Goes Google Count Clicks Against a Search to Weight its Algorithm?

One issue that has come to light recently is: "Does Google count the number of clicks to different sites in a search and use it to weight its rankings?". The theory is that if your page is number 2 in the search but gets more clicks than the number one site, Google might rank your site more favourably.

There are a number of reasons to suspect why this might be the case:

Relevance: Search engines thrive on producing relevant results. The more relevant the result to the search, the easier it is for someone to find what they are looking for using a particular search engine.

Adwords: Googles Adwords will weight adverts that get a higher clickthrough ratio. If you have two adverts for a particular product and one gets twice the clickthrough rate, then Google will show this more often. Again, relevance is involved. If an advert is more relevant (it must be if more people click on it) then search engines need to show this more often to improve the user experience.

The problem with this theory is that there is no way to verify it other than by anecdotal evidence. There will be a host of factors that bring your site a good ranking and anyone of these could make a difference. Furthermore, a link may be clicked on but users could 'bounce' straight away if they realise that the site is not what they'd wanted.

The best thing to remember is that once you're in the top 10 and certainly the top 5 you've made it. Traffic increases massively if you are ranked on the front page. It won't necessarily matter if you are 2nd 3rd or 4th if the description used against your site isn't relevant or enticing. If your description is well written, relevant and useful you will get people coming to your site. It's as simple as that.

Meta Keywords - Myths, Misspellings and Mysteries

In earlier, more innocent times, the meta keywords tag was used by web-designers and website owners to indicate the content of their web pages. Keywords were in use form around 1996 onwards.

By 1998, however, Search Engines had wised up to misuse and more cynical practices. The practice of "stuffing" tags with multiple copies of the same word or even with material unrelated to the contents of the web page was all too common and the keywords tag was rendered next to useless.

Because, historically, there has been a lot of emphasis put on keywords by website designers, the myth about their importance has continued. A look at any search engine forum or a chat about web-design will quickly encompass the keywords topic. Nowadays, however, there is little emphasis placed on them. According to a test performed by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, Google and Microsoft do not use keywords when a search is made.

Inasmuch as it is useful, the keywords tag can be used for misspellings. In the search engines that do use the tag for indexing (Yahoo & Ask), text in the tags is treated as if it was on the page. Misspelling words on your page can have the effect of making you look unprofessional. Hidden away, however, you can encompass common misspellings and not lose face.

As far as getting better rankings is concerned, if the keywords tag was the way, optimizers everywhere would be obsessing on this point. This is not the case and a simple viewing of the source code of any high-ranking site would show you the use of the keywords tag is sparing at best. Keywords will not substitute good copy. Well-written copy will not only get your site ranked but also, the visitors who come to your site will enjoy the content.

Nowadays, search engines worry far more about the links to your site than the keywords text and time spent on keywords is time wasted elsewhere.

Directory Submissions: Directories to Avoid Paying

Below is a list of directoris that have recently been penalised by Google for underhand practices. Basically, these directories are far more interested in gaining revenues from submissions than in providing well-vetted and useful content for search engines.

AvivaDirectory.com
AliveDirectory.com
Haabaa.com
DirectoryDump.com
BigWebLinks.com
ElegantDirectory.com
eWebPages.org
LinkBook.org
Trincas.org
CBravo.com
CDHNow.com
FreeWebIndex.com
Mingleon.com
PremiumDir.com
Submission4u.com
Aerospect.com
Bakie.com
LinkForever.net
LinksArena.com
LinksFactory.net
LinksHolder.com
WebVerve.com
Wezp.com
BestInternetResource.info
DirSpace.com
Eonte.com
Frogengine.com
LinkLister.co.uk
LinkVerve.com
LivelyDirectory.com
Submitdotcom.com

Registering your site with a directory can give you a rankings boost. Registering with the Yahoo and Open Directory is a must for websites that want to be taken seriously. Some rigour (financial & intellectual) has to be gone through in order to get a listing here.

This is not always the case, however, and some directories market by promoting search engine link value rather than their own intrinsic value as resources. If webmaster can pay for a premium listing that gets multiple links to their site with their own choice of anchor text then the directory is there for Search Engine Optimisers rather than for the general public.

Be careful when registering your site with directories. It can be tempting to pay for an increased ranking by these means but it is a short-term view and will provide you with no long-term benefit.

Selling Links - Not the way to go.

With a lot of chatter, arguement and debate on the subject of paid links, the debates seemed to have reignited this week wen it came to light that Google have confirmed they are penalising sites that sell links.

Paid links, those that are put on a site in return for a fee, have often been a way of raising a site's credibility, PageRank and exposure extremely quickly. The problem with this is that the democratic nature of search engines is usurped by those with the most money to splash around. If we imagine a Google search as a democratic system where the most popular sites appear at the top of the rankings, links become votes. The more links to a site, the more search engines perceive it as a destination, a place people want to go to. When money exchanges hands, extra votes can be bought and extra influence & greater standing in the search engine ranks can be gained.

There is a case to be made for paid links. For one, Google uses paid links to conduct its Adwords campaign and links are a highly valuable advertising tool. The differene between these adverts and paid links, however, is that adverts are often clearly marked. In a newspaper, adverts are separated from content & media owners disassociate themselves from the advertised content. The media outlet isn't recommending a product in an advert, the advertiser is. Paid links muddy this issue in order to work. In order to influence Google's PageRank system, these links must be like any other on a website. the advertised content and the publised content are indistinguishable.

Danny Sulliavan reported at Search Engine Land that Google have begun to talk about lowering the PageRank of those companies that have been selling links and it would appear that they intend to do this more in the future. It would be hard to identify a lot of the sites that sell links but it is not a valuable long-term strategy as far as search engine optimization is concerned as the penalties are reduced visibility in the Search Engines but, more importantly, lowered trust within your community, something that can tarnish you for a long time. There is no real sens in mixing up paid content & free content & it gives a skweed view of the Internet if you link to sites whose only intrinsic value is the money that the links were bought with.


Adverts but without advertising

Useful Browser Tool

For those of you interested in dynamic linking, the 'Search Status' tool from quirk is extremely handy. You can choose to see rel="nofollow" links on any given website. This is interesting as you can see how other SEOs or even how Google oversee the links on and from their site.

The toolbar has a number of other useful tricks up its sleeve. It'll enable you to quickly see the Meta information on a page, get an overview of the number of links of all different types to and from the page. This information opens in new tabs so that you don't lose any information on the page you are browsing. Furthermore, it shows the Google & Alexa Page Rank.

The toolbar sits snugly wherever you want it to in your browser & doesn't take up much room.

It's currently at v1.21, released on 22 August.

Building Words

One simple way to ensure that your content covers as many search terms as possible without looking contrived and clunky is to use building words.

Building words are simply the words that you can use to build keywords that relate to your site. They come in 5 major flavours:

Global keywords:
These are the main categories that your site falls in to. Let's say we're optimizing the party supplies site. These main keywords could be: Party, anniversary, wedding, birthday.

Stop words:
These are words that search engines do not index because they are too common but that can make for a smooth writing style. If you ever research keywords on sites like Wordtracker and find results like 'balloons UK' and think "why would anyone search for that?", the chances are that they have searched for 'balloons in the UK' but the search engine has removed the stop words. Stop words include words like: a, about, all, me, the, as, is, but, to, for. This adds up to rather a large list of words which is worth remembering. A more comprehensive list of words can be found by typing 'Stop Words' into Wikipedia.

Localised words:
These can help to give your keywords a localised theme and can give you an extra chance to use a keyword. Village & town names, the name of your region or the countries that yours site is focused on can all help.

Modifiers:
These are words that add more meat the bones fo your general keywords. There are some more universal modifiers like help, info and ideas but if you search competitors sites for general keywords, you will find a host of modifiers attached to them For example, with the party site we have: favours, themes, supplies, decorations and so on.

Brand, Product & Event Names:
These names can mean you do well in a search for targeted keywords. It is important to know your market & trends. Current party supply brands include: Bratz, Harry Potter, Bob the Builder, Barbie and Winnie the Pooh.

If we begin to combine these words we can cover a multitude of keywords:

The keyword 'birthday' would make us an also-ran in a race with 179 million competitors. Furthermore, someone searching for the word 'birthday' could be looking for the birthday of a famous person,they could want cards or facts or they might want to buy presents, none of which are necessarily relevant to you. When we add modifiers, localised words stop words & brand names, however, we reduce the competition and increase the percentage of people who know what they want from a search. 'Bob the Builder birthday party ideas' not only has 8 competitors but your text also includes a number of different arrangements of keywords - "Bob the Builder', birthday, 'birthday party' birthday party ideas', 'party', 'ideas', 'party ideas' and so on meaning that, whilst you are writing naturally, you are making your site appealing to people who want to know about all of these things.

Writing naturally is the name of the game, however. it is worth writing a list of these keywords, stopwords, modifiers, brand names & localised words & then knowing which major keywords you want to focus on for any given page before writing but you should not try to religiously include all combinations of these words as your text will not appeal to the people who do visit your page - this is counterproductive.

The Irrigation Approach

An approach that I have used to help people understand the dynamic linking side of search engine optimization is 'The Irrigation Approach'. In order to raise your site up the rankings, especially the Google rankings, it is helpful to imagine your site like an arid field: Your job is to sluice as much water to it as possible to make it thrive.

We want people to be able to get onto the site easily & so we need to make sure that the sluice gates to our site are open in order to let people and spiders through. In this case, getting as many well-qualified links to your site is good. Not all links will raise you up the rankings but if you take an holistic approach, each link allows people to flow through onto your site and so although a link might not have any worth to some search engines, you should always be open to the possibility that if it's allowing people in, it's broadening the market for and increasing the interest in your website.

If you imagine that each link is a leak in your irrigation system you can then decide whether you want a hole in a particular place or not. Some of the holes are beneficial - they may allow people and search engine spiders to leak into the places you most want them to visit.

Each link that has anchor text on it will deliever an accurate and focused sprinkle of people and spiders to your page. People will respond to the anchor text and you will get targeted visitors to your site and to pages on the site & the spiders will recognise how you have taken time to construct your irrigation system to deliver this timely sprinkle.

Each link that takes people away from the pages on your site that you want browsers to see is an unwanted leak. Each link that carries people out of the site is an unanted leak. Each link that takes search engine spiders away from the areas you want to index and appear high in the rankings is an unwanted leak.

You can use links at any interval on your site to allow people and spiders to leak anywhere. By using rel="nofollow", you can allow people to follow links (say to your terms & conditions) but keep spiders following along the channel. You can allow spiders to flow out in a pressurised torent to a few sites that you want to link to but if you link to many sites, then you will not have enough water in the system to make your land thrive.

There is a point where metaphor becomes confusing, but if you can imagine water springing out of each link to your site, it might help you to visualise the changes you need to make.

Wordtracker for the UK

One tool that many SEOs consider to be essential is Wordtracker, a website that enables you to see how popular certian keywords are by showing you how regularly people search for them and how many sites compete against that keyword.

Wordtracker offers its services to UK as well as US users. The UK data is available within the Keyword Researcher which can be accessed from the members home page.

On the options bar beneath the seed keywords box there is a dropdown box with the option to select the UK or the US database. The results from Wordtracker's UK data sources are held in a different database to that of the US. It is therefore easy to find keywords that are relevant to a UK audience as these may differ greatly (in spelling & taste) to those that a US audience would choose.

The strange thing about the Wordtracker site, however, is that the projects button on the homepage will only take you to US data, something which I have asked the lovely people at Wordtracker to address.

Pitfalls for Search Engine Spiders

When putting together your site, you need to bear in mind a number of factors that will hinder or prevent search engine spiders from crawling over and indexing your site. The following cause massive problems for spiders and should be avoided at all costs:

Deep Content: Any pages that cannot be reached within three clicks from the homepage.

Session Pages: Pages requiring a Cookie to enable navigation may casue problems because of the way spiders navigate.

Frames: Search engines do not like sites built on frames.

Pages Generated By a Database-Driven Site: URLs with ?, % & = signs are like red flags to search engines. It is easy for spiders to get lost in dynamic content & so much of it is not indexed.

Pages with More Than 150 Links: Search engines do not crawl large numbers of links on a site.

Pages Behind a rel="nofollow" Link: Google spiders will not follow these hyperlinks.

Pages That Require a Button to be Clicked: Pages that are only accessible using a submit button, drop-down menu or search are not indexed.


Pages Requiring a Login: Because spiders won't be able to log in.

Pages that Re-direct Before Showing Content: This is called 'cloaking' and can cause sites to be banned.

The simplest way to get your page spidered and indexed is to have HTML links to the pages you want to be crawled. Everything should be availalbe within 3 clicks of the homepage as a general rule & you should have an XML sitemap on your site to ensure that all of your content can be seen by spiders. Each page on a sitemap is considered relevant to users of search engines.

Optilink

One piece of Search Engine Optimization that is not regional is link building. All sites need good quality links on order to get a good showing in Search Engines.

Search Engines look at the web like a large voting system. The more links there are to a site, the more people are voting a site as something of interest, a destination.

There are many free tools that enable us to analyse sites to see who is linking to them - the Google Toolbar has a 'Backward Links' button that will show Google's analysis of a particular page but Optilink provides more detailed analysis from a number of search engines including AOL, AlltheWeb, Altavista, Google, Hotbot, Inktomi, MSN & Yahoo. You can request up to 1000 links at a time & you can see the anchor text that webmasters are linking to the site with.

I've enclosed a link to the video of the software which details the application in 2 minutes: http://www.windrosesoftware.com/optilink/video/ol-qs.html

Increasing Blogging Traffic

Part of the Search Engine Optimizer's job is marketing. One way of doing this is by creating a blog to draw traffic to a website. The problem is that it takes time to get people to know your blog exists, time to then get them to your blog, time to get it seen & time to have it trusted.

A company called Blog Rush have got around this with a novel solution that aims to bring many more people to your site than you would otherwise get. I have included a video below to explain this idea. It might look like a pyramid scheme but it works & it doesn't cost anything so give it a go. Please take a look at the video:



I've put the widget up in the top corner of this website & will report on the difference that it makes to this new blog. However, from reports of friends & colleagues, this can make a massive difference to blogs with high quality & can draw much needed attention to your blog and, by extention, to your site.

Please click the bottom of my widget to sign up & join the fun.

Mantra for all website owners

I read an interesting passage in one of Dan Thies's books the other day which said:

Search engines don’t care about you, they don’t care about your website, but they do care about their customers. If I get what I’m looking for when I use a search engine, I’ll use it again. Search engines are trying to deliver the most relevant resultspossible for every search.

It sounds harsh but it's excellent advice for anyone trying to create a website that needs to be plugged in to search engines. When thinking about your company's website, be sure to build it with your customers and with the search engines in mind. It is all very well wanting a snazzy or 'flashy' site as it makes you look good but if there is no content, users will not stay around ling & the search engines will not look favourably on your hard work.

This is where some of the sites I have been asked to look at recently have come unstuck. If you look at the Ice Cricket website or the party supplies website, you will notice that they are all light on text-based content. As a result, they will fall behind sites that provide up-to-date detailed text-based content in the long-run.

If you're thinking of designing a website for any reason, please let me know & I'll try to help you where I can.