This should produce a list of all the pages in your site that Google has found, and decided were worthy of indexing. If no pages were found then you need to call The SEO Guy!

If you cannot figure it out, feel free to contact us for assistance because we get to deal with these kinds of issues every day!   

Multiple Domain Names Penalty

If you own a web site AND you have multiple domain names registered, you might want to read this with your full attention. There are a great many web sites out there which, by inappropriate use of multiple domain names, effectively cripple their search engine rankings by blatantly breaching search engine guidelines! Site owners often register more than one domain, and there are sound reasons for doing this, including;

• The main URL includes a keyword phrase but is too long to type quickly, so a shorter, cryptic one is utilised and maybe is also used on business cards and letter heads.
• You take various versions of domains to prevent competitors from grabbing them – dot.com, dot.co.nz, dot.biz, dot.info etc, and point them all to the “main” site.
• You take various country versions – dot.co.nz, dot.com.au, dot.co.uk because you are going to expand into those markets – but in the interim you point them all to the “main” site.

There are also misguided reasons for doing this, including;

• Having multiple domains pointing to the same location in the hope that the search engines will be duped into indexing ALL of them as different content, giving you lots of top rankings under different domains.

Search engines hate duplicated content with a passion… but their automated spiders and bots cannot determine which category YOU fall into – uninformed and innocent of intent, or deliberately and knowingly manipulative. So all sites who transgress can expect to be treated equally. And yes, you can be banned from the SE indexes for getting it wrong!

The search engines do not give out many guidelines – in fact they are all very coy about giving too information much away. However, when they do make a statement by way of guidelines, regardless of how politely it is worded, you had best sit up and take notice because they are really, really serious about it!

Google Guidelines on Multiple Domains

In the case of Google, their Webmaster Guidelines are unambiguous! E.g. on this page; http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 Google are quite clear on this;

Quality Guidelines – Specific Guidelines

• Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content

What This Means to You

There is a clear and present danger in having multiple sites pointing to the same location if they load exactly the SAME content - this is a SERIOUS breach of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and is expressly FORBIDDEN because the search engines can only interpret this as a blatant attempt to generate duplicate content under different URL’s. Regardless of your actual intentions in this, its likely to result in a BAN from search engine indexes. Not a good start to an online presence, right?

Ignorance of The Law is No Excuse

Ignorance of search engine guidelines is not a valid excuse either! Unfortunately, many web designers and hosting companies are blissfully unaware of the correct way to implement multiple domain names. The result is that many web site owners unknowingly jeopardise their site’s inclusion in the search engine rankings.

My advice is that if you have more than one domain name, you check how its been set up.  If your have two domains; http://www.2nddomain.com and  http://www.2nddomain.com and BOTH load the same pages but with the different domains showing, then you have a problem. If you can also load the sites as http://www.2nddomain.com and http://www.2nddomain.com then totals 4 different ways of indexing the SAME content!
 

The Right Way to Do It 

That said, it IS permitted to have multiple domains pointing to the same content BUT it may only be done via the use of a Permanent 301 Redirect being applied to the secondary domains, e.g. typing in the URL for any of the secondary domains will redirect you to the main site. This change can easily be implemented, at no cost other than a few of minutes of time.

In this example,  http://www.2nddomain.com is redirected to http://www.2nddomain.com and and neither visitors nor SE spiders ever “see” content under the secondary domain name. The same logic should also be applied to the non-www versions of both domain names to complete the process and to prevent potential conflicts with the search engines.

Write and Distribute Articles, Boost PR and Join Web 2.0

Have you considered Article Writing as an SEO Tool to boost your Google Page Rank? No? Not at all?

Well, imagine for a moment a community that brings content providers (authors) together with content users (websites) to provide the content sifters (search engines) with the results desired by the content seeker (web surfers).

The web surfer savours the content appetiser and clicks the link to go directly to more content provided at the author’s web site – thus completing the circle. Along the way, everyone’s requirements are satisfied;

• The web surfers gets the information he/she required
• The search engine has relevant results to display
• The websites has good content to offer
• The author becomes known as an expert and gets more visitors, more sales, and more success…
• The author’s web site receives a decent Page Rank boost from all the new links

Perhaps THIS really IS Web 2.0!!!

Click HERE for a more detailed look at Articles as an SEO Tool…

So What the Hell IS Search Engine Optimisation – A verbose explanation…

Table of Contents

1 Introduction
2 The Two Approaches Traffic Generation
2 Site Optimisation
2 Pay-Per-Click
3 Search Engines
4 Some Immutable Laws
4.1 Form Follows Function
4.2 You Never Get a Second Chance to Make a First Impression
4.3 What vs Who
4.4 Content is King
4.5 No Page More Than Two Clicks Away
4.6 Mighty Meta-tags
4.7 Dubious Practices
5 Site Submissions
6 Summary

1 Introduction

What actually is search engine optimisation? This article sets out to dispel some of the myths surrounding SEO, and to promote awareness of the practice as tool to achieve a return on investment for your web site.

There is obviously confusion in the minds of many, as evidenced by the varied approaches seen within any cross-section of web sites. A lack of understanding is apparent on the part of many web designers e.g. those whose design techniques ensure that search engines cannot penetrate to any internal content!

In essence, SEO is the art of clarification and qualification, with a clear emphasis on the principle that “form follows function.” Thus, it is semantic, pedantic, and language-orientated rather than the marvel of the technical wizardry inherent in the dreaded Flash and JavaScript which (usually) serve to undermine it. Many designers obsess on form, building sites that serve as monuments to their creative genius. In an ideal world, a site would be first designed to fulfil its “function” of attracting clients and making sales, and its “form” would be one supporting element in the overall strategy aimed at achieving a “return on investment” for their clients.

To some degree, SEO is a moving target. Indeed, the pace of change in the past 2 years the major search engines have developed a habit of revising their relevancy ranking algorithms, amending listing options, changing alliances, altering customer base, changing names and content sources, not to mention buying and selling each other.

The bottom line is that it does not matter how good your site looks, if no one can find it.
There are several immutable laws that, if adhered to, will ensure your site prospers, and delivers the elusive ROI. The goal is generation of “qualified traffic” – defined as those who come to you because they want what you offer, and not by accident.

2 The Two Approaches Traffic Generation

The two approaches to raising the profile of a web site, SEO and PPC, are quite complimentary. Because it is difficult to optimise a site for a very wide range of keyword phrases, PPC marketing can greatly extend your reach. Optimise your site for the major keyword terms, and use PPC to target less obvious, lower volume keyword search terms.

2.1 Site Optimisation

First and foremost in generating traffic is site optimisation which, after the initial outlay, generates “free” traffic from search engines based on your ranking for particular search terms. This is the “Content is King” approach, and requires us to persuade the search engine that we have the content most relevant to the search. Volume and organisation is important, and we ensure that search engines can index all supporting content.

2.2 Pay-Per-Click

The “Function follows Form” approach, where you are quite prepared to pay to ensure people find your site, sometimes because its cheaper than rebuilding it. You “bid” for sponsored listing placement, and pay each time a visitor clicks on a “sponsored link” on a search engine and goes through to view your site. PPC allows you to generate traffic even if your site is poorly optimised, but is by far the most expensive option long term.

An advantage is that PPC campaign setup can allow the viewer to go direct to the page with the content most relevant for the term being used, e.g. bypassing splash pages etc.

The two heavyweights of PPC are Google’s Adwords, and Yahoo Search Marketing (previously Overture) Each has a slightly different approach to the PPC solution. Both are affordable and both have easy set up processes for establishing advertising campaigns. Copywriting is the key skill, as both have limited title and description space, which will have you sweating as you try to squeeze a sales pitch into a 35-40 character title!

3 Search Engines

There have been huge changes in the search engine scene in the past couple of years, from the spectacular rise of Google to the demise of Northern Light as a public search facility. Overture purchased AllTheWeb and AltaVista, and in turn was purchased by Yahoo, and so it went on. Google now supplies search results to almost half the lesser search engines – Anzwers, AOL, Netscape, ICQ Search, IWON etc.

However, from an SEO perspective the important changes are more fundamental than that, and relate to directory vs spider-based indexing. For a long period of time, an accurate listing in both the human-edited Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory were crucial to search engine traffic. Back then, even the spider-based engines such as Google placed great emphasis on directory categories, and if you were not listed in Open Directory, Google might not index you at all!

Both those directories seem now to have passed their “use-by date” in terms of delivering traffic but Google and Yahoo still place great emphasis on their links. Listings in the DMOZ and Yahoo directories are of tremendous credibility value to your site, and are probably the best links of all to have!

Between them, Google, Yahoo and MSN, account for almost 90% of all searches performed on the web, and all three of these search engines now derive their bulk content from spider-based indexing processes.

Therefore, it is more crucial than ever before that your site is optimised to allow your content to be indexed by search engine spiders!

4 Some Immutable Laws

There are some rules to be followed for success to occur…

4.1 Form Follows Function

Decide what role your web site should fulfil in your business plan. Build and maintain it to meet the defined functions. Keep it simple, make it fast and clean and above all, avoid any technology which impedes functionality. This includes unnecessary animations or graphics which slow page load times, encouraging visitors to move on to more responsive sites.

Databases can also be a serious impediment to indexing of internal content, and in many cases are total overkill, especially for smaller sites. Usually, they defeat the goal of creating multiple unique pages by serving generic Title, Description and Keyword meta-tags. They also generate complex URL’s which search engines cannot always penetrate, and even the creation of Site Map pages is rendered overly complex. Any URL with an “&” or a ‘?” in it has the potential to at best impede or at worst block a search engine spider’s access.

In most cases the use of databases is gratuitous and unnecessary, a fast-fix solution to the designer’s goal of churning out a site at the least possible cost and the greatest possible profit. In many cases a template approach would have been more suitable.

Templates if thoughtlessly implemented, may create equally serious impediments to unique page content. I.e. many template implementations do not provide for unique, page specific meta-tags.
Having one generic Title, Description and Keyword meta-tag on every page of the site is a truly appalling, but common, design “feature.”

4.2 You Never Get a 2nd Chance to Make a 1st Impression

Splash pages annoy people! This is a serious tactical mistake when you are trying to convert window-shoppers into clients. Splash pages are usually “slow to load” Flash or JavaScript applets which serve no purpose other than impede access to the “real” content. Attention spans on the Internet are short, and there are plenty of “good” sites to choose from. Eliminate every impediment and impel your visitors directly into the “guts” of your site.

The dreadful “Click to Enter Site” splash page with no content expels potential clients into cyberspace, looking for a “better” site that delivers immediate gratification to their quest.

Worse, the search engines place primary emphasis on the entry or Home page. If this page has no content, a fault common to almost all “splash” pages, can you guess where your rankings are going to be? Nowhere, because the search engine cannot find enough content to even categorise the site, let alone establish its relevancy to a query.

4.3 What vs Who

Clarify what it is your site offers, and ensure that this is clearly articulated throughout its content. Unless you are a “household name” brand, the focus should be on what you produce, sell or service, not on who you are.

Searchers usually refine a query with 2-4 words, e.g. “stainless steel spade” It is amazing how many sites waste vital opportunities with fatuous lines like “Welcome to my web site.”

Define the key words or phrases that potential customers would use to find you. Ensure that those are prominent components of every title, description, heading and paragraph, and part of a coherent sales pitch. For example the Johnson spade manufacturer’s site title ought not be “Welcome to the Johnson Agricultural Implements Web Site.” Instead, a minimalist “Stainless steel spades by Johnson” would provide maximum keyword density.

4.4 Content is King

• The goal of search engines is to deliver the most relevant content for each search
• Your goal is to make sure your content is relevant to any search made for products or services you offer!

The best way to ensure “free” prominence for your site is to provide valuable, in-depth, relevant content. A few lines of explanatory text buried inside a Flash animation do not do this. Product reviews, case studies, white papers, client testimonials, newsletters and manufacturers specifications are good content creation sources.

Make each page unique, and target a specific key word or phrase in meta-tags and body text.

Sites constructed entirely in Flash might look great, but they are destined for mediocrity in the “free” search engine traffic stakes.

4.5 No Page More Than Two Clicks Away

Wherever you are within a site, no page should be more than 2 clicks away from you. The search engines will usually only drill 3 layers deep. If you want all content indexed, this is a crucial issue, usually resolved via a Home page link to a site map page which in turn has text links to every internal page. A recent alternative is the Google Site Maps submission service which is well worth the effort of signing up to, not least for the excellent statistical information Google will provide you!

It is also important to provide hyperlinks to main internal pages from within Home Page body text. This elevates their importance, and reinforces keywords or phrases within the Home Page with relevant supporting content.

4.6 Mighty Meta-tags

There are many meta-tags. Most are ignored. Some, like the “keyword” tag are now less used by search engines due to persistent abuse. However, there are still two meta-tags crucial to your goal of a steady stream of qualified traffic. Both provide an opportunity to control exactly what viewers see by way of search engine results, and thus influence viewers decision to select your site from that list.

Both provide valuable information to the search engines as they try to determine the site’s theme, category, type etc;

First is the Title, the content of which is displayed on the top line of the browser when viewing a site. The page title is also used as the “headline” displayed when/if it appears on a search engine’s search results page. This is a crucial 1st impression, and again, “Welcome to My Web Site” does not cut the mustard. Summarise your offerings in less than 10 words, ensuring that the primary keywords or phrase is pre-eminent, thus ensuring maximum keyword density.

Second is the Description tag, often used verbatim in search engine’s search results page. Again, this gives you an opportunity to influence a searcher’s click-through decision, and should reinforce the message in the title in less than 25 words / 200 characters. Again, the primary keywords or phrase should occur at the start of the description to ensure emphasis, and total character count should be restricted to 200 in order to maintain maximum keyword density.

4.7 Dubious Practices

Necessity is the mother of invention, and the vital importance of Top 10 search engine rankings has spawned some seriously dodgy mechanisms to enable sites to climb to the top of the heap. These have ranged from the simple tricks of hidden text to the mysteries of doorway and hallway pages, link farms, and on to the intricacies of cloaking and redirection.

Basic rule of thumb should be – don’t do anything which might be construed as spamming, or subverting the search engines indexes.

Once a site is banned from a search engine index, it’s pretty much dead in the water. The search engines are always on the alert to newly discovered loopholes and close them quickly once discussion of new “trick” begins in search engine forums and list servers. Instead, rise to the top of the heap on merit, it’s a better long-term strategy!

5 Site Submissions

Having rebuilt your site in a search engine friendly fashion, how do you ensure it’s included within the indexes of the various search engines. This is another area which has changed dramatically. A few short years ago, listings were free. Not that long ago, you’d have to buy into a 48 hourly indexing process on Inktomi etc to ensure you stayed listed. Such a system delivered good value to the customer whilst generating good revenue for the search engines.

The state of flux seems to have eased. Indexing footpaths have been constructed between linked sites – to the point where if you have no good links TO your site, you may not be indexed at all, regardless of manual submissions.

The “Submission to 10,000 Search Engines for $99.95” was never good value, and is even less so today.

6 Summary

In terms of total traffic potential, the three main search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN, each of which feed their results into sundry subsidiary search engines and portals. The Big Three account for around 90% of all searches performed on the Internet. They are all now “spider” type engines, which index the content of web sites in an automated manner, and are not hierarchical, human-edited directories. They all have supplementary “sponsored listings” derived from PPC advertising subscription systems.

For a site owner, search engine optimisation of your web site is now even more important than it ever was. Your goal of a steady stream of qualified traffic is best met by ensuring you have the best content, organised/optimised in the best manner, and supplemented by well designed and managed PPC campaigns.

If you are a web designer, you have an obligation to your clients to ensure their sites are built in a manner which facilitates search engine indexing, instead of impeding it. Establish the function first, and the form as a secondary issue.

If you are business planning a new web site (or contemplating reconstruction of an existing site) insist on making SEO the most important design criteria, it will save you money in the long term, and ensure the return on investment (ROI) timetable is shortened.

Ben Kemp,
aka “The SEO Guy” (NZ)

Authors Note: Ben is a free-lance IT consultant and one of NZ’s longest serving SEO practitioners, working mainly for small to medium-sized business clients in New Zealand and Australia. A recipient of NZ and Australasian awards for achievement in Information Technology, he works either from his home on the rugged West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island, or from an apartment in Thailand – depending on the weather, and if its trout fishing season or not!

Contact Details;
———————————————-
The SEO Guy (NZ)
Email: bjk
Web: www.comauth.co.nz
Phone (+64) 0274 778 078
———————————————

So… what the hell IS Search Engine Optimisation? a brief explanation…

A great many web sites are launched every year, and in some respects it’s a little like building a shop in the middle of a forest e.g. you can’t see the wood for the trees.

Web design and search engine optimisation are two quite different disciplines. Most web designers are focused on form – intent of producing a visually attractive site which will gain a cusomers interest and attention long enough to make the sale etc. Few web page designers implement SEO as an integral part of the web development project.

Retrospective SEO requires a great deal of extra effort and, consequently, additional costs. For that reason many site owners opt to not do this at the outset, but find it necessary to address it later when site traffic does not match initial expectations.
 
For any business enterprise hoping to make any Internet-based sales, or promote its services, it is crucial that your prospective clients can actually find your web site.  A great many businesses and clients will make their first contact via search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The prospective client seeks out a service or product by making a search using a particular key word or phrase. Those web sites that appear in the first 1-2 pages of results have the best chance of making a sale. If your site does not rank in the Top 30 results, you basically have no chance of success, as barely 10% of searchers will go to or past the 3rd page of results. If they don’t find what they want of the first or second page, the majority will either refine their search term, or go to a different search engine.  

Search Engine Optimisation is all about marketing your web site more effectively, with the goal of improving your site’s exposure to customers and clients on the Internet. It has often been described as “part art and part science.” There are two main aspects to SEO;

The first is where we improve your “organic” or natural search results -achieving higher rankings by optimising and increasing the relevancy of your site to a specific search query. This is done by carefully analysing your sites ‘”theme” and ensuring that it is easy for the search engines to accurately categorise and index it. This requires the ability to concisely and accurately describe precisely what the site is about, using correct key words and phrases.

These key words and phrases are positioned at the strategic on-page and off-page locations that search engines expect to find such descriptive elements. These elements include meta-tags such as Title, Descriptions, Keywords, Image ALT and Comment tags, page and image file names, hyperlinked anchor text & bookmarks, paragraph headings, and body text.

Organic search engine rankings are regarded as the ultimate because they are “free” once the initial work is done. Better still, searchers regard these “natural” high rankings more favourably than the sponsored listings type described next.

The second aspect of SEO is pay-per-click, where your site appears in the “sponsored listing” section of the search engine’s results page and in Adsense advertising panels in many individual web sites. This requires you first to develop a list of relevant keywords or phrases. Then, you write advertising copy by way of titles and descriptions to be displayed to a searcher who uses the keywords or phrases you’ve chosen.

If a searcher clicks on your listing within the “Sponsored Listings” and goes to your site, you pay a predetermined amount per click. You set the “bid” threshold that you will pay, and this ranges from a few cents to over a $ for very competitive keywords. The most commonly encountered example of PPC is on Google – do a search for anything, you will 2-3 sponsored listings at the top of the page, and a block of them down the right hand side.  

For many businesses, a combination of organic and PPC search engine optimisation works best. This is especially true if you sell a wide variety of items. Under those circumstances, it can be difficult to target all possible permutation of keywords and phrases within pages on the site. However, using Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, it is possible to target hundreds or key words and phrases – the usual editorial criteria being that you can only use terms which are relevant to the content on your site.  Listings are validated by the PPC editorial staff prior to allowing them to go live online.

Both organic and PPC options are good at delivering “qualified” traffic to your site e.g. these are visitors who actively searched for the specific product or service, found a link to your site and clicked on it.

These days there is a great deal of competition amongst millions of web sites for rankings on the search engines. If you do not ensure your site is properly optimised for your specific theme, product and service, then it is doomed to mediocrity.

The consequences of NOT optimising your site are;

• most people will only find you by accident
• you don’t get “qualified” traffic – visitors who want what you sell
• you miss out on sales of products and services - your competitors get them instead!

However, the “return on investment” for SEO is usually very good indeed!

A properly optimised site will see prompt and measurable increases in search engine traffic, usually accompanied by an increase in enquries and sales.

Author: The SEO Guy