Web Design – Is it Search Engine Friendly?

The relative ease of instant website design has its drawbacks. Plenty of novice webmasters have hung out a shingle for “web design” despite a laughable level of knowledge and experience in the web design trade. With the use of instant website creators, free templates, and borrowed designs, it is easy to make a website and sell it to small brick-and-mortar companies who are not knowledgeable about what a standard site should have. After a few months with no traffic, or no visitor conversion, many of these business owners start to wonder if there is a problem.

There are still a surprising number of web designers who do not take search engines into consideration when designing a website. At Web.com Search Agency, we know this because people come to us and ask why they aren’t getting any traction in Google. Normally it takes only a few seconds to see that the site has been designed entirely in Flash, or it has a bad title, or its on-page content has been embedded in images. Any one of these factors can effectively make your site invisible to search engines. A classic design mistake is to have a homepage title that begins with “Welcome to” and ends with the business name. Usually this mistake is repeated on every page. At a more advanced level (if there is such a thing as advanced incompetence) there are designers who use every JavaScript trick in the book, from flyout menus that can’t be read by search spiders, to cursor tricks that looked neat back in 1997. When we see a new site that looks like it was designed for a free web hosting space, we don’t usually have to look too hard to find readability problems.

At the other end are modern looking ecommerce sites with shopping carts that are definitely not SEO (Search Engine Optimization, or the process of getting your site found on search engines) friendly. This is kind of surprising to us because a search engine friendly shopping cart can be the difference between success and failure for a company, and we are always telling our customers to go back and ask the cart designer for SEO features like unique titles, search engine friendly URLs (also referred to as mod rewrites in PHP) and XML sitemap functionality. A proper shopping cart should also be able to spit out a Google Shopping feed (AKA a Froogle Feed) for Google Base, which adds your product list to the world of Google. Many open source shopping carts have available upgrades for a few dollars more, or built by third party entrepreneurs, but this is also an indicator of poor planning on behalf of the shopping cart designer. A truly competitive online shopping cart would have all of these features in place at the base level. Shopping carts that aren’t SEO friendly are a disservice to their customers, because the whole idea of selling things online involves getting found in the internet arenas where sales are made.

How do you find out if your web designer does SEO friendly work? How can you tell if the shopping cart you want is search engine compatible? Ask for working samples. Even if you don’t know what to look for, most search engine optimization companies can look at the sample and tell you what would be lacking if the same model was applied to you. For shopping carts, you can always do a query in Google with the question “Is (shopping cart name here) SEO friendly” or “(cart name) SEO problem” and see what comes out. Many shopping carts have updated themselves over the past few years, so if you see forum postings that are old, find out if upgrades have been made. Finally, if the shopping cart salesperson tells you that the cart isn’t friendly yet but an update is on the way, you may want to look elsewhere, since such updates can take years and may not bestow full functionality. We had one customer find out that the update worked for the "new build" of the cart, but he could not update his cart because he had the "old build" and making a change would ruin his existing rankings.

(Special note: Given that our parent company Web.com practices SEO friendly web design, we would be remiss if we did not make a note of that fact in this posting.)

Finally, you should see if your web designer has basic SEO knowledge. Many self-styled webmasters will claim to know everything about SEO, in which case you should ask for examples of superior placement. Search engine optimization firms usually will work with your webmaster for updates, but there is often friction when a webmaster says that the business owner “doesn’t need” to add content, change titles, add analytics, or fix several small items that slow search engine spiders. Sometimes a webmaster will be using SEO tricks that worked five years ago, but will get you thrown out of the Google rankings today. A certain degree of SEO knowledge on the webmaster’s behalf will ensure that basic tenets of search spiderability are in place during the design phase. Advanced agency advice can help in the naming of files, pages, and images. Agencies can also write or edit SEO content in order to ensure that “keyword blurring” does not confuse the search engines and leave you with artificially low rankings. No matter what the size of your new site or redesign, an SEO compatible site design produces dividends in the form of cheap daily traffic for your business website.

SEO for Bing – Optimizing for Microsoft's New Search Engine

Many of our customers are curious about SEO (search engine optimization) for the Bing "decision" engine. The short answer is that if you were found on MSN Live Search, you are likely to have the same positions on Bing. This is because Bing’s search results are nearly identical to their previous incarnations on Live Search, but Bing’s interface and functionality have been upgraded to present people with more choices in the “related search” menu at the left of the page, and also shows you previous searches in the same area. The related search feature is the "decision engine" factor, but overall you still need to show up near the top of the list of results if you want to get found.

Over the past few weeks, one of the differences for our customers involved an increase in traffic compared to previous MSN Live Search data, which was noted once Google updated its Analytics to track Bing as a search engine. The traffic increase is likely due to the fact that Bing has quickly taken a bigger market share over Yahoo search, probably because Microsoft is spending a few hundred million dollars on advertisements. How long Bing keeps its share of the marketplace is anyone’s guess, but overall people seem to be having a positive search experience.

One of the problems with Bing and its predecessor Live Search has to do with the volatility seen in search results. Web.com Search Agency tracks results for several clients, and their competitors, and MSN’s volatility has been noticeable for multiple sites, not all of which are even using SEO practices. Keywords will move several spaces up or down, even from week to week, with a churn rate that almost always exceeds Google or Yahoo search results. Combined with the fact that MSN was always the #3 search engine, there was little interest in optimizing MSN over Google, or even Yahoo for that matter. One of the differences between Bing and other engines is that its algorith is not necessarily as dependant on link popularity, so on page factors are more paramount.

For people who want to be found in Bing, several of the old MSN Search rules apply. First, you need to cached by Bing, which is done by submitting your site. MSNbot is still the crawler that will visit your website, so make sure you aren’t excluding it in your robots.txt file. MSN also has a Webmaster Center, which is not as famous as Google’s, but still highly recommended if Bing is important to you or your clients.

Second, you want to make sure your site has fresh content. What is fresh content? Essentially, updates to pages, added functionality, and more information about products or services will give you a boost. One way to keep content fresh involves updating a blog regularly, or referencing new press releases from your homepage. You should also be doing periodic keyword research to see if there are any new phrases that are worth going after, and then build fresh content around those keywords. Many sources on the internet report that MSN’s algorithm is more keyword oriented, but you should still keep in line with rules that Yahoo and Google use to prevent keyword stuffing.

Third, ensure that your metatags are descriptive and reference your major keywords, since the general SEO consensus is that Bing and its predecessor use these as part of their indexing. As always, try to avoid keyword stuffing and keep in mind that you don’t want to go too deep into any gray areas, because Bing may also be spending more dollars on algorithm improvement in the future, which will help it to filter out lower quality sites. One potential advantage you may have with Bing is that you can look at the “related search” menu and see if you have any relevant topics that you can build into your own site. Assuming that people who search for general topics will follow this menu, you have a chance to sharpen your relevance in one or more of these fields. If Bing retains its position over Yahoo or takes a greater market share, you will have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor. Another topic of note is that Bing, like Google, has a certain preference for exact match domain names, but it also will list .tv and .cc domains among its results, which is less common for Google. Therefore, a truly competitive or low volume/high margin term from one of these extensions may be profitable.

As a rule, a site that is good for Google will fall into line with Yahoo and MSN, but new content appears to get a better boost, at least for awhile. New sites almost always show up first in MSN/Bing, which may create a credibility gap because there are a lot of new sites that aren’t good resources for their topic matter. For people who try out different search engines, the quickest correct answer is going to be the determining factor in market share longevity. Any improvement to the search experience is going to keep internet users coming back, which means that search engines are always going to be looking for the best possible resource related to the topic typed into the search box. Aside from all the talk about semantic matching, link-based algorithms, and domain trust, the main takeaway for anyone interested in optimizing for Bing (or any other engine) is that creating a useful, readable site is the first step to SEO success.

Search Engine Positioning

Though the term “search engine positioning” is a little more antiquated sounding than “search engine optimization,” it has some interesting connotations that may bridge the gap between marketing people who are savvy about the internet and those who aren’t up to speed on the ever-changing face of the search marketing world. It may also help people in the search engine optimization (SEO) business sell their services to the brick and mortar marketing departments who understand the old “positioning” concept vs. its meaning in the world of SEO.

Classic marketing students will be familiar with the concept of positioning as it relates to how a brand name is perceived. Most marketing school graduates were required to read the book “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” by Al Reis and Jack Trout. Briefly summarized, the book contends that your brand image tells people what your capabilities are. In an example from the book, it was noted that Xerox did not compete well in the computer market against IBM because people associate IBM with computers and Xerox with copiers. Since the book’s publication, “positioning” has itself become a buzzword so it creates a clear idea in the mind of a listener who has been exposed to the concept. Therefore, “search engine positioning” may be a bit deceptive (are you trying to position a search engine?) as a phrase, but it is possible to clarify the idea in a way that clears up its real meaning and gets potential customers on board with its possibilities.

Any SEO expert will consider “search engine positioning” to be synonymous with optimization. Additionally, the marketing concept of “positioning” on the internet doesn’t really work because search is demand driven, and branding involves sending a repetitive message through various channels until someone understands the connection between the brand and its service offering. However, the process of relating the concept of SEO to people who don’t work in the search engine trenches is difficult, and takes many different approaches. With a word like “positioning,” it is possible to relate that your spot in the search engine rankings is going to build brand equity (albeit more slowly) by creating an association between your company and the “what you do” searches made by the average searcher.

Many people in SEO have no interest in brand building, but traditional marketing types may seem to think of nothing else. Therefore, it is necessary to show brand-conscious SEO prospects how you can use optimization and PPC to build brand presence while simultaneously creating a profitable sales channel for non-branded searches. One of the keys to creating long term customer relationships in the SEO world is to show value month over month, and the residual aspect of good keyword optimization is that people will come back to the site by searching for the brand name once they know it, assuming the brand name matches up with the URL.

Finally, there are people who only want to build a brand presence on the search engines, and don’t necessarily have an interest in the potential for all of the traffic generated by search terms. Many clients want to have a presence on the web that takes people to a site and presents information in the same manner as a billboard or commercial. These are not always bad clients to have, as they may spend their advertising dollars in amounts comparable to radio and television campaigns. By adding value and creating better search engine positions for keywords relative to the brand being built, a search engine marketing agency can prepare for the day that the customer’s strategy changes into a keyword conversion model. This usually happens when a shakeup or merger brings in a manager more familiar with the internet and the potential of search. In cases like these, showing tangible value in combination with online branding expertise generally creates an opportunity for your agency to be retained.

PPC Glossary

If you’ve got someone managing your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign, then you probably are hearing a lot of jargon and acronyms. The world of PPC is similar to search engine optimization when it comes to abbreviations and tech-speak, but it is still important for a customer to understand what is being referenced in a conversation, since your PPC agency is using your money to make the best possible purchases. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) agencies generally use a whole raft of terms in their internal reporting, and unfortunately they don’t always tone down the jargon when speaking to customers.

Here is a by-no-means-definitive list of common PPC phrases that are used in the world of search engine marketing:

Adcenter – MSN’s PPC marketing platform, which shows ads on Bing and Microsoft properties.

Ad Group – A specific set of keywords associated with a related ad or group of ads. It is possible to have multiple ad groups in a campaign.

Adwords – Google’s Pay-Per-Click platform, which shows ads on Google, AOL, Ask.com, and multiple custom search engines.

Average Position – The average placement position of your ad over all its impressions. It normally takes several weeks for your average position to rise to the top in Adwords, even with high bids.

Bid – How much you are willing to spend on a click. A bid can be a “default” bid on a group of keywords, or a specific bid on a single keyword.

Broad Match – A type of keyword matching that will show your ad for the widest variety of terms deemed relevant by the search engine. In general, broad match keywords give a higher volume with a lower conversion rate.

Campaign – A set of ad groups. Even though each ad group can contain different keywords and ads, the campaign has a daily budget, geographic targeting, and other settings which will be effective for all the ads in the campaign. Once the campaign’s daily budget is exhausted, all the ads in the campaign stop appearing for their relevant keywords.

Channel – In content match, one of the websites where your ad is showing. You can choose specific channels or sets of channels, so you can choose to be on Facebook, or on certain sections or demographics where your ad is likely to get better results.

Click Fraud – Clicks from fraudulent activity. Some fraud comes from competitors intentionally clicking on your ad. Other fraud involves using automated tools to collect commissions for clicks (via channels like Google Adsense) or to exhaust your daily budget.

Content Bid – The default bid for a set of keywords on the content network. Note that this should be a fraction of your search bid.

Content Matching – The placement of PPC ads on websites. Ideally, these sites should have content that is relevant to the service offering of the company running the ad. Google runs content matching on its “content network.”

Contextual Advertising – Essentially the same thing as Content Matching, given that your ad is triggered by keywords in context on a news, article, blog, or content page.

Conversion – A desired action taken by a website visitor. With PPC, it is relatively easy to measure conversions on form fill-outs and purchases, but it is more difficult to quantify dollars earned from phone calls triggered by online ads. Search engines track visitors for up to 30 days, so your conversion may not happen until a subsequent visit several days later.

Conversion Rate - The percentage of times your ad resulted in a form fill-out, sale, or action. To calculate conversion rate, you take the number of actions divided by the number of clicks. A typical e-commerce conversion rate may be 2.5%, but a form fill-out conversion rate could be 10-20%. A very low conversion rate indicates problems.

Cost Per Conversion – The dollar cost associated with the conversion rate. If you had 100 clicks for one dollar each, and had a 5% conversion rate (5 conversions), your cost per conversion is $20. The formula is essentially the dollar cost divided by the number of conversions.

CPC – Cost Per Click. How much each click cost you. Because bidding is based on many factors, this amount is generally expressed as an average of multiple clicks. When applied to “advertising” it is synonymous with Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Creative – The text of a PPC Ad. In Google, the first line of your creative is 25 characters, the second and third lines are 35 characters.

CTR – Click Through Rate. The actual number of clicks on your ad divided by the number of impressions.

Day Parting – Setting your ads to appear at certain times of day, or certain days of the week. Many B2B customers will day part so their ads run during business hours when they can answer the phone.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion – The placement of a variable field in ad text that will show a searcher’s actual search phrase (within limits) in the body of the ad.

Exact Match – A keyword setting that only lets your ad show up when a precise keyword is searched upon. In Google Adwords, brackets are used for an exact match, so a keyword like [vegetable man] would only trigger an ad when that phrase is typed in with no words before, after, or between those two words.

Geotargeting – In a campaign, setting your ads to appear in a certain city, state, or country. Also called Local Matching.

Keyword - A word or phrase that triggers an advertisement. Keyword matches can be based on broad match, phrase match, or exact match. Negative Keywords can be used to keep ads from showing for the wrong searches.

Impressions – Number of times your ad is served up, either as a search match or through content placement.

Landing Page – The web page that the display ad or keyword “lands” on when an ad is clicked. If there is not a specific page assigned to an individual keyword, the landing page is determined by the “default URL” in the ad.

Negative Keyword – A keyword that is used to determine when an ad should not be shown. For example, if you have a campaign about computer keyboards, but don’t sell wireless keyboards, then you would add “-wireless” to your list of keywords. Anyone typing in “wireless keyboards” would not see your ad because the negative keyword excludes it.

Phrase Match – A keyword matching type that only shows your keyword when someone types in the specified phrase in a search query. With phrase match in Google Adwords, quotes are used around the keyword, so a phrase match designation for “dog food” would trigger an ad when someone typed in a search for “best dog food recipe.”

Position Preference – A setting that specifies the desired position of your PPC ads. Note that this can sometimes keep your ad from showing.

PPC – Pay-Per-Click. A model of serving ads where you only pay when someone actually clicks on the ad.

Quality Score - A somewhat complex formula used by search engines to decide whether your keywords are relevant to the landing page, how much trust your campaign has, and the click through rate on your ads. Changing an ad can change its quality score, so it is usually best to copy the ad and edit it, then pause the old one when the new one has gained its own quality level. There are also geographic and bidding factors.

ROI – Return On Investment. There are various ways to calculate the value of a PPC campaign. Normally it takes at least a month to ramp up a campaign and gain a quality score, and more time to determine buying patterns and seasonality. PPC ROI can be tough to track beyond the simple cost/benefit analysis, but if clicks are not resulting in profitable sales, then improvement is called for on the site and in the campaigns.

Yahoo! Search Marketing – Yahoo’s PPC platform, previously known as Overture, previously known as GoTo. It shows ads on Yahoo! and Altavista.com.


Some of the more advanced features of PPC management have not been touched on in this glossary, given that a tutorial would be a better spot for showing people all of the features available in Pay-Per-Click. Google offers video tutorials for its Adwords product which are highly recommended for any DIY PPC enthusiasts. The world of PPC management can be very expensive, and anyone who is in charge of an account (or a liaison to an agency) should be cognizant of the different aspects of pay-per-click, and their relative advantages or pitfalls.

What Does “Above the Fold” Mean?

“Above the Fold” is a newspaper term that has been adapted to web design. Originally, it referred to the information that was on the front page of a newspaper on the top section. Newspapers are sold on street corners, in vending machines, or at newsstands, so the biggest stories had to have easy to read headlines in an obvious place in order to get purchased. In website design, “above the fold” is equally applicable in the sense that the most important or actionable information should be visible without people having to scroll down.

As a selling point, having a clear message above the fold on your website is more important than it ever was for a newspaper. Most ecommerce and lead generation websites pay far more than the cost of a newspaper to get one person to visit the site. Whether you are purchasing traffic through an agency or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) service like Google Adwords, you will quickly find that the best converting keywords can cost anywhere from fifty cents to twenty seven dollars per click! If you’re investing this kind of money in one set of eyeballs, you should make sure that the landing page (the relevant page on your site, which should be the best match for your keyword) presents information to the reader quickly and encourages them to take action right away.

Eye tracking studies on popular sites like Google show how much value the top of a webpage contains. On a search engine, 100% of the people see the first three results, which is why people use search engine optimization techniques or Pay-Per-Click marketing to appear in these spaces. The shape of the “heat map” for eye tracking on Google is called the “golden triangle,” because of the value found in that section of above-the-fold space.

On a regular website, people have been conditioned to look for information in the center for information, and the top right for phone numbers, so there should always be a clear message at the top of just about every page on your website. Remember that you don’t have a lot of control over how or where people land on your site, so useful information should be built into the top and center of every page. As a side note, it has been observed that placing a contact form on the right margin “marginalizes” it, so it gets less attention than it would get if it were closer to the middle of the webpage. For people who get most of their customers through form fill-outs, even a small increase in conversion rate can be the difference between profitability and bankruptcy, so this should be one angle that is exploited whenever possible.

Another industry term used in website conversion optimization is “hero shot” which essentially refers to your product or service as the “hero” of the page. Logically, the image should convey that the product/service is the heroic solution to whatever problem or need that the customer wants addressed. People respond to images more quickly than they do text, so a picture showing how the product solves a problem will get a reaction. Depending on the landing page, the hero shot should be as relevant as possible to the search term. It generally goes in the upper center of the page below the header, which is sometimes called the "hero space."

One way to find out how well your on-page content is working is to use click tracking and analytics tools. Google Analytics has an overlay feature that shows which links people click on. Crazyegg and Clicktale offer even more advanced features which will either show you a heat map for user behavior or actual movies of mouse movement. This kind of advanced analytics is invaluable for testing site design and conversion features, because you can get unbiased information about how your site is performing.

The best information to put above the fold is your phone number, a brief contact form, or your top product categories and pricing. Secondarily, trust is a huge factor in turning visitors into customers, so you should be showing trust indicators like secure site logos, accreditations, and BBB membership information where people will see it right away. If you take credit cards and PayPal, you should have the logos visible right away, since acceptance of certain cards may be the difference between a sale and a lost visit.

The most important takeaway for the “above the fold” philosophy is that you want to create a quick value proposition that encourages people to stay on your website and get the information that they need. In the same way that newspapers offer a concise and attention grabbing headline to sell all the pages inside, your landing page’s above-the-fold (or "above-the-crease") space should do the same thing. No matter how traffic comes to your site, or what pages people land on, the "above the scroll” information is going to be the factor that determines whether you keep your audience or lose a potential customer.

SEO Tips

There are multiple places online to get tips for SEO. In fact, some sites pride themselves in giving up to 55 different tips on aspects of search engine optimization. If you’re new to the game, or just a small business looking to build SEO into your website, these tips can be overwhelming and jargon heavy. Here are a few basic optimization tips for the casual web designer.

1. Don’t just copy other people’s metatags. This was the preferred “poor man’s SEO” practice for a long time. Sites would grab the top titles, keywords, and descriptions, make a few minor edits, and publish. This was based on the fallacy that on-page optimization was the source of search engine ranking. You should make your site relevant to today’s search demand, not a copy of a copy of a site that was somewhere 5 years ago.
2. Find out the best keywords by using the Google Keyword Tool. Look at the “related keywords” list to see if people are typing in synonyms or are looking for a specific service that you can provide.
3. Make every page title unique. Page titles are the key to how a search engine will rank the site. There are many other factors, but sometimes you can get great results on an existing site just by changing the title.
4. The home page title should cover the broadest possible topic matter, and interior pages should be more specific. A roofing contractor in Phoenix would start with a homepage title containing “Phoenix Roofing Contractor” and interior pages would have things like “Flat Roofs” and “Leaky Roof Repair” as topics.
5. Each major page should have at least 250 words of readable content. "Readable" means that you can read it out loud without sounding repetitive. Even though there are plenty of ranking pages with less than 250 words, they usually have other factors in play.
6. Put your site up now, submit it to search engines, and get links to it. After that you can add pages. In many cases people are afraid to launch a site because they are afraid that thousands of visitors are going to stop by and notice that the site is not perfect. This is not going to happen. Search engines need time to index your site, and traffic is going to go from zero to trickle in about 2 months, so you need to get the ball rolling right away.
7. Follow Google’s Guidelines, Install Webmaster Tools, and Install Analytics. These tools are powerful and free. Sometimes people are afraid to give Google so much information about site traffic, but Google pretty much already knows, so you might as well be a part of the intelligence gathering.
8. Compare advice from different “SEO Experts” and ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask one optimization expert about the claims, advice, or techniques of another, without naming names. Nobody has a special relationship with Google, and if anyone says they have a proprietary or secret technique, it is probably not as good as the transparent one sold by reputable agencies. Agencies similar to Web.com Search Agency may not have esoteric SEO knowledge, but they do have experience in working with hundreds of sites, plus proprietary tools that make agency-based optimization much cheaper and less risky than DIY SEO.

Search engine optimization firms can help you get started with basic SEO and usually are able to offer products like link building, site optimization, and content writing which are above the skill level of the average webmaster. In fact, we have a network of webmasters that partner with us to provide SEO services during the site creation or redesign process. We have even had many site designers hire us to work on an optimization project for them so they could learn the basics of SEO and then build it into their own sites. The educational value of hiring an optimization firm can be very high as long as it involves clear account management and reporting. It is also very profitable for the SEO firm, since knowledgeable customers renew their contracts as their online business becomes more profitable, and they need to spend more time on making sales than maintaining their own SEO.

SEO Checklist If You Can't Find Your Site Google or Other Search Engines

“Why can’t I find my site in Google” is obviously a very common question in the world of search engine optimization. In most cases there is a stock answer involving the age of the site, the number of backlinks, or the lack of content on the site. The title of the web page may not match up with the overall context of the page, or it may be “index.html” or “Welcome” instead of something descriptive. If the site isn’t being found at all on the search engines, here is a list of what to look for:

1. Robots.txt file exclusion – Every once in awhile a webmaster will create a development site and use the command “Disallow: /” in the robots.txt file, which can usually be found at: http://www.[yoursitehere].com/robots.txt . If you don’t have a robots file, that won’t stop you from getting found. Sometimes, webmasters and amateurs put the same wrong command in the file, and the result is a quick vanishing act in the search engines. (Note: If you use Google Webmaster Tools, it will tell you about robots.txt commands like this one, by saying that Google is not being allowed to index your site.)


2. Metatag exclusions – On your source code, which you find by going to your website and selecting “View” and “Source” in the menu bar, you should look for a line that says something like "meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" in the code on the page. If this command is there, and you want your site to be found, this should be removed.


3. Duplicate On-Site Content – Do the pages on your site have the same content on multiple pages? Are the titles all the same? If so, the search engines may not know which page deserves the most attention. All content on your site should be unique, unless you need to have a standard piece of boilerplate on some pages. Even so, there should be plenty of content built around the boilerplate.


4. Duplicate Websites – A few years ago, our customers would independently come to an amazing revelation. Since our SEO worked on one website, they figured that they could copy the entire site onto a .net or .org domain name and hold down more than one spot in Google’s top 10. Unfortunately, this did not work because duplicate websites essentially get ignored in Google. If you are substantially copying the content off someone else’s website, or just scraping and pasting it, you are also unlikely to see results.


5. Content embedded in images, Flash, and JavaScript. Search engines have done a better job reading Flash files over the past few years, but there are still drawbacks. For one thing, lots of Flash designers embedded text in images, which can’t be easily read by search engines. In the same way, we have seen websites that looked like they had text, but were actually one big image. Search engines prefer text that is easy to read. When JavaScript is used, the search engines may be able to read it, but may not know what to do with the information or how to index it. In the same way, AJAX code is difficult for search engines to classify, or even find since it is delivered dynamically from a database.


6. Use of frames. There are still a few sites built in frames, and they still get the same poor results. Normally all the search engine sees is a homepage with a header, which is often just a picture. In this case the search engine doesn’t have anything to read other than a page title.


7. Copyright Violation (DMCA) – If you have been accused of copying someone else’s online or offline content, they can file a DMCA Removal Request with search engines. Normally these engines will attempt to contact you, but simultaneously they may remove your site content from their indexes. Most of the time you will get a letter in the mail from a law firm when this happens, but if your contact information is difficult to find due to private domain registration, then you may not get notified that way.


8. Bad neighborhood – What kind of content is on your site, and how do the search engines see it? Most of our clients would be considered “good neighborhood” sites, since we do not do SEO for adult, gambling, or offshore pharmaceutical clients. However, your content may have a keyword profile that is too similar to something that would not be found in safe search results. You may be linking to bad sites and not know it. In some cases we have had customers who had been hacked, and were hosting links to very bad domains, phishing sites, and the like. Once again, Google Webmaster Tools makes it easy to see how Google sees you, and by extension you can get a sense of how Bing and Yahoo are seeing your site.


9. Sending Malware and Viruses – Usually this is the result of having had your site hacked, but you may also be hosting software that does this type of thing on purpose. For some time, sites like Yahoo would take you out of their listings for a year if you were passing viruses, even unintentionally. Malware usually comes with “free” screensaver and chat programs, and normally you get a warning in Webmaster Tools, and a red notice on the search engine results saying “this site may harm your computer.” Experience with one client (hacked by sql injection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection) shows that the red notice cut off 90% of natural SEO traffic while the warning was up. Search engines have the choice of showing a warning or taking your site out of the index, and a new site is more likely to be removed.


10. Penalty/Filter – If your site is new, it may be seeing the “sandbox” filter, or it may not have been indexed yet. If you bought a domain name from someone else, it may have been banned for bad behavior. Lots of sites and domains for sale online are being sold because they tripped a spamming filter in Google, and no longer generate revenue.

If you believe that you have been penalized in Google, or Webmaster Tools has told you that you are, then you can always file a reinclusion request in Google, and Yahoo, but MSN’s reinclusion link is apparently guiding visitors to a search page with no information.

Most of the time, it is not difficult to get found in the search engines, but it is necessary to be patient. To see if you have been cached in Google, all you have to do is paste your domain name into the search box and see if your site is listed, or type in cache:example.com to see when your site was visited. Choose the “cached text” feature to see what Google can read.

Getting found by the search engines is the first step on the long road to rankings domination, but it is still the most important. Almost every other search engine optimization initiative regarding your site is going to be judged against how the web pages classified by search engine spiders. Advanced link building, content writing, pagerank sculpting, image optimization, and W3C compliance all take a back seat to being properly cached by the engines and placed somewhere among the billions of pages on the World Wide Web.

SEO Consultancy

Web.com Search Agency offers search engine optimization consultancy for international clients and people who want to expand their domestic online presence. Our SEO consulting services can be customized and range from hourly analysis and strategy consultation to an intensive audit of your company’s SEO profile. Whether you’re looking to get an audience in a small geographical area, or dominate the global search market, Web.com Search Agency can create a strategic roadmap which can be implemented by people on your end, at Web.com, or any one of our website development contacts. Every year, we provide multiple specialized consultancy solutions to large and small companies looking to discover roadblocks and challenges to getting found in top positions on Google, MSN (now Bing), and Yahoo search engines in the US and abroad.