Archive for February, 2008
published by Dan in SEO Basics
The size of your web page actually matters to search engines. Although the file size of a page does not affect its page rank it matters because search engines have a limit to the size of the page that they cache. Search engines cache all pages regardless of size (unless of course you specify that the page not be cached) however those that are over 150K in size are truncated. This means that keywords and phrases that were cut-off wouldn’t be indexed, which is not a good thing for your SEO.
Having your web pages’ contents fully cached is also desirable for your users desirable because you want them to be able to access all of your site’s contents even when your server is down. If your web page has too much content and there are still important information towards the end of the page it might not show in the end. Note though that the cache limit usually apply only top HTML and text files but PDF files are sually cached in its entirety even when above 150K in size.
Aside from ensuring that search engines can fully cache the contents of your page a smaller file size is beneficial to your users because it will result in a faster download speed, which is always a good thing. If you have too much content then do not cram it all into one page. Break it up into sections and alot one page per section. That way it will make your content not only more readable but also limit the file size so that it can be fully cached by search engines.
Popularity: 55% [?]
published by Dan in SEO | SEO Tools
Code Validity
When it comes to code validation it is argued by some that it doesn’t really affect a website in terms of SEO. While this is largely true in terms of accessibility (complete) non-adherence web standards can actually affect your website. How so? Because search engines need to be able to make sense of your website’s code in order to crawl and read its content. Of course search engine bots are very smart and getting smarter each day so that meeting just the minimum requirements to make a site functional and readable will do. However, if your code is validated you can at least rest easy knowing you shouldn’t worry about spiders being able to crawl your page. To check if your website code adheres to W3C standards you can use the W3C validator.
Broken Links
As mentioned time and again when dicussing link optimisation, the first step to optimising your links is making sure that all your links are working properly. Broken links will lead to page errors. This has two negative results being:
- Search engine spider might not be able to find the targeted page. This is especially true for pages that has very few or no other inbound link.
- It might affect your ranking. This could happen if your site has plenty of broken links.
To find out whether your site has broken links you can use W3C link checker, this free broken link checker, or any other broken link checker you might want to use. Make sure that you check for broken links periodically.
Popularity: 51% [?]
published by Dan in SEO | SEO Basics
Accessibility is often associated with website design and rightly so since it is a critical aspect of web design. A website that has lots of accessibility issues, no matter how professionally designed, will not get the amount of traffic targeted. Users will opt to simply visit other sites instead of waiting around for a site that’s always down to go up again. In the same way, search engines will also skip a site that’s down. For this reason accessibility is just as critical for SEO.
In my next few posts I will be discussing several accessibility problems that should be addressed to ensure that search engines (as well as users) won’t have a hard time reading your website’s content.
As mentioned earlier one of the most common accessibility issue is the performance of your site’s server. If your server is down frequently and/or it takes sometime for the servers to go up again after going down it will have a noticeably negative effect on not only the amount of traffic you get but also on your rank in ALL search engines. The reason for this is very simple, the more frequent and the longer your downtime is the greater the chance of having both users and bots visiting your site when it is down. If bots find your site down several times it will reflect on your site’s performance and will result in lower rankings. Aside from this it will obviously be unable to crawl new content so that even if you provide fresh content regularly you won’t be able to benefit much from your effort.
The solution to this problem is very simple and obvious - invest in a good hosting service. In the end though it might cost a bit more the return of investment will be worth it.
Popularity: 47% [?]
published by Dan in SEO
A boilerplate is defined as “any text that is or can be reused in new contexts or applications without being changed much from the original” it is “often found in press releases and is standard verbiage that gives a brief history of the organization(s) and is located at the bottom of all company-issued releases.” In short it is those repetitive content usually found on the header, footer, and navigational elements of your website.
Boilerplates are of course needed and there is no way to avoid certain terms repeatedly, even if you don’t put a brief company description in every page, since you need the navigational elements to be consistent throughout the site.
As of now, there isn’t a big problem with boilerplate, but according to a recent post on analysing boilerplate by William Slawski, Google may be currently using or may in the near future using a certain method to determine boilerplate and thus ignore the text identified as part of a boilerplate. What this means for SEOs is that we need to be careful about the placing of the content (text) so that it won’t be mistaken as boilerplate. Furthermore it is important that keywords/phrases are not repeated too frequently since too much repetition might result in those keywords/phrases being mistakenly identified as boilerplate.
Popularity: 55% [?]
published by Dan in SEO
When it comes to your business website you might not really need to get the attention of the international traffic but simply need to do well on local search. This makes real sense for businesses that simply use the site to advertise their local business and does not really operate an e-business. If you want to do well with Google Maps Local results though make sure that:
- your business address is located in the city you want to do well in (and that this business address can be found on your site! duh?)
- your business is listed in Local Business Center
- you have categorised your business properly
- your business’ name contain your keyword/keyphrase
- other websites mention your business address
- you don’t neglect other SEO aspects that work for ordinary search (i.e. number of links and quality of links)
Popularity: 45% [?]
published by Dan in SEO
- You can submit sitemaps using your preferred format (text file, RSS or atom feed, XML file). However, the XML sitemap protocol is the best format to use for sitemaps since it is easily upgradeable and can contain more comprehensive information.
- Sitemaps can be used to tell Google which URL you prefer to be used (shown in SERPs) in case you have multiple URLs pointing to the same content.
- The order by which the URLs appear on the sitemap file does not matter. It will not affect page rank.
- For websites with multiple sections you can submit an individual sitemap for each section. However, if you prefer to submit a single sitemap for your entire site that is just fine. Note though that a sitemap should contain no more than 50,000 URLs and have a maximum size of 10MB (uncompressed). If your site has more URLs than the limit imposed you have no choice but to make multiple sitemaps.
- For those who use multiple sitemaps you can manage them better by listing them in a sitemap index file. Note that a sitemap index file’s maximum number of files is 1,000 files.
Popularity: 48% [?]
published by Dan in SEO | SEO Tools
The concept of sitemaps can be confusing, especially since there are two kinds of sitemaps -HTML sitemap and XML sitemaps. I have already written about sitemaps several times and did two posts on common misconceptions about sitemaps. Listed below though are more information I got from Google’s Sitemap FAQs article. Note that I did not include information I already discussed in my previous post.
- The priority field in the metadata does not affect the ranking of your website’s pages. Setting the priority will simply help Google determine which pages are more important compared to the other pages in your site. If you cannot decide priority or are confused about this it is better to simply not assign priority at all. Assigning pages the same priority will result in all the pages seen as equally important, just the same as if you didn’t assign any priority.
- Sitemap metadata is useful so that Google will know more about your pages but if you do not understand them it is ok to leave them blank.
- Submitting a sitemap will NOT get your site penalised. Instances where a site is penalised after submitting a sitemap is purely coincidental and happened for a different reason. If you are using spamming/scrapping techniques then it IS foolish to submit a sitemap and help Google find your bad bad site though.
- You can put your sitemap in any Webmaster Tools-verified site due to Google’s sitemap cross-submission. Obviously, this is true only for Google and not other search engines.
to be continued…
Popularity: 49% [?]
published by Dan in News
Aside from the alternate URL suggestion in case of typo error leading to a 404 message two other problems addressed by Google Toolbar for IE’s new feature include DNS errors and connection failures.
DNS errors - Typo errors can also result in non-existent domain names instead of valid URLs. For example: http://www.doublespark-seo.com.uk/ Instead of simply giving a “Server not found” error the new feature suggests similar URLs so that users will realise they actually mistyped http://www.doublespark-seo.co.uk/
Connection failures - Connection failures are inevitable even with good hosting. In case your server is temporarily down Google will automatically show a link to the cached version of your page. This is very useful indeed for pages that want their content (though not neccessarily the most updated content) to always be accessible. Note that this is the same cached page that shows up in the Google search results. If no cached page shows up in the Google search results it might be that you have disallowed caching. In my opinion this is perhaps the most useful of the three new features since we want to be able to give service to users as much as possible.
Popularity: 52% [?]
published by Dan in News
Google Toolbar for IE (beta) has some pretty nifty features including the newest addition to it which helps users in case something goes wrong so that they can still view your site and its contents. Basically, these new features have nothing to do with your site’s SEO but any webmaster will be happy to know that their site still stands a better chance of being viewed even when a user mistypes the URL or there is a connection problem. Basically the first problem that this new feature addresses are 404 errors with default error pages.
As we all know if an invalid URL is typed in the 404 message, which by default says something like “Page Not Found” is returned by your server. What’s cool about the new toolbar feature is that when this happens instead of simply returning the 404 message it suggests an alternate URL to the user so that the user knows where to go to in case of simple misspelling. Note though that if you customise your site’s error page, which is a common practice to increase usability, the new toolbar feature will not work.
It goes without saying that this a good thing in terms of usability and also traffic generation since users, turned off by the 404 message, will give your site another chance if given useful suggestions.
to be continued…
Popularity: 56% [?]
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