It Is All About the Words

Before we start looking at my approach to search engine optimization
in detail, we need to look at search engines. This overview will give
you insight to what I have discovered about them and the indexing
applications (spiders) that they employ to retrieve information. This
chapter will also cover writing for search engines and human visitors.
From studying search engines for many years, I have learned that
search engines and search engine spiders have their own distinct,
individual and unique personality. Each reacts to different types of
content, keywords techniques and website layout in a different
manner.
Every search engine on the internet has an indexing personality; this
is why one page on a website may receive more search engine
referrals from one search engine than from another search engine.
Example; A page on your website ranks #3 for the search term
“widget resources” on Google, but on Yahoo search it ranks #96, and
#23 on MSN search. Why does this happen? Many “experts” call it a
result of different search engine algorithms, and for the most part this
is true. You would think content that ranks well on one search engine
should rank nearly as well on most search engines. From watching
search engine spiders indexing our sites for more than twelve years I
have found patterns in the way that each spider indexes a website.
For example, of late I have found that new or updated content on one
of our websites will show up in 3-7 days in Google and MSN search,
but Yahoo can take 10-30 days for the same content to show as
updated in their index. Ask Jeeves seems to be the slowest and
meticulous of all in terms of what is indexed, versus what actually
shows up in its index.
Google and MSN search engines index nearly every day and some
times day and night, whereas Yahoo and Ask Jeeves, may index once
a week on average. I have also noticed that Yahoo favors certain
types of content over others, but Google and MSN do not seem to
prefer certain types of content. I am not talking about keywords or
meta content but the actual content (body text) on the page. I have
also determined that Ask Jeeves in particular has a very hard time
with missing pages or errors on dynamic (database driven) websites,
it will continue to hit a missing page or error page repeatedly for
sometimes days on end. Google and MSN on the other hand will try
to hit the missing page or error page a couple of times and move on.
Google seems to like keywords in titles and exact matching
keyword(s) in the site content, whether the site content are headings
or page copy (body text). MSN search spiders seem to prefer title
keywords to content keywords. Yahoo seems to prefer Meta title and
description as well as page content. Ask Jeeves habits are still up in
the air, as I do not focus on it as I do with MSN, Google and Yahoo.
Web page time and date stamps play a role on how often a site is
indexed. For years I have had a mix of static and dynamic (database
driven) websites and the dynamic websites receive more attention
from nearly all of the search engine spiders, the only difference
between our static and dynamic websites are the time and date stamps
on the pages. Once a static page is written and posted on a website
the time/date stamp doesn’t change unless it is modified at a later
time, whereas on our dynamic websites each time the page is loaded
in a browser the time/date stamp changes. To most search engine
spiders the dynamic websites looks as if they are being updated more
often than the content on the static sites, because of this the spiders
spend more time each day indexing or re-indexing the content on the
website. Many search engine spiders take in account the file size as
well. The time/date stamp seems to be a big factor whether or not the
page will be re-indexed the next time the spider visits. So what does
this mean? This means that dynamic websites will show more
favorably and more quickly in the search engines index versus a
static site where the site content date/time stamps do not change very
often.
Someone has probably told you in the past that static pages are better
and at one time, this was true. However, today this is not the case and
dynamic database driven websites if set up properly can propel you
higher in the various search engine indexes. I will cover more about
getting the most out of a dynamic database driven website in chapter
four.
All search engines are not created equal, of course if you have been
attempting to optimize your website the search engines you probably
already know this, so I won’t go into too much detail about why this
is so, but I will touch on a few things that will help you to get your
search engine optimization project rolling. Being listed in some
search engines is about as easy as pushing a camel through the eye of
a needle. There are a huge number of search engines on the Internet,
but only small handful produce good and consistent long-term
organic referrals. I will only focus on three search engines for the
most part as 99.5 of my search referrals come from those search
engines. The three I am referring to are: Google, MSN and Yahoo.
Ask Jeeves runs a close forth place in terms of search referral traffic
but I do not optimize specifically for it.
For all the credit given, search engines and their indexing spiders are
not that smart, they only know one task and that is to index pages as
instructed by their creators. They do have some rudimentary
intelligence; I would estimate most search engines intelligence level
to be along the lines of a small child, roughly six to eight years old.
As mentioned earlier each search engine has a unique algorithm that
is used to retrieve and score web pages. Concisely an algorithm is
nothing more than a set of rules that the search engine spiders uses to
find good content and (hopefully) filter out useless or bad content.
The main idea behind search engine optimization is to attract the
search engine spiders and keep them happy indexing your content. As
I mentioned earlier search engine optimization is not rocket science,
but it require creating content that appeals to your viewership and the
search engine spiders.
The main problem with search engine optimization is writing content
that appeals to website visitors and still be ranked well in search
engine indexes. If you gear your content specifically for search
engine referrals then your website visitors will have a hard time
reading it, if you write your content specifically for your human
visitors there may not be enough keyword usage in your content to
interest the search engine spiders. There are several ways to get past
this dilemma. We will touch on a couple of approaches I use to get
around the human visitor vs. search engine spider content problem.
What we need to do is create content that will trigger search engine
spiders to consume it and put it in the search engines index. I call this
“spider food”. You can produce good content that will appeal to your
visitors and still include spider food using blurbs or header/footer
text. We will cover spider food and writing for visitors and search
engines in chapter six, but before we get into a detailed discussion of
writing for search engines and visitors we should go over some do’s
and don’t regarding search engine submissions and also dispel a
couple of SEO myths.
Before we get started, let us talk about search engine spam. If you are
new to search engine submissions or a seasoned veteran of the
Internet, then you have probably heard of search engine spam. There
are two types of search engine spam; one type is index spam. Index
spam are websites built for nothing else but to attract search engine
spiders, the pages contain nothing of real value content wise and the
person building these types of sites are trying to make money via
advertising. Search engine spam pages make it difficult for search
engine visitors to search for and find relevant information. The
second type of search engine spam is attributed to submitting sites
and pages to a search engine multiple times in a very short period
time. Often times a website submitted to many times may be
blacklisted and will not show up in the search engines index.