Webforumz Newsletter - August 2007

Articles

SEO Quick-List

There are far too many tutorials out there on how to do just about anything - some good, some great and some simply a blatant waste of web-space. Either way, tutorials have never been my style, so when faced with the task of writing an SEO article I decided to keep it simple and go straight to the point.

This article is a Quick-List, a Blueprint if you will, of the most basic and perhaps most fundamental questions and practices in SEO today. That doesn´t mean there won´t be room for argument - I´m sure plenty of you will want to scream at me and lock me in the closet every now and then...

Before we start, here´s a little jargon buster:

  • SE = Search Engine
  • SERP = Search Engine Results Page
  • SEO = Search Engine Optimisation
  • SEO (person) = Search Engine Optimisation Expert
  • URL = Universal Resource Locator
  • PR = Google Page-Rank
  • Ranking = position of an URL/website within the results of a certain search term
  • "Content Served" = the response (code) a website

SEO? What´s that?

SEs use thousands of parameters to determine a page´s rank for any given term. The ultimate aim of SEO is to fulfil as many of these parameters as possible. If I had to define SEO in one sentence, I´d say "Search Engine Optimisation is the collection of methods and techniques used to achieve maximum SE exposure and/or the highest possible SERP rankings for a certain site or URL".

On-site / On-page SEO

On-site SEO incorporates all SEO techniques that are applied on the target URL and within the target website. On-site SEO focuses primarily on 3 things:

  • The content - what is served.
  • The code - how it is served.
  • The URLs - where it is served (eg: the structure)

The essence of On-site SEO is to provide clear, concise quality content, without any ambiguities.

Off-site / Off-page SEO

Off-site SEO refers to all other SEO techniques that are applied outside the scope of the target website. Off-site SEO incorporates many techniques, most of which boil down to one thing:

  • Incoming links

Google Page-Rank (PR)

PR is a measure of how important a page is (according to Google). For the purpose of this article, I will only discuss PR in the SEO context - what it means and how to use it.

First things first: PR is not the cause or the result of high rankings.

PR depends mainly on 2 things: Incoming links and traffic. Some SEOs make the mistake of assuming high rankings come as a result of high PR, when in fact high PR is one natural outcome of high rankings.

Better SEO = higher rankings = more traffic = Higher PR

However, the concept behind Google´s PR is crucial when working with External Links (i.e.: incoming) and Internal Links (i.e.: the website´s structure). Every link from A to B is considered as a ´vote of confidence/credibility´ from A to B. We can use PR as a physical measurement of how this credibility travels from one URL to the next.

The role of SEO in this case is...

  1. Off-site: to maximise incoming PR by increasing the number of incoming links and the quality of incoming links.
  2. On-site: to harness incoming PR so that none of it is wasted (on broken links) and that most of it is channelled to the most important pages of the website (i.e.: the homepage, main category pages)

To sum up, PR isn´t a factor in SEO, neither is it a direct result of SEO. But the makings of a high-PR website are very similar to those of a high-ranking website. And because of that, the concept of PR can be used to...

  • properly apply linking techniques
  • measure the effectiveness of these techniques

Density and Prominence

Keyword density is a measure of how much emphasis (weight) a keyword is given within the content of a page. Most of the emphasis of a page is assigned to the text at the start of the page, at the end of the page and within these tags: <title>, <h1>, <a>, <img alt="">, <strong> and <em> (up to 3 or 4 times).

Never waste a precious strong/em tag on content that isn´t a bunch of keywords. You can use CSS to achieve any visual effect you want. You should only use those tags to put emphasis on a keyword/key-phrase.

Keyword prominence is a measure of how important a word is within its context - in other words, how close it is to the beginning of the sentence. E.g.: the word ´car´ is more prominent in ´car sale London´ (at the start) than in ´London car salel (at the end).

Keyword prominence and density are 2 concepts applied to every aspect of your website: URLs, headings, keywords, links, etc. Keep these 2 ideas in mind as you read through the rest of this article - they apply to absolutely everything.

Keywords/Key-phrases

A keyword is any word that accurately describes your content. A key-phrase is a combination of keywords.

Stop words are those considered too ´common´ or ´vague´, which are ignored in search terms (with exceptions, but let´s leave it at that for this article). You may think they´re harmless since they´re ignored, but stop words can be seriously damage your SEO strategy by occupying a huge amount of keyword density and prominence within key-phrases in titles, headings, URLs, links, etc... Example:

  • Car sales in London = car sales has 50% density, 100% prominence
  • Car sales London = car sales has 66% density, 100% prominence
  • London car sales = car sales has 66% density, 66% prominence

When writing up key-phrases, try to write in a newspaper headline style and miss out common words such as ´the´, ´a´, ´on´, ´of, ´in´, ´you´, ´me´, ´he´, ´it´, etc...

PS.: There are too many stop words in the English language so I won´t put a list here, but I do have a list if anyone wants it.

Keyword Ambiguity

Search engines are aware of these ambiguities so you´d only be shooting yourself in the foot if you tried to cover both. Take "xmas trees delivered" and "christmas trees delivered" for example. The word xmas never appears in the site´s content, but pinesandneedles.com still ranks top for either of these 2 search phrases.

I find this difficult to explain, but here´s why: (using xmas, christmas and some imaginary numbers)

When you are strict and avoid ambiguity:
Let´s say that you only use "christmas" throughout the site, it ends up with a prominence of 10. (Just some number to illustrate this example).

When a user searches for something with the word "xmas", the search engines will consider both "xmas" and "christmas" equally, so you end up being a very likely match for their search.

When you go with the flow and cover every possibility:
Let´s say you´ve used the words ´xmas´ and ´christmas´ equally throughout the website and they each end up with prominence 5. (just some number to illustrate this example, but smaller than the number on the previous example)

When a user searches for something with the word "xmas", the search engines will consider both "xmas" and "christmas", but you are not as likely to match either, because you´ve distributed the prominence between 2 phrases.

When it comes to ambiguous words, it´s always best to leave the search engines to deal with it their own way. Just do your bit by being clear and consistent.

Domains

I read an article yesterday that provides evidence Google (and other SEs) still assigns a great deal of density to keywords on domain name. If you can have a keyword-rich domain like ´london-dry-cleaners.com´ instead of ´123cleaners.com´, then you have nothing to loose.

URLs

URLs are very important in SEO. The text in an URL is still some of the most prominent text of any page, along with its title and headings. For that reason, it´s crucial to have SE friendly, keyword-rich URLs.

Format

To illustrate this, I´ll just use the phrase "professional web design":

  • /ProfessionalWebDesign/ - ambiguous words (webdesign, web design, sign)
  • /Professional-Web-Design/ - no ambiguity, words are separated
  • /Professional+Web+Design/ - no ambiguity, words separated with URL equivalent of space. This is a perfect match.

Static vs. Dynamic URLs

Static URLs (.htm) are better than dynamic URLs (.asp, .php). Spiders crawl static content more often because dynamic pages take longer to load. This doesn´t mean you have to physically create static HTML files for all your pages.

On Linux you can use .htaccess of mod_rewrite to simulate the .htm extension.

On Windows you can use a custom dynamic 404 error page in that will handle the request as if it were an URL with a .htm extension.

URLs are case sensitive

http://www.fyneworks.com/Professional-Web-Design/ is not the same as http://www.fyneworks.com/Professional-Web-DESIGN/.

On Windows Servers: IIS does not respect this web convention, so you have to enforce the URL case using a server-side scripting language (e.g.: ASP).

On Unix Servers: this rule applies, but you should avoid missing pages by looking for an alternative page to display even when the wrong case is used. Then permanently redirect (status 301) to the correct URL.

Duplicate Content

There are many issues surrounding duplicate content but on this article I will focus on the single most common mistake web-designers make: The duplicate homepage.

The URLs below are all unique, but they provide are 4 different ways of accessing the exact same page, with the same title, same headings, same content all round:

  • http://fyneworks.com/
  • http://www.fyneworks.com/
  • http://fyneworks.com/index.htm
  • http://www.fyneworks.com/index.htm

The first mistake web-designers make is not to enforce the www. prefix to the domain name. http://fyneworks.com and http://www.fyneworks.com are 2 different websites that would have ended up being exact copies had I not setup a script to permanently redirect all requests to the www. domain. The solution is to read the URL used in the request and check for the www. If it´s not there, the request must be permanently redirected to the URL with the www. prefix.

The second and most common mistake is to use <a href="index.htm">...</a> to link to the website´s homepage. By doing this, you automatically create a duplicate homepage (http://fyneworks.com/index.htm) to the one incoming links will point to (http://www.fyneworks.com/index.htm). The solution, always link to "/" ("./" within directories).

Code

A ´spider´ is a robot, a computer program that ´crawls´ the web gathering information about the pages it finds. With millions and billions of pages websites out there, you can understand that these things are in a hurry to get their job done. Your job as a SEO is to ensure the spiders can do their job smoothly. How? Clean, light, valid code.

When a spider hits an error it will try to get on crawling a website. But if it hits too many errors, the spider will leave and most likely not come back for a while. These errors can be anything from html errors, encoding problems, scripting/server errors, broken links, etc...

Tables

Ditch them. Use CSS liquid layouts instead. More control, less code and a step towards ´Semantic Zen´ (below).

CSS / JavaScript

In order to determine the density of keywords, SEs also analyse the code to content ratio in every section of your page. Your job as a SEO is to minimize the amount of code and maximise the amount of content on every page. You can achieve this by separating content from presentation. That means removing all CSS/JavaScript from your page and storing it in external files.

The <head> Section

Don´t bloat the <head> section of your page with useless meta tags such as ´Author´ and ´Location´, they will only diminish the density and prominence of your description and keywords meta tags. The only thing you should have in the <head> section of your page are (in order): title, meta description, meta keywords, content type/encoding, links to stylesheets and scripts and your Google Sitemaps verification tag.</head>

Crunching your code (Advanced)

If you can, remove all useless white-space from your page. This will make your code unreadable to humans, but you could end-up saving as much as 40% of code on each page and the spiders will love it. Of course, this has the added benefit of saving a great deal of bandwidth on larger websites.

Content

Whether you like it or not, the true essence of the web is content. Content is what users want to find. Content is what Search Engines search for. Content is what makes people sit in front of their computer screen for hours.

There are many types of content (visual, sound, etc), but SEs and SEO focuses around textual content. If you want to rank well, you will need content. Without content you´re as good as a soldier without a weapon - unless you´re Jack Bauer.

Semantics (and Headings)

The best way to describe semantics is: A web-page is a document and it should look like a document when you take away all the JavaScript and CSS. The basic rules are:

  • Every page must have one (and only one h1)
  • Headings must only appear in ascending order (H1 > H2 > H3)
  • Emphasise important text with <strong> and <em>

Semantic code is useful because it helps you see what Search Engines see. Disable all stylesheets on your page and note the bigger and bolder sections of text -those will be assigned the most density within the page´s content, and you want them to be full of keywords, nothing but keywords (in the right order)...

Images

Images are content and contribute to the overall quality of your website. On any one page, try to have at least one image with the key-phrase that page is targeting.

Never use images for navigation - not even if you set the alt property. (Core navigation that is, an image link here and there isn´t a problem).

Links - the official currency of SEO-land

In this article I often use the words credibility, authority, confidence, reputation, etc. I may be inconsistent with my use of words, but they all refer to the same thing - this abstract currency that flows among sites that link to each other.

When page A links to page B, page A gives page B a fraction of its authority. If page A has too many outgoing links, it will end up with little authority. Similarly, if page B has few links but receives many links, it will end up with a great deal of authority. Keep this concept in mind when you read the new few sections of this article.

Incoming Links

The value of an incoming link depends on:

  • The content of the linking page
  • The link text
  • The content immediately around the link
  • The number of links on the page
  • The position of the link within the content (header, footer, main body?)
  • How well the content of the linking page compares to that of the target website

If you´re considering purchasing incoming links, I strongly recommend you consider all the points above before reaching for your wallet.

Incoming links cannot damage your rankings. SEs understand you can´t control who links to your website so you will not be penalized if you receive links from bad neighbourhoods. They will simply be of no benefit to you. The only problem is when you link to a bad neighbourhood (see external links below).

External Links

External links are an important aspect of quality content. It´s always good to offer a few links to related quality content. But beware of whom you link to. Incoming links cannot damage your reputation, but an outgoing link to a bad neighbourhood can very much do so.

A link is a ´vote of confidence´ to the page you´re linking to and you definitely do not want to give your precious votes to poor quality websites - quite simply - it makes you look bad.

Reciprocal Links

I´m well known to be sceptical when it comes to reciprocal links (probably because of this article). One true, sincere incoming link is much more valuable than a thousand reciprocal links. If you read the ´Incoming Links´ section above you´ll understand, but here´s why:

Reciprocal links

  • Link is usually on a page with poor or no content
  • Links are normally considered poor quality because the content surrounding the link is unrelated
  • Content of linking page is almost always unrelated
  • Linking pages normally have dozens if not hundreds of external links
  • Link pages normally have low PR because of the number of outgoing links

So basically, reciprocal links give you a tiny share of something that isn´t worth much in the first place.

One-Way links on the other hand...

  • Link is on a page of quality content
  • Content is related to the link
  • Content of linking page is related to your website
  • Linking page with have a minimal amount of outgoing links, usually just yours.
  • Article pages can only improve their PRs because they get traffic, they get bookmarked and linked to by people (used as reference).

So basically, you get a big share of something that´s very valuable will only get better! I´m no genius but I know what I´d go for...

So one-way links are a win-win situation. "Oh yeah? How the hell am I going to get incoming links genius-boy?", you say. Fear not my friend, read on and you shall find the way...

Article Submissions

I call this the "clever SEO´s answer to reciprocal linking". As I mentioned earlier, content is what makes the Internet world go round. Here´s where you use your precious content to get yourself a bunch of quality incoming links. There are thousands of websites out there that want content. You give them content and they give you links. Simple.

The added benefits of Article Submissions:

  • Your content is likely to be re-published over and over again so you´ll gradually get more and more incoming links.
  • The content of the linking page is 100% related to yours - you know that, you wrote it!
  • Increase your exposure: picture a client looking for your services. He is searching and doesn´t find you, but happens to come across the article you wrote. Bingo!

The results of Article Submission are un-questionable. I´m not going to brag, but let´s just say - it works and I have an empty page that is currently sitting at the top of Google after beating over 1.5 million other pages.

One Page One Phrase Strategy

This is by no means the definitive way of doing things, but in the ever-changing world of SEO, I´ve found the following techniques to work very well on any given page targeting a certain key-phrase. Use the following as a checklist for your own projects.

If I had to optimise a page for "car sales" I build a page where...

  • URL is SE friendly version of the phrase (site.com/car+sales/)
  • Title is the phrase (<title>car sales</title>)
  • Phrase is at the start of description meta tag
  • Phrase is at the start of keywords meta tag
  • H1 is the phrase - matches title (<h1>car sales</h1>)
  • H2 is variation of or contains the phrase (<h2>cars on sale</h2>, <h2>cheap car sale</h2>, <h2>online car sale</h2>)
  • When possible, all links to the page use the key-phrase (<a...>car sales</a>)
  • At least 3 <strong>/<em> occurrence of phrase within paragraph text <strong>car sales</strong> and <em>car sales</em>) - whilst also making sure there aren´t many other strong/em tags using other phrases which would reduce the density of our key-phrase.
  • The key-phrase appears in 1 of the first 2 and 1 of the last 2 paragraphs of the document. When you write a document about something, you usually mention it in the introduction and the conclusion. This technique enforces the importance of the key-phrase within the page content.
  • There´s at least one image using the phrase in its source and alt text (<img src="/img/car+sales.jpg" alt="car sales"/>)
  • The page links to itself with the title of the page - this means you have at least one link within the page that uses that exact phrase, and you have at least one link with that phrase that links to the page. Two birds, one stone.

PS.: for a phrase like "car sales", it´s tempting to use stop words like "cars for sale" or "cars on sale" and it´s important to structure your content so you can avoid these. words like "the", "and", "a", "for", "or", "in" and a few others do nothing but diminish the density of your keywords within a phrase...

Conclusion

I´d like to quote an article I read not long ago on the SiteProNews website. I just cannot think of a better way to say:

The tactics required to rank highly on Google can be complex and time consuming however the path itself is straightforward. If you are willing to spend the time it will take to do it right, success is virtually assured. If you are not, then prepare to make way for those who are.

I set out to write a quick list but as it turns out, 3500 words and countless cups of tea later there´s still so much more that could be discussed. But I think the list above has all the fundamental requirements of a successful SEO project.

I hope this article provides a good basis for anyone starting up in SEO and answers the questions of those who are in doubt or struggling.

Good luck