Tafiti - The future of search engines?

I have recently been trying the beta version of a search engine called Tafiti, built by Microsoft. It seems to have some particularly useful features. The name 'Tafiti' is Swahili for 'do research': the search engine is more robust than most making it a very useful platform for researchers and for anyone who needs to do multiple searches to compile what they need.

Whats makes Tafiti stand outout is its ability to 'stack' individual search results together. If you type in 'Charles Darwin' & you can see that of a result is of interest to you, you can drag it to a 'stack' and continue to search. You can drag pictures, rss feeds, maps and pretty much anything to the 'stack'. These collections of resources can then be named and the excerpts you have selected are put in an html page that can either be emailed to you or to your colleagues or it can be published to your webspace.

Search results can be further filtered so that you can see items of specific interest within a broader category. For example, within my Charles Darwin search page, I might filter for articles with the word 'Beagle'.

There is a 'carousel' which enables you to view the results by different types (pictures, web pages, feeds etc) without clicking away from your page.

Finally, the search engine has cross-browser support and your searches can be saved for later, say if you were researching from home & from work.

I believe that the search engine has been in beta form since August but it's well worth a look. It is far more dynamic than most search engiens and offers functionality without complication.

Stuck for Content - How About an FAQ?

One of the problems that small firms have is the size of their budget. Often a website budget has been based on that the design of a website costs and does not take into account the value of good copy.

Well-written copy, in my research, increases the business done on e-commerce websites by 40% on average. Well-written copy gets browsers enganged & gives them the key facts & entices them without bambozzling them with science.

Many firms do not want to pay for this service, however, and would rather write the content themselves. This can be fine but it's amazing how many people are dumbstruck when it comes to writing about their business, even if they go out and sell it all day every day.

One way to get started is with an FAQ. By thinking about the questions you get asked the most, by polling your clients to see what most concerns them when they make a decision involving your industry and by formulating questions and answers for each of the aspects of your business you have done three things:

1. Formed the basis of each section of your site - you know the questions people ask when they're interested in your services now write your copy accordingly
2. Created extra content for your site - you now have a user-friendly FAQ that people can refer to, allowing them to feel reassured by you & your business.
3. Gained an extra page for optimization - you can link each question back to the relevant pages of your site with anchor text.

This can be an invaluable way of showcasing you as a source of good advice, of creating extra content & of increasing the content and relevance of your pages within the search engines.

It's Official - Paid Links Can Harm You

After the recent drop in the rankings of certain directories, it seemed that Google was on a mission to cut out the practice of webmasters paying for premium listings on websites. A recent update to the Google Webmaster section now shows this to be true:

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.

Google's arguement is that paid links can create inequity in searches with the people with the deepest pockets being able to buy prestige which does not correspond to their standing or merit within the community.

Buying and selling links does have a place, especially in directories that need to invest time & effort analysing their content but links sold purely for advertising purposes have no place in Google's new world and sites found exercising this practice will be penalised.

Link Building - Tips for Emailing

Part of any link building strategy involves contacting the webmaster of the sites you have identified as good targets. The most unobtrusive way of doing this is by email. It is not pushy & means that people can get back to you at their leisure. That said, because email is more leisurely & less pressured, you need compelling reasons why people should link to your content.


Eric Ward at Search Engine Land has identified a typical email that might be sent:


Greetings;
My name is Ga+++++ +++++++++, and I'm in charge of getting links of web site. I have visited your site http://www.ericward.com/articles/index.html and I believe a link exchange could benefit us both.
I'm offering you the following: If you place a link to my site in just one single page in your website, I'll place a link to your website in 3 different sites. I'll provide you the details. These are my sites info:
Title: Web marketing GroupURL: http://www.webmarketinggroup.co.uk/Description: Online marketing solutions delivering measurable results. Services include search engine optimisation, website design and digital magazines.
And these are the sites where I would place a link to your site:
http://www.wmwebtech.com/ : PR6http://www.dcadultliteracy.org/ : PR6http://www.usalah.org/ : PR5
As you can see, all of these sites have a decent PR, so if you are interested, please add the link to your site, reply to this mail and I would gladly add your link in my sites after I verify them.
Thanks a lot for your attention, hope to hear back from you.
++++++++++oup.co.ukGab++++++ ++++

On the face of it, it's not too bad & you may well have sent something similar at some time, but, on closer inspection, there are a number of problems that would put off a number of webmasters.

These are:

ADDRESS - the address that this email is being sent to is wrong, this shows a slapdash approach. If you want to link to quality sites, you wouldn't expect to find one at the end of a poorly thought-out email. Furthermore, the emailer is mailing an address that has not asked for content form the site. This makes the email unsolicited.

IMPERSONAL - there is no name included despiste the link to the ericward.com website.

'GETTING LINKS' - this person is obviously paid to get links and so you might not trust the content.

JARGON - terms like 'link exchange' and 'PR' are used which might be of no use to the webmaster.

GMAIL ADDRESS - although you might not be able to tell this, the email comes from a gmail account which is not very professional.


When people make the decision to link they want to link to relevant well-thought-out sites. They do not want to do it because a link exchange would be of benefit (this is not quantified), they just want to find good content.

Using Digg as part of your search engine marketing campaign

Many optimizers try to find new traffic in a variety of ways. One more modern method is by trying to create a stir on a social networking or social bookmarking site. One of the bigest sites, as far as new, informative content is concerned is Digg, a site that allows users to recommend (digg) or 'bury' a story according to their perception of its usefulness to the community. This can be a hit & miss affair, subject to whimsy and to the fact that you are promoting something rather than doing something for altruistic purposes. The results, though, can be more than worthwhile, with massive numbers of browsers being drawn to a site that has something which evokes zeitgeist.

The frustration of trying to work out just what makes a good story or just how Digg works can be eased in knowing that Digg has an algorithm in order to assess which pages are the most popular at any given time & should be thrust into the limelight of the Digg homepage. The algorithm is used to ensure that community participation is fair and that no one can unduly influence content promotion. Therefore, the algorithm is kept secret from the community to prevent people from bypassing or manipulating it.

Unlike editorially driven sites like Slashdot where news is handpicked by a tiny group of individuals, socially driven sites use the votes aggregated by the community to decide what content gets promoted to their home pages to be viewed by the masses. At the same time, content promotion isn't as simple as just comparing absolute number of votes that each submission gets and then promoting the ones with the most votes. There are several other things to consider:

Recent participation rank of user and followers

Depending on how successful you have recently been on Digg, subsequent successes may be more difficult. The rank and recent successes of a user are taken into account both when you are submitting a story and also while Digging (voting on stories). If you get a quick succession of Diggs from "high-value" users, you are likely to be promoted faster and at a lower number of Diggs, than if even dozens of new users Digg you. This, of course, is to ensure that the Diggs are of good quality and the community is actually doing its work by voting for good content and burying bad content.

Voting activity

The number of Diggs your story will require to reach the home page is correlated to the number of votes (Diggs) generally being cast on Digg at any given time and how your story compares to the average.

Submission category and activity in the category

Competition in some categories (Technology, Word and Business) is much fiercer than in other categories (Sports, Entertainment) and therefore it is much easier to submit and have something promoted in the Sports/Motorsport category than Technology/Tech. Industry News. Also, along with being compared to general voting activity on Digg, your content is compared more directly (and probably with more weight) to content in its category. For example, it is possible to have a story promoted at 50 Diggs even though it's not high on the upcoming queue for all sections, as long as it is at the top in the queue for its category.

Speed of votes and diversity of voters

The faster a story gets votes, the lower the vote count has to be at which it is promoted. For example, a story may collect 120 Diggs over 24 hours and not be promoted. If the same story gets 90 Diggs in one hour it will almost certainly hit the front page. At the same time, however, it is incredibly important to have diversity in votes. Diversity helps prevent people from banding together into "voting-rings" and unfairly pushing their stories to the top. This is one of the reasons why you see stories from top-ranked users sit at the top of the queue for hours waiting to fulfill the algorithm's diversity requirement (i.e. they are penalized for having a following of users that Digg every one of their stories).

Buries received

This is quite straightforward. The more buries you, the longer it will take for your content to be promoted. If the Bury to Digg ratio (which is not 1:1; buries are weighted more heavily than Diggs) is too high, your story will completely be removed from the queue. That said, it is possible for a story to acquire enough votes to outgrow the Buries it gets.

Comments and comment ratings received

Participation in the comments can help push a story over the edge. People think that inserting "great article—thanks!" will help further their cause, while in reality these fake comments have the exact opposite effect. There is nothing easier than spotting a spammy submission with fake comments and burying it to oblivion. Naturally acquired comments (and ones that are voted up by the community), on the other hand, help tip the content promotion algorithm in your favor.

Myths

There are a number of misconceptions about the algorithm that are worth addressing. Following on from above, most of them are common sense but they can save you masses of time whe you know them. These mosconceptions are:


An absolute number of votes is required

There is no absolute number. The number varies daily and even hourly. As mentioned before, the number of Diggs you need varies based on submission category, recent participation record of the submitter and subsequent Diggers, as well as the number of votes and the time in which they are aggregated and the diversity of the voters.

You're doomed if your story isn't submitted by a top-user

There is no such thing as content being automatically promoted to home-page. Even the best content, submitted by the most consistent user can get buried if enough people don't like it and Bury it. The algorithm tries to ensure a level playing field for all users (though this doesn't always work), and in fact is sometimes harsher on top users than on newer ones.

Wrong: Number of friends is important

The number of friends you add on Digg is completely irrelevant. What Digg looks for is diversity in the Diggs a story receives. Digg friends are likeminded people & will not help your diversity.

There is a 24-hour window for success

A small number of submissions do get promoted after submission if people continue to regularly show interest in them. The key is in the story being interesting rather than in a timescale.

Planning your web presence

These days, a website is a must for businesses. With over 8 in 10 businesses using broadband, the Internet has become as useful a resource as any to find information.

Ask yourself how you find information about potential suppliers. Do you use the Yellow Pages, do you look in the newspaper or in trade magazines or do you finds search engines like Google are far quicker and can deliver informaiton that answers all your questions?

The planning of a web presence should never be taken lightly. You are creating a shop window (or even a shop) that is acting as your online ambassador 24 hours a day. If you judge the people you do business by how they appear then people will judge you by your website. This can be truly liberating, however, as the Internet gives even the smallest business the chance to shine. This can only happen, though, if thought is given to the following aspects of your online arm:

Domain Name - The first step in gaining a web presence comes with registering a domain name. Ensure that your name makes it clear what your company is about as this will help your search engine rankings in the long-run.

Hosting - In order to put your site on the Internet, it must be hosted on a web server. There are a myriad of hosting companies offering different services. You need to think whether you're going to stream video or audio from the site, whether the site is built on a database, what scripts the server needs to run (do you just need a contact form or will you need something more elaborate) and how many people will use the site in order to make an informed decision.

Copywriting is an important part of selling online. Our research has shown that clear, well-written copy on the homepage of an e-commerce site increases sales by 40%on average.

Design encompasses a number of subjects from the logo to the look, feel and structure of your site. Be sure to set up your site in a way that emphasises what you do and why you do it better than anyone else. Try to devote seperate pages to different elements of your business as this will help larger portions of your site to be of relevance for those searching for you.

Optimization is a key part of any business's web strategy. Without trumpeting yourself to the general public you are practically invisible. Without favourable search engine rankings you limit your audience to those who already know about the site which is not helpful at all.

Try to find an optimizer that knows the specifics of the UK market and the details of UK searches. Be sure that the firm offers statistical packages showing not only how you are improving in the rankings but how many people are visiting your site as a result of the optimization process.

Marketing - A good design firm should be able to offer marketing services. Marketing can cost as much or as little as you want it to and it can bring massive rewards. Try to include a news page so that your site's content is kept fresh and up-to-date. Include anything that is newsworthy in this section and people will begin to pick up on it.

Advertising - If you are advertising products or a high-value service you may need to consider a pay per click advertising scheme. This can bring you instant traffic and sales. See if your design firm has pay per click services.

Email campaigns - In order to keep your clients and customers up-to-date, an email campaign can be an unobtrusive but highly effective way of increasing sales. Try to run a campaign before every special offer or change in your company's practices. Be sure that your campaign tracks the number of emails that are read, the number that are bounced back & treated as spam and the number of sales made as a result of the email so that you can calculate your return on investment.

Before planning a new website or upgrading an existing one, it is important to bear all of these things in mind. If you can find a firm that can offer a comprehensive service or at least if you think about these aspects of a web presence for yourself, your site will be better planned & there will not be problems down the line. It is easy for an optimizer to get involved beofre a site has been designed than after and some simple advice can make a massive difference to your rankings.

Link Building - Starting Out

The most important part of any optimization campaign is link-building. Getting relevant links from relevant sites to your content will improve your rankings like nothing else.

In order to get you started, I've assembled a few pointers:

Apply to the Open and Yahoo! directories

Submit to solid directories such as Joe Ant, Skaffe and Gimpsy

Join your chamber of commerce, industry association, marketing organisaition, masonic lodge or anything to get your name out.

Issue press releases on a regular basis. Printed media gets you know & media websites will include the printed text & links.

Buy a list of high-profile journalists and contact directly for one-on-one interviews

Backlink your competitors and those ranking ahead of you for link and advertising leads.

Announce your new site in targeted industry magazines. Buy advertising, if necessary.

Comment on the sites of prominent bloggers in your industry to get your site known.

Create a blog and update it regularly. If your site is seen as a destination rather than a passing-place, you will receive more weeks. Add the blog to all the blog directories & RSS feeds to RSS directories.

Some of these things cost money. If you are just starting out, you will learn far more by not paying in the first instance, you will find out how to get links for free & you will quickly find what works. If you have a budget, split it wisely and do not exceed it.

Finding Quality Directories

There are a number of directories on the Internet. From the Yahoo Directory which started out as Jerry Yang's way of cataloguing interesting sites, to the Open Directory, Google's pet project, your entry in a directory can show your site's intentions as being serious. However, there are thousands of directories out there and, with last month's shake-up many have lost their value as they fail to provide useful or filtered information.

Paying for an entry in a directory may appeal as it is a guaranteed way to get your site listed and linked on the Internet for free. The problem is that this can be unending. It is hard to know if you should pay for a listing and where you should draw the line. Matt Cutts, Google's mainstay on optimization issues, gives the following guidelines on the usefulness of a directory:

I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a
directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:-
Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets
closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.- What is the quality
of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the
urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That
doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.- If there is a fee, what’s
the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for
the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

If your fee is extortionate, if it guarantees you entry to a directory or if it enables you to get the anchor text you want on the link, you should not
entertain buying it.

Do not rule out directories altogether, though, as the good ones include an element of human interaction that search engines cannot provide. Search engines reward such resources as they inform searches and help to make them relevant.

Keep assessing your keywords

The Internet, more than anything, is subject to fashions, fads & whimsy. Everything is transitory and people and their wants change too. Keywords are the same. As users become more savvy & niche markets are opened up, trends in searches change. It is worth keeping on top of this if you want to continue to drive qualified browsers to your site.

In order to research your keywords successfully you need to seek out keywords within your niche; analyze your keywords for potential profitability & decide which keywords are appropriate for your business. Just because a keyword is popular doesn’t mean that it will be profitable for you. That’s where you have to analyze the keywords themselves as search terms and weigh them against your own site concept.

Recheck the keywords you are using every six months. You might not need to make changes but you may get a sense of how your market is changing and what your company needs to do in order to keep up.

Localise your website

It is often very difficult to make your website's local advantege count for anything. UK-based companies look to find advantages to having a UK-based website but don't want to be seen as UK-only enterprises nor do they like beign lost in the global results that many search engines can give.

Last week, Google began to offer a solution. Business location can be registered through Google Webmaster Central. In the tools tab, thee is an option to set the geographic location.

This is especially helpful if businesses trade over the web with a .com domain or if large companies have country-specific sites.

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.