See Your Site With the Eyes of a Spider

Making efforts to optimize a site is great but what counts is how search engines see your efforts. While even the most careful optimization does not guarantee tops position in search results, if your site does not follow basic SEO truths, then it is more than certain that this site will not score well with search engines. One way to check in advance how your SEO efforts are seen by search engines is to use a search engine simulator.
Spiders Explained

Basically all search engine spiders function on the same principle – they crawl the Web and index pages, which are stored in a database and later use various algorithms to determine page ranking, relevancy, etc of the collected pages. While the algorithms of calculating ranking and relevancy widely differ among search engines, the way they index sites is more or less uniform and it is very important that you know what spiders are interested in and what they neglect.

Search engine spiders are robots and they do not read your pages the way a human does. Instead, they tend to see only particular stuff and are blind for many extras (Flash, JavaScript) that are intended for humans. Since spiders determine if humans will find your site, it is worth to consider what spiders like and what don't.
Flash, JavaScript, Image Text or Frames?!

Flash, JavaScript and image text are NOT visible to search engines. Frames are a real disaster in terms of SEO ranking. All of them might be great in terms of design and usability but for search engines they are absolutely wrong. An incredible mistake one can make is to have a Flash intro page (frames or no frames, this will hardly make the situation worse) with the keywords buried in the animation. Check with the Search Engine Spider Simulator tool a page with Flash and images (and preferably no text or inbound or outbound hyperlinks) and you will see that to search engines this page appears almost blank.

Running your site through this simulator will show you more than the fact that Flash and JavaScript are not SEO favorites. In a way, spiders are like text browsers and they don't see anything that is not a piece of text. So having an image with text in it means nothing to a spider and it will ignore it. A workaround (recommended as a SEO best practice) is to include meaningful description of the image in the ALT attribute of the tag but be careful not to use too many keywords in it because you risk penalties for keyword stuffing. ALT attribute is especially essential, when you use links rather than text for links. You can use ALT text for describing what a Flash movie is about but again, be careful not to trespass the line between optimization and over-optimization.

Social Media Optimization

Social Media is not a website. It’s not something you set up and leave, just attracting traffic to it. I see it lots of times and feel it’s such a waste. Unfortunately it’s mainly because people don’t understand what to do with Twitter and Facebook. How many of us did when we first started? I certainly didn’t and I’m still learning.

You have to converse, chat to people, instigate conversations.

Setting up a Facebook business page or Twitter account then not chatting is like booking a room especially for you to meet people, inviting people into the room then walking out, closing the door and leaving them wondering why they bothered responding to your invite to attend.

It’s a bit rude plus wasting the moment and opportunity.

Don’t leave gaps of days and weeks between participating – it doesn’t take much for a tweet or status update here and there – especially with it all on mobile phones nowadays.

Chat to people. Talk about what you’ve been doing; no matter how mundane that may seem to you. It gets you chatting to people with the same interests and soon spreads. On Twitter search for your interests whether it’s XFactor or Politics, Accounts or EastEnders and you’ll find lists of people with those interests chatting and no-one really minds if you join in.

Basically imagine you are in that room networking. You have to talk to people or they don’t talk back. You have to say something or no-one knows you are there. People will see you and that’s good for business isn’t it?

If you are hoping to get some of your business tweets retweeted then make sure you retweet some too. Quid pro quo.

If you tweet about business all the time expect to be unfollowed. Twitter is about chatting and getting to know the person behind the company with a few business tweets thrown in.

Your Facebook business page can be more about business obviously as the name suggests. But again, if you are constantly thrown advertising in your face how soon before you switch off?

If you are stuck for something to say on your page then maybe add a blog or article that you find interesting and want to share with others.

Add up events – they don’t necessarily have to be one you are hosting – it’s just good to pass the message on and hopefully the favour will be returned.

Start a discussion about something you think will get people interacting.

Social Media has to be subtle, not full on advertising in every tweet or status update or you won’t get anywhere.

Those are my thoughts; how do you make Social Media work well for you?

Google Testing Website Previews in Search Results

Just a few weeks after successfully launching Google Instant, reports from all over the web world are pouring in that the tech giant is already testing their next possible product: A full page image preview of target websites with blue backgrounds hovering over search results if you scroll over them.

A page preview of the webpage pops up on the side of the search result page with certain section of highlighted text relevant to the search query and by clicking on this image you will be taken to the full website.

Here is an example of how the My Voucher Codes website appears in the preview.

The fact that the highlighted text is relevant to the search result shows that Google has the technology to bring out the exact piece of text on every single web page indexed for the search terms.

Its worth noting that the full details of a longer web pages will not be shown in the preview, the page will be cut off at a certain point. This gives even more weight to the rule that all the important information on your webpage should be above the fold.

This testing is not be confused with the thumbnail previews that Google introduced about a year ago as a search option (available in the left hand options bar).

Google is yet to confirm if this just a test or if Google plans to roll this out to all their users. When Mashable approached Google about it a spokesperson simply said: “At any given time we are running between 50-200 search experiments”. Clearly Google is giving nothing away!

Page Preview could dramatically affect click through rates as we will get to see the effect of web page designs has on converting searches into visitors.

As a daily Google searcher, I would love this feature to become a staple in the Google search results. The layout and design of a website plays quite a role in determining if I am going to purchase from the site or not.

Tips to convert visits into leads for your site

Return On Investment (ROI). Without it, all the online marketing and web traffic in the world means nothing. And for those companies who conduct a majority (or all) of their business online, positive ROI is essential to having a successful business.

From an SEO standpoint, showing a positive ROI is critical in building and maintaining client satisfaction. Sure, the primary goal of anySEO company is to drive traffic through a variety of methods (rankings, social media, viral marketing, etc.). And for the purpose of sales, getting tons and tons of traffic is great- if that traffic is converting. Otherwise, you'll have the most popular, but least profitable website in your industry.

So, how do you get your web traffic to convert into sales? There are a ton of techniques out there that, depending on your site and your niche, may or may not work for you. Here are a few tried and true methods that we have come across and implemented on a variety of our client's sites:

1. Begin with a Solid Website Design or Improve Your Current Site - If the foundation of your online business (i.e. your website) is shaky, don't expect to convert many visits into sales. I've spoken with several business owners who settled for a cheap, easy website over a more professional one and have suffered because of it. Think about your own online buying tendencies: Do you purchase from a website that looks like a college student's side project, or do you purchase from a clean, organized, professional looking site? Putting up some extra cash for the creation of your site and lead to much better conversion rates down the road. If you've already made the mistake of cheaping out on your website, then a re-design may be the next best solution. Your goal should be to create a clean, unified look while providing easy navigation for users. You want your pages to share a common theme and be pleasing to the eye in order to draw visitors deeper into your site. Keep in mind that loud and flashy is not always the best way to convert visitors.

   

2. Create a Prominent Call to Action - A common theme we see with sites who are having trouble converting visitors is that their call to action is located at the bottom of the page or in some other obscure area. How are visitors supposed to buy from your site when they can't even find the checkout page? Placing your call to action toward the top of the page (preferably above the fold) will let visitors know exactly where to go to place an order. Make the call to action stand out using enticing language (i.e. "Buy Now", "Order Today") and bright coloring (make sure the design/ coloring fits with the overall theme of your site).
   
3. Get Visitors Involved- If people are coming to your site and leaving right away, you have no chance at getting sales. Decreasing the bounce rate on your site decreasing bounce rate on your site by improving the "stickiness" will keep visitors looking at your pages longer, which means there's a better chance they will convert. Improving site stickiness can include adding a search box, restructuing content to be more reader friendly, or implementing a forum where visitors can actively participate.

4. Funnel Visitors to Important, Sales-Focused Areas of Your Site- Funneling visitors to specific areas of your site incorporates aspects from the above three techniques. Make it easy for visitors to find your products and navigate through your site. If possible, include your best-selling or most important products on your homepage in a prominent location. Allow visitors to reach all of your products is as few clicks as possible. Any more than three or four clicks, and you run the risk of losing people's interest. One method that works well is to place product images or references on the side of your blog and then submitting to popular social media sites.
   

6. Focus on Your Target Market- Taking a"shortgun"approach to marketing your website may lead to a conversion here and there, but focusing your efforts on your target market will yeild much better results. Put yourself in your potential customer's shoes: where would you look and what would you look for when searching for your product or service? Your goal should be to place your website in front of as many potential buyers as possible. Do some research and find out where your potential buyers may be visiting and what they may be searching for, then tailor your website to match those results.

Google PageRank, How is it calculated and How to Get It

Google's PageRank (PR) is one of the most sought after, and yet misunderstood, web page attributes. PageRank, named after one of the founders of the Google search engine, Larry Page, was the innovative foundation that the Google search engine was built on.

The theory was that a link from one web page to a web page of another site was in essence a vote for that page. The reasoning was that webmasters would only link to pages that they thought were interesting and of value to their viewers. Google used the number of inbound links (IBL) to a page to judge the importance and relevance of that page, and based on this calculation, and other factors, decided where to place that page on the search results page (SERP).

They devised a scale of measurement for PageRank from 1 to 10. Then for the information of webmasters and interested people they produced a toolbar that can be deployed in Internet Explorer that will indicate the PageRank value of any page being viewed in the browser. These values have become known as PR0 to PR10.

Since PR values are a result of IBLs, Google decided to give them their own name and refers to inbound links as backlinks. As part of the toolbar there is a quick lookup of the number of backlinks that Google reports for the page that is currently being viewed in the browser. This search can also be done without the aid of the toolbar by simply typing "link:http://www.yourURL.com" into the Google search box.

The one trick to this link search is that Google does not display all backlinks. At one time it was thought that they only listed pages with a value of PR4 or greater. Today however, you will find backlinks reported from pages of lower PR values. So, at best, Google's backlink search seems to present some sample of pages linking to the site. Suffice it to say that this search is not a reliable measure of all IBLs to a page.

How is PageRank calculated

In simplest terms PR is calculated by the sharing of PR from all the IBL links to your page. This is not strictly accurate because Google also uses the internal links within a site in the calculation of PR. Each link to a page carries with it and passes PR value to the target page. The PR points or value passed depend on the PR value of the page they come from, and the total outbound links from the page. It is generally agreed that a page will only pass about 85% of its value to the page it links to. So a PR5 page with a single outbound link will pass 85% of the value of a PR5 page to the page it links to.

But virtually no page has only a single link -- remember internal links are also used in the total outbound link count -- so the value passed to any page is 85% of the PR, divided by the total number of outbound links.

The question now becomes what is the PR point value of the different PR levels. Most observers believe that the relationship between PR levels is logarithmic rather than linear. In other words PR5 is not worth 25% more than a PR4, but may be worth 4 to 6 times more.

It is also understood that a PR value is not a single number, but is in fact a range of values. So not all PR6s are equal. As the chart below shows a PR6 maybe just on the upper boundary of a PR5 or it maybe just short of the entry point for a PR7.

The chart that follows shows the range for each PR value. It also shows how much PR value or PR points a page with 50 outbound links will pass depending on of its own PR rank. From this I have calculated the number of links required from each value of PageRank necessary for a page to attain a desired page rank.

The assumptions and the mathematics:

For those who are interested I have used logarithmic values of base 5.5. In other words the value range for a PR1 lies between 5.5 to the power of 1 and 5.5 to the power of 1.99, and PR2 lies between the value of 5.5 to the power of 2 and 5.5 to the power of 2.99 etc. The rest of the chart is fairly straight forward. It assumes that there are 50 links per page and that 85% of the PR value is passed to the recipient page.

The number of links required to attain any ranking is based on the median value of the donor page and the entry threshold of the desired PR value. In other words to achieve a PR5 you need 5,033 points and the average points available from a PR6 page with 50 links is 1507.

The chart was calculated with an Excel spreadsheet and it can be downloaded if anyone wants to play with the calculations and assumptions. It might be interesting to work with a different base number for the logarithmic calculation. And it is also interesting to see the impact of more or less outbound links from a page.

Nobody knows for sure how Google calculates PR. I have shown this chart to a number of knowledgeable people and they have all agreed that my calculations look reasonable. One SEO guru from a major firm said the results were very similar to independent research that his firm had conducted.

So take it or leave it. It is probably a fair reflection of how PR is passed and accumulated.

The lesson that can be drawn from this explanation and chart is that if you want to increase your PR you need a few links from pages with equivalent or higher PR, or a great many links from sites with lower PR.

URL: Very Important for any Website

Matt Cutts answers to some of the very
common queries on URLs

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?

A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

• www.example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?

A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.

Q: Is there anything else I can do?

A: Yes. Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).

Q: If I want to get rid of domain.com but keep www.domain.com, should I use the url removal tool to remove domain.com?

A: No, definitely don’t do this. If you remove one of the www vs. non-www hostnames, it can end up removing your whole domain for six months. Definitely don’t do this. If you did use the url removal tool to remove your entire domain when you actually only wanted to remove the www or non-www version of your domain, do a reinclusion request and mention that you removed your entire domain by accident using the url removal tool and that you’d like it reincluded.

Q: I noticed that you don’t do a 301 redirect on your site from the non-www to the www version, Matt. Why not? Are you stupid in the head?

A: Actually, it’s on purpose. I noticed that several months ago but decided not to change it on my end or ask anyone at Google to fix it. I may add a 301 eventually, but for now it’s a helpful test case.

Q: So when you say www vs. non-www, you’re talking about a type of canonicalization. Are there other ways that urls get canonicalized?

A: Yes, there can be a lot, but most people never notice (or need to notice) them. Search engines can do things like keeping or removing trailing slashes, trying to convert urls with upper case to lower case, or removing session IDs from bulletin board or other software (many bulletin board software packages will work fine if you omit the session ID).

Q: Let’s talk about the inurl: operator. Why does everyone think that if inurl:mydomain.com shows results that aren’t from mydomain.com, it must be hijacked?

A: Many months ago, if you saw someresult.com/search2.php?url=mydomain.com, that would sometimes have content from mydomain. That could happen when the someresult.com url was a 302 redirect to mydomain.com and we decided to show a result from someresult.com. Since then, we’ve changed our heuristics to make showing the source url for 302 redirects much more rare. We are moving to a framework for handling redirects in which we will almost always show the destination url. Yahoo handles 302 redirects by usually showing the destination url, and we are in the middle of transitioning to a similar set of heuristics. Note that Yahoo reserves the right to have exceptions on redirect handling, and Google does too. Based on our analysis, we will show the source url for a 302 redirect less than half a percent of the time (basically, when we have strong reason to think the source url is correct).

Q: Okay, how about supplemental results. Do supplemental results cause a penalty in Google?

A: Nope.

Q: I have some pages in the supplemental results that are old now. What should I do?

A: I wouldn’t spend much effort on them. If the pages have moved, I would make sure that there’s a 301 redirect to the new location of pages. If the pages are truly gone, I’d make sure that you serve a 404 on those pages. After that, I wouldn’t put any more effort in. When Google eventually recrawls those pages, it will pick up the changes, but because it can take longer for us to crawl supplemental results, you might not see that update for a while.

How Google Handles Multi-Language Sites

While there probably aren’t too many website that have multiple languages, Google does have a different way of handling these types of sites.

Matt Cutts recently shared the answer to the following question in a video:

“How would Google consider (and rank) a site that uses meta data and URLs in a language (Italian) and has the h1 of the pages in another (English) considered more appealing for users?

ex:
title: Pallacanestro
h1: Basket
url: site.com/pallacanestro/”

Matt says that if a page on a site has mutiple languages, then Google will identify the main language on the page and return it to the search results which are most appropriate. However, if they have trouble determining the right language to use then this could affect the ranking of your site.

Matt suggests having only single languages on a page. If this means you need to have two versions of a page (in different languages) then this is fine as it means your website can rank for both languages in the separate SERPs.

If you would like further explanation, then check out Matt’s video below.