Search Engine Optimization for Site Owners and Small Businesses

Now that everybody and their uncle is an expert in search engine optimization you get to read some really off the wall advice. I have collected a few gems that had me laughing and reproduced them below. Most of these are from Yahoo Answers and Live QnA but you can find answers like these almost everywhere.

These are all from the last few months and I have corrected the spelling, grammar and replaced any links with <url>.

Q. What is cloaking in SEO?
A. Cloaking is the speed process for your cpu. You can over cloak your cpu but be aware of the overheating, the biggest problem of over cloaking is that it overheats the cpu.

Q. Seo stuff, what are some basic pointers?
A. My friend I have the perfect website for you. It includes over 1000 links to free advertising websites including free directories, free search engine submissions, free viral marketing, free top keywords and much, much more <url> also investing in the big daddy search engine and program hoppers will prove very profitable.

Q. If your site is a cooking site but you add your site as a link to sports related forums, would your site be penalized or banned from the search engines?
A. It is legal to point from one topic to other, you will just get a lower rank but it is better than nothing.

Q. Can someone explain how sub-domains can impact search engine optimization?
A. If you want top ranking in MSN just spam with sub-domains.

Q. Why does page rank fall?
A. The number of hits you get and the frequency that your site is updated changes your ratings.

Q. What does “omitted results” mean e.g. “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 103 already displayed”?
A. It means that there are search results that have been left out.

Q. What is SEO?
A. South East Organization.

Q. Can an expert tell me why Google is not updating our website?
A. No it doesn’t update, you have to resubmit it.

Q. Why are SEO Consultants too expensive for webmasters?
A. I personally used a firm that did a 250,000 site submissions for my site, it worked great.

Q. What are SEO and SEM and how do they differ?
A. SEO typically includes keyword research, density balancing, tagging, linking strategy and website submission. With SEM you can buy advertising to get to the top.

Q. Can any of you SEO experts recommend a good link exchange site that works?
A. I’ve found 45 different link exchange services and the two that I think work the best are <url> and <url>.

Q. Can anyone suggest any SEO tips for my website?
A. I checked your website and one thing is missing, a Visitor’s Guest Book where visitors can insert a message describing their business and website.

Q. What are some SEO tips?
A. The most important item is meta tags, very good keywords and keyword density.

Q. What is the best way to get a website to appear on the first page of search engines, can I do it myself?
A. My experience is that trying to do it yourself does not give the best results. My website has been online for about 5 years now and on average I get about 11 unique hits per day and my meta tags are in order.

Q. How do you get removed from a search result?
A. You don’t. Whatever embarrassing thing you may have committed in a public forum is indelibly etched.

How do I add my website to search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL?
A. From my understanding, your website will pop up in search engines based on how many people visit your website but how people visit your website if it’s not in a search engine, ironic right?

“The physician can bury his mistakes but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines”. Frank Lloyd Wright (1869 - 1959), New York Times, October 4, 1953.

If Frank Lloyd Wright were alive today I wonder what he would say about web designers’ mistakes. I get to see thousands of prospective clients and their competitors’ websites over the course of a year and although web design is improving I am still left thinking that 95% of web designers and web design firms just don’t understand the basics.

I have had to become an expert in diplomacy while explaining to prospective clients that the website for which they have paid hard earned money is (to put it politely) not as good as it might have been.

There seem to be five web design and build failures that come up again and again that require discussion with website owners. I rarely if ever get to talk through these points with the designers so I have listed them here as questions.

If you are thinking of having a new site or revamping your existing site you may want to make sure that these questions will be unnecessary before you appoint someone to carry out the work.

Here are the five questions for web designers:

1. Why don’t you learn what goes in the HEAD element?

Just because your client is unlikely to peruse the HEAD element doesn’t mean you should ignore it or fill it with garbage.

2. What’s so difficult about producing search engine friendly urls?

Dynamically generated urls can cause problems for search engine crawlers and may be ignored. Why not generate search engine friendly, human readable urls instead?

3. Why large logos?

Logos that take up 25% of the home page are a waste of valuable real estate. Users want to see what they came for not pictures of models staring up at the camera.

4. Do you leave blank alt tags for a reason?

Alt tags really do have a purpose. They are for the many users who use talking browsers, screen readers, text browsers or browsers on small devices.

5. Why don’t you use web standards like W3C?

Did you know that separating structure from presentation makes it easy for alternative browsing devices and screen readers to interpret the content? Or that using semantic and structured HTML makes for simpler development and easier maintenance? Or that less HTML means smaller file sizes and quicker downloads? Or that a semantically marked up document is easily adapted to alternative browsing devices and print? Or that if you use standards and write valid code you reduce the risk of future web browsers not being able to understand the code you have written?

“If we value the pursuit of knowledge we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us”. Adlai E. Stevenson II from a speech at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, October 8, 1952.

This is a compendium of our experiments and the experiments of others to determine how the major search engines currently treat the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

A few months ago I placed a rel=”nofollow” on one of the existing test pages that we had used in the past to determine the search engine indexing behavior of keywords in urls. The link was placed to a new test page with style=”text-decoration:none” to reduce the possibility of someone clicking it and signaling the existence of the new ‘linked to’ page as a referrer. Here is a partial screen shot of the page in Firefox using the SearchStatus extension which highlights rel=”nofollow” links. There are no other links to the new test page.

Google, Yahoo and MSN are now showing a recent cache of the page and we can see how they handled the link.

We know that Google and Yahoo follow rel=”nofollow” links in the sense that they will visit the ‘linked to’ page. Valentin Agachi reported this in detail some time ago in his post Does rel=nofollow work? So for our own experiment and starting with the simplest behavior first:

MSN appears not to have spidered and certainly has not indexed the ‘linked to’ page:

Yahoo has spidered and indexed the ‘linked to’ page:

Yahoo also shows the page in the serps at 14/64 for an exact search on the anchor text.

Google has spidered but not indexed the page:

Mark Barrera in his post “nofollow” - Does it Really Work Like Google Claims? has shown that if the ‘linked to’ page is in the index already then Google will rank the page for the anchor text. Google will also acknowledge the link on the cached page with “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page”.

Here is a summary of all our findings:

What we can’t know for sure is if the search engines are completely disregarding the rel=”nofollow” in their algorithms. Google says in the Official Google Blog “When Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results”. MSN appears to disregard rel=”nofollow” links in every aspect and Yahoo seems to treat rel=”nofollow” links the same way as any other link but they are probably disregarding them for ranking purposes.

Google has spawned a whole new generation of search engines with the introduction of its Custom Search Engine (CSE). Without any technical knowledge anyone can now use the Google search platform to create a search engine focused on any content they want.

You can choose which pages or sites you want to include in your custom search engine, how the content should be prioritized, whether others can contribute to the index and what the search results page will look like.

Already an increasing number of people are creating niche custom search engines. For example; Specialized Aquarium and Fish Keeping which searches over a hundred aquarium sites, Medical Libraries Blogs which searches all the blogs of medical libraries and librarians or A Dedicated Information Architecture Search Engine.

There is however an interesting anomaly when building a custom search for which I can find no rational explanation. I built a custom search using the seven SEO sites from the SEO Forums http://www.seo-blog.com/seo-forums.php post. It would appear that the order of entry of the sites makes a difference to the order of the results. Here are partial screen shots of the tests that confirm this:

The same seven sites in Test Search Engine 1.0 and Test Search Engine 2.0 are searched for the phrase |external nofollow| and produce different results. The only difference in the build was the order of entry of the sites. Other search phrases (but not all) also show similar differences in the order of results.

Surprising…..

November 2, 2006

A Google Co-op Engineer has shed light on this test result as follows:

Theres actually a very subtle bug going on here, in one of the search engines an extra whitespace got added to one of the URLs so its actually searching over:

forums.digitalpoint.com/%20

Which effectively renders this URL useless.

Thanks for pointing this out, we’ll fix it in the next release by making sure we do a better job of stripping whitespace off the URLs!

That explains it!

“I’m exiled, you can’t convert me, I’m lost in the haze of your delicate ways…” From “We Better Talk This Over” by Bob Dylan 1978.

Your website has a purpose, it might be to get your visitors to purchase products, complete a form, download a file, register for a newsletter or some other action. The number of visitors to your website who perform the required action as a percentage of the total number of visitors is called the conversion rate or conversion ratio.

The vast majority of website owners do not know their conversion ratio even though for most sites it can easily be improved. You can use Google Analytics which is free and allows you to set up goals (for example the ‘Thank You’ page you show after a purchase) and Google will calculate the goal conversion metrics for your site. So now there is no excuse for not knowing your conversion ratio!

Once you know what your conversion ratio is you can set about improving it. When you make site changes to improve your conversion ratio it is very important to measure the effects of these changes because they could be positive or negative. The way this is done is to have two pages, one is the original page and the other is the one where you have made changes. You then randomly allocate visitors to these two pages and after a suitable period you can, with appropriate software, analyze which page gives the higher conversion ratio. This procedure is called A/B split testing.

In practice you will want to conduct a number of A/B split tests simultaneously and to do this you will require a third party service that provides Multivariate Testing or Taguchi Optimization as it is sometimes called. You can learn more about this procedure from the websites of these providers; Offermatica, Vertster and SiteSpect.

Addendum:

April 12, 2007

Google has made available a tool that enables non-technical users to set-up and run multivariate landing page experiments. Website Optimizer (integrated into AdWords) works alongside Google Analytics and all third party site analytics packages.

Your conversion ratio will be influenced by many factors but one of the most important for site owners, particularly ecommerce site owners, is how the user perceives your site in terms of credibility and trust. This is not surprising given that users read daily of credit card fraud, scams and credit card data being stolen.

Improving Trust and Credibility.

There are many things you can do to improve the credibility and trust of your site in the eyes of users.

• Show that there is a real organization behind your site. If you have a physical office or store show a picture of it and show pictures of your staff with friendly captions underneath. Your site should clearly disclose its purpose, its mission and its ownership.
• Make it easy for users to contact you. Have a Freephone telephone number in addition to publishing your address, telephone number and email address. Install live chat software which allows your company representatives to engage in one to one chat with your web site visitors in real-time. There are many options for this but LivePerson have a good system with a free trial period and good support.
• Clearly disclose all fees charged before the ordering process begins. Make sure you include all service, transaction, handling fees and shipping costs.
• You should state clearly policies for returning unwanted items or canceling transactions.
• You should openly declare your policy on a consumer’s rights if a purchase is made based on inaccurate information on your site.
• Your privacy policies should be easy to find and be clearly and simply stated.
• You should disclose how personal data from your site visitors and customers will be used.

I have seen large increases in conversion ratios arising from the inclusion of an Online “Trust” Certificate like these : (Click on the certificates to find out more about them.)

There is an interesting dichotomy as far as trust certificates are concerned. Although if prominently displayed they will increase conversion ratios it seems that sites that use them are significantly less trustworthy than those that don’t!

The reason for this is ‘adverse selection’ in that many untrustworthy sites will use certification to mask their untrustworthiness and hope to fool the users. There is a recent study by Benjamin Edelman of Harvard University titled Adverse Selection in Online Trust Certifications which explains this in detail, particularly with reference to TRUSTe and the Better Business Bureau Privacy Program. It’s something to be aware of but definitely should not stop you using them to improve your conversion rate.