SEO UPDATES

I don’t know much about computers. The computer guy at work is a pretty cool dude but sometimes when I talk to him it’s difficult.

Me: Hey, did you have a good weekend?
Him: Blah, blah blah blah computer talk. Blah blah blah.
Me: Oh, really? I went to a movie.
Him: Blah blah blah blah blah blah computer talk.

I then usually leave him there in the break room while I go find donuts.

Not a whole lot, it turns out.

Meta tags were originally intended to help search engines index web pages more accurately and to give people a little bit of control over their sites’ keywords, descriptions, etc.

Then they started being abused. Search engines recognized this abuse and made meta tags less important to search engine ranking. Now, many of the major search engines (like Google) simply ignore most meta tags.

Here’s a rundown on meta tag support from Search Engine Watch’s “How To Use HTML Meta Tags“:

• “Meta Robots: This tag enjoys full support, but you only need it if you DO NOT want your pages indexed.
• Meta Description: This tag enjoys much support, and it is well worth using.
• Meta Keywords: This tag is only supported by some major crawlers and probably isn’t worth the time to implement.
• Meta Everything Else: Any other meta tag you see is ignored by the major crawlers, though they may be used by specialized search engines.”

So are they worth it?

Well, they won’t be what make or break your site ranking, but it can’t hurt to have them, just in case — especially for the benefit of smaller or country-specific search engines.

Just use them wisely: Your description tag should include a succinct blurb and a few keywords (but not too many: keyword-loading can be grounds for exclusion from certain search engines), and your keyword tag should include words that are relevant to your subject area (but don’t repeat them too often: that’s another search-engine no-no).

I recently built a few web pages, and articles such as “Will Plain-Text Ads Continue to Rule?” were extremely helpful when it came time to decide what sort of ads to include. This article was written in April, 2003, by Dr. Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group.

The summary paragraph is as follows:

Text-only advertisements work far better than banners, but is this only due to their novelty? Search engine text ads will retain their superiority over time, but text ads on other sites will work only if they focus on directly meeting users’ needs.

The article goes on to talk about how text ads work for several reasons:

• They are not automatically disregarded by users with banner blindness
• They are a novelty
• They are taken more seriously because they can often communicate more effectively with users

The last reason might be the only one that lasts over time, Nielsen writes. Text ads are “forced to express a message in a few words,” and this focus is exactly what flashy, vague banners tend to lack.

He finishes the article with:

After ten years of watching Web users, one clear conclusion is that they are utterly selfish and live in the moment. Giving users exactly what they want, right now, is the road to Web success, and having to write small boxes of text encourages advertisers to travel it.

Good advice for those of us with web sites!

Business Week published a piece by Sherry Alpert on March 28, 2005 entitled ‘Let Search Engines Do the Walking.’

Here’s an excerpt or two…

Because of cost effectiveness and the ability to target very specific markets, more small businesses are making an online strategy at least one part of their overall campaigns. With that comes a whole different set of challenges, but to get moving in the right direction, ask yourself a couple of easy questions: Are you selling a service or a product? And, more importantly, what is the benefit to people finding you online?

These are the main points:

1. IT’S NOT ABOUT FLASH.

“Do you need eye-popping graphics and Flash animations — and the cost and complexity that come with them? Probably not.” “You want to lace your Web site with as much relevant, informative description about your company and services, so that the search engines will pick it up.”

2. THINK KEYWORDS.

“…People can post a beautifully designed Web site with all the bells and whistles, but unless it draws results on search engines, what will it all that work matter if the masses will never see it? Search engines see only words on your Web site, and keywords are, well, key. Without the right ones in page titles, meta tags, and copy, your Web site will be so far down the list that few will ever find it.”

3. POWER LEADS.

“Let’s say you’re selling a service that is driven by reputation and referrals.” “Many service businesses… get significant leads and new clients from optimized Web sites.” Prospective clients want to see that you have a “substantial” site, or else they might consider you “an amateur or a neophyte with nothing worth posting.”

The conclusion of the article?

For small businesses still reluctant to embrace the Internet — and there are plenty — no matter your industry, you would be well-advised to have a well-designed, well-written, but not overly jazzed-up, Web site. It will bolster your credibility, and just as important, your accessibility. Today, it’s a virtual necessity.

A service that can be used to help limit the fraud that seems to be growing in the Pay-Per-Click world.

New Service Helps Stop Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Click Fraud

PPC Trax released to the general public to help track and stop PPC click fraud, improve PPC advertisers’ conversion rates and improve PPC Return-On-Investment (ROI).

[ClickPress, Mon Feb 21 2005] Chandler, AZ - February 21, 2005 - PPC Trax has announced the beta release of it’s highly anticipated Pay-Per-Click (PPC) tracking and auditing service at http://www.ppctrax.com/ .

With the billion dollar PPC industry still growing at 20% per year, new advertisers come into the market daily. New and long-time PPC advertisers with ad spend budgets from $200 to thousands
per day are being systematically defrauded of their marketing budgets.

Both groups of marketers and advertisers are clamoring for a solution to help prevent affiliates, publishers and competitors from stealing their ad budgets in the growing scheme.

PPC Trax is a monthly service that offers detailed click fraud tracking and reporting starting as low as $29.00 per month.

For a limited time, PPC Trax is offering free 30 day trial accounts to PPC advertisers.

“Clients and colleagues have been begging us to develop a simple to use but highly effective PPC tracking solution that can help detect and stop PPC click fraud as well as serve as the basis for
recovering refunds from pay-per-click search engines and media properties”, said Skip Pratt, General
Manager of PPC Trax.

“We decided to invest the capital and manpower realizing this gap in the market exists and there is a pent-up demand from marketers to make more effective use of their advertising budgets and to
cease fraud from occurring to them” Pratt continued.

Since the vendors who offer pay-per-click advertising have an inherent conflict of interest in preventing click fraud, advertisers are now turning to third party click auditors such as PPC Trax.

PPC marketers and advertisers benefit from using the PPC Trax service by:

- Improving website lead generation and PPC sales conversion rates
- Maximizing profitable PPC ads faster
- Eliminating costly, non-performing PPC advertising
- Developing the perfect advertising mix for their website
- Identifying the most profitable keywords for their PPC campaign
- Eliminating failed PPC ads faster
- Detecting and document PPC click fraud
- Recoup fraudulent PC expenses from PPC search engines
- Identifying PPC competitors who may be draining their PPC budget
- Identifying IP addresses that are frequent clickers or fraudsters
- Monitoring click spikes that indicate fraudsters are on the march

The service offers each subscriber, whether small home-based businesses or large corporations:

- Track any filetype - .php, .html, .htm, .asp, .cfm, .cgi, .pl,
- Generous transactions per URL
- Transactions can be aggregated among URL’s
- IP address capture
- IP address geographic location
- User Agent (browser, bot etc.)
- Date and Time stamp
- Referring URL
- Email alerts
- IP address history
- Custom reports

In addition, PPC Trax is offering “recovery based” click fraud services using it’s online and staff services. PPC Trax shoulders the risk of refunds from the PPC search engine and performs all the labor to prepare and submit refund requests. This service has certain requirements. Contact the company at the website below for more information.

PPC Trax is offering a limited-time, free 30 day PPC click fraud tracking account. The free trial offer is a full function account. There are no further commitments required.

To improve your PPC sales conversion ratios and improve PPC return-on-investment, visit www.ppctrax.com

About PPC Trax
PPC Trax provides real-time click fraud and web advertising tracking, auditing and recovery services for it’s small, medium and large corporate clients. For more information, see the company website at:
www.ppctrax.com

Here are a few guidelines suggested by MSN to help you out. First and foremost, MSN readily admits that MSNbot will actively be using Meta tags for part of its web site analysis. Yes, meta tags are still relevant pieces of code (despite all the nay sayers out there), and with this new Bot they seem to play a very important role within the indexing algorithm. Similar to other search engines, the ‘title tag’ again appears to be the most heavily weighted within the algorithm, followed closely by the Meta Description Tag and if you read between the lines, it is suggested that your best ‘keywords’ should be included in both places. MSN does not come straight out and say that the “keywords meta tag” will be utilized, but by reading between the guidelines it strongly suggests the keywords in all areas (title, description and keyword tag and content) should adhere to each other.

Content of course is still king when it comes to MSNbot’s ability to put the entire puzzle together. Apparently, at this stage, the Bot does not read text within a graphic, so if you have important keywords contained within a graphic (especially on your main page), they strongly suggest you move those keywords into plain old text format. And here’s a tip; the closer to the top of the page, the better.

MSN Search calls for pages to be under 150K in size, suggesting the Bot will either simply stop reading after this point or in a worse case scenario, may measure/weigh the page size before reading and simply skip the page all together. This point is not made entirely clear, but it should be of enough concern to have every SEO firm scampering to measure their clients web site’s index pages, just in case. In actuality, a page size of 150k could contain a lot of relevant text content, but add a few fancy graphics in there and the total can add up quickly.

An interesting point within the guidelines suggests that words (even keywords) within headers, footers and tables will not be read. Again, simple text is the rule of thumb. This may cause some web sites to need a complete redesign. Graphics with long or non-content supported ALT tags will also be dismissed. This is very similar to the rules from other major search engines, as it provides somewhat of a safeguard against sites that stuff keywords in an attempt to fool or “spam” the engines into thinking they are something they are not. Redirects will not be read either.

Linking, as per usual, will be an important part of MSNBot’s equation. They offer two suggestions as to which links will be deemed the most important: links from the main page and links no more than three levels deep. This means all hyperlinks on your site should be accessible within three clicks or less from each other for maximum effectiveness. Very interesting. Larger web sites may have a problem adhering to this rule, but it should be kept in mind that the MSNBot is still feeling its way through the web. A three deep scenario is probably the beginning of the parameter. It will surely offer a deeper crawl as it becomes more sophisticated.

Read More

Technorati reports that 30,000 - 40,000 new blogs are being created each day. According to David Sifry, part of the growth of new blogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs. What are spam blogs? They are fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites.

They contain robot-generated posts made up of random words, with the title linking back to the blogger’s own pages. Many bloggers see them as a way of getting their pages indexed quickly by Google and other search engines.

The following was posted on 3/22/05 to this thread:

Good Day All,

We are a marketing firm specializing in Online Gaming & Poker and are looking to hire a Senior(if possible) Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Specialist/Manager.

We would prefer to have a local candidate, or someone who comes from Ontario or Canada, but relocation is an option if absolutely necessary.

Rusty, Danny, and other Moderators, any ideas on how and where I can find Toronto based SEO’s looking for work?

If anyone is interested - Please PM me..

Cheers

Critter

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