SEO, Lies and Video Tape (part 5)

In the first first post of this series, I pointed out that SEO companies sell features that can be done easily by most people, thus avoiding cost. As a reminder, those 4 simple, easy-to-accomplish techniques are:

• Having a descriptive domain name
• Creating and submitting a sitemap
• Descriptive titles and meaningful content
• Getting other websites to link to you

In this post I want to explore the final item:

Getting other websites to link to you
For a long time, this was Google's secret sauce. Instead of using metadata, or just the words on your webpage, or some other easily-manipulated option to set your page ranking, Google looked for links TO you that existed on other sites.

They still do this, and it's still useful. It's also useful because it's an indicator of how popular your webiste ACTUALLY is on the internet. If people are talking about your site - linking to you, repeating your posts, etc - then you are popular. If they're not, you're not.

However, it's a hard trick to pull off without resorting to various "link exchange" programs and such. One thing you can do that helps a bit is make it very easy for readers to "like", "retweet", "+1", "Stumble" and "Digg" your pages and posts. Each of those creates another link out in the internet that can be picked up by Google and contribute to your page ranking.

But you have to make people WANT to click those options, and these days people blow right past them.

The best advice I can give you goes back to the previous point - creating meaningful content that people care about, and it will be repeated by others and thus improve your ranking.

SEO, Lies and Video Tape (part 4)

In the first first post of this series, I pointed out that SEO companies sell features that can be done easily by most people, thus avoiding cost. As a reminder, those 4 simple, easy-to-accomplish techniques are:

• Having a descriptive domain name
• Creating and submitting a sitemap
• Descriptive titles and meaningful content
• Getting other websites to link to you

In this post I want to explore the third bullet-point:

Descriptive titles and meaningful content
When a search engine looks at your site (and especially the new stuff on your site), it's reading words. I know that sounds dumb when you read it in print, but you have to keep it in mind. And just like you learned in 5th grade English about Newspaper styles, the title is given the highest importance, then the subtitle, then the first sentence, then the paragraph.

So, if your title says "the Rubiyat of Omar Kayam" and the first paragraph is a long series of jokes about Olivia Newton John's "Xanadu" album, the search engine is going to have a hard time placing your post with search results for "how to potty training kittens" - which you got around to mentioning around paragraph 4.

So while it sounds boring, following a standard news article style format is a great way to help you rank higher on search results.

Finally, if your website runs on blog or CMS software (rather than static web pages), consider changing from permalinks that are numeric (http://www.mysite.com/index.php?postid=115) to something more descriptive

One more thing for bloggers: Canonical URL tags. Your website actually has several URL's including www.mysite.com, http://mysite.com, mysite.com/index.html, and a few others. Typing any of them would get you to the home page. And search engines treat each one as a separate website, which means your page ranking could get divvied up among the potential options. To avoid this, you enable canonical tags - depending on the system you are using there are various plugins or template options, so that everything on your site is ALWAYS formatted the same.

But all of that is just formatting tricks. the other part of this bullet point is much harder: creating meaningful content. There's no single tip I can give you to do that. You know your audience (or you should, and shame on you if you have no idea who it is your are trying speak to!), you know what they want to hear about, and you know how much (or how little) they can tolerate reading in a sitting. Should you break up your articles into smaller "nibbles" and have them post on successive days? Or should you create one long masterpiece that has everything all in one place? Do you talk about the thermodynamics of microwave hairdryers or the latest fashion trends found in "Civil War Re-Creationist Magazine"? Only you can know that.

What I _can_ tell you is that, if your audience finds your posts meaningful they will not only keep coming back for more, they will repeat what they've read in tweets, facebook posts, Google+ articles and more.

And that feeds into my next post...

SEO, Lies and Video Tape (part 3)

In the first first post of this series, I pointed out that SEO companies sell features that can be done easily by most people, thus avoiding cost. As a reminder, those 4 simple, easy-to-accomplish techniques are:

• Having a descriptive domain name
• Creating and submitting a sitemap
• Descriptive titles and meaningful content
• Getting other websites to link to you

Last time I discussed domain names. In this post I want to explore the next item:

Creating and submitting a sitemap

A sitemap is what the name implies - a map of your site. The point is that the automated indexing routines ("crawlers") from Google, Yahoo, Bing and others can work faster if they have a list of web pages to scan. And that's what a sitemap is.

NOT having a sitemap doesn't mean your site won't get indexed. But it does mean that pages might be overlooked or that updates to your site won't show up on search queries as quickly - all of which translate to lost visitors.

Submitting your sitemap isn't necessary - all the search engines will find it eventually unless you've named it something completely weird and/or stuck it into a stupid directory name like "golf scores". That having been said if you are being a diligent web designer, you can push the issue so that you remove all doubt.

In most cases, you will need an account with each of the search engines in order to submit your sitemap. That also shouldn't be an issue for you since, as a web designer, you ought to have those accounts anyway.

Also, let's be honest: Google is THE game in town. So it behooves you to get a Google Webmaster account (as well as a Google Analytics account). Neither cost you anything. I'm not going to take time here to go over all the bells and whistles of these tools, but you can get the ball rolling by going to http://www.google.com/webmasters/

To add your sitemap to Google:

1.     Sign in to your Google Webmaster account.
2.     From the dashboard, click the "Add A Site" button
3.     Go through the steps to verify the site
4.     Click on the site to bring up it's specific stats
5.     Click "Site Configuration" from the sidebar to expand the list
6.     Click "Sitemaps"
7.     Click the "Submit a Sitemap" button and follow the prompts

To add your sitemap to Yahoo!:

1.     From the Search Engines page, copy the link to your Sitemap file.
2.     Sign in to your Yahoo! account.
3.     Enter the URL for your site in the Submit Site feed field (e.g., http://www.yourdomain.com)
4.     Click Submit Feed.

Bing?

Creating a sitemap is very simple. The instructions below really depend on whether your site is a "regular" static site made up of a bunch of pages, or if it's more like a blog.

Regular Sitemaps

To create a sitemap for your regular site you have to generate it or write it by hand. If you immediately thought "oh let's do it by hand, that sounds exciting" then I'm done speaking to you. Please leave my website. I'll wait.

OK, now that the mouth-breathing village idiots have left the building, we can move on.

The easiest way to do this as a one-time-shot is to use one of the (many) online sitemap generators. For the sake of example, I'm using http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ . But feel free to use any one you want.

1. Go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
2. Enter the webiste URL
3. Enter your change frequency (that tells the web crawlers how often to come back and recrawl the site.
4. Fill in any other options based on the Sitemap generator you are using and click Go/Start/Run/Whatever
5. Once the process is complete, you be presented with downloadable versions of your sitemap in at least a couple of formats (xml, txt, html). Go ahead and pull them down to your local computer
6. Now upload them to the root folder on your website.
7. Finally, using the steps I outlined earlier, submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and wherever else your fancy deems important.

Blog Sitemaps

Setting up a sitemap for a blog is even easier than for a regular site, because most blog software have add-ons or plugins to do the job for you.

For example, in Wordpress I recommend adding the pluging "Google XML Sitemaps". From there the options are very straightforward and it even submits the sitemap to Google for you.

TRICK: Skipping webpages and folders with robots.txt

While it might sound counter-intuitive at first blush, every site has folders and even web pages that you DON'T want to have show up on search results. Things like the "images" folder where you put all your webpage graphic elements, or the webpage "testme.html" which you use to test out new stuff before adding it to the live pages, or the "documentation" folder where you store all the design information about the website

(What's that, you don't HAVE documentation on your website? Here's some advice: Don't say that out loud to your customer.)

To get Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc to overlook pages, you use a robots.txt file. This file - also found at the root of your website - tells web crawlers which pages to look at and which to skip. In it's simplest form, it looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

This tells the web crawler that this file applies to ALL search agents, and there are NO pages disallowed. Using my example above, let's say you wanted to tell google NOT to index /images, /documentation and testme.html. Your robots.txt file would look like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /documentation/
Disallow: /testme.html

While there is a lot more the robots.txt file can do for you, I want to leave you with one reminder: Robots.txt is a well-known filename that anyone can pull up on your website. So don't use it to try to hide things from visitors because robots.txt  is basically a big fat finger pointing to those directories saying "look here for good stuff". 

Make sure you check back here (or better yet, use "sign up" options in the sidebar to add this to your RSS feed or receive email notifications) for the next installment where we rise up out of the weeds of step by step instructions to talk about descriptive titles and meaningful content.

SEO, Lies and Video Tape (part 2)

In my last post, I pointed out that SEO companies sell features that can be done easily by most people, thus avoiding cost. As a reminder, those 4 simple, easy-to-accomplish techniques are:

• Having a descriptive domain name
• Creating and submitting a sitemap
• Descriptive titles and meaningful content
• Getting other websites to link to you

In this post I want to explore the first item:

Descriptive Domain Names
This may be the easiest of the 4 items, but also the one that could cause you the most grief. If you have a site that sells timeshare apartments for hamsters in Aruba, then a domain name of "hamster-aruba-timeshares.com" is going to automatically rank higher in searches than "hamsterpads.com" or "bluewatersandexercisewheels.com". Even if the latter two are poetic and evocative, the fact is that search engines look at the domain name itself to see if there is a match.

It also means that if you are selling wicker baskets in Tupelo, Mississippi - and even though your company may be called "Southern Criss Cross" - you are better off with a domain name like "TupeloWicker.com". Unless you have so much corporate recognition that people will search for you at "southerncrisscross.com".

But remember the point of searches - it's there to help people to who DON'T already know you. The ones who already do will find you anyway.

One option is to buy a couple of domain names and point both to the same website. Just don't go hog wild on that. Some search engines will actually rank your site LOWER if they see you have 5 or 6 domain names all pointing to the same place. Also, if you have 5 domain names, your page ranking stats could get divvied up between each of those names, resulting in a lower overall page rank. (although there is a way around that - "canonical URLs", which I'll describe later in this series)

Two or three domains, however, should be OK if you really think you need it.

The trick in all this, as you can imagine, is to find something that is memorable while still being descriptive.

Good luck!

SEO, Lies and Video Tape

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies promise big money (for those using their services, naturally). They toss around figures about tens of millions of online searches every day that could be generating thousands of dollars in revenue, but only if your site ranks high enough on searches - only if you act now, no time to wait, operators are standing by!

Page Rank - how high up a website appears in a search query - is the holy grail for web designers (and those who hire them). Page ranking holds the key to new visitors, who translate into profits (or at least attention which is basically the same thing in internet terms). The higher up you are in a set of query results, the more likely someone is to click your link and visit your site.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving pagerank. SEO spins the flax of simple Google or Yahoo queries into click-through gold.

This makes Consultants specializing in SEO, in effect, prospectors who know that "there's gold in them thar clicks" and claim to hold the secret to mining those veins of data that will yeild untold riches.

And because of that, there's a lot of of people who work hard to make all that prospecting sound very difficult, specialized, arcane and - most importantly - expensive.

Based on my experience, it's not. In fact, it comes down to 4 key techniques. Everything else is snakeoil. All 4 techniques are things that ANYONE - even the greenest novice - can do. It doesn't take a masters degree in programming. It doesn't require hours of setup or maintenence. Most of it can be done in about 2 hours.

Those 4 simple, easy-to-accomplish techniques are:

• Having a descriptive domain name
• Creating and submitting a sitemap
• Descriptive titles and meaningful content
• Getting other websites to link to you

That's it. No midnight sacrifices of twinkies to the pantheon of database deities. No clandestine payments to Google.

In the next several posts I'm going to break down each of those items. Meanwhile, I want to answer what is probably going through your head right now:

So what am I paying for?
Aside from the 4 things I've already mentioned, what do typical SEO companies do for you? Well, it's not exactly nothing, but as I mentioned before, the lion's share of SEO improvements are the things I've already given you for free.

They might offer you services - helping you add a widget to retweet articles or to let readers "like" you on Facebook. They might offer you analytics - figuring out what your relative page rank is now and how many clicks you are getting so you know where you stand.


These are all useful features, but are things any good web designer/administrator should be able to provide for you. They are things lots of supposedly "novice" web admins can do too. Caveate Emptor!

The only other thing I've seen is where some SEO companies own and run a series of unrelated websites called link farms. You pay them to add you to all (or some) of their websites, which could improve your page rank based on the last tip I gave you ("Getting Other Websites To Link To You"). The interesting thing is that Google adjusts for this - the "value" of a link is relative to the value of the page that it appears on. So a link coming from a page that is part of a link farm is worth almost nothing. But most customers don't realize that. They just see that their link will appear on 20 other websites and think "I'm going to be sooo popular!".

Stay tuned for the rest of this series where I give details (and in some cases step-by-step instructions) on how to be your own SEO expert.