Q and A: Is a 3 word search phrase counted as 1, 2 or 3 keywords?

Dear Kalena...

Just read your fine feature article at Site Pro news in the Nov 28th issue. In your part 2, would it be possible to include the max character length, max# of keywords that you would recommend be used. Also I was wondering if a three word term such as "widgets in FL" would be counted as one keyword or two or three?

Ed

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Ed

Thanks so much for your feedback on my article. That article is actually half of a larger one I wrote a few weeks ago and you can expect to see the other half in SiteProNews shortly. I think Part 2 will answer your questions, but this recent piece by Danny Sullivan about the keywords tag might also help.

As for "widgets in Florida", there is no official standard in terms of how many keywords you should target on each page or in each tag, but it is generally very difficult to optimize a single page for more than 3 or 4 keywords or phrases. "Widgets in Florida" can be considered a single search term but also covers the individual keywords "widgets" and "Florida" and the phrase "widgets Florida" (search engines consider "in" to be a stop word) so I would describe that phrase as covering 3 or 4 search terms and I would probably stick with optimizing your page for that single phrase and concentrating on other search queries for your other pages.

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VIDEO Q and A: Is our site being penalized by Google?

Dear Kalena...

The problems we are having are mainly with Google. We have 1,000 indexed pages showing in the 'site:' command from Google search. We have already done many things to get our rankings up but we appear to be penalized. Customers can not find our indexed pages by title OR content. We suspect sabotage by another company. We have sent emails and faxes to Google and asked them to investigate. They ignore us. We're out of options.

Darren

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Darren

Click here to see my video answer


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Q and A: What's the best way to optimize a Flash site?

Dear Kalena...

I've got a Web design company, and some clients ask me about SEO. One client has an all Flash designed web site. I've read about Javascript SWFObject and a DIV with search engine accessible primary content. But, is it really a good technique? Some people say it can be dangerous and penalized. What's the truth? Can you help me?

Roberto

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Roberto

Adobe Dreamweaver came out with some search-friendly Flash option a few years ago, but it's still pretty poor, in my opinion. If you have to use Flash, you're best off calling it from a separate (small) file to your search friendly page, which sounds like the method you mention. Nothing dodgy about that.

Better still, let the viewer decide: give them a Flash version and a flat HTML version and let them pick. Search engines will always index the flat version so your bases are covered.

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Q and A: How many times can I repeat a keyword before being penalized?

Dear Kalena...

How many times are you allowed to repeat a keyword within the H1, H2, H3... tags before you are penalized for it?

Emily

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Emily

Ah, this old chestnut. Pardon me for saying so, but you're logic is back-to-front. You are making the classic webmaster mistake of trying to engineer your site with search engines in mind. I know I sound like a broken record, but you should ALWAYS design for your audience first and foremost. Search engines, schmearch engines.

As for your Heading tags, there's no harm in using keywords within them, but create the headings so they make the most sense for your site visitors. Headings are ideal for breaking up the text on a page and making it easier to read. But they've got to be comfortable to read too. If you add too much keyword repetition, it will look and read very poorly. As for the keyword penalty threshold, search engines don't publish precise details of their filters but it's a no-brainer that keyword repetition will be picked up, as will excessive heading tags. Personally, I would stick with a single keyword instance per heading and no more than 2 or 3 heading tags per page.

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World First: Search Engine Wiki

We've done it! After many months of preparation, today we officially launched Search Engine Wiki (BETA). Search Engine Wiki is the world's first vertical wiki dedicated to search engines and search engine marketing. Here is the official press release.

The idea behind the site is to provide a collaborative online library of search engine marketing (SEM) resources, complete with resident librarian, Ms Parker (pictured). Some of the extensive resources found on the site include:

• Lists of international search engines - categorized by country, type and industry.
• A glossary of definitions for common terms used in Search Engine Optimization (SEO),
  Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
• A library of search engine marketing articles.
• Employment resources listing SEO, PPC and SEM job vacancies.
• A collection of popular search engine marketing blogs and news feeds.
• Frequently Asked Questions about search engines and SEM.
• Lists of popular search engine marketing tools and time saving software.
• Links to upcoming search industry conferences and events.
• Introductions to well known search industry personalities.

Search Engine Wiki is designed for interactivity. Wiki users can suggest resources and definitions to be added or sign up to become editors and add these resources themselves. Search Engine College students are also encouraged to collaborate and contribute to the Wiki during their training and beyond.

Search Engine Wiki is now in BETA release and welcomes your contributions and feedback.


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Q and A: How do you know what keywords are adequate for each page?

Dear Kalena...

I am just knowing your blog and I am admiring it because: first, you are a very savvy writer about the SEO subject; second, I can see that you have many readers in the FeedBurner feed; and, well, a PR of 5, not bad at all. My question is this: Many websites have no keywords in their pages. When I see the source code, nada. Of course many of these pages are really sales letters and maybe is not interesting for the owners to concern about meta tags. So, what is the best way to know which keywords are the more adequate for a certain page if I intend to use PPC as an affiliate? Thank you in advance and I would like to read your answer.

Regards,
Jesus in Mexico

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Jesus

Keyword research is a tricky business. Sites that don't use keywords within their visible text and META tags may not be looking to rank well in the organic SERPs. Perhaps they are using PPC landing pages, email marketing or social media to drive traffic. Or maybe they just don't know how to optimize their pages.

Targeting keywords is a different kettle of fish for SEO and PPC. If you are researching keywords to use within your regular site pages to help the site rank in the organic search results (SEO), I recommend using services such as KeywordDiscovery and WordTracker. WordTracker actually have a 15 percent discount offer on until the end of November, so be sure to use coupon code us-annual-15 if you decide to subscribe.

If you are looking for the best keywords to use for your PPC campaigns, I would recommend that you use the Google Keyword Tool, the Overture Keyword Selector and/or the keyword suggestion tool built into Yahoo Sponsored Search. If you plan to use landing pages for your PPC campaign, you don't necessarily need to optimize them for crawlers. If the page content is very similar on each, you might want to prevent them from being indexed by search bots anyway.

No matter what keyword research tools you plan to use, start your search by compiling a seed list of keywords and phrases that you imagine your potential customers/visitors might type in to search engines. Ask your family, friends and colleagues for more keyword ideas and build up your seed list until you feel confident you have exhausted all avenues. Then start using the keyword tools. You'll be amazed at how many more keyword combinations you'll find!


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Q and A: How well have we optimized our site?

Dear Kalena...

Last year I took both your SEO101 and SEO201 courses. They were very informative and I really appreciate your putting them out there for us. Shortly after completing the course we did a complete overhaul on our website and implemented many of the lessons learned from your class. I'd like to continue to improve my rankings on search engines and I'd like to begin by targeting my product pages. Can you have a look at them and give me some pointers, please.

Thank you
Jonathan

Kalena's Answer:

Hi Jonathan, nice to hear from you!

I've taken a quick look at your site and to be quite blunt, I don't see much evidence of our lessons in your SEO implementation. Maybe your web designer has changed things since you sent me this, but looking at the site today, quite a few things worry me:

1) Where are your optimized Title attributes and META tags? There was a whole lesson dedicated to this in SEO101. I can't find them on ANY page. This is mission critical.

2) Where are the search friendly URLs you learned were so important in SEO201? For example, This URL doesn't tell users or search engines anything about the page content.

3) Where's the 250 words of optimized text on each product page?

4) Is there really a need to use session ids? As stated in our lesson notes, Google has stated in the past that they don't index URLs that use session ids.

5) Your home page text seems optimized for a very narrow selection of keywords or the keyword density seems too low. For example I can only find one instance of the word "flower".

I could go on but you get the gist. May I suggest going over your course notes again, particularly Lessons 5 and 6 of SEO101.


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Q and A: What files do I need to transfer from a client site in order to optimize it?

Dear Kalena...

I have a good fundamental knowledge of SEO and HTML, but have no practical experience. As such, I need answers to the following questions please. In order to do SEO from a remote location, it's my understanding that I will need to do a transfer from an organization's storage server drive to my computer, using FTP and Internet Explorer. However, I don't know exactly what should be transferred to do the SEO work. I would really appreciate some input on this please.

Also, once I have made the changes, do I simply save them and transfer the revised work back to the organization? In addition, do I necessarily need to use Dreamweaver or a similar type of program to make the changes, or can I just hand-code the changes? Please add as much detail as you think appropriate when answering these question.

Thank-you very much.

Peter

Kalena's Answer:

Hi Peter

Geez, I would've expected a cup of coffee or two to answer all these! Here goes:

1) If you have no practical experience in SEO, you have no fundamental knowledge, it's that simple. Until you have actually optimized code, you really have very little knowledge of SEO.

2) Again, if you don't understand what needs to be transferred in order to do the SEO work, in my opinion, you don't know enough yet to successfully optimize a site.

Basically, to SEO a site, you need access to the HTML code of all pages being optimized. What I do is ask my client for FTP access to their site and then I download a full copy of the pages to be optimized, including the CSS files, javascript and any images used on the pages. This is so that the pages render correctly in my WYSIWYG page editor while I'm working on them.

I generally hand code the title and meta tags first, then do the actual code optimizing in a text editor (EditPlus is my current favorite), before importing all the changes into the HTML code and tweaking any on-page optimization in my WYSIWYG editor. You might find you don't need to view the page in WYSIWYG and that hand coding is all you need. Every SEO works differently.

3) Before you start the SEO, you should find out from your client whether they are happy for you to have full FTP access to their site and simply upload the optimized pages, or whether they want their in-house site admin to implement your SEO changes. If the latter is the case, I create detailed code instructions for each page, hand them over to the client and then check the integration for errors. Some clients will want to see what the page will look like before it goes live so they can approve/edit your changes. That's when a WYSIWYG version comes in handy - you can upload your optimized page versions to a test area on your server or theirs and highlight the changes for them. Other clients will be happy for you to just edit their live site. But you should always make a backup of the old versions of their pages, just in case.

If you are serious about SEO, I strongly suggest you take up one of our SEO training courses which take you through the optimization of a site, step-by-step, with set assignments to test the practical side of your knowledge. You should also volunteer to work on some sites while you find your feet. Practical experience should help you decide how much you know about SEO and how much left there is to learn.

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Q and A: Which type of page formatting is best for SEO purposes?

Dear Kalena...

For SEO and other purposes, in a simple medium sized site, using Dreamweaver - which method of formatting is best: using CSS, style, format or manually? Does it matter if a mixture is used, a result of having different people designing the site?

Thanks
Peter

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Peter

In terms of search engine compatibility, you should try to keep as much of your page formatting off the page as possible. The aim being to keep the HTML clean and reduce code bloat to ensure search robots can index it more easily.

So this means using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and external JavaScript files if you are using JavaScript menus. Need more info? Read this page about formatting web pages for better SEO.


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Q and A: Where can I find search engine optimization services at low cost?

Dear Kalena...

How can I find someone to optimize my site at a low cost? You listed 11 things (a Google penalty, dodgy code, hidden text, new competitors, 404 errors, keyword stuffing, fast acquisition of links, domain issues, major hosti­ng outages, over-optimization and code bloat) in your Site Pro News article. I wouldn't know where to start.

I am going to Africa for three months and I need someone to optimize my site while I am gone. How do I find someone to work on my site at a low rate?

Don

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Don

There are plenty of smaller SEO companies and freelance SEO experts that I'm sure would be interested in helping you. A good place to start is ELance, where you can post your project and let people out-bid each other to do the work. You can choose who you want to complete the project based on costs, experience and a host of other factors.

Failing that, you can search the SEO Consultants Directory for a lower cost SEO provider. All companies listed in the Directory are required to meet stringent ethical and professional SEO standards before being listed.

Keep watching our Search Engine College Jobs Board because soon we will be launching a new projects area on there where companies can list small jobs and SEM projects they need help with.

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Q and A: Do you really need to hide optimization from Google?

Dear Kalena...

What do you think of this article by Jill Whalen? This goes against everything I’ve learned; you need to SEO your sites but “under the Google radar” so that they don’t think you are SEOing but optimized your site by accident?

What’s a SEOer to do?

Thanks,
Reid

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Reid

I've known Jill a long time and I get where she's coming from. Basically, she means you shouldn't follow a particular formula for optimizing web sites. There are no strict rules, don't get bogged down counting keywords or the number of characters in your META Descriptions. Don't stress about having keywords in your ALT IMG attributes or using H1 tags on every page. Just improve the compatibility of your pages with searchers and visitors.

I don't agree with her idea that Google may penalize any sites they think are optimized, but I do agree that Google probably looks for over-optimized sites, especially those that use keywords in their domain names and things like that. I also agree with this statement:

"If you've done it right, an everyday user should not have any idea that a page has been SEO'd."

It's quite true - a beautifully optimized and copywritten web site should no show obvious signs that it has been SEO'd. As I say in the SEO courses I teach, I don't recommend you obsess about keyword density or backwards engineering the search algorithms. Just design and optimize a web page with your visitors in mind and the rankings will usually follow.


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Q and A: Should we outsource SEO or take it in-house?

Dear Kalena...

Our company is looking into doing SEO for all of our publication and trade show websites. They feel that we need to outsource because a consultant did it for their company, versus keeping the knowledge in-house (either hiring or training staff).

Do you feel that if writers are trained to write for the web and a staff member is adequately trained, we need to outsource? We have about 45 websites.

Thank you
Gabrielle

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Gabrielle

The decision of whether to outsource SEO or manage it in-house is a difficult one. There is no "right way" because the requirements of each business are so different. But the job of optimizing 45 web sites is a large one and I doubt you could manage this effectively in-house without hiring several specialist SEO staff.

If the company you work for has used outside SEO consultants in the past, you need to discuss how well that relationship worked for them and whether it was cost-effective. Were the desired results achieved? Was it value for money? Could in-house staff have achieved the same results for less cost?

Unless a company is willing to hire a dedicated staff member to look after search engine optimization for their site/s, or send their existing staff for fast-track SEO training, my inclination is to recommend outsourcing, for the following reasons:

1) SEO has a steep learning curve and it could take your in-house staff many months and/or years to learn the ropes. Outsourcing it to professionals will save a lot of time (and therefore money).

2) A little bit of SEO knowledge can be a dangerous thing - the person/s optimizing your sites need to know *exactly* what the consequences are of the code changes they are making, or else they could end up doing your site more harm than good.

3) Successful SEO requires very specific knowledge and experience gained from years of trial and error optimizing web sites. It is unlikely your in-house staff have this knowledge and so you will likely get much better results by outsourcing to professionals.

4) Optimizing web sites is not your core business. Your staff should be focused on the core business of your company. Also, staff members assigned a new task of SEO are unlikely to dedicate themselves fully to the task if they have other responsibilities as well.

In my opinion, the best balance could be achieved by outsourcing a percentage of the work (e.g. the optimization of 5 web sites) to a professional SEO firm with a solid reputation and have them work closely with your in-house copywriting team to ensure the optimized web sites accurately reflect your business without compromising search engine compatibility.

If the arrangement works well, you can outsource optimization of the remaining web sites or bring it in-house if you feel that would serve you better. Best of luck!


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Macho SEO Pissing Competitions

I really can't stand SEO competitions. You know the ones, where somebody picks a search query and SEOs compete to have their site rank the highest within a certain time frame. They're nothing but look at me! macho pissing competitions, in my opinion. Participants might as well just unzip their pants, compare sizes and get it over with.

I said as much to the instigator of the latest comp who sent me an email this week hyping up the latest competition and telling me I'd been "selected" as a potential participant due to my status as a "skilled SEO provider". The latest silly competition is promoting (laughably) the title of World's Best SEO for the winner.

Oh come ON! I can assure you that any SEO worth his or her salt will be waaaaay too busy with real clients to take part in such juvenile, time-wasting antics. And no, I'm not going to post the URL.

Ok, bitchfest over.


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Q and A: Where can I find a draft SEO contract?

Dear Kalena...

I’m looking for a good draft of an SEO contract. Do you have any suggestions about where I can obtain one? I’ve found a few on the internet but they’re not quite what I was looking for. I know that whatever I get I will end up adapting it.

Gary

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Gary

I was on a similar search for a good SEO contract a few years ago when I stumbled across Proposal Kit. They include a very detailed SEO contract within their Proposal Kit Pro product and their Contract Kit Pro.

Here is the review I wrote about Proposal Kit's SEO contract. Please note that the links in that article are my affiliate links so I get a small commission if you purchase from them.

But if you happen to like their proposal packs and DO decide to purchase, make sure you mention coupon code WEBRANK to get 10% discount on your purchase.

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Q and A: Why isn't my blogging helping my SEO efforts?

Here's a recent exchange on LiveHelp with blog reader Jerry, who is concerned that his blog efforts aren't paying SEO dividends:

Jerry: Hi kalena, I'm writing like crazy but not bumping my seo juice. I was hoping for advice
kalena : how are you syndicating your articles?
Jerry : I'm not. I'm just blogging.
kalena : Ah. Have you registered your blog with as many blog directories as possible?
kalena : Do you make it super easy for readers to find your RSS feed?
Jerry : technorati and blogpulse
Jerry : yes, I use addthis
kalena : do you Digg etc your own posts?
Jerry : No, i haven't figured digg out yet. That's one I want to work on
Jerry : What about syndicating?
kalena : If you think your post is unique enough, you should Digg it yourself. Digg will tell you if there are posts on the same subject, but usually you can Digg your own
Jerry : Okay. That sounds like a good tip. I think it's very unique
kalena : yes, if you can encourage other sites and bloggers to syndicate your own blog feed, that's a good way to get traffic
kalena : It helps if you can get bloggers in the same industry to link to or comment on your posts
Jerry : How do I find them to ask them? My blog about memoirs is so unique I have not found too many like it
kalena : Do searches for popular sites and blogs on your subject matter and simply email them and ask for a link. Or send them a post that you think they'd like.
Jerry : Okay. But I get stuck in blogosphere when I search. I've been doing this for 4 months and still haven't got the hang of finding similar blogs
kalena : Try writing a few longer posts or mini articles on your blog. They are the ones that usually get traffic. Or create a useful tool for other memoir writers to use
Jerry : They are ALL articles
Jerry : I'm cranking out some of my best writing ever
kalena : Try creating a free account at helium.com. They are looking for new writers and you can link back to your blog.
Jerry : huh. That's new. Okay I'll try that
kalena : Hold on for a sec, I have a great list of article distribution sites...
Jerry : NEAT!
kalena : Ok, here is the URL: http://www.searchenginecollege.com/hub/weblinks.php?cat_id=52
kalena : Also, you can join Yahoo Groups and do a search for Article Announcement groups. These are places where you can submit your articles for free to thousands of sites who will re-publish them with your link
Jerry : That sounds perfect.
kalena : Glad to help.
Jerry : Thanks so much for your time!! This is awesome. I think I already have you on my blogroll
Jerry : If you have a moment I have a couple technical questions
kalena : Just a quickie as I am grading assignments
Jerry : Thanks! I started with the ugly default slug
Jerry : Should I go back and fix them with pretty permalinks?
Jerry : AND another question. Can I repost them, or does that get me in trouble with google for double posting.
Jerry : permalink
kalena : Re permalinks, if you have a look at the titles of my blog posts, they are permanent links.
Jerry : yes, they look great. All my first 4 months were ugly
kalena : You can add code to your Blogger template to ensure all your article/blog post headings are permanent links
kalena : Don't know about double posting, but why would you want to do that?
Jerry : Two reasons. I had SO LITTLE traffic my first few months, I don't want them to be lost
Jerry : And 2, the permalinks the first time were those ugly looking ?p=232" or whatever
kalena : I'll email you the code to create permalinks out of your blog post titles:
Jerry : Thanks Kalena. You've been awesome. Thanks for taking the time.
kalena : ok I'll shoot it through when I get time.
kalena : You're welcome. Good luck with the syndication
Jerry : Thanks
kalena : bye


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Q and A: Is it better to use a database or build individual web pages for each product?

Dear Kalena...

I was thinking of starting an e-commerce site and wanted to ask for your opinion regarding information of the individual products. Is it better to simply build a separate web page for each product rather than storing them in a database? This way search engines should be able to crawl them and I may get more visitors.

Thank You,
Daniel

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Daniel

It's difficult to answer this question without knowing your range of products. Assuming your product range doesn't extend into the hundreds and the specs for your products won't change regularly, I would create a dedicated web page for each product that has it's own URL e.g. www.site.com/catalog/product74855.htm rather than having a single catalog page with dynamically generated product pages like www.site.com/catalog.asp?productid=74855 and www.site.com/catalog.asp?productid=74856 etc.

When a database is used to generate content, some search engines will only ever index a single page. For example, in the situation above, the URL www.site.com/catalog.asp would be indexed but the product pages wouldn't be viewed as pages in their own right. Having flat product pages also gives you the opportunity to optimize each one for unique target keywords relating specifically to their content.

With the increasing uptake of the sitemaps protocol, search engines are getting better at indexing dynamic content, but why take the risk? You might as well make your site as findable as possible right? With large e-commerce sites, you've rarely got any choice but to use a database. The solution here is to use one in conjunction with mod_rewrite to ensure each page has it's own "static" URL.

If your product information changes on a regular basis, another solution that a colleague of mine uses is to have a database that generates a dynamic main page for each product, but to manually create a flat product description page that appears when persons click on a "more information" link within the main page. This description page can have a product image on it and optimized descriptive text that can be edited whenever the product is updated. As long as you provide a way for search engines to easily find it, this type of content makes juicy spider food.

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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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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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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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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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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.

These companies are simply keeping up appearances, investing heavily in Internet technology because their competitors are doing the same."

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

Dear Kalena...

Can you please help us? I just came across your site and you seem very knowledgeable.

Our problem is Google! Our site has been active for a few years now at www.theforeverrose.com We were once #1 for the search "the forever rose" (and ranked well for a few others as well). But we have been gradually slipping, now we are in position 90 for "the forever rose" and off the charts for others?

Our PageRank was once a three and gradually dropped to now 0. We cannot figure out why and things keep getting worse. We strictly follow all of Google's rules and ethics, we rank fine in Yahoo and MSN. I am tired of hearing the obvious; more links, more pages, better content, SEO.... etc, we have been doing that. I feel like we are just missing something really simple, something right in front of our eyes, something that is penalizing us!

Can you please help? Any of your help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You,
Mike

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Mike

A quick check of your site with the Google Site Status tool shows that pages from your site are included in the index, but that Google may not know about all your site pages. The site was last indexed by Googlebot on 25 April and you have one backward link displayed by Google but 81 backlinks shown on Yahoo.

Your home page has a Google Toolbar PageRank of zero and some pages have greyed out PageRank and no cache, suggesting they haven't been indexed. Curiously, Google is showing 46 pages from your site in their index, while Yahoo is only showing 25 pages indexed. The fact that the site has already aged and used to have a much higher PageRank may suggest a penalty of some kind.

But there could be a few explanations for your poor PageRank and lack of rankings:

1) You are using a black page background but you then have a table on it with a white background and black text. Some search engines will see this as black text on a black background. It's possible that this may be tripping spam filters.

2) Your site is built using old technology and contains a lot of code bloat. Tables are clunky and difficult for search spiders to index and Googlebot may have tripped up on your code and not indexed all your pages.

3) Your home page contains keyword repetition for the words "rose" and "roses". I don't think the repetition is excessive, but it may have triggered some type of suppression filter in Google.

4) Your site has poor link popularity and the sites that link to you tend to have a very low quality score and no PageRank e.g. cufflinksdepot.com/dir-gifts.htm and escapesportif.com/resources/gifts.html. You don't have enough incoming links pointing to your site from what Google calls "trusted sites" - popular directories, portals and authoritative sites in your industry. Your internal links could also use some work from an anchor text angle.

5) Most of your site pages might be stuck in Google's supplemental index, colloquially (but unfairly) known as Google Hell. Google's Matt Cutts explains why some sites have the bulk of the pages moved to the supplemental results:

"If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit)."

Here's what you should do to address the problems:

1) For better indexing, consider upgrading the site design away from tables to clean HTML and use CSS for formatting. Until you do that, change the background of all pages to white to avoid any potential hidden text penalties from your table layout.

2) Run your site through a text-editor such as Lynx to see what search engines see when they index your site. Verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools and check the diagnostics for potential indexing problems.

3) Optimize your site from scratch. You should make sure your site is search engine compatible and optimized for a wider range of target search keywords and phrases rather than the obvious ones.

4) Create and upload an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps or use the new Sitemaps Protocol in your robots.txt file to tell search engines where to find your XML sitemap. I like to use the free XML Sitemaps Generator to create my sitemaps.

5) Commence a link building campaign pronto. This campaign should include submitting your site to all the major and minor directories and search engines where the site doesn't currently feature, as well as niche directories and portal sites in your specific industry. Where possible, anchor text incorporating your target keywords should be used within the links. My consulting company can take care of link building for you if you like.


Once changes to your site code have been made and you have achieved some good quality links, most of your problems should disappear. If the problems persist, file a re-inclusion request with Google, explaining what might have triggered penalties and what changes you've made to address the issues. Although technically your site hasn't been excluded from the Google index, this should prompt a review of your site by Google's anti-spam team and hopefully result in any suppression penalties being lifted.

Good luck and let us know how you get on!

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Q and A: Can you give advice to an SEO Beginner?

Dear Kalena...

I am glad to know you as one of the SEO Consultants, I am SEO beginner and want to learn more tips on seo.

I want you to suggest, comment or whatever advice to improve my learnings in SEO, please see my website www.webdesignervisayas.tk and please comment and suggest.

Cartujano

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Cartujano

In terms of learning SEO, there are almost unlimited resources. You can read articles, blogs, forums, e-books and sites about the subject and here is a good starting point for those. You should also practise and tweak your skills as much as possible on as many web sites as you can.

If you are interested in training options, you can take a course such as those we offer at Search Engine College. David Temple has authored a very detailed article about the various Search Marketing Training options available which will be appearing in the next issue of Search Marketing Standard magazine, so make sure you catch that.

With regards to your site, I'm sorry but I don't provide free site assessments. These are available via my hourly consulting rates (contact me for more details). What I will say is that any site that has a META refresh embedded in the home page and a pop-up ad on the redirect page is more than likely going to send a big red flag to search engines.

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Q and A: Is it better to use more text on a single page from an SEO perspective?

Dear Kalena...

Having just bribed you with a coffee, I have a question which might be interesting to other readers. Say a web site has 500 words of text. Would the site have a higher Google PageRank if all the text was on one page (using scroll bars) as opposed to spreading over 5 pages?

For example the home page of the Oz site (http://www.lowercall.com.au/index.html) is currently spread over 4 web pages. The latter pages do not have any PageRank whereas the first page does. Is there any reason why we should not put all the text on one page and use a scroll bar?

Kind regards
Mike

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Mike

Thanks for the coffee top-up, I really need it this week! Let me make some comments on your situation:

1) I seriously hope your entire site contains more than 500 words of text. For pages to do well in the search engines, they usually require around 250-300 words of text each, as a minimum. In my experience, a web site with less than five text-heavy pages does not perform well in search engines.

2) I'm assuming you are looking at the green bar PageRank in the Google Toolbar? Let's just get one thing straight here. That little green bar is NOT a true indication of your site's Google PageRank. That figure is known only to Google. It's not even a close approximation these days, because it is only updated when the Toolbar software is updated and by then your site's true PageRank score has changed dramatically anyway. So it's always out of date. You shouldn't be looking at that green bar at all.

3) Generally, a page with more text on it will perform better than a short page with very little text. This is because a page with more text provides more information to search engines about your site. It also generally contains more keywords and keyword phrases so it can be compared to search queries and found to be a more relevant match to a wider range of search queries. But the PageRank of a page is not dependent on the amount of text on that page, it is dependent on a wide number of on-page and off-page factors, only some of which are within your control.

4) In my opinion, you should concentrate on fleshing out the pages of your site dramatically. The site is not performing well in search engines because there is so little content available to visitors and bots. The site is also not very search engine compatible in terms of navigation and tag optimization. You should implement text links to make it easier for search robots to find and index all your pages and you should have an SEO expert review your Title Tags, META Tags and visible copy.

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Q and A: Does the use of bold or italics tags add relevancy weight in search engines?

Dear Kalena...

A quick question - How much added value is there to placing keyword text within bold, strong, italics, or emphasis tags in terms of the weight given to those terms by search engines?

Thanks,
Adam

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Adam

Just like a healthy diet, everything in moderation is the key to a search engine compatible page. Yes, if you use bold/strong or italics to highlight text on your page, the search engines will assume you consider the content of that text to be important.

Same goes for the use of H1, H2 tags etc. If you consider certain keyword strings important enough to emphasize via headings, it is my understanding that the search engines will give the content between the tags slightly higher relevancy weight than content outside the tags. But don't go overboard and emphasize too much content, or you will defeat the whole purpose of making certain keywords stand out. You'll also annoy your readers - there's nothing worse than trying to read a web page that has been over-formatted. Overuse of such tags might also trigger anti-sp@mdexing filters.

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Q and A: Why does my site ranking fluctuate so much in Google and Yahoo?

Dear Kalena...

What do you think about recent changes going in Google and Yahoo search? Because I have seen that my site in Yahoo was on top but now I am not able to find it on any pages though I can see that my site is there in Yahoo by site. So what can you suggest about this?

Kind regards,
Huned

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Huned

Search engines are constantly in a state of flux. Think about how many new pages are added to the Internet on a daily basis. Now think about how many different computers around the world are required to hold all this information. Top that with the number of idiots trying to game the system or crack the search algorithms and you've got the problems that Google and Yahoo face.

It's only natural that your site will ebb and flow within the search results. The major engines need to shuffle their content between data-centers and tweak their relevancy algorithms on a regular basis. Instead of concentrating on what rank your site is on any particular day, try checking the search engine compatibility and the usability of your site for visitors. If it can be better, improve it! The more improvements that you make in these areas , the more likely you are to see your site rank higher in the search results.

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Q and A: How can I increase my site traffic and my AdSense commission?

Dear Kalena...

My site is www.shopitonline.co.uk, and it's been up since November 2005. The traffic I am getting now is near enough to 3000 visitors per month.

I would really like to increase this traffice substantially, and also increase the Google Adsense commission. The Google Adsense has been on for just about a month, and the commission is next to nothing. How can I improve these 2 areas?

Thanks
Saleem

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Saleem

I no longer see Google AdSense ads on your site - perhaps you've removed these since you submitted your question? There are a lot of ways to increase your AdSense commissions. Most of them are listed in my article: Top 10 AdSense Tricks to Boost Your Commission. But be warned, Google has changed the rules for AdSense publishers since this article was written so you should check with their revised AdSense Policies before using any of the suggested tips.

Now, about bringing more traffic to your site, I would start with correctly optimizing it for target keywords. Here are just a few of the many problems with your site:

1) Your Title Attributes are too long, incorrectly formatted and stuffed with too many keywords. Your Title Tag should be a grammatically correct sentence of no more than 15 words, containing 2 or 3 target search keywords/phrases.

2) Your META Keywords Tag is too long and stuffed with too many keywords and contains keyword repetition which may trigger search engine spam filters.

3) Your META Description Tag isn't enticing enough and contains highly generic keywords which won't attract buyers for your individual products. Your Description Tag is often used by search engines and directories to list your site so you want to ensure it is written in a way that attracts clicks.

4) You use the same Title and META Tags on EVERY page of your site! You should create tailored Title and META tags for each and every page of your site, based on keyword relevant to the page content. That way you are creating multiple entrances into your site instead of relying on the front door.

5) Your site contains query strings and presents dynamic content for each page (e.g. http://www.shopitonline.co.uk/default.asp?cat=43), meaning some search engines will have difficulty finding all your content and treat your site as having a single page. If you don't want to redesign the site, you should consider using flat HTML pages for your most important category content or integrating a parameter workaround to switch the dynamic URLs into static ones.

6) I know your site is a directory, but you are trying to target too many generic products and categories with a single set of Title and META Tags. This is a complete waste of time. You should be dividing your content into various themes and optimizing each area for keywords relating to that theme.

In relation to gaining more traffic - I notice your link popularity scores are pretty low. You probably need to conduct a long term link building campaign and attract one-way incoming links from high quality sites and other directories. Try contacting sites that contain large lists of directories and search engines and asking them to link to you. You could also try a Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign on Google AdWords and/or Yahoo! Search Marketing to promote your free directory submission.

Good Luck!

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Q and A: Is Web 2.0 an SEO Killer?

Dear Kalena...

I have been doing link building for a local SEO firm for a couple of years now. I want to learn more but the person I sub-contract for seems reluctant to teach more than bits and pieces. Never the whole picture. After reading your article 11 Reasons Why You Should Consider A Job In Search Engine Marketing, I mentioned wanting to learn more since it looks the future is good in this industry. Her response was: "Just because SEO is hot today doesn't mean with more Web 2.0 functionality coming down the road it couldn't change all that in a very short time".

Is this a belief held by the majority of the industry? I would like to know that I am putting my energy into something that will be around for a while.

Thanks
Sue

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Sue

It sounds like you should find a new employer! It's interesting that somebody working in SEO is so sceptical about its future. Regardless of her personal opinion, not embracing the opportunity to educate you about search engine compatible design (and that's what SEO is in a nutshell) seems very short-sighted. Perhaps she's concerned that you will indeed learn more than her and take her job?

I can assure you that the majority of us working in SEO have no immediate concern about its continuing viability. Traditional search engine optimization methods may change over time as we move towards a Web 2.0 approach to design and collaboration, but there will always be a market for consulting to make sites more search engine compatible, user friendly and accessible.

What you need to do is expand your skills to a range of areas aside from link building (think blogging, search-friendly design, web site copywriting, usability etc.) so that you will be ready to meet the market demand that continues to grow. Good luck!

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Q and A: Can you please suggest improvements to my web site?

Dear Kalena...

I enjoy your Q. & A. column and note from your profile that you enjoy looking at new websites. I invite you to take a moment and give my website a look at www.thetreeofselfrealization.com especially the section on partnerships.

Please feel free to ask questions and to make suggestions for its improvement. Your comments will be greatly appreciated and helpful as I try to reach my target audience.

Sincerely,

John

Kalena's Answer:

Hi John

Lots of things will improve your site's search engine compatibility. Here are just a few suggestions:

• Your title tag only contains the phrase "The Tree of Self Realization". Unless persons know the name of your site, they are not going to type that phrase into search engines. You need to expan on your title tag to include logical search keywords relating to your content.
  
  
• Your home page HTML is missing a META Description Tag. This tag is often used by search engines to describe your site in their search results pages, so it shouldn't be excluded.
  
  
• Your navigation menu is entirely graphical, meaning search engines can't index it. I suggest changing it or supplementing it with a text-based menu.
  
  
• Your home page copy consists of long paragraphs of text. People don't read on the web, they scan. So you need to break up long pieces of copy with headings and bullet points if you want them seen.
  
  
• There's no site map. A site map is important for usability and also to enable search engines to find and index all the pages on your site.
  

Happy Editing!

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Q and A: Is SEO still a lucrative industry?

Dear Kalena...

Is SEO still a lucrative industry? Is the industry very saturated?

Thanks in advance
Jimmy

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Jimmy

My opinion is that there will always be a place for SEO because there is and there will continue to be a demand for consultants to help make websites more compatible with search engines.

The SEOs that will survive and prosper are the ones that are able to adapt to the changing requirements of the industry. For example, most traditional search engine optimization firms have had to embrace and add pay-per-click advertising to their range of services due to the growth of this field and resulting high demand from clients.

In terms of industry saturation - the survivors know that you need a niche in order to be successful. There are a million SEO firms, but how many specialize in the real estate industry? Or offer foreign language SEO? Or offer free SEO to charities? You just have to find a niche and stand out within it. As Matt Cutts points out, there are a LOT of niches.

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Motherlode of all Search Engine Blogs

Someone was asking me for a list of my favorite search blogs. I finally completed the list and here it is...

read more | digg story

Google Code Search Engine Reveals SEO Blunders

I've been waiting a LONG time for this. Google Code Search is now live in the Labs. You can now search any published HTML code for keywords, HTML syntax and SEO tricks.

Want to see who is still using the mythical "revisit-after" META Tag? Try this search.

Fun for all the family.
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Q and A: Should I set up a forum on my site for SEO purposes?

Dear Kalena...

Great blog! I wish mine was so successful. Anyway, the question I'd like to ask you is about forums. I'm setting us a new web site bestonlinedating.eu where I'd like to include a forum.

Having little experience in the broad SEO field, I cannot justify if setting up a forum for my web site would be beneficial in terms of search engine optimisation. Does Google & others love forums? Any suggestion from you would be most appreciated.

Regards,
Danka

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Danka

Thanks for the blog feedback, I appreciate it.

Regarding setting up a forum, you've got your priorities all wrong. When making changes to your site, you can't let search engines rule your decisions! You should always grow your site development strategy based on the needs of your site visitors, NOT because of some supposed search engine advantage.

Forums can be a good way to add fresh content and new pages (threads) to your site on a regular basis, but as far as any search engine benefits go, it's the same as everything else. It's the quality of the content you add and it's popularity with your site visitors that will benefit you, not the fact it is a forum.

Do you have time to run and monitor a forum on a regular basis? Can you locate, implement and update reliable forum software? Do you have the traffic that is required to keep a forum active and interesting? Will a forum *really* add value to your site from a visitor perspective? These are the questions that should rule your decision.

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Q and A: Why have my SEO efforts pushed my Google rankings down?

Dear Kalena...

First of all, I wish to express my gratitude to you for taking time to answer all the various SEO questions raised. I have picked up a lot of quick tips through your blog, you’re really a darling, thank you.

As I have started experimenting with SEO just a few months back, I have been trying to optimize www.psoriasisandskinclinic.com for quite some time now. It is a website promoting and selling natural remedies to treat Skin Problems (eg. Psoriasis) and it’s a very competitive market. I started off by improving the usability of the site and its exposure. I have also included it in several PPC sites and trying to increase its reciprocal links.
However, recently I realized that instead of going up the generic rankings in Google, it actually fell and till now I can’t find any listings in the first 5 pages of Google search result at all if I type in several important search keywords.

Please Kalena, give me some advice as to what am I doing wrong or what can I do to improve the situation as I might lose my job if this trend continues. Much appreciated. Thank you.

Best Regards,
Joseph

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Joseph

Thanks for the blog back-slap, I appreciate it!

Regarding your site, you don't mention how new it is to the Internet. Judging by your very low Google Toolbar PageRank score and lack of listed backward links, I am assuming the site is under 9 months old. If I'm right, the site is undoubtedly still experiencing Google's aging delay for new sites and there's nothing to worry about. It's very common to see your site appear in the Google SERPs and then disappear for months.

Yahoo is showing at least 15 incoming links pointing to your site, so your link efforts appear to be working. You simply need to wait for Google to catch up.

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Q and A: Why has my design change had a negative impact on my Google rankings?

Dear Kalena...

I just came across your site after several weeks of cruising google and my old favorite, webmasterworld to no avail. If you have any insight to throw my way, I'd really appreciate it.

Urban Lowdown ( www.urbanlowdown.com) is about 4 years old and has gone through many growth spurts over the last year and a half as I've been making the site as optimized as possible, including changing the fundamental structure of the site, including navigation and design several times.

Every update I've made so far has, after an initial dip, has resulted in an increase in traffic (99% of which is driven by search engines, primarily google...)

Until the last update which I made a month and a half ago. I made a substantial design change, with some navigational changes, but nothing fundamental. The url structure is the same, my tags (h1 etc) are the same - there is nothing I can see that I've done which is
beyond cosmetic.

The result has been fairly disastrous. Two months ago I was 600+ unique visitors a day and 2,000 page loads. Since the last update, I am down to 150 - 200 uniques a day and holding there.

I am pretty baffled by this, although the main culprit seems to be my indexed (google) pages. I have sitemaps for all of my main sections and have several thousand pages which used to be indexed and are reflected by the sitemaps.

Over the last few weeks, my indexed pages have dropped to 200, up to 600, 900, and in the two hundreds again. Articles which used be rank in the top 5 don't even show up in the indexes any more. Urban Lowdown has been my pet project that I have done totally on my own time and money, and it's so depressing to watch what's been happening.

If you can shed any light on where exactly I may have screwed things up, I would be eternally grateful.

kind regards,
Gordon

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Gordon

It sounds like a typical case of Sandboxitis to me. Google almost always places an aging delay on newly launched sites, but sometimes existing sites that undergo a design change can trip a filter that places them in the Google Sandbox for an undisclosed period of time. While in the Sandbox, the site seems to disappear from the Google SERPs for related keywords and can sometimes only be found for the domain name or site name.

Naturally, this can cause webmasters to panic, but it usually wears off after a few months and the site re-emerges in the rankings once again. As for your site, you are showing a healthy Google Toolbar PageRank of 5 out of 10, over 11,800 pages indexed by Google and 74 backward links pointing to your site from other sites, indicating no serious damage. I think you simply have to play the waiting game for a few weeks and things will naturally revert to normal.

In the meantime, you might want to lessen your reliance on Google for traffic and start marketing your site via other channels.

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Q and A: Why doesn't our client's site generate business?

Dear Kalena...

What's wrong with our client's site? It's at http://www.holidaymode.com.au/

Our client is slow with feedback, but every now and again they let me know not much business is being generated.

The site has been through a few changes to attempt to enhance it and to make it user friendly. The Itinerary planner doesn't get used much – too complicated? The site seems to be indexed OK.

It's a highly competitive market and I'm about to suggest to them that the site's ready for another complete update. They're not willing to use PPC.

Your expert assessment will be much appreciated.

Ros

Kalena's Answer:

Hi Ros

Nice to hear from you again. I've had a look at your client's site and it seems to be well-indexed by Google as you said. I see that 479 pages have been indexed and the last cache was updated on June 22. A couple of suggestions:

1) The site currently uses "|" symbols in the title tags. I'm not sure if all search engines are able to index these. Some symbols such as "&" and "%" and "#" can act as stop signs for search robots and can prevent them from indexing all of the HTML code. I'd remove them and use hyphens instead

2) The META Description tag on the home page isn't formatted in sentences. It's simply a bunch of keywords stuffed together and it looks like a META Keywords tag instead. Because some search engines display the content of the META Description tag on their search results pages, you want to format the tag so that it is in readable, logical sentences that are enticing enough to make viewers click on the site listing. Your current description may be putting potential visitors off.

How new is the site? I notice it hasn't yet built up much link popularity. If the site has only recently been launched, you might find it is still suffering from Google's aging delay for competitive keyword rankings as discussed in detail here. While you and your client wait it out, ensure the site is submitted to niche directories and start building on those backward links.

If the traffic is building but the conversions aren't, you might encourage your client to invest in a professional usability review to see what's causing visitors to drop out somewhere between click and conversion. I highly recommend Usability Effect for providing this service. If you mention SEC in the comment box of the order form, you'll get 10% off your invoice.

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Q and A: Do we need unique titles on each page?

Dear Kalena...

Its me again in Koh Samui.

I have been reading your site again with much interest and used the Sitemap Generator which, for me, threw up some odd results. The "Title" of our pages is:

"Ko Samui Properties:Ko Samui Properties Real Estate Houses Land"

and the site map seems to pick up just the "Title" of the web pages.

The photographs of the properties are in folders indexed by our reference numbers eg AB 495 and show as "Un title page" and the photographs are linked to the individual property web page.

The site map does not seem to recognise individual web pages relating to the individual properties except by the standard header which is the same for each page.

If this is what the Search Engine is seeing, then I presume it is not adequate but is this really a problem, or should we look at changing the Title on each web page?

Many thanks for your assistance.

Harry

Kalena's Answer:

Hi Harry

The Sitemap Generator is simply creating a list of all the pages on your site and it is naming them using the content of your Title Attribute on each page. So any pages that have duplicate titles, will show up as the same page name multiple times but with different links.

Same goes for your photographs pages. You are seeing "Un title page" for these pages because that is the content you have specified in the Title Attribute in the HTML on those pages.

You should always create unique Title Attributes and META Tags for each and every page of your site. The content of the tags should reflect the unique content of each page e.g. Koh Samui houses, Koh Samui land etc.

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Q and A: How does Google PageRank work?

Dear Kalena...

I found your page and you seem to know what youre talking about.

I have recently started a site with game related downloads (www.gameupdates.org). The site has only been around since January but have grown fast.

Now to the question.

Google recently updated the pagerank but I don't get it how it works. The only page with PR before the update was the main page www.gameupdates.org with a PR of one. After the update the index page still have a pagerank of one but almost every other page got a pagerank of five. I'm confused here, why don't I get a higher PR on the index page? ..

Thanks
Tomas

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Tomas

First up, you should never rely on the Google Toolbar PageRank to be an accurate indicator of your PageRank. Your true Google PageRank is known only to Google and does not necessarily reflect the PageRank you see in your Google Toolbar. You can learn more about how PageRank works here.

That said, it is a little unusual for your home page PageRank to show a lower score than inner pages, but it's not rare. It simply means that:

1) More sites are linking to or talking about inner pages such as http://www.gameupdates.org/browse.php

2) Google believes your inner pages are more relevant to particular search queries than your top level home page.

Given that most of your audience would bookmark or navigate straight to your inner pages such as downloads and updates and skip your home page altogether, this makes total sense.

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Q and A: What does this Google guideline mean?

Dear Kalena...

I am new to your blog and I enjoyed visiting it again today.
You have a new regular visitor.

Thanks for the link to the Google guidelines. I understood most of it but I would appreciate clarification of what they mean by both parts of the first guideline:

"Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link."

(I do my own HTML. The site is very basic.)

Thanks,
Betsy

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Betsy

Thanks for the blog feedback, it's great to be reassured sometimes that people are actually reading this thing! Now to your question.

What Google means by that statement is that your site navigation structure (menu) should be straight-forward and each page should have at least one link pointing to it from within your site. The easiest way to achieve this is to create a site map with text links pointing to every page on your site. This is to enable Google to find and index all your pages and also to help visitors. Then you can put a link to your site map on your home page or within your navigation menu.

Hope this helps!

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SEO Crossword Puzzle

You're going to like this one. All you procrastinating SEOs, check out the SEO Crossword Puzzle from Bill Cook and see how fast you can solve it. I did pretty well, would've finished in less than 10 minutes, but I couldn't for the life of me think why one of the answers wouldn't fit and it took me an extra 5 to realize I'd misspelt it.

And any Search Engine College students reading this, I'm expecting you to know ALL the answers!
Heck, I might add this crossword to our curriculum :-) Backscratch goes to Jennifer at Search Engine Guide.

Q and A: What else can I do to increase rankings?

Dear Kalena...

I saw an article you posted in a search engine newsletter I get daily and found it very interesting. I work for an online business and we have been really trying to increase our rankings over the last few months. At this point, I don't know what else to do! We have increased our inbound links, optimized pages, removed all duplicate content (this was an issue originally)...adsense an pay-per-click doesn't make sense for us at this point (budgetary concerns).... any suggestions?

Marisa

Kalena's Answer:

Hi Marisa

I can see a few issues straight away:

1) Your top level domain redirects to a page within a sub-directory: i.e. http://site.com/store/Default.asp. This appears to be set up at the server level, so possibly a 301 is in place. Problem is, search engines consider content at the top domain level to be the most important and they usually give pages at that level a higher PageRank and relevancy score than pages buried deeper in sub-directories. You might want to consider moving your home page to the top level where search engines are expecting it to be i.e. http://www.site.com/default.asp

2) Your title attributes are too long and contain too many keywords. Consider shortening them to read as a logical sentence and just include one or two key phrases instead of trying to stuff so many keywords in there.

3) Many of your pages contain session IDs (e.g. http://www.site.com/store/dept-data.asp?dept_id=3050). From my understanding of their webmaster guidelines, Google doesn't index pages containing session IDs so much of your content is unlikely to be found in Google. See Google's Webmaster Guidelines for more information on this issue.

4) The Google Toolbar PageRank displays a 4 out of 10 for your home page and 40 backward links. You can improve on this considerably (and likely boost your ranking) if you proactively seek out one-way inbound links to your site from high quality directories or popular sites with a similar theme to yours.

To ensure your important content is always indexed, keep it within your top 2 directory levels, avoid session ids in your URLs and submit an XML sitemap to Google SiteMaps.

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Q and A: Can I ask you a million questions?

Dear Kalena...

My name is Per-Otto. I work in Sweden as a Consultant and Gestalt therapist. While being part time sick 5 years ago I learned html and started to manage my own website. Since then I am doing everything myself. I am subscribed to several webmaster newsletters among others Site Pro News. This has been very useful.

I want to keep my site as clean as possible and write everything in html and lately in xhtml using frontpage only to view the site. I am very good at optimizing and have been top ten in the major search engines for the last 3-4 years and I am very often number one for short phrases and two word combinations in my main niches.

My site has grown into a cluster with several sub domains having their own domain names. The title of the main site is www.samtalspartner.se with the English counterpart www.dialoguepartner.com. I also have several sites in the outdooracivity nische the main site being www.rekreation.biz.

I would like it if you look at my site(s) and give me advice if there is anything important I have missed. Since it is a hell of a job to change my layout and other things that concerns all sites I will probably start using CSS soon but have not had the time to learn it.

I have some questions. If I want to start using Google AdSense advertising is it possible to just let some very specified customer in to the site? On my main site advertising will be Counterproductive and seem unprofessional if it is not very fitting for the site. On my recreationsite(s) it will be easier but is still important that it stays proper and is clearly connected to the theme of the site.

I am just building a new site called personalcoaching.se. I have put a lot of keywords on the main page but no other text. Could this be seen as keyword stuffing and make me banned?
See link: http://www.samtalspartner.se/personalcoaching/indexny03.html. Could you give me your best advice for learning CSS quickly?

Lately I succeded in grabbing the eu domain: unionsite.eu. Do you have any advice on how to use it or maybe where to sell it? (I also have weblogeu.com, weblogyou.com, weblogglobal.com, digablog.com and some others, but most of my sites are for the Swedish public).

Hope you can give me some advice.

Per-Otto

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Per-Otto

That is a LOT of questions for a single blog post. I will take them one at a time:

1) I would like it if you look at my site(s) and give me advice if there is anything important I have missed.

Sorry, but I don't do site consultations for free. That falls under my hourly consulting service.

2) If I want to start using Google AdSense advertising is it possible to just let some very specified customers in to the site?

No. You have very little control over who views your site or what ads your site shows. You can however request that ads from particular domains are excluded from displaying on your site.

3) I am just building a new site called personalcoaching.se. I have put a lot of keywords on the main page but no other text. Could this be seen as keyword stuffing and make me banned? See link: http://www.samtalspartner.se/personalcoaching/indexny03.html.

I've had a look at the first site and it looks like a parked domain with only links to another site and no content. Because it's not in English, I can't be sure so I can't help you. The second link leads to a page that is not in English either, but it looks as though it contains very little content and simply a list of keywords and links. I think you've answered you're own question there.

4) Could you give me your best advice for learning CSS quickly?

Not really. I'm not an expert in CSS and I'm not aware of any sites where you can learn it quickly, but here might be a good place to start your search.

5) Lately I succeded in grabbing the eu domain: unionsite.eu. Do you have any advice on how to use it or maybe where to sell it?

No. I'm surprised you didn't give some thought to that before you bought it.

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Q and A: How can I get my good Google ranking back?

Dear Kalena...

I ran across your Google AdSense article in SitePro News today. I plan on incorporating many of your suggestions and will keep you posted on my results. I started using AdSense about 2 ½ weeks ago and have generated over $120. I'm not sure if that's considered reasonable, but I want to do much better!

Also, my retail site, www.theledstore.com , was number 1 – 5 on Google for some of my main keywords up until late last year. I understand that Google did an update around that time. Additionally, I had a designer completely overhaul the design and functionality of the site. I'm not sure which one of these things, if not both, contributed to our falling completely out of any reasonable Google search results. On a good day, we may show up on page 17 for a keyword search for "LED Flashlights". Previously, we would have been in position #1 on page 1 of Google.

Do you have any ideas about what we can do to get our ranking back? I was generating thousands in sales in a month, and then the bottom fell out. While we rank close to #1 for terms like "LED Flashlights" on MSN and Yahoo, it doesn't generate the traffic that Google did for us. I assume I have a lot more work to do on my linking strategy (one-way and reciprocal), among other things.

I welcome any advice/comments you may have.

Thanks!
Caleb

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Caleb

Thanks for the feedback on my article. I'd be interested to hear of your AdSense progress.

Regarding your site rankings, I viewed your site and little alarm bells started ringing immediately. First of all, the site shows a Y! favicon suggesting that it is based on a Yahoo! Store template. Looking at your code confirmed this for me. Your site is actually using a Yahoo! CMS and is sitting on Yahoo! Name Servers. You can see the Yahoo! version of the URL for your site here: http://store.yahoo.net/theledstore/.

Now I don't know whether you have always used a Yahoo! Store template for your site, or whether it's a new thing for you, but I have heard a LOT of complaints from Yahoo! Store owners about the inability of their sites to attain high search engine rankings. Whether this is due to the fact the CMS is not as search engine friendly to index or because of the way the content is stored in a sub-domain, I'm not sure.

If you have always had a Yahoo! Store, chances are that the re-design has triggered your site to be placed in the Google Sandbox. See this post for more information. If you haven't, then you might want to rethink using a Yahoo! Store and try a domain-based e-commerce solution instead.

The good news is that Google has indexed 32 pages from the site and listed 48 backward links, plus you have a toolbar PageRank of 5 out of 10, so I don't detect any penalties. But you might want to rethink the tiny text in the navigation menu at the bottom of the page, as it might trigger some search engine spam filters.
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Q and A: What is the best way to redirect old urls to new urls?

Dear Kalena...

Thanks to your great tips, my site is doing terrific in the search engines.

I rearranged some directories on the site and now have some url's which should be changed. Can I do redirects from the old url's to new url's? Regardless of the time and effort involved, what is the absoulute best way of doing this without losing any ranking?

Thanks as always,
Lisa

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Lisa

Glad to hear of your site's success! Thanks for sharing it with us.

Regarding redirecting your old URLs to your new ones, there are a couple of ways:

1) You can set up 301 Permanently Moved redirects from old urls to new urls from within your hosting control panel. Simply login to your panel and look for a link under "Site Management" called "Redirects". Enter the old url in the field prompt and the new page url you want people taken to. This will automatically create the redirects in your .htaccess file. If you don't have access to your hosting control panel, your hosts should be able to set this up for you. Read the article Turn Harmful 404 Error Pages Into Helpful 301 Redirects for more information on this technique.

2) If you don't need visitors to be re-directed to a unique page, but simply don't want to lose traffic via outdated page listings in the search engines, then create a custom 404 error page with a link to your home page, site map or site search tool on it. You can see an example custom 404 page here on our site.

That way, whenever a visitor clicks on an outdated link in a search engine or non-existent URL from another site, instead of arriving at the standard ugly white 404 error page, they are taken to an actual page on your site and encouraged to dig deeper rather than to click away.

Hope this helps! *

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Q and A: Why won't Google fully index my site?

Dear Kalena...

My site has been in operation for almost 9 months. No matter what i do i cannot get any pages from the site indexed by Google. It currently has just 2 and yesterday had 8. I use a sitemap text file which is downloaded regularily. So far this month Google has downloaded 150MB and a similar amount was downlaoded last month. Please advise me on what i should do.

Thanks
John

Kalena's Answer:

Dear John

I've had a look at your site and have noticed a few things:

1) Your site only has a Google Toolbar PageRank of 2 out of 10. This is due to the fact that the site is relatively new and has not yet built up link popularity. An immediate solution to this is to start submitting your site to niche directories and portals relating to travel/property and to seek out as many in-bound links to your site from high quality sites in your industry as you can.

2) If your site is only 9 months old, it's highly likely it is still suffering from Google's aging delay and/or sandbox for new sites. This means that your site will not be easily found on Google for any keywords until after a certain time period has expired. See my posts Why Has My Site Dropped Out of Google? and Difference Between Google's Aging Delay and Sandbox for more information.

3) Your site was last cached by Google on 13 April and currently has 2 pages indexed. This should increase once the aging delay has expired and your sitemap is indexed more regularly.

4) You mention you've sent Google a text sitemap. You should really be creating an XML sitemap and submitting it to Google Sitemaps. See my post Which is the Best Google Sitemap Creator to Use? for more information on how to do this.

5) Your site seems to use identical or very similar Title attributes and META Tags for each page. Some pages e.g. faq.html, don't even have Titles or META Tags! If you want Google to index and rank each page individually, you've got to treat them like individual pages! Optimize each page for unique keywords relating to the content on that page.

While you're in aging delay limbo, best to concentrate on building up links to your site and optimizing your pages for target keywords. Good luck!

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Google Granted New Patents Today

According to LatestPatents.com, Google has been granted two new US patents today based on prior applications:

1) System and method for searching and recommending objects from a categorically organized information repository.

2) Document retrieval system with access control.

I haven't had a good look at them yet, but you can bet that the SEO community will be poring over them right now and jumping to all sorts of algorithm conclusions. If I find any gold nuggets, I'll post them here.

Q and A: Has Google banned our site?

Dear Kalena...

Found your wonderful site and hope you can enlighten me on the intricacies of Google. Our website www.breatheonline.com recently used to rank very highly for most yoga keywords, particularly involving "private yoga" and all London postcodes. Now it has disappeared altogether. Although our more recent www.breatheyoga.co.uk which points to the original domain is still in there.

I now suspect that Google has taken a dim view of our "cloaked" text which you will see if you "select" near the bottom of any page on the site. I wasn't aware until I had a proper look at the guidelines that Google was against this practice. Is it possible that they have simply banned us or something? How can we redeem ourselves?

Hope you can help.

Many thanks

Robin

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Robin

It's pretty simple really. Your sites contain identical content and Google has simply decided to index one and ignore the other.

In your case, Google has decided that www.breatheyoga.co.uk is the main site and www.breatheonline.com is the duplicate. Your UK domain has a Google Toolbar PageRank of 4 out of 10, around 14 backward links and 23 pages indexed by Google, while your "main" domain has a zero PageRank, no backward links and no pages indexed.

Strangely, neither site is showing in the Google cache but I can't see any caching references in your code. It might be something to do with your domain hosting set up. It also looks like you've removed whatever "cloaked" text you are referring to - that's a sensible thing to do.

To solve your duplicate content issue, I would implement a 301 redirect from your "main" domain to your UK domain as soon as possible, or make sure both sites are on the same IP address, with one parked and redirected to the other.

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Q and A: Why isn't Google picking up my Title and Description tags?

Dear Kalena...

Firstly, I would like to commend you on your newsletter. A friend recommended it to me and I have been extremely happy with the informative and pleasing layout of the content since.

I have been trying to optimize my new site www.gbintel.com for a couple of months now. I see that yahoo has listed my site but google for some reason does not pick up my title and description tag text and so I assume my keywords are not being crawled either. Do you know
why that is?

Marco

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Marco

Google generally chooses to display a snippet of text from your web page that includes the search query, rather than your Title element or META Description tag. Sometimes they will display tag content, but that's usually only if they don't find a relevant snippet in your site text. In the case of your site, they have used a snippet from your home page text.

Google has indexed 12 documents from your site, including web pages, PDF files and Flash files. But because your site is relatively new and has not yet built up link popularity, you'll find you will experience Google's aging delay before you'll see it appear for target search queries. This is pretty standard procedure for new sites so I suggest you use the waiting time to build more quality content pages.

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Q and A: Does a link need to be underlined to be search engine friendly?

Dear Kalena...

I overheard a client state that in order for a link to be "search-friendly" it needs to be underlined. Now call me crazy, but I always thought that the visual format mattered little to search engines and that they are concerned with the markup. Who's right?

Adam

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Adam

You are right. Search engines will find a link on your page whether it is visually underlined or not because they index the code, not the visual aspects.

What your client may have been referring to is site usability. Research has shown that people are used to links being underlined and instinctively recognize words that are underlined as links to other pages. Therefore, usability experts recommend that you underline all links in your web pages and don't use underlines for headings or word emphasis as it can cause confusion.

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Search Engine Marketing Salaries - What Can You Expect?

There's been a slew of blog posts and articles over the past week regarding the type of salaries that search engine marketing and search engine optimization consultants are currently commanding in the U.S. Clearly, the search industry is making some people rich.

Here are some typical salaries in USD:

Entry level SEO/SEM position = $30-45K
Three to five years experience / online account managers = $50-75K
Five + years / organic SEO specialists = $75-90K
Senior management level = $70-120K
SEM Director = $95-150K
VP Level = $100-200K (although there have been reports of offers ranging from $250-315K at this level)

I just wish this list had been available when I was trying to justify my search engine optimization salary increase back in 2000! More discussion on SEO/SEM salaries here:

- SEM Salaries
- SEM Salaries - What People Are Paying
- Search Marketing Salaries - What You Should Be Paid

Perhaps this is incentive enough to take a course in search engine marketing.

Q and A: What is the best way to optimize a large dynamic site?

Dear Kalena...

If I have a site that has some dynamic pages ( say some 100 pages), and I want few of these pages (say some 10 pages) to optimise seperately for organic listing.

The solutions possible are:

1. I can create 10 html pages seperately, but it will cause content duplication problem.

2. I can create 10 static pages and run a script in the body of the static page to call the respective dynamic page. This will not create duplicate content problem, but URL redirection is done here. Redirection is frowned. So I dont want to go with this option also.

3. I can change the dynamic URL to look like a static URL. This option is acceptable.

Is there any other way to solve this problem?

Can you please help me to get clarified with my doubts, Please.

Awaiting for your reply.

Sudha

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Sudha

The optimum solution is 3), to make the dynamic page URLs more spider-friendly. Some useful links to help you with this are:

- Workaround for ASP
- Workaround for Apache
- Workaround for IIS

But you can also do 1) and simply block search engines from indexing the dynamic page duplicates by adding them to your Robots.txt file or adding a "no index, no follow" robots tag to the HTML code on those pages. I would definitely stay away from 2) as it might throw up some red flags.

But in terms of dynamic pages, search engines have become better at indexing dynamically generated content. Google doesn't index sites containing session id's but can now handle indexing sites with a large number of dynamic pages, provided they are included in an XML sitemap submitted to Google sitemaps. See this post for more info.

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Q and A: How does Google rank search results?

Dear Kalena...

I am very confused by Google. I don't understand why my site is not positioned highly for certain keywords when it is good quality and has a lot of traffic. How do they determine who ranks above whom?

Confused

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Confused

Google has a highly technical way of indexing and ranking pages. Just because you consider your site to be of high quality doesn't mean that Google thinks the same. Also, the amount of traffic your site gets does not necessarily impact how relevant Google finds it to be when matching it with search queries.

To better understand how Google works, I suggest you read the tutorial How Does Google Collect and Rank Results? written by Google software engineer Matt Cutts.

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Q and A: Why won't Google index my two home pages?

Dear Kalena...

Have you ever heard of Google refusing to index pages that have similar names? I have one page called index.htm and one page called index.html.

They are entirely different content, yet only one gets indexed.

Any help would be appreciated.

Chris

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Chris

Before I answer your question, I've got a question for you - why on earth would you want to have two index pages? I can't see any advantage to that whatsoever. You only have one home page and that's the one that should be named index.htm (OR index.html). If you have different content that you want indexed on both pages, then best to name one of them something other than the home page standard.

From my understanding, most search engine robots will naturally look for the standard home page file names when indexing your site. I believe they start with index.htm then if they don't find it, they try index.html, default.htm, default.html etc. When they find one with content, my guess is that the others are ignored or treated as the same page.

For what it's worth, Google has determined that your top level domain holds your home page content and has not indexed either of your index pages. How do I know this? Because Google has indexed 123 pages from your site, but neither index.htm or index.html is included and the cache of your home page shows your domain only.

Perhaps the existence of two index pages confused Googlebot and both were ignored as a result. Perhaps there is another reason - I don't know. To find out for sure, create and submit an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps and watch the crawl stats closely.

The lesson here is: why risk confusing search bots and visitors? Stick with one index page and name the other page something else entirely e.g. welcome.html.

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Q and A: How can I learn search engine optimization for free?

Dear Kalena...

How can I learn search engine optimization for free?

Vic

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Vic

By entering our March Funny Photo Caption Competition!

By simply providing a funny caption for the photo to the right, you can win a self-study search engine marketing course of your choice.

View comments here to see the latest entries. Winner announced 1 April.

Jobs in the Search Engine Industry

Are you looking for a job in the search industry? Then be sure to check out our job postings in the SEC Lounge. You must be a Lounge member to view our employment forum, but membership is free.

We've currently got over 20 job vacancies currently listed and we're always looking for more. Some of the vacancies listed include:

- search engine optimization guru
- search engine marketing associate
- search engine marketing specialist
- Internet marketing sales
- SEO engineer
- search engine optimization analyst
- keyword taxonomy specialist
- director of search engine optimization
- keyword operations manager

If your company has any positions vacant in the fields of search engine optimization or search engine marketing and you would like us to list them in the Lounge, free of charge, please email me the following details:

1) Position title
2) Job Reference # (if applicable)
3) Name of employer (if publicly advertised)
4) Location of position
5) Date Posted
6) Position description with as much detail as possible
7) Approximate salary range (if available)
8) Closing date for applications
9) Link to more information (if available)
10) Contact email/URL for applications

Or see this thread for further instructions (Lounge members only).

See you in the Lounge!

Q and A: Which of these dynamic URLs are more acceptable to Google?

Dear Kalena...

For dynamic pages, can you comment on if either one of these URLs are more acceptable by Google? Or is anything beyond the ? treated the same way and it doesn't matter how many perimeters are after the "?"?

http://www.perle.com/products/default.asp?cat=C001
http://www.perle.com/products/default.asp?a=1&i=4

M Fong

Kalena's Answer:

Dear M Fong

According to their Webmaster Guidelines, Google doesn't index URLs that include session ids after the query string:

"Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index".

As far as I understand, the more parameters your URLs include, the more chance you have that Google will not index that page. But that is more to do with Googlebot trying to restrict the excessive server load created when indexing an unknown quantity of dynamic content.

To ensure your important content is always indexed, keep it within your top 2 directory levels, avoid session ids in your URLs and submit an XML sitemap to Google SiteMaps.

---------------------------

[If you found this post helpful, you might benefit from downloading our free Search Engine Optimization lesson]

Google Pilot Program to Let Webmasters Know When They've Been Penalized

Don't know how I missed this one.

Google has launched a pilot program to alert webmasters when spammy methods that go against Google's Webmaster Guidelines are spotted on their sites. Google staff will email webmasters, providing specific details of code breaches spotted.

As far as I'm aware, this is the first time that Google has proactively provided webmasters with confirmed acknowledgement of the removal of their site AND provided specific references to code practices that caused such removal, together with advice for reinclusion.

Matt Cutts has been talking up the program at Search Engine Strategies New York this week, explaining the type of sites they are targeting:

" We want to let legitimate sites know when we spot issues like hidden text", he says.

"This is not targeted to sites like buy-my-cheap-viagra-here-while-consolidating-
your-debt-and-buy-some-posters-about-online-casinos.com, but more for sites that have good content, but may not be as savvy about what their SEO was doing or what that “Make thousands of doorway pages for $39.95″ software was doing."

You can see an example of an email alert from Google here. Great stuff Google and a long time coming.

Q and A: Why does my site show different results for searches with and without www?

Dear Kalena...

I was trying to find out a little about some file requests on my log files when I found your blog. I tried my website using the site query thingy with and without the www. bit and got a different number on the results. I also got a few pages which say 300 Multiple Choices, they also end with the file extension .asp. I would be greatful for any light you could shed on this for me, my website has a great ranking and a great position on the search engines, I am a bit wary of changing anything just in case it disappears altogether.

Peter

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Peter

I'm not 100% sure what your question is but I'm assuming it's: "Why does my site show different results for searches with and without www?".

I've checked your site and it looks like it's suffering from the Dupe Domain Indexing Dilemma. This can happen when your server is configured to show your site at both domain versions (with www and without). See the link above for how to fix this using a 301 redirect.

Sometimes Google can logically work out which is the correct version of your site, even if it loads with or without www, but sometimes Google can't. See this post for more info. One way to tell for sure if you've got DDID and whether it's a problem, is to install the Google Toolbar and see if it shows different Toolbar PageRank for each version of your site. If so, then you most likely have a problem. That's what I did with your site. Hope this helps!


[If you found this post helpful, you might benefit from downloading our free Search Engine Optimization lesson]

Q and A: How important are keywords within URLs for SEO purposes?

Dear Kalena...

I´m working in url rewrite for my website. I have a few questions or problems I'd like to solve, just wondering if you could help me: in my new url´s how important are keywords for SEO? Which directories inside the url are more important? How should I separate keywords for better results?

I hope you can help me, any commentary will surely be of help.

Thanks!
Santiago


Kalena's Answer:

Dear Santiago

Wow that's a lot of questions. Might need a coffee to cope with those. Let's see:

1) All things being equal, I do think that using keywords within your file names (and visible URLs) helps your search relevancy and usability a little. Particularly if you have a large catalog of products and you can sort them into logical file-names. But it will only ever help a little and certainly not if you go overboard and throw in every possible keyword combination for the sake of it. For example:

This is logical:

site.com/blue-suede-shoes.htm

But this is not:

site.com/we-sell-blue-suede-shoes-that-will-make-you-look-like-elvis.htm

Consider your site usability and link potential. How many people would want to link to or type in such a long page name? Also note the difference between using keywords in your file-names vs keywords in your domains - the latter is ugly as well as pointless for SEO. It may also attract the wrong sort of attention from Google according to their head of Webspam Matt Cutts.

2) In terms of directories, I'm assuming you mean directory levels of your URLs? From what I understand, the closer your content resides to your top level domain, the more important search engines consider it to be for indexing purposes. Content buried many sub-directories deep like site.com/catalog/shoes/suede/blue.htm may not ever get indexed, so be sure to use a logical directory structure that is no more than 1 or 2 levels deep. The alternative is to use Google's SiteMaps tool instructing Googlebot how to index all your sub-directories and pages.

3) Ah, the old hyphens vs underscores debate. I'll let Jill Whalen wax lyrical on that one. Matt Cutts also throws in his 2 cents worth about the issue here. In short, hyphens (dashes) are the way to go.

---------------------------

[If you found this post helpful, you might benefit from downloading our free Search Engine Optimization lesson]

Q and A: Should I pay for SEO or learn it myself?

Dear Kalena...

I have been reading your blog and various search engine forums for a few months now and I feel like I'm only just scraping the surface of this complicated topic. I design web sites part time and now one of my clients wants to find a search engine optimization expert to optimize the web site I built for her. She wants to know if I can do it or hire someone who can do it for her.

Should I bite the bullet and hire an SEO expert? Or should I put my (limited) knowledge to the test and try to learn more and do it myself? Would your course help me quickly?

SEO wannabe

Kalena's Answer:

Dear SEO wannabe

It depends on how much time you have to get this done and your level of knowledge already. If your client is in a hurry to have her site optimized and you don't have time for trial and error, I would recommend outsourcing the work to a professional SEO firm. After all, she seems happy enough for you to outsource the work and bill her back for it.

On the other hand, if you feel confident that you know enough about SEO to make a good job of it for your client and she is happy for you to experiment and tweak a little over the coming months to get it right, then why not DIY and pocket the full $ your client is willing to pay? You might want to offer her a discounted rate, given your inexperience.

Our SEO courses should definitely help you quickly, especially as they are self-study based and designed to be studied in a time-frame that suits you. If you're not sure whether to start with our SEO101 or SEO201 course, best take our SEO Pre-Course Qualifying Quiz to determine your current level. When you're ready to enroll, simply complete our student registration form.

Good Luck!


[If you found this post helpful, you might benefit from downloading our free Search Engine Optimization lesson]

Q and A: Why is Google showing different results to you and I for the same search query?

Dear Kalena...

Thank you for taking the time to answer my question.

You may be interested to know that typing ‘linksys lowercall’ into Google on my machine here in sunny England now brings up your blog page.....but sadly not our site – see attached screen shot.

I don’t think this has to do with the shuffle simply because I have tried this most days for the last month or two. Anyway the mystery goes on!

Mike

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Mike

Actually, I am convinced it is the database shuffle. According to Google staffer Matt Cutts, they are currently undergoing a Big Daddy of shuffles.

So results may appear different on the same PC at various intervals, let alone on those in different countries!

Kalena

Mike's Reply:

Hi Kalena

Wow the bigdaddy is interesting stuff.

If you send me a screen shot of what you see when you type 'lowercall avg' into google, I will buy you 2 coffees via your website.

Over and out from sunny UK.

Mike

Kalena's Answer:

Hi Mike

You've got yourself a deal! Attached is the screenshot where your site rules for that query.

cheers
Kalena

Mike's Reply:

Thanks Kalena – I have bought you two coffees as agreed.

Actually, your advice is worth much more to me than two coffees, had I not seen your Google screen shot with my own eyes, I would not have believed it.

There must be hundreds of people wondering why some of their web pages are ‘apparently’ not appearing. The ‘lowercall avg’ help page was created and uploaded in September 2005, ago so I suspect there are some serious buggy issues with the big daddy transition.

All the best from sunny England

Mike

PS If ever you need anything from the UK or my company can be of any help just ask.

Q and A: Why aren't our pages indexed by Google or Yahoo?

Dear Kalena...

Hello and thank you for your most interesting newsletter which we as a company subscribe to.

1. Is there any obvious reason why none of the pages linked to 'Miscellaneous' at the link below are indexed by Google or Yahoo. These help pages were created months ago.

http://www.lowercall.com/faq.html

E.g. type into google or yahoo 'lowercall linksys camera' and nothing comes up. Type the same thing into MSN and pages are indexed fine.

2. If you type 'cheap calls' into google, one of our competitors called has managed to get themselves on the front page.

When I look at the source code for this competitor's page, right at the bottom there is some HTML code which is new to me - can you explain what this code does and if it is a way of optimising a page to further enhance search engine ranking.

[ a href="gben-server-PageServer?ARTICLE=SEARCH.SO.CHEAPCALL" class="searchterms">Cheap calls[ /a]

Kind Regards

Michael

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Michael

I've checked and your "miscellaneous" page IS indexed by Google AND Yahoo. In fact, Google has indexed 97 pages of your site. At my end, the search query lowercall linksys camera triggers a single site listing in Google - yours.

Perhaps there was a database shuffle going on at the time of your most recent search? Regardless, it's there now. A good way to ensure all your pages are indexed regularly by Google is to use their SiteMaps submit tool.

Regarding your competitor, I took a look at the site in question and you're right, it does seem like they are doing something a bit dodgy. There's nothing spammy about the code they're using, it's simply a way to call their database and request different content to appear based on their various products and services.

However, a few things trigger alarm bells:

1) They have stuck a whole bunch of links at the bottom of the page containing keyword-stuffed anchor text. This smells of search engine spam.

2) For these links, they have used tiny font in a color that is almost the same as the page background. This suggests they don't want human visitors to see them and so again, it reeks of search engine spam.

3) Each of these links leads to what I would classify as a "doorway page", optimised for a particular keyword or phrase but containing very little original content. Hmmm this isn't looking good.

4) Each of these "doorway pages" links to each other, creating a type of internal link network.

No question about it. I would definitely classify this as search engine spam, and so it seems, would Google. On their Webmaster Guidelines page they say:

• Make pages for users, not for search engines.
  
• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.
  

Your competitor is doing all these things. BUT, it doesn't look like Google's anti-spam filters have picked up on this, which may be why you are still seeing your competitor high in the rankings. My guess is that the site will sink like a stone once those blatant techniques are discovered and penalized via spam filtering.

I would just wait it out. Google will sort the wheat from the chaff eventually. Then again, maybe Google has bigger fish to fry. If you're concerned about it, you could always try bringing it to their attention by submitting a spam report.

[If you found this post helpful, you might benefit from downloading our free Search Engine Optimization lesson]

Q and A: Is it true that you should have no more than 40 links to a page?

Dear Kalena...

I'm sending you a copy below of an email I received. Can you verify or refute the "no more than 40 links to a page rule"? Fact or fiction?

Basically it was just a simple request for a reciprocal link on my hobby website http://www.hoosierkitties.com They did not want a listing on the page Bulletin Boards & Directories because they would have to "share" page ranking with too many other websites.

If it is a fact, I am going to be very, very busy. Some day when I have nothing better to do with my time, I am going to get this site on some portal software, but until then do I need to break down each page with over 40 links? I guess the only logical way is alphabetically?

Again, thanks for your wonderful insight.

regards,
Lisa

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Lisa

For the benefit of our readers, I'll first summarize the email you forwarded.

Basically, the directory editor has refused Lisa's link submission because, apparently, adding the link to the requested category would push the number of links on the page over the 40 mark. Here's an extract from her email:

"Our link must be on a page with no more than 40 links, and right now, our link is on a page with many more than that. Every link on a page has to share that page ranking. Once the number of links gets above 40 it can actually hurt the page ranking for each of those links in the minds of the Google "robbots". Then when people search for something that is offered on our site, Google won't bring our site up for a loooooong time; Google will give us a very low ranking."

This is just rubbish! Firstly, yes, Google clearly states in their Webmaster Guidelines that you should keep the number of links on a page to a reasonable number, but they specify "less than 100", not 40, not 50 or some other arbitrary figure.

Secondly, the exact ranking of a site is not solely determined on the number of links to a page, it is determined by over 100 different factors, with link popularity contributing a mere fraction to the final algorithm.

Finally, why on earth does this directory ask for submissions to this particular category if they have no intention of ever publishing those submissions? They clearly don't know what the heck they're doing so Lisa, I wouldn't worry about them refusing your link.

You're better off without them!

[If you found this post helpful, you might benefit from downloading our free Search Engine Optimization lesson]

Q and A: How can I get Google to update the cache on my pages?

Dear Kalena...

Thanks so much for your blog. I cannot begin to tell you how much I have learned in the past few months.

My question today is there any way to get Google to update the cache on some of my pages? If the cache has not been updated in a year, can I assume that Google feels the page is really irrelevent?

Sunny regards,
Lisa

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Lisa

Thanks for the feedback on the blog. Now to answer your question, don't assume anything with Google! Just because the big G hasn't indexed your page in a while or is showing an outdated version, doesn't necessarily mean anything bad. Google and other search engines move to their own beat when it comes to collecting, sorting and displaying updated page content.

Here are a few ways to improve your chances of having your pages indexed and cached more regularly by Google:

• Use a robots.txt file with specific instructions to Googlebot regarding pages you want indexed or avoided.
  
  
• Create and submit an XML site map to Google SiteMaps.
  
  
• Use a reliable hosting firm to make sure your site is live 24/7.
  
  
• Update your page content regularly (this can be achieved easily by creating a blog or newsfeed).
  
  
• Improve the link popularity of your site by acquiring one way links pointing to it from high quality related sites and directories. This article and this one should help.
  
  
• Create unique, useful, humorous and timely content that people will want to link to and visit on a regular basis.

Good luck Lisa and keep reading :-)

Q and A: Why doesn't my site show up in the first 20 pages of Google?

Dear Kalena...

My website, www.NoHotwire.com seems to never show up in google's search engine. My website is indexed by google, but it never shows up in the first, oh, 20 pages when you search for anti theft devices or car alarms. Can you help?

Best regards,

Richard

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Richard

It's simple. Your site doesn't rank high because Google doesn't see it as being more relevant than the sites that DO show up in the first 20 pages.

If you want to be found higher, you've got to do a better job at:

1) optimizing your site for target search queries (I suggest taking a beginner's course in search engine optimization). I don't see the phrase "car alarms" within the visible text on your home page. How can you expect Google to consider your site relevant for this phrase if it doesn't even appear on your most important page?

2) manually building your site's link popularity amongst similarly-themed sites.

3) improving and adding to your site content so it becomes more popular and more relevant to your target search queries.

Good luck!

Q and A: What determines whether local results or AdWords get top listings on the search engines?

Dear Kalena...

Why do local results sometimes get top listing, and other times adwords? Is there any way to predict this?

Toronto Baskets and Gifts

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Toronto

As search engine technology becomes more sophisticated and engines get better at predicting what users are searching for, the way results are structured becomes more and more complex.

These days, there are a large range of factors that influence the ranking of search results. They can include:

- searcher IP address location
- geographic qualifiers in search query
- language used in search query
- site IP address location (where it's hosted)
- site TLD extension (e.g. site.com or site.com.au)
- search preferences chosen by user (e.g. language or region)
- location of search site chosen by user (e.g. google.com.au vs google.com)
- user's advanced search preferences
- user's search history (if using Google Toolbar or My Google)

As for AdWords results, they are influenced by:

- site IP address location (where it's hosted)
- advertiser's location targeting preferences
- advertiser's language targeting preferences
- language of advertisement
- click-through rate of ad itself
- advertiser's maximum campaign click-through budget
- advertiser's maximum keyword click-through budget

Whether organic search results or paid results like AdWords appear depend on all these factors in combination with each other. So a searcher in another country from yours could see completely different search results when conducting the same search query on Google.com

Sometimes where a search query is more obscure, there won't be any related AdWords ads appearing because nobody is willing to pay for clicks on those queries. At other times, the search query is so common that hundreds of sponsored PPC ads appear next to the organic listings. Sound complex? Yep, it is!

Q and A: Why has my new site disappeared from Google?

Dear Kalena...

Maybe you can help me.

I have a new site which has been online for a few weeks. I have posted links in numerous directories and have registered by the top search engines. My site appeared for a few days in google and then was gone even the url. Then the url came back but no description, now the url has gone again (with google). I have although throughout this time a great ranking with MSN. Maybe you could help me find out whats up with google. my site is : http://www.pgalive.com

Thanks
Nick

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Nick

Sounds to me like the standard Google aging delay for new sites. You'll just have to be patient.

Q and A: Which are preferable from a SEO perspective - absolute or relative links?

Dear Kalena...

Can you please tell me which are preferable from a SEO perspective - absolute or relative links?

Thanks,
Barney


Kalena's Answer:

Dear Barney

Let me start by defining absolute vs relative links for readers who aren't familiar with these terms.

An absolute link defines the precise location of a web page or file including the full domain. Below is an example of an absolute link:

[a href="http://www.domain.com/subdirectory/page.html"] [/a]

A relative link assumes that the search engine spiders and browsers already know on which domain and sub-directory the current document is located, so a full URL is not specified. Below is an example of a relative link:

[a href="page.html"] [/a]

Note that the http://www is not included in a relative link. Also I've used square brackets to replace <> so I don't break the Blogger code.

There is no preferred option for SEO. In terms of search engine compatibility, it doesn't matter if you use absolute or relative links on your site, because most search engines automatically convert relative links into an absolute links anyway.

Some programmers like to use relative links because the shorter code can decrease a page's download time. I prefer to code in absolute links so there is less room for error when designing the site or referring to image files etc. Also, when you code in absolute links, you can publish part of the site to another domain (a new page for your client's site on your own test site for example), without the need to upload all the image files, CSS etc to make it load correctly. This is because all the files referenced refer to the actual domain where they sit, rather than the temporary domain location that they are being viewed on. This is convenient from a designer's perspective.

However you decide to link to files on your site, make sure you are consistent.

Q and A: How can we get Google to index and update all our pages?

Dear Kalena...

Thanks for being generous with your time and knowledge!

Here's the short version of our situation and my question: Googlebots faithfully visit our site [URL removed] virtually every night and do major downloading everytime, and yet most of our cached pages remain outdated (such as January 24, 2005). How can we get Google to index and update all our pages?

Now for the backstory and why this is an urgent problem. We noticed a dip in our rankngs in last month and discovered that Google had kicked off Jagger III. At first we attributed our sinking rankings to this, but after digging further, we discovered we had a major problem with our site. (Jagger was a blessing in disguise.) Our slide has been going on for some time (I believe we have been getting false positives when checking our rankings for keyword searches).

Unknown to us (and for reasons unknown), in January or earlier, virtually all our internal links had mutated and began pointing to [URL removed] instead of [URL removed], where x is the name of a page. In fact, if you do a Google index check for [URL removed], you'll get 150 pages. But for [URL removed] it's only 67. This means that 83 pages are indexed EXCLUSIVELY as [URL removed].

Here's the rub: All external links to our site are for [URL removed], and none are for [URL removed], so the 83 [URL removed] pages have no (or little) credibility in Google's eyes. Bottom line result: while our 67 [URL removed] pages do very well for the appropriate keyword searches (top 5-15), the [URL removed] pages for the most part don't show up on the radar. And MANY of our products are listed on those pages.

We have fixed the internal links so that they all point to [URL removed], but, as I say, Google just isn't re-indexing most of the pages. In fact, many of the [URL removed] pages haven't been indexed in quite awhile. Google just seems to keep indexing the same old handful of pages. I don't understand the logic.

Am I explaining this OK? Any ideas on how to get Google to index ALL the pages after visiting?

Rick

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Rick

Apart from putting me to sleep with your question *yawn*, if I didn't know better, I'd swear you were trying to blogslam to get links to your site. So I've removed your URL to save you from yourself.

In answer to your question, just two words: Google Sitemaps.

Q and A: Any more suggestions for getting reinstated in Google?

Dear Kalena...

Thanks for this post where you explained possible reasons why my site vanished from Google. After lots of work, I have cleaned up my site. Any more suggestions please?

Thanks,
Jamie

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Jamie

Just one suggestion: start again. I can't see any improvements at all. For one thing, there's absolutely no text on your home page and even the "HTML site" you offer as an alternative to Flash has no text either! The text currently on your services page would suffice as home page text. But before you do that, get reading so you know what needs to be done.

How to submit a Google site re-inclusion request

This week I stumbled upon a very useful post by Google staffer Matt Cutts. If you believe your site has been penalized or removed entirely from the Google index, and you've been wondering how to get it re-included, it's essential that you read this post.

Here's an extract:

"Fundamentally, Google wants to know two things: 1) that any spam on the site is gone or fixed, and 2) that it’s not going to happen again. I’d recommend giving a short explanation of what happened from your perspective: what actions may have led to any penalties and any corrective action that you’ve taken to prevent any spam in the future. If you employed an SEO company, it indicates good faith if you tell us specifics about the SEO firm and what they did–it assists us in evaluating reinclusion requests. Note that SEO and mostly-affiliate sites may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reincluded; such sites should be quite familiar with Google’s quality guidelines".

Q and A: Do I need to use duplicate pages or redirects to track ad conversions?

Dear Kalena...

Thank you for your answer to my previous question. Thank goodness there is someone out there that knows what their doing and can make a layman like me understand the reply! I have got rid of the redirect, which I was not even aware was there.

I am confused regarding Google's attitude to the following scenario. I want to track the response we receive to newspaper and magazine advertising by using a tail on our website address, i.e www.macoles.com/jh. As I understand it Google will downgrade the site because the content is identical to the main default page and that having now learnt about redirects, could I use the redirect option safely to effectively monitor the advertising in the same way? Or would Google still "frown" on this as bad policy. Does it make any difference whether I use either scenario, I.e., A) Have duplicate page content at /jh or B) Have a redirect on /jh to the default page.

I have asked various 'experts' on this and have been given contradicting information on this point, and have not really been able to get a definitive answer by researching online.

Adrian

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Adrian

You don't need to create a separate page to track your ads. You simply need to use a tracking URL in your advertisements such as www.macoles.com?source=magazineJH. You can change the content after "source=" to whatever you like, as long as it helps you differentiate the source of traffic. This is how people running pay per click campaigns track the performance of their ads.

These tracking URLs still take people to your home page, but the unique address allows you to monitor how many people entered your site through a particular ad. You'll need to make sure your site log file analysis program supports tracking URLs and doesn't just lump visitors to www.macoles.com and www.macoles.com?source=magazineJH in together. Your site host should be able to assist you in setting up your site analytics to support this. If you don't have a site analytics program or can't get it to work with your existing one, I highly recommend ClickTracks.

Q and A: When will Google's Jagger algorithm update end?

Dear Kalena...

Looking for your thoughts regarding the Google Jagger update.

One of my websites has seen the worst and the best in rankings for it's best keyword in recent weeks. I am not complaining where it is right now.

Have you been able to gaze into your crystal ball to view when the update to this algorithm will end?

Thank you in advance for you enlightenment.

Lisa

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Lisa

I don't care when the current update ends. I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on Google's updates. I leave that to the algorithm chasers. Let them get all freaked out about the latest tiny tweaks to Google's algorithm and chase their tails trying to keep their sites under the radar. I've got better things to do. So should you!

Rather than worry about whether Google's databases have finished shuffling or the exact rank of your site for a certain keyword at any minute of the day, why don't you concern yourself with things that are actually within your control? Like the quality of your site, the addition of new content, your site's usability, whether visitors are following the navigation pathways you've created, whether visitors are converting to customers and whether you could increase/improve the backward links pointing to your site?

These are a much better use of your time and (strangely enough) will do more to improve your site's relevance in the search engines than endless algorithm dissection. If you really need to feed your algorithm habit, this article should suffice.

Additional info about today's post

After I made my post about keyword-stuffed domains today, I happened to stumble upon a post by Googler Matt Cutts in his blog. Apart from recommending people use hyphens (dashes) instead of underscores in their file names, Matt also had something interesting to say about hyphens in domains:

"To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url. Of course I can only speak for Google, not other search engines. And bear in mind that if your domain looks like www.buy-cheap-viagra-online-while-consolidating-your-debt-
so-you-can-play-texas-holdem-while-watching-porn.com, that may still attract attention for other reasons."

So looks like the automatic penalty for multiple dashes in a domain or page URL is just another SEO myth. But keyword-stuffed domains may attract unwanted attention from Google, so beware.

Q and A: Is there benefit in having multiple domains containing search keywords?

Dear Kalena...

I'm a web designer and I have many clients who register domain names that match their business name. This is great, but in many cases these domain names don't include their primary keyword. Is there benefit in having multiple domain names pointing to the same site and using the keyword included domain name for search engine registration? Is there any risk of duplicate content as you discussed in your September 05 newsetter?

Thank you - I find your newsletters very helpful and hope to complete one of you courses soon.

Cheers,
Nicole


Kalena's Answer:

Dear Nicole

Keyword-stuffed domains? No, nada, absolutely not. Sure, it used to be all the rage to register multiple domains containing as many keywords as possible all separated by hyphens. But this only ever gave sites a teeny tiny boost in the relevancy stakes, if any at all. And those days are long gone. Keyword-stuffed domains are now considered retro spam.

Nearly all current search engine algorithms filter out keywords within domain names and word has it that over-use of hyphens within a domain name can actually earn your site a penalty. Besides that, the experts agree that keyword-stuffed domains just look silly.

But thanks for providing our:

Retro Spam Tactic of the Week!

Q and A: Are we in the Google Sandbox?

Dear Kalena...

Having spent some time in an effort to get our site a good listing on Google I have now given up and started using Adwords. I am hoping that this is a short term thing and that in the long term I can improve our listings to the extent where I don't have to pay to be in the running with Google.

For some time I have suspected that there is something fundamentally wrong with the construction of the site. In the past we have spent many hundreds of pounds to a company that promised to get us a top 5 listing on Google (yes, I now know this cannot be promised by anyone!).

Today for the first time I learnt (from your site) about the Sandbox. Are we in the Sandbox?? Kalena I am a lost soul and need some help from a higher power! (That's you!)

Could you give me any guidance please? BTW I am aware we need to do some work on the site as the time users spend on the index page is very short, but I am juggling lots of missions!

Thanks Kalena, the site is fab and I learn day by day.

Best regards
Adrian

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Adrian

Regardless of whether your site is in the Sandbox, there is one big glaring problem that I can see on your site immediately. You use a META refresh to redirect all visitors from http://www.macoles.com/ to http://www.macoles.com/html/. What is the point of that?

META refreshes can be viewed as suspicious by search engines, because some spammers use them to pull the old "bait and switch" tactic. That is, advertise a certain type of content in the search engine listings but then redirect visitors to an entirely different site e.g. porn, gambling etc. I've also heard that META refreshes can cause problems for search bots trying to index your site. Some bots coming across refresh code will simply leave the site without indexing it.

According to this site, you should never use a META refresh on a page that you want indexed by search engines. It also states that Googlebot has trouble with pages that use a refresh time-out of "0" like yours does.

However having checked your site, I can see that:

1) Googlebot last cached it on November 16.
2) You have a Google Toolbar PageRank of 4/10 and 5 backward links.
3) Google has indexed 69 pages from your site.

So although Google may not currently have trouble with your META refresh, other engines might so I would trash it as soon as possible.

Regarding whether your site is in the Google Sandbox, I don't think it is. Why? Because a few searches for logical keyword phrases such as "self catering holidays Jersey" pulls up your site within the top 10. Sure your site doesn't rank highly for more competitive terms like "holiday cottages Jersey", but your poor link popularity probably has more to do with that. If your site was sandboxed, I wouldn't expect it to rank well for any of your target phrases.

So Adrian, if you want to boost your search engine rankings, get rid of that horrible META refresh, get to work increasing the links pointing to your site from related high quality sites and keep adding fresh content.

Q and A: Why doesn't my site show a Google PageRank?

Dear Kalena...

I have added my website to Google (www.lyriclabs.com). Now the search result come but the page ranking not come in my google toolbar.

what can I do? Please help me..

Maran

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Maran

Your Google Toolbar PageRank shows at zero in my browser (all white). The toolbar PageRank is only an estimate of your actual Google PageRank. Even so, the fact that the estimate is at zero is cause for concern, unless your site was only recently launched. It's common for new sites to show a non-existent or very low PageRank until their backward links increase.

If your site is not new to the Internet, it is almost certainly a lack of link popularity and/or low relevance causing your poor PageRank. Google is not showing any backward links to your site so you should focus on building up high quality links. Try seeking out niche directories and similarly themed portals about translation or language services and submit your site to them requesting a link back.

Also consider your site from Google's perspective. Have you made it as relevant as possible for your target search queries? Does the site follow Google's Webmaster Guidelines? Have you implemented any tactics that Google frowns upon? Have you included lots of relevant, unique and useful content relating to your products and services? Make your site more usable and relevant for your visitors and your Google PageRank will normally improve.

The fact that I can't find your site using your target keyword phrase suggests it may be Sandboxed. You may just need to be patient and ride it out. Best of luck!

Search Engine Advice - LIVE

Some of you have been asking me for advice about your websites that you don't want published in this blog. So in response to this demand, I've set up Private Search Engine Consulting via Live Help.

If you'd like some professional advice about the search engine compatibility of your site, or perhaps just a second opinion about a search engine issue that's been bugging you, simply click on the Live Help link to the left to request a chat with me. Pricing for this exclusive service is listed here.

Please note you can continue to submit you specific questions free of charge via the usual link, provided you are happy for them to be published. You can also request that your domain and/or name remain anonymous. So what are you waiting for? Ask me something!

Q and A: Why is Google ignoring my site?

Dear Kalena...

I am writing to you because I have tried to ignore the fact that Google has been ignoring my site for over a year now, but I have had enough.

I have tried to optimise my website as best I could. Ok I do not do this on a full-time basis but I do try my best; adding relevant content, trying to building links with relevant websites which are subject related, etc etc.

My website ranks well for keywords like "plus size fashion", "plus size bridal wear" and "plus size casual" on search engines like Yahoo, MSN Search and AllTheWeb but Google would not have anything to do with me. I can see that Google had indexed by website, it has indexed around 250 pages, so I shouldn't be blacklisted. My site also has a PR 4... modest I know but not low enough to throw away.

I am clueless as to what I might be doing wrong! Can you shed some light please?

Kudos for the great blog - I look forward to your posts!

Best regards,

Sarah

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Sarah

I'm assuming that your site is the same as your email domain? If so, you've got some serious coding problems. I can't even get the site to load in either FireFox or Internet Explorer. I get an error in FF I've never seen before:

"Redirection limit for this URL exceeded. Unable to load the requested page. This may be caused by cookies that are blocked".

I don't get an error with IE, but it just times out without loading the page. Based on the error message, I'm assuming that your site code uses a number of redirects or META refreshes. Although Google has indexed 379 pages from your site, I can't seem to get any to load and I've clicked on about six.

I have no doubt that your code problems are causing major issues for Googlebot when it comes to index your site. Not to mention the fact that many of your potential visitors probably can't view your site!

Sarah, I would get your code sorted out quick smart and rid yourself of any unneccessary redirects. I used the HTML validator from W3 and a 302 error showed up, indicating serious redirect issues. Better get it sorted!

Q and A: Why has my site vanished from Google?

Dear Kalena...

Me Too. I have had my site for nearly ten years and have been listed very well with Google since they began. A few weeks ago I vanished. Below is a copy of an email to Google. Please do not mention my web URL. Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Jamie

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Jamie

You are kidding right? You REALLY don't know why your site has disappeared? Looks like Google has actually banned your site from their index and I don't blame them. Why do I think it's banned? The site isn't cached by Googlebot, shows a Toolbar PageRank of zero, it has no backward links and no pages indexed.

Why don't I blame them? Because the site uses many of the retro spam tactics that were popular back in the 90s:

• Keyword-stuffed Title Tags
• Keyword-stuffed META Description Tags
• Keyword-stuffed META Keyword Tags
• Keyword-stuffed Alt Image attributes
  
• Multiple doorway pages (consider your index1.htm, p1975.htm and p2197.htm as three of many examples)
  
• Duplicate content on many pages
  
• A cross-linked internal directory of over 1,000 pages (while not necessarily spammy, could be seen as an attempt to artificially inflate your link popularity).
  

The list goes on. Oh and the bulletin board you said you deleted in your email to Google is still alive and well and ranking in Yahoo (see /anyboard9/forum/index.html). This forum alone could have earned you the Google penalty. I could be wrong, but to me it reeks of fake posts in a misguided attempt to boost your traffic and rankings.

Looks like you've got some serious rebuilding to do Jamie. Start here.

And thanks for playing:

Name That Retro Spam!

Q and A: How much site editing can be done before it gets sandboxed?

Dear Kalena...

I was wondering if there is any notion out there as to how much can be done to a site before causing Google to throw it in the sandbox.

In other words what kind of changes can I make to the mark up of the site before it goes into Google Search Result Limbo?

Adam

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Adam

There is no definitive answer to this. If you are making extensive changes to your linking structure or obtaining lots of incoming links in a short space of time, indications are that the site may get sandboxed.

But any excessive editing of your code, particularly optimization of pages for specific keywords may trigger filters within Google's latest algorithm.

Adam, you just can't let search engines define the changes you make to your site and when you want to make those changes. Your audience should be the prime motivation for any changes you want to make. If you spent all your time obsessing over whether code tweaks will impact your positions on this or that engine, you'd be a nervous wreck! Try to follow the search engine's own webmaster guidelines, keep your audience happy, update your site on YOUR schedule and relax!

Q and A: Isn't this duplicate content?

Dear Kalena...

Following your column of November 7, where you quote Google's guidelines, "Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content"...

Was wondering your thoughts on how Google allows these as their number 1 and number 2 rankings as search results for "aruba pictures":

http://www.arubatravelinfo.com/pictures.html
http://www.arubatravelinfo.com/photos.html

Lisa

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Lisa

I wouldn't call those pages duplicates. Far from it. They have a similar theme, but the layout is different, the text is different and the images are different.

That said, I have seen a lot of pages in Google SERPs that should be considered duplicates. Some of these are still ranking well. It just depends how long it takes for Google's sp@m filters to find them and filter out the duplicate. It might not seem fair, but with their content database as large as it is, Google is managing pretty well, considering.

If ever you see Google results you think go against their own webmaster guidelines, you can always submit a Spam Report.

Q and A: Has my site been penalized?

Dear Kalena...

In the past 3 days, my website has gone from the top 3 ranking positions all the way to #35 or below. Have I been penalized? Partially penalized?

Specifically, the website used to rank #3 for the term "hip hop samples" for the past six months. Plus, it ranked in the top 4 for several other terms like "fruity loops samples" and "free hip hop samples" etc.

FYI... most of the other competitor sites' rankings for the same terms "hip hop samples" & "fruity loops samples" have remained unchanged while www.modernbeats.com has plummeted.

Kind Regards,
Liam

Kalena's Answer:

Hi Liam

Your site has a Google Toolbar PageRank of 5, plus 68 backward links and Google has indexed nearly 200 pages of your site, so a manual penalty seems unlikely. Have you made a lot of changes to your site lately? Specifically, have you added visible or anchor text for your target phrases? My guess is your site has been sandboxed for competitive terms . See this post for more info.

In terms of your site's search engine compatibility, I can see some glaring issues there:

1) Your home page contains no visible body text apart from visitor testimonials at the bottom. How do you expect search engines to consider your site to be relevant for search queries for your target keywords if you don't actually use those keywords in your body text?

2) Your Title Tag appears to be a little long and not optimized for peak ranking performance or usability. It should ideally be a logical and grammatically correct sentence of 9 or 10 words, incorporating important keywords. Remember that people will see this title in the Favorites list if they bookmark your site.

3) Your META Description Tag is not formatted correctly and appears to be simply a bunch of keywords strung together. Again, this tag should be a grammatically correct sentence or two, incorporating your important keywords in a logical way. People may well see this description of your site in the search engine results pages so it should be enticing enough for them to click on.

4) You are using a technique with your Alt Img attributes that is almost certainly tripping search engine sp@m filters. What you have on your site is one of the worst cases of keyword-stuffed Alt tags that I've ever seen! Your Alt tags should be used to logically describe the images that exist on your site. They were developed primarily to allow accessibility to visually impaired visitors, not as some secret way to trick search engines.

And on that note, you've earned our:

Retro Spam Tactic of the Week!

Is your site working hard for you?

Here's an analogy for you. Yesterday, I was working my butt off in the gym on the cardio machines, panting wildly with sweat dripping off me and my face as red as a beet. Not the most attractive sight, but I figure, you're at the gym to work out right? Might as well go hard or go home.

Well as I looked around me, I could see all these people simply going through the motions. There they were, minus perspiration in their shiny new lycra and expensive gym shoes casually walking on the treadmill or lazily turning the wheels on a bike while reading a book or glued to the TV screens in front of them. Only a few seemed to be there for the actual purpose of working out. The rest seemed to be there to check out the talent or to simply keep up the appearance of fitness, while doing the bare minimum.

Huh? I don't get it. Why have these gym bimbos paid so much money for a gym membership and all the related gear if they aren't going to take full advantage of their investment?

Then it struck me - these gymbos were just like those companies who spend thousands of dollars on a shiny new website with all the bells and whistles like e-commerce software, blogs, shopping carts, web analytics, the lot and then fail to take advantage of it. 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, checking for usability or analyzing trends.

These companies are simply keeping up appearances, investing heavily in Internet technology because their competitors are doing the same. But no thought has gone into the search engine compatibility of the site, how usable it is for visitors or whether it meets accessibility guidelines. They don't look at their site statistics, they don't check for broken links and they sure as heck don't investigate why their sites aren't converting traffic into customers. What a waste!

Is your site working hard for you? If not, it might be time to book a site fitness assesment. Stay tuned for more info...

A: Do you know of research that links SEO to increased brand awareness?

Hi Laura

Sure, there are a number of quite recent studies that relate to the impact of SEO on brand awareness. Perhaps the best known of these is the paper The State of Search Marketing 2004, commissioned by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) last year.

The study showed that:

1) U.S. based advertisers would spend over $4 billion dollars in 2004 on search engine marketing.

2) Brand awareness was overall the #1 objective advertisers set for search marketing programs, above sales and lead generation initiatives.

A full copy of the study is available from the link above.

Other research that may assist you includes:

- How America Searches (released this week)
- Consumers Search Before Buying Online
- Increased Brand Awareness via PPC and SEO
- How Much Should You Budget for Search Marketing in 2005?

Q: Do you know of research that links SEO to increased brand awareness?

Dear Kalena...

I am conducting research for a proposal to a large-scale corporation. The purpose of the proposal is to convince the larger corporation to fund the redesign of a smaller organization's web site. (The smaller organization is a collection of independent specialized retailers, and the larger corporation is a product line.)

Our major selling-point is that the corporation would be heavily featured in the organization's web site, which will eventually lead to higher brand awareness. Part of the funding will go towards a search engine optimization service. The proposal needs to convince the corporation that SEO is a worthwhile investment.

After spending a few hours looking for research on SEO as it relates to an increase in brand awareness, I was lead to your blog. Do you know of any research that relates search engine ranking to an increase in consumer awareness? Or how SEO can increase brand awareness?

Thanks for your time,

Laura

A: Is it important what tags you put at the very top of your HTML code?

Hi Ros

Your HTML should follow W3C guidelines and include your doctype, open HTML tag and header tags first. What you are doing is fine, provided you are in fact using HTML 4.0 to code your site.

The other tags you list look like they were taken from a document that uses Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) and they are referencing the specific version of XHTML they are using as well as linking to a specific DTD template example provided by W3C org here. This is most likely for the benefit of internal programmers to ensure consistency and code validation in the event of changes.

In terms of search engine compatibility, it's best to keep your header as close to the top of the code as possible and move as much code as you can into style sheets so that you don't suffer from code bloat and end up pushing important content to the bottom of the code. Search engine robots are thought to only index a limited amount of code on each page and you want your most important, keyword-rich code to be indexed first. Even more important is a search engine's ability to index your code. Make sure it validates to W3C standards so robots don't get tripped up while indexing.

Q: Is it important what tags you put at the very top of your HTML code?

Dear Kalena...

Is it important what you put in TAGS at the very top? At the moment I'm using:

<< !doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" >>
html
head
etc…….

I've just seen this code and I'm wondering what it is:

<< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"? >>
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" >>
<< xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml >>

[all code deliberately broken for viewing purposes]

Regards
Ros