Content can drive traffic to a Web site by way of search engines. But many well-established and expensive sites are designed in such a way that search engines cannot see the text on their pages. In such cases, simply registering pages with search engines accomplishes nothing.
My approach is intended to make visible the content that you already have so search engine users who are interested in that content can find you -- and to accomplish that without affecting your current, branded site design.
First, let's take a closer look at the typical problems -- what kind of page designs get in the way.
Then let's look at the faulty solutions typically proposed by search optimization companies -- such as metatags and doorway pages.
Then let's look at the best and simplest solution.
Unfortunately, branding rules and politics may prevent you from solving the problem the simple way.
But there are workarounds that allow you to leave your corporate design as is and make your pages more visible to search engines without violating search engine rules.
Many sites present dynamic pages -- generating pages on-the-fly
from databases. Such pages typically have a ? in the URL, which serves
as a stop sign for search engine crawlers. These crawlers need to avoid
being trapped at dynamic sites, which could generate huge number of pages,
clogging search engine indexes with useless content.
Other sites use javascript in such a way that very little text is visible to search engine crawlers. Even the links to other pages at your site may be buried, so that if a crawler finds one page at your site, it can't follow a trail of links to discover the rest of your site.
Other sites use frames or tables, which while not blocking crawlers, wind up confusing search engine users. For instance, when a frames page is indexed, each window is indexed separately, so someone finding a match and clicking on it will be presented with that window alone, out of context. And when pages dependent on tables are indexed, the words are interpreted as appearing in sequential order, left to right, instead of associated by columns and rows. As a result, phrases get jumbled.
When companies realize that their pages are poorly represented or not at all represented in search engine indexes, they typically target the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem. They'll set measurable goals that are irrelevant to their true business needs -- such as "ranking" for specific key words -- and then hire experts who try to trick search engines into delivering those the desired results. In the process, the "experts" may break the rules that search engines have set up to try to keep their indexes truly useful, and thereby get the company's pages completely thrown out. In any case, the experts typically have their hands tied -- they are unable to add new useful content to the site and are unable to change the site's basic design. Hence they often propose adding metatags to existing poorly designed pages and/or creating doorway pages.
There are two kinds of metatags that matter to search engines. The
description metatag indicates the text that should appear in a search engine
results list. The default is the first couple lines of text. If that text
is nonsense -- random words that happen to be associated with graphics
-- or if there is no plain static text at all, because of the way the pages
are generated -- a description metatag might be useful, but it's just a
band aid for a problem that you created for yourself with your page design.
Keep in mind that the two most important parts of a Web page for purposes of search engine ranking are the HTML title and the first couple lines of text. Yes, the description metatag can give you a coherent description in results lists, instead of gibberish; but the first lines of text still retain their priority for ranking. In general, search engine ranking algorithms pay little of no attention to metatags, mainly because they are very vulnerable to "spam". Search engine companies want to ensure as much as possible that what actually appears on the page is a good match for their users' queries; and they trust the actual static words on the page far more than anything that might appear in metatags. So a page that has no description metatag and has a good clear description in the first couple lines of text is likely to do better in ranking than a page with those very same words presented in a description metatag and little or no static text on the page itself.
The second kind of metatag is called "keyword", a term that confuses many people, leading them to think in terms of databases. Many presume that search engines index keywords, and hence that the keyword metatag is very important. In fact, only two of the major search engines, Inktomi and AltaVista, pay any attention at all to keyword metatags. And AltaVista gives plain text on a Web page higher priority than anything in keyword metatags, for purposes of ranking.
Today's search engines in fact index every word on every page. And many search engine users enter multi-word queries. So the more useful text you have on your pages, the more likely it is that searchers who want your kind of information will find you. Instead of spending time and money generating key word metatags, you should add more and more useful content to your site.
To get a concrete feel for how this works, try a high end web traffic analysis program, like WebTrends Log Analyzer. (You can download it for a 30-day free trial). Such a program will let you see how people come to your pages -- showing not only the volume of traffic from each of the major search engines, but also the queries that people used to find you. You are likely to be amazed at the variety and the detail of the queries. Very few people enter single word queries -- and those who do are not likely to be good prospects.
To get a sense of the typical behavior of search engine users, check
stats generated for my site using WebTrends on one particular day in January.
Go
to www.samizdat.com/jan25/jan25.htm [no longer online] In the left
column, click on "Referrers and Keywords". Then click on "Top Search Engines",
"Top Search Phrases", and
"Top Key Words". The key words are relatively useless, while the phrases
are rich and informative.
Keywords only matter for advertising -- search engines will sell you ad space on pages generated when certain words appear in the query. But for actual searching, keywords are meaningless. Put your effort into generating more good content.
Also don't waste your time with key-word position checkers -- programs, like WebPosition Gold that tell you how your whole site or particular pages rank for particular queries. Such programs bang away repeatedly and automatically at search engines, adding an enormous load to those systems and hence slowing response time for actual users and forcing the search engines to invest more to keep performance at acceptable levels. While the results you get from such programs might make you look good to your boss, they mean little or nothing in terms of how much traffic your pages are likely to get by way of search engines. For traffic, you need content, and lots of it.
Some search engine optimization companies will propose creating
"doorway" pages for your site.
A doorway page consists of artificially generated content, designed
to emphasize pre-selected keywords. The page itself is meaningless. Its
sole
purpose is to fool search engines, with the objective of coming near
the top of lists of matches when queries include those key words. In fact,
search engines strongly discourage that practice, and when they detect
it, many will blacklist those pages and sometimes even all pages from the
same
site -- kicking them out of the index.
You might think, "Why worry? There's more than a billion pages out there. How will anyone ever know?" As was evident in presentation after presentation at a recent search engine conference in Boston, your competitors and the people hired by your competitors to design their sites watch what you do very carefully. They understand these techniques and how to spot them. And when they spot them, they blow the whistle -- loud. Search engine folks are inundated with alert messages about wrong doing, sent by competitors of the companies that are using those techniques.
Also, doorway pages typically reside on the servers of the "search optimization"
companies that produce them. They automatically
redirect traffic to actual pages at the customer's site. That means
that the customer receives more traffic, but to the search engine the traffic
appears
as if it is going to the optimization company. So when the search engine
calculates the "popularity" of pages for purposes of ranking, the customer
site gets none of that credit.
In other words, many people go to great lengths and great expense to try to fool search engines. But the risks are great -- not just annoyed search engine users, but your sites becoming blacklisted.
It is far less expensive and far more effective to write good, useful
content and present it simply so it can be properly indexed.
Since search engines index every word on every page they find, the
more useful text you have at your site, the more likely your pages will
be found by people who are interested in them. This is a random game --
the more content you have, the more dice you throw, so the more likely
you'll win.
Focus on building content, not on trying to trick search engines.
Large pages are more valuable than short ones -- large in terms of text, not graphics. Graphics are useless for search engines.
For maximum effectiveness, you need plain static HTML pages (not ASP pages), without frames or tables or java applets.
The most important text should appear at the top of the page. In fact, the first couple of lines of text should make sense as a description of the page.
And the HTML title (not the file name, and not the headline that appears on the page, but rather the title in the HTML header) should be carefully written to mention everything that is important about the page, in very few words. That title will appear in search engine results lists as the words that are linked to your page. And words that appear in HTML titles are typically given very high priority by search engines -- in other words if two pages match a given query and one of those pages has the query words in the HTML title, that is the page that will appear on top.
These static pages can have static graphic images (jpg or gif), if you
like. Such images will not help you with search engines, but won't hurt
you either -- so long as none of the text is embedded in images.
In some cases, a simple text-heavy design goes counter to the aesthetic
taste of the Web designers or management. More often, corporate branding
rules get in the way.
Even at Digital Equipment, the company that invented the pioneering search engine AltaVista, corporate branding rules got in the way of making the company's pages findable by search engines.
Typically, the branding folks come up with a "template" based on what they have done in the past with their print brochures and without realizing they are costing the company traffic and hence revenue with such rules.
Branding rules, which are intended to present a consistent corporate visual image to the world, were often created before the Web or by people who had no real knowledge of how the Web works. Once in place, such rules can make it very difficult to do what is necessary to use content to attract traffic to a Web site by way of search engines. And bureaucracy often makes it very difficult to change such rules once they are in place.
Basically, there are two parallel design goals when building a Web site.
1) Design for the optimum user experience at the site, with a consistent look-and-feel that follows corporate branding standards.
2) Design for optimum traffic and revenue growth by making your content clearly visible to users of the major search engines.
Far too often, large companies put all their emphasis on the user experience at the site and forget the search engines which are necessary for getting people to the site in the first place.
Only people who find your site can appreciate the experience.
You need to take steps to draw more people to the site. But the design that optimizes the user experience will probably get in the way of search engines, and hence cost your traffic and business.
If you have no chance of converting the branding and marketing folks
from their current search-engine unfriendly site design, consider creating
mirror pages.
This approach keeps your current branded design in place, but you can still take full advantage of your text content to attract more visitors and hence generate more business.
Brand plays an important role on the Web -- for existing customers and partners and for users who have found your site and want to navigate through it for further information.
But to attract new prospects using search engines, you need to take a different and parallel approach that emphasizes text.
Your mirror pages have the exact same text content as your standard pages, but they are presented in static HTML, with meaningful HTML titles and with the first couple lines of text written so they can serve as a description. They have no metatags. They have a minimum of graphics.
If the standard pages are very tiny -- forcing the visitor to look at a whole series of pages to read or print what is really a single document -- the mirror pages will consolidate that text (serving at the same time a "printer friendly" version).
Each of these pages has links to your main site, with an explanation that people should go there for the optimum experience -- with all the graphics and dynamic effects. But people who were looking for specific information and found this mirror page by way of a search engine will be quite happy because you have provided those people with exactly what they were looking for. There are no links from mirror pages to other mirror pages, and no links from standard pages to mirror pages.
Static HTML pages attract traffic by way of search engines and provide new visitors with the information they want, very efficiently.
Also create a sitemap page that consists of a hyperlinked list of
all your mirror pages. You submit that sitemap page, not your home page
to the search engines.
Search engine crawlers follow a trail of links to "discover" the content on the Web. If your pages today are not well represented in search engines, chances are good that you are using a technique that either halts crawlers (e.g., dynamic pages with question marks in the URLs) or that present links to other pages at your site using a technique that makes those links invisible to crawlers, such as dropdown menus. By sending a crawler to a static HTML sitemap with links to every one of the search-engine-friendly pages at your site, you make it easy for that crawler to find all of your content.
Also, search engine crawlers typically stop after going several layers
deep into a site (following 2-3 links in succession). (Last I heard, Lycos
only
went one layer deep). If you have a sitemap with links to every mirror
page, and if you submit that page, instead of your home page, to the major
search
engines, you make it so every page at your site is just one layer deep.
Doorway pages are designed to fool search engines. Mirror pages
are designed to make it easy for search engines to find and index your
real content. The "key words" and "key phrases" that doorway pages focus
on are of no real value. Search engines index every single word of every
single page. And people who are looking for unique phrases that are matched
on you pages are the very best prospects. Your measure of success
should be in terms of leads and sales, not in terms of "high rankings"
for particular search words or hits or even visitors. People who are fooled
into going to one of your pages by a phony doorway page and who don't see
what they were looking for on the page they arrived at are worth nothing
to you.
To put it another way, some schools prepare their students to pass a particular test; while others prepare them for success in the real world. Don't mistake the measurement for the reality. Don't be impressed by the "rankings" of competitors or by the "rankings" that search engine optimization companies claim they can deliver. Focus on your real business objectives. Don't try deceptive tricks. They backfire. Provide real content in a form that can be well-indexed and that is also immediately useful to your customers and prospects.
Your mirror pages have text and links to encourage visitors to go to your standard site. If those standard pages provide real benefit and you explain that benefit clearly, visitors should head there. Do not use automatic redirects and other cloaking mechanisms that take visitors to a page they didn't ask for That's "spam." Treat your visitors with respect, and abide by the sensible rules of search engines.
People arriving at mirror pages from search engines immediately see what they were looking for. Those arriving at doorway pages are automatically redirected to other pages where they typically do not find what they are looking for because the exact words of the query do not appear on the destination page.
You want to target search engine users who are actually looking for
the content on your pages. The more pages you have with the full-text indexed,
the better your chances that those people with unique queries will
find your pages.
Also, mirror pages reside on your site. Any traffic directed there by search engines counts toward the popularity of your pages and site when those search engines determine which pages should appear high on lists of matches.
Check www.jeremyjosephs.com
That is the site of freelance writer, Jeremy Josephs, in Montpelier, France.
The standard site looks professional, but got zero traffic.
Then check www.jeremyjosephs.com/sitemap.html That will take you to his sitemap, with links to mirror pages for his site. Check a few of the links to get to plain-text search-engine friendly versions of his articles and books. By using this technique, he now gets over 1000 visitors/week.
Remember that your goal is not "maximum positioning" for your pages with regard to particular keywords. Your goal is not just getting more pages into search engine indexes. It's a question of traffic and new business.
Also, don't expect immediate results. It may take months before your new mirror pages get into the search engine indexes. Search engines vary as to how frequently they crawl and update their indexes, ranging from about a week with AltaVista, to 6-8 weeks with many, and up to 3 months with some. And if you trigger spam alarms with doorway pages and other tricks, it could take years to untangle the mess.
For another example, check www.richardtosti.com, www.richardtosti.com/plain.html and www.richardtosti.com/sitemap.html; also www.medicalattys.com and www.medicalattys.com/rep/ (not really a sitemap, but a document that serves the same purpose).
There are no links from your full-blown pages to the mirror pages
-- only links from the mirror pages back. Hence only people arriving by
way of search engines or by bookmarks/favorites are likely to ever find
these pages. But since the pages reside on your servers and provide your
content directly, issues of branding could still arise. These pages have
a text-heavy look and undoubtedly will not conform to your corporate branding
rules.
You need to explain that these pages are not part of your site, rather they are an add-on, intended to draw traffic, and that the corporate rules should not apply here.
Think of search engine traffic like word-of-mouth referrals to your company. You brand your brochures and your advertising. But you wouldn't consider branding word-of-mouth marketing.
Instead of asking a friend, a Web user turns to a search engine and asks -- "where can I get information about xyz and pdq?" The search engine then provides a plain-text results list -- that includes no one's logos, no one's branding. And when users click on links in such lists, they expect to go straight to pages that have the kind of information they are looking for. This is very different from calling up a sales person and asking to receive a brochure or a spec sheet.
Explain the difference between optimizing the user experience and optimizing
search engine results. Try to find ways to work together to generate new
business for the company.
What if you can't convince management to allow you to create mirror
pages? Your pages are all dynamic with a ? in the URL, so crawlers come
to a halt whenever they come to one of your pages, not following any trail
of links. And your pages have no useful text is visible to search engine
crawlers. Are you totally dead in the water? Not necessarily.
In this worst case scenario,
1) Write useful informative HTML titles for each and every page (every
one different)
2) Write description and keyword Metatags for each and every page (every
one different, and without much repetition among HTML title, description
Metatag, and keyword metatag).
3) Create a sitemap page -- a static HTML page that ignores branding
rules: just a list of the HTML titles of all your pages with links (including
the ?)
4) If branding rules prevent you from posting this sitemap page on
your company's site, then post it anywhere else -- even on free Web hosting
space.
5) Submit this sitemap page to the major search engines. They should
eventually check every page linked to from that sitemap page. They won't
be able to follow the links any further (the ? stopping them), but they
should be able to capture the HTML title and, in some cases, the metatags
-- so you could still end up with some information about all of your pages
in the major search engine indexes.
6) Each HTML title and metatag should be no longer than 255 characters
But don't lose sight of the fact that if you are forced to proceed this way to help your company attract new prospects through search engines, your company has serious management problems. Keep kicking and screaming in hopes that eventually your message will be heard and the corporate rules change. And meanwhile, be sure to update your resume and post it on the Web.
I took a quick look at the site, and immediately saw that it was over-designed -- that the page design was getting in the way of search engines ever seeing and indexing the content.
Content can drive traffic to a Web site by way of search engines. But
many well-established and expensive sites are designed in such a way that
search engines cannot see the text on their pages. In such cases, simply
registering pages with search engines
accomplishes nothing.
Many sites present dynamic pages -- generating pages on-the-fly from
databases. Such pages typically have a ? in the URL,
which serves as a stop sign for search engine crawlers. These crawlers
need to avoid being trapped at dynamic sites, which
could generate huge number of pages, clogging search engine indexes
with useless content.
Other sites use javascript in such a way that very little text is visible
to search engine crawlers. Even the links to other pages at
your site may be buried, so that if a crawler finds one page at your
site, it can't follow a trail of links to discover the rest of your
site.
Other sites use frames or tables, which while not blocking crawlers,
wind up confusing search engine users. For instance, when
a frames page is indexed, each window is indexed separately, so someone
finding a match and clicking on it will be presented
with that window alone, out of context. And when pages dependent on
tables are indexed, the words are interpreted as
appearing in sequential order, left to right, instead of associated
by columns and rows. As a result, phrases get jumbled.
When companies realize that their pages are poorly represented or not
at all represented in search engine indexes, they typically
target the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem. They'll
set measurable goals that are irrelevant to their true business
needs -- such as "ranking" for specific key words -- and then hire
experts who try to trick search engines into delivering those
the desired results. In the process, the "experts" may break
the rules that search engines have set up to try to keep their
indexes truly useful, and thereby get the company's pages completely
thrown out. In any case, the experts typically have their
hands tied -- they are unable to add new useful content to the site
and are unable to change the site's basic design.
Today's search engines index every word on every page. And many search
engine users enter multi-word queries. So
the more useful text you have on your pages, the more likely it is
that searchers who want your kind of information will find you.
Instead of spending time and money generating key word metatags, you
should add more and more useful content to your site.
Keywords only matter for advertising -- search engines will sell you
ad space on pages generated when certain words appear
in the query. But for actual searching, keywords are meaningless. Put
your effort into generating more good content.
Also don't waste your time with key-word position checkers -- programs,
like WebPosition Gold that tell you how your whole
site or particular pages rank for particular queries. Such programs
bang away repeatedly and automatically at search engines,
adding an enormous load to those systems and hence slowing response
time for actual users and forcing the search engines to
invest more to keep performance at acceptable levels. While the results
you get from such programs might make you look good to your boss, they
mean little or nothing in terms of how much traffic your pages are likely
to get by way of search engines. For
traffic, you need content, and lots of it.
Since search engines index every word on every page they find, the more
useful text you have at your site, the more likely your
pages will be found by people who are interested in them. This is a
random game -- the more content you have, the more dice
you throw, so the more likely you'll win.
Focus on building content, not on trying to trick search engines.
Large pages are more valuable than short ones -- large in terms of text, not graphics. Graphics are useless for search engines.
For maximum effectiveness, you need plain static HTML pages (not ASP pages), without frames or tables or java applets.
The most important text should appear at the top of the page. In fact,
the first couple of lines of text should make sense as a
description of the page.
And the HTML title (not the file name, and not the headline that appears
on the page, but rather the title in the HTML header)
should be carefully written to mention everything that is important
about the page, in very few words. That title will appear in
search engine results lists as the words that are linked to your page.
And words that appear in HTML titles are typically given
very high priority by search engines -- in other words if two pages
match a given query and one of those pages has the query
words in the HTML title, that is the page that will appear on top.
These static pages can have static graphic images (jpg or gif), if you
like. Such images will not help you with search engines, but
won't hurt you either -- so long as none of the text is embedded in
images.
So, I told my friend, forget about key words. Instead, focus on generating
content -- text that is useful to your customers.
This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West
Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
For a library for the price of a book, visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
Return to B&R Samizdat Express
For a thorough discussion of this topic, buy Richard's book Web Business
Bootcamp (published by Wiley) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471164194/brsamizdatexpres
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