Website Optimization and Promotion

Googles latest algo update has craked down hard on copyright material and spammy use of AdSense. In particular they seem to have an appetite for spam sites using copyrighted materials. In Matt Cutts blog, he urges we the betrayed to stop those who are stealing our content by contacting Google through the Ads By Goooooooooogle link on any AdSense displayed on those pages.

You should read his blog to find the secret codeword to use when you contact Google about the spammers. He has lots of detailed information abou thow this new system works. How do you know who is stealing your content? I use a service called CopyScape to hunt down material from other sites that comes from my pages.

Many of these sites appear to be created by automated page generation software that grabs pages from search results and chops the information up to create unreadable pages that are intended to help ranking and draw AdSense clicks. This is a direct infringement on your copyrighted material. If you click the Ads by Gooooooogle link on their AdSense and enter the ‘word’ jagger1 into the details section of your message, Google will send out the anti-spam police and kick in the violators door. Or at least intervene in some way.

Help keep the internet clean and prevent your copyrighted material from being used illegally. And may Google remember that RSS was intended to distibuted and be reprinted

Yahoo sitemaps go back a ways, but most folks I talk to are all about the Google buzz. Yahoo uses a proprietary format for their sitemap as well but the structure is easier to create. Simply create a .txt file and copy each URL of your site on a new line. Use the entire URL beginning from the http:// and you have yourself a Yahoo sitemap! You will need to store this file somewhere on your server. A sitemap creation service can automatically do this for you making your life easier and eliminating the need for you to keep your sitemap up to date.

You can name the file anything you like, but Yahoo uses the example of urllist.txt on their website. You can use the Yahoo Submit page to submit your sitemap to their crawler. This is the same page that allows you to submit your homepage to their crawler. As with any good Engine, they always remember to tell you that they don’t accept all entries.

Any good sitemap for a good website ought to be collected and spidered by Yahoo, but if you don’t create the file properly your sitemap may be the one getting rejected by them. If you give this an honest effort it isn’t difficult to do. One page of your site per line using the full URL, save the file on your server, submit it, you’re done. In the future, you just update that file and they will continue to spider your Yahoo sitemap as they make their rounds.

Link checking has always been the kind of thing that I know should happen and often strive to do regularly (hmm, been a while since I’ve checked my own links, now that I think of it). Having a website with broken links is like having the space shuttle with odd white clouds leaking from the sides… it’s just not right. Nothing is worse than clicking a link you’re interested in and having it lead to nowhere.

Todays client site (who shall remain nameless) had an uncountable number of broken links. In their defense, it is a VERY old site that still has a remnant or two of dancing javascripts on the back pages somewhere. He is obviously seeking to update it and get it done right, which is why he chose this shameless self-promoter

Enter the Xenu link sleuth. This is an awesome piece of software that crawls the site and checks internal links and external links as separate entities. It can create HTML sitemaps (poorly, but it tries) AND kick out a format suitable for a Yahoo Sitemap. Now for the big question I always hear… Yahoo Sitemap? Well, catch that story in my next article Yes, Yahoo has had their own sitemap format long before Google rolled theirs out. The biggest problem I see with Xenu is that it does not have a delay factor between hits. This has caused problems with very large PHPNuke based sites in the past for me, so I generally try to use it on static sites where it does not stress any one file too much (the one that creates all files in PHP-Nuke is modules.php).

Broken links are annoying to your visitors and catastrophic to Search Engines. Most engines will penalize you rfor having broken links probably for the same reason as humans find them annoying… broken links are a waste of time. They lead nowhere and then you have to back up. From an engineering perspective, they are a waste of time. Instead of clicking once to get where you want to go, broken links force you to click the back button, rescan the good page, and pick a new link to visit. The scorecard says instead of one click, you must click at least 3 times and re-scan the page for a new link. Do you have any idea how much that adds up over the course of a year?

Check your links, make sure they work. Xenu is free, but there are many other excellent pieces of link-checking software out there to choose from. Now that you read this, there is no reason to walk around with broken links hanging out… hire me! I’ll fix them…

Google has updated their ranking formula and PageRank this past week and what a topsy-turvy mess it has been! I’ve heard many stories from amateur webmasters to professional SEO’s about how their previously glorious ranking dove in the SERPs. I’ve heard some speculate that Google was no longer ranking sites that used AdWords and others speculate that services like LinksManager were the cause for their demise. I myself took a dip on a few previously strong phrases since this past weekend, which is especially disturbing to me, but I’m pretty sure that it was NOT related to the recent full moon we just had or the wrong butterfly flapping it’s wings over the ocean.

Normally I do well for various keyphrases across the engines and I’ve managed to build myself a reputation amongst a growing number of successful clients and a few fans (where do they keep the SEO groupies?). It immediately occured to me that the clients of mine that were hardest hit were recent victims of a particularly long server crash. I’ve never had this kind of problem before with my servers, but it happened shortly before the dip in rank. I know that downtime appears to the search engines that your site is gone, but this can’t be the entire problem. How do I explain the increase in nearly every site I touched to a PR4 or better? Surely something went right.

Some of the sites under my care that didn’t do so well have… well… bad HTML code. I know that one of the things that Google stiffened up on was the use of invisible text on pages and, in particular, the spammiest of invisible text as shown in Matt Cutts blog. But the ‘bad code’ sites I have under my control don’t use spammy code… just PHPNuke using multiple [html] tags. Well, it turns out this is a killer of pages also. Who would have guessed? In our defense on those pages, it was on the list after some functionality changes…. it just became #1 priority.

Needless to say, most of the bad rankings have turned out to be explained by some fairly common phenomena. I would like to see in about a week or two if these fixes that didn’t matter so much before, made the difference in SERP position or not after the most recent update. If the server crash was to blame for the poor SERP ranking, only time should repair that problem.

Summary: Who knows… not all of the data is in yet and not all of the ‘fixes’ have been made or had time to filter through. The obvious fixes according to Google, other engines, the W3C, and common sense say to validate your code and make good pages. Good pages have good code and great content. Even if this isn’t ‘THE’ answer for fixing Google SEO, it can’t hurt a website to fix your code and keep reliable servers. Jumping into radical changes can, itself, hurt your ranking.

Google is about to begin their update of toolbar PageRank for sites in the US. They began the update already for European markets. This PR update ought to prove interesting. They have instituted many changes, most of which are not understood yet.

One thing has been tossed around quite a bit and that is changes to how Google treats backlinks and link exchange strategies. It is common knowledge that Google strives to rate sites by backlinks as one of many criteria. Their Utopian view of backlinks does not allow unrelated backlinks to count toward ranking. Although they haven’t quite nailed this yet, their latest changes may have taken them a step closer towards perfecting their linking analysis.

I think that counting links as a measure of a websites value is important, but leaves something to be desired when it comes to practical application. I commonly troll the various freelance websites available on the net looking for work to help pad my downtimes when business is slow. Many of the jobs I see posted ask for (say) 1,000 PR5+ links. Google has done well to penalize these sites as their links do not place any value on the site. They are not being linked to because of quality content, it is because they hunt down links for the purpose of fooling Google into believing they are worthwhile sites.

Worthwhile sites build their links over time spread out fairly evenly and increase in the number of links as they become more popular and other website metrics increase. As Alexa ranking improves and search engine positioning goes up, it is natural to expect a site to gain links faster… kind of a snowball effect. It would not be natural for a site to increase it’s links overnight or even to gain 1,000 links in a month after not having any for a long time. The only sites where this naturally occurs would be the Red Cross after a disaster or campaign sites around election time.

Google has tried to counter the unnatural link explosions by creating a damper effect on sudden and unnatural rises in links to sites. I can only imagine that one of the changes in this latest update will intensify that damper effect and help to nullify webmasters attempts to artificially trick Google into believing that their website is actually valuable by adding many links quickly.

One of the things Google has ‘missed’ to some degree is the practice of linking to unrelated sites. Google has paid some attention to this, but I still see many sites about cars that link to real estate sites who have unusually high PR (based on my experience). Why would someone looking for a muffler for their ‘05 Trailblazer want to follow links to Florida Real Estate or Betty’s Crafts? (Sorry Betty, I just picked any name that came to mind).

When Google gets stronger about the relationships of links, many sites will suffer severly. Until then, people will continue to throw good money at unrelated sites. The uncomfortable time will come when many sites get knocked out of their comfortable PR because Google decides that enough is enough and starts to actually deduct points for ‘bad’ links instead of just giving a reduced value for them.

Comptrio is hot on producing a suite of htaccess tools. I will be releasing (after testing) an htaccess security script to help you secure your website using the htaccess file including some user-management. Web Scripting security is great for managing user accounts and keeping track of who is on which page to customize their experience, but to LOCK PEOPLE OUT of areas they shouldn’t be in, you need the level of security that only htaccess provides. This script is nearly ready for release within days.

I will be ‘attempting’ to create an htaccess rewrite script that will require minor modifications to your existing scripts in order to use ‘friendly URLs’ instead of the ugly things with question marks in them that scare away the Search engine spiders. This may not be released for a few weeks, but should make your life easier than ever and give a major SEO advantage to those who use it.

I will also be releasing some way of compiling little tricks like redirecting your domain name in order to have consistent URLs. This will help prevent splitting your PageRank between two names for the same page. Instead of having Domain.com and www.Domain.com, your pages will inform the spiders of a permanent name change to either one or the other (your choice).

These htaccess tools will help ‘mature’ your website beyond being considered (by search engines) as some kids creation with a copy of FrontPage into a more professionally created and well-rounded website. Search engines are increasingly beginning to care about these subtle differences as it separates the major players from the fly-by-nights.

Installation will be available if you ever have problems getting these scripts to work. These scripts (due to their nature) require setting some server permissions and proper placement of files outside of the web-root (so that no browsers can see your password file). It’s easy to setup, but some need more help than others. I’ll be here to help.

Because of a specially made Paypal IPN script I wrote, your htaccess tools will be automatically delivered to your inbox by email as a zip attachment. If you have a need for IPN scripting to get automatic updates of payments made to you via Paypal, contact me with a description of what you need automated (upon successful payment by your customers) and I can set this up for you.

Keep on reaching for the top and your website will succeed! htaccess can help…

No reputable SEO professional will offer you first place. I stress ‘reputable’. None of us have any direct control over Google or any other engine despite bogus claims by some. We merely do our best to influence the engines to believe that your site is most relevant for a term.

I happen to be very good at influencing the engines to believe the sites I optimize are related to the words I want them to rank highly for and, most of the time, I get my way. I would never lie and make guarantees about position though. SEO’s have no direct control over the engines and, therefore, cannot guarantee position.

To expand the thought on this, there are millions of site that want to be on top of ‘Website Optimization’ SERPs only 10 are going to get it. Does your budget come close to that of the top sites? Are you pursuing your efforts efficiently?

If you are willing to spend $50 one time to get on the top… save your money (or change your strategy and SEO expectations). The time and effort it takes to be on top (especially in competetive arenas) will simply not allow small one-time efforts to succeed. The amount of effort top ranking sites in competetive categories use requires that you do it yourself or that you spend like any other marketing avenue… setup a budget and stick with it.

I’m not saying that you can’t get great results from low budgets, I’m just saying use some common sense when setting up a budget and don’t expect the world for peanuts… especially if you are in a niche where you are competing against Behemoths who have the resources to employ a full-time staff of professionals to rise to the top. The real point behind SEO advertising is not to prank, it’s the traffic that comes from it. By widening your target markets to include many low-level (but active) keywords and keyphrases, you can triple your traffic or more from the engines.

Large budgets are honestly no guarantee of success either. Bad SEO efforts or optimization that is targeting weak keywords will dash your efforts. It would be similar to advertising under trash-can lids in the real world and may not be the best placement of your product or service. Your best bet is to have realistic expectations of what SEO CAN and CANNOT do for you and your site.

I have some ‘pre-compiled’ packages I offer for SEO with setup beginning around $250. This consists of several scripts to help monitor spiders and build sitemaps while ensuring that the overall health of the site is acceptable (robots.txt, htaccess, HTML, OPML, Google, and Yahoo sitemaps). This gets me started on keyword research to make sure that the SEO efforts will target appropriate phrases and gets your site submitted “PROPERLY” to the top engines and DMOZ. Proper keyword targeting will ensure that your budget is not being wasted on words that do not bring traffic in. This is a solid foundation and is designed to get you going. This part is pretty standard across all sites, but chances are that you will need more to take off and top out in your markets niches.

Since, at this point, most sites begin to take different paths to SEO greatness, this is where individual customizations and strategies come into play. This is the point where, according to your budget, I can suggest different approaches and methods to help your site get better ranking. Not every site will require every SEO method to be fully tweaked. Many times, quiet little niches can have many top keywords without a whole lot of effort into the optimization. Many sites can improve ranking by some minor code adjustments that help to inform the search engines what your site is about.

Bottom line is, good SEO takes time and effort and that requires a dedication on the part of your SEO provider and your budget. While you may be able to improve your site over time by small increments, someone else is throwing all they have into beating your site on the SERPs. Stay competetive, do what you can, but have realistic expectations about your goals. The ability to expand on SEO strategies and implement many various optimization tactics will help your provider to succeed but the SEO expectations must be realistic.

By the way, great SEO not only dominates at competetive keywords, but can also find many little niches to funnel traffic your way. I get more traffic from all of my ‘little words’ than I do from a top position on ‘website optimization’ and it was easier to get top ranking for those words.

Traffic from a small budget is not impossible, if you look at it realistically. I’d love a Lexus for $50, but if I am lucky enough to get it… it may not work like I expected. Maybe I should save my $50 until I can get a better Lexus… or get a Pinto to get me around for now until I can get a better car.

One question that I am often asked is how big an ‘average’ blog post should be. While there is no one answer for this, I have developed a “3-4″ guideline to use when blogging for SEO purposes. The 3-4 guideline is one of many ways to know how much blogging is enough to satisfy search engines while setting a reasonable goal for your efforts. It consists of 3-4 posts per week with 3-4 paragraphs per post and 3-4 senteces per paragraph.

Posting new articles 3-4 times per week will keep your blog quite active and help to bring in many new users to your site. It is not that difficult to think of 3-4 topics per week if you are keeping up with your website, if you are knowledgable, and have something to offer your visitors. Chances are good that you have many situations worth writing about each week. Write about solutions to problems, write anecdotal content, at some point during the week you can easily say “Oh yeah!” and have yourself a new topic.

3-4 paragraphs will help set a goal for your writing patterns. Bigger blogs are better, but anything smaller than 3-4 paragraphs robs the content of valuable keywords and relevant text. Again, there is not set limit for this, but this guideline should help your article contain enough material to rank well in most engines.

If each paragraph has 3-4 sentences it has a better chance of being a complete thought. 3-4 sentences should give you enough space to argue or support your point and to offer resources for further reading if necessary. Following the 3 to 4 rules in this easy to remember formula should help non-writers get started on writing good articles and help to keep ideas flowing for a rich and useful blog. It is intended to help keep you from writing ’spam’ blogs with little useful content.

Google has to stop accepting pages at some point prior to their PR Toolbar update. I am not sure what the exact date of their update will be or what the exact number of days is that they cutoff new pages from taking part in the updates, but I have noticed that pages that were published within a few weeks of an update have no PR.

The July 14th Google Toolbar Update is a prime example as pages from Jun 18th have a PR toolbar rating and pages published as late as July 26th have no PR. This was obviously published before the July 14th update, but wasn’t published early enough to be included.

I suspect this has a lot to do with the frequency that your site is spidered and the relative importance that Google has for your site. The next Google PR update is predicted for late October (although they love to scramble it). According to the small look I made into a brief part of their history, they stop accepting new material about 3 weeks prior to the update.

I am not positive when they will stop accepting pages for the next Google update, but I strongly suspect this time will come within the next week or two… or less. Waiting for the update to begin does not help you out as pages are stored for processing before the dance begins. Get your best pages up now to get in on the next update.

*************************************
*
* Update
*
*************************************

It turns out, according to the PageRank of the articles on this site, that PageRank was actually cutoff between Oct. 3 and Oct 10. I have looked around and the date seems more toward the 10th… guess I should have written more during that time to track the date.

Comptrio offers an online URL encoding tool that now offers a selection for an afiliate link ‘hide’ or a more standards compliant version of URL encoding. A fully compliant generator will be available by next week.

This began as an online tool that I created without linking it to my site or creating a webpage for it. Since I have turned it into a webpage on my site it has generated a lot of traffic and I feel the need to create a more responsible version of it. Some of the first steps were made tonight. Only the reserved characters in the query string are encoded when using this tool in compliance mode. The URLs produced are standards compliant. The goal is complete RFC 3986 compliance. This is the most recent web standard on this aspect of web design as of January 2005.

The affiliate link ‘hide’ portion of this online tool encodes all characters in the URL. This is used by people who wish to protect their affiliate links from prying eyes. It is not a 100% solid way to hide a URL as it can be de-coded, but most users won’t even try to crack the code. It is real difficult to read and works on almost every browser you will ever hear of. Try it out and see for yourself! Enter a full URL or a partial.

This started out as a small tool for my use, became a busy webpage, and will end up as a solid tool for the web design and development community to use. I am open to suggestions on this or any tool offered by Comptrio to improve it’s usability.

***************
EDITORS NOTE

This tool was modified as of 29SEP2005 to work properly. The URLs it generates are 100% standards compliant. It works equally well with URLs that currently use & and adds it to those that need it. Let me know if you find any errors, I’ll be happy to add a few more rules to the engine if you spot any bugs or problems I missed.