Archive for October, 2009
October 26th, 2009 by SEO Topics
A search engine is a way for Internet users to find what they are looking for on the Web. Popular engines include Google, Yahoo! and Bing. These engines allow people to type in a word, or a series of words, to find information online. A possible query might be “Christmas cookie recipes” or “Seattle insurance companies.”
Search engines help us find the information, products and services we are looking for on the Web. By entering keyword queries in the search field, we can tell an engine exactly what we are looking for and let it bring us the most authoritative and relevant results. That’s why an engine frequently crawls the Web using a metacrawler (sometimes referred to as a spider) to see what’s new and adjust its rankings accordingly.
So, what is a metacrawler/search engine spider? The engines crawl the Web using a metacrawler to scan websites for their content, keywords, meta tags, inbound and outbound links and other factors. Once the spider figures out what the page is about, it will rank that page accordingly for the appropriate keyword phrases.
That’s why it’s imperative that each page be properly optimized to rank for the appropriate keyword phrases. By using search engine optimization methods to help the engines determine what each page is about, a site’s rankings can be dramatically increased.
In addition to regular engines, there are specialized types of search engines such as a meta search engine, which uses a combination of other search engines to compile results. There are also directory search engines, which help people find websites listed in online directories.
Give us a call at 1-877-Rank-321 to learn more about search engines and how they can be optimized to ensure your website’s success!
Tags: what is a search engine?
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October 26th, 2009 by SEO Topics
Have you ever wondered how a search engine works? A search engine is a basically a directory for the World Wide Web (WWW). These free online directories, such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing, allow Web users to search the Web using a defined set of keywords to narrow down what they are looking for. Because there are billions of Web pages available on the Internet, engines help direct people to the content they desire so that they don’t have to comb through endless possibilities.
By entering in keyword phrases, you can tell the engine exactly what you’re looking for. If you type in New York Car Rental, the search engine knows that you want to see websites about car rentals in New York. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can further refine your search by adding additional words to the query such as New York City Car Rental or New York Car Rental Policies. In the first instance, you are telling the engine that you want to see results for car rentals in New York City (as opposed to other locations in New York State). In the other query you are telling it that you want to know about the car rental policies in New York, essentially telling the search engine specifically what you want to know about New York car rentals.
Generally, the narrower the query, the more relevant and helpful the results will be. That’s why a key component of search engine optimization (SEO) is understanding how a search engine works from a keyword perspective. Once you find out which keywords people are using to find your business – you can then optimize your website to rank highly for these keywords.
Contact us at 1-877-Rank-321 to learn how Web.com Search Agency can help you understand how Internet search engines work and how you can optimize your website to rank highly for specific keyword phrases.
Tags: how do search engines work
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October 26th, 2009 by SEO Topics
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is a highly effective way to market your business online and drive increased traffic to your site. PPC ads usually appear to the right of natural search engine results under the title Sponsored Links. In addition to the URL, these links usually have a page title, as well as a short description of the products and services offered.
Pay-per-click search engine marketing is a highly effective part of any SEO campaign. PPC ads guarantee instant page-one placement and campaigns can be structured to target a variety of keyword phrases to enhance your success. Our PPC experts will carefully analyze your website and potential keywords to bid on as we structure a unique campaign that will best fit your business’s needs.
Once keywords have been identified, our experts will write enticing ad copy that will grab the attention of Web surfers and draw them to your website. Once someone clicks on your ad and enters your site, you will be charged an agreed-upon price per click.
Our pay-per-click Internet marketing pros will periodically monitor your campaign to track its progress on a keyword-by-keyword basis and make adjustments as necessary. Having a flexible PPC campaign allows us to maximize your return on investment and enhance your website’s success.
PPC Web marketing, whether on its own or as part of a broader search engine optimization campaign, can drive valuable traffic to your site that will increase your sales. To learn more or to get started, give us a call today at 1-877-Rank-321!
Tags: ppc marketing
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October 20th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
Tools like Google Analytics give you an insight into your customer base that can’t be matched by giants in the brick-and-mortar field. You actually can see what people have in their minds when they come to your website or online store, and you can use that information to expand your product line if people aren’t finding what they’re looking for. For years, companies have spent millions of dollars on survey takers, focus group agencies, and consultants, but the information they have gotten is not as accurate as what you can get out of Google Analytics, which is free.
If you’ve already got Google Analytics installed on your site, you only have to make a few clicks to see what your visitors are looking for. On the left hand menu, click “Traffic Sources” and then “Keywords” to get a list of all the words people are typing into search engines in order to find your site. If you want to see how well you web pages match up with public opinion, you can look at the columns in the middle, an on the right hand column you will see the label “Bounce Rate” which indicates how many people jump off the site after only visiting one page for that keyword. Toward the center of the column, the “Pages/Visit” and “Average Time on Site” categories offer a highly insightful look into whether people explore more pages on your website, and how long they stay. An average bounce rate can range from 35 to 50% for natural traffic, but it can be far lower with targeted paid traffic.
The list of keywords itself can be very valuable, with the caveat that you’ll probably see some strange searches in the list if you get enough traffic. As a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company, Web.com Search Agency gets odd queries like “jack first page search engine listings without any seo knowledge” or “can you fool local business center” even though searches like these are not indicative of the audience we are serving. Since our site is a source of SEO knowledge intended for a broad audience, some of our visitors are looking for topics that are beyond the scope of what we offer, what we would recommend, or even what is possible. The vast majority of our searches are relevant to search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, and the many free SEO tools we have on our site. Incidentally, hosting free tools, calculators, and widgets on your own site is a great way to get repeat visitors, unsolicited links, and positive attention from the search engines.
Once you’ve got a long list of keywords (preferably from a few weeks of visits or more) what should you do with it? First of all, it needs to be studied in context. If you have your keyword list open in Analytics, you can scroll to the bottom and filter the list by one or two main keywords. This will give you an idea of all the variations people are using to find you. You can see the average bounce rate for your filtered keywords, and you may get a better idea of which words get better results, a lower bounce rate, more pages per visit. If you’ve set up goal conversions in Analytics, you can even see which keywords are leading people to fill out a form or make a purchase, which is information that you can feed back into your paid marketing campaigns. If you’ve got a group of words and phrases that have a very high bounce rate, you can likewise add these into PPC as negatives, or adjust your website to entice these visitors to stay.
When you use Google Analytics to make improvements, you can also see how well an adjustment to a web page is working. For instance, if you keep track of when changes are made, and follow your bounce rate for the same period of time, you can see if there is a positive or negative response to the change. If you’ve got more than one website, you can compare analytics reports to see if one version or the other is getting a better response rate. Instead of hiring a market research firm to tell you what a sample group likes, you can use Google Analytics as an audience response tool that gives you unvarnished information.
Google Analytics can also give you data segmented down to the user’s city, state, connection speed, and screen resolution. This can be very important depending on your demographic, since some audiences may not be fully up-to-date with fast connections and wide screens, so they are more likely to leave a site if it loads slowly or requires horizontal scrolling. Some recent changes in Google may also be benefitting local merchants in their own areas, so they may be seeing a lower bounce rate from nearby visitors, or a higher conversion rate from people who want to shop locally.
If you’re marketing a product to a nationwide audience, you can see how well the site is received in different regions of the country. When used in conjunction with offline marketing initiatives like TV commercials, infomercials, print advertising, and radio ads, Google Analytics can actually count the number of people who came to your site or a particular page. By cross-referencing this data with broadcast times and publication dates, you can learn a lot about the buying cycle associated with your product or service. You can also compare regional audience responses to your media and make adjustments.
A final piece of the information puzzle solved by Analytics involves what you aren’t finding when you check your site statistics. If you have great search engine rankings for several terms, but few clicks, then you may have chosen keywords that don’t get very good traffic. You may notice that there is a lack of traffic from a particular search engine, which may indicate a penalty of some kind. You can also use the Benchmarking feature to see data on other sites in your field, so you can get a quick idea of whether you’re experiencing results relative to your market segment.
Google Analytics and related programs like ClickTracks, Omniture, and WebTrends have made it possible for small businesses to get customer information that used to be jealously guarded by large corporations. One advantage for store owners who are also webmasters is that they have the flexibility to act on this information in a short amount of time, so a site can be improved in the space of a few months to account for customer behavior and preferences. Additionally, store owners can use their keyword visit histories to expand product lines or offer services that site visitors are demanding. Given enough time and information, your ability to read your customer base’s mind can provide the kind of hefty dividends that people outside the virtual world can only dream of.
Tags: google analytics
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October 15th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
What if your online store failed because it missed out on thousands of free search engine visitors? If you have an online shopping cart that isn’t built with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind, then you’re probably missing out on a lot of residual traffic that converts at a better-than-average rate.
Are you looking for an ecommerce shopping cart that is search engine friendly? If you’re planning to build an ecommerce store, or aren’t getting results with your current shopping cart, you should consider upgrading to a version that can be read and indexed by search engines. If you want your products to be found in Bing, Yahoo, and Google, having an SEO friendly shopping cart can be a tremendous advantage, because your site can offer a unique web page for every product that you sell.
What makes a shopping cart search engine friendly? Here are some factors that are better if they come “off the shelf” rather than as a result of expensive program modifications:
- Unique titles and descriptions. This could either be accomplished by dynamically adding your product description and part number to the title and description, or by having the ability to write it yourself. For very big shopping carts, a set of dynamic titles in the format of “{item name} Free Shipping on {product number}{item name} at Mystore.com” is a brief example.
- Total control of titles and descriptions. If you can’t put unique titles and descriptions on all your products, you are going to have problems, but some products need hand-crafted title and description fields for better optimization. The ability to write your own titles on any page is also critical if you find that a shopping cart page is cannibalizing the keyword value of a more important page on your site.
- Ability to add content. You may not want to add content on every product page, but if you follow the 80/20 rule, then you know that a certain set of products is responsible for the bulk of your revenue. If you can improve the on-page content on high margin/volume items, you may improve your search engine positions.
- Descriptive URL rendering – Also known as “search engine friendly rewrites” this means that your URL will have a clean look in the style of: example.com/gadgets/widgets/three-handled-gradunza.html. Search engines like to associate words, and you should only include item numbers if people actually search for them. For example, printer ink refills would be a good item to have described numerically in association with the brand name.
- Breadcrumbs – Automatic breadcrumb generation helps search engines categorize your products. Using the example above, a breadcrumb structure may look like: Gadgets>Widgets>Gradunzas.
- Ability to name photos and generate alt tags. Some carts assign numerical values to images. This reduces relevance, and also confuses image search programs that may use your image in their results if it has a descriptive name.
- XML Sitemap Generation – Your shopping cart should be able to generate a new XML Sitemap (AKA a Google Sitemap) whenever products are added or removed. Search engines use these sitemaps to find pages they haven’t heard about, so you may want your cart to redirect old pages that have been removed to a similar category.
- Minimal Parameters – If your URL contains a lot of ampersands and question marks, it becomes harder for the search engine to read. There should be a setting in the cart for “search engine friendly rewrites” that takes care of this for you.
- Part of your own site – A shopping cart that resolves to your main domain (not a subdomain!) can leverage the trust and PageRank values already associated with your website. This is important because search engine values associated with your homepage can devolve to your interior pages if you’ve got a good linking structure in place. There is also some value passed back to your site when people link to products that they like.
- Ability to create shopping feeds for Google Shopping (formerly Froogle) and engines like Shopzilla. Even though this isn’t strictly SEO, Google Shopping results appear near product searches, and there can be a tremendous amount of value in having a cart that feeds into major shopping engines.
- No Session IDs – Search engines have gotten better at figuring out how to get around Session IDs on pages, which can sometimes get ignored by search engines because they are seen as temporary pages, or indexed multiple times and considered to be duplicates. Whenever possible, use cookies or other ways of keeping your URLs free from excess IDs. Normally a session ID would contain identifiers like “sid,” “cscid,” or “phpsessid” in your URL along with numbers.
- Spaces for comments (assuming you want comments) If your users can review products, they are adding useful content to your product pages for free. Naturally, someone should review and moderate the comments to make sure that they are not overly negative or defamatory.
Ability to add Google Analytics and other tracking software. Every page in the shopping cart should be able to include Google’s code snippet.
Before tearing out your current ecommerce cart and rebuilding your entire database, you might want to check with your vendor to see if updates are available. Most of the top selling carts have added new functionality that creates URL rewrites, controllable title and description fields, and product feeds. Even if you have to hire a programmer to make these features work, it can be a very good investment, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of products for sale.
What if you’re looking for a new shopping cart? Ask you salesperson for examples of sites that use the cart. You can then go to a search engine and use the site command to find out how many pages are seen by the engine. For instance, you can type in site:amazon.com and see 358 million pages. If a search engine can’t read shopping cart pages, it may only show a few pages from the site. Some shopping cart systems also generate the rest of the pages on the site, so it is very important to make sure that every page is represented for carts of this type.
The value of an SEO friendly ecommerce cart cannot be understated, especially when you’re just starting your online store. At Web.com Search Agency, we’ve seen some of the headaches that come with a pre-installed cart that can’t be modified or upgraded. The last thing you want to do is invest time and money in a new and better system because your old shopping cart is incompatible with search engines. Even though a search engine friendly cart is only one part of the ecommerce optimization equation, properly formatted pages can serve as several thousand extra representations of your site on a search engine. Given that people search for things in a variety of ways, you have the ability to cast a wider net when you’ve got a good ecommerce cart on your side.
Tags: search engine friendly cart, seo friendly shopping cart
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October 13th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
Search engines use a lot of different methods for understanding the relative value of data on a web page. In a manner of speaking, they are trying to see the page in the same way that a human being would. Secondarily, they would prefer to ignore the same things on a web page that a person would naturally gloss over. The technical term for assigning different values to different parts of a web page is known as “page segmentation” and in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), proper placement of content and links on a page may improve search engine rankings.
Even though there are a lot of different ways to create a web site, most pages have a similar architecture. In the parlance of SEO, these segments are broken into what are called “blocks” which a search engine can better classify. It should be noted that different algorithms will give different weights to each block, but some common sense should prevail in the importance of each segment. Here are some of the aspects of a web page that a search engine may consider:
- Header – The header section of your site may contain elements like the H1 tag, a phone number, or visual information that is brief but very informative to the customer. You might have navigation links, tabs, or breadcrumbs in this part of the page. A search engine should consider the significance of this block to be above average.
- Navigation – Search engines are going to use the navigation links to discover the relative importance of other pages on your site. However, extraneous information in this section may not be as weighted since navigation only gets read when you need to get to another page. If you have a bunch of outbound text links under your normal navigation, their placement may be suspect.
- Body Content – (Note that the relative placement of the body content block may be a factor.) For an informational site, the body content should have very high importance. For people who are getting SEO value from link purchases, placement in the body content among text is generally considered to have a higher value than a link floating around in the footer or right margin. For “white hat” purists, the body content is going to be where well-written and topical information should reside. As always, this content should closely agree with the page title.
- Footer – The footer block will normally contain redundant navigation, links to other sites your company may own, your physical address, fax number, and other useful data. A person may get to the footer after reading the body content and navigate from there. A text link to another site may have a higher chance of being considered to be spammy, especially if it resides among 16 other text links for marginally relevant sites.
- Margin – What goes in your right margin block, assuming you have one? You might have a blogroll, a series of text links, or even a form. Opinions vary on the value of this block, but there is some consensus that a block containing a bunch of suspect links isn’t going to help a “good” link that gets put in the same piece of real estate.
- Visual Elements – Blocks for visual elements like images and graphics may become more important over time, since search engines are getting better at reading the text inside image blocks, and recognizing objects in pictures. As always, good image labeling and alt tag association may help the page as a whole, since a picture of a dog on a page about dogs reinforces relevance.
- Advertising – A block recognized as advertising is likely to get a below average value. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t advertise on your site, but links from this block may not get much weight, and too many blocks of advertising could lower your score altogether. Search engines probably won’t want to serve up pages full of ads when they make their money selling the same thing.
- Blog Comments – A block of blog comments (which would naturally be recognized beneath the block showing blog content) is going to get less weight overall. It doesn’t help to have spammers who try to put links to their own content (whether it’s an SEO link or not may not matter), or run-of-the-mill crackpots who go off on a tangent that is totally irrelevant. In this case, a lower segmentation value for blog comments is probably helping the blogger get found.
- Forum Comments – Forum comments can be very useful when they answer common questions. Some thought has been given to the idea that the actual content of the forum posting has more value than the signature of the comment block, which is devalued because it may contain spammy links.
- Miscellaneous links – Some of the cheaper “link submission” sites out there will put your site’s link on pages with several hundred other links. A block of these links will already have low value because link popularity is divided by all the outbound links on the page, but being in a block of such links would further diminish the value. Also, sites that do sitewide links in certain page segments are also easy to identify, and buying links like these is not recommended.
To understand why search engines may think that segmentation is important, you only need to see that patents have already been filed for search algorithms by Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. The process of segmentation allows for better understanding of what a person may find important, and what a person may ignore. Eye tracking studies have already shown that people have trained themselves to bypass advertising content on web pages, so a search engine would likely consider any content in an advertising block to have minimal relevance. In the same way, blog comments, which may have been a useful SEO trick for generating content and links, are going to get less importance because of their profile compared to the actual blog posting.
The most important takeaway for the SEO professional is to ensure that content and links are placed on parts of the page where they will have the most impact. The practice of stuffing content below the footer is going to have less and less relevance if the “meaty” portion of the site is considered to be more adjacent to the header and side navigation. Secondarily, a site with an unusual design, or one that can’t be deciphered by a search engine, may lose the content power that a properly segmented site can provide. For link building purposes, links to your site from suspicious areas aren’t going to get much value, and too many “bad segment” links could be an algorithmic indicator of paid link acquisition. At Web.com Search Agency, understanding page segmentation is also very important for helping our SEO clients craft websites that are search engine friendly and more useful for customers, which can be a “win-win” situation when the site gets good search engine traffic and makes the client more money.
Tags: page segmentation
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October 8th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
Can you make money building sites primarily designed to create income through Google Adsense? The answer is yes. As always, the definition of “making money” is different for different people, since the money you make on a daily basis may not exceed the value of a few hours’ work at the burger joint on the corner. There are multiple “get rich quick” sites online that lead people to believe that they can make several thousand dollars a month with “Google Ads” but unfortunately it takes a lot of skill to build a site that gets traffic and generates ad clicks.
For the uninitiated, Google Adsense is a service that runs contextual ads on websites. If you have an article about gardening and have Google Adsense code installed, Google will read the website content and populate the page with relevant ads. If someone clicks on the ad, you get a share of the money. Google Adsense primarily runs out of the Content Network of Google Adwords. If you advertise in Adwords and haven’t turned off the Content Network, your ads are going to show up next to whatever text Google thinks is relevant to your ad.
If you want to make money off Adsense, you have to have a site that gets traffic. Some sites get their traffic from user popularity, so MySpace will run Adsense ads to monetize content, but it probably is relying on regular user traffic to get clicks. MySpace also runs a lot of ads in addition to its Adsense. Sites along the line of Facebook, MySpace, and even YouTube fall into the category of sites that would get traffic even in the absence of search engines, because people recommend them. If you’re building a new site, and expecting to get traffic for free, then you probably are thinking of using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to generate traffic for your site. Basically you’re trying to get the search engine to rank your site for profitable phrases, so people can visit and then click on the ads. As a fair warning, this is not always a recommended business model for anyone who is new to SEO or Google Adsense, since you can usually make more money online by selling the things that people are paying to advertise, or flipping the website itself when it gets enough traffic.
Google also has a vested interest in ensuring that its search results don’t get plugged up with sites designed to monetize clicks. Therefore, a site that makes money on Adsense (or any other CPC program) will need to pass the standard SEO tests for usefulness and resource value. Generally speaking, you will want to create the same kind of “sticky” content that makes people want to recommend the site to a friend and keep coming back. Google’s webmaster guidelines recommend sites that “add value” and the way to do this is to have information that people want to see.
There is also a standard SEO investment in a site that wants to make money off contextual advertising. If you want to rank for a competitive term, you’re going to have to get links to your website, create a site architecture that is search engine friendly, and wait for the site to rise in the search engines. A small percentage of people who do SEO will see great results in the space of one or two months, but it could take 6 months and a lot of money to get “average” results on some competitive projects. Assuming that you can wait around to see things happen, you might find yourself making OK money with the Adsense model, but you could probably make even more running an affiliate program on sites like Commission Junction or ShareSale.
Many Adsense sites go for terms that have been identified as high cost-per-click bids. There is a nice list of them at Spyfu.com. Theoretically, you could build a set of sites around these terms and cash in on the traffic. Unfortunately, the theory has a few pitfalls, since (1) there may be a high click cost but low search volume for the terms and (2) there are a lot of smart people who already know about this list, and got a head start! One thing you can tell from this list is that attorney, settlement, and insurance terms dominate the highest CPC keywords. The historically expensive term “mesothelioma” (asbestos related lung cancer) has cost as much as $100 per click over the past few years, since lawyers are working on multibillion dollar settlements for asbestos-related illnesses. Naturally, people have done a lot of work on SEO for sites related to this condition, and a search engine like Google, Bing, and Yahoo may put these sites into a more stringent category because big dollar click bids attract some of the more advanced SEO spamming techniques.
Using SEO traffic to get Adsense clicks can also be problematic in the sense that your Adsense account can be suspended or cancelled if Google believes that there are any fraudulent clicks. Smart site owners never click on their own Adsense ads, and it is best not to encourage anyone you know to click on them either, no matter how tempting. Your site can’t even encourage site visitors to click on ads, or you may lose your account. The world of online forums reveals that there isn’t much you can do to appeal as suspension or cancellation, even if you believe it is inadvertent or caused by malicious behavior on someone else’s behalf.
To sum it up, the best way to get traffic that improves your bottom line in Adsense is to follow the same SEO rules that everyone else is using. Build a site with useful, interesting content. Get links from trusted sites that are relevant to the subject matter. Have features that keep people coming back to the site, or tools that they would recommend to a friend. Even though we don’t run ads on the Web.com Search Agency site, we get good rankings and traffic thanks to our multiple SEO topics, popular search engine optimization tools, and our frequent updates, which have gotten unsolicited links from around the globe while showing Google, Yahoo, and Bing that our site has a better than average freshness factor. For people who want to build a website revenue model that is based on Adsense, it never hurts to be a thought leader in the online community, and a successful site may develop opportunities for better revenue than the contextual cost-per-click market can provide.
Tags: adsense seo
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October 6th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
There’s a new phenomenon in Google search results that is worthy of a quick update. If Google has properly classified the location of your business, you may find yourself at a higher spot in the organic search results when you do your searches from in town. When you’re searching from a few hundred miles away, you may see your ranking at the same spot it was before Google did its update about a month ago. There is even a brief mention of this update in a recent Business Week article.
Overall, the response to the new positioning is good, assuming that you get a fair chunk of business from your local market. If your business is based on high positions for nationwide or international searches, you may have more of a problem. All of a sudden, rankings are different for each city, and this can be a double whammy for people who have already been marginalized by local map results that have supplanted the visual marketplace on the search results. Over the past few weeks, webmasters have been improving their local SEO practices to try and take advantage of this new algorithmic tweak.
If Google hasn’t associated your site with its local address, then you could be missing out on your share of local queries.
- Add your site to the Google Local Business Center. Add all your local branches and describe your services.
- Put your address at the bottom of the homepage in addition to the Contact and About pages.
- Make sure you’re present in local business directories and online yellow page directories. Reviews in these directories are also considered by Google Local. (Web.com Search Agency has a local business submission offering as part of its SEO packages.)
- If your store doesn’t have a permanent address, consider getting one.
One of the keys to being found in localized search results involves actually being in the area. Search engines are getting smarter all the time, and are getting better at matching up corporate name registrations, business licenses, and phone book entries with actual locations. To a certain extent, you can still fool local directories by using post office boxes and other tricks in order to get a spot on Google Maps as well as Bing and Yahoo local directories. Right now, it would appear that your website can only be associated with one location, so it is in your best interest to put your legal home office address on the site. If you want to get found for franchise locations, you may want to create separate websites for each location, then associate the site for each one with the address using Google Local Business Center and other directories. People still put a great deal of trust in businesses that have local offices, so you may find that the site traffic you get from nearby customers has a higher conversion rate.
As search engine algorithms mature, the type of results delivered to users will be more and more unique depending on the query. As a result, it is in every webmaster’s best interest to make sure that their sites have targeted relevant information that is easy for search engines to classify. Many small businesses now have an advantage over sites that got great nationwide traffic, but only in their target areas. However, if Google doesn’t know the address associated with the site, you aren’t going to get the extra lift that local sites are getting in their own hometowns. Therefore, the time that it takes to get your site in line with local algorithm requirements can pay off quickly by giving you a larger share of customers in your own back yard.
Tags: local search, localized search results
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October 1st, 2009 by Patrick Hare
Similar to the concept of Domain Trust, the idea of Page Trust (or “on page trust factors”) centers around a search engine’s rating of the type and kind of content on a website itself. There is a certain amount of controversy in the SEO community about whether and how an engine like Google would assign trust to a site. This idea is important in the “all other things being equal” category, since you don’t want a minor ranking factor to keep you from a better position, and you don’t want to be off the first page if a simple fix can get you there.
You can also get different definitions of Page Trust depending on who you ask, so we thought we’d share our idea behind the concept in this posting. Most of the time, the implementation of on-page trust factors should be second nature in the SEO process, and part of the site design advice given to customers. Here are a few items that consistently show up in conversations about Page Trust in the SEO world:
- Spiderability – Can Google, Bing, and Yahoo read the site? If they can’t read it, how can they trust it?
- Speed – How fast does the site load? If you go into Google analytics and compare bounce rate by connection speed, you might see why this is a good metric for search engines.
- Content – Is the content original? Is it useful? Is it stuffed with keywords? Was it written by a person or machine? Does it show up in a substantially similar or identical format on other pages? Does it match up with the title and the internal links pointing at it?
- Navigation – How do the pages relate to each other? Do they split up topics and categories in a way that gives more prominence to more important items? Is the navigation clean and easy to follow?
- Linking Structure – Do internal pages link back to the homepage? Is there a clear path that a user can follow around the site? Are there just enough, but not too many, internal links on most pages. (hint: more than 100 internal links on a non-sitemap page is probably too much.)
- Language – Does the language on the page match the language metatag. You don’t want to claim UK English on a US site, but you really don’t want to say it’s in French if it isn’t.
- Advertising – Are image or text link ads being sold on the page? This could significantly change how the trust of the page is being considered. Many sites that run ads use redirect links (where you link to another page on your own site that refreshes to the destination) for statistical purposes and to make sure they aren’t supplying a direct link. An obvious affiliate link from your page can sink it fairly fast, given the SEO abuses perpetrated by many affiliate sites.
- Grammar – What is the reading level on the page? Note that academic subjects may go for a higher level of grammar. In any case, semantic algorithms are going to have more and more influence on relevance in the future, so you want to ensure that usage, spelling, and natural language are being used.
- Address/Contact Page – Does your brick-and-mortar presence have a physical address? Addresses add confidence for search engines, especially if they match up with yellow and white page listings that have already been classified. Make sure you claim your Google Local listing and point it at your website.
- Categories – Good category structures help search engines understand the relevance of pages, how they relate to each other, and how they support the theme on the homepage.
- Privacy – A privacy policy is expected on a site, even if it collects no information of any kind. It should be on its own page.
- About – “About Us” pages can sometimes be seen as an artifact, but they’re an expected part of the architecture. Pure Speculation: if you were designing a search engine, you might want to get some information from the About Us page (who, what, why, where) so you could see what the site is about, knowing that most sites on the internet don’t actively try to SEO themselves.
- URLs – Clean, search engine friendly URLs with minimal tracking parameters (think ampersands and question marks) won’t make the search engine think that the page is temporary or used for paid traffic monitoring.
- W3C Validation – This is a tough one, since most sites aren’t W3C compliant, even though it may be a requirement in certain countries. Google doesn’t seem to care about compliance, and very big sites in the Google index won’t pass validation, but from a site trust standpoint you might consider being as compliant as possible. If you’re an SEO consulting firm doing work for a client, you can expect that another firm is going to come along at some point and ask your client about the number of W3C failures on the site.
One of the debatable factors in the realm of Page Trust is whether search engines use it on its own to determine the value of a site. Formulas like the Google Algorithm are secret, but it isn’t too much of a stretch to consider that search engines would give greater value to pages that show greater legitimacy. After all, Google and Yahoo were built by Stanford scientists, and the people at Bing are also pretty smart. If they want their academic colleagues (and everyone else) to endorse their engines, then they should be taking people to results that aren’t misspelled, poorly formatted, or downright questionable. Therefore, an algorithm for Page Trust would separate the wheat from the chaff fairly quickly. No matter whether Page Trust is a major or minor consideration, almost any well formatted website really should have these factors in play already, and the job of the SEO consultant should include pointing out a lack of Page Trust as a factor in low rankings.
As always, there should be some consideration to the idea that search engines rank web pages, not websites. However, search engines aren’t afraid to ban a whole website, so each page should be able to stand on its own in the trust department, but the site itself has to expand on that trust. From a purely on-page, non-domain related viewpoint, all the site pages have to be robust, spiderable, navigable, and “trustworthy.” Page Trust may be a single component of the SEO ecosystem, but it should be approached with the same care given to domain name selection and link building.
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