Understand Google’s Guidelines

Meet Google, the “coolest kid” on the cyberblock!

Google is popular, and popularity means it may be tough to get in initially. Even if you do everything right, it could take months to see results, at least if you use their URL submission page. However, there is hope! There’s a method to get indexed in 24 hours, so don’t even bother submitting through the URL page.

But before you get to that, you should know about the guidelines you must follow to ensure that your site not only gets listed, but also doesn’t get banned. Plus, you should learn about elements of your website that Google won’t look at.

How to Get Google to Read Your Keywords First

Google’s bots read web pages from the topmost left corner of your site to the bottom right. However, most sites are designed with all of the links on the left side, and the content on the right. In fact, earlier in this book you learned that this is the recommended website design you should use. Yet the problem with this design is instead of seeing your content first, Google sees the links first. Your links may not be seen to be as optimized as your content.

One solution is to use three panes rather than two. Keep the normal left and right panes, but add an extra pane at the top left of the layout. Don’t put keywords in this extra pane. With this area “blank” when the Google bots read the site, rather than going for the links as they normally would, the bots see that a portion of where the links are is “blank.” This then forces it to read the content first, which is more keyword-rich than the links.

Note that not all search engines read sites this way, which is why this guideline was provided in this special section dedicated to optimizing for Google. You could be on the safe side and use the layout anyway, especially if you do plan to submit to Google, which you should. It doesn’t take away from the look of the site, and by using it you ensure that your content gets read first. If you don’t use it, you aren’t giving yourself the best opportunity to rank highly in Google search engine listings. Making tables isn’t very hard to do. Most word processors and even WYSIWYG HTML editors provide them, so take advantage of it.

Things That Google Ignores

There are some HTML attributes that Google pays no attention to when it goes through its crawling process. While you won’t get penalized if you use these attributes, why waste your time with them if they’re not going to count anyway?

Of course, there are exceptions to these rules, as noted in the numbered list below. There are also some elements listed that you will choose not to include.

1. The keywords and description attributes of the meta tag. The keywords and description attributes are read by other search engines. However, the boost you get from having them isn’t as much as if you follow the other techniques, such as proper link building. If you submit to Google only, you may not want to include the keywords attribute, but focus on a smart “upsell” or “positioning,” “branding” of your message in the description attribute. Other search engines use them, so you should go on and include them.

2. The comments tag. The comments tag is an optional tag designed more for the website designer than for search engines or browsers. You use it to make personal notes related to what the upcoming coding does. It’s especially useful if other webmasters are working on web pages that have been started by someone else. Still, it isn’t a necessary tag, so you can omit it if you want.

3. The style tag. This tag has attributes that specify what your site will look like. This deals with styling of your page (CSS). If you’re using extensive CSS, include the file as an external reference.

4. The script tag. This tag lets the browser know that a block of JavaScript code is about to be initiated. While Google ignores the information in this tag, it’s still useful if you want to take advantage of JavaScript. You would use JavaScript when you want to run applets, special programs that run in a separate browser window. Use of this tag may or may not be optional, depending on what your site is for.

5. Duplicate links. If you have duplicate links to the same page, Google only counts the first one.

6. Interlinking to points on the same page. Interlinking involves picking a point on your web page called an anchor that you want another anchor to link to. This practice is commonly used when websites present very long copy on the same page. Readers can click on links throughout the document to jump to other parts of the document. It’s very effective for increasing readability, but it’s another optional device. Worst case, you could break up the copy and make more subtopic links.

7. Graphics, animation and video. Google pays no attention to these types of content, but it may notice the descriptive attributes surrounding them and certainly their URLs.

8. Boolean words. We discussed these earlier. They are words like a, an, the, is, etc. If you’re optimizing for Google only, don’t bother including these keywords.

How Not to Link to Sites That Are in a Bad Neighborhood

Basically, sites that are in a bad neighborhood are those that post on link farms, splogs, or other sites using black hat SEO techniques. Stay away from these types of sites. Do you know that if a person you’re linking to posts on these types of sites, you could get in trouble with Google as well? It’s unfair, but true. And don’t think that because a site has a good page rank today that tomorrow it won’t use black hat techniques that would mess up your site. This is why you need to keep your eye on the sites to which you link.

One way you can do this is to read the page rank bar on the Google toolbar. This is better than using linkvendor.com, because it tells you if a site has been banned, whereas linkvendor.com may not. If the page rank bar is gray, that indicates a ban. However, don’t confuse being banned with having a page rank of 0. Just because a site has a 0 page rank, that doesn’t mean it’s linking to sites in a bad neighborhood. It could just mean that not enough time has passed for the webmaster to get the site to rank high enough in search engines to receive a higher page rank. Recently, for example, there was a proxy problem (now fixed) that erroneously returned sites with a page rank of 0 which in fact were ranked higher.

You can use SEO Elite to determine a site’s page rank. To do this, you first open the program and select radio button 4. Enter the URL of one of your links, then select “Google PR” from the checkboxes. Click “OK.” You’re shown a report that displays the page rank for each of the web pages within the site you’re linking to. Be on alert for those with a rank of 0.As you already know, this doesn’t mean they’re linking to bad neighborhoods, so you’ll need a method to find out for sure. Now select radio button 6. Through this you can see if the site still appears in Google’s search engine listings. Next, select the Google checkbox. If it returns 0, you know the site no longer appears in the search engine listings, and you should stay far away from it.

How to Get Your Site Listed in Google in 24 Hours or Less

Wouldn’t it be nice to start seeing your site in Google’s search engine results in 24 hours or less? It should be first noted that if a site is crawled but not yet indexed, the results aren’t visible to search users. For example, if you enter the full domain of your site with the “http://www.” and your site hasn’t been listed yet, it won’t show up in Google’s results. When your site does get indexed, if you enter the full URL, you’ll see your site listed. This listing contains the URL, the title of your website, and a description.

To get your site indexed quickly, you won’t use Google’s submission form (google.com/addurl.html). Using this method may take 2-6 weeks to get your site indexed.

So, what do you need to do to get your website indexed in 24 hours or less? The first step is to visit Google and enter a broad, generic keyword that’s relevant to your site. This is the rare time that the broader the keyword, the better. Don’t worry about trying to go for niche markets with this step, because you’re going to want to have access to sites with the highest level of traffic. Once you enter the keyword, you see the Google listings. Use the “Page Rank” indicator on the Google toolbar to see what the page rank is (or you could use SEO Elite or LinkVendor, but doing it right from the browser is faster).

To refresh your memory, the higher your page rank, the more websites that are linking to you. Keep an eye out for sites that have a page rank of 5 or higher (with the higher ranking being the better one). Visit each of these sites to see if they offer a link exchange. Remember, if they do they’ll advertise it in the same way you did yours, through a “Link to Us” web page or something similar. Look for the contact information if it’s listed. If it’s not listed, use the Whois utility found through domain name services or SEO Elite to find their e-mail address. Use the same methods of e-mail etiquette you learned about before and send them an e-mail asking if they’re interested in a link exchange. Remember to post their links on your site first before you send out the e-mail. And don’t forget that you can still purchase advertising on the resources given throughout this book.

Just make sure the site you choose has a page rank of over 5. If you advertise your site on a site with a page rank of 5, your site will get indexed in three days or less. If you advertise your site on a site with a page rank of 6, you can get your site indexed in less than 24 hours.

cleaning out the closet on StumbleUpon

I have recently heard news about StumbleUpon banning several accounts because the users submitted comercial content. Here is the message these unfortunate stumblers usually received:

Regrettably, your account privileges have been suspended due to a breach of our TOS. I respectfully draw your attention to our Terms, particularly with respect to the clauses which forbid the use of personal accounts for the promotion of a business, product or service, and also with regard to the sending of ’spam’ messages to other members.

Our terms can be found here: http://www.stumbleupon.com/terms.html

Under the circumstances, the restriction is unlikely to be lifted.

Was it a surprise? For many yes, but if you take a look at their TOS, you’ll see these actions are strictly frowned upon. StumbleUpon is not for selling things, not for promoting an affiliate program, not for blatant product reviews, with a buy link.
Consequently, some of the people that befriended these “commercial accounts” can have some kind of flag raised.

So here are a few steps for cleaning your closet on StumbleUpon one of my friends, kukon,  let me in on:

• Take a look at the people you are mutual friends with. Click on the username without any avatar. Usually, when an account is under review, the display image or avatar is not displayed in the SU network. Remove that user from your friend list and the page will change to an empty one, if it’s the case, saying the account is reviewed.
• See what your friends are submitting or stumbling upon. Constantly submitting or thumbing up articles from certain domains can damage your account.
• Be an active user for the community. Try to submit things that are interesting to others, that have the potential to turn popular. Contribute and make yourself known to other stumblers!

Recently, StumbleUpon has also been banning websites that offered stumble exchanges. Here is an excerpt confirming it:
Are incentive programs allowed? Someone asked me to rate their web-site?

StumbleUpon does not allow personal accounts to be used for the purposes of incentivization or promoting sites. This would be considered a breach of our Terms.

The practice of sending PM’s encouraging or inviting other stumblers to rate/review sites in exchange for reciprocal reviews/ratings, monetary, or any other form of reward is strictly forbidden.

The practice of actively soliciting a rating or review for a site is also forbidden. Should you receive a PM, or encounter forum postings that breach this rule, you are encouraged to report this via feedback.
Accounts participating in such practices will be deleted and banned, and the related sites deleted and banned from the system.

Five Common SEO Mistakes

Choosing Wrong Keywords

Targeting the wrong keywords is the common mistakes that most people do, even the experienced experts make it. For example, you may optimize your website for the keywords which you think may be best and more relevant and rank number one for those keywords but still may not gain new traffic. The reason is that you are not targeting the right keyword. Reasons that you may choose a wrong Keyword:

   1. Selecting keywords that are very popular. If the keyword is too popular, you have to put up lot of work to bring rankings. For example choosing keywords like car, bike etc.

   2. Choosing a keyword phrase that is too broad. If you are choosing a keyword that is too broad then you might not get the appropriate traffic as a highly targeted keyword phrase.

Choosing the right keyword may make or break your SEO. So make correct decisions while choosing keywords for your website.

JavaScript Menus

For Search engine friendly website, plain text menus are always recommended rather than JavaScript menus. But still using dynamic JavaScript menus are necessary for some websites. Using JavaScript is not bad until you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your website accordingly. If you are using JavaScript in you website then be sure that you create a sitemap or No Script tag for making your links crawlable.

Graphic Header

Many websites are designed with graphic header. We can see websites having company logo occupying the full width of the page. This mistake has to be avoided. The upper part of the page is very important place where you can insert your targeted keywords. When search engines see a graphic image, the prime position is totally wasted there since search engines do not make use of images. And another mistake is that header contains text information in image form to make it attractive. But again text in it cannot be indexed by search engines and will not contribute toward page rank.

The best way to present a logo is to use a hybrid approach - keep the logo at the top of each page and size it that it does not occupy the whole width. Use the rest of the width for the text header.

Pure Flash Website

Search engines do not understand flash and if a website is designed with pure flash then they will see the entire website as a single page. And you may not get the opportunity to optimize different pages for targeted keywords. If you are having a pure flash website, then do follow the below strategies,

   1. Rebuild your website by breaking up the flash file and moving the major sections to its own HTML page. Flash elements can then be included as needed on each separate page.
   2. If you can’t do the first point then you can get smart by using separate URLS by implementing SWF address.
   3. Give more focus on Off page optimization. Concentrate more on the keywords targeted.
   4. Creating a HTML alternative is another best option for Flash SEO. It is not only helpful for Search engines but also for disable visitors for the website.

Importance of URLs

A good URL helps you to rank better in search engines. Dynamic URLs are commonly used in E-commerce sites but the disadvantage is that an URL with keyword can rank better than dynamic URLs with special characters and session ids. Major search engines provide more weightage to page with static and URLS containing keywords. If you are having a website with dynamic URLs then you can use Mod-Rewrite Rule to handle conversion still keeping the dynamic URL.

Frustrated by search?

Irritated with irrelevant results?

There maybe a better albeit still imperfect way. Metasearch.

Metasearch engines combines the results from multiple search engines in order to give searchers a better look at result sets.

Searching for a term on any of the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) will yield results that are different. There may or may not be some overlap. A metasearch engine aggregates the results from all three (and sometimes others) and attempts to provide a better list of relevant results. The goal of any search engine is to provide answers to a searcher’s questions. The metasearch engine has the advantage of pulling those “answers” from multiple sources. In the process of combining results, the better metasearch engines will eliminate duplicates. The best ones will allow users to view the results in comparison mode. A column is displayed for the results from the metasearch engine, then a column from Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. By giving searchers not only their own aggregated results, but also the comparison results, meta engines provide a far greater ability to find answers to questions.

Metasearch engines should be called a Searcher’s Search Engine because they are geared towards helping the searcher. There is another kind of search engine called the Marketer’s Search Engine which I discuss in a separate article. These kind of search engines, while still helpful to searchers, are more heavily helpful to marketers.

Remember, the goal is to find answers to questions. Having the ability to see all the relevant data, instead of one slice of the data, will help users find the answer(s) much more quickly.

There are two metasearch engines that I would recommend.

Dogpile is probably the most well known of the metasearch engines. Myriad Search is little known tool used mainly by a small niche of people. However, both are helpful in seeing aggregated and comparison results.

Reasons to use metasearch:

*find answers to questions from a broader base of results
*find better results
*make searching easier
*understand the big three search engines
*compare the big three search engines
*use big three analysis to improve SEO

Saul Flower writes and maintains Recommended Web Tools, an online resource for web development beginners.

Tags: search, search+engines, google+search, web+tools, metasearch