Search Engine Optimization | Dangerous Common Sense

Double Trouble

One new client bought two domain names, one for their business and one for their family and personal life. Let’s say one domain is www.ozdachs.biz (for business) and the other is www.ozdachs.com (for personal).

He started his business web site and took advantage of the offer of the hosting company to point the address of his future family web to the business site. That is, you see the same pages whether you go to www.ozdachs.biz or www.ozdachs.com . “Great!” he thought. His business will get double listings in Google and other search engines until he’s ready to put up family photos and whatever on his personal site.

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t give double listings to content it finds at different addresses on the Internet.

In fact, if Google notices the duplication of content, it will take one of these three bad actions:

1. In the worse case, Google will suspect that the two sites are both sleazy cheats. Google will see the duplicated material as the work of lazy webmasters up to no good. Google hates copied pages, and it may ban both sites completely from its result pages. That means neither site will show up in any search results.

2. Google will decide that one of the duplicated sites is real and the other is a cheat. How Google picks the “real” one is not known. Google will then ban the one they identified as a cheat. There’s a 50-50 chance that Google will ban the business site and decide that the placeholder family site is the one that should show up in search results.

3. In the best bad case, Google will DIVIDE the ranking of each duplicated page. If the home page would normally show up as #1 for a search of “blue widgets”, Google would adjust the importance of both sites’ home pages and will display them in position #30 or worse. In addition, in the search results for SOME phrases, the business’ site page will show up higher than the duplicated content on the personal site. For other phrases, the personal site’s pages will show up above the exact same business page. It’s a genuine mash-up.

Basically, this “free” pointing of the home site to the business site is a serious problem for someone interested in getting traffic from Google.

Apparently the hosting service thinks it’s doing my client a service by letting people access the one set of web pages by using either site address. In reality, they’re hurting the client’s chance of showing up in a good position in Google.

I have no fancy workarounds to talk about or options to suggest. Simply, if you’re offered the chance to point two domains to the same content, just don’t do it!

By Ozdachs|2009-11-30T16:31:07-08:00November 30th, 2009|Google, Search Engine Optimization|3 Comments

Web Design, Search Engine Optimization, Data Backups, and Other Topics. Huh?

A non-web designer colleague asked this afternoon which topics a group of us techies would like to speak on:

• Computer security
• Backups
• Computer maintenance
• Web site development
• Search engine optimization

The grouping of ideas illustrates exactly how too many web designers approach a new site. Web design is one topic and optimizing the site for visibility on search engines is another subject all together.

Of course, one of the purposes of most business web sites is to attract new clients who stumble across the web site by searching Google or Yahoo or Bing or somewhere.

But, designers and their clients too often create a web site without focusing on the site’s purpose, getting new clients. The new site is structured without thought to showing up in search engine result pages. In fact, the new site may be difficult to modify to add search engine friendly text, graphics, or tagged information.

The problem is more broad: in today’s world of hyper-specialization, the creation of web sites has been deconstructed into too many discrete tasks, each lorded over by a guru who is quick to say that this or that aspect of a web site simply isn’t in their field.

There are the designers for the look of the site. There are usability experts. There are functionality designers who are distinct from coders that implement the functionality designed. And, different from all these experts is the search engine optimization analyst.

All of this specialization might be reasonable in a design project team for a major corporation. For 90% of small- and medium-sized businesses, the tunnel-vision specialization is detrimental.

Most businesses want to sit down with their web person and have the one expert create an Internet presence that will meet the commercial needs of the business. The business owner doesn’t expect to talk to one person about the site’s look, another about its friendliness to users, and still another person about placement in search engine results. The owner wants a general contractor who will build the site.

At best, separating the topics of web design and search engine optimization is another sign that the Internet is coming of age. It now supports a bureaucracy, or at least a Curia. It won’t be long before there are Search Engine Optimization college classes and technical certifications — if there aren’t already.

But, I question the awkward division of the unified task of web site development.

Most businesses cannot afford a web site project staffed with specialists and, I suppose, coordinated by a project manager. The businesses need a single web designer who takes into account visual appeal, usability, search engine optimization, and all other aspects of the site.

I enjoy seeing a business owner look over a new site that we created together. One where I may have even taken some of the photographs while designing the pages and tuning them for showing up in Google.

My customers cannot afford an army of Internet technicians working on their site. And, they don’t need one so long as we remember the business goals of the business web site.

So, I suggested to my colleague that I would be happy to give a presentation on web design that would include tips on search engine optimization. We’ll see what he says.

By Ozdachs|2009-09-30T18:56:52-07:00September 30th, 2009|Search Engine Optimization, Web Design|2 Comments

Google Ranking Tip: You Get Just One Phrase Per Web Page

I am working with a frustrated client who is concerned that her site is not visible on Google’s search engine results.

I asked what search terms she was having problems with, and she said, “All of them. My site isn’t in the top for ‘aaaa’, ‘bbbb’, ‘cccc’, … ‘xxxx’, ‘yyyy’, or ‘zzzz’. Each of those terms are valid synonyms for the service she offers.

Aha!

To help her site, I’ve asked her to pick the ONE most important search term she wants her site to show up for. “All of them” is not something I can tune a web page for. Even if all the terms mean the same thing.

The reason I cannot tune a single page for all the terms is simple. Google’s method of ranking pages is to read a web page and to then count the placement and frequency of the words on that page. Then, based on its secret algorithm, Google decides what that one page is about and how valuable the content of that page is likely to be to a visitor searching for any particular set of words.

In order to tune a page to make Google think it is a good resource for, say for example, “San Francisco accountants”, I have to put “San Francisco accountants” in the page’s title, headers, photograph descriptions, and paragraph text. I have to emphasize that one phrase, “San Francisco accountants” in order to convince Google of the page’s focus.

To tune for “San Francisco accountants” the words I use are “San Francisco accountants”, not “SF accountants” nor “San Francisco CPAs”. A human reader may know that those three phrases talk about the same professional service, but Google does not.

Similarly, “vacation rental” may mean “vacation lodging” to a human being. You may search for “vacation rental” and be happy finding a page talking about “vacation lodging”. But, to computer-minded Google the terms have only “vacation” in common.

To Google “apartments” and “apt” are also unrelated as are “tennis shoe” and “sneaker”. (At least they are at the time I write this blog entry.) Google deals in words and phrases and is ignorant of topics and meaning.

A thorough optimizing of a site to show up highly on Google requires individual pages for each keyword phrase. Each of these pages will emphasize that particular keyword, and each page must also have unique content on it.

A business that has 10 “money words” for which it wants high Google ranking will have to have at least 10 pages in the site, one for each phrase. This requirement is, of course, one which many small businesses cannot meet. Creating text and graphics for each of these pages can be a burden!

Therefore, for a first step I advise my clients to pick the one phrase they most want to show up for in Google. I then tune their home page for that most important phrase. As time, energy, and money permit we can, over time, create separate pages for each of the desired money phrases.

If you’re not showing up as high as you want on Google results, start with this simple tip. Look at your home page. Edit it to highlight the ONE phrase that you most want to show up for. Your home page should focus on that phrase like a laser and not throw out all your keyword goals like a shotgun.

Next Up: Picking the One Phrase that Will Get Your Site the Most Visitors

By Ozdachs|2009-08-26T14:19:36-07:00August 26th, 2009|Marketing, Search Engine Optimization|2 Comments

Why Focus on Google?

When business owners ask for help appearing in Search Engine results, we talk about what Google likes to see. We tune pages to be attractive to Google.

Being #1 in Google is the Gold Standard.

Why Google?

Because most people world-wide use Google. I checked yesterday morning and the latest statistics show that 79% of all searches go through Google. Second place world-wide is Baidu (China) at 9% . Yahoo! is at 7% and Bing (Microsoft’s new search site) at 3%. (Data provided by HitsLink Market Share)

So, if you have limited time and a limited budget, it makes sense to focus on Google. Preparing Yahoo!-tuned pages and creating a Yahoo! ad campaign takes the same amount of effort as tuning for Google and advertising at Big B. But the return is the potential of being seen by 79% of the world at Google while only 7% of web

Ozdachs monitors the ebb and flow of search engine traffic. Yahoo! used to be a much more important force in the search market. It may be more important again.

The recently announced Yahoo! and Microsoft Bing collaboration is currently getting 10% of traffic worldwide, according to HitsLink. If that percentage grows over time, we will advise clients to consider tuning their pages for Yahoo!/Bing or buying Pay-Per-Click ads at that site, too.

But, right now our recommendation for cost-effective optimization and ad placement is to stick to Google. That’s where the potential visitors to your site are surfing.

By Ozdachs|2009-08-04T14:44:24-07:00August 4th, 2009|Google, Search Engine Optimization|1 Comment

#1 in Google

Congratulations to Ozdach’s client Seattle Home Staging experts Set the Stage for showing up at the top of Google results for their primary keyword phrase.

When I spoke with Patty, the owner, after discovering their placement, she was non-plussed. She said something like, “Oh yeah. We’ve been there awhile. I thought you knew.”

Some accomplishment! And, nice that you’re staying on top, Patty!

Patty said that being on top in Google search results has let her weather the bad home sales market better than other local stagers. She also buys Google AdWords and puts her business on the page as a Google sponsor to help keep the phone ringing.

We’re happy to have created her website with Search Engine Optimization in mind. And, we talk with her regularly to answer her questions about content and optimization.

One trick: Patty updates her site frequently with Contribute. There’s new text and content online every few weeks. Google loves sites that are frequently updated, so Patty’s ongoing work reinforces the text optimization we did when we originally created the site.

By Ozdachs|2009-08-03T06:25:46-07:00August 3rd, 2009|Marketing, Sample Clients, Search Engine Optimization|0 Comments