One of the easiest ways to help your websites search engine ranking position, is to internally link all your pages to one another by text links - this can be at the bottom of your index page. Although flash and javascript menus make look more visually appealing, search engines cannot crawl your web site as easily.
RSS Feeds
SEO PAWN News on the developments of search engine optimization
Automated AdWords
AdWords new feature, the Conversion Optimizer, still in its beta stage helps advertisers meet their return on investment (ROI) objectives by automatically managing bids according to a maximum cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goal. Therefore, by automating the bidding process it will help advertisers minimize their conversion costs whilst saving time. There are currently two areas on any Google search where an advertiser can put there advert, either at the side or at the very top. These are known as Sponsored Links.
Google’s AdWords have become ever popular over the last 7 years, first being launched in mid 2000. AdWords is a pay-per-click (PPC) online advertising strategy, displaying website title, URL and brief 2 line description. To get to the top of these advertisements for key words or phrases you have to pay a certain amount, for every click. The greater the demand by companies for a particular phrase the greater the cost of the click will be. This can range anything from £0.50 to £3.00 plus, with the advertisers specifying the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount of money they are willing to pay per click.
The ordering of the paid listings depends on the advertisers bids, as they are paying for placement (P4P). Advertisers can also choose a limit per day or week – once a companies advertisement has got to a certain amount of clicks, they will disappear for the rest of the day.
Website Browser Usage Hindering SEO?
In the past week much has been made about web browsers hindering search engine optimization. Design still takes the key role in web design, whilst search engine optimization, accessibility and correct XHTML mark-up are all influencing factors on the users’ experience of a website. As most web designers put most emphasis on design rather than optimization and clients wanting a cheap, quick great looking website, something has to give, with it more than likely being the optimization.
The majority of users across the world have a PC rather than a Mac; with the default browser on a PC being Internet Explorer. However, it’s not that easy. The two latest versions of explorer 6 and 7 are still the most popular, so designers need to create websites for both versions. Anyone who has had there website statistics running for over a year will see a notable difference of IE6 declining, IE7 increasing whilst Mozilla Firefox steadily gaining a greater percentage. Safari and Opera are still relatively low as both are Mac browsers.
Although no browser helps or hinders search engine optimisation ‘technically’ - (the purpose of a web browser is to display the World Wide Web), it does make a difference to how designers code and people view websites. Why? Every browser is slightly different, and so websites need to be compatible across all platforms. Web designers can create great looking websites but the trick is to design them with search engine optimisation always in mind.
A flash website is a clear example of how it is a good element within a website, that browsers cannot effect the design or layout – being embedded. But flash is useless as a website in its own right. Very little search engine optimization can be applied to it, making it very hard for search engines to find. With it always to have slightly different view of a website in all the browsers than have it perfect in flash.
Long Tail Searching
When optimizing a website, optimizers focus on services and products with the most popular searched phrases and keywords, thus gaining the most hits – theoretically maximising traffic. However, the ‘Long Tail’ theory sees this as not the case, with only 20% of your business being represented. This is a small proportion of the available market. So by homing in on other niche areas, you will benefit from long tail searches.
By web developers and SEO practitioners tailoring the website for clients as well as search engines, they will be able to attract more potential customers. Broadening the website optimization through adding specific niche keyword phrases. Therefore, products that are as not mainstream as others, can become just as popular – getting to the top of search engines for niche areas with few competitors.
Optimizers who centre all there attention on the most searched keywords should remember long tail keywords, as they are restricting the amount of traffic. Long tail searches are an area that must be exploited to its full potential.
Text Based Links or Image Based Links, which is stronger?
Recently there have been discussions and documents about the emphasis Google, Yahoo and MSN put on text and image based links in relation to web site page rank position. But, which is the most influential? Evidently, SEO Pawn do not have the main threes algorithm, although we can make an educated guess from the research and our search engine optimization experience.
First off, hyperlinks, text or image based do both provide a value that will contribute to where the website ranks. The real question is which link is valued more highly. A textual link is seen as more highly by search engines as you can include your keywords within the link text thus relating to a ‘good’ targeted search term. On the other hand, image links may not be as strong in value but do perform well, as long as you optimize them properly, utilizing there accessibility attributes (the alt tag).
Merging image links with H elements do extremely well, but this is seen by some practitioners as bad practice, being search engine spam. On the whole, text links are and will always be stronger, as you can have targeted text whilst image links will remain reasonably strong.
Google’s Behavioural Targeting
Behavioural targeting put simply is a SEO technique to increase website traffic and status of companies advertising campaigns. By using cookies search engines can observe a users online activities and behaviour, seeing what sites they view thus displaying adverts relative to there web surfing history. Therefore, in theory, advertisers can target there ads at the people who will be the most interested and influenced by them – however this is not always the case.
In the past few weeks Google has been claiming that its new approach to adverts is not behavioural targeting. However, webmasters, analysts as well as SEO Pawn are very dubious about it. Google has emphasized that they will be using search queries entered by users in their search engine.
For instance, if a user types in ‘bicycle sales’, then adverts may appear with bicycle dealers or cheap bicycles. If the user then types in ‘cycling in mountains’, then the adverts may be targeted at cycling with a particular focus on mountain bikes. Google hopes to get around the issue of behavioural targeting by using sessions, creating adverts that combine a set of searches during one session.
The adverts will therefore become more appropriate and relevant to the user, being unique and tailored towards them – actually being useful. This would be a benefit to everyone, as Google moves away from the traditional behavioural targeting into what they call ‘Personalised Search’.
How search engines work
The job of a search engine is to retrieve information, reducing the users’ time to search for it.
There are three types of search engines: Web Search Engines – Information on the world wide web Enterprise Search Engines – Information on the intranet Personal Search Engines – Information on a specific website or application
Web search engines are the foundations of the internet, without them there would be no internet. Before search engines existed, there was loads of information, but people could not find it. Search engines display an interface where users can specify something they are looking for via the ‘search box’. The search engine will then find items that match that search query.
Search engines consist of five discrete software components: 1. Spider: a robotic browser like program that downloads web pages. 2. Crawler: a wandering spider that automatically follows links found on pages. 3. Indexer: a blender like program that dissects web pages that are downloaded by spiders. 4. The Database: a warehouse of the pages downloaded and processed. 5. Search Engine Results Engine: digs search results out of the database
To provide information to the user quickly search engines index web pages from as many web sites as they can. By collection information on there page content, meta data as well as a number of other factors, search engines can efficiently provide matching items to the user. Therefore, your website needs to be indexed by search engines for people to find it on those search engines.
Hyphens still better than underscores
When naming pages on your website, you need to make them search engine friendly. This gives the search engine an indication of what the content on the page is about. But how do you name your pages without using spaces so the search engines can find them.
There are three ways:
No gaps: suspendedceilingservices.html Underscores: suspended_ceiling_services.html Hyphens: suspended-ceiling-services.html
Matt Cutts (Google) has recently stated that hyphens are the better choice for naming pages. If your website currently uses underscores it is not worth migrating them over to hyphens (dashes), however, if you are starting a website from scratch then use hyphens.
