Importance of Proper Re-directs

Search engines are highly sensitive to how you program re-directs of a URL or domain. You must program the re-directs in a search engine friendly way or face the loss of search visibility. This is especially important when you launch a new website with new URLs, have multiple domains pointing to the same website, or change the domain of your website.

301 vs 302 re-directs

These are server-side re-directs. A 301 is a permanent re-direct. It is search engine friendly due to the nature that the search engines will see the 301 and update their indexes with the new destination URL. A 302 re-direct is a temporary re-direct and is not search engine friendly. The search engines will not update their indexes with the new destination URL when using 302 re-directs, thus you end up with old pages remaining in the index. Programming one re-direct or the other is a click away on IIS servers. On Apache servers it is a few lines of code in the mod_rewrite.

Either way takes the same amount of time. So do it right the first time around. It means everything as to whether your website will hold or lose search visibility.

meta-refresh

A meta-refresh redirects is extremely easy to program, however it is not search engine friendly. Search engines will not recognize a meta-refresh as a valid re-direct, so again you will lose search visibility that the original page established.

Meta-refreshes were long used to spam the search engines. If the search engines even think there is the possibility that you are doing the meta-refresh to deliver different content to search engines than to users, the search engines will ban your domain. Google did it to www.BMW.de. After BMW stopped the practice, Google unbanned the domain. If your company does not have the stature of a BMW, don't expect them to easily listen to your plea that you changed your ways.

Javascript

Javascript re-directs again are easy to program. However since search engines are text based, they are unable to read JAVA. Therefore the search engines never see the redirect and begin indexing both URLs. If these 2 different URLs or domains have the same content on them, the search engines are unable to recognize that they are the same website and you simply programmed the re-directs wrong, thus leading to duplicate content penalties.

Conclusion

Re-directs are not all that confusing. When you acknowledge how the search engines crawl and what message you are delivering to them, it does make it easier to understand. Something so simple can cause your online presence to diminish overnight. Please don?t make that mistake.

Will two problematic search portals figure out how to do it right again? MSN and YAHOO!

From about 2001 to 2003 Google, Yahoo and MSN split the search market almost evenly. Since then Google has grabbed the lion's share of search traffic, while Yahoo and MSN lost searchers big time. Market share statistics vary due to whether the measurement is total portal traffic or search traffic. From E-Power's view, Google is somewhere around 70% of search marketing share. Yahoo is in the teens and MSN has single digit market share. How the once mighty have fallen!

E-Power believes Google took market share because it generates the best search results, while Yahoo and MSN delivered too many irrelevant search returns.

Can Yahoo/MSN meet the challenge to improve their search results?

Or will the two join the search engine scrapheap next to Excite, AltaVista, Infoseek and Lycos?

For years Yahoo was the premiere search engine with the best search results. It was King of Search!

Yahoo's search results suffered because it allowed black arts SEO such as IP cloaking ? if the Website was willing to pay fees through the Paid Inclusion Search Submit Pro program. Consequently many questionable search results appeared at the top.

So while Google was tracking searcher behavior to let the searchers determine the most relevant search results, Yahoo was allowing dirty SEO tricks - for a price. This provided short-term monetary gain, while degrading Yahoo's search results, thus causing a long-term drop in search traffic.

Yahoo's cash generator, Yahoo Search Marketing PPC, has become a pain to deal with. The paperwork for large programs is time-consuming and the customer service is lacking when compared with Google AdWords. Plus Google AdWords tools that measure, track and improve your program are far superior to Yahoo's.

MSN's search integrity seemed to wane around the time Daniel Feussner was director of operations for Microsoft US-Speech Engineering Services and Retrieval Technology in 2001-2002. Feussner stole around $9 millions in Microsoft software. He used the money for many luxuries ? a Ferrari 355 Berlinetta, a Jaguar Vanden Plas, a Humvee, diamond rings and a 51-foot yacht named the Brazilian Queen. Feussner posted pictures of his toys on his Website. He committed suicide before being brought to trial.

I always felt that the Feussner case said a lot about Microsoft. Why are its top decision-makers not the best and the brightest, with some common sense? Does being a monopoly make you competitively weak in markets where you are not a monopoly?

MSN went downhill, even abandoning its own search engine to use Yahoo's Inktomi. MSN Live returned with a search engine built on the old. Many times MSN?s search results will return 10 year old web pages. On a better note, it is improving. But it still doesn?t have search results as relevant as Google's.

That is the key.

Can MSN/Yahoo develop a search engine at least as good as Google? They can learn from Google. They can stop the nonsense from SEO black arts that no longer plague Google.

To do so, the MSN/Yahoo decision-makers need to not pursue quick money over long-term excellence. Google did not become this good overnight. MSN/Yahoo's #1 priority must be delivering the most relevant search results. Do that, then market share and revenues will follow.

Learn from Your Competitors to Build a Stronger Search Marketing Program

A great way to improve your competitive advantage is to learn more about your competitors. The Web makes it easy to discover your competitors' new products, their specs, and how they are positioned. You may even learn about their pricing and clients.

The Web also delivers the opportunity to learn about your competitors' online marketing efforts. Use this knowledge to improve your own program.

Here are a few tips:

1) Competitor Website

- Check meta-keywords to see what keywords they are targeting
- Read the site's content for keywords and message points to incorporate
- Look for ideas to make your site more interactive for your audience

2) Analyze your competitors with the best search positions

- Search your most important phrases.
- Identify the sites with the best search positions
- Compare how you rank against them. Use that as a benchmark for improvement
- Analyze how they use content to achieve top search positions

3) Check backlinks

- Review competitor backlinks to identify relevant Websites where you should have a link on
- On Google and Yahoo search "links: (domain)" or simply the domain name
- Find out whether you can request or buy a link from those sites within your industry

4) Estimate traffic and traffic trends
- Use http://siteanalytics.compete.com for estimated Website traffic
- Compare your traffic trends with the competitors
- Check Top Keywords to have an idea what phrases are driving traffic to their sites

5) Check PPC ads

- Consider their message points for testing on your program

Why Your Web Developer Should Not Implement Your SEO

Last Winter I met with a company that had a second page search position on Google for its most important target phrase. Bringing them up to the first page seemed relatively easy. Optimize relevant content and links. Add new in-bound links. And first page Google search positions should come soon thereafter.

Instead the marketing director decided to use the Web developer of their new site for search optimization. The developer offered the service and bragged about the top search positions it achieved for it clients. The company I was speaking with did not understand how the search positions the developer bragged about were not nearly as competitive as the phrase her company was targeting.

In Summer the new Web site launched. It was search engine friendly. It was optimized with keyword-filled page specific titles. Meta descriptions and meta keywords were filled in. A keyword-filled Site Map was included.

The Result ? the site could not be found in Google and search referral traffic collapsed.

What went wrong?

What happened was that the Web developer was using badly outdated search optimization techniques. The Web developer did search optimization in good faith. But the developer was not up to date with the always rapidly changing search engine algorithms.

Though technically the site was search optimized, the Web developer did not take steps to make sure the most important target phrases are identified and featured on the site. They optimized the content given to them by the client, but failed to revise the content for search engines.

The page titles began with the same seven keywords so that Google looked at the site and saw that none of its pages had any distinguishing keywords. The first 4 to 8 words in a page title are huge for search positioning. But if they are the same on every page, what makes them unique in the eyes of a search engine?

The site lacks keywords in text links. These are important to telling search engines what topics individual pages focus on.

The Home page lacks content and keywords entirely. The Home page is your most important page for search engines.

All this added up to search optimization that had no impact on search engines. The programmers who optimized the site did not take care of the details that generate search visibility.

Unless you are doing search engine optimization all the time, consistently measuring and analyzing search positions and traffic, then you will not see how Google and the other search engines are changing.

Web developers are designers and programmers. Typically they are not marketers. Programmers make decisions that do not necessarily work well with search engines. For example we constantly fight with Web developers to do search engine friendly re-directs rather than the 302 re-directs developers typically program. The programming difference is minor. But the affect on search engines makes the difference between search visibility or not.

Web developers are concerned more with technology developments, rather than evolving search optimization practices such as Social Media Marketing.

Web developers usually do not become involved with content development. Whereas Content is King for search optimization.

Developers mean well. However E-Power's experience with Web developers is that they should stick to design and programming. Online marketing is a totally different discipline.

If you want to compete for the growing business available from your market using search engines, then you need an organization dedicated to search optimization doing it every day.

Local Search Marketing Basics

Local searches on Google and Yahoo are growing in popularity and have been for some time, yet many companies completely forget about their local markets or don?t take advantage of the tools available. Businesses can make simple changes and capitalize on their local markets as well as giving their search marketing program as a whole a nice boost.

1) Include your address on every page of your website. This is the most overlooked and easiest way to gain some local exposure.

2) Update and optimize your business listings on Google, Yahoo and MSN Local. It's amazing how many businesses do not include a link to their website within their local listing. Create a compelling description for your company using your most important key phrases.

3) Correct any incorrect yellow page listings as well as adding a link to your website again if not already listed. Be sure to also take advantage of your description. www.yellowpages.com, www.superpages.com.

4) If your organization has multiple locations, be sure to optimize all of the locations and to include a link on all of those locations' listings.

5) Update directory listings in infoUSA and Amacai. These directories among others generally feed many of the online Yellow Pages and major search engines their data, however beware that correcting these directories may not correct all incorrect listings. Old data can still be pulled from other sources in which correcting can be extremely difficult.

6) If you are having trouble getting your business listing to show up within local results on Google try taking advantage of some of their paid advertising opportunities. Google offers advertising via Google Maps and within their Google local results. You can also target potential customers by state, city, IP address as well as a certain radius around your business. All the above options can be implemented through your Google AdWords program.

7) Yahoo Search Marketing also offers geographic targeting which allows you to advertise on a key phrase within a certain geographic area (region, country, state, province or city).

8) If you want to expand paid local advertising further and have the right market you may want to look into www.yellowpages.com, www.superpages.com and www.citysearch.com.

Site Maps Explained

The days where Site Maps meant one thing are no longer around. Today when someone is referring to a Site Map it may be an actual page on their website that serves as a guide, it could be a XML file listing all of the website's URLs along with attributes for use with Google Webmaster Tools and the other search engines or it may be someone simply referring to Google Webmaster Tools, which used to be referred to as Google Sitemaps.

Site Maps serve an important role in search engine optimization. First let's discuss a Site Map meaning an actual page on the website. From a visitor's standpoint: A Site Map should serve as a table of contents for your visitors. Prominently place a link to Site Map on all pages, therefore if a visitor does get lost, they can easily find what they are looking for.

From a search engine marketer's view, the Site Map should provide the search engines with an easy route into all your website's pages. By using relevant key phrases in the links off your Site Map you better map out what your site is about for Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other search engines. It serves as a table of contents to the search engines as well.

A Site Map on your website can easily be tailored to your visitors as well as the search engines, providing double the impact. Every website should include a well linked Site Map.

Site Map XML Files

Now, the other Site Map. Many refer to the XML file for a website as a Site Map as well. You think, well how does someone get Site Map out of XML. Easy. Through Google Webmaster Tools as well as the other search engines you can submit your website's XML file. In the past, Google Webmaster Tools was called Google Sitemaps, thus where the confusion began.

The XML file serves the same purpose as the actual webpage Site Map. It is a table of contents for the search engines. Within the XML file you can assign certain attributes to each URL, telling the search engines which URLs are most important to your website. Below is an example of an entry for a URL from a XML file.

Through the XML file you can assign an attribute of daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly for how often a page typically changes with the attribute. The priority is what I touched on earlier. You assign values ranging from 0.1 to 1.0 on how important a page is with 1.0 being most important. Typically you should only assign your website's home page and actual Site Map web page a 1.0. Then the priority should follow your website's architecture down from there. In the end, providing the search engines with yet another outline of your website.

Both the actual Site Map web page as well as the XML file are important pieces of the SEO arena. They provide direct "paths" for the search engines to follow around your website as well as a guide for your visitors.

Looking Back at Search Engine Optimization

Anyone can see the road that they walk on
Is paved in gold
And it's always summer
They'll never get cold
They'll never get hungry
They'll never get old and grey
-- The Way by Fastball

The Way seemed to be playing everywhere in the Summer of 1998. Then and now the song seems like an allegory for the dreams that search engines sent soaring high.

That Summer E-Power Marketing started offering search engine marketing. The nine years since leave me older, and I have a few grey hairs. The rewards of figuring out the search engines and making them work for E-Power's clients give me satisfaction beyond the monetary. And the challenges never stop.

While working for a Web developer, I saw that marketing the Website was ? and is ? the challenge that fulfills the promise. So I made up my mind and started packing to launch E-Power Marketing on July 2, 1998.

Organic search engine optimization was quite different nine years ago. That was before Google.

Yahoo ruled. Establishing a keyword-filled description in Yahoo Directory was a giant step toward driving search engine traffic. E-Power Marketing successfully listed our clients with keyword-rich directory descriptions, while many others were failing. They failed because they used automated software to submit to Yahoo directory. This often resulted in a Yahoo Directory listing that had a blank description. The keywords in the description generated Yahoo search positions. Other Webmasters submitted too frequently, causing Yahoo editors to ignore the too-frequent requests.

To make AltaVista rock, write 100 words using the target phrase 4 or 5 times, then repeat the target phrase in meta keywords up to 1,024 total characters, but not over. Voila! You are on the 1st page!

Infoseek was the best place to test search optimization. In two weeks if Infoseek did not reward your site with top search positions, then you knew you had to go back and try again.

Voyeur was a Website that allowed you to watch real searches on Magellan, one of the first Web search engines. I learned people searched a lot of dirty words.

Techies loved HotBot because Wired Magazine started the search engine.

Excite would soon sell for something like $7 billion to AT&T while generating about $40 million in revenue, thus setting off the Internet Frenzy.

What a wild ride! I loved it all! Even when the Internet Bubble burst, though that created challenges.

Today E-Power Marketing is stronger than ever, which is more than we can say about many of the big players of 1998.

Yahoo is still a Player. But it is a weak #2 to Google. Yahoo Directory has more influence on Google than on Yahoo search results.

AltaVista missed launching an Initial Public Offering before the Bubble burst. Today it is still a good search engine, but enjoys a fraction of the search market share it once owned.

Infoseek is now Go.com. It has not been its own search engine for years. Today it picks up search results from Yahoo.

Voyeur and Magellan are long gone.

HotBot uses search results from Ask. Hard to say whether many techies use it anymore.

Excite search results are a mix of paid and natural search from different sources. Excite never came close to paying back $7 billion. Today it is owned by IAC Search & Media.

Today Google rewards search positions because of strong, relevant content with links pointing to the pages. The algorithm generates far more relevant search results than the search engines of years past.

Still, it was fun copying and pasting meta keywords for AltaVista to hit the 1,024 characters without going over.

What's good for Humans is good for Google

Google has long tuned its algorithms to take search positions out of the hands of Webmasters and into the hands of searchers.

Among the many ways Google accomplishes this is by measuring click thru popularity. Google does this by tracking how often a search return is clicked. Does the searcher stay on the site or return to search results? How long does the searcher stay on the site? What pages are searchers frequently visiting? If the searcher stays on the search results, then search positioning improves. If the searcher quickly returns to Google and goes to another site, then search positions suffer.

To optimize for this Google behavior, give your target audience more to read or do. The result is that visitors will stay on your site longer, and Google will reward better search positions.

Provide your online audience with complete information about your organization, its products and services. Google does not reward online brochures. Remember - valuable and interesting content is king!

Engage your online audience with the issues affecting your niche. Start a Blog that comments on your industry's events. Write White Papers that describe your vision. Develop forums to discuss the issues. Allow your visitors to interact and provide their input on the subject.

Focus these actions on keywords, then optimize the new content for the keywords. Link to these pages with keyword text links.

Take these actions with humans in mind, and the search engines will follow.

Link Popularity - Page Specific, NOT Site Specific

Many people confuse link popularity as being only the root domains popularity. More and more, internal pages link popularity is becoming the influential factor, not simply your home page. Your root domain can enjoy a great link popularity and Google PageRank, but your site won't reap the entire benefit unless your internal pages have links pointing to them too.

Internal linking contributes highly to your sites total link popularity thus search positioning especially on Google. Getting external links pointing to your internal pages has become a more determining search position factor than before.

Google's Webmaster Tools provides a good estimate of your website's link popularity both to the root and internally. You can see how well your site is externally links as well as interlinked with itself.

Finding places to link into your internal pages can be a challenge. Providing your visitors with information they are looking for and interesting content is a link building strategy itself. By using the correct avenues, internal link popularity is a great way to build search visibility, traffic and overall search positioning.

Yahoo Introduces Robots-Nocontent Tag

Yahoo introduced a robots-nocontent tag on the Yahoo! Search Blog. The new robots-nocontent tag allows you to note sections of a page, such as navigation, headers, boilerplate, legal disclaimers, etc. that you want Yahoo! to ignore. This allows the unique content to become the main focus of the page.

When Yahoo! comes to visit the page, it will not acknowledge the content/code within the robots-nocontent tags as useful information for finding the page for search results. Now, my concern is if someone places their navigation within this tag; isn't the navigation valuable information when it comes to finding a page? Doesn't your internal link structure play a role in your search results as well as anchor text used within the navigation links?

I caution those who choose the new robots-nocontent tag to use it wisely. The new tag can be a useful tool. Just be sure to put long consideration and thought into the decision before choosing to use the robots-nocontent tag on a section of your pages.

Anchor Text Upgrade in Google Webmaster Tools

Google's Webmaster Tools has provided yet another useful upgrade. Google announced the upgrade to the Anchor Text. This new feature tells you what text is being used in links pointing to your website. Since anchor text is an important part of the SEO pie, this feature shows you what keywords are being emphasized for your website.

This feature was not available on all sites, but has now been rolled out to everyone who has Google Webmaster Tools set up for their website.

Previously Google's Webmaster Tools only provided the most popular single words contained in the links, now you are provided with the full Anchor Text among variations up to 200 phrases. They have also brought back the section showing you the most common individual words contained in your websites anchor text.

I have to give my props to Google for this tool. It's a beauty!!

Sitemaps Made Easier!

Google has been working on making the implementation of Sitemaps easy for everyone. In the process they have created a website www.sitemaps.org, which provides information of how your XML file should be formatted, FAQs, definitions and more. Most importantly to remember, not only does Google use your XML file, Yahoo, MSN and most recently ASK all use your XML file for assistance in crawling your website.

The major announcement came early this week, the solution to offering the search engines an easy way to locate your XML file, using your robots.txt file. Since every website can have a robots.txt file, you can now use it to tell the search engines where your XML file is located.

To do so, add the following line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

If you are using a Sitemap index file, simply use the location of that file. You do not need to list each individual Sitemap contained in your index.

Create your XML file, add a line of code to your robots.txt file and let the engines crawl away!

10 Issues to Consider When Reviewing / Designing Your Web Sites Architecture

1) I list this first because it is the most common problem with websites. Duplicate Pages!!! Each page should have only ONE URL. Many database driven web sites will generate multiple URLs for the same page depending on how a user drills down to the page. Search engines pick this up quickly and penalize the pages for duplicate content.

2) AVOID SESSION and USER IDs!!!! Just like #1 mentions, session ids and user ids create duplicate pages. Each time the search engine crawls the site a new session/user id is generated, thus creating many URLs for the same page.

3) Be sure to include text href links in your navigation and content. JAVA, Flash or other non search-engine friendly tech can be used in your navigation, just be sure to also include text links for the search engines. The more these text links are part of your actual navigation the better.

4) Keep your web sites navigation simple. Be sure to also keep your navigation consistent across the entire website. Your web site's navigational structure also ties directly into Google Sitelinks. Google will analyze a web sites link structure when crawling and watch for shortcuts to information users most likely are looking for. Then add Sitelinks to the search results.

5)Create a Site Map or multiple Site Maps. If your web site is considerably large, create multiple Site Maps that are interlinked and categorized.

6) Visible content. Search engines LOVE content. Don't bury your valuable content in Flash or JavaScript. Use visible text and use links within that text to assist the search engines in finding your most valuable pages.

7) Assign unique relevant page specific meta-tags. If you are developing a new website or looking at a CMS, double check that you will have the ability to assign page specific meta-tags, specifically titles.

8) Breadcrumbs. Users find breadcrumbs extremely helpful when navigating a site. For search engines they provide yet again more text links, so they are a plus. However, be careful when creating your breadcrumbs that you do not end up with back to back links.

9) If your website has a Calendar or other dynamically driven application that could result in an infinite loop, place a no index, no follow tag on the page, or block that page using a robots.txt file.

10) View your site through a text based browser such as Lynx. With no images, JAVA or other technologies, you are able to see what the search engines can see. Therefore you'll know if they can read your text and follow your links.

Search Engine Rules and Aligning Domains

The Wall Street Journal published an article on the woes of Topix.net switching to Topix.com. The article highlights the struggles and loss of positions on Search Engines after the switch occurred.

The WSJ article makes many important points. The most important point, and it was not said by the WSJ, is that the Web marketers that they quoted do not know why their sites gain and then lose search positions.

Here are the points as I see them.

1. Search engines can make businesses thrive.

2. Search algorithms change and can really hurt those businesses that depend on Google. These two points are not disputed.

3. Topix.net lost Google search positions when it switched to Topix.com. The loss is due to quirky Google rules. Topix.com did not follow those publicly known quirky rules. They did not align their domains or follow other guidelines, and Google positions fell.

4. Yes, it is frustrating that online chat boards are how you get natural SEO support from Google. At least there is that support. For years the search engines did not respond to the SEO community. Google started the dialogue. It's far from perfect, but better than dealing with Yahoo through the years. With Google we do know what is important and what is not.

5. If Marchex runs 200,000 sites like www.bayareahotels.com then they should worry about losing Google search positions. It is a site full of ad links and it is not properly optimized. The interior pages are redundant. The Marchex SEO strategy is exactly what Google is trying to clean out of its top search pages for competitive phrases. The Marchex Chief Strategy Officer should follow his own advice and build strong content.

Google Webmaster Tools New Link Feature

Earlier this month, Google released a new Link option within Google's Webmaster Tools. Google allows you to look up which websites are linking to your by using search commands like: link:www.domain.com, links: www.domain.com, plus other variations through the regular search. However, Google only allows you to see a sample of those back links.

The new Link option now provides you with a larger sample of those websites linking to you. Although you won't get to see all incoming links to your site, including those listed in Google's supplemental index, you will see a larger sample than if using the now outdated link commands. The Link option is only for your website, so you are not able to check out your competition's strategic linking programs. You will still need to use the above mentioned link commands for competitor analysis.

To use this new link option, you need to be a Google Webmaster user. Once you've verified your website, click on the My Sites screen and choose your domain. Then you will see the following tabs: Diagnostic, Statistics, Links and Sitemaps. The new Links tab allows you to see external and internal links for your website. External links are the links most people are concerned with. These are links coming from outside of your site. You can see what other sites are linking to you, whether it is the home page, or the interior pages. Internal links tell you how well your site is interlinked within itself.

The new Links tab definitely offers valuable information, plus Google also allows you to download the data into an Excel spreadsheet making management of the data much easier than before. So, why did Google decide to offer this new feature? Google spokespeople claim they decided to offer the option because of feedback from Webmasters. Google is more comfortable with the idea because the info is only going to specific site owners, rather than to everyone. Either way, I'm happy with the new tool!

SEO Considerations When Selecting an E-Commerce or Content Management System

Want to sell on the Web? You need e-commerce software.

Want to update your Web site's content without waiting for and paying extra to your Web developer? Then you want a Content Management System (CMS).

E-commerce and CMS systems can present problems to search engine indexing. Many create Web sites that look like Spam to search engines. As a result, search visibility lags or is limited.

What do you need to worry about to avoid looking like Spam when selecting such a system?

Many systems create multiple URLs for the same pages or pages that look the same to search engines. That sets of Spam filters and penalties at the search engines.

Navigation-driven URLs or systems that include path variables generate multiple URLs. Session IDs are even worse generating what looks like new URLs every time the search spider crawls your site.

How do you know the system you are considering is search engine friendly? After all, many e-commerce and CMS vendors with these problems claim their systems are search engine friendly, when they are not.

Ask the vendor for a list of Web sites built with their software. Then download XENU link checker at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html. The software is free.

Install XENU and check each of the Web sites that the vendor provided. Does XENU finish the report, or does it go on and on? If XENU cannot finish crawling the sites, then the sites' software creates URL loops that will make your site look like Spam to search engines.

Even if XENU finishes crawling the sites, this may not mean the software will always build search engine friendly sites. But you will quickly eliminate the most problematic e-commerce or CMS software.