« How Not To Advertise Your SEO Services | Interacting With Site Visitors: Web 2.0 Doesn't Have To Be Complicated »
January 25, 2008
How Do You Optimize For Multiple Search Engines?
By Scott Goodyear
www.MarketPosition.com
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.
← What is this?
