Digital Media Buzz > The New Rules: Update Your SEO Tactics

The New Rules: Update Your SEO Tactics

By James Zipadelli

Is your website not getting the traffic it needs, or not being ranked in a search engine high enough? A few simple fixes can help, says Brian Ussery, director of SEO Technology at Atlanta-based Search Discovery, Inc.

Stick to the basics
“One of the most common issues I see happens when clients build a new site,” Ussery says. “Let’s say a client creates a testing environment like testing.domain.com, which is accessible to search engines. If engines find this new site (testing.domain.com) they may consider it to be the new site and filter www.domain.com from search results when the new site content goes live at www.domain.com.

The result, Ussery says, is the “thinning” of keyword relevancy and a drop in PageRank, which is Google’s algorithm. Ussery prefers Google because he says the search engine has the most market share.

If your Web page lacks a title, it might not be ranked, either, Ussery says. “Websites can also be accessible by  www.google.com and google.com. Search engines see that as two different pages. It’s referred as a canonical URL.”

This emphasis on the basics is corroborated by Keith Hogan, vice president for Search Technology at Ask.com. “The site owner should closely watch the access logs to see what pages are visited and by whom,” Hogan says. “Are the crawlers able to follow the site navigation (is there a ‘Robots’ exclusion that is blocking part of the site)? Do the crawlers get trapped with session IDs in the URL strings? Can users successfully navigate on the site?

“Also, the basics of page text are very important,” Hogan continues. “The most important text elements with respect to matching user queries are the title and the main headings, i.e. the most prominent things on the page that the user sees. If a particular page isn’t ranking as expected, and the page is in the search engine index, the site owner can verify that the text of the page is in the engine properly by searching for text strings on that page using the ’site:’ search parameter, which restricts the search engine to considering pages just from that site.”

Hogan has several suggestions for new website owners.

• Find the best name for the site.
• Make sure that the titles and descriptions on each page match the content of the page.
• Make sure that the intra-site navigation is simple enough for a search engine to crawl.
• Focus on making the text quality and uniqueness the best it can be.
• Create a Robots.txt crawler directive file.
• Create a SiteMaps file and submit it to all of the search engines.

Hogan says Ask.com uses dozens of variables to rank websites, and these variables affect the results a user would get. “With respect to links from pages outside of a site, Ask’s algorithm is focused on a subject-specific popularity, which means that we value a few links from authoritative pages in the subject area over a large number of links from pages outside of the subject area,” Hogan says. “For example, a site with a page about Australian Shepherd dogs that has just a few links from the major dog clubs will outrank the same type of page on another site that has hundreds of links from random places. The search engine treats words differently depending on where they show up on the page (Title, Headings, Body, in the URL string), and the search engine associates the text in external HTML anchor links with the page. The Ask engine also will do various word translations; so, for example, a query like ‘top 10 fastest cars’ will match a document with the text ‘top ten fastest cars’.”

Another no-no is dead links, Ussery says. “Dead links are a signal of quality, and they’re just not good to have on your site, even from a branding perspective,” Ussery says. “It has to be frustrating for users to look at the resource you’re linking to. It also frustrates me because maybe it seems that your website is not updating regularly, and maybe there are other websites out there that are better than yours.”

Find a legitimate URL-shortening service
Andy Meadows, the CEO of Austin, Texas-based Easy.com and budURL.com, says it is easier to pay for his company’s service than a “free” service. “If someone is providing something for free, the first question people should ask is, ‘How do they make money?’” Meadows says. “You don’t really know what happens day to day.  People who are willing to pay for a service that will be around for a while.”

Meadows says one of the easiest ways to find a URL shortening service is to look at the redirect type they offer. “You want to choose one that has a 301 or 307 redirect,” Meadows says. “Both of them are SEO friendly. It gives a certain level of transparency to your short URL and gives credit to your destination URL.”