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Chasing the Search Engines' Algorithms... Should You or Shouldn't You?By Robin Nobles It's a common occurrence. SEOs often spend countless hours trying to 'break" a search engine's algorithm. "If I could just crack Google's algo, my pages would soar to the top of the rankings!" Let's look at some flaws in this way of thinking. 1. Picture the Google engineers and tech folks turning the algo dial as soon as you "think" you have "cracked" the algo. Your rankings may fall, and you would have to figure out what's working with the engine right nöw. In other words, your rankings may nevër be long term. 2. Instead of spending all of this time trying to impress a search engine with a perfect page, why not impress your true target audience... your customers. Has Google, MSN, or Yahoo! Search ever bought anything from you? They're not your target audience. Your customers are your target audience. Write your pages and content for them. 3. When you expend so much of your energy chasing algorithms, you often focus on only a few elements that influence ranking – those elements that are working right nöw and that you hope will give your pages the best chance for success. It is said that Google has over 100 ranking elements that influence ranking and relevancy. Some are more important than others. But focusing on just one or two "main" elements and discounting the rest can prove disastrous to a Web site. A different approach . . . Wouldn't you rather achieve top rankings and keep them there, and have those rankings equate to salës and monëy in your back pocket? After all, isn't it ultimately the salës you're after, as opposed to just the rankings? If those rankings don't equate to traffïc that equates to salës, you löse, any way you look at it. Five Basic Steps for Achieving Top Rankings without Chasing Algorithms 1. Forget about the search engines. Yes, you heard me correctly. The search engines aren't and nevër will be your "ideal target audience." They don't buy your goods and services. They're not who you should be trying to please with your Web pages and site. Instead, write your Web page content for your target audience. 2. Don't ever forget the basics. No matter what's happening in the algorithms, continue using your main keyword phrase prominently in your title tag, META description and keyword tags, link text, body, heading tags, and so forth. That way, when the algo dial is turned, you won't have to make changes to all of your pages. You'll always be ready. 3. Focus your keyword-containing tags and body text on one keyword phrase only. Each page should be focused on one keyword phrase, and each page should have its own unique tags. 4. Write well-crafted content for your Web pages, and add new content on a regular basis. If content is king, context is queen. Focus on your keyword phrase, synonyms and related words, and surrounding text. Use a program like ThemeMaster if you need help determining those supporting words. 5. Remember that both on-page and off-page factors are important.
Don't sacrifice one for the other. On-page factors are your tags,
body text, prominence, relevance, etc. Off-page factors are link
popularity (quality and number of your inbound links) and link reputation
(what those inbound links "say" about your Web page when they link
to you). What about search engine research? Isn't it important?
Let me give you an example. At the beginning of this year, pages began falling out of Google's index. The forums were alive with speculation and what to do about it. Through research, we determined this was a compliancy issue. By having compliant code, the search engine spiders are more easily able to spider the content. The solution? Make sure you use a DOCTYPE tag and an ISO Character Set Statement at the top of every Web page. For example:<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.1 Transitional//EN"> <META HTTP-EQUIV=content-type CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> If you didn't know about the compliancy issues, you could have made changes to your Web pages that didn't need to be made, wasted countless hours trying this or that, all to come up dry. Research helps to make sure you remain on top of what's happening in the search engine industry. It's what sets you apart from other SEOs. You make your decisions based on research and facts, versus speculation and theory. In Conclusion... "Take it from someone who has been in this business for nine years and studies the algorithms closely - don't chase the algorithms. You say that you have a #2 ranking for a certain keyword phrase that alone is bringing your site 550 visitors per day? Great. In the time that you have spent gaining that ranking, I have written 285 pages of unique content, obtained 821 links, etc., and collectively I am getting over 1,300 visitors per day," says Jerry West of WebMarketingNow. In other words, by focusing on more than just chasing algorithms, you have the potential of having a much more successful Web site. About The Author Robin Nobles conducts live SEO workshops in locations across North America. She also teaches online SEO training and offers the Workshop Resource Center, a networking community for SEOs. Localized SEO training is being offered through the Search Engine Academy. Copyright 2005 Robin Nobles. All rights reserved. |
DMOZ in 2005 (a.k.a. The Open Directory Project) By Phil Craven (c) 2005 WebWorkShop The original concept of DMOZ was excellent for its time. The DMOZ site's About page makes these statements about the concept, and about the reasons for the directory's creation:- "Automated search engines are increasingly unable to turn up useful results to search queries. The small paid editorial staffs at commercial directory sites can't keep up with submissions, and the quality and comprehensiveness of their directories has suffered. Link rot is setting in and they can't keep pace with the growth of the Internet."
But things have changed a lot since DMOZ began in the mid 1990s. Since then, Google came along with very relevant search results, and they were kind enough to show the other engines how to produce such relevant results. That caused dramatic improvements, to the extent that top search engines have been able to provide very relevant search results for some time, and they provide a lot more of them than DMOZ is able to do. The small paid editorial staffs at commercial directory sites still can't keep up with submissions, but their backlogs are small when compared with DMOZ's massive backlog. According to reports, there are over a million site submissions that are waiting to be reviewed, and delays of several years between submitting a site and it being reviewed are not uncommon. The backlog problem is so huge that many editors have redefined the problem so that it no longer exists. To them there is no backlog, because the submitted sites are not there to be reviewed. They are merely a low priority pool of sites that they can dip into if they want to, and some of them prefer to find sites on their own.
Link rot (dead links) has become widespread in DMOZ through the years, and they certainly can't "keep pace with the growth of the Web". There isn't a single reason for the creation of DMOZ that DMOZ itself doesn't nöw suffer from. So how come such an excellent original concept ended up with a directory that has the same problems that it sought to solve, and on a much largër scale? One reason is that the Web has grown at a much faster pace than was perhaps anticipated, and the DMOZ editors simply can't keep up. Another reason is that there are simply not enough editors who are adding sites to the directory. At the time of writing, the DMOZ front page boasts 69,412 editors, but that is the number of editors that they've had since the beginning, and most of them are no longer there. A recent report stated that there are currently about 10,000 editors who are able to edit, and that only around 3,000 of those are active in building the directory. The word "active" is used to describe editors who actually edit quite often, but as little as one edit every few months is acceptable. The word doesn't mean "busy", although some of them are. With so few people doing anything, it isn't even possible for them to keep up with the link rot in such a huge directory, and there's the ever increasing problem of listings that link to topics other than what they were listed for. It simply isn't possible for them to maintain the directory as they would like.
The idea of becoming "the definitive catalog of the Web" was a fine one, but it turned out to be an impossible dream. The purpose of DMOZ is dead. Today's search engines produce excellent results in large quantities, and much more quickly than drilling down into a directory to find something.
So is there any value at all in the DMOZ directory? As a useful catalog of the Web, and when compared with the major search engines, the answer is no, although a few people do find it to be a useful research resource. For website owners, the links to their websites that a listïng in DMOZ creatës are useful for search engine ranking purposes, but even those are becoming less useful as search engines improve, and seek to block out unwanted duplicate content from their indexes. It was a fine concept, and it looked promising for a while, but the idea of DMOZ becoming the definitive catalog of the Web is gone. Improvements in the search engines eclipsed its value, and the growth rate of the Web meant that it could nevër achieve its goal. It began with an excellent concept, and they gave it a good shot, but it didn't work. The continuing growth rate of the Web ensures that it can nevër work. It continues as a good directory of a large number of web sites, but that is all. And not many people use directories when the search engines produce such good results, and so quickly.
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What's the Most Effective "You think that the Q-square formula (quality + quantity) of getting inbound links (reciprocal or one-way) is the best way to increase your search engine rankings." Just about right, eh? And unless you are a complete newbie to search engine optimization, this is exactly what SEO experts have been telling you time and time and time again. And if there was any doubt that search engines were being spammed, paid links put rest to those fears. The SEO experts make monëy, you get a boost in your rankings, everyone's happy.
Or so they'd have you think. Over the past year or so, search engines have started to take serious measures to combat sp@m against them. Search engine spamming usually occurs in one of three ways: Multiple submissions of your web pages (you'd be surprised to learn that people still do this). Keyword spamming in low quality content. Link spamming (building tons of links to a new site REALLY quickly). On the other hand, you've probably heard about the need for quality content ever since you started learning about search engine optimization (hopefully). Either way, here's a refresher: Search engines are looking for unique and useful content – information that is accurate and important to the people interested in that field. Search engines also look for fresh content – regular additions to your website, etc (this is why blogging became / is such a huge craze). So let's put that all together: Search engines are working towards fighting SEO sp@m – bad, keyword stuffed content and link spamming – by: Devaluing the "ranking boost" that these elements give. Penalizing the websites that are obviously spamming search engines. The end result? Traditional link building is no longer your best bet to get high search engine rankings.
That's not to say that you should dump your link campaigns all at once and scamper for the hills – links will continue to have value within search engines and until the search engine algorithms develop well enough to distinguish between "organic" linking and links generated through a link-building campaign (not easy to do at all, even with Google's or Microsoft's resources), getting inbound links will stay the easiest way to bump up your search engine rankings by several pages. However, for SEO purposes, that brings us back to square one. We like things to be easy, but we also want things to work well. If link-building is a good tactic, but not the best tactic (especially when everyone and their mother is getting a few hundred links every month to their 30-page AdSense websites), then where does it leave the rest of us? The answer lies with what the search engines have been saying all along – quality content, wrapped around quality, organic links. Let me explain that. Search engines have taken two specific measures to improve their results and reduce commercialized sp@m from their search engines: Link pages are being "identified" as such and therefore are being considered as low-quality links (you'll remember from Link Building 101 that the quality of the link is a big factor in how much it improves your website's rankings). Some of the identifying criteria for a link page are: the number of links on that page, the ratio of text to links on that page, and relevance of the link, which I explain in the next point. Search engine algorithms are currently looking at the context that the links are placed in (i.e. surrounding text as well as the page's keywords) to measure the relevance of the host site to YOUR website – in other words, checking the text of the page your inbound link is placed on to find out whether that site is relevant to your industry / niche. This leads us to the following conclusions:
The linking page must have as few links as possible. The links should be focused on as few sites as possible (to funnel the value of the link page). The links should be surrounded by "relevant" content. The linking page should contain "quality" content (written for human reading rather than written for search engines – there's a sharp difference between keyword optimization and keyword stuffing). Now you must be wondering...."is there a point to all this?" And I respect that, because this is exactly what internet marketing and SEO gurus have been saying for a long time nöw. Just like I often ask myself: So WHAT? So... What if I told you that you could use a blindingly simple marketing tactic that will not only bring you relevant, powerful and valuable inbound links, but that it will ALSO bring you regular visitors?
How many SEO techniques can promise visitors from other websites? Nöw I'm not trying to sell you a product, so I'll cut to the chase. Take a single page. Take ONE core keyword describing your industry / main business, and a few more keywords for a couple of main category pages. Write 350-550 words of unique, quality content that gives the reader useful information. Each paragraph should be tightly focused around one keyword, and should contain one link (not more) to a related page (for your main keyword, link to your website, for your category keywords link to your category pages). Use keywords (but not sentences) as anchor text. Once you've completed this page, contact link partners in YOUR niche – not direct competitors obviously, but complementary businesses (if you sell information books on candle-making, your ideal link partners would be informational websites on candle-making), and make them this pitch: "Are you looking for a quick and easy way to boost your search engine rankings? Search engines demand relevance, they demand quality, they demand freshness. I'd like to offer you the chance to do a valuable exchange – I'll provide you with an optimized article on a subject relevant to your business, and in return all I ask is that you allow me to place some links to my website on the page. In fact, you can even plug in your own links – affiliate, to your own website or any other website." Of course, you'll probably have to write a more sophisticated approach letter than those 6 lines, but the intent is clear: write quality content, and then place it on websites relevant to your industry. Usually, the website hostïng the page will want some monthly payment in return (after all, you're effectively buying a page on their website). If you've followed my advice and picked well-ranked websites with quality content, the monëy will be worth it. In addition, you'll probably be paying less than an out-and-out link purchase as you're also giving them something in return (quality content to boost their search engine rankings). Got all that? Congratulations. You've just learned about what I like to call a "Hosted Marketing Page". Don't be fooled by its simplicity. What I've explained in 4 paragraphs (318 words) will probably be the subject of endless marketing campaigns and short $49 reports over the next year. Nöw some of you might be saying: I know this – isn't this just another version of marketing your website through articles (where you write articles, submit them to article directories and have webmasters pick them up to post on their websites)? What's so great about this? We KNOW this. The question isn't that you know this, the question is: are you doing this? Article submissions are shots in the dark – article farms do give a better boost in search engine rankings than simple links, but most article directories are too general to help you rank well on the relevance factor. If your article gets picked up by a few webmasters, the extra links will be dampened by the fact that the content is "duplicated" – thus reducing its value. Search engines are wising up to article submissions just as they started combating link sp@m a year and a half ago – at any rate, article submissions are marketing tools / branding tools, not pure SEO tools. Experiment with a Hosted Marketing Page of your own. If you don't have the time to contact link partners directly, talk to your link-building expert (or company) and explain what you are looking for (heck, you can forward this article to them). The beauty of Hosted Marketing Pages is that they complement your regular SEO strategy. Link building, if done right, is still a quick and cheap way of getting higher search engine rankings. However, if you are looking to make a HUGE splash instead of just poking around, then I urge you to seriously consider the power of Hosted Marketing Pages. If you would like help with your "Hosted Marketing Page" campaign, visit Textlinkbrokers.com. They are the leader in link popularity building programs and are the only company offering this particular service.
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