Search Engine Marketing Consultant

A search engine requires links to get from one page to the next and the way your website is structured is important. Your website may, either deliberately or accidentally, contain links that confuse or stop a search engine spider altogether. Additionally your website may entirely lack the type of link a search engine requires to access certain pages within your website.

Speed Bumps

These can slow down, confuse or possibly stop a search engine as it crawls through your website. Complex types of links or pages that require the search engine to follow four or five links before it finds a page are examples of speed bumps, other possibilities are:

1. Dynamic websites that produce links with two or more parameters i.e. http://www.dynamicwebsite.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom%.
2. Pages with a large number of links (+100) to other pages on the website. The SE spider might get tired of following all these links and give up.
3. Pages buried deep within the website that require three or more links to access.
4. Pages requiring a session ID or cookie to enable access.
5. Pages that contain frames.

Road Blocks

These may possibly stop a spider in its tracks.

1. Pages only accessible by completing a form and clicking on a submit button.
2. Pages requiring a drop down menu before they can be accessed.
3. Pages deliberately blocked by use of a robots meta tag or robots.txt file.
4. Pages protected by a login box.
5. Pages that redirect to another page before a SE spider can read any content on the page.

The last road block is a well known black hat method that the search engines hate. Redirects can be used to trick a search engine into thinking it is on a page with one kind of content while the redirect switches humans to another page with content of an entirely different kind, often porn or some kind of medication. These techniques are known as bait and switch or cloaking.

The best way of ensuring that a page on your website is fully accessible by a search engine is to provide direct links, preferably starting from the home page with no more than a total of three links to get to it. Another way is to provide a sitemap structured for the search engines.

The web consists of billions of pages many, if not most, of which are geared to get you to part with your hard earned cash. Every owner of these commercial pages is interested in getting those pages ranked well on the search engines and many resort to shady or black hat practices delivering pages that have little informational value or interest to the visitors. This is spamming, and like email spamming, relies on volume rather than quality to get results. From time to time you will come across these pages they might consist of links or content copied (scraped) from other websites.

The search engines continually labour to get these worthless pages to the bottom of the search engine listing while pushing those pages that have genuine popularity to the top of the rankings. Two of the most important considerations for search engines when evaluating pages are content and links from other websites to that page.

Search engines store the essential elements of the content of billions of pages and one of the things they are able to do is match the content of similar pages. If the search engine finds two or more pages with the same information presented in the same way they will give a good ranking to one page and demote the copies and so original content is valuable to the search engines.

Another very important measure of web page quality is the number of other websites that are linking to that page. Not all links are equal. When measuring the value of an inbound link search engines take into account the following factors (among others):

1. Is the link one way, i.e. are you linking back to the website that is linking to you? This is called reciprocal linking. Search engines value one way links higher than reciprocal links.
2. How trustworthy is the site linking to you. A link from a government website (.gov or .edu) carries a lot of value in the eyes of the search engines. Other important sites would be NYTimes.com or CNN.com. A link from a minor directory is almost worthless.
3. How relevant is the webpage linking to you. If the page is about the same or a similar topic it will be worth more than a page that has no relevancy.
4. What does the link say. Many links are text links i.e. the link surrounds some text, often “click here”. If you were to link your website to this page a link that says “seo for beginners” or “who do search engines trust” Would be worth more than “click here”.

Today, the search engines have sophisticated ways of measuring the quality of inbound links and these measures are continually improving.

Really different words for the same thing. When you go on Google or any seach engine with the aim of finding something, as an example “cave houses for sale in Spain”, you might enter one the following phrases in Google’s search box:

cave houses
cave houses Spain
cave houses for sale Spain

or a furthter ten or twenty variations such as:

cave home for sale
modern cave house
cave houses in Andalucia.

All of the above are search terms also called queries or key words or key phrases by search engine professionals. To make life a little simpler I will use search term to cover all the options.

All the search engines rely on search terms to determine which results should be shown to the searcher. Normally the search engines not only show pages that exactly match the search term but also pages:

1. that contain those words in any order
2. with other words in between the words used in the search term
3. with words similar to those used in the search term i.e. home instead of house.

Search engines use semantics or the science of languages to produce a wider variation of results but still remain on topic and deliver relevant results.

Search engines collect the search terms used and publish the results with varying degrees of accuracy. These results can be analysed to find out which search terms are used to find your product, service or information.

Today, search engines also analyse pages to find out which words are typically grouped together or found on a page that covers a particular topic.

Ontology, as used in computer and information science is, crudely, the study of relationships between words and or phrases within a certain topic (see Wikipedia). When particular terms or phrases are regularly found together on web pages the search engines construct formulae about the relationships between these terms. Search engines have now built the most incredible data about phrase relationships.

This huge artificial intelligence is growing on a daily basic and search engines continually  improve their systems to produce more intelligent and accurate search results. Search engines invest heavily in determining a greater understanding of the intent behind the search terms used by searchers.

Search engine results pages or SERPs are ever becoming more relevant to the searchers intent and this will only improve with time.

Each search engine operates in a slightly different way and will give differing results for the same search query. No one outside of the search engine’s inner circle of designers knows the exact formula for their processes and these are closely guarded secrets.

There are three stages to how a search engine works.

Stage 1. Crawling the Web

Each search engine has one or more programs called “bot” or “spiders” that go from page to page on the web following the links from one page to the next.

Estimates are that of the approximately 20 billion existing pages, search engines have crawled between 8 and 10 billion.

Stage 2. Storing the Pages or Indexing

Once a page has been found by a seach engine spider it is stored on a huge database or index. It is estimated that there are over 20 billion pages on the Internet and search engines are storing between 8 and 20 billion of those pages.

Stage 3. Processing Searches

When someone uses the search box on a search engine it goes to its database or index and searches for all pages that match that search query. The search engine then lists those pages with the most relevant pages appearing first in the search results. This sounds simple but search engines now use complex formulas or algorithms to determine which page is the most relevant.

SEO firms have a good approximation of how these ranking algorithms work but no one can guarantee that you will get on the first page of a search engines results for competitive terms.

It takes just a fraction of a second for a search engine to go to its database, sort the most relevant pages and display them for you but processes used by Google, Yahoo! and MSN are extremely complex, require massive computing power and perform millions of calculations each second.

Please take a few moments here to read Brian Johnston’s story here and vote for his charity and help give the charity a chance to win 25,000$.

Percentage of U.S. Searches For Main Search Engines  May-08

Search numbers compared

Having the ability to get your website on the first few pages of the search engines for relevant search terms can bring additional customers to your web site.

The vast majority of small or micro business owners put up a website and then after a while they start to wonder why they are only getting a few visitors or perhaps none at all. Unless you have something very special and attractive on your website you are unlikely to attract reasonable amounts of traffic unless you carry out SEO.

The search queries that you optimise your site for need to be carefully selected. It is not enough to think up a list of phrases that your customers might use, although it is an great place to start. With research you will find that your potential customers are using a much wider range of search terms than you thought possible.

1. Once you have a list of search terms there are two more things that you have to know.
   How many people are inputting that search term each day or month to find your website or those of your competitors. It is pointless having a first page position or ranking for a search term that nobody or very few people are using.
2. How many other websites are competing for the search terms you have chosen. It is unrealistic to think that you can get a first page listing on a competitive search term without spending a great deal of time and money getting there. The big boys have teams of SEO staff working on their sites and spend a small fortune getting there and maintaining their positionsl

Getting targetted visitors to your website can bring publicity, revenue and exposure in quantities greater than and other method and as such investing in SEO either through your own efforts or by employing an SEO professional can produce exceptional rates of return.

This post is the first of a series of aimed at helping the owners and staff of small and medium sized businesses understand search engine optimisation or SEO.

Search engine optimisation is the technique used to optimise a web site’s internal and external properties with the aim of increasing traffic and potential customers to the web site. This is done mainly by raising the web site’s position on the pages of the search engines. In other words SEO consists of ways of getting a web site on the first page of Google, Yahoo or MSN for certain search phrases used by the web site’s potential customers.

SEO is a broad subject, which is why it is often confusing. The posts that will appear in the following days and weeks will attempt to clarify what a small business needs to understand so that the techniques described can be implemented either in house or contracted out to a SEO specialist.

Without this knowledge it is difficult for a small firm to evaluate an offer made by a SEO consultant. There are more charlatans than genuine SEO firms on the web so caution is always advised if you do not want to waste your hard earned money.

It is not uncommon while carrying out keyword research for a client seeking a local presence on the search engines to find that the keyword research tools that we use yield no  searches for relevant terms in that locality.

Does that mean that no one is searching for his type of business in his area and that he should shut up shop, even though he has plenty of customers walking through the door? Obviously the answer is no, so how else can we  help our client.

1. Keyword tools have their limitation.

All keyword research tools derive their information from databases, some of which are quite small i.e. 2% of actual searches made over a given period of time. Even Google’s database has limits as Google covers about 60% of searches made on search engines.

2. Realise Google provides local search results even without local modifiers

Google has recently introduced a functionality that works something like this. A searcher lives in Barcelona and therefore his IP address (the point where his computer connects to the Internet) is situated in Barcelona. Google can recognise his IP address as being in Barcelona. The seacher is looking for dog kennels and puts into his Google search box “dog kennels” and nothing more, i.e. no local modifiers such as Barcelona. Google will return results based on his local area in among more global results. Dog kenels in Barcelona will appear among dog kennels in Spain and dog kennels throughout the rest of the world.

Ensuring your client’s business is included in Google’s Local Business Centre may help your website rank better in local search results.

Something that should be borne in mind is that the searcher’s IP address may not be where the searcher lives. For instance I live over 400 kilometers from Madrid but because of my Internet service that is where my IP address shows up.

3. Use a larger nearby city as a model.

Use a larger city, where there is good keyword data, to determine the search terms that are being used to find businesses in the same category as your client. In all likelyhood the same search terms are being used to find the business in your client’s locality but with lower traffic levels.

4. Do non-local keyword research and then add local keyword modifiers.

For the moment forget the local part and find search terms used nationally or globally to find your client’s business type. You would need to select the terms with the highest search. You can then add modifiers or words that make the search local. Say, for instance “dog boarding kennels” is a highly searched national term, to make it local add a locality modifier i.e. Barcelona.

5. Use local online directories to find related terms.

If you type in a search term into many local directories it will give you a list of related categories. You can then use these in 4. above to derive local search terms.

6. Use pay per click advertising.

Using the search terms collected above you can test them to see if any of the terms actually have traffic by running a pay per click campaign that runs long enough to collect meaningful data.

7. If all else fails

If none of the above produces search term that produce sufficient traffic for your local business you will have to move up to the next largest geographic area and optimise your client’s website/campaign for the industry search terms relevant to that area.

Please add comments and suggestions.

Not many people know this but almost one in five searches are for images and this gives images some great potential for getting links back to your website and thereby improving your search engine position.

You can use images in press releases, articles and put them on image sharing websites such as Flickr  and PhotoBucket. By adding a title and tag to the image that contain your keywords you can help your search engine optimisation and get high rankings in the search engines.

Also remember images are showing up more and more in the search engine results, particularly Google’s Universal search results.

Finally the work required to get images to rank well is considerably less than that required for the written word.

Contact us here if you would like to know more about how images can help your web site rank well.

Using the Google keyword tool a basic keyword list of 234 search terms was drawn up. These terms were fed through the NicheBot’s deep digging keyword tool the Google Keyword Cruncher. This tool can take a keyword and continue searching until it finds up to 15,000 keywords (if that is what you want it to do). The keywords were fed through the Google Keyword Cruncher twenty at a time producing an expanded master list of 6,104 keywords.

NicheBot has an excellent keyword filtering system, which allows you to create sublists based around a word or theme. Using the filter a sublist was created around the word ‘owner’. The filter was also used to remove keywords or phrases for which there were too many competing webpages (there is no point in targeting these high competition keywords as we would not achieve a first or second page ranking). If there were over 15,000 competing pages with the keyword in the page title the keyword was discarded.

This list contained 416 keyphrases all containing the word ‘owner’.

A Sample of the 'owner' list

The ‘owner’ list was further filtered to remove any search terms containing city or country names (these will be used later to promote individual properties).

This still left a list of 320 search terms (fantastic for the future) so in order to target the richest search terms a competition filter of 100 competing intitle pages was selected, leaving a list of 118 keywords.

The first keyword selected was ‘property sale owner’ which according to the Google Keyword Cruncher had a search volume of 40,500 and only 5 competing pages for intitle:”property sale owner”

The next stage was to check these results using MicroNicheFinder and excellent tool for exploring keyword lists and finding those super focused keywords with reasonable search and low competition.

Micro Niche Finder