This is a picture taken of my hummingbird feeder that’s on my office window. Sometimes working from home gets lonely, and this little bird has been wonderfully entertaining. I think it’s a “she” and that she’s an Anna’s Hummingbird. It took many, many weeks to attract her to the feeder, and now that’s she’s visiting regularly, I’m working hard to keep the nectar fresh and environment welcoming, so she returns often. Which got me to thinking about how hummingbirds are a little like a search engine. Hang in there with me on this one…

When you build a new website, much like when you put up a new hummingbird feeder, you are hopeful you’ll get traffic. You don’t know when they’ll visit, but you’re just hopeful, and you wait. And wait. And wait. And maybe hang some red ribbons to attract attention (hummingbirds only).

And to make sure that hummingbirds like what they find when they visit, you’re supposed to keep the nectar fresh, the feeder clean, etc. To make sure search engines like what they find when they visit, you work hard to make sure the website architecture is sound, and the content contains important keywords.

And one day, magic happens…and the first visit happens. It’s very exciting, and you hope that the hummingbird likes what she’s found and will rank your feeder above your neighbor’s. And when Google visits, you are very excited and hope that Google ranks your website above your competition. Hopefully you’re seeing the similarities by now. Nectar = Website structure and content.

Both ranking well with hummingbirds and Google take planning, preparation, execution and lots of patience, and hopefully by now, you see the similarities too. Ok….back to work.

Virtually all of my website clients aren’t aware of what redirects are and when a web developer should use them. They don’t understand how important it is to tell search engines where to find renamed pages. It’s similar to notifying the post office when you move that you can now be found at a new address. (It’s the best analogy I could come up with).

When search engines “crawl” over your site, they make a record of what pages they found. If you want to see what pages Google has found when crawling your website, read this article. If you follow these instructions, you can actually see what Google has indexed – what pages Google thinks comprise your website. In order for a page to come up in a search engine result, it must have been indexed.

So, imagine you have a page called “widgets.html”. Google comes along and crawls your site and now in the Google index there’s an entry for “widgets.html”. Time passes, and you decide you want/need to change the page name. Your web developer makes a new page called “newwidgets.html”.

The best way to inform Google that the old page is gone and has been permanently changed to the new page, is to create a permanent redirect. Your web developer makes a file (a plain text file) that’s called .htaccess and creates redirect commands/code for each page. The actual code will vary depending on your website hosting server. I use DreamHost, so any examples here work for them, but might not work for you if you have a different hosting company.

The .htaccess file has code that basically says “if you’re looking for a page with the name of “widgets.html”, it’s been permanently moved to this new file named “newwidgets.html” and please update your records”. When search engines encounter this code they will update their index and replace the old page with the new one. Pretty neat!

So why did I write this article on redirects? Because I often find that clients are unaware of what they are and when their web developer should use them, and some web developers don’t always use them when they change page names, change domain names, or redesign a client’s website.

Why? Well, frankly it’s a fairly tedious process if there are many pages to redirect, but it’s very important to make sure your web developer does this if the URL’s of a page are going to change.

So if you are shopping for a web developer to redesign your website, ask them if they are going to redirect the old pages to the new ones and how they will accomplish that. If they don’t say “.htaccess” as part of their answer, you might want to keep shopping.

More Information on 301 Redirects:

Here’s a wonderful article I found on redirects: htaccess 301 redirect tutorial. I learned that you can even redirect page names that have blanks in them (a bad web design practice) by putting quotation marks around the page with the blanks:

redirect 301 “/old page.htm”  http://www.example.com/newpage.htm

And if you have a WordPress blog and you change the URL/Permalinks, you’ll need to create redirects using a redirection plugin like this one.

You wouldn’t move without telling the post office your new address would you? Don’t change a page URL without using a 301 (permanently moved) redirect!

When Luis contacted me for help with his website, he was in awful shape. He was getting around 2 visitors  a day, around 60 visitors a month. He was having trouble with his current web designer, who was also hosting his website and over-charging him. We moved his website to DreamHost, installed a traffic tracking tool, and set about working on SEO. I did my best to educate Luis as to the rules of the SEO game, and after a few months, Luis agreed to install a blog to further add unique relevant content to his website. The results are amazing, and today, he emailed me a picture of his most recent stats:

Last September, he had 256 visitors. This July, he had 1,742. That’s an increase of nearly 700%!

This increase is a result of following Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, good basic SEO principles, and adding lots of unique relevant content. It’s also a result of the website owner, Luis, carefully watching his website stats and continually using the data to improve his website.

As you can see, working together as partners, we’ve done good job at improving his website traffic. And it’s not just traffic, Luis has gotten many new clients because of the SEO work we’ve done – remember, SEO is not just about rankings or traffic, but about getting new clients and customers for your small business. Before you hire someone to do SEO on your website, ask to see real data from past clients!

Link building is a pain – no doubt about it. It takes a lot of time to get other people to create links to your website, and while I perform many different SEO activities for my website clients, link building is not one of them.

Even with my own website, I focus on adding content to attract links, rather than soliciting other website owners to give me links. I delete every single link exchange request I receive. So I was very interested in reviewing both the contract, and the evidence provided by a link building outsourcing company that one of my clients had hired. I was shocked and angered with what I found.

The SEO outsourcing company had given her a contract that included claims like:

“We will build 400 links from high-authority social media sites per month.”

“We will build 300 links per month from high-authority blogs.”

Wow, that’s like 700 links in one month! To be perfectly honest, I had no idea at all how someone could get 700 links from “high-authority” blogs and social media sites in one month.

Let’s review what “high-authority” means. In general, folks in the SEO world will use this phrase to mean web pages that have a high page rank that suggests that these pages have high quality content that has attracted many quality inlinks over time.  For example, my home page has a page rank of 5/10 – you can use this page rank tool to see this. Amazon.com has a PR of 9/10, so for me, a “high-authority” site should have a PR of maybe between 3 and 6. Generally, it takes quite a bit of time and work to get your PR to increase from 0 (zero) to 1 and then 2 and on up the scale. A LOT of work. Getting a “high-authority” site or page happens slowly, after many, many months and possibly years of work.

I asked my client to get proof from this company of the link building they had done. They sent a “Link Building Report” that contained approximately 200 URL’s. Note, 200 is a whole lot less than 700. Upon closer inspection of the URL’s, it became apparent that half of them weren’t URL’s to web pages, but rather RSS feeds. So the list because more like 85 actual URL’s to web pages. Way less than 700.

I asked the client if she would put these 85 real URL’s into a spreadsheet for me so I could do further analysis. She did this, and I noticed another pattern – that the URL’s were all from free web page or free blog builder sites or free social media sites, 26 to be specific. Here’s the list in alphabetical order:

blogspot.com
clearblogs.com
ehow.com
experienceproject.com
facebook.com
flickr.com
goarticles.com
helium.com
hi5.com
hubpages.com
knol.google.com
mahalo.com
multiply.com
mybuzzle.com
myspace.com
newsvine.com
quizilla.com
scribd.com
squidoo.com
tumbir.com
twitter.com
wetpaint.com
wikihow.com
wikispaces.com
wordpress.com
zimbio.com

No doubt you’ll recognize some of these sites. And while there certainly are many “high-authority” blogs on wordpress.com, as one example, that’s not what these link building scam folks did. They created  brand new accounts on these websites. Then, they created pages with fake content (they repeated 4 different fake articles they had created) with a link to my client’s website. We could literally see the time stamps on the pages. All pages were created with a week of each other, at the end of the month.

I emailed several of these websites, and indeed they confirmed that this activity is in violation of their Terms of Service and told me that the pages would be removed:

From Newsvine:

“Newsvine is a social news site that prohibits advertising. Our content is focused on journalism, not traffic direction.

That’s really unfortunate that Newsvine is being ‘sold’ as part of a SEO package. Our system’s pretty good – users start out in an area called the Greenhouse, meaning their content doesn’t reach the majority of the site until they’re confirmed to not be spammers. The accounts will probably be gone by the end of the day.”

From Multiply.com:

“It is a violation of our terms. Your profile must describe you, an individual person. Examples of inappropriate profiles include, but are not limited to, profiles that purport to represent an animal, place, inanimate object, fictional character, or real individual who is not you. The Multiply Web site is for the personal use of individual Members only and may not be used in connection with any commercial endeavors. Organizations, companies, and/or businesses may not become Members and should not use the Service or the Web site for any purpose.”

From Wetpaint.com:

We generally frown on using Wetpaint as a link farm in order to try to increase search rankings. Also, most link building companies don’t realize that Wetpaint imposes a “nofollow” on all outbound links, so the benefits of using Wetpaint for such purposes are probably negligible.

According to the Wetpaint Terms of Use, you agree not to use the service to:
Upload, post, email, transmit, or otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, “link farms,” “junk mail,” “spam,” “chain letters,” ‘pyramid schemes,” or any other form of solicitation.

So let’s review:

1. They claimed to create 700 “high-authority” links in one month.

2. They provided evidence of building 85 pages that contained links to my client’s website.

3. All 85 links were from 26 domains, all of which are free places online where you can create a webpage.

4. All 85 pages had duplicate content, the same 4 articles were copied and pasted over and over.

5. All 85 pages were brand new subdomains and pages with ZERO authority, ZERO page-rank.

6. Some of the 85 pages were created in violation of the terms of use of the core service providers, and will be removed as they are discovered.

What does this mean? It means that every single one of the links they created are completely, utterly, worthless at best.

At worst, Google might even detect this paid link building scheme and penalize my client’s website. Seriously – paid link building can actually be damaging.

What’s the moral of the story?

If you’re tempted to outsource your link building to a company – be very, very sure you know exactly all the details of what they plan to do BEFORE you pay them any money. Be sure you understand what Google considers good and bad link building.  After looking all around online for advice, I’m  not even sure that I now think outsourcing link building is a worthwhile endeavor  – this is one of the best discussions I could find and many of the commenters recommend never outsourcing link building. Here’s one of my favorite quotes:

“Outsourcing link development is risky business whichever way you look at it. I know of recognized SEM agencies in the UK who offer this service to their SEO clients, but who, upon hearing you wish to terminate your SEO contract, claim they will have to remove all the inbound links they’ve been maintaining. Now this may be calling your bluff to make you sign another 1 year extension, but the fact of the matter is that if these guys are doing it and doing it well, they probably own the network from whence your inbound links come.

Do you want to be held to ransom like this? I don’t.”

And another great quote from the discussion:

“We need to be honest with ourselves here folks… sooner or later the engines will identify these “highly effective, yet 100% ethical” bought link networks. If you’re paying someone to link their network of sites to you, you are effectively manipulating your listings by artificial means…. in other words the natural/organic listing ain’t so natural after-all.

Short term gains may be there for the taking, but long term we need to stop chasing algorithms and get on with developing great user content and websites that make other sites WANT to link to us. “

So before you hire an SEO company to outsource your link building – you need to really do your homework to make sure you understand exactly what they are doing, why they are doing it, and whether it’s really doing your website more harm than good.

I did manage to find one good article that contained tips on link building – but be warned, it’s a ton of work over a long period of time. And maybe that’s exactly as it should be.

I found, to my amazement, a graphic advertising a Google Sitemap for $250.

Wow, a Google Sitemap for $250. Now I realize many of you are thinking, what the heck is a sitemap and maybe this is a reasonable price. Not so!

First off, Google and Yahoo and Bing and everyone else use the same XML sitemap format. You don’t  need a different one for Google and Yahoo and Bing. Secondly, it’s a little text file that simply lists the pages on your site. It’s supposed to help search engines find all the pages on your site. Now whenever I design a website, I create one, just as an insurance policy to make sure Google finds all the pages, but if Google has already found your pages, you might not need one. Click here to see if Google has indexed all of your website’s pages. Google even provides a free site map generator.

Now, if your website isn’t fully indexed and you think you need a sitemap, what’s a reasonable price? Well, for many of the websites I design that are under 30 pages, making a sitemap takes maybe 15 minutes. Maybe an attorney can make $250 in 15 minutes, but not most web designers. Therefore, charging a flat rate of $250 for a sitemap is really, really, really overcharging folks for something they might not need and even if they do need it, it’s pretty quick to create.

This is just one example of an SEO company or individual charging for things that are pretty close to free. Here are some others:

Submission to Search Engines

I often see this offered as a service. First off, if you take the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing, you’ve got 90% of the search engine market covered (see January 2009 results). What if I told you could submit your website to these three search engines for free? Seriously. Here are the links:

1. Submit your website to Google
2. Submit your website to Yahoo
3. Submit your website to MSN

Now, if the big three let you submit for free, what are chances the other little players charge you? You get the point.  And you only need to do this ONCE for your website. Submitting over and over will only annoy them, and we don’t want that.

Robots.txt File

This is another example if a very small file that can help your website. Again, this takes maybe 5 whole minutes to create and is typically much smaller than the sitemap file. Oh, and Google also has a tool that will help you create this little helper file too. Click here to get Google’s help to create a robots.txt file. It’s supposed to give “bots” those mysterious little programs that crawl around the web directions. Again, not super hard to make and should only take someone a few minutes.

Meta Tags

Now this item is a tricky one. It’s super easy to change a website’s meta tags. But what to change them to is the part that takes the time investment. What are meta tags? These little pieces of code, very short, that are (or should be) a part of your website code near the top of your page. Want to see what your meta tags look like? Just go to your home page, click “view source” in your browser. Look at the top for something like:

<title>Hello I am your title and should be filled with keywords</title>

That’s the “title” tag. And here’s the description tag:

<meta name=”Description” content=”Hello I am a description of this particular page” />

That’s it. See how short they are? The hard part is doing the research to figure out what to put in these two meta tags. But actually changing them is very quick. A good SEO person should involve you in this research. Changing the tags is trivial, deciding what to change them to is not. And what about the keyword meta tag? The keyword meta tag was declared dead and useless in 2002.

Link Building

Be really, really careful of link building scams – they can actually do damage to your search engine rankings.  On the website I saw they were offering a month of link building for over $3000. This is a huge amount of money – and you need to find out exactly what you’re getting for this. If they are just going to spam small business website owners with endless link exchange requests, it’s not worth it. Find out details, ask questions. If they can’t explain their link building practices in language that you understand, look elsewhere.

W3C Validation

While it is debatable whether having your website validate is a benefit to SEO, actually finding out IF your website code is valid is free. Click here to use the W3C Validation tool.

Image Tag Optimization

Sounds impressive huh? Well, it’s a very small task depending on the number of images you have on your website. In general, whenever you add an image, there’s a part of the image code that can contain keywords. It’s contained in the ALT attribute of the image tag. So if you sell widgets, it might look like this:

<img src=”images/widget.jpg” alt=”widget”>

It’s just a little bitty extra piece that should, as a matter of good design, be on every image.

Local Google Listing

By now you’re getting pattern, right? Google stuff is FREE. Click here to learn how to get your business listed in Google Local.

Want good FREE SEO advice? Visit Google’s Webmaster Central. Even if you’re not a web designer, it will give you a good education right from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. And if someone gives you a list of SEO services they will provide – do a little bit of research to see if any of these things are really something you can do yourself. There are lot of people out there to take advantage of this thing called SEO – a little education goes a long way.

My therapist client thought he had backlinks from three prominent therapy directories: Psychology Today, the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT), and the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT).

In general, when you can get your website listed in a directory that’s full of content that’s related to your targeted keywords, it’s a good thing. But when I used a backlink checker tool, I didn’t see any of these links coming in to his website. So I did some checking and here’s what I found:

1. Redirects – Psychology Today has a big directory of therapists and if you pay them some money they will list you too. They’ll give you your own page with your picture information about your practice and a link that’s entitled “Visit My Website”. When you click on it, you go to the therapist’s website. So it’s a link right? Sort of. If you hover your mouse over the link, you’ll actually see it looks like this:

http://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/mywebsite-verify.php?profid=12345

It’s not really a link to your website. It’s a link to Psychology Today’s subdomain “therapists.psychologytoday.com” and it’s building a redirect command based on your profile id. While clicking on the link takes you to your website, this kind of link does not pass any authority or “link juice”. It does nothing in terms of your search engine rankings.

2. Only Accesible via a Form – The AAMFT actually uses a service called TherapistLocator.net – but when you try to search, you first have to click on an “I accept” link that then takes you to a form. In order to access the page, you have to fill out the form and click a button. Search engines can’t do this. They can only find their way to webpages by crawling around links. Therefore while a human might find your practice, a search engine will never find your page on TherapistLocator.net. The ABCT has the same setup – you must fill out a form to get to the therapist’s page, a search engine roadblock.

3. Whoops, There Is No Link – On the ABCT website I tried to location my client’s page, and found it, but whoops, there was no link to his website. So if you think you have a link to your website somewhere, just double check it to make sure.

4. NoFollow – Another type of search engine roadblock, are links that have the “nofollow” attribute attached to the anchor tag. You have to view the source code of the page (which is really easy, just click “view source” in your browser) and see if the link code has this attribute. This is an instruction for a search engine bot not to follow the link, therefore, you don’t get any link juice. I didn’t find this in any of the examples for this client, but I have seen them before on other directories for other clients.

So in summary, backlinks (links from other websites to your website) are really important to search engine ranking. They are like a vote for your website and pass some authority or “link juice”. But just because you think your website is listed in a directory, doesn’t mean that it’s helping your search engine ranking:

First make sure the link to your website is actually there.

Next, make sure you can get to your website’s link by clicking on other links, and not by filling out a form.

Once you get to your website’s link, make sure it’s a real link directly to your website URL and not a fancy redirect.

And if it’s a real link, make sure it doesn’t have a “nofollow” attribute attached.

If it passes these tests, it’s a really good link and will help your search engine ranking. If not, it might still help humans find your website, as many people do use these type of professional directories to search.

I adhere to Google’s Quality Guidelines for Webmasters. While it’s true that Google’s massive search engine algorithm is secret, they publish detailed guidelines for those of us who design websites to tell us what to do, and what not to do. Web designers who don’t follow these are creating websites that may be penalized or removed from Google’s index. Being removed from Google’s index could cause a small business, who relies on Google’s traffic, to go belly up. Violating these guidelines can have serious consequences.

One of the big quality guideline violations, is known as “doorway pages“. Here’s how Google defines doorway pages:

“Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our webmaster guidelines.”

Here’s an example of a doorway page scheme I ran across recently while doing some search engine optimization for a client. For the sake of this blog article, let’s say my client makes widgets in Seattle. When I was investigating other websites that ranked well for “widgets Seattle” I noticed this one site, let’s call it “SeattleWidgets.com” (not it’s real domain name) that was ranked highly. When I looked at their backlinks, I noticed they had several links from websites that should have been competitors. But when I looked at these websites, they were all actually doorway pages that had links back to the main SeattleWidgets.com site.

How did they do this? They purchased domains that included the names of different neighborhoods around Seattle and added “widgets”. These doorway domains looked like this:

pioneersquarewidgets.com
lakeunionwidgets.com
belltownwidgets.com
southlakeunionwidgets.com

You get the idea. When you went to these doorway domains, they were nearly identical in appearance, all made from the identical template. The content was similar, except stuffed with keywords about widgets and the neighborhood. But when you clicked on the links, you got redirected to the main website SeattleWidgets.com.  They even tried to make it sound official, and had “A subsidiary of  Seattle Widgets” in the banner area. But the phone number and address was identical. All links led to the same “real” domain. Thus, these domains were doorway pages, and violated Google’s quality guidelines.

So what do you do if you’ve discovered that a competitor has created many of these doorway pages or multiple domains that all direct traffic back to their “real” website? Answer: Report them to Google. Follow this link to report spam in the Google index. It’s quick and easy, and helping Google to get rid of these junk websites is a good thing. You’ll be helping your own business and helping others. It’s all good.

What do you do if you have one of these doorway page scam? Stop it immediately. Remove the content and set up redirects to your one “real” domain and pray that you did this in time before Google caught you. And don’t do it again.

Call up the website under scrutiny on your browser.

Look at the title at the very top of your browser. No,  not the URL (web address) but above it.

Does it simply state the name of the business? Or worse yet, does it say “home”?

This title is called a “meta tag”, which means it contains information that’s about your website, and doesn’t appears anywhere in the content. It’s a higher level tag than the other tags. This it why it appears outside the content, at the very top of your browser window.

Want to see where else it shows up? In the search engine snippet. If you’ve never heard of this, you can watch Google’s Matt Cutts explain the anatomy of a search snippet here. It’s important your title contain your most important keywords – and this is critical – unless your business is already known, don’t use the name of your business first in the title, put it last. You’re trying to have people find you who don’t know the name of your business.

This meta tag, the title tag is super, super duper important. It tells search engines what your page is about. Yes, the content on the page matters as well, very much so. But this one tiny detail of web design, that is so vital to search engine optimization, will frequently be ignored by web designers who care more about how a website looks, and less about how well it will serve the small business  owner.

So if you’re looking for a web designer, and you’re looking through their portfolio, notice their titles. If you don’t see any attempt to use keywords in the titles, look no further. Find someone else.

Likewise, if you have a website and your page titles are “home” or “your company name”, find someone to do some minimum search engine optimization on your website pronto. Unless of course you’re Home Depot, but I’m guessing you’re not

Adding an online store to your small business website is a big endeavor – and you want to be sure you’re getting the most out of your online investment. Here are a few tips and examples that will hopefully help you either make a wise online store application purchase, or fully optimize your existing store.

1. Make sure each product page has it’s own unique, specific title tag.

The page title is what’s seen in your browser window at the very top edge. Here’s an example: https://ahimsadogtraining.com/store/manners-minder–treat-and-train.php. This page’s title is “Manner Minders Sale / Treat and Train…” Page titles are important to search engines, and what comes first matters most. Therefore you want an online store to have the product name come first in the page title.

2. Use keywords in the product description.

Search engines can’t see images of your product, so be sure to use many different keywords in your product description to help that product page rank well. In the example above, note how many times “Manners Minder” is used in the product description. Don’t be afraid of being repetitive.

3. Make sure each product page has it’s own unique, specific description tag.

The description tag (like the title tag) is viewable either by looking at the source code of a page, or by looking at a search snippet. In the online store I work with, the description tag is automatically set to be equal to the short text description, but your store may be different.

4. Enable reviews/product comments.

Remember search engines love content that’s relevant to your product. If your online store supports reviews, you may want to enable them to let folks add their own content about particular products.

5. Make sure your online store product pages are crawlable by Google et al.

In the past, some folks would say that dynamically generated pages, like online stores, wouldn’t get crawled and indexed by search engines. In general this is not the case, but it’s always good to double check to make sure the product pages of your online store are getting crawled and indexed. Here’s how to check to see which pages of your website have been indexed.

Many of the general rules of SEO apply to online stores, the tricky part is that online stores are dynamically generated content, and so it is important that your online store lets you manipulate the title tag, the description tag, and that your store’s product pages are easily crawled and indexed. When shopping for an online store, ask your web developer to show you examples of existing stores, and then check to see for yourself whether the stores’ product pages have been indexed.

When new websites are “born”, it make take a while for them to start getting search engine traffic. And you can’t get search traffic from a search engine until they have visited your website and “crawled” over it’s pages.  It’s important for new website owners to know how to tell if and when search engines, like Google, the most important search engine, has come and crawled around their website. But how do you tell when Google has visited your website?

The best way to tell, is by using a neat feature of the Google search page. To use this, you can either go to Google.com, or use the Google search field in your browser’s toolbar. The important point here, is to use the Google search field, and not the browser’s regular URL (this is what website you’re on now) field.

In the Google search field, type in “site:” immediately followed by your domain name. No spaces.

So if I want to see the results for my own website, I would type in “site:AldebaranWebDesign.com” and hit the return button.

I’ll paste my own results below, so you can see what these look like:

A few things to highlight. First, you only see results if Google has crawled at least one page of your site.  Google won’t crawl your entire site on the first visit – it might take several visits, over a period of time to index all the pages in your website.

Take a look at the results. In the above example, the first line of each snippet, is the title of the page. This is set by the web designer by utilizing the “meta tag” for title. The second line is the page description. This is also set by the meta tag for description. If these look funny or don’t make sense – contact your designer to get these fixed.

See on the last line of each snippet, how it has a link to “Cached” ? The cached version is a snapshot of the page as Google captured it during it’s last crawl. If you click on “Cached” you can see this snapshot as well as a timestamp of when the crawl occured. Fascinating stuff!

How long will it take Google to find my website and pay it’s first visit?

Good question, and the answer is: it depends. When I develop new websites, I always inform Google (and MSN and Yahoo) of the new site’s existence. If you find evidence your new website hasn’t been crawled yet, you can always use this link to submit it to Google. Submitting more than once does nothing and may annoy Google, so don’t do it repeatedly. Another way to get Google to visit your new website, is to make sure other websites have links to your site. When Google crawls them, it will follow those links to your site. I’d say if you have a new website and have submitted it to Google, it should take around a month to get crawled for the first time.

How long will it take to get my whole website fully indexed by Google?

It may take several weeks after the first crawl to get fully indexed, assuming your website is fairly small, under 50 pages. The larger your website, the more time it takes to get fully indexed.

Why is getting indexed so important to getting traffic?

Because you need to be indexed by a search engine before they will send you any traffic, just like you need to have your business published in a phone directory before folks can look you up and find your business. Indexing is a page by page activity – and most likely your home page will be indexed first. But until a page is crawled and indexed by a search engine, that search engine won’t be able to show your page in the results of searches.

What if I have a blog or an online store – will they be indexed?

If you have a blog or an online store that’s written in PHP, yes, they will be indexed as well. I don’t work in other languages, so I don’t have personal proof, but I do believe that most kinds of dynamic website pages are crawl-able and index-able by Google. To verify this, simply check yourself. If you have 100 products in your store, or 100 blog articles, they all should eventually be indexed by Google. But it’s a good question to ask your web designer to prove this to you before you invest in a particular blog or online store or other database driven online application.

What about Yahoo and MSN?

You can use the same technique to see if Yahoo and MSN have visited and indexed your website. The only difference is that like Google, MSN shows you the crawl date via “Cached Page”, while Yahoo doesn’t. Just remember you’re typing “site:yourdomain.com” in the search field.

So if you have a brand new website, or an old one that isn’t bringing you much search engine traffic, take a look and make sure your website has been crawled and indexed by the major search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo. You can’t get free search traffic until you get crawled.

I often receive requests from people I don’t know asking me to exchange links. Exchange means that they’ll put a link on their website to me if I put a link on my website to them. Then we’d become one big happy link family. And the more links to your website, the better, right?

Well, it depends.

Let’s do a refresher on what makes links from other websites valuable. First, they should be coming from websites that have a good “pagerank” with Google. There are tools available to check out a website’s pagerank, like this one. Compare the website’s home page “page rank” to the page they’re saying they’ll put your link on. If the page rank is “n/a” or 0 (zero), look elsewhere for links.

The second thing to remember, is that the page they’re putting your link on should have content that’s relevant to your keywords. For example, if you’re a dog trainer, you should try to get on dog related websites – the links are evaluated in context with the content that surrounds them.

The third thing, is understand how unethical folks will promise you a link, but in reality attach a “nofollow” value attribute (HTML) that in essence, tells search engines not to follow the link, thereby rendering the link to you worthless. If the page has other links on it, view the source code and find the code that’s got the link, and look for a “nofollow” attribute. If you see it, it means this person is trading worthless links. (I’ve added them to the links below, so if you view the source code of the page, you can see what they look like)

So, with these three rules in mind, let’s look at an email I received recently asking me to exchange links. Here’s the email:

Hello,

I was looking at your site and it’s very interesting and well structured. I also have a website, please take a look at it:
http://safecofield.stadiumhotelnetwork.com

I was thinking if you would like to make a link exchange, this will be a benefit for both of us, don’t you think so?

Here are my site details:
Title: Safeco Field Hotels
Description: Stadium Hotel Network offers great rates on over 50 hotels near Safeco Field.
URL: http://safecofield.stadiumhotelnetwork.com

The reciprocal link of your site you can find at:
http://safecofield.stadiumhotelnetwork.com/resources

If you accept my link exchange invitation please add my link on your page, and I will put your link to my site as soon as possible.

Kind regards,
Tanya

Now, let’s test Rule #1.

1. What’s the PR of the home page and the page the link is promised?

The home page has a PR of 3, which is fine. However the page that the link will be on has a PR of zero. Not good.

Let’s look at Rule #2.

2. Is the content relevant to my business? “Safeco Field Stadium Hotel Network”? Um, I’m a web designer, so no, this is completely irrelevant.

And finally, Rule #3.

3. Since there are no other links on this page, I can’t tell if there are “nofollow” tags

So in summary, this is not a good deal for me. In general, as a rule, I don’t add links to other people’s websites because they ask me to – rather I add them because I think they’ll be helpful to my clients and blog readers. Understand what I’m saying, that links should somehow add value to my web page, a source of additional information – not simply a link to someone else’s website that is not at all relevant, like the Safeco Field Stadium Hotel Network.

Now, why you ask, would someone send me this email. The answer is, because they’re engaging in a link building campaign, trying to get as many links to their website as possible. Apparently, they don’t care where the links come from, as I imagine not many folks who are looking for a hotel will also be interested in web design services.

If you’re going to send folks unsolicited emails asking for links, at least tell me WHY a link to your website will be of value to MY website visitors. Convince me. Don’t try to flatter me with a generic complement like “I was looking at your site and it’s very interesting and well structured”. Not good enough. Although I do love flattery, it won’t get you a link from me.

Another tip to getting links from others, is to post VALUE ADDED comments on other people’s blogs. If you join the conversation and have something that really is going to improve the quality of the conversation, go ahead and include a link to your website, or relevant article. I frequently do this, and since many blogs are monitored by humans, they let my links remain, because I’m careful not to look like a spammer, but rather someone who is participating on the conversation and ADDING VALUE.

Happy link building!

Here’s a link to the tool so you can try this out for yourself: Google Keyword Selection Tool.

The tool is designed to help people, primarily those who use Google AdWords Online Advertising, select the best keywords for their campaigns. Here’s an example screenshot (click on the thumbnail to see it full size):

It’s truly incredible data to behold. So if you’re wondering how many people search Google.com for specific keywords, give this free tool a try.

One of the cool things to check out, is clicking on the “Choose columns to display”. In the view above, I’ve chosen to show Volume Trends. No wonder I’ve been so busy lately – look at how searches for website design have gone up over the summer months. Very, very cool data. Maybe I’ll use it to plan my next vacation!

If you have a Flash website, the article is worth reading. It appears that Google is improving it’s ability to discern text and follow links, but is still unable to “read” images. So if your website designer is using Flash, make sure they know the difference between text and images, and build your Flash website in the most search engine friendly fashion possible.

Or, you could simply avoid Flash altogether or use with great caution. I’ve chosen the former and some other internet marketing experts like Ian Lurie advise the latter . For most of my clientele, Flash is good for movies, but regular HTML, Javascript and a bit of PHP work just fine for everything else.

I recently had a good friend ask me to figure out why her friend’s website was not coming up in Google. After a quick review, the answer was obvious: the site had no text content, it was 100% flash. It also had zero backlinks. There was no reason why Google would rank this site, in fact, it wasn’t even in the Google index at all. It had a splash page, and played the same music on all pages. Which leads me to a familiar theme that keeps running in my head: who should you select to design your website: an Artist or an Engineer?

Ok, so I’m biased because I’m an engineer. Not just someone who calls themselves an engineer, but a real one with an engineering degree. I’ve created concepts, designs, prototypes, tests, and finally production quality products. Engineers might not be the most aesthetically driven sort of folks, but they sure do care about how things work. And websites are not just static pictures that you look at like a painting. They are dynamic. They are part of a living, breathing organic network called the Internet.

Now I agree that websites should be pleasing to look at, after all it’s a visual medium for the most part. They should also be easy for people to use. But the purpose of the internet is the sharing of information.

I typically design websites for small business owners. Not artists, musicians, entertainers or media companies. Small business owners are not in the entertainment industry. Their websites have one main purpose: to get more paying customers. They do this by communicating information about their products and services in a compelling and clear manner.

Artists create art to convey messages, stir emotions and inspire us. They are experts at creating beautiful things. But, they are not driven to create things that DO something. Websites must do many tasks. They need to capture your attention, lead you to perform certain behaviors (like checkout out a shopping cart or filling out a contact form). They must run and get content from a database and serve it to your visitors at lightening fast speeds. They must process credit cards securely. They allow you to create virtual communities by utilizing blogs or forums. They are very, very busy, and anything but static.

And they must be designed in such a way that other people can find them. Do you want your website to be a piece of art that hangs in a museum that no one knows the address of? Or do you want your website to be available to the entire world? Focusing exclusively on what your website looks like, and constructing it entirely of images or Flash, makes your website appear to search engines like a blank page.

Remember what “HTML” stands for? Hyper TEXT Markup Language. TEXT, TEXT, TEXT…it’s about written words. This is how search engines “see” the content on your website. They can’t “see” images, they can’t “see” Flash movies…but boy can they read text!

See how many times this is mentioned on the Google Webmaster Guidelines:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Note they said text links, not images.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.

Again…Google is telling you to use text, not images.

If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

And again…the more plain, regular, standard text, the better.

Still not convinced? Read this article from Google on “Working with Flash, images and other non-text files“. Here’s the very first few sentences (the bold is added by me):

In general, search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos, and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines.

Why then, given this clearly stated rule, do some web designers still create websites who have literally no content in text? Why do they make websites that are 100% flash, like the one my friend asked me to review?

Perhaps they simply don’t understand how the internet works and have never cared to learn. They are artists at heart and like to make eye candy. Or maybe they know and simply don’t care about whether or not their website customers EVER get any traffic.

Either way, as I’m sure you can tell by now, this annoys me to no end. How someone can call themselves a web designer and take people’s money and then give a 100% flash website that is completely invisible to search engines, not to mention people with visual impairments who rely on text readers, is simply beyond me.

So before you hire your website designer, figure out whether they’re more like an artist, or like an engineer. Do they focus on appearance to the exclusion of functionality? Are they knowledgeable about even the most basic search engine principles? Ask them, and look at the sites in their portfolio. Is there more to it that just shallow surface flashiness? Do their websites WORK for their clients?

Use this handy tool to check out their portfolio – it will show you how a website looks to a Search Engine

1. Enter the exact website address of the page you want to view. (eg. www.iwebtool.com)
2. Enter keywords you want to search for.
3. Click the “Show Me Search Engine Spider View” button.
The results will be displayed the the box below.

Powered by iWEBTOOL

Look at what’s in the window above. (If it’s not working, you may have to come back later and try it, the iwebtool.com site that provides this tool is very busy!) What you see is exactly how the page looks to search engine spiders as they crawl over your website. If your website has no or little visible text in this box, then you need to add content that is text…simple as that.

ADDENDUM: To Folks With Flash Sites Who Are Paying For Clicks

For some reason, I’ve been recently contacted by several folks who have 100% Flash websites who are looking for Google AdWords (Pay-Per-Click) consulting. I sent them this article in the hopes that they will understand that while I’m more than happy to help them with AdWords, I also feel that ethically I should tell them about how poorly their websites are performing in Search Engines.

There’s absolutely no reason that people should have to pay for all of their website traffic – search engines like Google are continually trying to find websites that are relevant to what people are searching for. Why have a website that’s designed to be invisible to Google and then turn around and pay Google for traffic? It just doesn’t make sense to me.

So if you have a website that’s Flash, and you’re thinking about Google AdWords or another Pay-Per-Click service, please take a moment to learn/read about Search Engine Optimization – I think it will be well worth your time and possibly enable you to ween yourself off of Pay-Per-Click and attract some free traffic that your competition, who doesn’t have a Flash website, has been getting.

Like blogs, forums are a way for people to attempt to get backlinks to their own websites. This is typically done by leaving comments that contain links to their website URL’s. If you’re honestly helping others and truthfully representing yourself, there is nothing wrong with having a link to your website, say, in your signature, or possibly to a relevant article you’ve written. But when you simply fake who you are, put in a useless comment in the hope to get a backlink to your website, you are considered a spammer.

This morning, my partner’s forum received a posting that said this:

Hi my name is collins and I look forward to learning about dogs from all of you. My older dog attacks my young puppy. Is there a way to train an old dog to like the new puppy?

Sounds like someone asking for help doesn’t it?

Except that the person added a link to a website in the signature. Where did the link go?

Take a guess.

A dog trainer! On the dog trainer’s home page, it had this statement. Brace yourself, it’s not modest:

Although she does not claim the ability to “read your dog’s mind”, her knowledge of canine behavior is so vast and her experience is so extensive, that when you describe your pet’s problem, she can not only tell you how to solve the problem, but why the problem exists.

Does the trainer have no idea how to solve dog issues like the one she posted, and she’s misrepresenting herself on her website? Or is she just looking for ways to get backlinks to her website by pretending to be a person looking for help. My guess is that it’s the latter, which is why I wrote this post.

If you want to get backlinks by posting in people’s forums, don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. If you are knowledgeable about the topic and can offer good advice to others, then simply do that. If you are indeed helpful, the forum owner will probably let you post your link, because you aren’t a spammer.

In this case, the forum owner looked at the posting and the link and quickly determined that it was another dog trainer trying to get backlinks to her website by pretending to be someone looking for help.

Now, what the other dog trainer SHOULD have done was to RESPOND to another person’s post who is looking for help. In this way, the other dog trainer was ADDING VALUE to the forum, not just simply trying to exploit it.

So a word to the wise: there’s nothing wrong with looking for forums where discussions are going on that are relevant to your business. Feel free to post and join the discussion. But don’t be a spammer and try to get undeserved backlinks. Be honest, be yourself…contribute!

I presume small business owners know they shouldn’t put content on their websites that they didn’t create themselves, but recently, I realized this was an incorrect assumption. And like I usually do when something surprises me, I write a blog article about it

What is duplicate content? For this post, I use “duplicate content” to mean textual content that is found elsewhere on the internet, either in other pages on your own website, or on the pages of other people’s websites.

What Does Google Say About Duplicate Content? You can read about what Google says about duplicate content here. While there some debate in the online world whether having duplicate content will actually cause search engines, like Google, to penalize your website’s rankings, there is agreement that it’s a bad practice.

Can I use quotations? It’s fine if you comment on other people’s content and include quotations – this happens in blogs all the time. But if you’re copy and pasting (with or without citing) large blocks of content from other people’s websites, this is not only unethical (you might be violating copyright laws), but it also won’t substantially help you get more traffic via search engine rankings – because search engines are smart, and they can tell unique content from duplicate content.

How Would You Feel If Someone Stole Your Content? The practice of using other people’s content for your own website content rather than writing content yourself, is called “scraping“. And there are even companies who now specialize in helping you determine if your website content has been “scraped” or copied verbatim on some else’s website: Check out Copyscape.com.

Create Your Own, Unique Website Content. To avoid being penalized by search engines for duplicate content, or getting into trouble with copyright violation – do the right thing and create your own unique content. If you don’t like to write, you can hire a copywriter to do this for you, but don’t steal content from other websites – it’s a losing game.

To optimize your blog for search engines (search engine optimization or SEO), you should understand how much of an impact individual post titles can have on your post’s rankings, and how to manipulate post slugs. Titles and slugs?!

When first creating a new WordPress post, you enter a title:

If you have the plugin installed called “Optimal Title”, then you’re in luck, because it will make the post title also show up as the page title with your blog title afterward, which is important for SEO. In page titles, positioning matters, and so when you create blog articles, put the most important keywords first. This is critical to the search engine ranking positioning for your blog posts.

Next, take a look at the “Post Slug” field. It looks like this:

Why is it called a “Slug” – I have no idea. If you leave it blank, the “slug” or page name of your blog will be set based on the settings in “Options” -> “Permalinks”. My setting is this: /%postname%/, meaning that if I didn’t set the slug, this post’s URL would look like this:

AldebaranWebDesign.com/blog/Blog-SEO-Using-Post-Titles-and-Post-Slugs/

But that’s a bit long and there’s no sense in having your post URL be overly lengthy, and this is where “Post Slug” comes in handy.

Post Slug will overrule the Permalink setting, so you can make them nice and short, and make sure they only include keywords. So if I use the post slug field like it’s shown above, my post URL will look like this:

AldebaranWebDesign.com/blog/blog-seo-titles-slugs/

Nice and compact and contains only the most important keywords.

Here’s a screenshot of this post in my browser, just to one more time, emphasize the difference between page title and slug.

So three things to remember:
1. Make sure “Optimal Title” or something like it is set up in your blog so that your blog post titles come before your blog name in your browser’s page title.
2. Put your most important keywords in your blog titles first.
3. If you have a long title, use the slug to make it shorter.

Why is Bounce Rate Important?

Because bounce rate can tell you something about the quality of the particular webpage or particular traffic source. Let’s look at some example from my own website traffic statistics:

Bounce Rate For Different Pages On My Website.

You can see that my home page has a bounce rate of 42.3% while my Citysearch click fraud article has a bounce rate of 50.7%. (I’ve just changed the look of my home page, so we’ll see if this rate changes for the month of Feb). Blog articles often have higher bounce rates than “regular” website pages. Look at the different bounce rates for your webpages and investigate what the differences are between pages with low bounce rates and pages with high bounce rates.

Bounce Rates For Referral Sources.

You should also look at the bounce rate for the different traffic referral sources, especially if you are paying for this traffic. Notice that for my website, Google US has a bounce rate of 52.9%, while traffic from websites of my clients has a bounce rate of 34.7%. This makes sense, doesn’t it? If you are using pay-per-click advertising, be sure you’re watching the bounce rate of traffic from your ads, because a higher bounce rate means either your ad isn’t attracting the right buyers, or your ad’s landing page isn’t good enough to capture them.

What Should Your Bounce Rate Targets Be?
Obviously, the lower your bounce rate is, the better. Looking at the web traffic tracking statistics of my clients, the lowest bounce rate for a home page is around 22%. Remember, other things can affect your bounce rate – such as whether folks are searching specifically for your business name (ie: “Ahimsa Dog Training”) or generic keywords (“dog training seattle”). If people are looking for your specific business, due to your advertising efforts, your home page bounce rate will be lower.

I found an article that reported different bounce rates for different types of websites. The following is a quote from their blog:

“Retail sites driving well targeted traffic 20-40% bounce. (One vendor told us anything above 33% should be a flag)

Simple landing pages (with one call to action such as add to cart) I’ve seen bounce at a much higher rate, anywhere from 70-90%.

Content websites with high search visibility (often for irrelevant terms) can bounce at 40-60%.

Portals (MSN, Yahoo groups etc) have much lower bounce rates in our experience 10-30%.

Service sites (self service or FAQ sites) again usually lower 10-30%.

Lead generation (services for sale) 30-50%

Bounce rates on a blog is something I think is misleading. By their very nature a blog is a long list of posts and articles. I think bounce could quite easily be 80-100% on blogs because people tend to be reading one article or post at a time. However that doesn’t mean that people aren’t finding value which is why i think it’s misleading.”

The above guidelines are based in this one company’s experience, so your bounce rate may differ, but I think it’s a fair guideline to use.