SEO UPDATES

A thread currently going on the Searchenginewatch.com forums mentions having “to constantly review and change content and link up with credible link partners”. The emphasis here is to put on the word “change”. It’s not exactly changing content that one needs to do, but adding new content. One of the answers in the thread is pretty explicit when it comes to this matter:

If you change content on a page, as a friend yesterday was telling me he did, you’re liable to confuse the engines as to what your page is about.

The idea came about because of observations that Googlebot would return to spider pages that changed often, news pages and the like. This does not necessarily correlate with increased rankings on a phrase. Yes, it’s probably a good idea not to let your pages get stale, and to send out signals that your site is active. But constantly making changes to a page’s content isn’t the way to improve the rankings for that page.

What you really want to do is to add content (good enough that it’s worth linking to) to a site in the form of new pages that relate to your other pages. This adds new content for users, attracts inbound links, and provides a broader range of targets for the search engine indexes.

Besides, don’t visitors like to see new content, rather than the same old content rehashed every few weeks? Regularly updated content is also part of what makes people want to link to a website without the owner having to query for links.

(Link via SEO Book.)

Here’s a very interesting article on seomoz.org about search engine ranking factors. I couldn’t believe it at first, to find such a wide and organized list—perhaphs a little too wide, alright. However, the various factors it lists are gathered according to their importance, which means you don’t have to follow them all scrupulously to see your website climb in search engines.

The article starts with an introduction to these very levels of importance that are going to be used to categorize the ranking factors, and even ends with a list of what can be detrimental to a site. All good material!

(Link via Steve Rubel.)

BlogSEO has an interesting piece about how word of mouth advertising can also bring you visitors, and does wield some potential, conrary to what many may think.

In a nutshell, here’s what is advised:

• Become a member of forums that are focused on the topic you are interested in. And post meaningful topics and replies there, of course!
• Add a link to your signature and include it with all your outgoing mail. It seems logical, but very often we don’t even think of that.
• Tell your friends about what you do. Blogging or having a website is nothing to be ashamed of, and there’s really no need to hide it, is there?
• Comment actively on other blogs. Alright, this is worth for blogs. And it sure works pretty well.

Ignat has already seen some benefits thanks to this tactics, so it’s indeed worth the shot!

A post by Bill Hartzer on Search Engine Guide caught my attention recently. It’s titled Does an Over-Optimization Penalty Exist?, and asks a few interesting questions about this “problem” (I’m putting the word between quotes, as by reading the source article, it looks like not everyone risks encoutering such a penalty in their own SEO). Her’s an example of what over-optimization includes:

You decide that your site is not ranking well. So, you change the navigation on your site so that all the home page links say “keyword keyword home” instead of “home”. A few days later you lose your rankings, which is a serious blow to your traffic. Since that was the only thing you changed on your site you change those links to your home page back so it says, “home” instead of “keyword keyword home”. BINGO! All of your lost rankings and your lost traffic comes back a few days later.

If that’s not proof of an over-optimization penalty then I don’t know what is–I would call that an OOP: you do something to try to boost your rankings by over optimizing some element of your website, something that backfires and causes a loss of rankings.

I don’t think I’ve ever have to deal with this myself as of yet, but it’s after all only been a few weeks that I’m seriously researching and using SEO tactics, and I also know I haven’t finishing learning. I very likely rank among the “white hats” described by Hartzer—people who haven’t tested SEO limits to —so this probably normal.

In any case, over-optimization must not be mixed with spamming. Spamming will get a site banned from search engines; over-optimizing won’t.

Blog Business World has a somewhat long but nonetheless interesting article on how to optimize a Blogger blog so that it ranks well in the search engines results pages.

Some of these tips may seem evident at first, but I think that they’re worth a look no matter what: Blogger services can be easily overlooked, since they operate from subdomains and not from “your” URL, which isn’t an advantage in terms of SEO.

Among other things, the entry explains briefly how to create a blog on Blogger, then jumps to tips about links, crafting useful titles, and appropriate use of the H tags in posts.

Like all free web hosts, Blogger hosted blogs face unique optimization challenges. Unlike sites where the domain name is owned by the webmaster, free blog hosts maintain ownership of the blog. In fact, the blog name is a sub-domain of the blog host, making value from the blog URL a less powerful optimization tool.
Despite the limitations faced by a blog hosted by Google owned Blogger, there are many very powerful optimization techniques available to the blogger. As we will see, blogs have some optimization methods, that are only available to blogs in general, regardless of host.
When considering the optimization techniques to apply to blogs, the basics of fresh keyword rich content, theme relevance, incoming links, and link anchor text all apply to blogs. In that sense optimization for blogs is no different from other websites.

Found through BlogSEO, here’s a good article about how to optimize your Flash site for search engines. By essence, Flash is all about images and animations, and not about these text links that Google and others so much rely on.

Here are the points it develops. They’re of course more detailed in the article itself:

• Use Flash movies on your HTML pages—do not create your site entirely in Flash. A better way to incorporate Flash, if indeed your client must have it, is to first create an HTML site, and then use Flash movies in place of images, buttons, and banners.
• Use Splash Pages Sparingly and Appropriately. Also provide visitors with means to skip the intro, else you may just lose them. (I myself really dislike such intro movies imposed on me: I need t ohave the option to skip them!)
• The Macromedia Software Developer Kit (SDK). Macromedia’s Search Engine SDK includes an application that is called swf2html, which extracts links and text from a flash movie, then returns the data into an HTML file.
• Increase your Link Building Strategy. If you must give up some of your crucial text in favor of the slick Flash content, then it is even more important for you to concentrate on your linking strategies.
• Prepare to use Pay Per Click Heavily. A budget for this type of advertising must be included in the cost of developing the site, as it seems that the search engines may be getting better at reading Flash, they still don’t index Flash sites quickly, if at all.
• Build an HTML site, and incorporate Flash later. Some web developers choose to develop a website in HTML first, then once they’ve established search engine positioning and PageRank, add Flash later on.
• Use CSS layers. A method I have seen used is creating invisible layers in CSS, which can place invisible text over the Flash text, readable by search engines, yet not appearing to the human eye. I will caution strongly against this method, as I believe it is very similar to cloaking. However, the controversy arises because while cloaking is presenting one set of text information to visitors, then another to search engines, the search engines can detect this type of practice as spam, and the likelihood of banning exists.

A list of additional tips is also given at the end of the article.

The article isn’t extremely recent, as it dates back to July of this year, but I found it useful to mention something I had already seen on other sites, during my first attempts at researching SEO tactics more efifciently: domain name registration length. This is especially valid for Google, in fact.

Does the length of your website’s domain name registration affect the search results at Google? This question has come up recently and a lot of website owners have been wondering about it, especially since it was mentioned in a patent awarded to Google in April. According to the patent, “Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.” According to this statement in the patent, domains that expire in 10 years are more valuable and legitimate than domains that will expire in less than a year.

It can be an important detail to keep in mind, as determining for how long a domain name is registered is a way for Google to bust out spam sites, as opposed to legitimate sites which owners care about. And this is a key in the way your website will be indexed by the search engine.

Google, in general, is always looking for ways to weed out the bad (spammers) from the good (legitimate) websites. I suspect that they looked for a pattern among the good, legitimate websites and found that most good, legitimate websites have a commitment towards their business and their domain name-they register it for a long period of time. In other words, the theory behind all of this is that if you register a domain name for several years it shows Google that you’re committed to that domain name. If you register a domain name for 1 year then you’re not as committed to that domain name. A lot of spammers use “throw away” domain names and register them for only a year. So, Google uses the length of time that a domain is registered to determine whether the owner of that domain name is committed to it or not.

You can read the whole article by Bill Hartzer here.

One thing I’ve learnt since I’ve started dabbling into SEO is that when it comes to domain names, cryptic and smart names aren’t a good choice, contrary to what a “newcomer” in this field may think. Instead, one should aim at transparency and efficiency. Here’s a little list of all the tips and tricks I’ve gathered so far about this:

• Choose a name that reflects your product or the goal of your site. Don’t pick BobJones.com if you sell lava lamps: in such a case, lavalamps.com would be a much better choice.
• Pick the domain name first, then build your site around it, not the contrary (see next point for one of the reasons to this).
• Don’t take too much time to choose: things move fast on the internet, and you may find yourself without anything if the domain name you so carefully thought has been taken in the meantime.
• Keep your domain name short! This also involves keeping it readable and easy to remember.
• Use keywords in your domain name. If a person wants to buy a lava lamp, it’s only logical that the first URL she’ll type in will be lavalamp.com, or something close to that.
• In the same vein, try to get your domain name in multiple extensions (.com, .net, .biz…), in singular and plural versions if applicable, as well as in several spellings. Yes, this is to take typos into accounts.
• Always prefer .com as top domain level, as it’s the most searched for TLD.
• Limit your domain name to two words, three at the most.
• Avoid hyphens, numbers, “the”, “and”, etc… in your domain name. These make things terribly awkward when you need to spell it; moreover, people usually won’t think about typing “the” in a URL.

There probably are other useful tips to take into account here, but these ones should already carry you far when it comes to marketing your website.

This nifty tool was recently built and put online by one of the developers at Search Engine Roundtable, and after a few tries with it, I’ve found that it can indeed be very useful when looking to craft good keyword phrases.

The Dynamic Keyword Phrase Generator enables you to plug in your primary, secondary and even tertiary keyword phrases. All you need to do is enter in these keyword phrases, separated by comma (,) into the appropriate fields and click generate below. The Dynamic Keyword Phrase Generator will develop a robust list that you can copy and paste into your program of choice.

If, like me, you tend to sometimes fall short of keyword phrases to insert in your pages, give it a try… Perhaps all the generated keywords won’t be exactly what you’re looking for, yet it’ll sure give you a good pool from which to choose.