|
 |
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Get the best results from Google, Yahoo and the major search engines.
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the art of optimising a web page or website so that it gets the best possible indexing/page rank for specified keywords.
Clients often get confused with this term as it can mean different things in different contexts.
One important thing to remember - no one can promise to get you on the front page of Google.
If they do - run. They are lying to you. If they could guarantee it, everyone would be on the front page.
The best any of us can possibly hope to do is complete all the tasks that the major search engines need to successfully list your keywords correctly and draw upon our extensive knowledge to outwit and out play your competition to get you as high as each individual search engine will possibly let you climb.
A DotCom Promotions we have had great success with SEO clients achieving front page Google many times, though it is a long term task to stay there. As soon as you achieve front page status, the rest of the world wants to knock you out so they can get in there too.
What is important to achieve good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
- Content Creation
- Content Management
- Publishing
- Presentation
- Archiving
|
- Back Up
- Uploading
- Editing
- Distribution
|
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
How we get the best results from Google, Yahoo and major search engines.
Major Search Engines
Why should you care about search engines? The answer is... Traffic Traffic Traffic.
Most new visitors to your site come through from a search engine.
The potential market here is so big that you can't afford to ignore it.
There is no magic pill or trick to land in the top positions of the major search engines. It talkes work.
Success requires timly information, good technique, patience and time.
Forget about almost all search engines, focus on just a few. Google, AOL, MSN, Yahoo.
There are a few different types of engines around today including Crawler based engines, Non spider indexes, Human powered directories, pay-per-click systems and hybrid search sites.
Google uses a crawler called GoogleBot that lists some, but not all, info on the pages that they find.
Yahoo is a human powered directory. Humans check the submission and will list as they see fit.
Both Yahoo and Google also utilise pay-per-click. This means that you can sign up and for a small fee each time your link is clicked
Spider/Crawler/Bots: same thing. They crawl the web following and listing links that they find.
Ranking Software: Software algorithms that organize, rank and find info related to a search query. Each search engine has its own unique (secret) algorithm and that is why it is difficult to guarantee top position. They also regularly change this algorithm as they learn more to make the search engine better.
How Search Engines Rank Web Pages:
All Search Engines guard their individual algorithms closely but they all follow general rules that we can adhere to.
There are 5 things that are important to search engines:
1. Keyword Location
2. Keyword Frequency
3. Link Popularity
4. Page Importance
5. Page Reputation
6. Click Through Measurement
Pages with the search term or keywords appearing in the Domain Name, the page Title, the top Headline or in positions of prominance like at the top of the page are assumed to be more relevant and are ranked better.
Search engines will also analyse how often keywords appear in relation to other words on the web page. This is Keyword Density and is another inportant factor to attaining your high ranking.
Be careful. Keyword Spamming, the overuse of keywords gratuitously splattered over a page, will see you penalised and in some cases deleted from the engine altogether.
Link Popularity is measured by the amount of quality (top level page and well ranked sites) links that are out there pointing to your website.
Page Importance is the importance system that calculates the importance of pages factoring in the importance of sites that contain those pages. The importance system may factor in the importance of sites based on the strength of the correlation of the importance of a page to the importance of a site. The strength of the correlation may be based upon the depth of the page within the site. The importance system may iteratively calculate the importance of the pages using "conditional" transition probabilities.
Page Reputation: Your mother was right - again! Popularity isn't everything. Your page reputation can mean the difference between SEO success and failure, even if your link popularity is high. Increasing the number of incoming links to your site can improve your rankings by building page popularity. Popularity remains valuable, but it needs to be tempered by reputation. Page reputation comes from what other pages are "saying" about your page.
Click through measurement is measured by the amount of people that actually click on your link in the search results. If they click a lot it will be deemed more important and relevant than one higher up the rankings that never gets clicked. (be careful, repeatedly clicking your own link does not help as the engine records your IP address and checks that against the click nulifying it as click fraud).
What are the most popular search engines?
Even though there are thousands of search engines the vast majority of users use a very small amount of sites. The top 5 are Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask Jeeves, in that order.
If you concentrate on Google, you will go up on AOL, Netscape and Earthlink automatically as they are fed directly by Google. . Some estimates state that Googles share of the search results are 85% of the total because so many search engines simply get their data from Google. So Google is the first one that we need to optimize for.
Concentrating on Yahoo gives you AltaVista, HotBot, Goo, Espotting, MSN, About and Fast in the same way, as Yahoo supplies their search results. Yahoo is the number 1 competitior to Google so we also need to optimize for Yahoo.
MSN is the third that we need to optimize for, even though they get data from Yahoo, they have there own unique algorithm and likes and dislikes.
Open Directory Project (ODP) is a significant system that we need to optimize for. Googles page rank system considers rankings on this system important and its results are also fed to AOL.
Only two more engines are worth worrying about. Ask Jeeves and Teoma.
Also consider a Google AdWords campaign. Google gives importance to links coming from itself so if there is a link to your new site from Google already when it goes to rank it you will get an extra gold star.
Looksmart is important if you are having trouble getting listed in the more important directories. (http://listings.looksmart.com/home/pricing.jhtml)
Evaluate your current SEO status.
Is your site already listed?
Try this. Type site:www.yoursite.com.au into Google to get a list of all the pages that Google has listed from your site. Read the blue bar at the top to get an acurate number of the pages listed.
Try this. Type into your browser http://dir.yahoo.com and you will go to the Yahoo directory. Type in your website - www.yoursite.com.au - and you will see if you are in the Yahoo main directory.
Check the others too and get a list of ones you are not in so you know where to start.
Examining your pages.
Page Rank is Googles test to see how you are soing in status.
Try not to have frames because it makes it harder to list. If it does, add a \"noframes\" tag including links to all the pages on your site that you want listed so that the spiders know what pages to search.
Also, check that the page has correct meta tags. These are tags that sit in the head of your html code and give the search engines specific valuable information about your page including keywords, classification, description and info on when to come back and re-list the page.
Make sure every page has a Title. It will show up as a description of the page when listed on the search results. DO NOT leave the title as UNTITLED DOCUMENT. Make the title tag right below the tag. Make your title descriptive and ensure that it contains the keywords that you want to optimise for.
Search Engines are biased towards text heavy pages. If your page consists mainly of graphics it is hard for the engine to know what the page is about. Alternatively, if your text contains no keywords it loses relevance to the search engines.
If you have DHTML dropdown menus, the GoogleBot will not be able to navidat to those pages on you site as it cannot navigate javascript links. In order to get around this it is essential to include a sitemap with html links clearly marked. Another good idea is to mirror your top navigation with a text based navigation at the base of the page that the robots can follow easily.
Domain Names.
Use primary targeted keywords in your domain name. This is because Google, Yahoo etc., assume that the domain name is relevant to the keywords. It also improves the chance of humans clicking on your link if it matches the keywords they have entered.
Also, some search engines prefer names with dashes seperating the words. ie; www.i-like-it.com is better than www.ilikeit.com.
If your domain name contains your company name it may be worth buying a few more domain names rich in keywords that you are using and pointing them at your website. An example would be www.SunnySki.com.au and extra names like www.nsw-ski-tours.com.au and www.cheap-ski-weekends.com.au and have the last two default to your original site. It is always a good idea to register the plural incase a user puts or omits an s off the end of your name.
Why use multiple domain names?
It provides multiple ways for users to find you and it improves your search engine rankings. Search engines place importance on the qualiry of incoming links to your site. It is called link popularity. By linking multiple domains together, preferably from different service providers, you are adding relevant links, each adding to your sites popularity. Also, having more than one link in a search engine increases the odds that one will be clicked leading the user to your site.
Insist that when you host your site that it will have a unique IP address. Some hosts stach several sites on a shared hosting platform. This is not such a good idea for optimization.
Choosing Targeted Keywords.
Get the keywords wrong and everything else will fail.
Do this before designing your website.
Make a list of every possible keyword that customers will use to search for your site.
If you have an existing site, check the log to see how people got there and the search terms that they used.
Include obvious spelling mistakes as they count for as much as 25% of all searches.
Include plural and singular versions of your keywords.
Multiple word keyphrases are generally more effective than single keywords and get you better targeted traffic.
Analyse the current top 5 listings in each keyword search. Check the domain name, the title, their keywords, the headline, the first paragraph of copy etc,. and you will get an idea of how they managed to get to the top.
Refining Keywords.
Remove ambiguous terms.
Remove too broad or general.
Avoid words that are too competitive.
Focus on narrowly defined words that are highly relevant.
Find 3-4 keyword/phrases and test.
Use a tool like WORDTRACKER to discover the popularity of your chosen keywords.
Keyword Tools.
www.keywordtracker.com
Using the free trial at wordtracker you will get the number of times per day a term is used, number of times in the last 60 days that a term was searched for, similar terms and synonyms and usage statistics for them, common spelling mistakes and competitor sites meta tag keywords.
Google AdWords also has good tools for this sort of thing. Simply sign up and use the free tools to hone your keywords.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
This will give you good stats on any keyword combination that you type into the form field. It measures relative keyword popularity.
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-information/
This is a nice free keyword tool too. It gives WordTracker suggestions, competing pages for that term, Google sugestions on refinement and other word suggestions.
http://www.google.com/trends
This is a really, really cool wat to track trends.
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
And this one gives weekly search patterns.
http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/iq/iq.shtml
http://www.metaspy.com/info.metac.spy/metaspy/unfiltered.htm
http://www.metaspy.com/info.metac.spy/metaspy/
intitle:yourkeyword
type this into Google, replacing yourkeyword with a real keyword and you will get back a list of competing title with your keyword.
Keyword Placement.
Keyword relevancy: Keywords must match the content of your site.
Put best keywords first.
Keyword Density: How many times the keyword appears on your page.
Develop special information pages loaded up with carefully selected and placed keywords.
Create pages that engines like.
Create Keyword Rich pages.
The keyword should be repeated a number of times so that page gets a higher ranking.
Locate keywords in prominent places like the Title, at the top of the page and in a heading at the top of the page.
Titles: Use keywords first and limit use of dead weught words like in, the, on about, for and if.
Meta Tags.
Invisible tags for search engines that hide in the head code of your html documents.
These are used as a summary of your site when listed in the results.
Humans will read this in the results so treat it like a short advertisment for your business and write good tags.
The description tag should repeat the primary keyword of the page and if practicle use several secondary keywords.
Keywords tag: Aviod repeating keywords, limit tag to 19 words, use only keywords relevant to content of your pages and appear in the text on the page. Place most important words first.
Content.
Keywords in a heading are better than in text. Try to start with a keyword in the heading.
CAPS give extra points to a keyword as does emphasis, italicising a keyword or making it bold.
Images can have an alt="" atribute with keywords embeded. Less weight is given to them these days as people abused them with spamming keywords so they are now mostly ignored.
How much text should you use?
Pages between 100-250 words work great.
Links are very important too. Link to other pages in the text. Try to make the link have the keywords and be relevant to the page that it is linking to.
Update as much as possible and try to add new pages with new text regularly.
Try to place keywords at the top of the page and again at the bottom in the text.
The first few lines should acurately describe the contents of that page. The reason for this is that if the engine ignores your meta description and makes its own it will usually grab it from the first few lines. It then uses this to desplay your listing to the public, and the better it fits what they are searching for the more likely they are to click through to your site.
Create as many links to other pages on your site that contain the same keyword. This can lead to a higher ranking for the original page.
Link to other pages that have the keyword in the file name. This can also lead to a higher ranking for the original page.
Keep paragraphs short.
If possible, give the html file the same name as your keyword or phrase. Seperate the words by hyphens.
Incoming links are critical. Search engines like both incoming and outgoing links to pages and may actually penalise you for not having both. Incoming can be from other pages on your site and outgoing can be to other site pages or to other websites.
Site maps are a great idea. Call it sitemap.html. It is just a page of links to every page on the site. You can also slip in your primary and secondary keywords. Be sure that the text on the link is featured in the page that it links to. Add extra content on the sitemap page as some search engines refuse to list pages that only contain links and nothing else. Add a short description of the link underneath the link. Then load that description with primary and secondary keywords.
Common Mistakes.
1. Targeting the wrong keywords. Choose your keywords carefully and systematically.
2. Dont create pages with too many graphics. They are invisible to search engines so can't be indexed.
3. Too much clutter makes extra work for the bots. Javascript, Graphics and html tags clutter up the code so that the search bots get lost. Move image maps to the bottom of the pages. They still work down there but it lets the engines index what they want easily.
4. Dont use html frames wherever possible.
5. Navigation that can't be indexed like javascript DHTML drop down menus or flash navigation is no good. It is just invisible to engine bots and they can't follow links so that any pages that the nav links to will not be indexed. To fix this put a text link nav at the base of every page.
Link Popularity.
This can make or break a site.
Go to blogs and leave comments with links to your site. Make it a habit to do this 5 times each week. The links back to you that Google and Yahoo find will move you up the rankings quickly.
Search engines use the number of links to your site and pages as a measurement of its value. If you have a lot of links to your page from other pages the search engines will treat your page as more important giving it a higher ranking.
A ranking score is based on the number of incoming links and the more links the better the ranking. The weight placed on these links depends on the page rank of the page that has the links to you.
Page Reputation.
A ranking score based on what other pages and links say about the page its linking to.
A link survey tool will gather for you all the links coming into your pages/site and analyse the importanve of the links. The slower way is to gather them yourself and check what the link says and get each page rank.
Page Importance.
Page Rank tool from google will tell you this.
It gets progressivly harder to push a page up a number on the scale.
It is much easier to go from 3 to 4 than it is to go from 4 to 5. Rankings above 8 are very rare.
Strategies to achieve high rankings.
Become a content provider and give others a reason to link to your site. Do this by providing content they can link to or content they can post on their website in exchange for a link back to your website.
Enter into all directories that are similar to your theme.
Enter blog comments that link back to your website.
Keep track of links. Yours and your competitors.
TrackEngine is a good tool for tracking these links.
The key is the actual words in the links that are pointing to your site. So try to control what those incoming links say about your site and make sure they contain your targeted keywords.
Links Pages
They are not as useful as they used to be. Many search engines are starting to ignore these pages or at least are not giving them the same strength/weight that they used to because of spammers misrepresenting these to gain a higher ranking.
Search engines are much more concerned with getting quality links coming into your site rather than links from a Link Farm.
The more links on a page the less the importance of any one link.
Scatter the links around your pages and place where they make sence, in context.
Dont call the pages link pages.
Add content to pages with links. Put a description text with each link so that the page is not link heavy.
Bad Links.
Not all links are good links.
Link Farms, Free-for-all links and links from sites that are unrelated to yours can all cause you problems and damage your index ranking.
If the link leading back to you comes from an unrelated site, one way to fix this is to get the link to point not at you but to an article that you create about your site and post it on their site. Then the link will point to this article about you that is rich in keywords and will have keyword links back to your site embedded within the article/content.
Avoid reciprocal link pages buried too deep in a site. Top level or one link down is the max that you should aim for. Any deeper and no weight will be given to that link.
Improving Links.
Find out who is linking to your competitiors sites. Contact the owner to negotiate a link to your site. Offer to link to them. Usually if they got linked, you can too. Your oposition has already done a lot of the hard work for you by identifying the prime link candidates. Remember that your competitors in this case are not the businesses that you compete with in your local area, they are the top 5 listing in your chosen keyword results list.
Start by matching their links structure as closely as you can. Then improve your link structure and hope that they have gone to sleep and are not also monitoring your movements.
Get listed on Yahoo, Open Directory Project, About and other specialty directories that are relevant to your product or service.
Advertise where your competitior is listed.
Only solicit links on pages that have a google page rank of 5-6 or better.
Optimisation Tricks.
The basic idea is to trick the search engines.
This can be bad because if caught you can be banned. I do not recommend any of these trick methods but will list them so that you know what to look out for when analysing your competitiors sites.
Keyword Spamming.
Repeating Keywords over and over at the top of the page or throughout the text. The text is usually marked up using tags. Generally this doesn't work anymore and if caught the page will be dropped from the index. Its much better to work them into sentences and have them in context. This is acceptable and will give you better results as your keyword density will go up.
Invisible Text.
The trick is in adding keywords, keyword phrases or entire sentences that search engines can see but the human viewers can't. To accomplish this set the font colout to the same colour as the background. This works very well and is very hard for the search engines to detect. You have the added benefit that you can load it by making it a heading and in bold and italic to give mush weight to it. Try to make the text colours slightly different but not so much that the eye can tell. If you are caught the engines will delete you from the directory. If it is on white #FFFFFF simply change the colour of the text to #FAFFFF and it will be deemed not invisible though the humen eye can't see it. I do not recommend this method.
Images.
Use the alt="" tag to place keywords into the tag. You will not be penalised for doing this. Don't repeat any keyword more than once or it may be picked up for keyword spamming.
Blank graphic spacer trick.
Place keywords into the alt tags. They can also be used as links to point to other pages on your site. Search engines place higher priority on text based links than graphics based links so text links are better.
Redirect.
The trick is to show one page to teh visiting search engines and another to a visiting human. There are many legitimate uses for this. One page redirects to another immediately. A javascript redirect goes in the head of a document. The code is document.location-"http://www.yoursite.com.au". This will then redirect to yoursite.com.au. They will almost never find a redirect performed by a javascript command.
HTML Comments.
Below is the code to put comments into html code that you can read when viewing the code but it will not be viewable by the user.
\<\!-- Keyword comments here--\>
This does not work anymore as all search engines have wised up to the trick and now look for the tags and disregard any information found between them.
Bait & Switch.
This is the practice of submitting highly optimised pages to the search engines then switching the page to one that is more suited to a human viewer once the page has been ranked highly. If you see an opposition page that you cant tell why it would be ranked higher than you can get, this is possibly what they have done. To fix this problem so that you are all on a similar playing field, simply submit their page yourself to the major search engines and they will be indexed again thus losing their high ranking and they will be indexed where they are supposed to be, lower than you.
Cloaking or IP Delivery.
Cloaking is much harder for the engines to detect.
Effective and controversial.
When WebBots search a page they give you info about themselves like version, type etc. Part of that info they supply is their IP number. Get the IP numbers of teh major search engines bots and you can tell if it is a bot that is visiting. If you know it is a bot requesting a page you can show it the highly optimized page and the other to the human. Google state that they don't ban sites that use cloaking, only ones that use it to cheat. Search Google for IP Delivery.
This is from Google themselves.
"IP delivery: delivering results to users based on IP address. Cloaking: showing different pages to users than to search engines. IP delivery includes things like "users from Britain get sent to the co.uk, users from France get sent to the .fr". This is fine-even Google does this. It's when you do something *special* or out-of-the-ordinary for Googlebot that you start to get in trouble, because that's cloaking. In the example above, cloaking would be "if a user is from Googlelandia, they get sent to our Google-only optimized text pages." So IP delivery is fine, but don't do anything special for Googlebot. Just treat it like a typical user visiting the site." - Matt Cutts, GOOGLE.
Information Pages.
Info pages are text heavy, keyword rich pages that are specifically designed and optimized for search engines. They have many keyword rich links on the page and not many graphics. They are a start off point for searching your site. Try to include additional content on the page that is not a link, maybe short descriptions about each link, again rich in keyword or secondary keyword phrases. Make sure that the content matches the cintent on the linked to page. Make some links outgoing to other sites.
Hidden Links.
Do not do these. It is to be avoided. Search engines hate it. Try a site map instead as they do like these.
Search engine Strategies
Google is your first choice to optimize for. Google claims that its entire database is refreshed every 60 days, for high ranking pages it is as frequesnt as every 24 hours.
Submit pages to Google at www.google.com/addurl.html
It will take 2 days to two weeks to be indexed, unless it is the first time your site is being listed in which there is a period of testing which could be as long as 2 months. This is called the sandbox. Don't worry, we all go through it. Joining AdWords as well as getting submitted to Open Directory Project and Yahoo should push the process along.
AdWords should generate keyword traffic within 48 hours.
You can tell the last time Google indexed you by clicking the cached link on your search result listing and checking the time and date stamp.
Scoring well with Google.
Google places a lot of importance with page titles.
Meta Tags are placed in the top of the html code to tell the GoogleBot spiders things like Keywords, Description, Classification Category and how long till you want it to come back and re index this page. Having well coded meta tags is essential.
Try to have keywords in your domain name.
Have your incoming links different from your domain name. For some reason Google penalises you if the text exactly matches your domain name.
Use keywords in your text and titles including plurals.
Create alt tags with keywords and synonyms relevant to your keywords.
Your main keywords should be in the top third of the page.
Do not repeat keywords more than once in the text.
Use synonyms while maintaining a consistant theme. Google penalises you for over optimising important keywords.
Use a tool to determine the best order for your keywords and try to keep them in that order on your pages.
Google bases the text in the description on the text in proximity to the keyword that is being searched for (unless you have good meta tags in which case it will usually use that.).
Links on Home Page have more impact and carry more weight.
Site maps are very helpful to letting Google know where all the pages in your site are so they can all be indexed. (http://www.sitemaps.org/)
Be consistant when giving incoming URLs. "www.yoursite.com.au" and "yoursite.com.au" could be considered by Google to be two different sites, splitting your page ranking by half. Make sure link partners always use the same URL to take full advantage of the benefits.
When procuring linking partners ignore partners with a page ranking of 3 or less. Try to get 6 or higher.
Manage your inbound links if possible. Try to get keyword phrases as opposed to an exact URL as the text on the link. Google rewards variation.
An average of 50 inbound relevant links is a good goal.
Content for links is a good idea.
Avoid using link farms, web rings or link exchanges.
Scoring well with Yahoo!.
Yahoo submissions take about 30 days after they find a link to the page and the database is then refreshed constantly. It takes possible 14-21 days if you submit a page using https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit.
Yahoo also offer a fee based submission that guarantees that every page is indexed and a refresh rate of 48 hours, meaning that if you change the content of your site the changes will be indexed within 48 hours.
Yahoo supports meta tags: description, keywords and meta robot and will display up to 129 characters in the search results. This is only if it is listed using a keyword from your meta tags. If it is found by a non keyword it will take the description from random text at the bottom of the page. This is unless you are listed in the Yahoo Directory, then that description will be used instead.
Try to get domain names containing one or more keywords in them.
Use keywords in content, meta tags and page titles.
Try not to use inbound links that are unrelated to your theme.
Use a site map.
Try to use text links instead of image links.
Avoid using link farms, web rings or link exchanges.
Inbound links should have keywords in the text.
Inbound link pages could have keywords in the title.
Yahoo also has a pay-per-click system that is worth investigating.
Scoring well with Ask Jeeves.
Ask Jeeves is a crawler based engine and supports robot.txt and site maps.
Submission can be as fast as 7 days if you use their paid submission program else it can be up to 60 days before you are listed.
Doesnt like javascript redirect.
Doesnt like Bait and Switch pages.
Get a domain name with your keyword in it.
Use EXACT phrases in your text.
Try to get keyword density of 5% in the content text and a little higher inthe title.
Scoring well in Open Directory Project (ODP)
Humans enter each listing. They will look at your site and judge it.
You need to first select a category that acurately fits your sites content.
Submit by clicking the suggest URL on their home page.
http://www.dmoz.org/
http://www.dmoz.org/add.html
Submission time can be as long as 6 months.
Make sure that it is submitted to the appropriate category.
If it has not been submitted after 6 month find an editor on their forum and ask why nicely.
To be listed here the site must contain useful or unique content.
Site must contain sufficient pages with good content.
You can submit differnt pages into different categories.
Sites with regional emphasis should be submitted to the regional section.
No mirror sites or redirects.
All links must work.
No under construction pages.
Create quick loading pages.
Test pages with html validating program and fix errors before submitting.
Not be an affiliate company.
Place keywords and phrases in title.
No redirects.
No prices in site descriptions.
Must be an upper level domain (starts with www.)
Sites listed in ODP get a ranking boost at Google, so do it.
Scoring well with MSN.
Get a domain name with your keywords in the title and avoid using more than two dashes.
Use keywords in the title preferrably as the first term.
Use keywords in the header tags.
Scatter Keywords amongst text in your pages.
Do not place keywords in file names.
Place keywords in both incoming and outgoing links.
Bold links work best.
Use a site map.
Maintain high quality links.
Indexing HiTech Pages.
Search engines find it hard to index video, Flash, graphics, frames and dynamic pages. In order to get the crawlers to index these pages correctly or even at all you need to do a few things.
Use the "noframes" tag for sites that use frames.
Flash/ShockWave can be indexed by using z-order. Simply hide the robot text in a layer with z-index lower than the flash which is on top of it hiding it from the humans. It only works on 4.0+ browsers.
Indexing dynamic pages is difficult. This is usually indicated by a "?" after the URL. Crawlers balk at these as they get caught on robot TRAPS where there is no end to the combination of pages that they will have to index. The ?, =, & and several others make the robot leave.
The answer is to turn the URL into something more readable.
Google does index dynamic content to one level deep.
AltaVista will but only if submitted directly.
Yahoo only trough paid service.
Registering your site.
Using the paid schemes will get you there quicker.
Establish a search engine submission budget.
Recommended submission order is:
Google AdWords and Yahoo! Sponsored Search
Google and Yahoo.
Open Directory Project and Yahoo Directory.
If FREE is your criteria you should start with the second rung, Google and Yahoo.
The first thing that you need to do is get a link on a page from a site that is already listed on Google or Yahoo.
Why not just submit your site to them?
The best way to get high rankings is to build quality links to your website. This is the best way to get listed by the major crawler websites. They all prefer to find the links on their own from links found on pages already listed. If you do it this way you have a better chance of avoiding the "SandBox" which will see you left out in the cold for a few months while they make sure that you are not a domain taster or fly by nighter.
Once your site is linked to from a website you know is listed on Google or Yahoo you can go ahead and submit that page, the page that has the link to your website as well as submitting your own website.
Go to Google and click their free URL submission page and add both URLs. Your site and the site page that has a link to your site. This will improve your chances that Google will find your site and trust it to be worth listing.
To make it easier, get more external links to your site and submit those too.
Google says that if you have trouble getting listed, try getting listed bu Yahoo or ODP and Google will get it from there.
Next is to submit your home page to Yahoo using their Free URL Submission tool.
You need to register first so sign up free and get a membership. Get links. Sign up with Google AdWords if need be. Join all free directories that you can.
You now reach 95% of all searchers.
Next thing to do is to join the Open Directory Project and Yahoo Directories.
These are both directories meaning they are powered by human beings. Yahoo Directories and Yahoo Search are different. Yahoo Search is a crawler based index. Yahoo Directories is a human fed directory that contains only a title, short description and a link to the site. They do not list individual pages, just the entire site. The result is a categorised list of websites.
Since they contain little info they are hard to search. They must be assigned to categories. They are important to you for several reasons. ODP feeds results to Google and other search engines. It also helps your link popularity and page rank.
Directories don't care about links, the only way to get into them is to submit your site and have a human editor OK it and index it.
Yahoo is the easiest to get into and you can have your site listed in a week. Go to http://au.dir.yahoo.com/ and read the info. A listing here will give you a better page rank in Google.
Start by making sure that your site is not already included in the directory.
Go to http://au.dir.yahoo.com/ and type your URL into the search field. If your site does not come up you are not listed and you need to submit. If you are unsure of the category that you should be in, find yoor competitors and see where they are listed.
Now lets submit to the Open Directory Project. Google loves this one. So does AOL and Yahoo. The submission is not guaranteed. Sometimes you may wait for months. To submit go to www.dmoz.org and click suggest URL. Once again, find your competitors and see if that is the category for you. Remember that it is a human that will list you so make the category truly reflect what your site is about or they will not index you. Follow the steps and wait. It could take up to 6 months.
If your site is not indexed after a while you can go to this link www.resource-zone.com and speak to one of the editors to see why it has not been listed.
You can also now go to any of the thousands of search engines but they all get their data from the top 5 so if you have done it all correctly there is no reason to worry about the rest, they will do it for you.
Optimisation Tools
Review the webmasters pages at each search engine. They tell you what they like and don't like.
http://www.google.com.au/search? num=50&hl=en&safe=off&q=site+optimization+tools&btnG=Search&meta=
http://au.dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/ Site_Announcement_and_Promotion/
http://au.dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/ Site_Announcement_and_Promotion/Search_Engine_Optimisation__SEO_/
http://www.link-popularity-checker.com/
http://searchenginewatch.com/
This gives you an updated view of what is happening right now in the world of search engines.
http://www.wordtracker.com/
Word Tracker has a free trial that will give you great info on your keywords.
http://www.rankquest.com/tools/Google-Search-Tool.php?url=about:blank
This will give you almost everything that you need to optimize the pants off your site.
http://www.rankquest.com/tools/Keyword-Density-Analyzer.php
Page Rank is Googles test to see how you are soing in status.
http://www.sitemaps.org.
Sitemap tips at sitemap.org will help you to correctly format your sitemap.
Call for a free quote.
Call Adam on (02) 9957 3337 or use the Contact Us form and we will go over all aspects of creating a website and explain all the different options available to you.
We are experienced in all areas of designing, programming, marketing and promoting your website and will utilise this vast array of knowledge to tailor a solution specifically for your business.
|
|
|
