SEO Secrets

Since Jigsaw Design moved from focusing strictly on Design to Search Engine Optimizing, we have been spending a lot of time researching this process and reading feedback from other SEO Companies via message boards, blogs and other sources. We eventually came to the conclusion that 90% of the people out there really don't have much of a clue what they are talking about. In the next few paragraphs, we will be discussing some methods and practices that will boost your position and still keep you in good favor with the search engines. We will also be looking at some practices that SEO's put a lot of stock into that may not necessarily be as important as they will lead you to believe.

IMPORTANT

Less code more content

When a web crawler visits your site, it is there to read your title, description and content. What it doesn't want to do is wade though pages of code in order to find a few lines of content. There are two reasons why this is bad:

1. It looks to the crawler that you are trying to hide something (spammers will use code to hide hidden text or redirects). If the crawler doesn't understand something, it will ignore it and, most likely, your site.

2. The web crawler may think you don't have enough content to put any importance into your site and, if it doesn't think your site is important, then it will not list you too high in the returned search results.

What you should be shooting for is at least a 2/1 ratio in favor of content on 75% of your pages. This will let the web crawler know your site has some sort of relevance and also gives the crawler more content to index, which it really likes.

Frames and Flash

I have addressed this subject before, but I want to go into it again because it is one of those things which a lot of SEO's just don't understand. The major search engines, i.e. Yahoo, Google and MSN, will all say the same thing on their web masters pages and that is "some web crawlers have difficulty reading the context of these pages". What it doesn't say is don't use flash or framed pages because this is a no-no. The reason why I want to make that clear is a lot of SEO's will try and tell you that this is a bad thing and that all your pages need to be flat static pages with lots of alt text behind your flat images. This is not the case. We have gotten many websites in the top ten and number one spots, some of which use both flash and framed pages. Some do not even have any indexable text or links on the home page. So how do we do it? Simple and its something you should be doing anyway. You should have an alternative version of your site which viewers with flash installed will be directed to. For a framed site, you should also have a non-framed version for people whose browsers don't support framed pages. Now that you know how simple it is, here is the temptation. Because your index page will most likely only be seen by maybe 10% of the people that come to your site, the temptation will be to flood that page with keywords and search text to get yourself bumped up the search and that will happen. However, when you get caught (which you will), you will be dumped. This page should only contain a stripped down version of your site and should only contain the same text content as your flash or framed site.

Keyword overindulgence

When writing the copy for your site, write it for your viewer and not for the web crawler. A lot of people get tempted to use the same word or phrase over and over to try and get themselves placed first on an web search. This is a total rookie move and can also get you bumped for what's called keyword flooding. Here are some examples:

• Bad

  Bay Area Search Engine Optimizing

  Bay Area search engine optimizing company, located in the bay area. Our services include search engine optimizing, SEO and search engine placement. As part of our search engine optimizing service, we guarantee you top placement on all search engines within 30 days or your money back. When you chose our company for your search engine optimizing needs we will........ I think you get the point.

• Good

  Bay Area Search Engine optimizing

  Jigsaw design is located in the Bay Area California. We are committed to serving all your design needs. Also, as part of our service, we also include search engine optimization, web hosting and online store solutions...... bla bla bla

I'm sure you notice the difference. Our web site does show up in the top ten for the search term "bay area web search engine optimizing". However, that was before we wrote this article. So how many times can you include the same search term? That only the Search engine companies know for sure. However, based our experience with sites we have successfully placed in the top ten, we would say no more than once every two paragraphs or once every 100 words.

Out of style sheets

Style sheets are one of those things that are easy to abuse and can get you in trouble. When use correctly, they can really help you when optimizing a site. To abuse the use of style sheets is simple. All you have to do is make your H1 tag the same as your normal text style to try and make the crawler think that all your text is important. The trouble is crawlers are not as dumb as the used to be. They figured out that nobody has a header that lasts 5 paragraphs. The proper use of the H1 tag is your main page header. For example, this page is "SEO Secrets". Sub headers like "out of style sheets" should use the H2 tag and your content should always be normal text. Never, no matter how tempting it is don't make any text hidden by use of style sheets or any other method because your site will be bumped. Also do not make the folder that your style sheet is in hidden or private because, if the web crawler can't read your style sheet, it's not going to trust that everything is legitimate.

Stale content

You may be able to get your site listed in the top ten within 30 - 60 days, but that's no guarantee it will stay there. If your site is not continually being updated with fresh content and growing, then the search engines will simply dump it in favor of newer fresher sites. You should be adding a new page to your site every time the crawler visits and updating your old content as much as you can. Daily is preferred, but weekly at the very least. This will mean that the crawler will have fresh content to index and new links to explore. Thus, it will never see your site as stale and drop it.

NOT AS IMPORTANT AS A LOT OF SEO'S WOULD HAVE YOU BELIEVE

Page Rank

If you have downloaded Google's toolbar, you will see a bar at the top of each page which gives you a rating from 1 to 10 of how Google ranks your site. This means absolutely nothing when it comes to search engine optimizing. Some search engine companies think that getting a high page rank means you are going to be listed higher in the search. This is not the case. In fact, it couldn't be further from the truth. What this little bar indicates is simply how important Google sees your site and it makes that judgment on the quality of sites that link to you. The single most important thing about your site is not page rank, it is not how many incoming links you have and it is not how long your site has been up. It is your content, plain and simple. If your content matches the search criteria, then you will be listed. The more relevant content you have, the higher your site will be listed. There are a lot of sites listed in the number one spot that don't have any page rank.

Incoming links

Don't believe a word you hear about incoming links, the quality of the link or anything to do with link exchange because the truth is; it doesn't really matter how many links you have to your site and what sites link to you. What does matter is the way the sites link to you and how often new links show up to your site. If you wake up tomorrow and, overnight, 1 million other sites decided to link to you, that would not affect your position in any way (what it may do is hurt your listing because it will look like spam). Here is how links work for you:

1. If you are a plastic surgeon and another plastic surgery site links to you, that will give you a boost because you are being linked to a site that has some relevance to yours.

2. If your site sells used network equipment and the link to your site is like this used network equipment that will give you a boost because the link is a search term.

3. If you acquire new links slowly over the course of time, that will give you a boost because it looks like your site is gaining popularity.

4. If people link to internal pages of your site, as well as your home page, that will give you a boost because it looks like you have lots of pages of relevant information.

Link Building

Inbound links are one of the main factors for ranking well for competitive keywords. But only number of inbound links can't do the job for you. Inbound links are only helpful when it is a one-way link or a relevant link for your site. That's why there is always two opinions regarding link building.

Link Building and Its History

It started off long back when Google implemented the Pagerank concept in the Search Algorithm. Webmasters all over the world started misusing them for their own benefit. Concepts like Link Farms and bad neighborhood came into effect. Thanks to Google that took evasive measures to tackle this kind of spam through their numerous updates.


Link Building for Google

From my experience I can say that it is really tough to make your way to the top ten in Google for competitive keywords. Google considers Link as a vote of support from a site to another site on the web. And for that you have to pick quality links. Editorial links are the preferred ones but even links given out by other sites are appreciated. Link bought through any kind of network or Paid Links are the typical links that can harm you in the process and the effect may vary from poor performance to getting banned from Google.


Link Building for Yahoo and MSN

For Yahoo and MSN the case is different. If you have proper structure with great navigation, content, and few numbers of links, then you have good chance to rank for fairly competitive keywords.


Important Point to remember while Link Building

1. Do not link out to bad neighborhood site.
2. Always check the link provided to you.
3. Before giving a link out to any site think how it would help your visitors.
4. Getting a link from related site is much more appreciated.
5. Check the Anchor Text and the position of the link.
6. Check the Anchor Text of the link pointing out to the site linking to you.
7. Prefer directories for best one way links.
8. Editorial links are preferred ahead of other links.


Effect of Links in Search Engine Ranking

The followings are the metrics that Search Engines consider when weighting links. All these can affects rankings positively or negatively.

1. Anchor text (when it matches queries, it can have a significant positive impact)
2. Placement on the page
3. PageRank of the linking page
4. Trust in the linking domain
5. Link structure in HTML (inside an image, javascript, standard a href, etc.) - although Javascript links are sometimes followed, they appear to provide only a fraction of the link weight that normal links grant. Likewise, links from images (and anchor text in the form of alt text) appears to provide somewhat less weight than standard HTML links.
6. Nature of the link (when it appeared, how long it stays on the page for, etc.) - can affect how much weight the link is given and be used to identify patterns that may indicate manipulation
7. Use of nofollow
8. Relevance of page content to linked-to page
9. Relevance of site to linked-to page
10. Text surrounding the link
11. Number of outbound links present in the linking page
12. Previous link relationships between the domains (if the page/site has already linked to the page/site in the past, it may be given less weight and this may also be used to identify and discount reciprocal linking schemes)
13. Hosting relationships (if the domains are hosted on the same IP address, or same c-block of IP addresses, the link may lose some of its weight)
14. Registration relationships (if the domains share registration information, it may be interpreted as less editorial and given less weight)


Factors Affecting Link Building

1. The traditional mutual linking between sites. This process is termed as reciprocal linking. However, the SEO’s are of the opinion that this strategy of link building has been diminished by Google. There is also a belief that the better strategy of building links with sites of relevant content.

2. The three-way link (also known as triangular linking) is the method of linking the site A and site B for a link back from another site. It is a much developed and modern strategy of link building than the two-way method. The Two-way linking is not in practice since they seem to be similar to the one-way linking to Google. However there are Search Engine optimizers who are of the opinion that the Google identifies three-way linking and there is often the risk of penalties.

3. This is the three-way link method where linking is done from a different site instead of a link from the site A. The benefit of this type of link building is that there is no need of the outbound links in case of the site A. However the SEO’s are of the opinion that site A might be have to suffer penalties from Google.

4. The four-way linking is favored by few webmasters. They have the same advantages and disadvantages like the number two and number three methods as discussed above.

5. Article links: An informative article with links displayed in the middle or at the end of the article. These articles are provided to the webmasters free of cost as content for their sites in return of the link in the site of the client. There is a belief that the publication of the article on different sites might result into some problem since it has the duplicate content and the links of the articles are also similar. A number of these articles are submitted to “article farms”. It is advisable to offer unique articles on the webmaster but producing many of the unique articles is often expensive.

6. One-way link is also considered to be effective. Even though these one way links come from the sites having low page rank these are considered to be effective. However SEO’s are of the opinion that one-way link from FFA’s and the directories are considered to be spam by Google. It is essential to find out related sites in order to avoid being marked as spam by Google. However, this method seldom works.

7. Buying Links - This is the technique of buying text links along with keywords. It is stated in the guidelines for webmasters that Google does not support buying of links. There is also a method of reporting against the sites that buy links. Few of the SEO’s think that Google creates this fear among people so that people buy Adwords instead of advertising somewhere else. The SEO’s also believe that buying banner ads is better than text links since Google cannot consider them as Spam. If the text based ads are sponsored link then text based ads are not a better idea. Some SEO are of the view that if there is no keyword in the link anything can be done for reputation. It is also possible to detect reputation from site where the banner is.

8. We consider A as the site that we are trying to promote. The best strategy is to create various information sites with relevant content on the different IP C-blocks in order to “take the fall”. If you follow this strategy then site A will receive links from links from other sites like site B, C and D. The sites B, C and D participate in the different linking activities with the purpose of creating Page Rank. This might be considered spam.

9. You can also build a site naturally. The best way is to create excellent content. It is an easy way to promote a site that is informative but is not ideal for commercial site. However it is pretty time-taking affair.

10. It is a combination of all the above strategies. However, Google can punish a site for any of the strategy and may not be aware of the strategy.

Adsense optimization tips for more revenue

If you earn more revenue from Google adsense, you have to optimize your adsense ads on your website. These tips will help you to earn more and more.
Google Adsense is no doubt the world’s best ad network in contextual advertising. You can generate more revenue than that you are currently earning with just few fine tunings. They gave out some great adsense optimization tips that they have gathered over the past few years. The original Webinar transcript is very lengthy, so here’s a quick summary:

* Ad Location - “the middle, above the fold location perform best.” Also “if you have an article page with a long body of text, the bottom of that article is actually pretty successful”
* Ad Formats - “the top three formats are the 336×280 that you see on the page; the 300×250 medium rectangle; and then the 160×600 wide skyscraper.” Additionally “the wider ad formats are doing better than the other ones and the reason is that they actually take up fewer lines. And so with every additional line, you have a chance of losing that interested user.”
* Ad Colors - Pick colors that blend well with the site. Matches the background color, and compliments the site. Make them feel like a part of the site. They give an example where a customer went from blended background to yellow, and clicks dropped 65%
* Ad Blindness - if the colors stick out too much, readers may immediatly identify them as ads and not even look at them. Also frequent readers may stop reading ads so you could alternate positioning and colors to get their attention. “The more you blend in with the site, the less chance that ad blindness will occur.”
* Experiment - this was a big theme in the webinar echoed by all experts. Use channels to test different colors, positioning, and formats to find out what works best. They show that you can more than double your revenue just by finding the right color, position, format combo.
* Image Ads - If you want to maximize revenue they recommend turning them on. I personally disable them in my account, because I find them too distracting/annoying to the user. Yes you may increase your CPC, but you will probably decrease impressions over time.
* Link Units - Don’t take up much space, and also “allows the user to refine what they’re interested in. So if they may not be interested in specific ads on your page, they might be interested in a particular topic, and by clicking on a link unit and a link in the link unit, they’ll be able to specify that they’re interested in that specific topic and get a lot more options and variety on the ads that might appear.” I also bet google remembers what they click on and then tries to generate better ads for the page… just my speculation.
* AdSense For Search - You can use this for your site search, and you get a percentage of ad clicks.
* Never click on your own ads - One of the callers asked the question “I was just noticing that someone asked about clicking on their own ads and it says you’re not supposed to. And I don’t remember reading that. And I occasionally do click on the ads… So is that detrimental in some way?” - I can’t believe they said that to google. Google’s response was: “Yes, that’s sort of chief among the terms and conditions”.
* Impression Counter - Google confirmed that Page Impressions are counted when a public service ad (or alternate ad url or color) is displayed.
* Your site is unique - all these things may not matter, the best location, format, and color is different for every site. So again, go experiment.

What is CPI?

Cost Per Impression is a phrase often used in online advertising and marketing related to web traffic. It is used for measuring the worth and cost of a specific e-marketing campaign. This technique is applied with web banners, text links, e-mail spam, and opt-in e-mail advertising, although opt-in e-mail advertising is more commonly charged on a Cost Per Action (CPA) basis.

The Cost Per Impression is often abbreviated to CPI

This type of advertising arrangement closely resembles Television and Print Advertising Methods for speculating the cost of an Advertisement. Often, industry agreed approximates are used. With Television the Nielsen Ratings are used and Print is based on the circulation a publication has.

For Online Advertising, the numbers of views can be a lot more precise. When a user requests a Web Page, the originating server creates a log entry. Also, a third party tracker can be placed in the web page to verify how many accesses that page had.

There are other advertising pricing structures. CPC - Cost Per Click Through, CPL - Cost Per Lead (lead usually meaning a free registration), CPS - Cost Per Sale. These structures are collectively referred to as CPA - Cost per Action.

CPI and/or Flat rate advertising deals are sometimes preferred by the Publisher/Webmaster because they will receive a more consistent fee proportional to the amount of traffic.

Today, it is very common for large publishers to charge for most of their advertising inventory on a CPM or Cost Per Time (CPT) basis.

A related term, eCPM or effective Cost Per Mille, is used to measure the effectiveness of advertising inventory sold (by the publisher) via a CPC, CPA, or CPT basis