Q and A: Should we create domain names incorporating our major product keywords?

Dear Kalena...

We run an ecommerce site and my boss would like to take advantage of the strong demand for a couple of our products in particular. One of the ideas being tossed around is creating domain names that incorporate these keywords so that search engines find them more quickly (i.e., www.sitenameproduct1.com, www.sitenameproduct2.com)

What are your thoughts on this approach? Is this considered 'black hat' and could this get us in trouble with the major search engines?

Thanks
Kelly

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Kelly

Creating new domains for this purpose is a really, really bad idea. Although they are getting better at it, many search engines can't distinguish keywords within domain names unless they are separated by hyphens and there is really next to no ranking advantage for having keywords in a domain anyway.

It's not black hat, but it's a total myth and hasn't worked since about 2001. In fact, trying to get brand new domains ranked in Google takes up to a year now because of the aging delay so to launch new sites for this purpose is definitely not a good strategy.

You'd be much better off creating a few new pages on your existing site dedicated to the popular products and optimize them well for related keywords. For example, create some articles about the products or people's experience with the products and link to the product detail pages from within the articles using target keywords in the anchor text of the links.

Your existing site has great PageRank and link popularity and it is the best place to put content about your products. If you place a link from your home page to the new product articles/pages, that should help the search engines find the new content quickly and hopefully provide more rankings for keywords relating to those products. The other option is to boost the number of product related keywords in your pay per click campaigns and create dedicated landing pages for them so they convert better.

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Q and A: Why have my Google ads disappeared from my site?

Dear Kalena...

What does it mean when your google ads disappear from your blogs and website?

Marc

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Marc

I'm assuming you are an AdSense advertiser and all your ads have disappeared? Sounds like:

a) Your AdSense account has been cancelled due to non-compliance with AdSense policies (or)

b) Your AdSense code has been corrupted and is no longer displaying ads

Survey says a). Have you emailed Google to ask what the problem is? Have you been warned that your account may be cancelled? Better follow these instructions and get the news from the horse's mouth.


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Article on SiteProNews

I was thrilled to see my article SEM Industry Training: What Are the Options? on the front page of SiteProNews today. SPN sure know how to provide traffic!

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Q and A: Why has my Google PageRank dropped to zero?

Dear Kalena...

A couple of weeks ago our Google PageRank was 6/10. Not bad but room for improvement. This week I'm finally ready to work on this and my Google tool bar says the PageRank is 0/10. What happened? The only change I made was some contact info for our http://dmoz.org/ directory listing.

Diane

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Diane

Rest assured, your dmoz listing change has nothing to do with a drop in PageRank. It is more likely to be a toolbar glitch. I've seen my Toolbar show a PR0 for every site I visit, I've even seen a 10/10 for every site! It's just a bug that sometimes occurs if you upgrade your Browser version or use the tabbed browsing option. Closing down your browser and starting a new session should fix it, or simply re-install the toolbar.

In fact, I've just checked your site and it's showing a very healthy PR6 again. Panic over!


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Ignore the Box

There's a new secret to gaining traffic on the web. Rather than thinking outside the box, staff at the popular Craigslist site have a different motto:

"Ignore the box completely"

An interview with Craigslist's CEO Jim Buckmaster reveals the company are too busy focusing on usability to worry about what anyone else is doing. They don't even want to make money. Heck, they try NOT to make money.

Their unusual approach is working. The site publishes nearly 15 million classified ads every month from users who clearly enjoy contributing to a site without ads.

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Q and A: How long do you have to wait until a site gets crawled?

Dear Kalena...

Hi there - good useful info here. Just a quick question. When you add your new url to Google or other search engines how long do you have to wait till it gets crawled? Your help would be great thanks

Eugene

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Eugene

It depends. Often a site will get crawled faster if it is linked to from another site that gets crawled daily, but it is totally up to the search engine robot's crawling schedule. Here's some info from Google's FAQ on the subject:

"Our crawl process is algorithmic; computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site."

If you are curious to know when and how often Google and Yahoo crawl your site, you can verify your site with Google's Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer.

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PPC Proves Sweet for Some

Picture this: rival manufacturers of gourmet chocolates in two different US States both set up Google AdWords accounts. The California-based manufacturer blows $3,000 with only 3 sales, the Vermont company makes $30,000 in annual sales via PPC.

Why did one succeed and the other fail so spectacularly? Simple: the Vermont firm had a staff member vigilently monitoring, testing and tweaking their campaign over a long period. He researched thousands of long-tail keywords, added logical negative keywords and continuously reworks the wording of their ads to improve ROI.

Just goes to prove that PPC is not a set-and-forget undertaking. This is something we try to drill into our PPC 101 students.

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Q and A: What can I do to improve ranking results on regional Google sites?

Dear Kalena...

I am doing some very basic SEO work for a South African website that targets the local market only. The majority of local searches are done on google.co.za, not google.com. What can I do to better my results on google.co.za for popular keywords?

Marco (a happy subscriber of the Search Light Newsletter)


Kalena's Answer:

Dear Marco

Glad you like the newsletter. Re your question, the best thing you can do is ensure the site is published on a regional domain ending in .co.za. This is because Google gives ranking priority to regional sites where available on their local search engines. It would also help if the site was hosted in South Africa as sometimes Google will check the physical location (IP address) of a site to determine its relevance to a regional search query.

Apart from that, try to use regional keywords in the visible content of the pages to ensure Google recognizes the regional market you are targeting and will match it to related search queries. And of course make sure the site is submitted to and indexed by the most popular regional search engines servicing South Africa.

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Marketing Pilgrim's 2007 SEM Scholarship Winner

Andy Beal has announced the winner of Marketing Pilgrim's SEM Scholarship for 2007. The winner is Jeff Horsager who won votes from four of the competition judges with his article Increase Conversion Rates with the Google Website Optimizer.

A big back slap goes to Jeff and my commiserations go to Daniel Tynski, whose article The 7 Deadly Sins that Hurt You as an SEO won my vote and attracted over 10,000 visitors - more than all the other entrants combined! Oh well. There's always next year.

As the ultimate winner, Jeff wins enrollment in our Certified Search Engine Marketer Pathway course. I'll look forward to handing over the keys to Jeff shortly.

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Q and A: Does Google favor sites running AdSense?

Dear Kalena...

It's nice to see language I can understand! You make instructions very clear thank you. I have a new website with Google ads on it. If I get 10 clicks per day on my ads, does Google favor my site over and above others that may be in the same category that don't run Google ads? I was thinking to some extent they might, so they can make more money. Do you know anything about this? Thanks, and I look forward to your reply.

Dean

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Dean

When AdSense first launched, there were many sceptics in the industry who predicted that Google's algorithm would favor successful AdSense advertisers. Thankfully, they were wrong. I've never seen any indication that Google gives any type of ranking boost or favoritism to sites running AdSense. The only possible technical advantage to having AdSense units on your page would be that Googlebot might visit more often. But even that is not proven.

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LookSmart shareholder can't take a joke

Seems I annoyed a LookSmart shareholder with my little joke in the Pandia interview today. Check out this email I received shortly after it was published:

I look forward to the day so called pundits in the SEO/SEM crowd stop bashing LookSmart at every opportunity. I suppose it's trendy or posh to take a stab at a company with a poor past but people who do, like you did should reconsider the snickers and backhanded commentary as you did in the Pandia interview.

It's old school, childish and rude to "pile on" a company who has over 100 employees and numerous shareholders who maintain a faith they company will not only survive but thrive in the growing sector they share with the big guns. Have you stopped to take a look at LookSmart lately? I doubt it because if you had you would know it is no the same company that it was the day Microsoft dumped them.

Finally, I did respect your knowledge and reputation more before I read you slight than I do now. You have lost the desire to be objective and still play to the SEO "old school" crowd and that shows sadly little desire on your part to evolve.

Regards,
M, Looksmart Shareholder

My response? I probably should've ignored it but I couldn't resist:

Hello M

Thank you for your email. It might interest you to know that I have looked at LookSmart lately, as they are considered one of the more popular Pay Per Click services behind the big three and as such, I thoroughly reviewed their offering in our latest Pay Per Click training course offered to Search Engine College students. My inclusion of them in the course material was unbiased and factual and I provide a summary of the service offered, despite my own disinterest in using it.

My personal opinion of LookSmart does not stem from a desire to appeal to the SEO "old school" crowd. It is based on my poor experience with them since I signed up as one of their original customers back in 2000 and paid their "one time fee" only to be forced to rollover to a different service than what I paid for. I used to be angry at LookSmart, very angry. Then I became frustrated and took my frustrations to their Australian CEO via a published interview with him. Now I can at least joke about it. I might have the memory of an elephant, but I have the right to my opinion and I certainly have the right to express it in a personal interview.

I don't need someone whose own bias about a company is financially motivated telling me that my personal bias is childish and rude.

Kalena

Funny how some people can't take a joke.

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Interview on Pandia

I was interviewed by the delightful Per Koch of Pandia this week about, amongst other things, Google's Universal Search and how it will impact the future of this crazy industry. We even discover a mutual adoration of Kate Bush. Check out the interview here.

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Q and A: Do we need to start over with our web site?

Dear Kalena...

Thank you very, very much for the thorough analysis of our site. That is just what we were looking for. We built the site with Microsoft Frontpage 2003 (and still use it) a few years ago. I thought 'tables' were the staple of all websites, what is CSS? So you are saying we need to start over right? What web building software should we use? Do you ever do this sort of work (correcting all the problems you described with our site)? The background and a few other small things we can fix now. Can we use a light grey background or does google like white better? Also what is "anchor text link" and "Your internal links could also use some work from an anchor text angle." How do I find these "Trusted Sites"?

Thank you very much Kalena!

Mike

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Mike

That's a lot of questions! Think I'll need some more caffeine :-)

Let's take them one by one:

1) What is CSS?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is a way to store the design and layout code for your site in a separate file so you don't have to include it in the HTML code of every page. Instead, each page simply refers to the CSS file. It's a much neater way of designing a web site than tables and search engines prefer it too because there is less code for them to index and less chance of your code tripping up a search engine bot while it's indexing your site.

2) So you are saying we need to start over right? What web building software should we use?

Yes, preferably. Tables are old technology and very difficult to design with. Also, the site could use an overhaul - no offence but it does look a little "home made". I have a confession to make - I am also a Front Page junkie! But I have learned over the years that Front Page adds a lot of unnecessary code to web pages and most sites built with FP aren't very search engine friendly so I try not to use it anymore. It's best if you build a site from scratch using HTML code and CSS or hire a designer who can build one for you in PHP or HTML. There are web site templates you can purchase online, but often these are built with tables. The alternative is to use an Open Source Content Management System (there are available free of charge) but it will require a steep learning curve. If you'd like some recommendations for reasonably priced web designers that understand how to build search engine friendly sites, please let me know.

3) Do you ever do this sort of work (correcting all the problems you described with our site)?

Yes, I offer search engine optimization services via my hourly consulting rates and my company Jordan Consulting Group can provide a quote for web design using a Content Management System. Use the Ask Kalena link again and ask for a quote on either service if you're interested. If you want to learn quickly how to optimize your own site from scratch, consider taking one of our online search engine optimization courses.

4) Can we use a light grey background or does google like white better?

Light grey should be fine, as long as it has a different HEX color to your table background in your HTML code.

5) What is "anchor text link" and "Your internal links could also use some work from an anchor text angle."

Anchor text, (sometimes known as the link label), is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The keywords you use in a link to a site can have an impact on how well that site ranks for searches utilizing those keywords. In other words, if you want your site to rank well for "gold dipped roses", then you should incorporate links within your site that use "gold dipped roses" in the anchor text of the links. You can do this by linking from internal pages of your site to other internal pages of your site with such anchor text. But the keywords you use in your link text should always be relevant to the page content you are linking to. You should also try to encourage other sites to link to you using anchor text in their links.

6) How do I find these "Trusted Sites"?

Ah, that's a time-consuming task. You need to research and look for popular directories to submit your site to and approach sites that have a similar theme to your site to ask for a link. Try looking for niche directories, regional directories and industry portals relating to your business as a source of one-way incoming links Some sites will require a reciprocal link placed on your site to theirs before they will link to you, but reciprocal links don't have as much search engine value as one-way incoming links. If you don't have time, you can hire a company to run a link building campaign on your behalf.

Good luck!

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Q and A: Why haven't I profited from my site?

Dear Kalena...

This is Parthiban from India. I have a site which is relating to home based business and about personal loans, because I'm working in a private finance company.

My question is why I haven't I profited from my site, even though I have a Google Adsense account? I get very few visitors to my site. Please tell me how to increase my site's traffic and how to add meta tags to my site. What is search engine optimization? How do I add my site to get listed in Google's search engine? Please guide me to get some income from this site.

Thanking you
Parthiban

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Parthiban

I've had a look at your site and I'm not surprised it hasn't made you any money. Let me take your questions one by one:

1) Why I haven't I profited from my site, even though I have a Google Adsense account?

Because you don't take the site seriously. For starters, your site is hosted on a free hosting service and doesn't even have it's own domain. Next problem is that it's covered in ads. I can't see the content at all because it's totally buried in AdSense units and referral links. Visitors aren't going to try to find your content amongst all those ads.

2) Please tell me how to increase my site's traffic and how to add meta tags to my site.

Get your own domain. Search engines won't take the site seriously until you do. Clean up the site and put some real useful content on there. Delete 80 percent of those ad units, they are putting people off. Build links from sites in your industry. Write articles. Start a blog. Download this free SEO lesson. It will teach you how to develop title and meta tags from scratch.

3) What is search engine optimization?

How long is a piece of string? Why is the sky blue? All these questions have endless answers. Best if you take our SEO 101 course to learn the answers for yourself.

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I Think I'm Turning Supplemental

Time for a bit of Friday fun. JLH of the JLH Design Blog was apparently bored enought today to re-write the lyrics from great songs of the 70s and 80s to match his love-hate relationship with search engines. My personal favorite is "I Think I'm Turning Supplemental", sung to the tune of "I Think I'm Turning Japanese" by The Vapors. Here's an extract:

No sex, no links, no spam, no java
No flash, no sin, no you, no wonder it’s farked
Everyone around me is a total spammer
Everyone links to me like a copy scraper... Everyone.
That’s why I’m turning Supplemental
I think I’m turning Supplemental
I really think so

Happy Friday everyone!

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Q and A: Do alt image attributes have an impact on search engine rankings?

Dear Kalena...

I have a question regarding SEO.

How much of an effect if any, do Alt Img Attributes have on search engine rankings? Some articles say Alt Img Attributes have little to no effect on search engine rankings, while other articles say that if used properly they can have a positive effect on search engine rankings.

Can you please shed some light on this debate? I'd really appreciate it,

thanks
Nick

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Nick

The use of Alt Img attributes is important from a usability perspective, more so than any other reason. To ensure vision-impaired visitors (or those browsing with images turned off) can understand what your images represent, they should have alt text associated with them. This is not vital for design-related images, such as borders or spacers, but more so for product images, graphical headings and such. Now, there was a time when the use of Alt attributes contributed to a site's search relevancy. But thanks to abuse by webmasters over the years, the significance of the Atl attribute contribution to the overall ranking algorithm has reduced dramatically and it is also one of the areas search engines look at carefully for evidence of spam.

So what does that mean for persons optimizing their sites? It means you should still use Alt attributes but approach them from a usability perspective and forget any assumed search engine value. For example, if you sell shoes and you have 3 images of different shoes on a page, you should use simple Alt text to describe each in a way that a vision-impaired person could understand: "alt=blue suede shoes", "alt=black leather loafers", "alt=white strappy sandles". The wrong way to approach the same situation would be: "alt=shoes, shoes shoes", "alt=cheap cheap shoes", "alt=best shoes in the world". The first example is descriptive and clear and could also contribute to a page's relevancy for related keyword searches. The latter is non-descriptive, keyword-stuffed and self-promotional. It would be much more likely to trip spam filters.

Hope this helps :-)


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Breaking news: Google Rolls Out Predictive Search

Just got the scoop from Marketing Pilgrim that Google has rolled out what they're calling a Universal Search Model that incorporates web search results with related results from Google Images, Google News, Google Video, Google News and Blogger in the one search interface.

Why is this important? Three reasons off the top of my head:

1) It is the first step towards a true predictive search model, based on a new algorithm integrating user search patterns and predictive formulae.

2) It will change the way people search as a whole, therefore impacting the existing business models of SEO and SEM firms.

3) It will boost the importance of non-text content within web sites - image and video content will become a major marketing channel in it's own right, rather than a tool to attract visitors to text content.

Wowsie!

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Marketing Pilgrim SEM Scholarship Finalists Announced

Marketing Pilgrim has revealed the names of the five article authors who have made the final round of the SEM Scholarship competition. They are:

Paul Steinbrueck
CK Chung (aka Kid Disco)
Daniel Tynski
Marios Alexandrou
Jeff Horsager

Three cheers for each finalist! As a member of the panel of judges, I'm looking forward to tucking in to each article and choosing the one that best satisfies my appetite for fresh SEO/SEM reading material.

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Q and A: How do I change my default search language in Google?

Dear Kalena...

When I go to write in Arabic language in Google search or any other search, it shows different language, but English language is ok. Please tell me the solution.

Thank you
Shahana

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Shahana

I'm going to rephrase your question as follows: "how do I change my default search language in Google?" If I've misunderstood your question, my apologies and please email me again.

Now, it sounds like your Google searching preferences have somehow been changed. Next time you are at the Google home page, click on the preferences link next to the search box. This will take you to an area where you can choose your default Google interface language, as well as the language/s of web pages you'd prefer to be shown when you are searching. You can see a full list of Google's supported languages here.

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Website vs Web Site

When I'm grading student assignments for our Search Engine Optimization courses, I often come across alternative spellings. Some are regionally based, such as "optimization" versus "optimisation". But today I want to comment on "website" versus "web site" which I'm seeing a lot of confusion over.

There are conflicting arguments about this, but in academic circles, the correct version is considered "web site" as two words in support of W3 standards. Sites such as the Chicago Manual of Style Online insist that the two word version is correct formal usage. Then again, a search for "web site" on Wikipedia.org redirects to their definition article for "website". Dictionary.com also suggest "website" is the most commonly used form as it has developed in usage:

Usage Note: The transition from World Wide Web site to Web site to website as a single uncapitalized word mirrors the development of other technological expressions which have tended to take unhyphenated forms as they become more familiar. Thus email is gaining ground over the forms E-mail and e-mail, especially in texts that are more technologically oriented.

But perform a Google search for both versions and you’ll see that web site is much more common than website.

Personally, I believe you should always use the two-word version in your site, particularly in your Title and Description tags, because search engines won’t be able to distinguish the two words if you bunch them together as "website" and you might not capture as many searchers. If you use "website", you might also isolate pedantic readers who feel "web site" is the correct spelling. Consistency is key, no matter which version you decide to use.

So readers: which version do you prefer? Tell us via comments.

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Q and A: Does changing the name of a site impact search rankings?

Dear Kalena...

I am thinking of changing the name of my internet business site so as to direct more traffic because the current name, while nice, doesn't really spell out what we do. It is now Gilt-Edge Luxury Tours and Travel and I would like to change it to DC Luxury Tours. However, we have had this site for 10 years and it well indexed by the search engines. Does changing the name (but not the url which would stay the same) have any impact on the search engines? Or would I have to start all over from scratch if I changed the name?

Gilda

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Gilda

A site name change is not necessarily a problem. It would be different if you were changing your domain or changing your name from one with keywords in it to one without. Losing the word "travel" from your site name may slightly impact your site's rankings for searches involving the word "travel", but only if you no longer include that word prominently in your site. Your main site heading will no longer include "travel", but you can compensate by making sure that the rest of the site is optimized for travel-related keywords.

The other area that might be impacted is your link popularity. If other sites are currently linking to you using your old name, it might be contributing to your site's relevancy for "luxury tours and travel". But if ranking for "DC luxury tours" or "DC tours" is actually more important to you, then you should encourage sites already linking to you to change the anchor text of their link to your new site name and of course any new link partners should link to you using your new name. DC Luxury Tours is certainly easier to remember than your old name, so the change should be good from a marketing and usability perspective.

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The PayPal Punk Purchase

Some days I wonder at people's stupidity and ignorance. Honestly, I could scream right now. Yesterday we had someone place a large order for Search Engine College courses through our PayPal shopping cart. Nothing wrong with that right? No, except that they only paid 0.01 at the checkout, leaving an unpaid balance of $1,174.99. We immediately received a "Fraud Detected" message from our cart system and so I didn't pass the order on to be fulfilled. I sent an email to the purchaser explaining the situation and asking him to complete or cancel the order. No response.

Today, I receive an email from PayPal saying that the purchaser had opened a dispute for the payment made, indicating that they never received the item. Of course they never received the damn item. They only paid 1 cent for a $1,175 order! And they decide to lodge a dispute with PayPal just to be reimbursed the 1 cent they paid? Phleeeaaaze! I refunded the 0.01 and they closed the dispute. But what a complete waste of time. I should bill them an hour's consulting! Sorry to vent, but sometimes a blog is a good way to get these things off your chest.

Aaaah. I feel better now.

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Q and A: Should I be concerned that Google is not caching my index page?

Hello all. Happy Thursday! I've got a Live Chat FAQ transcript for you today:

Dale : Good evening.
kalena : How may I help You?
Dale : This is a tremendous service.
kalena : Live Help? Glad you like it
Dale : Quick question , should I be concerned that Google is not caching my index page?
kalena : Yes. Has it been cached before? How long has it not been cached?
Dale : Last week I changed the title format of my posts and the index cache was dropped.
kalena : Can you give me the URL and I'll take a quick look?
Dale : They have re indexed the posts with the amended tiltles
Dale : jerseyboysblog.com
Dale : I have read that it could be a data center thing
kalena : I see that you've got a verification tag in place. Have you looked at the stats for the site in GG Webmaster Tools?
Dale : Yes I have, everything is fine except the cache
kalena : If Googlebot hasn't had any problems indexing and all looks ok in sitemaps, my guess is that either your new data is on a datacenter that hasn't updated yet or your page has been sent to the supplemental index.
kalena : Have you updated your XML file and pinged GG to request re-indexing of the sitemap?
Dale : I hope so, I seen sites go from no cache to no PR to no index.
kalena : And the only changes you made were to your title tags for blog posts, right?
Dale : Yes, I updated the site site map manually and resubmitted successfully.
Dale : I amended the CSS so the posts are at the top of the page and the navigation is at the bottom
kalena : Ok, then hopefully it is just a temporary issue and should be resolved between the next cache update and database shuffle.
kalena : Have you checked the way GG views your robots.txt since the changes?
Dale : I have tried to optimize organically.
kalena : Ah. If you've made a LOT of changes to the site in terms of organic SEO, it may have prompted an aging delay, but that shouldn't affect the cache. Are you still seeing good rankings?
Dale : I have dropped from six to ten for the key term Jersey Boys, but that has always fuctuated
kalena : yes. If you were suffering the aging/redesign delay, you wouldn't be ranking for anything. Same if you are in the supplementals, but you also would have an old cache.
Dale : It is hard to compete against ticket brokers with 100's of affiliate links.
kalena : sure, I understand. Just keep an eye on Webmaster Tools and you can always submit a query to GG via that interface if probs continue
Dale : Okay, good night, and thank you.
kalena : so long

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Does Your Web Site Need a Workout?

I recently turned one of my blog rants into an article and I thought you, my dear readers, would enjoy it.

Does Your Web Site Need a Workout talks about how some companies waste hundreds of thousands of dollars on their web site without ensuring that it's working hard for them. Extract:

"I see it so often, regardless of company size. Web sites that could easily be bringing in loads of traffic and revenue simply wasting away because nobody can be bothered tracking visitor activity, analyzing trends or checking for search engine compatibility and usability.

Thes