If you're a do-it-yourselfer (DIYer) when it comes to building your website, there are a number of strategies you can use to help yourself in getting your webpages ranked in the seach engines. for example, carefully written titles, description meta tags, keyword-rich body text and incoming links.

An important, but often neglected, element is the use of keywords in your Headings. The single most important heading on a page is the headline, name of the article or page name. Call it what you want, just be aware that this isn't the same as the Title Tag which shows up on search engines.

Headings are the large font headlines that tell what's on a webpage -- the main headline as well as subheadings. There's an art to writing a headline, but that's a blog for another day. What we're concerned with here is the structure of your heading/headline.

Headings in HTML,  H1, H2, H3... offer important clues to the search engines . Since headlines often contain important clues to the content of the webpage, search engines take note of any keywords found in headings. 

In HTML, there are six header tags:

• H1
• H2
• H3
• H4
• H5
• H6

 <H# ...> indicates a header or a title of a section or subsection of the document. For example, to start the section of your page that discusses your product, you might put--

<H1>Buy My Product<H1/>

Which gives you this on the page

Buy My Product

 Each header tag indicates the relative importance of each section it is heading: <H1 ...> is for the major sections of your document, or as the one header to the entire document. <H2 ...> is for the secondary sections of your document, etc.

Using keyword-rich heading and subheads not only helps your search engine rankings, it can also make it easier for visitors to read the content on the page. Since many people start out skimming a webpage when they land on it, headers and subheads can both help gain their attention and guide them to what they are searching for.

So use keyword-rich headers and subheads frequently on your page. The search engines will take notice and so will visitors to your page.

One of the best ways to guarantee success on the Web is to keep visitors interested in visiting your site often.

One of the best ways to do this is by offering new or refreshed content. Frequent updates to your site will keep customers engaged and assured that they have good reason to return. Frankly, nothing turns off customers more than seeing outdated or irrelevant information.

So how do you keep content fresh? There are a number of  ways to create interesting content, including:

• Blogs: Blogs are a great viral marketing tool because they can incorporate the elements of interactivity, community and collaboration.  One caveat, don’t bore them to death.
• Polls and surveys: People love to share their opinions and polls and surveys work well as they provide visitors with both instant gratification and underscore interactivity.
• Articles and White Papers: People love to get free information. By updating and offering free articles and white papers on your site, you not only give them a reason to return, you can also score inbound links by allowing them to republish the work (with attribution, of course).
• Customer-driven content: One great way to get new content without having to write it yourself or hire freelancers is to ask your customers for contributions. Many visitors will jump at the chance to provide you with content, simply for the chance to see their name in print.

 Content is still king on the Web. It should be the starting point for your Website and never treated as an afterthought. There’s simply no reason not to have an updated and interesting website. Set up a regular schedule for updating content on your site. For example, blog three times a week.

 Keep content fresh and relevant, and you’ll keep them coming back for more.

 

 

I was recently reminded about test conclusions, posted last May by those wonderful people at Marketing Experiments, on the subject of Website headlines.

Their conclusions pretty much sum up what most copywriters will tell you about your Website--

1. Your Landing Page absolutely must have a headline.
2. The more specific your headline, the better your results.
3. Properly optimizing your headline will produce the best results.

The report is a quick read, so you've got no excuse for not reading it. Especially when you read how their findings showed that optimizing the headline on a Web page could produce an increase in the Website's conversion  rate in excess of 73%.

I'm frequently amazed at how many Website's don't even bother to have a headline on the page, much less one that is written to attract attention and keep the visitor on the site. 

Let's face it, when you're seeking prospects on the Web, don't you want to do everyting you possibly can to not only attract them to your site, but turn them into customers? Of course you do.

So, read the report, and then do one of two things--

• work on creating a compelling, optimized headline for your site, or
• give us a call here at Zunch, and put us to work on creating a prospect-grabbing headline for you.

And if you think you've got a particularly challenging headline to create, just tell them you want me to work on it for you. I love a good challenge.  

Today many sites are using Content Management Systems (CMS) in order to make it easy to do site updates and add new content, but one should not forget that many of these CMS activities can actually harm and even destroy a site’s rankings, if the CMS is not installed and used properly.

Once you decide to switch to a CMS make sure that the old URLs are redirected, using 301 permanent redirection to the newer URLs. If possible, retain the existing URL paths.

Choose your CMS carefully, as there are many Content Management Systems that create a site structure with very unfriendly URLs and that contain a number of special characters.

Devote some time to find a system that will offer clean simple URL strings with minimal extra characters. This will help in retaining the current rankings of the site.

The ideal CMS should be one that allows editing of all aspects of a given page like Meta Tags, Alt tags, Footer etc.

A good, search-engine-friendly CMS is money well spent, especially if you are interested in maintaining and improving your existing rankings.

As long as search engines are the primary means people use to find Websites, search engine optimization (SEO) will play a vital role. Search engines do change their search algorithms from time to time, but in spite of this they will always look for quality site content to rank sites correctly. And quality content requires proper keyword placement, among other things.

No doubt search engine optimization will continue to change in the coming future and changes will also occur in the use of keywords, linking techniques and website structure, but they will always have an impact in the rankings of a website. Consequently, SEO will continue to play an important role in getting a Website top rankings.

Ten years from now, search will certainly look different, but let’s not forget that the Internet is still very young and search even younger. Regardless, in search engine optimization, the small things may change, but the basic fundamentals will remain the same and should always be in place to sustain consistent rankings in the search engines.

Today, more and more website developers are realizing the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) in developing a website. They have realized that together with a great design, websites need high search engine rankings to attract increased premium targeted visitors from the search engines. As a result, search engine optimization has become a  required element in website design.

What Good is a Website if No One Can Find It?

A large majority of websites are not designed keeping search engine ranking factors in mind and they get short-changed in the search engines’ rankings. When constructing your site, make sure your site is using a search engine friendly design. Search engine friendly web design entails creating website elements such as graphics, layout, coding, interlinking of pages, site structure and content in a manner that search engines want that makes the site visible to the search engines.

So you're fighting to get a high ranking in the search engines and convert visitors into customers. No easy task, particularly as your competitors probably have the same goals in mind.

Want to know what will make or break you, particularly as to converting visitors to customers?

Your content.

Great content builds your brand. It makes the sale. And it closes the deal. 

Yet way too many sites give little thought to content. I'm still amazed at how many companies simply upload their brochure onto their site and think that's sufficient. Or worse, fill up their pages with Flash or static images, doing nothing to sell a visitor on doing business with them.

Why is the Web Full of "Filler?"

At best, I'd guess that maybe (and this is a big "maybe") 20% of the sites on the web selling products or services have content designed to make sales and create customers. I'm probably being generous at the 20% figure. Gerry McGovern, a UK-based consultant widely regarded as a leading expert on the subject of web content, believes that less than 10% of content on the web is effective.

That means that somewhere between 80-90% of commercial websites are failing to do their job.

All because someone doesn't want to spend the time necessary to create enticing content. All because far too many businesses forget that their website is, in fact, a "Sales Person."

So they load it up with whatever "filler" they deem appropriate and then wonder why they aren't getting more sales from their website.

The Difference That Your Choice of Words Can Make

There's an old story of how investment bankers were looking for investors in what were then referred to as "third world economies." Most investors had little interest. But then someone got the bright idea to start calling them "emerging economies" and suddenly the money came flowing in.

Similarly, Fortune used to offer a supplement called "Better Plans for Retirement," but found little demand for it. Someone got the bright idea to change the title to "Retire Rich," and, BLAM!, suddenly the supplement became an in-demand, best seller.

All that happened because someone took the time to choose the right words. 

Finding the right words for your page title, your headlines, for all your content, is the essence of website success.  Do a search for keywords in your industry and look at the results on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). I'll guarantee you that the top choices have well-written, content rich pages that both provide information and sell the visitor on doing business with them.

Those sites will also be properly structured to be search engine friendly. That means that they use headlines and sub-headlines, short paragraphs and bullet points, among other things, to create a site that is informative, easy to read and entices the visitor to keep reading.

Think about this. Early in it's development, the Internet was often called the "Information Superhighway."

Why?

Because most people were (and still are) going there for information. Information that's delivered in the form of content.

If the information, the content, you provide is insufficient, your site has failed.

If the information you provide is sufficient, if it answers your prospects questions and meets their needs, your site is a success and you're on your way to earning new customers.

Take a look at your website today and try to judge it as objectively as possible. Ask yourself, "Is it doing the job it is supposed to?"

If the answer is no, then rethink your content. It might be a good idea to hire a copywriter who is knowledgeable regarding creating SEO and customer friendly content.

Here at Zunch Worldwide we offer copywriting as one of our services. If you'd like to learn what we can do for you, call or e-mail us today.

But whether you do it yourself, hire us or hire a copywriter, don't accept anything less than effective, persuasive copy-- the essence of website success.

 

InternetRetailer shows us some interesting statistics for why people use one engine over another. Not surprisingly, a majority of AOL, Yahoo and MSN searchers use the service because its convenient; they are already there doing other things. What is surprising, however, is the fact that 24% of MSN searchers don't know why they use MSN! Hmm...

The chart also reinforces the idea that it really doesn't matter who has the most relevant results. As I've said before, search is all about convenience. The moment you start searching the goal is to STOP SEARCHING. This is why Google was busy building GMail and Google Local when webmasters across the world were crying "just focus on your results and perfect your algorithm...blah blah blah."

Another interesting note of interest will be the release of IE7. The integrated search bar will make it easier and more convenient than ever to choose an engine and get searching. We'll see how different this chart looks next November.

AD:TECH 05 - Shanghai - November 15-17, 2005 - Shanghai International Convention Center, PRC

Be sure to stop by booth E12 and visit with Zunch Communications' APAC Business Director Terrence Ou. Terrence will also be speaking on Tuesday November 15th about SEO methodology and will be giving a site clinic on Wednesday November 16th.

This morning it occurred to me how useful free software can be. In particular, I've found Xenu Link Sleuth to be incredibly time saving in the past few days. As any good search marketer knows, a poorly architected site structure can many times be the largest hurdle to conquer in an SEO campaign. Even the nicest looking, most comprehensive site in the world will suffer mightily if URL session IDs are present or if javascript navigation is predominantly used. Tools are needed to expedite the site evaluation process and quickly identify the culprit of a poor-performing site.

Link Sleuth very eloquently and graciously hammers a site with asynchronous requests, gathering information from thousands and ten thousands of links in a matter of minutes. Once finished, easy-to-read reports are produced that display 404 pages, orphaned pages, a sitemap and more. I've even built my own link crawler for our team to use, but I continue to go back to Link Sleuth.

As a side note, we are trying to do our part by offering ClickFraudDetective, our click fraud software, free of charge. The best things in life are free, right?

Very cool tool to help with URL detection --> Yahoo Site Explorer

We have been using this utility extensively since it launched a few weeks back for determining old URLs that are indexed that need to be 301-redirected to new URLs of pages that we are building out.

* This utility is in Beta

I guess MSN should work on their link building. A PR of 2!

http://www.msn.com

If you've recently gone in search of a .com or .net suffix for your website, chances are your first choice is taken. This is becoming an increasingly frequent problem given the proliferation of "domain squatters" that buy up domain names and then wait for someone to come looking for one of them, at which point they insist on an exorbitant fee for the use of the name.

I’ve run into this problem a few times with some of my past clients setting up websites. In the past, the client always opted for a different name, sometimes throwing off marketing plans built around a particular name.

But with the proliferation of more domain suffixes like .ws or .tv or .cc, it appears the options for getting the name you want are broadening.

But is it necessarily a good idea to buy a .ws when the .com you coveted isn't available? Maybe. Maybe not.

Maybe

The primary advantage of the newer, and lesser known, suffixes is that you are more likely to get the domain name you want since there isn't much demand for .ws and its brethren. Major corporations are buying up .ws, .tv and other names, but that's strictly to protect their brands. Most don't bother to do anything more than post a redirect, and rarely use them for advertising or marketing purposes.

Maybe Not

At this time, it's pretty well established that the average person has little or no awareness of the range of domain suffixes that have only come into being in recent years. So if someone is uncertain of your domain name, they're more likely to guess at ".com" or ".net" and possibly never look beyond those options.

For some reason, we've tended to attach a certain cache to .com and .net, while viewing .ws, .tv and others with a degree of dubiousness.

And, as noted, the big boys don't see much value in these suffixes. They're only picking them up to keep someone else from grabbing them and using them as a tool to take business away.

Based on pure recognition value, a .com is the best choice, followed by .net, .org and .biz. These suffixes tend to have higher recall and definitely have higher resale value, as reflected by the values found at www.Afternic.com and other such sites.

So, do you or don't you go with .ws?

If at all possible, find a name that is available with a .com or .net. Failing in that, check into .biz; .org is also an option, but people tend to associate .org with non-profit and governmental entities.

But if you just can't find a name that works using those suffixes, .ws and others may be your only choice.

Look at it this way, if you go with one of the lesser known domain suffixes, you may be a trendsetter, .ws may be all the rage a year from now.

 

Google the term 'miserable failure' and you'll find the biography of George W. Bush from whitehouse.gov.  That is, until recently.  The oldest and greatest example of link bombing has been usurped, and it appears the staff at the Whitehouse is to blame. 

For years, the first result for 'miserable failure' was this URL:  http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html.  Checking the source on this URL today reveals this interesting code:

<meta HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="0; URL=http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/">

This is a client-side meta redirect, so it does not return a 301 or 302 server code. 

While some are speculating that this is strategic on the part of the Whitehouse to remove this embarrasment, it looks to me just to be a crude attempt with little strategy.  Why do I say that?  Well, for starters, the page that you end up on links to the Bio page, which loops back through the redirect.  If the Whitehouse staff wanted to strategically eliminate the ranking, they would have changed the URL of the bio page and refrained from using any redirects at all.  As it is now, it is possible that Google will end up treating this meta redirect as if it were a 301 redirect, and all the bomber links will be credited to whitehouse.gov/president.

Now that I think of it, that scenario could be strategic if the Whitehouse is anticipating a democrat in office next year.

Ted had asked me to review his site and give him some suggestions. The Vice-President of marketing for a large commercial real estate developer, his site for a new downtown multi-use center was "lost in space" as far as search engines were concerned.

The site had been up for over six months and still wasn't registering on Google or other search engines. He was paying a fortune in Pay-Per-Click  (PPC) to some company I'd never heard of, and nothing was happening there either. His plan, which made sense, was to use PPC for six-to-nine months while his ranking in Google and other search engines rose.

But that hadn't happened. In fact, you could "google" the name of the project and it didn't come up.

One look at his site had told me most of what i needed to know. I confirmed it by doing a spider search simulation to verify my facts.

Ted's site was one big Flash-construct. The only words on the landing page were the name of the project. I started explaining how spiders don't read Flash, and therefore the landing page, together with ten other pages his designer had built around Flash and Javascript (which spiders also don't read), weren't being indexed as a result. No indexing by spiders = no rankings.

For an hour I went back-and-forth. Ted wanted a "cool" site that would rank in the search engines. He wanted a site dominated by Flash and images. He didn't want a lot of "words." I gave him my recommendations and left.

Last time I checked, Ted's site still was unlisted on Google.

Google has indexed 8 Billion web pages and is hard at work on the next 8 Billion as you read this. They do this with a small army of search engine spiders.

If you're interested in getting high rankings on Goolge and other search engines, the spiders are your best friend. And you've got to know what to do to make them feel invited. Your website must be "spider-friendly" to make them feel welcome.

Spiders don't read websites the way you and I do. Spiders read the HTML, the web page source code. So if your site has bad code, or little or no code, the spiders don't care too much for your site. And they leave without having indexed you.

Spiders love websites with content (text) and good code. They dislike Javascript and images, since they can't read either one. That's not to say you can't allow them to "see" the images with good web design, they'll be more than happy to crawl over your image if you happen to attach an ALT tag to it.

It's a tricky business, designing a site that both human and search engine spider visitors will like. You want the human visitors to stop by, visit and potentially buy your product or service. And the best means to get your prospects to your site is to have sound web design: good content, good site design and good code.

At a minimum, those three items are necessary to get the spiders to crawl your site and index it. We won't even go into linking strategies, the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and valid XHTML, the latest generation in HTML standards, right now.

Once you're indexed, if you've done things correctly and continue to do so, you're on your way to the top of the rankings.

It's complicated. It's confusing. It can drive you nuts if you do it on your own.

And, yes, you can do it on your own, but as you see, there's a lot of work involved. But it's necessary work.

According to some surveys, as many as 86% of all people arrive at a particular website via the search engines. So if you want prospects to find you, you've got to have a site that is properly designed and search engine optimized.

A high ranking on the search engines can bring you highly targeted traffic, traffic that is searching for your service or product. You can't afford to miss these vistors just because you want a "cool" site and ignore proper SEO-freindly design conventions.

And by the way, if you get a smart webdesigner and copywriter together, you can have a site that is both "cool" and spider-friendly.

My suggestion? If you don't have time to educate yourself on spider-firendly webdesign, check into using a professional search engine optimization company.

We have given Google way too much credit lately. 

A collegue and I were doing some research this morning, and we were both appalled at the pages which were ranking for some relatively non-competitive terms.  It wasn't the pages in the SERPs themselves that were spammy, but rather the backlinks of these pages.  It appears that while the SERPs themselves may be somewhat free from spammy pages, scraper sites and link farms still push legitimate pages up the SERPs. 

In an effort to compete, we've given our entire squad a challenge.  The employee who creates the most scraper SPAM sites by Friday gets an extra week of vacation.  OK, I made up the part about the vacation.

No, no, of course we didn't do that.  But if the engines don't get their act together and start picking up on this crap we're all going to have to band together.  Is is that hard to identify a scraper page and devalue all the links?

Google seems to be adding words to the title links for some pages contained in the supplemental index.  I've seen this occur on four separate domains now in the past three days.  In all of these cases, the title appearing in the search results does not match the title appearing in the cache of the page, nor does it match a title tag that was ever present. 

Followup:  There is a thread on WMW that details some of the issues being seen.  Halfdeck also has a nice writeup about it on his blog.

We know with the recent story about the five million junk pages indexed in Google that the folks at the 'plex are having some issues.  Hopefully they'll figure it out sooner than later.

Once the initial search engine optimization process is complete they keywords should be monitored around twice a month. As any one ranking report is only a window in time, ranking reports should be looked collectively over an established period of time. If your site has never gone under optimization before then, depending on your back links and the competitiveness of your keywords you may see drastic improvements. After this initial phase it is perfectly normal and expected to see fluctuations in keyword rankings as search engine rankings are never static.

Search engines are continuously adding new content, discovering new links and tweaking their scoring algorithms. Because rankings can fluctuation in any given day its important to look at the ranking reports over a period of time to observe true trends. Just because you have noticed a keyword has declined in Google the last two ranking reports may not mean that you need to take drastic actions and re-optimize or overhaul a page. If you are able to look at the ranking reports since the baseline (initial pre-SEO) report and see an overall upward trend, then you may want to wait until a third ranking report. As a rule of thumb I like to see three declines for a keyword before considering taking action, unless the previous two declines have been drastic.

As the program progresses you will inevitably have rankings that form a declining trend. When this happens you may want to consider if your linking program has been targeting the keyword(s) in question in addition to examining back links and on-page optimization of sites that now rank higher than yours.

Myself and our insanely talented creative director Gina Hamm just finished up a usability report. One of our larger SEO clients had asked us to provide an analysis on the traffic reports and usability of the site. Naturally, Gina handled most of the design aspects and usability, and I spent most of my time interpreting the site metrics. Together we were able to provide a report with a ton of useful information and recommendations to improve the website experience for every user. For a large website, it only takes a small improvement to make drastic differences. (Example: Raising the conversion rate of a site just a fraction of a percentage could equal tens of thousands of dollars in revenue.)

I was also reminded how effective SEO and good usability are sometimes one in the same. Focusing the content of a page and adding textual navigation links were some of the items included in Gina's report. Of course these are helpful to a typical user, but they can also have great benefits toward an SEO program.

Working together to make sites successful...that's what Zunch is all about!

In my experiences, many people with a general level of exposure to search engine optimization believe on the page optimization is where the 'magic' happens. I'm here to tell you there isn't any magic, nor a silver bullet that will gain your web site the best search engine visibility. It's adhering to best practices and having a strategy formulated to cover your keywords that will make the difference in the long run, combined with the first five segments of this series.

Best Practices:

Try to use no more than 3-5 keywords on a given page.

Prioritize the keywords you have selected for the page.

Use the keywords in your title tag in a coherent fashion (your title tags play a large part in bringing in visitors from the search engines).

Use the keywords in your meta description tag in a coherent fashion (sometimes a search engine may choose to use the meta description you have provided in conjunction with your title tag).

Use the keywords in your meta keywords (do not spam your keywords tag with keywords that are not amongst those chosen for this page).

Use an h1 header tag to begin the content of your page which contains as many of your keywords as it makes sense to use (remember your prioritization).

The content on the page needs to use the keywords you have chosen. There is no density percentages to target, however it should be clear that this content is about the keywords you have chosen for this page. If you find that your becoming too repetitive with certain keywords, use synonyms.

Break up the logical flow of your content into segments and give each segment a sub-header (ie: h2, h3, etc.) where appropriate. If possible, you could have different paragraphs of text aimed at the keywords selected for the page and use sub-headings with those keywords. This format is very similar to college English term paper writing.

Whenever possible and prudent, link to other pages from within your content and use keywords for those pages when possible (avoid 'click here' links).

These are the fundamentals of SEO page optimization, that when carried out will help to provide a good understanding to the search engines, and especially your users, as to what the page is about.

We've seen a recent PageRank up date this week. One thing that people have been noticing is that some of the home page PageRank is lower that their internal pages.

There is a discussion underway here at search engine watch on the topic. View Thread >>>

I personally brought up 3 points that could be the reason. They are as follows:

• Advertising links not using the rel="nofollow" tag, and being off topic
• Better Link Popularity on the internal pages
• Just another one of those wacky glitches

What ever it is, it hasn't seemed to be messing with rankings on any of my personal sites. Webforgers.net being one of them.

I was reminded this morning how important it is to involve an SEO consultant in the very beginning stages of a website. If you're building a large website and you expect to hire an SEO once the site launches to optimize it....STOP! Spend the money upfront to have the consultant give recommendations on engineering the database, sitemap and site structure to work for you, not against you, with regards to SEO. With an optimized website structure already in place, adding the proper keywords and content in the right place is easy.

Trust me, having to reconstruct a website after it's built is no fun. And you'll be thankful when you have rankings in three months instead of nine. ;-)

While going through ranking reports today I noticed something that was just flat out wrong! I manage a client that has had previous SEO done to their site. As I went through the site I noticed some old spam in the page. About half the coding on the home page was spam.

I instructed the client to move it immediately! In the last two bi-monthly ranking reports I've noticed that the Google Rankings have steadily increased... Now here is the part that is just flat out wrong the MSN rankings have started to decrease...

Now I know that MSN backlinks are easily gamed, anyone can plop a site wide link up for a term and in 2 weeks start to rank for the link text. Now I'm starting to see that the on page content is very prone to spam as well.

Here's a good example:

A search for "Dallas Movers" pulls up a good example of spam in both search.msn.com and live.com

The site h2movers is about as bad as it gets... MSN has a very long way to go if they want to beat out Google. Google is what it is because they've held the #1 search engine position for so long. They have actively had people try and game their system because of that #1 spot. Everytime someone catches on to a loop hole in the Google system, the Google engineers have plugged it.

In conclussion, I can't put the spam back nor will I for the client. A drop in MSN rankings is a loss I'm willing to take for a gain in Google. As per MSN you've got a long way to go before you can over take anyone, I'm sure all the spammers out there are rooting for ya :)

I see it everyday. Someone proposing a url structure in the forums and asking for advice on whether it'll get crawled or if there are any visual flaws. So let this be an end-all post on the subject.

Out of all the experimenting with urls, I've found that
.com/ to
.com/folder/file.htm
works the best at being crawled regulary and deeply. PERIOD.

Now let me go over the problems with the other structures that I see everyday as I cruise the forums.

The Directory Structure & PR Dither Rewrite
This is like the Camero Mullet (see 2nd image) of mod_rewrites, olds school and looked cool back in the day.

.com/ (PR5)
/folder/file.hml (PR4)
/folder/folder/file.html (PR3)
/folder/folder/folder/file.html (PR0)

In the directory tree structure the root links to the first folder, the file in the first folder links to the file in the 2nd folder and so on. Once you get to 3 folders deep you lose your PR in most cases. This is because a puny PR 3 isn't strong enought to warrant a crawl that deep into a site. You could even see this in some of the deeper sections of the Yahoo! directory. The further you went the lower the PR and some sections were just so deep off the root they didn't even warrant a cache.

Of course the solution to the above would be to link to every page in the site on every teir or use the high PR from a root sitemap to feed spiders deeper. This also dissolves if you have a large site. A good example would be a country: USA (1 page) >> State (50) >> County (~3250) >> City (17,500*)

Obviously no single page could hold 20,000+ links and be crawled. Plus browsers would strain to render that coding. Then deciphering all the navigation. Its just not logical.

Junk Rewrites
Like The Tron Guy, It Should be avoided at all costs.
Nice Moose Knuckle by the way Jay!

These are the cases where the developer stuffs every variable thats not needed into the url. So the effect is a nonsensical jump from Root to a file 3-5 folders deep.

.com/ (PR 5) | (PR 3)
/folder/folder/folder/folder/folder/file.html (PR 2-3) | (PR 0)

The problem is that a site has to gain a significant amount of PR on the home page just to push the spiders into the rest of the site. This is why there are many complaints when a developer that has switched to mod rewrite static urls and complains, "I can't get my new urls to get indexed". You could be waiting months or years depending on how fast you can get inbound links.

It's not that they can't get indexed it just that your home/root pages aren't powerful enought to warrant a deep crawl. I see this alot with shopping cart/cms add-ons for mambo & oscommerce. For windows servers I would suggest using ISAPI Rewrite. ISAPI Rewrite gives you the same functionality and control as the mod_rewrite application for Apache.

The Tried and True Solution

Short and simple and 1 step away from the root at all times. I've come to this because I did all of the above and learned the hard way.

For example the site ~www.sbdpro.com was patterned after the Yahoo! Directory. It has consitantly for the last 2 years had a PR 4 home page. But with that structure it could never get the spiders deeper than 2 categories or 2 folders deep. Since the deepest depths in that directory is 8 tiers down there really was no solution or point of keeping this url structure.

It was changed about a year ago. All links from the root go to /directory/file-name.htm It didn't matter how many tiers down you went, all categories were now 1 tier away from the root, all subcategories were one tier from the root. The crosslinking all stayed the site had no index problems as all.

The effect was astonishing the PR still drops out in the 3rd tier with a PR 2 yet the spiders still followed the links through 5 more tiers of crosslinking & PR 0 pages to reach the 8th tier down.

My advice to all new mod rewrites.

1. Don't get married to your first try at mod rewritten urls. Change them because you're in it for the long run (hopefully). The above site ranked for "small business directory" page 1 consistantly during the change in Yahoo and MSN. It even jumped to page 2 in Google for that term as well and did a stretch for a while.

2. Keep your urls simple and close to the root. You will see more spider activity and have less headaches.

3. Make sure you rewriterule syntax is optimal and you are not bogging down your server. See this thread here >>

Other Resources

Webforgers.net - Mod Rewrite Tutorials
Ilovejackdaniels.com - Mod Rewrite Cheat Sheets

~ = 3rd party database of counties I bought.
* = From spidering Yahoo directory for city names under the state sections.

It was just over a year ago that I remember standing in the SES NY expo hall talking with a guy (forgot his name) about personal search and its implications for SEOs like myself. I told him at that time that it was my belief that personalized search results en masse were not going to appear as quickly as one might think. "Within the year?" he asked. "No, I doubt it," I replied.

For the most part, personalized search has been slow to appear. But I can't help but notice that Google routinely provides personalized search results for me now when I'm logged in. Of course I'm always interested in the difference between personalized results and normal results, and typically there's not much difference. But how much information am I willing to give Google, Yahoo or MSN in return for "better results"? As a user, I prefer the idea of three independent, objective entities giving me their best shots as opposed to one entity knowing my deepest thoughts and anticipating my next move. I suspect I'm not alone in this one, either. With all that these companies are trying to build, there's no questioning their end goal. Just this week we hear more news that Google wants to host all of my computer files. Every website we visit must have an account with a profile,user preferences, favorite foods and, oh yeah...how do you like your coffee?

I've always said, the goal of every search is to stop searching. I'm just not willing to give up more personal info to cut down the time on my searches. With more practice, I'll become a better searcher on my own!

Well this is an interesting idea.

Actually, I love it! Last night I built a web spider script and it's been working that engine over for a few hours now. So far I've won a $50 Amex card, two Best Buy gift cards, an xBox game and a Canon Powershot 5.0MP digital camera.

OK, not really, but I wonder if I could?

OK, follow up time. It looks like quite a few people have been hammering MSN, possibly causing MSN to change the way the Search and Win program works. From the website...

If a link appears on the search results page with the words MSN Search & Win, click the link to see if you instantly won.

But it looks like MSN is mixing up the words on the SERPs to foil the automated queries. Here's two screen shots with examples:





As you can see, one search has the words "Win what you search for" and the other has "Use MSN Search...and Win!".

In Michael Martinez's latest post over at Spider-food.net he runs over a few factors related to link theory. As Big Daddy pours out and rankings shift around keep these factors in mind.

• Document Inception Date (see sections 0034-0044)
• Content Updates/Changes (see sections 0046-0056)
• Query analysis (see sections 0058-0065)
• Link-based Criteria (see sections 0067-0080)
• Anchor text (see sections 0082-0086)
• Traffic (see sections 0088-0091)
• User behavior (see sections 0093-0095)
• Domain-related information (see sections 0097-0102)
• Ranking history (see sections 0104-0112)
• User maintained/generated data (see sections 0114-0117)
• Unique words, bigrams, phrases in anchor text (see sections 0119-0121)
• Linkage of independent peers (see sections 0123-0125)
• Document topics (see sections 0126-0129)

Source: forums.spider-food.net

Barry points out a thread this morning from WMW that goes back to a discussion Jeff and I had earlier this year about anchor tags in URLs (www.domain.com/index.html#footer). How do the search engines handle such links? Our experience has been that Google drops all pound signs from URLs.

Wizard from WMW seems to agree:

I'd say #anchor is not a part of URL actually, browser doesn't send it to server with HTTP request.


Google doesn't treat /page.html#anchor as different URL than /page.html. It might be possible that keywords after # mark matter a little, but in Google links database everything after # is stripped.

This seems like the logical thing to do in my opinion, since there would in fact be huge duplicate content problems.

So, what? Here's what: You need an affiliate program? Build it to craft your affiliate links to read like http://www.zunch.com#affid1074 instead of using question marks. Parse the URL at the server level for the ID, and set the cookie or whatever it is you do. It should work just as well as using a question mark, and you get the added benefit of every affiliate link pointing directly to your home page. That is, to the search engines, the link looks like a typical backlink, with no affiliate tracking variable. Nice!

Mobile phone users are finding yet another way to put their phones and other portable devices to use— by cruising the Internet with mobile devices. And while it can be expensive to surf the Web this way, millions of mobile device users are already doing so.  In fact, enough users are doing so that a new domain extension has been created: .mobi.

.mobi that has been established for sites created for websites targeting the mobile Web surfer community.

Search engine companies are focusing their sites on this community of users, offering mobile search options. In fact, Google mobile search is already a major player in this market.

So how do you make sure your site is search engine optimized for mobile devices?
 
Thankfully, the SEO practices are the same as with conventional website SEO, although you should keep in mind that with a mobile site you want your code lean in order to enhance downloading time. Moreover, content should be separated from format by using CSS through an external style sheet. This CSS file can be loaded into a mobile browser's cache once and can then be used repeatedly.

As with conventional websites, you should use quality content and have an effective design and navigation scheme to make your site a must-see, and an easy download, on the mobile web.