the audiences and outcomes for your site, you can start to make sense of all those numbers and graphs. 

Based on what should be happening, you can formulate questions with which to approach the traffic reports to measure your site’s effectiveness.

Here are some ideas:

Are your long pages effective?

Often, I see long pages with key content “below the fold” - below the first screenful of information.  Many visitors won’t scroll down the page if they’re not immediately engaged by it; therefore they’ll miss the lower elements.
Is this happening on your site?  Look for clicks on the links that are further down the page - are you getting an appropriate amount of traffic to the inside sections that these lead to?  How much time is the average visitor spending on your long page - are they clicking off to the first thing that catches their eye - if so, is this really where you want them to go?

Can you measure member benefits?

If you provide an online database for prospective customers to find a supplier, track how many searches are done, and how many click-thru’s your members receive.  This can give you some powerful statements for your member benefits material.

What are the hot content areas?

Knowing your “Most Requested Pages” gives you some key clues about what’s hot - and from that, which content might be worth developing further, either as a member benefit, or for non-dues income.

It can be helpful to design your site to delineate this.  For example, instead of having a long page of different pamphlets, show each product on a separate page.  Now you can track which ones are most sought after, and perhaps consider offering these as online, instantly downloadable e-books.

What are your conversion rates?

If there’s a hot content area - a highly requested page that doesn’t translate into its required outcome, something’s wrong. 

Possibilities include:

* You believe you have an exciting offering, but your visitors don’t - so perhaps you should rethink your content or product
* You do have an exciting offering, but the page copy isn’t reflecting that effectively, or perhaps the price is too high
* Something else is stopping visitors from completing the transaction - perhaps you’re asking for too much information, or the shopping cart isn’t working
Your traffic reports may not tell you what the solution is - but they should give you a pretty clear idea of where your problems lie.

Step 5:  Tweaking and testing

The good news about the Web is that it’s a great testing ground for new products and ideas.  When you find an area on your site that isn’t performing optimally, you can make small incremental changes, and immediately see the results reflected in your traffic reports.  So you can keep tweaking until you hit the winning formula for each page.

Step 6:  Don’t forget your internal search engine

Your internal search engine allows you to track the keyword searches that visitors perform once they’re on your site.  This also has some valuable clues:

* You’ll almost certainly see searches for content that should be obviously apparent.  This proves that visitors won’t work to find anything - but it can also give indications as to the usability of your structure and navigation.

* Lots of searches for content that you don’t currently provide will give you ideas for developing future products or services, based on visitor demand.

I think of Web traffic reports as “market research that cannot lie”.  They represent what your visitors do, unprompted, and really can contain some gold nuggets.  Happy Mining!

Philippa Gamse, CyberSpeaker, is a Web strategy consultant and professional speaker. Check out her free tipsheet for 23 ideas to promote your Website: http://www.CyberSpeaker.com/tipsheet.html Philippa can be reached at (831) 465-0317.

With the help of MSN, recently I’ve been reminiscing about the Google of old.
Remember those days? When you could take a good quality site, add a few
keywords, get a few incoming links and bada-bing, bada-boom, it’d be #1 on
Google? Remember the old days, pre-Florida, pre-sandbox? The days when we, as
search engine optimization specialists, didn’t feel like a private schoolgirl smoking
in the bathroom? When we didn’t feel like the iron fist would come crashing down at
any moment? Yes, those were the good old days. And MSN has finally brought them
back, though on a much smaller scale.

Google hit it right on the nose back then. Search results were almost never
irrelevant - venturing to the second page of results was an event that drew gasps.
There was never, ever any reason to leave Google and search for the same query on
another search engine. Satisfied users the world over, it was the search engine of
choice almost everywhere searches were conducted. I myself never strayed from
Google, I was loyal and I was rewarded for my loyalty with consistently relevant
results.

But has Google taken their quest for perfection a few steps too far? Case in point:
http://www.jimmylerner.com - this web site is the official site of an author. Search
on MSN for his name, “jimmy lerner” and his web site is the top result. Now, try the
same search on Google. The top results are pages devoted to reviewing his book,
book stores selling his book, a press release I sent out to announce his new site and
a few times I’ve even seen sites show up in the top ten that simply have a link to his
site from theirs and are completely unrelated. His site has been jumping from the
second page to the first and back again.

This begs the question, optimization or no optimization, what, exactly, is the
problem with a quality, informative web site reaching number one for a search query
that is probably conducted specifically to find that exact site? Has the focus and aim
of Google changed from offering relevancy to satisfied searchers to simply impeding
the progress of SEOs? Is Google’s main concern now, to stop individuals from
helping a site reach number one? It can seem that way, can’t it? And I can only say
one thing about it. Bad move, Google.

I’ve heard a few people say that it’s just a transition period. That all web sites are in
the same boat, everyone’s waiting to see the fruits of their optimization labour.
Perhaps this is true, and perhaps over the next little while we will see changes at
Google that make our jaws drop, impressed at the level of perfection we never
thought possible. But I think maybe Google needs to re-focus their energies. Take
the focus back to the user, not the SEOs. Get back to the near-impeccable relevancy
level before I start using MSN to learn about all my favorite authors.

Courtney Heard is the founder of Abalone
Designs, a search engine optimization company in Vancouver, Canada. She has
been involved in web development and marketing since 1995 and has helped start
several businesses since then in the Vancouver area. More of Courtney’s articles are
available at http://www.abalone.ca/resources/

Before you make drastic changes to your website after a rocky search engine update, take time to study your web server logs, changes in traffic to your site, and your ranking in the search engines.

Making Changes Before Analysis

Making rash decisions when you are hearing one thing then another from forum postings and articles is not the best choice to make. Much of the talk about fluctuations in the search engine rankings is just that–talk. Cold hard facts come from established tests of what is going on and why. Don’t jump ship before examining what is going on with your website first. Panic will lead you nowhere.

Let’s talk about basic search engine fundamentals you need to know.

Search Engine Rankings Fluctuate

First, you need to know that search engine rankings fluctuate; that is just the way it is. Google is a prime example of ranking changes happening throughout the day. The best way to find out how you are faring is to study the traffic coming to your site over time. Nope, not just a day or two, try a week or two at least to see if your rankings return. A search engine update may last a week before finishing and the rankings settle. Most importantly, are you receiving traffic at your website? Are you still making sales? Okay then, something is working. Don’t jump on the “change everything” bandwagon. Pay attention to what is true in regard to your website.

No One Knows Algorithms Like The Search Engines

The truth is much of the talk about organic (natural) search engine marketing information is speculative. The people who know exactly what the search engine is doing are the engineers who created it, and they are not going to give away their secrets. This means that understanding what happens when updates occur may be difficult to pin down. Keeping tabs with leaders in the industry through articles, forum postings and blogs may give you a general idea of what is happening. Take that information and then apply it to what is actually happening with your website traffic and sales.

You Need A Log Statistics Program

If you do not take anything else away with you from this article be sure you heed this advice: you need a log statistics program in place. With a good log statistics program you will be able to see various reports showing the number of unique visits taking place on your website, what keyword phrases visitors use to find your pages, what pages are being visited, which search engines are being used to find your website, and much more. Knowing what the “normal” website traffic of your website is will give you a good idea of what may be actually changing over time when updates do occur.

Resubmitting Doesn’t Help

Don’t resubmit your web pages in the crush of an update. Search engines have crawlers, known as search engine robots or spiders, that are able to pick up a web page through links in order to add it to the search engine databases. For this reason you do not need to submit your pages to search engines anymore. Even if you mysteriously go from “top ten” to number 500 in the rankings, the fact that you are still listed means that you are still in the search engine’s database, and you do not need to resubmit. Watch search engine robot activity in your server logs and you will be able to see when your web pages are being revisited by the robots.

Google PageRank Should Not Rule Your Life

So many people fixate on Google’s PageRank. I suggest you should be more concerned about the traffic coming to your website, sales, the amount of content on your site and the number of on topic or directory backlinks you have acquired. PageRank is part of a much bigger equation of over 100 ways in which Google evaluates your website. Don’t forget about the traffic that comes from the other search engines as well. Google may not always be the leader in search engines, keep current with the other major search engine players in the industry.

Common Sense Makes Sense

Use common sense. If you are a small business you can ill afford to make changes that may adversely affect your bottom line. Observation and patience will gain you more than quick fixes. In my experience, the true test of an update is watching the search engine results settle over at least a week or two worth of time. Let the dust settle, analyze the situation, and see what happens from there.

Moderation may be helpful, whether in gaining backlinks, making website changes or your reactions to changes. Don’t panic. If it isn’t broken…don’t fix it.

Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing, a Search Engine Optimization company serving small businesses. She has specialized in Search Engine Promotion since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O’Reilly Media, Inc., a technical book publishing company.

Copyright © 2002-2005 Search Innovation Marketing.
http://www.searchinnovation.com
All Rights Reserved.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is big business. Many Internet companies proclaim that they can increased your web traffic and page ranking. Of course, they charge big bucks to help you improve your web site traffic. What you are really paying for is their so-called expertise or what some call intellectual capital. This leads to a simple question: If you could reallocate some of your limited marketing dollars through your own efforts and achieve your small business Internet marketing goals, how would that affect your business? During these last few months, this is precisely the action that I took.

First Lesson Learned: SEO is more about simplicity than complexity. The challenge is to understand the simplicity within the complexity of search engines, robots and key words.

To understand the simplicity of SEO begins by returning to why web sites exist. Originally, web sites were considered to be cyber space storefronts. As the Internet evolved, web sites evolved with incredible graphics and even more information including the ability to sell products and services through a “Shopping Cart.”

Today, web sites are still evolving and objectives ever expanding. Some are used to demonstrate subject matter expertise while others are to share collective information within a company’s internal and external customers. Each micro second trillions of bytes of data travel through this “Super Highway.”

Returning to the highways of yesteryear, what do we remember? Possibly, the Burma Shave slogans on the numerous road signs come to mind? If you can recollect the Burma Shave signs, the product Burma Shave was always on the last sign. (You can visit http://www.fiftiesweb.com/burmal.htm for verification.)

Second Lesson Learned: SEO is about what you do, not who you are.

Advertising agencies understood the value of benefits and that people bought based upon benefits. For example, women did not want rough cheeks and men enjoyed driving cars “wide open.” So what does this have to do with your web site you might ask?

Third Lesson Learned: I needed my own “Burma Signs.”
Each web site has a page title or what I respectfully ask you to now consider them as your own “Burma Signs” on the Internet Super Highway. Your page title is one long uninterrupted road sign instead of several small ones. By using http://inventory.overture.com, you can determine what key words that you wish to place on your “Burma Signs.”

When I began revising my website, I had a page title that began with ADVANCED SYSTEMS. In checking key word searches, I learned that ADVANCED SYSTEMS was searched less than 700 times during the previous month. However, when I keyed in the word “training,” I received over 165,000 searches. Title selection just became quite simple. (Note: See second lesson learned.)

So if you wish to hit your target of increased web traffic, then simply begin with your page title. Use key words that describe what you do and not who you are. Remember to try to keep the title to 77 characters and include your location because this is the Internet highway and sometimes travelers do get lost.

Copyright 2005(c) Leanne Hoagland-Smith, www.processspecialist.com

This article may be freely published. Permission to publish this article, electronically or in print, as long as the bylines are included, with a live link, and the article is not changed in any way (grammatical corrections accepted).

Leanne Hoagland-Smith, M.S. CEO of ADVANCED SYSTEMS located outside of Chicago, IL, is the Learning & Process Specialist. With over 25 years of business & education experience, she helps her clients to double their performance. By uniting systems, strategies and people to create loyal internal customers, Leanne delivers ROI solutions in 4 key areas: financials, leadership, relationships and growth & innovation within a variety of industries including education, healthcare, manufacturing and professional services. As co-author of M.A.G.I.C.A.L. Potential: 7 Capacities for Living an Amazing Life Beyond Purpose to Achievement due for 2005 release, Leanne speaks nationally to a variety of audiences. Please contact Leanne at 219.759.5601 or visit http://www.processspecialist.com if you are seeking to connect your passion to your purpose to double your performance for unheard of results.