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CEO at Econsultancy
22 April 2004 12:08pm
Can you get a no.1 ranking on the likes of Google for the organic / natural results where:
- your page hasn't even been indexed by Google
- your page doesn't contain the text being searched for
- very few people link to you
You wouldn't think so would you? But consider this...
Try searching for 'click here' on Google - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=click+here - and Adobe's Acrobat Reader download page comes top. But the words 'click here' don't appear on that page anywhere. However, you can imagine how many sites around the world link to this page with anchor text 'click here'. Indeed if you look at Google's cached page for this search (http://66.102.11.104/search?q=cache:3gToxRwhIFwJ:www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html+click+here&hl=en) you'll see the sentence: "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: click here"
Or, try searching for 'interactive agency' on Google - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=interactive+agency - and you'll see iagency.com come top. If you visit their site (http://www.iagency.com/) you get just a graphic and 'coming soon' as text. Check the source code and there are no kewords there, no meta tags, no nothing. Try checking to see who links to them with a backward link check on Google (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=link%3Awww.iagency.com&btnG=Google+Search) and it seems only 14 sites link to them. So how did they get that no.1 ranking...
What does the above tell us?
- whilst getting crawled and indexed are important they are not the silver bullet to high organic rankings. Indeed, you don't even need them at all.
- links to your site are vitally important for your rankings but a) it is the quality of links that is important not the quantity and b) Google aren't going to tell you, or anyone, what all your in-bound links are or which actually count most towards your ranking.
The more I look at organic SEO the more I am convinced that whilst there are a few best practice things that you can do (getting crawled, getting in the right web directories, getting the right internal and external links etc.), your best bet is not to spend too much time and money trying to beat the search engines at their game but to concentrate instead on a) creating great content that people recognise as great content and b) doing marketing and PR to make sure the right people know about that great content. Google is clever enough to work out the rest...
Any thoughts?
Managing Director at Ahead 4 Business
23 April 2004 11:31am
It seems iagency are missing out on an opportunity, to put it mildly - they could at least have put their phone number up!
Paul Brett
www.ahead4business.com
Freelance Web Consultant at architxt.net
26 April 2004 11:49am
You're absolutely right.
In my experience it is better to spend time building content and promoting it then hours trying to figure out how the search engines 'think' and forever changing a site's design and copy.
One should think about SEO when planning a site's interface, along with usability and accessibility. Once launched, it is much more effective (amd often cheaper) to carry out PPC campaigns and pay to get listed in directories.
Lawrence
On 12:08:36 22 April 2004 Ashley wrote:
>Can you get a no.1 ranking on the likes of Google for the
>organic / natural results where:
>
>- your page hasn't even been indexed by Google
>- your page doesn't contain the text being searched for
>- very few people link to you
>
>You wouldn't think so would you? But consider this...
>
>Try searching for 'click here' on Google -
>http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-
>8&q=click+here - and Adobe's Acrobat Reader download
>page comes top. But the words 'click here' don't appear on
>that page anywhere. However, you can imagine how many
>sites around the world link to this page with anchor text
>'click here'. Indeed if you look at Google's cached page
>for this search (http://66.102.11.104/search?q=cache:3gTox-
>RwhIFwJ:www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html+clic-
>k+here&hl=en) you'll see the sentence: "These
>terms only appear in links pointing to this page: click
>here"
>
>Or, try searching for 'interactive agency' on Google -
>http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-
>8&q=interactive+agency - and you'll see iagency.com
>come top. If you visit their site
>(http://www.iagency.com/) you get just a graphic and
>'coming soon' as text. Check the source code and there are
>no kewords there, no meta tags, no nothing. Try checking
>to see who links to them with a backward link check on
>Google (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-
>8&oe=UTF-8&q=link%3Awww.iagency.com&btnG=Googl-
>e+Search) and it seems only 14 sites link to them. So how
>did they get that no.1 ranking...
>
>What does the above tell us?
>- whilst getting crawled and indexed are important they
>are not the silver bullet to high organic rankings.
>Indeed, you don't even need them at all.
>
>- links to your site are vitally important for your
>rankings but a) it is the quality of links that is
>important not the quantity and b) Google aren't going to
>tell you, or anyone, what all your in-bound links are or
>which actually count most towards your ranking.
>
>The more I look at organic SEO the more I am convinced
>that whilst there are a few best practice things that you
>can do (getting crawled, getting in the right web
>directories, getting the right internal and external links
>etc.), your best bet is not to spend too much time and
>money trying to beat the search engines at their game but
>to concentrate instead on a) creating great content that
>people recognise as great content and b) doing marketing
>and PR to make sure the right people know about that great
>content. Google is clever enough to work out the rest...
>
>Any thoughts?
Director at The Winchester Diet
27 April 2004 06:50am
Lawrence,
Your pragmatic view was like a breath of fresh air. Thank you.
Yours aye
Julie Brown
www.winchester-diet.co.uk
Marketing Director at Nemisys
27 April 2004 16:23pm
Couldn't agree more. I recently gave a few tips to a friend who has put together his site using FrontPage and just wanted "to get the basics right". I've listed them below, abbreviated.
A few weeks later, he's no 6 on Google for "email training" from 11.5 million results!!
No "great content", just the basics.
I'm considering giving up on actually doing SEO for people, instead making sure our own CMS gives our clients control of the most important elements and offering a couple of hours instruction/tips.
Cheers, John Duffy
www.nemisys.uk.com
1. Choose the page you are going to focus on for email training
2. When linking to it from the home page, use the words “email training” as the link
3. Next bit’s more of a pain – you need to rename the actual html file (and so all your links to it), to email-training.htm. Make sure you use a hyphen (not an underscore) in the file name – that way the engines recognise the 2 separate keywords
4. Use email training at the start of the page title, but don’t forget you are branding & also encouraging click-throughs with it too – ie “Email training from Tagg – as unique as you are”
5. This one might be too difficult in the context of the design, but use the HTML Header tag <h1>Email training</1>
6. If you can use a little more text on the page, you can also add the phrase to the first sentence of the content. If sticking with the same amount of content, best not to use it as you may be perceived to be “keyword stuffing” (it’s to do with keyword density on the page)
6. Make the meta description relevant and also encourage click-throughs with that too, as on many engines (not Google though) that will be the text that is shown in the search listings.
7. And depending on how long that took, you can either use the same principle with the rest of the site, or just do the one page and see how it goes before doing the rest.
8. Finally, add your site to the Open Directory - http://dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/Training/ is probably the best category for you? It’s free, and feeds its results to many other engines, and will also help a lot with your reputation.
Senior SEO at Weboptimiser
28 April 2004 10:09am
A couple of minor points :
>5. This one might be too difficult in the context of the
>design, but use the HTML Header tag <h1>Email
>training</h1>
Use of CSS lets you easily control what <h1> tags look like on the screen, so it shouldn't effect the design of your site particularly
>6. Make the meta description relevant and also encourage
>click-throughs with that too, as on many engines (not
>Google though) that will be the text that is shown in the
>search listings.
Google DO use the meta description as the snippet occasionally, but not reliably. They will also use the contents of an <img alt> attribute, if no "normal" text is available. They prefer to use text from the page though
The anchor text is the killer in Google at the moment though. If you can get one or two external links using your targetted phrase as the anchor text, that works wonders
Marketing Director at Nemisys
28 April 2004 10:49am
Points well made - ref the html comment, was more to do with a home user teaching himself FrontPage.
Agreed anchor tag too, although the paranoid in me edited this out, given the recent interest in the practice of buying links from decent PR pages.
Cheers, John
CEO at Econsultancy
28 April 2004 11:48am
Two points made in this thread about linking:
"If you can get one or two external links using your targetted phrase as the anchor text, that works wonders"
"...given the recent interest in the practice of buying links from decent PR pages..."
Linking is a very interesting area for SEO in my opinion. The reason being that I believe it represents the bulk of future work opportunities for SEO agencies (ones that specialise in organic SEO and not PPC etc.). Once clients / site owners have covered off the hygience factors for optimisation (as described earlier in this thread) what will they be prepared to pay for? I think they may well pay for someone who really understands the value of linkage to manage, maintain and optimise their linking - both inbound and outbound. They'll be link negotiators, link traders if you like.
As for buying links, or trading them with commercial value attached, why not? Assuming that the links are of genuine value and relevance to the users and the linking sites, why shouldn't there be some commercial value exchange there? Some links are more valuable than others.
We'd be happy to pay for the right links and we'd be happy to consider taking money for linking to a site that we think is good. At the moment it's just early days and there isn't enough understanding of how to value these links to make it easy to assign values to them. But I think it will happen. And there will be a need to outsource this to people who know how to maximise the value for you. It's the same for PPC at the moment - you can do it yourself quite easily, but is it really worth it?
A question we often get asked is - "OK, so I understand its not about the quantity of links, and we mustn't work with link farms and the like, but how do we find out who would be valuable linking partners?". Here are a few things to do:
1. Search Teoma (http://www.teoma.com) on phrases relevant to your business and users and then look at the Resources that come up (right hand column) as possible linking partners
2. Search Google.com using expressions like ‘[your business offering] + addURL’ / ‘[your business offering] + submit site’ to find sites where you might be able to submit your link (free or paid for) to relevant directories. (But beware link farms.)
3. Check “backward links” to competitors’ sites. Go to google.com and use this syntax: link:www.blue-widgets.com to find people who link to bluewidgets.com. You can get an idea of who already links to you but you should do the same search for people who link to your competitors as they might well be relevant linking partners too.
4. Search on keywords or phrases that are relevant to your business and customers and see who currently ranks highly – they would make good link partners.
You should create a links knowledge base to keep track of who is linking to you, new links that have been created, dropped links etc. You should update this each month to see what impact linkage is having on your rankings.
Often people blame Google updates for the fact that they've dropped out of the rankings suddently where the real reason is that a key link you had has gone...
Freelance Web Consultant at architxt.net
28 April 2004 11:57am
I wonder if search engines are able to distinguish between accessible and non-accessible code. Not necessarily to penalize sites that are not, but to have a filter in place so that users can search only sites that are accessible.
Product Marketing at Google UK
28 April 2004 12:14pm
Very happy to see a pragmatic approach, I am getting increasingly annoyed with SEO specialists who make it all out to be this mysterious black box.
One thing not addressed here yet is dynamic product content & links: On large retail websites the majority of content is product content, which is dynamically served by their commerce engine. Category and product links are generated based on what is in the product database, and the links don't contain the category name but stuff like catID=20 to keep the URL length down. There are typically few pages of flat html content, e.g. product guides (which do help their Google rating apparently, even if no customer ever looks at them).
Things that seem help search engines index dynamic content (I'm no techy, so this is perhaps put too crudely, hope I don't get anything wrong!):
1) Page title: Add the category/product name into the page title for category/product pages
2) Unique URLS: Don't put the identifying category ID into a query string at the end of the URL after.html or .jsp where the crawler ignores it. www.example.com/category.html?catID=20 looks the same to the crawler as www.example.com/category.html?catID=45, so the search engine will only index a single category page on the entire site - which may be your most important category, or a tiny unimportant one.
For example Amazon's URLs are all unique.
3) Cache the whole page as HTML, fixing the links to categories and products rather than generating them dynamically whenever the page loads: This means you can't personalise the content, but I would argue being found by search engines is more important, and it will also speed up the page load time. I think Comet do this, which may be one of the reasons why they come up very high on Google for generic terms such as 'washing machine'.
Am I getting this right? Any others? Would be interested to hear.
Obi