The Hurbicide Guru

Google, the most popular, and many say best, search engine, offers searchers many options to help them zero in on just what they’re looking for. Although these search modifier features are documented on own site, many searchers, including experienced marketers and technically savvy people, simple don’t know these features are available. But these features, along with the Google search box, are only available to human searchers, who can type in their search parameters, and perhaps some keyboard scripting programs as well. But there is a way for programmers and web site designers to access Google’s database from their own sites, in the exact way they need. This is done by using Google’s Web API (Application Program Interface).

With the API, programmers can use most any web programming language, such as PHP, ASP, Perl, .NET, and Java. Google’s Web API provides “data hooks” that allow a remote program to access certain portions of Google easily.

You must be very aware of the Google Web API Terms of Service. You must obtain a developer key that you will include in each API use, you are allowed only 1,000 automated queries per day, and perhaps most important, you may not use the Google API for commercial purposes. It is only for your personal use, and you of course may not violate any laws or copyright protection.

Google provides a developer’s kit to help you get started. Data is interchanged between Google and the application program using an XML structure, so the results from Google should be relatively easy to parse even for only moderately experienced developers. If you have problems or questions, Google offers Getting Help, Reference and FAQ links, and you will find help and discussions on any of several forums should you need more help. Just search Google - from the search box!

About The Author

Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.sitetube.com. Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.

One of the most measurable facets of any online marketing strategy is how do I win in the serps. How do I get my site to rank substantially in Google or Yahoo?

One of the most fundamental facets in doing well in the search engines (forgetting the fundamentals like brilliant content are already set up) is bringing links to your site. You can plan for this a couple of ways, some viewed positively by the search engines and some not so happily.

One of the trusted methods, that the search engine engineers think is OK is link building with articles.

Basically this calls for writing a positive article, preferably around something from your area of expertise, and then posting it to a free article directory.

You really should not undervalue the crucial nature of link building. If there is one point that takes precedence to the search engines, on the whole, it is links. Sure, there are piles of other signals, e.g the domain name, but you are kidding yourself if you reckon you are going to be listed well, and easily noticed, if you do not gain any links.

Building links with articles is easy. It is something the search engines say is okay. And, it adds value to the web, by providing valuable content that might be interesting or useful to users. The real question is what are you waiting for?

I tried out Microsoft’s new search engine (beta version) the other day. They have been working on it quite secretly now for almost a year. It has been rumored to be a Google killer once in full public release. They say its accuracy and ability to return relevant results will far surpass any other search engine on the Internet. That remains to be seen. I tried various combinations of single, double, and triple word/phrased searches to inspect the results.

To the casual observer I suppose a certain percentage of the results would seem to be accurate, but upon closer inspection and with a trained eye, the results for the most part ranged from poor to outright terrible.

I then attempted a series of searches on the same combination of words. “custom designed screen printed t-shirts” I was attempting to determine how much the results and rankings changed (or did not change) within the same set of query words. I searched with a variety of spellings on a particular keyword In this case, I selected the word “T shirts” then t-shirts (with a dash) and finally “tshirts” (no dash, all one word)

One web site had very consistent results across all three spelling methods. This intrigued me so I clicked on the link to analyze the site. i.e. Why was this one so well optimized or more specifically why did this new Microsoft beta search engine find this web site so tasty.

The site was completely broken. None of the graphics loaded properly. (in Internet Explorer) It was devoid of any contextual content on the home page and scarcely little throughout the rest of the pages. Some scrolling Java script overlapped the button for a drop down menu. No outside links. Nothing. Excuse the pun but this was not a pretty site. How then could Microsoft possibly rank this site one, two and three for completely different keyword phrasings and spellings on a soon to be major release for a search engine?

The answer revealed itself as soon as I took a look at the web site’s HTML source code.

Guess what folks, meta tags are back! At least as far as the Beta version of Microsoft’s new search engine is concerned, especially the keyword Meta Tag. Above all, this tag seemed to account for the heaviest weight in determining the aforementioned rankings. I will err on the side of caution here and assume that Microsoft has not finalized all their algorithm parameters yet, but the keyword tag was definitely what their spider had been eating.

The problem However, (beside the horrible site) was that this particular keyword tag, by all SEO standards, was an abomination! Nearly every rule and guideline we’ve come to know and love ALL thrown out the window! It looked like a tag from 1995. Multiple repetition. Too many characters, way too many words, broken lines, poorly weighted keywords, bad spacing, and completely useless keywords. What’s a “rinsger” anyway?

Have a look for yourself. Here it is. (Without formatting changes)

KEYWORDS CONTENT=”tshirts, tees, tee shirts, tee-shirts, printed t-shirts, blank t-shirts, eshirts, ishirts, short sleeves, sweatshirts, long sleeve, v-necks, tank tops, jerseys, screenprintings, screen-printings, custom t-shirts, custom designs, custom printing, custom embroidery, michigan, fraternitys, sororitys, sportswear, artwork, typesetting, imprints, engraves, emboss, stamps, pocket ts, ts, rinsger tis, ringers, ladies ts, designs, designing, apparel, clothing, clothes, screens, printers, silkscree embroidery, embroidered, customs, fraternities, sororities, golf, towels, logos, promotional, fundraisers, personalized, company, tailgates, formals, footballs, blocks, carnivals, circus, pledges, bid, day, rush, halloween, christmas, easter, thanksgiving, halloween t-shirts, christmas t-shirts, easter t-shirts, thanksgiving t-shirts, floors, dormitory, churches, clubs, sports, sport teams, choirs, schools, businesses, fundraisers, intramural, hanes, jerseys, fruit of the looms, universities, michigan state university, MSU, msu, university of michigan, U of M, UofM, u of m, eastern michigan university, EMU, emu, western michigan university, WMU, wmu, central michigan university, CMU, cmu, colleges, universitys, universities, shrits, tshrits, t-shrits, desings, te-shirts, teshirts, sirts, shits, shitts, custums, screan”

Yup, pretty darn ugly, but the Microsoft Beta search engine seems to be eating it up. Granted this engine is still in beta version but let’s review. Broken, useless site. Broken useless tags. Number one ranking! What’s wrong with this picture?

Most search engine users will try a new search engine only a few times. When they do not get the search result accuracy and relevance they expect, they will soon dismiss it and move along. Beta version or no beta version, one thing is for certain. The Microsoft coders have plenty of additional work to do before releasing this search engine to the general public. Google coders, take the weekend off.

About The Author

Robert McCourty is a founding partner and the Marketing Director of Metamend Software and Design Ltd., a cutting edge search engine optimization (SEO) and web site promotion and marketing company. http://www.metamend.com/

Comparison of Google SEO vs. Yahoo SEO I’m certain webmasters have been debating Google vs. Yahoo SEO for some time now. It seems - at least to me anyways - that good positions on Yahoo usually net good positions on MSN as well. So one would think their ranking algorithms are somewhat similar.

I’m not sure that keeping good Google positions will benefit you on other engines. I’ve found - I can optimize for Yahoo & MSN - and they will not turn the tables on me at any given point. It may become so that in the future they are as dynamic as Google - but I have found Yahoo & MSN to contain more “static” results. By static, I mean that once you manage to get top positions on Yahoo & MSN (and especially for popular keywords) you usually are able to hold this rank for a while.

Other webmasters will agree, you either know the Google formula or you don’t. I have still not discovered the formula. I have had pages (and ones with good content too) rank well on Google for a short period of time, then disappear completely from those query results. Google is a strange creature indeed, and although I have been into Internet Marketing for over two years now (and it is my only income) I have a very hard time keeping up with Google and trying to optimize for it.

Quite frankly, I gave up after all that jibber-jabber about Update Florida and the “Sandbox Effect.” I figured such rapid changes, and such severe penalties for any given site - were uncharacteristic of Google. Google has a tendency to change their algorithms, and consequently their SERPS, almost overnight. If you’re able to hold a top position on Google for certain keywords, all the power to you. I wish I could myself - as I believe Google would supply more traffic to my site then Yahoo can.

But in the long run, optimizing for MSN & Yahoo is likely in your best interest. Unless you yourself can crack the Google code, or know someone who can/has, I would suggest sticking to optimizing for Inktomi. These old optimization methods posted for optimizing for Inktomi (a simple Google search will find them for you, I know, how ironic) actually still work very well for both Yahoo and MSN engines. I have been using them for a while now and am having no problems getting SERP listings for these keywords.

It does take a little bit of time what with link campaigns and all, but no empire was built overnight. For more information on link building, and other subjects, please read my other articles.

I am a young, aspiring computer engineer into Internet Marketing, hardware, software, web design, SEO and just about anything related to computers. Please come check out my growing PC forum at http://www.markspcforum.com

Relevant links from other websites are the foundation of any decent ranking in the search engines. Finding those links, however, can be a daunting task at first. These three strategies are the basic stuff for helping newer web sites gain one way links.

If you’re not quite sure how to go about beginning to build up relevant one way links for your web site here are my three starting strategies. If you put a decent amount of effort into them and your web site approaches a decent level of quality you will see some very good results.

Writing and submitting articles for links This one is obvious. It is also one of the very most effective ways to gain decent one way links. There are hundreds of free article directories out there. By writing articles with good, solid, useable content and submitting them to these directories it is very possible that you will find many sites using your articles and linking back to your page.

The key to this though is that you want good, useful articles. You don’t want to go around submitting articles that are just ads for your product or even articles containing a ton of links to your site and affiliate links. Write about something people want to know. You can even write for pure entertainment.

Most article directories usually allow you to include a resource box and/or author bio. This is where you will add a bit about yourself and what you do along with a couple of links to your site or sites. The terms of the directory usually specify that any body using the article for their site or ezine must use the unaltered article, including bio and resource box, leaving all the links live.

The ultimate test of your articles usefulness will be measured by its spread to other sites or use in ezines. Of course this does depend alot on how many article directories you submitted to. I can usually find my articles on other sites within three days of submission. To check and see how far your articles have spread type your articles title into the Google search bar in quotation marks. You should see most of the sites using your article.

To maximize the potential of this strategy you will have to write and submit articles consistently. People will begin looking for your name in the directories and your articles and one way links will spread. Submit to as many article directories as is possible and maybe consider investing in some article submission software if you want to get really serious.

Submit to the many different web directories There is a limitless quantity of directories that you can submit your url to for free. Large ones like DMOZ and Yahoo will get some major recognition from search engines for your site. Smaller ones are good for a free backlink and maybe a trickle of traffic. When you put it all together it adds up eventually. This strategy is usually the very start for people.

It’s important to realize that most of the big directories are incredibly picky however. A listing in DMOZ, for instance, will turn Google’s head and also get you in the Google directory and several other large directories and hundreds of web sites. DMOZ has seen everything though. Every listing is carefully reviewed by a human editor. If your site isn’t quite finished or just isn’t really all that special then you’re asking for rejection by submitting the URL to DMOZ. If you’re going to try to submit your site to the big directories then make sure you have all your ducks in a row.

You may be able to tell that I consider DMOZ the most important directory listing to add to your collection. DMOZ aside though, it’s a good idea to make sure your web site is in good shape before submitting to anything. This would even include search engines.

Discussion boards and other online communities If you’re involved in any chatroom communities, forums, video game clans or anything of the nature make sure to use the tools provided effectively. Obviously don’t spam people with your URL or affiliate links or whatever but if there is a place to add your profile then do it. If you can link to your web site in your signature then do it. If you email back and forth alot or forward all of those stupid email jokes to several hundred people add your signature to your emails with a link to your site.

This is just basic common sense. Don’t spam people or act like a walking advertisement. If you’re a respected member of an online community people will check out your profile and then your web site. If your signature has a link to your site then every post becomes a one way link to your web site. If the community ranks decently in the search engines this can definately be worth something. When people become aware of your web site there is always the chance of forming partnerships with like minded individuals that benefit your site and theirs.

Conclussion Give these strategies a trial run. With time you will find out what works best for you and come up with even better ways of tracking down the all important links. I hope you found this article helpful. Good luck.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become one of the biggest internet buzz-words recently. Everyone is talking about it. These days it seems there’s an “expert” around every corner promising all kinds of wonderful things to online business owners. Beware! If you are interested in building a long term successful online business, there are few things you should know when it comes to search engine optimization.

Before we move too far along we need to understand a little about the economics of search engines. This will give us a better understanding of why they behave the way they do and why common Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices will continue to provide diminishing returns, eventually into obscurity.

Contrary to a very common belief, internet users searching the web are not the search engine’s customers. Advertiser’s are. Just follow the trail of money and you’ll see what I mean. Internet users are the “product” that the search engines “deliver” to advertisers. Specifically they are selling highly targeted traffic to their advertising clients. When a user types in search criteria, they are expressing their desire for information (or products) related to those search terms. By delivering ads that are directly relevant to the search results, search engines are in a unique position to capitalize on the concept of targeted traffic. For advertisers, search engine users are a gold mine of pre-qualified potential customers and they are quite happy to pay a premium to get their products in front of them.

So now that that’s out of the way, how do search engines (SEs) compete with each other for those advertising dollars? The answer is two-fold and closely resembles the way any marketer goes about increasing sales. The first is obviously to get more traffic to the search engine. The second is to increase the conversion rate of that traffic. In other words the percentage of traffic that results in sales for the advertising clients. So if you own a search engine how do you accomplish these two things? The answer lies in delivering the best search results for any given search criteria. The more relevant the results that a search engine can deliver consistently, the more people will rely on it. This translates into more overall traffic and better targeting of ads to that traffic. Simple in concept… very complex in practice!

A little history lesson

In the beginning, search engines employed some rather primitive methods of determining a web page’s relevance to a search query. These methods proved to be quite simple to reverse engineer and as a result “Search Engine Optimizers” (SEOers) where able to use techniques to manipulate the search results in their favor. This abuse, often referred to as SE spam undermined the search engine’s main commodity, the quality and relevancy of it’s contextual search results. To combat the problem, the SEs developed increasingly complex mathematical algorithms to evaluate pages for possible inclusion in search engine result pages (SERPs). In addition to the traditional “on-page” information that was so easy to manipulate, many SEs began looking at a multitude of “off-page” criteria and giving them an increasing amount of weight in their overall equations.

On-page vs. off-page criteria

There are many different items that a SE looks at “on-page” when it evaluates it. The page’s title, how many occurrences of a searched word or phrase (keywords and key phrases) are on the page and their proximity to one other, what the headings on the page describe, etc. all come into play. The chief disadvantage of using only this information (aside from the ease of which it can be manipulated by clever SEOers), is that it tells nothing about the quality of the information on the page. Until the day comes (and it is coming) when search technology and computing power are sufficient to take advantage of “artificial intelligence” to make sound judgements about the quality of a page by evaluating the page alone, SEs will continue to rely heavily on “off-page” criteria. The reason for this is simple. Nothing compares to human intelligence when judging a page’s importance. Computers running even the most complex algorithms simply can’t do it.

So instead, the bright people who develop search engine technology have realized that by tracking how humans behave and interact with a web page, they can get a fairly good idea of how humans rate that page and the quality of it’s information. This is the “off-page” criteria that we are talking about. There are hundreds if not thousands of different things that are tracked and evaluated “off-page”. We know, or at least can make some pretty educated guesses as to what some of these things are. For instance, it is obvious from the collective experiences of many web professionals that SEs keep track of how many links come into a site from pages on other sites with high quality, relevant information. A link from such a source tells the SE that the information on the site that is being linked to is likely to be credible and of high quality as well. A human with related quality information on their site did link to it after all. It’s also widely accepted that search engines monitor their own search engine result pages (SERPs) to determine such things as which results are getting the most clicks (it’s not always the top ones) and how long it is before the searcher returns to the SERPs to continue searching. Obviously if the fifth site on the list is getting more clicks, it’s probable that it appears to more closely match what the searcher is looking for than the ones above it. Furthermore, if the user stays on that site for an hour rather than five seconds it’s likely that they found what they were looking for and the SE will take these things into account.

There are perhaps a handful of individuals in the world who know the whole picture of how all of this happens and if they want to keep their high paying jobs at the major SEs, they’re not about to tell you or me. But it has led to a lot of speculation among SEOers. In fact the SEO industry has evolved into a world-wide phenomena with “professional SEO consultants” charging companies tens of thousand of dollars to “get their web site into the top 10″. Some SEOers are continuously dreaming up ways of tricking the engines without getting “sandboxed” (having the engine penalize a web site by dropping it’s rank). The SEs in turn regularly update and change the algorithms that they use to rank pages so that what worked yesterday in SEO may not apply today. The SEOers scramble to catch up and the continuous cycle of “algorithm chasing” continues.

SE’s employ some of the most brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists on the planet and the unfortunate truth is that SEOers will always be at least one step behind them. Next time someone tells you that they can guarantee you a spot in the “top ten” with the major search engines ask yourself this one question. “Are they trying to sell me something?” Then walk away.

Now don’t get me wrong here. I’m not against SEO or anyone who does it. I fact, I firmly believe that a certain amount of optimization is vital to any online marketing effort, particularly at the outset of a campaign. It serves to give a site that little push in the right direction towards building traffic. But I caution anyone not to take it too far. It’s very easy to misplace too much emphasis on it.

So what do we do instead?

This one’s easy. Rather that playing the SEO numbers game with the SEs, we instead give them exactly what they’re looking for in the first place. If you recall from earlier, SEs are trying to learn from and indeed relying heavily on human behavior patterns to rate search results. The are on a mission to provide results and information that are highly relevant and real to searchers (in other words, human beings). So, provide information that is highly relevant to humans and the rest will fall into place naturally and organically. It may take a little longer, but the results will be worth it. Believe me!

Let me illustrate with a couple of examples

John decides that he would like to build a web site and make some money online. He builds a rather elaborately designed site and proceeds to optimize it to death. John’s been reading all about optimization strategies and he pulls out all the stops on this one. He has a page title that’s twenty-five words long (most of which have nothing to do with each other). He’s packed the text of his pages full of his favorite keywords to the point that they are nearly incomprehensible to a normal reader (but the search engines “love them”). He’s cross linked every page so many times that people are actually getting lost on his little 5 page site because they’re clicking on every second word which is underlined. But it doesn’t stop there. He then goes out and submits to every search engine and directory known to man regardless of locale of relevancy to his topic. He joins a few link exchanges and starts trading links with anyone who will reciprocate no matter how poor their site is. Maybe he even pays for a few “high rank links”. You get the idea. Before he knows it his site is showing up on the first page of the SERPs of all the major search engines and he’s sitting back patting himself on the back for a job well done.

Mary on the other hand comes up with and idea for an online business web site based on her area of expertise and after researching and identifying a niche in the market. She goes about building a nice simple cleanly designed web site that is logical an easy to use. She puts a lot of time and effort drawing on her experience and skills to write high quality content that is helpful to her visitors (or rather will be when she has some). After writing fifteen or twenty pages of original article content, she decides that she too should do some “optimizing”. At this point she’s realizes that the “on-page” SOE is already more or less done. Her keywords and key phrases (which she carefully researched from day one) are appearing naturally though out her articles, her page titles are reflective of the content of the pages, her headings are also aptly descriptive, and her pages navigate with function and simplicity. So, she moves on to the “off-page” optimization. She submits her site to the major search engines and directories. She then researches local and industry related directories and submits to them as well. Finally she identifies several well ranked important sites with in-demand content that is complimentary to her own and will be of use to her visitors (or rather will be when she has some). She drops a friendly e-mail to the owners of these sites outlining the possible benefits of a reciprocal link arrangement. Most, sadly, don’t reply but a couple of enlightened ones do. After reviewing her site they agree that it could be beneficial to their users as well and set up a link to her site. Mary spends the next several months occasionally checking her traffic stats, her rank in the search engines etc., but finds she is still way down on the SERPs if she’s on them at all. Not one to be discouraged though, she continues to churn out several solid articles a week and add them to her site.

Now remember John? He’s been sitting back riding the wave of initial success for the last few months. He’s even made a few sales. But then he starts to notice a disturbing trend. His site is slowly falling in the SERPs and his traffic is dropping off. People are visiting but they aren’t staying long and they’re certainly not buying anything. He also begins to notice that the large number of links he had pointing to his site are disappearing at an alarming rate. Try as he might, he just can’t seem to turn it around…

Mary’s spent the last few months patiently waiting for traffic and continuing to add excellent content to her site. And then it happens. First, a trickle of visitors come. She can see from her server logs that they are being referred from those well-chosen link partners she made agreements with. The search engines have also discovered those links and noticed the high quality sources that they are coming from. They represent a pretty good endorsement and the SE’s are starting to realize that Mary’s site must have something useful to offer. Consequently Mary’s rank starts to improve. Now people begin to find her in the SEs. Even though her site is still a page or two down in the SERPs people seem to like the description and they’re visiting. They’re also staying on her site for long periods of time reading all of her superb content, The search engines once again conclude (and quite rightly) from tracking this behavior that Mary’s site is worth even more rank. Finally the day comes when Mary find’s her site at the top of the SERPs for her chosen keywords and she has a large amount of targeted traffic coming in. She doesn’t quit though. She continues to create new and interesting content and her business continues to grow and prosper. Why? Because she continues to provide exactly what the SEs want. The same high quality content that human searchers are looking for.

…And where did things fall apart for poor John? Well, most of his “link exchange” partners suffered the same fate he did. The SEs noticed the irrelevancy of the links and dropped their weight to zero. His visitors coming in through his first page SERP placement where hitting the back button on their browsers as soon as they realized that John’s site was of absolutely no use to them (even if they could read it or figure out how to use it). Eventually people stopped clicking those links altogether. Additionally, one of the major SEs went through an algorithm change during that time period causing John’s site to lose some additional rank. Things just kind of slid downhill. Did John not work hard enough on his business? Actually in the beginning John worked very hard and the short-term results proved it. The problem is that he concentrated way too much of his effort in the wrong areas. In the long run instead of building a viable online business, all he ended up doing was playing a complex game of “chase the algorithm” with the SEs for a short time (and big surprise, he lost). Oh well, it was fun while it lasted…

I realize that the above examples are a bit of a simplification. But the bottom line is that as search engines become increasingly sophisticated and try harder than ever to deliver results that are real and relevant to humans, you can make your life and theirs much more lucrative by just giving them what they want from the start. Leave the math to the mathematicians and the tricky SEO to the SEOers and go about creating compelling content that humans and search engines alike will love.

Colin Plant is the owner of AtHomeBusinessNetwork.com a resource and community web site for people who have an interest in developing and running successful online home based businesses. He is also the principal of Concept Dynamics Interactive, a full service web design and multimedia firm.

http://www.AtHomeBusinessNetwork.com
http://www.conceptdynamics.ca

It is indispensable therefore to get the attention of major search engines as well such Google, Yahoo, Alltheweb.com and others. In order to get high rankings you should have well-optimized content SEO copywriting is a special technique that allows search engines to get more high rankings for your web site. This method by which your web site is found by major search engines is one of the most effective as it is most frequently used by the visitors of your web site. Moreover, it is one of the most cost-effective methods as well. Online advertisement might cost a lot, besides your potential client might not even pay attention to it. Certainly you should bear in mind what type of business you provide as well as what type of clients you intend to target. That is why it is very important to develop effective marketing strategy with the search engine optimization process. You should know the keywords by which your web site is found by your visitors. Needles to say, that the web site of dental company is found by other keywords than the site of law firm.

This technique allows your site to be ranked higher and increase free traffic on your web site. In writing of SEO content copy it important to remember that one should not attempt to write a completely new web copy rather one should concentrate on the revising and reediting content written by copywriters. Remember that final product should be “suitable for reading” both by search engines and people. The survival of many web sites depends on the traffic got by major search engines. Once your text ha been written and has been submitted, the search engines starts looking for relevant words in it. The pages of your web site will be ranked higher if more relevant keywords appear in the content of your web site. Finally, try either to read about this process or even hire some professional who can handle this task for you. Remember that if SEO process is performed incorrectly it might ruin rather than help your business.

Killer-Content.com - Copywriting Services

As a search engine optimization specialist I often optimize
existing web pages for small business clients, upload them to
the site and see pages re-indexed by Google within a week.
This only happens with existing business sites that have been
online for a few years. Google seems to be updating their
index as often as every other week at this point and older
established sites that are already indexed seem to be re-
crawled on that twice a month schedule on a fairly routine
basis.

Two clients that hired me for recent work saw their rankings
shoot to the top for a newly targeted search phrase in a
weekend when I did optimization on a Thursday and they were
ranked instantly by Saturday. Now keep in mind that this
doesn’t happen for everyone, only those that have been online
for some period and already have significant content that
simply needs tweaking and proper title and metatag information
added. They usually have relatively good existing PageRank and
do well for other RELEVANT search phrases already. I offer that
warning only to avoid instilling false hopes in anyone hoping
to achieve the same instant ranking boost overnight.

Those clients that do succeed in this way are often thrilled
with the results accomplished in such short order. I’d love
to be able to offer that type of ranking boosts to everyone,
but some are more equal than others when it comes to easy,
inexpensive SEO tune-ups that rev up your rankings overnight.
Your mileage may vary.

WHY DO NEW SITES SUFFER?

What is going on with newer sites that don’t get crawled for
months? I’ve got a client, a newer attorney directory that
offers tons of great information in the form of articles on
specific areas of law, links to incredibly valuable and
relevant legal sites and over 600,000 attorneys listed by
practice area and state. Yet the site has not been re-crawled
by Google for over 3 months! Now this would not be such a big
issue for many sites, but this site is relatively new and we’ve
optimized all the titles, tags & page text, created a complete
site map and placed links to all these resources on the front
page.

I know that the site is not being crawled because Google’s
cached copy of the front page shows it before we did the
work four months ago, without the new links and without
title tags. We’ve submitted the site by hand, (manually)
once a month for three months via the Google Add URL page.
http://www.google.com/addurl.html When the hand submission
failed to get it re-indexed for four months, we submitted
the sitemap page, which has not been crawled at all. Google
shows only ONE page on this site, when in fact it has
thousands of pages, a sitemap and dozens static pages!

Part of the problem is that this site must be dynamic, since
a database of over 632,000 attorneys must be accessed,
retrieved and served for any of those law firms searched for
to be returned to the site visitor. Google warns owners of
dynamic sites that Googlebot may not crawl dynamically
generated pages with “?”" question marks in the URL. This is
to avoid crashing the server with too many concurrent page
requests from Google’s spider.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html#A1

The solution to this dynamic URL problem has been discussed
widely in search engine forums and solutions have been bandied
about including software provided by SEO’s, URL re-write
techniques for dynamic pages on APACHE servers
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/urls/ and PHP pages
http://www.stargeek.com/php-seo.php to generate search engine
friendly URL’s. Others recommend simply adding static HTML
sitemap pages as alternatives for the search engine spiders.
In this instance the client’s developer simply said “I
can’t
do that (PHP solution) on this server”. So we resorted to
putting up the static HTML sitemap pages with hard-coded

URLS to the main 54 pages of the site at
http://lawfirm411.com/Law-Firm-411-sitemap.html This should
get at least those fifty pages crawled by Googlebot, but
Googles’ spider appears not to be crawling this site at all.
How do we know this? See for yourself by using the following
query in the search box at Google: allinurl:www.lawfirm411.com
where the result page shows ONE page in the results. If you
try that query on your own site (replace your own domain name
for lawfirm411.com), you’ll see the results lists ALL your
pages.

The site home page was crawled by Google four months ago, when
they took their “Cached Snapshot” of the page. You can see
this by visiting the Google cached page here:
http://66.102.7.104/search?sourceid=navclient&;ie=UTF-8&q=cache:www.lawfirm411.com
where the date of this snapshot is “Apr 20, 2004 07:42:19 GMT”
and they haven’t been back since. The page in that snapshot
has none of the newly added links, an outdated title tag, and
old content.

This problem is not unique to this site. One client we worked
with two years ago had a dynamically generated, framed site!
Those two site structures have always given search engines
trouble. Their site was not crawled at all and only the front
page showed up. Our solution was to create a second domain
(owned by the client), which had static HTML pages that
precisely mirrored the content of the client’s framed,
dynamically generated site. Guess what happened after
Googlebot crawled the static site? Google indexed the framed
site in full and then banned the static site from the index!
Not an approach we advocate, but the one that worked for this
client.

We’re still searching for ways to get Googlebot back to
LawFirm411.com before creating that new static site, but
decided to share this odd experience with the SEO community
before going to any extremes. Google provides over 70% of
most search engine referred traffic to ALL of our clients
and we realized we can’t site idly by and see a major client
languish because Googlebot didn’t like what it found at the
client site on the first visit four months ago.
This issue dogs newer sites in other places as well. The Open
Directory Project has also become notoriously slow in adding
new sites to the directory and in this case, has not picked
up this site even after 6 regular monthly submissions. The
web playing field may have begun tilting toward older,
established sites and away from new ones.

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Mike Banks Valentine is the SEO for http://www.lawfirm411.com

Contact him at http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm

Improve Your Small Business Online at our Ecommerce Tutorial

http://website101.com/Free-Tutorials/index.html

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