Carl’s SEO & Web Design Blog

It use to be that Google did a “Google Dance” once a month indexing everything and if you were lucky you held on to your position or climbed up some. The less fortunates saw their site head for the back forty or disappear entirely. One of the famous ones was the Florida Dance that happened before a recent Christmas, dropping a lot of commercial sites the never-never land and getting these online businesses upset going into the Christmas shopping season.

The Dances are gone now. Google uses a different strategy. There are billions of pages, and the indexing challenge for returning the good sites to a searcher was too big for “the old way”.

Google now tries to return only pages with good ranking that are relevant to the search. These are indexed every month or less - some indexed every day. The main page of this site was indexed less than a week ago. The more important your page, the more often Google will index it. Sites considered less relevant are banished to the supplemental index. These are only returned to the searcher if Google can’t find much matching the site. These pages are indexed much, much less frequently if at all. If one of these pages is returned in a search, it is marked supplemental. Here is an example from our business site:

Comments on: Not getting a good Google position?
http://www.netadventures.biz/wordpress/2005/07/19/not-getting-a-good-google-position/ Building Web Sites that work.. Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:32:58 +0000 …
www.netadventures.biz/wordpress/2005/07/19/not-getting-a-good-google-position/feed/ - 1k - Supplemental Result - Cached - Similar pages
Don’t worry if some of your pages get into the supplemental index. We have thousands of pages in our site and a good number in the supplemental index. We just make sure the important pages aren’t there. Our book shows you how to get your pages out of the supplemental index.

To see if you have pages there, search your site on:

site:www.netadventures.biz *** -yuiopjkl

where the domain specified is your own. Use the three asterisks and any nonsense string with a minus sign in front of it. Avoid any special characters in the string. This is an undocumented feature, so don’t trust it too much.

PS - yes, we know there are some bad links in this site. We are working on that.

Administrator Google, Internet Marketing and Promotion, Search engine optimization

One very important blog - if you haven’t found it - is Matt Cutt’s blog. Matt works at Google and has become the primary interface between Google and the SEO community. This is as close as you are going to get to the inside scoop on how Google works. You can find his blog at:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/.

Check it out - search by topic or scan the archives.

A good recent posting is available at:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/infrastructure-status-january-2007/

This describes some of where Google is going in 2007. It’s a little big of technical stuff here, but those supplemental results he mentions are the listings Googe returns when it can’t find enough information on a search in its main database. These are labeled as such in the return from a search. Obviously, that isn’t a good place for your site to be listed. If you are there, it generally means you have a weak image to the search engine (too few links to your site?) or you are doing borderline spamming of the search engines. Matt says it basically means you have low PageRank.

Administrator Adwords - Google, Blogging, Google, Google Mapping, Internet Marketing and Promotion, Search engine optimization

Yahoo has changed its bidding system (paid advertising) to compete more effectively with Google. You can find more details of this at:
http://www.ysmblog.com/blog/2007/01/08/the-new-bidding-system/

Administrator Adwords - Google, Internet Marketing and Promotion, Overture, Search engine optimization

For the second time, we’ve had a client having problems with their email through Comcast. Comcast is blocking their email when using another host, even though they aren’t spamming. Contacting Comcast about it doesn’t do anything. Comcast is on our blacklist of hosts that support spammers at:
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.pdf

They are also on our short list of the most serious offenders. This list is at:
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/badhosts.htm

We use Comcast broadband services at the moment, but do not use their email because of these serious problems. We had our Comcast address deleted from our email program when we saw strong evidence that they had sold our address and we started getting spam on the Comcast address. Since we never used the address, the only way anyone could have gotten it was from Comcast.

Our advice to our clients: Don’t use the Comcast POP server for your email, and don’t use a Comcast email address on any other hosting system for people to contact you. You could very well never get that email from a potential client from Comcast blocking. And Comcast won’t tell you what they are doing. Nor can you recover damages.

Administrator General, Google, Internet Marketing and Promotion, Spam, Web Design

Google Adwords has changed things a bit for their ads going into the holidays. Bid price has become more important for positioining your pages and the quality of the landing page less so. This, I presume, is to enhance Google’s profit during December. This means you may have to increaee your bid to maintain the same CTR during the month.

Administrator Adwords - Google, Google, Internet Marketing and Promotion, Search engine optimization

If you have a web site targeted for the coming holiday sales, here are a few tips for your site:

1. It’s a little late for optimizing a new site for the organic (free) engines for the holidays. If you have an existing site, target your title, description, and page contents to one to three keyword phrases that are used frequently in searching the engines and have a minimum of competition. Second, get as many links into your site as possible. Our seo book has many tips on these strategies and others.

2. Using paid advertising gets you positioned well in minutes (Google’s Adwords) or in a week (Yahoo). Our seo book now has a lengthy chapter on using these PPC strategies to get them working for you quickly.

Order the book today and get your site going today!

Administrator Adwords - Google, Google, Internet Marketing and Promotion, Search engine optimization, Yahoo

Thinking of using Google Adwords? A new and updated version of our SEO book is now available at:
http://www.the-seobook.com.

The book is now 256 pages, and the PPC chapter is now expanded with more information for using Google Adwords for successful selling. Why not order it today? If you are thinking of selling something online during the holiday season and you are using a new web site, you’ll need Google Adwords to get the word out by then. Google will have trouble optimizing a new site for any quality ranking by the holidays unless you are using Adwords.

Administrator Adwords - Google, Google, Internet Marketing and Promotion, Search engine optimization

If you have installed Google’s Toolbar on your site, you will see a new menu bar with a PageRank icon at the top. It returns a value of 0-10 for any page you are viewing in your browser. The implication is that the higher this number, the more important your page is in Google.

PageRank is a value based on Google’s early algorithm for ranking pages. The concept was based on the observation of the founders of Google that in various printed research papers certain papers were referenced more than others. If a papers was referenced many, many times by other papers the referenced paper was considered an authority. The more back references to a paper, the more important the referenced paper must be. PageRank borrowed the same concept. The more web pages referencing a given page, the more important the referenced page must be. This early algorithm was patented and used in referencing web pages and defining authority sites. The more pages of high quality linking to your site, the higher your PageRank.

Unfortunately, those creating web pages were soon abusing this algorithm to force ranking on their own pages. To see the problem, try searching Google on failure. Today the algorithm is only one of over a hundred factors that control the ranking of results in Google. Moreover, the PageRank Google does use is calculated dynamically and is actually has a range much, much larger than the 0-10 you see in the toolbar. Periodically the value is reduced to a 0-10 value and projected in the toolbar. This is a logarithmic reduction - in other words, it’s a LOT harder to get that toolbar from 5 to 6 than from 2 to 3. The actual toolbar value, then, is a delayed value, is not based on any specific keyword phrase, and only one of many factors Google uses in ranking your page. It’s not a red herring and is important, but don’t aim too hard for it to the exclusion of other factors.

For good ranking, be sure you are targeting strong keyword phrases, develop your site as an authority on those phrases so that people link to you naturally, keep the site dynamic and constantly changing, and strengthen the interactive elements of the site.

Administrator Google, Internet Marketing and Promotion, Search engine optimization

One question I often get is which way should I go - aim for the free or organic search engines or purchase a PPC (pay-per-click) ad in Google’s Adwords, Micorosft Live, or the Yahoo Search Engine Marketing?

The answer is generally yes; that is, go for both. The organic engines are free, but in Google it often takes 6-8 months to position a new site with any level of credibility. The advantage, however, is that’s free (except for your time for the optimization). As a result, your ROI (return-on-investment) is infinite. Traffic can vary with time, sometimes dramatically.

The PPC engines cost you something, but you are immediately on the Internet. There are other advantages as well. PPC engines such as Google’s Adwords or the Microsoft Live, are excellent places to test your site with various keyword phrases. With Microsoft Live, the cost is low but the traffic will also be low. Google’s Adwords will cost more, but as your traffic goes up the cost goes down and traffic starts at a higher level. In addition, the paid advertising includes multiple tools for measuring how your site is working. Finally, your paid ad is a trusted site to the search engines. A human being has looked at it.

Expect that with either route your traffic will gnerally be higher with the organic engines. Searchers put more trust in the free ads. One top ad I often see in the Yahoo PPC (which drives the CNN advertising) is from a company with very poor ethics and morals. As a result, the Yahoo PPC is really shouting at me that you can’t trust their PPC advertisements. This is less likely in Google, as the PPC cost goes down as the traffic goes up. A corrupt company will not get much traffic. This is not true in Yahoo, where it you have enough money you can buy the position you want.

Why not try both organic and paid? You might even keep two sites - one optimized for the free engines, another for your Adwords campaigns. Remember, unlike with classified ads in a magazine or newspaper, you pay nothing until they click through to your site. You pay for the click-throughs, not the impressions (ad listing).

Administrator Google, Internet Marketing and Promotion, Search engine optimization

Branding is very important in web site marketing and the success of your site. A brand is a collection of images, text, symbols, logos, slogans, and design that represent a company or individual. It is so important in marketing that companies often trademark their brands (particularly logos or the company name) to protect the identity of the company. You purchase items at stores, often paying more for a branded product because you know and trust the brand.

This means that in selling a service or product with a web site, your site needs to brand the product or service. If your company is new, you show strive and work toward the branding of your product or service, using your web site to help with this.

Brands protect you from becoming a commodity. So avoid commoditization at all costs.
Sir Anthony O’Reilly, former Heinz CEO

I began to realize this with my own sites when someone mentioned to me that “I was all over the Internet”. I replied that was essential for my business. I had to show I could do it to build trust in those who would be my clients.

The real shocker came when my brother emailed and said a search on my name showed almost 400,000 pages, with my sites at the top. I was even more shocked when I searched on my name and found Google returned just under 4 million pages, and the top five were all referencing me or my sites. Google had essentially branded my name without me even knowing it!

What this means for your web site is that you need to decide how to brand your product or service and how the web site will carry that brand. For example, a city needs to brand their image, and then their web site can carry that image. For my own town of Tualatin, a major Bridgeport shopping center effectively branded the community. It was so successfully, in fact, that land near the shopping center has become very important to other developers. Restaurants and other stores are taking up the name and riding in on the brand, enhancing it further..

Administrator Internet Marketing and Promotion, Search engine optimization, Web Design