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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.
What is the impact on a website of being ‘blacklisted’ by Google? Recently the insurance comparison website GoCompare.com faced precisely this dilemma after the search engine picked up on irregular inbound links to its site, causing it to plummet down the rankings.
We are currently seeing a seasonal peak in searches for ‘car insurance’, and the term has increased its share of searches by 31% since the week ending 29th December. Before it fell out with Google, this was good news for GoCompare as the comparison site had established itself as the top website within Google’s natural / organic listings for the term. However, since being ‘blacklisted’ it has dropped down the listings and, at the time of writing, is currently on the seventh page of listings – i.e. well outside of the top 10.
Looking at the data, during the week ending 26th January 2008 GoCompare was the number one site receiving traffic from the term ‘car insurance’, capturing 17.49% of the all search traffic from the term. In fact, the term was so important to GoCompare that it was the number one term sending traffic to the site, accounting for more traffic even than the branded term ‘go compare’. During the week ending 26 January 2008, one in six visits to the site came from the term.
The chart below shows traffic to GoCompare from the term ‘car insurance’ on the left axis, compared to overall searches for the term on the right axis. The area highlighted in red illustrates the impact on GoCompare after the blacklisting had taken effect (during week ending 2nd February).
GoCompare received only 2.31% of all search term traffic from the term ‘car insurance’ during the week ending 9th February, which is an 87% decrease from week ending 26th Jan when it held the #1 natural position on Google. However, as we see from this chart, searches for ‘car insurance’ remained constant during this period.
So what has the impact been on GoCompare’s competitors in the insurance price comparison sector? Confused.com and Comparethemarket.com have shown the largest increase in traffic from searches for ‘car insurance’ over the last two weeks. Traffic from the term to Confused.com has increased by 77% since the 26th January, while traffic to Comparethemarket.com has tripled over the same period.
Search engines are the most important source of traffic to finance price comparison websites, accounting for over a third of their upstream traffic. Ensuring that a website is well-optimised for search engines is vital in such a competitive industry, but this example illustrates the fine balance that needs to be achieved between effective SEO and breaking the ‘rules’.
I figure most of us dread Monday mornings…the commute, the traffic on the commute, the people…ughh. I’d be willing to bet that Monday is our least productive day next to Friday. But why not start the week with a few little steps that us bloggers can take to better our SEO and start ranking higher in the search engines? They don’t take that long to implement, and once you do, typically you won’t have to bother with it anymore (unless you change themes..but more on that later). So take notes, because here we go!5 Simple Blog SEO Tips
1. Keywords - Have you really sat down and thought about how you want people to find your blog in the search engines? So, so many bloggers start up a blog based on a central topic, and they think targeting “dog training” is enough. WRONG! First of all, the odds of doing well with a highly competitive keyword like that is slim in the beginning anyway, so you need to take a look at some good keywords with less competition. How many of you have a list of keywords saved somewhere that you want to work on? I’d bet some of you don’t. Well, how about you take today to sit down and write out 20 phrases (go for 3-5 words) that you think match your site. There are a couple benefits to this, as you’ll see on paper what your overall theme is about, and you’ve also effectively just made 20 blog post titles that you can (and should) write an article on! Once you have all of these down, head over to this free keyword tool, start inputting your keyword phrases, and see what kind of a search volume each one commands. Look, even if you chose one that gets only 20 searches a day, that’s fine! That means you have a chance at ranking high for that phrase, and also, you stand a chance of gaining an additional 20 visits to your site a day for life! (In theory, of course). Again, write a nice 300-500 word article for each keyword, make sure not to use the keyword too much in the article (use it only in relevant sentences, or it will look like spam), and post it up! You’d be surprised at how much you can benefit from this, and I will cover keyword targeted articles in the future, as there is much more to be said…but this is a start.
2. Sitemap - Although a nice sitemap doesn’t have a direct effect on your rankings, it has a major indirect effect, as it helps the major search engines crawl your site more efficiently and makes them aware of all your content in one nice little file. I’m surprised at the amount of bloggers that don’t have a sitemap, as bloggers tend to have large amounts of pages indexed. Why not make it easier for the search engines to find you? Here is a nice sitemap generator plugin that you can upload, activate, and configure in seconds. It will generate a very well organized xml-sitemap that you can submit to Google webmaster tools (if you haven’t already). Take the time to do this if you haven’t already, it’s very easy, and can help you out tremendously for the long run.
3. Anchor Text - Search engines place a high value on proper anchor text when counting a backlink to your site. If your site is about “car sales”, you want people linking back to you with proper anchor texts with a relevant keyword like “car sales”, or “auto sales”. What I mean is, don’t ever, EVER use “click here” when linking to someones page. I dare say that if you do that, you may as well not link to them at all, because it’s not helping much. So get in a good habit of using relevant and related anchor text when linking out, because not only does it help them, it also helps you! Search engines will find your link much more interesting if it’s properly anchored. If you see that someone used “click here” to link to you (or something equally lame), don’t feel bad in sending them a quick email asking them to change it to a better keyword. It’s beneficial for both parties, and the other webmaster usually won’t mind at all.
4. Clean House - If you’re serious about ranking well for your keywords, pay attention. Google and friends rank your page based upon many factors, some we know, and some we don’t. What we do know is that one factor is the way your code looks on the back end. Search engines do not like dirty, cluttered code, and it can honestly hurt your rankings by having a mess of unorganized code behind that beautiful blog of yours. I know, most people don’t have a clue how to clean up code (me being one of them), but there are many, many people on popular webmaster forums that would happily clean it up and optimize it for you for a small fee. Hire a trusted forum member who happens to be a code monkey to take a look and see what he/she can do for you. This may cost anywhere from $10-$50, so be sure to negotiate the price, and get it over with. Again, if you don’t plan on changing themes any time soon, you won’t have to do this again for a while, and it can reap great rewards as far as your rankings are concerned.
5. ALT Tags - Did you know that whenever you post an image to your blog, that you are given an option to name it, in case the image fails to load? That way, if someone loads your blog, and an image is broken, they can still see what the image was (assuming you named it correctly). It’s called an ALT tag, and it looks something like this:
<img src=”boat.gif” alt=”Big Boat” >
A lot of folks don’t take the time to take advantage of the alt tag text, or they name it something irrelevant. But wait! Did you know that there are SEO experts that have confirmed a slight boost in rankings by naming your ALT text with the relevant keyword? Pretty cool, eh? Now, they’re not saying that it’s going to get you to number one if you use good ALT tags, but it just may give you an edge over your direct competitors. Mainly, the ALT tag is great for image SEO, so make sure you name it what it really is. The above is a good example of how you would name a picture of a big boat. That way when people search for “big boat” in a search engine’s image search, you have a chance at showing up. So start taking advantage of the ALT tag, and when you get the time, you should go back to each and every image in your site and ALT tag them appropriately. You can thank me later.
Depending on who you ask, you’ll probably receive several reasons why the Meta keywords tag is of almost no value to your website (with a few minor exceptions). However, as much as the experts bash the lack of importance of the meta keywords tag - you’ll often hear them say something along the lines of, “But just in case, we put it in a clients site anyway”.That’s huge, because even though the general school of thought across the SEO industry is that Meta keywords simply don’t matter anymore (besides the occasional remote search engine), there are reasons that you should consider including it in your website. I think Russ Jones summed it up best when he said:
I love that comparison, and it’s exactly the reason why I still recommend to clients/friends that they go ahead and slap a Meta keywords tag in there just in case it comes down to a neck and neck situation in the rankings and you’re looking for every possible advantage you can use (even if it’s exceptionally insignificant).
Another interesting view on the use of keywords in the Meta keywords tag is something that Elisabeth Osmeloski mentioned during a “survey of the experts” at SEOMoz:
“
I think that’s a very interesting observation, and who knows, it just may have some truth to it!
Including Meta keywords in the Meta keywords tag was often a way (back in the late 90’s) to influence your ranking for pretty much anything you wanted. Webmasters realized that if they stuff in things like Buy Viagra, Cheap Viagra, and similar spammy words - that it would help rank their spam pages. Of course, I don’t believe this lasted very long, as the search engines wised up to it pretty swiftly for the most part.
That’s why the weighting isn’t worth much (if anything), because it’s just too easy to manipulate. Again, I think the main reasons most webmasters still include it, is because in the construction of a well organized site, it’s kind of “expected” to be there. Like I said before, why not include it? It’s just another way to ‘possibly’ help you out, and it certainly doesn’t hurt anything. Just make sure that you use actual relavent keywords, and not spamwords - because then you may risk getting flagged.
Bottom line - Use the Meta keywords tag properly. It’s considered good practice, and definitely can’t harm you.
In a recent post about paid links, Danny Sullivan wrote about how Google’s army of engineers are going to start hand editing PageRank scores if they think you are selling links, which is a move that wreaks of desperation.
Google is only decreasing the PageRank for a subset of the sites they actually know about. …
Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review. That should help prevent false matches from happening so easily.
In contrast, if you’re a smaller site not deemed as important to relevancy, a harsher punishment of a ranking penalty may be dealt out.
Introducing the New, Corporate Web
If they actually follow through with any of this then Google, which touts the value of PageRank, clearly no longer believes in its value. They already show stale data in their toolbar, and might as well scrap the whole thing and start fresh. Their mind control exercise is getting a bit obnoxious.
Now they are editing PageRank and relevancy scores. They don’t edit based on quality of information but based on method of promotion. And if it is a corporation breaking Google’s arbitrary shifting ruleset then Google simply decides not to edit, or only fakes that they care.
Google is Wikipedia, but Worse
With this news of more hand editing, Google also shows that they are biased against small webmasters are and actively trying to screw over small webmasters to increase their corporate profits.
Google is becoming much like the Wikipedia, where generalists wrongly assume topical knowledge greater than that of the real topical experts. In some cases Wikipedia is saved by talk pages and community participation that allow the experts to be heard. Google has no talk page though, which means that Google search results will become a dried out and dumbed down version of the web.
The Real Problem With Half Truths & Hand Editing
The response to every move is a counter move. So if they actually try to squash link buying then webmasters will look for indirect ways to purchase links. Google also offers tips on how to sculpt PageRank, but sculpt to much and suddenly the intent is changed, and you are banned.
Why leave such a thing up to a single Google engineer making a judgement call? If they want to increase the quality of the web they need to be more innovative in encouraging the creation of good content, not make people afraid to invest into creating content only to watch a Google engineer kill it.
Link bait is good when you are a large corporation or are syndicating Google spin, but if you are too successful at link bait they will ban your site for it. They did it to one of my sites and they even banned one of their own site.
If you are a small webmaster and get judged by Google don’t expect compassion. They have no talk page, and they already paid an AdSense publisher to steal all your content. They don’t need you.
How to Do Well in Google
If you are a webmaster assume that Google is lying to you and ignore them. If their view of the web and webmaster advice are reduced to half truths and lies then we can only hope something a bit more honest will come out of their downfall.
