Latest Articles
How Do You Optimize For Multiple Search Engines?
January 25, 2008 By Webposition SEO Team
By Scott Goodyear
We are often asked by WebPosition users, “how do you optimize for more than one engine?” Although you can optimize the same web page for multiple engines, some engines will have such widely differing preferences that optimizing for multiple engines can be nearly impossible. As you start creating a page that has more appeal to one engine, it may become less appealing to another. While you can perform split A/B testing in order to see what works out best between different versions of your pages, I think most people just want to put up a few pages and be done with it. If you are in this camp, it is generally recommended that you optimize separate pages for each search engine. Although I’ve covered this a bit in an article called Reinforcing Ideas and Improving Relevance to Gain Better Rankings, it may help to illustrate the multi optimization point in a another way. Open another browser window and point it to the e-commerce store, ThinkGeek.com and I’ll show you what I mean.
You can go to just about any product that ThinkGeek carries, but for now, let’s look at this “hacker work shirt” page. When you look at this page, you will see that they have several sub pages for this particular shirt. Just from this main page, I can count at least 3 web pages for this shirt.
There is the main description page at:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/6620/
There is a zoomed in view of the shirt at:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/6620/zoom/
There is an action shots page at:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/6620/action/
Additionally, once you get to the action shots page, there are at least 6 other web pages that have a photo and a small bit of text next to a photo that a customer or staffer had sent in. These are just a few examples:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/6620/action/210c0a6/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/6620/action/2107603/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/6620/action/21055d4/
These 9 or so web pages can each be optimized for a different engine and keyword/phrase. Ideally, a theme runs through each of these pages and the text is optimized for one engine or another. While the photo submitters are probably sending in their own photo captions, there is no reason why ThinkGeek staff can’t add some of their own text.
Thus a page like this Mac Hacker photo, might be optimized by ThinkGeek staff for a phrase like “mac hacker shirt”. They could add a couple of paragraphs that either respond in some way to the image in the photo, the submitter’s title/info, or write something up that talks about how even Mac users tinker with their computers and could use a great work shirt. They can even link to other hacker or Mac themed pages from their own site’s product pages in order to reinforce relevance of their keyword themes. They may even link out to a few interesting Mac hacker related sites that fairly above board like this Makezine post of where some one converted a new Mac Mini to use the case of an old Macintosh SE30.
While I’m on the keywords Mac and hacker, I’m going to head to Google and run a search that a few friends and WebPosition visitors with Macs have run: mac hack run XP. These folks have Macs but want to run PC applications like WebPosition. There are a variety of third party software hacks and suites that have been used to make Macintosh computers work with PC programs but Mac now has an official product called “Boot Camp” to help in this process. O’Reilly has a Boot Camp guide that shows up in this Google search result. Technically Boot Camp is not an actual “hack” but something that helps people avoid having to perform potentially harmful things to their machines. If you look, this is a fairly plain web page. In checking other search engines, it does not show up in Yahoo, MSN, etc. in the top rankings. Thus, this page is a candidate for further optimization against multiple engines, or better yet, the creating of additional pages that talk about Mac, XP, Boot Camp, etc. Perhaps they might create a few pages with further excerpts from the guide and create some intro text that optimizes for a specific keyword/engine.
Finally, if you are like ThinkGeek and have a search engine on your site, has anyone told you that your own engine is an SEO tool? If I’m a Mac person compare these two searches: ipod – 21 items and mac – 8 items. All iPod items are Mac items. Also, are there more than 21 Mac related items for sale in the store? These are optimization opportunities and depending on your goals, you may wish to optimize these various product pages for various engines as well as various keywords. If you don’t have an on site engine, consider some of the custom search engines that you can freely create and add to your site.
Thanks to ThinkGeek for allowing me deconstruct a few of the opportunities on their site! If you need a stapler for your geeky office friends or other unique gifts, check them out.
How Not To Advertise Your SEO Services
January 23, 2008 By Webposition SEO Team
By Scott Goodyear
A few weeks ago, I had a post talking about link exchange spam that we periodically receive. As a follow up, just a few things to note regarding advertising your SEO services online. I got an email from a “Nick Slevin” advertising that he could “help to improve my rankings”. It appears that I wasn’t the only one. As an online marketer, I get all sorts of questions regarding how sites should market online. Email marketing is often a touchy subject.
In the case of Nick Slevin’s email, his email address leads to a non-existent web site. The email came to us out of the blue and with no prior business connection that I could find. Even Google appears to get marketing spam similar to this.
Generally, if you are a web site owner, you shouldn’t throw money and the keys to the kingdom (your site’s login) at places like this. Even in cases where the “scam” is not readily apparent, you may end up with a very minimally SEO’d web site and a lot of hidden pages. I’ve heard many horror stories and have spoken to several web site owners where they find that they’ve been added to Google’s Malware list and have no idea why. They think back to that time they had the site “SEO’d” and wonder if that had anything to do with the current low rankings or malware notice.
When they have some one review the files on their web hosting account… They may end up finding a lot hidden pages, pages that are not linked from their normal web pages. Often these hidden pages include links to pirated software sites, spy ware installers, link exchanges they hadn’t approved of, and the like.
These bad experiences can put a bad spin on SEO and make it harder for legitimate SEOs to successfully use email marketing. Because Google and other engines may decrease rankings or add pass-through/warning pages, with out much notice to the web master of the “bad” site or if they are even able to find a good email in a WHOIS record, it may look bad on the engines until a web site owner begins to understand that the problem is with their site rather than an engine. Google does have a review tool here but this may not root out the entire problem. If you’ve been working with an SEO from a random email, you may still want to have a look at the files and HTML pages in your web hosting account.
It is possible that this Nick Slevin is real, that he is creating a real SEO business, maybe, but who knows. An actual web site, some clients that tell the good and bad about your business, perhaps membership in organizations like Sempo or local search organizations similar to SEMPDX, and other activities can help to further back the legitimacy of a business. Not guarantee, but further the positive impression.
If you are an SEO reading this post and you’ve read Mr. Daz’ post, an additional tip… You also shouldn’t promise any top 10 rankings. Lets face it, the engines control the rankings. SEOs work with some of the art and science behind SEO but largely we are similar to coaches, professional resume writers, marketers of all stripes, and many other professions in that we try to shape an outcome that is largely out of our hands. It doesn’t mean that you can’t help to obtain top rankings, just that you can’t guarantee rankings. Most site owners think that you mean top 10 rankings on competitive phrases, not the low hanging fruit that ranks just by adding some meta tags and a title tag.
When I get one of those “we guarantee top 10 rankings” emails, and I’m feeling ornery, I sometimes reply and ask that they guarantee that my site can rank in the top 10 for the terms: Google, MSN, or Yahoo within Google, MSN, or Yahoo. Or better yet, can they guarantee that they can put their own site in such a top spot? Odd, they don’t usually reply and I don’t see them in the rankings.