Well, we’ve been talking about SEO for a while, but it just may be that you’re not familiar with all the terms I’ve been using in this blog and others that may be helpful in understanding general SEO. Here is a compilation of basic SEO terminology:

Analytics: This is a type of software that enables you to track all sorts of information on your website, such as the traffic to your website, the sources, the keywords, the bounce rate and a useful comparison to the past, so you can assess your website’s growth, strengths and weaknesses.

Alt Tags: Short for alternate text. This text is associated with graphic elements and describes images so that search engine crawlers know how to index a specific image.

Anchor Text: Anchor text refers to a word or phrase used as a link. This is used by search engines in the ranking process.

Back Links: A synonym for incoming links. These are links in websites other than your own, pointing at your website.

Bounce Rate: The rate of visitors to your website who choose to leave your website after viewing only one page, and ‘bounce’ away.

Cache: Cache refers to copies of your website stored in the search engine’s database or on the user’s hard drive. This makes it possible for web pages to load faster when you hit the back button for example.

Directory: An online categorization and listing compiled by humans.

Google XML Sitemap: These are xml files that list the URL’s on a specific website.

Internet Promotion: Marketing done on the internet through emails, banners and other web based techniques.

Keyword: This is a word or a phrase (which could include even four words or more) that describes a product or service and is used recurrently.

Link Building: The process of obtaining quality incoming links or back links in an effort to encourage the search engines to trust your website and increase its ranking and importance.

Link Farm: A group of highly interlinked sites with an agenda of inflating the popularity (PR) of the websites. This is considered an illegitimate technique, spamming of the search engine index process.

Meta Tags: These are tags that are not visible to your website’s visitors but provide important information to the search engine crawlers. Some of these meta tags are visible in SERP pages.

Meta Keywords: These are the keywords that appear in the meta tag. In the Wix website builder, this tag is accessed through the settings box at the top of the builder. Customarily you would enter around 7 keywords. These keywords will only be seen by search engines or by viewing the source of your website.

Meta Description: A description, about to 200 characters long that is not visible on the actual website but appears when your website shows up in a SERP.

Meta Title: A short title – up to 70 characters long (when optimizing for Google) that can be viewed at the very top of your web page as well as any time your website shows up in a SERP.

Natural Listings/Organic Search Results: Non-paid listings in search engine result pages.

Optimization: The process of strategizing and tweaking your website so that the content and structure of the website is best suited for search engine crawlers with the objective of getting listed and ranked well by the search engines.

Out bound links: Links directing to external URL’s outside the website.

Page Rank (PR): This is a scale named after Larry Page (one of Google’s co-founders) which estimates the importance of a web page. This is estimated on a scale from 0-10.

Page Views (Impressions): The number of times a visitor views a certain page or a specific ad.

Redirect: A user who attempts to enter a certain URL is automatically taken to another page without clicking on anything. There are different types of redirects. Redirects are generally not good for page rank.

Search Engine Ranking: A measure of the popularity of a specific website based on its placement in the results page for a specific keyword.

SEM: Search engine marketing.

SERP: Search engine results page. A list of the pages that come up when searching for a specific keyword.

Spider: The search engine’s ‘crawler’ or ’spider’ which scans your website pages in order to index it.

So we’ve been discussing SEO from many different aspects for quite a while. We’ve touched a variety of different topics relating to the optimization of your Wix website. I thought this is probably a good opportunity to do a little review and summary of the most important aspects of SEO and how to implement it in your Wix Flash websites, and have it posted all in one place. So here goes:

1. Content

Google and the other search engines crawl your website using the text. They crawl text. That is why you need to have as much of it as possible on your website. A website with no text will simply look empty to the search engine. Make sure you have content in your website and that this content is informative, in the sense that it will tell the search engine who you are and what your website is about.

To be more specific for Wix, I recommend at least 400 words in the homepage. Don’t sweat it though, if you’re using mini-pages you can spread the words throughout the mini-pages, as they’re all counted as one.

2. Keywords  & Meta Tags

Keywords are important in search engine optimization. Keywords are the search terms used by your target audience to reach you. For small to medium sized websites, think of 3-5 main keywords which you would like to optimize. These should be terms (they can be one, two, three or more words) that are relevant to your website and are likely to be searched in order to reach you. The first thing you can do is integrate these keywords into your content as naturally as possible. They should be part of the natural flow of information, and they should make several appearances.  The second thing is using headers to emphasize your keywords. Use your keywords in your headers. This is done through the title text box in the Wix website builder.

Third but certainly as important, use the keywords in your Meta tags. Meta tags are added through the website builder settings that appear at the top of the editor.  Add a title (up to 70 characters long) and a description (around 155 characters including spacing). Use the keywords you want to promote and make sure your description isn’t too short.

3. Links

Links are an important part of search engine optimization. A link pointing at you lets the search engine know you’re there. The more links pointing at you’re the higher your chances of getting indexed faster. Links from high ranking websites, or more important websites (aka – websites with a high page rank) are better and more meaningful than links from link farms or websites of low importance (meaning – websites with a low or no page rank). To take full advantage of the linking system use anchor links. Anchor links are links that are embedded organically into the text. For example, I could say that if you want to learn more about using links to promote your website, you should follow the link. So now the search engine knows that the target page has something to do with information on links and website promotion, and if lots of you start clicking on that link, it will also learn that the content on that page must be valuable. This will increase the ranking and rating of the target page.

4. Structure

The structure of your website is the way each page is connected to another and the manner in which information flows through your site. These days it is understood that the best type of website architecture is a flat architecture. By creating a flat architecture you are endeavoring that each page on your website can be reached with a minimum amount of clicks. This is good both for your website’s users and for search engines. If your homepage has the maximum page rank and importance, than that importance is trickled down throughout the pages. That’s why keeping as many pages as possible as close as possible to the home page (close in terms of the number of links apart), increases their importance.

5. Sitemaps, Directories and Submitting to the Search Engines

There are a number of methods to help your website get indexed along with all the pages in it. The first method of getting all your pages indexed is by using sitemaps. Sitemaps map out all the pages of your website through links. As the search engine crawls your website, having a sitemap increases the chances that all the pages will be crawled and indexed.

Get listed in as many directories as possible. The more traffic a directory has the better. Getting listed under the most relevant category lets search engines know more about your website and also leads relevant traffic your way. It’s an all round beneficial method of promoting your website online.

Last but not least, you can also submit your website directly to the search engines. Both Yahoo and Google have manual submission pages. This does not ensure that the crawler will index your website but it certainly increases the chances.

Good Luck.

This week I’d like to talk to you about a great new idea for promoting your websites Many of you have used Wix to create a Flash website for your business or non-profit organization and this could be particularly interesting for you.

Submit your website to Google’s Local Business Center listings. According to Google’s statistics 82% of searches for local business information go through Google. By submitting your website to this service you can control the way your business is listed in Google and its appearance in Google maps. This definitely gives you an advantage as you can also get information on the actual searches. The best news? It’s a free service so this is really a win-win situation.  Take a look at the short video they prepared explaining how to list your website. If you search ‘plumbers in New York for example, the first results will show the best results from Google’s local directory with a link to their website and a phone number alongside the Google map pin pointing their location. Putting it bluntly – this is good for business.

So What are the Advantages?

Getting your page listed is just the first advantage. With this listing, your traffic will increase, leading to an improved ranking for your website in general and the other keywords as well.

Also, you can get all sorts of information on your business you would not have had access to before, such as what type of keywords are being used to find you, what area of town your customers are coming from,  of  the type of traffic arriving at your site. Understanding trends amongst your clientele will allow you to cater to these specific needs.

If you have a restaurant for example, you may discover that 40% of the people reaching your website are searching for seafood or are coming from a specific area of town where you may want to open a second branch.

Knowing which keywords are working for you can give you a better idea of how to optimize your website textually, which words to emphasize and which words are just not working for you.

In short this is a win-win situation allowing you to get more from the search engine and putting your business on the map.

Good Luck!

Your website architecture is important both in terms of its target audience usability and also when taking search engines into consideration.

Focusing on the search engines for this post remember that your site architecture may influence and affect your page rank and traffic, particularly for inner pages. A higher page rank doesn’t necessarily ensure a higher ranking in search results, but it helps. It also tells your users that the information on your page is reliable, having passed the Google test.

So what does ‘flat architecture’ mean? Flat architecture is the alternative to ‘deep’ or ‘nested’ architecture. A deep architecture refers to a long chain of links, leading to inner pages, while a flat architecture refers to a system where practically no link chains exist and each page can be reached in one, two or three links.

Having a flat website makes it possible to access each page on your website quickly. From a search engine’s perspective less clicks translates into higher importance and fewer clicks into diminished importance. This is also based on the logic that the more clicks it takes to reach a page, the fewer the viewers who will reach it. This doesn’t mean you should put all your content on one page. Keep in mind that the logic behind Google’s algorithms is to target improved usability, if all your content is on one page and assuming that you have enough content to fill in several pages, will clog the page and make it harder for users to understand where and what to look at.

Here is a sketch of what was traditionally considered the best practice for an SEO structured website:

Here is a sketch of a modified web architecture, based on the flat structure theory:

This modified web structure is a good idea for websites. If you have hundreds of pages you may find that you’re clogging your homepage with links and damaging the usability of your website, not to mention that Google traditionally does not crawl over 100 links on a specific page.

In terms of transferring the ‘link juice’ and improving the ranking, the more links on a page, the more the potency of the link juice is diminished. Most experts agree that the typical algorithm for link juice is something along the lines: .85 * (1/X), with ‘x’ representing the number of links on the page.  Even so, homepage links are stronger and more valuable than deeper links and the further away a page is (in terms of links) from the homepage, the lower its page rank and importance.

Please remember that this is referring specifically to small websites. Websites with thousands of pages will have to utilize a completely different strategy that will be compatible with their size and subject. If you would like to read further on this subject, you may enjoy Sergey & Larry’s famous original paper on Page Rank .

Good luck with your new Flash website!

We’ve talked about finding the keywords to use in your website but we never really got down into the grit and grind of how best to integrate them.

How you use your keywords is important, particularly now as the new caffeine version of Google is coming out. If you use the keyword out of context, or repetitively in an exaggerated manner, it will not benefit your website in the same way as correct implementation.

Here are a few tips and ideas on how to use your keywords organically to get the best results:

1. Keywords in Your Titles

Even if you have a really catchy poetic title to give your website, you may want to reconsider and use your most important keyword here, or even two if you can. The search engine spiders read article titles and so do users for that matter. The title’s weight in determining indexing is quite large, so take advantage of it.

2. Photos

Adding texts to a picture is called adding ‘alt texts’ and that is how you’ll find it in the source of your website. Search engine crawlers can’t see images, but they can read the texts behind the picture, such as the description and the title so take advantage of these fields to use your keywords once again. In the Wix website builder you can add texts to your pictures as you add them to the galleries or by publishing the picture.

3. Writing a Smokin’ Description

The description is accessed through the settings menu at the top of the builder. The description is very important both for search engines and users. When your website appears in search results your description will accompany the result.  Make sure to include at least two of your most important keywords in your description. If you’ve chosen your keywords wisely, it shouldn’t be too difficult as the subject of your website should be related to the keywords. Take some time to write a super description. It’s worth the effort.

4. Meta Tags

Aside from the description Meta tag which you’re already familiar with there are other ways to get your keywords read in the source. For one thing, consider the names of your website pages. Suppose you’re building a website about flowers and you have galleries filled with pictures of flowers. Now, imagine you’ve divided the galleries by color (ex: red flowers, blue flowers, yellow flowers etc). Naming the page on which the gallery is located ‘Red Flowers’ if the gallery includes red flowers can help the search engine crawler figure out what that page is about. If you’ve added tags to each of the pictures and they include (at least some of them) the keyword ‘red flowers’, you’ve moved a few steps closer to optimizing your website. Headers are another element you should consider. Headers receive greater weight in determining indexing than regular texts and can be easily created in the Wix website builder. To create a header use the ‘title text box’ instead of the regular ‘paragraph’ text boxes. The bigger the title, the higher that header will rank. The largest header will appear as H1 in your website’s source (right click over the website > view source), the second largest will be H2 and so on and so forth.

5. Textual Integration

How should you use your keyword? How many times is enough? The purpose of the search engine crawler is to divine what subject your web page deals with. If you keep that in mind it will be easier to figure out how to use your keywords. If you find yourself writing a text and the same keyword keeps coming up naturally, you shouldn’t feel the need to erase it. If it comes up that often though, you may want to consider using different variations of that keyword as well instead, but that is for your consideration. Depending on how many texts you have on your website, using your keyword 3-5 times is more than enough.

To get some more information on how optimized your website is, you can download seaquake. This freeware will definitely give you more insight on how optimized your texts are and what the Google bot will see as he visits your website. It includes different statistics and details that are very helpful in the optimization process.

Google doesn’t appreciate being fooled, and once it discovers websites using inappropriate optimization techniques it may also punish them by reducing the website’s ranking and even removing the website from its search results altogether. If you’re not sure that what you’re doing is acceptable SEO practice or not, keep in mind the one golden rule: If it’s good for your users, it’s good for Google. Incorporating elements that are for Google’s bot eyes alone usually leads to fishy results. The following is a list of ILLEGITIMATE SEO practices. Here’s what you SHOULD NOT be doing:

Using Redirects to Manipulate Google Page Rank

An illegitimate redirect is a one that occurs automatically when you approach a certain URL. As you click on the link to that site, the page URL (address) will appear for a short while and then automatically redirect you to the main site. This technique is used to increase the number of times the website will appear in search results, as it will appear through different domains.

Google’s crawlers will see a different page than the users, fooling the robot into giving a false page rank.

Not all redirects are considered spam, there are several redirect types that Google accepts and acknowledges, which you can read about in other blog posts here, or through Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

100% Frames

We’ve already discussed iframes here in this blog. Just like the redirect, and the golden principle of SEO, if what your users see is different than what the Google bot sees, it’s a problem. A 100% frame page is a page covered completely by a frame that consists of different content from the rest of the website. End result – Google sees one thing on which it bases its page ranking and the user sees something entirely different.

Just like the redirect, this enables spammers to index the same site over and over again under different domains. While the different domains may have different content and get ranked as a result of that content, the end user will find himself viewing the same main site.

Hiding Texts and Links

If a text is visible to search engines only it is considered spam. So what does Google consider hidden text?

• Any text written in the same color (or close to) as the web page background.
• Any text situated in an area of the page that has been defined as hidden or invisible using CSS.
• Extremely small fonts that are not legible to internet user.
• Any text that is being hidden behind an image.

While you might find this useful, particularly if you don’t want to overload your web design with texts, it may very well backfire at you. It may get you kicked out of the ranking game altogether, not to mention that clicking ctrl-a in the browser may reveal your texts anyway.

Other Illegitimate Practices to Avoid

Spamming the keywords – using the same keyword over and over without any real content involved.

Cloaking – this is a technological ruse. As you enter the website, the website issues a query inspecting your status. If you are discovered as a crawler you will end up seeing a different page than you would have reached as a regular user.

Doorway Pages – these are pages created solely to optimize for a specific word. The chosen keyword is repeated over and over again on this page, suggesting high relevance to search engines. This doorway page will either include a link to the main homepage or it will include an automatic redirect to the homepage. Either way, this doorway is considered unethical SEO practice.

Excessive Linking between Websites – an exaggerated amount of links between two sites. What’s considered exaggerated? Good question. There isn’t a specific number of links and it depends greatly on the balance of the rest of the content. There is higher risk of getting caught when the two sites use the same IP. In general, triangle linking is much better for SEO purposes. This means that if your website is site A, and you sent a link to site B, site B will link to site C and site C will send the link right back to you – site A. Another unethical practice involves a bombardment of links on a single page or website. Link farms are a particularly deplorable practice.

Selling Links for PR

Lately, websites that have integrated a practice where they sell links to other websites (meaning, website x pays website y to include a link to it) have been losing ground fast. This is done in order to increase the page rank and is also considered deceptive.

So, How Will You Be Discovered?

Search engines use three different methods to discover culprit websites. The first is technological. Search engine bots are programmed to uncover some of the more obvious deception techniques. When the crawler runs in to such cases it will raise a ‘red flag’. This will lead to a temporary PRO penalty (in Google). Usually these penalties are only temporary but in certain cases they may become permanent.

Google and the other search engines also encourage users to report unethical website promotion techniques. You can report other websites through a special web page dedicated to this subject. This is Google’s Spam Report page. You need to sign in to use it though.

Forums are another method of discovering SEO scams. Apparently Google employees read webmaster forums and if they run into something suspicious… they do something about it.

In this blog we’ve been discussing search engine optimization from many different angles and one of the primary subjects has always been keywords, and how to use them. But how do you choose the right keywords for your website? Good question.  Here are a few tips.

Choosing your keyword involves several stages:

1. Brainstorm. Visualize your potential customers. What kind of words would your customers use when attempting to find information or services which your site offers. Think of alternative spellings, different word combinations, synonyms, slang…
   A good way to find out what keywords to optimize is by researching the keywords being used by your current customers. If you already have a website this is a good way to go.
2. Take Advantage of Keyword Research Tools. There are several online tools that can help you sift through the thousands of keyword options. These include Google Adwords, Google Trends, Wordtracker and Overture. I will go into further detail on each of the tools, but suffice to say using these tools can give you data on trends and statistics related to keyword selection.
3. Check Out the Competition. Certain keywords are very popular but very competitive. Take a look at the websites currently ranked in the first places to understand the scale necessary to overtake these spots. Your website may be a spiritual haven for example, but using just the word God as a keyword, may not be the wisest decision. God is the second most popular search term on the internet (after sex of course), and when you search for it in Google, there are 397,000,000 results as of today, November 2009.
4. Create a Chart. Analyze the keyword data you’ve collected in a chart and compare traffic, relevance to your website, each keyword’s conversion rate etc. This method is the best way to reach an informed decision. After you’ve selected and implemented the targeted keywords, you can use analytics programs (such as Google Analytics) to review and refine your choice of keywords.

Keyword Research Tools

Adwords – Adwords is dedicated to advertising in Google, but it also has the keyword external tool that is very useful for finding new keyword ideas.  You enter a word or phrase, and it will generate related keywords along with some basic information on them. This is a good place to start your brainstorm session.

Google Trends – Google trends is great because it lets you see which keywords are more popular than others in a simple graph. In both cases you have the option of changing different parameters to suit your specific search needs.

WordTracker – another popular tool for keyword data collection. WordTracker acquires most of its statistics through the meta search engine Dogpile that has approximately 1% of all searches online.  WordTracker provides a lot of detail, and even though this information comes from a relatively smaller piece of the pie, it is relatively reliable.

Overture – Overture was re-branded Yahoo! Search Marketing and provides data collected from searches performed in Yahoo! Yahoo has 22%-28% of searches online. It provides good data and methods for measuring comparative numbers.

Keyword Analysis Parameters

Even after choosing your keywords and implementing them in your website tactfully you should always stay alert to changes in trends and the general data. Here are a few parameters by which you can test the keywords you like best:

• Conversion Rate – this parameter covers the percent of surfers searching for that term who converts. To convert in this case, means to click on an ad, to purchase a product etc)
• Predicted Traffic – a prediction of the amount of surfers who will be searching for this specific keyword each month. This data may change as trends do, so stay updated
• Per Customer Value – this parameter covers the average revenues per customer using the keyword and leads to a comparison of lucrative keywords vs. less profitable ones.

Once you’ve analyzed this data you should be well on your way to optimizing your website for the best keywords possible. Remember, it takes more than a couple of days and the key to SEO is also a lot of patience and persistence.

Don’t try to grab the entire pie at once. Rather, work slowly and carefully through the keywords and build your site gradually. This is also a better method of working with Google, which usually credits older sites before new ones anyway. Target one or two main keywords or phrases per page tops and work your way up in the page ranks. As your website matures, gains more and more links, grows in terms of content and pages and acquires greater legitimacy with the search engines, you’ll find targeting multiple keywords more feasible.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Bots or Spiders – Search engine bots, or spiders, use hyperlinks to ‘crawl’ pages and documents. Estimates say that search engines have crawled between 8-10 billion pages of the approximately 20 billion pages that exist on the World Wide Web today.

Links are a method of identifying the popularity and/or importance of a specific website. Using link analysis search engines analyze both the source page and the destination. Link data provides information on different affiliations between websites as well as contextual data about the website – which websites are linked to that site etc.

Search engines will also denote greater value to links coming from stronger websites, aka websites that are known to be reliable and popular. This is why using a link farm to promote your website is probably a waste of time and getting a link from the Wikipedia website for example, will create a much greater splash for your ranking. How do you know which websites are more powerful than others? Take a look at the website’s page-rank. So what is a page rank?

Page Rank – This is an explanation of the PageRank as it appears in Google’s technological overview page:

“PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.”

Google considers links as votes. When you link your website to another, you are saying that their content is interesting and relevant and you are also helping define the type of relevancy by providing more information through hyperlinks or anchor text links.

Anchor Text Links – search engines will use the anchor text as additional data helping them determine the content of the destination page. If I wrote an article on free Flash templates and used the term as a link to Wix, as I just did, what I am actually telling search engines is that the term free Flash websites is relevant to the Wix website, therefore, Wix deals with free Flash templates.

Search engines are also known to consider the text surrounding the link and allocate greater importance to this text than the rest of the texts on your website. This gives links that are part of a paragraph greater importance than links in a footer or sidebar.

Another factor that is part of the search engine’s considerations is the subject matter of the destination page. If you create an anchor links with the words ‘free Flash templates’ and this link leads to a page that discusses free Flash templates in its content, the link will probably receive greater value.

You can get information on links through the search engines and the most reliable source is Yahoo! Here are a few commands that will give you information on links:

1. Linkdomain:url.com
   This command will give you results that display all the pages linked to any web page hosted at the url.com domain.
2. Link:http://www.url.com/page.html
   This command shows those pages that are linked directly to the page specified in the URL.
3. Linkdomain:url.com word
   This search command will display all the pages that include the term specified in the “word” that are linked to pages hosted at the specified URL. Use this command to find topical pages linking the URL.
4. Linkdomain:url.com -term
   Use the “– “ symbol to indicate that pages that include the term that appears after the symbol should be excluded from the search.
5. Linkdomain:url.com -site:url.com
   In addition to the “-“symbol, you can also remove specific sites from the results. This may be especially significant if a large site links to the destination website on every page, and you only want to see links that don’t include that site.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

So what have you already learned about SEO? Think you’ve figured it out? Here are a few questions that’ll help give you an idea of how much information you still have to learn, and how much SEO you already know. You can take the entire test at the seomoz website.

1. Where is it LEAST important to include keywords?

1. title
2. body text
3. Meta Keywords
4. Headers

2. What is the best way to maximize the frequency with which your website/web page is crawled by he search engines?

1. Insert a “crawl delay” parameter into the robots.txt file.
2. Submit your site directly to the search engines through submission forms
3. Visit Google’s Webmaster Central and increase your “crawl frequency”
4. Search for your website more frequently in the major search engines
5. Add new content frequently

3. How can description Meta tags help with the search engine optimization?

1. This is a trick question! – Meta descriptions are not important
2. They’re an important ranking factor in search algorithms
3. They’re the texts that entice searchers to choose and click your listing
4. They help inform search engines which keywords are most important on your page

4. Which of these sources is considered the best source for competitive link data?

1. Ask.com
2. MSN
3. Alexa
4. Google
5. Yahoo

5. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

1. There is no difference, they are synonymous
2. SEO refers to organic/natural listings while SEM deals with PPC or paid searches
3. SEM implies association with traditional marketing companies, while SEO is usually independent or uaffiliated with traditional marketing
4. SEO focuses on organic/natural search ranking, SEM encompasses all aspects of search marketing
5. SEO is what they call SEM on the West coast

6. Which of the following is NOT considered to be a highly important factor in ranking a particular search term?

1. Temporal relevancy – the number and quality of links pointing at a certain page over a given time
2. An HTML validation (according to W3C standards) of a page
3. The quality and quantity of all external links to the page
4. The link popularity of a specific page within the domain
5. Keyword usage in the title tag of the page

7. When creating “flat architecture” for a site, what are you attempting to minimize?

1. The KB size/weight of pages targeting search engines
2. The total amount of scrolling necessary for the website’s navigation
3. Colors used in the design
4. The number of tabs/windows that open during normal navigation
5. How many links a search engine must go though in order to reach content pages

8. Which of the following is NOT the best method for creating quality title tags?

1. Writing great copy that encourages users to “click” on your listing
2. Making sure each page has a unique title
3. Including an exhaustive list of keywords
4. Limiting the title tag to about 65 characters, including spaces

9. Which character limitation is the best in regards to the title tags (assuming you want your title tag to be fully displayed in search engines)?

1. 108
2. 20
3. 65
4. 45
5. 85

10. The ‘PageRank’ was dubbed just so because it was created by Larry Page and not because it happens to rank pages.

1. False
2. True

11. Creating a ’sitemap’ with links to other pages in your domain is important because…

1. Most web users outside theUS prefer this navigational method
2. It can help search engine crawlers access many pages on your website easily
3. A site map reduces the rate at which spiders crawl your pages
4. It’s a mandatory requirement for submission to most of the important search engines

12. Why are absolute (http://www.mysite.com/my-category) URLs better than relative (”/my-category”) URLs for on-page internal linking?

1. Absolute URLs provide a link back to the original website after they are scraped and copied onto other domains
2. They provide more keyword context for search engines
3. These URLs provide greater keyword weight
4. Absolute URLs are filled with vodka – duh!
5. Search engines can’t crawl relative URLs

13. How should you avoid duplicate content issues that are often present in temporal pagination issues (where content moves from page to page, as can be seen in article lists, multi-page articles and blogs)?

1. Use a Meta robot “noindex, follow” tag to the paginated pages
2. Each page should be displayed in a new tab/window
3. Link the paginated pages with a rel=”nofollow” in the link tag
4. Pagination does not have any duplicate content problems associated with it

14. What should you do with old URLs after updating your site’s URL structure to build new versions of your pages?

1. Nothing
2. Move the old links to a sub-domain
3. Create 404 landing pages for the old URLs so search engines & visitors understand that the content is no longer there
4. Use a 301 to redirect them to the new URLs
5. Request their removal via webmaster central and site explorer in Yahoo!

15. When multiple pages on your website are targeting the same keywords, which is the best way to avoid keyword cannibalization?

1. Restrict search engines from crawling/indexing less important pages
2. Remove duplicate keywords from the Meta keywords tag on secondary pages
3. Add links on all the secondary pages directing back to the page you want ranked for the term/phrase, using primary keywords as anchor texts
4. Increase keyword density on the main page and make sure its denser than that of the other pages

Did better than you thought? Not as good?

Here are a few good SEO websites/blogs you might enjoy reading for more information:

• Matt Cutts has been working for Google since 2000. His blog is an easy read and always a great place to find updates on Google.
• The SEOBOOK is also a good read with handy information and links to a good training center.
• Another place to read up on SEO tricks and tools is SEOCHAT.
• One of the best places to get updates is search engine land.

Answers: [1=4] [2=5] [3=3] [4=5] [5=4] [6=2] [7=5] [8=3] [9=3] [10=2] [11=2] [12=1] [13=1] [14=4] [15=3]

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

I want to use this post to address a prevalent misconception. Many people, as they begin to optimize their website, tend to perceive this process as somewhat contradictory with the rest of the work they’ve put in with the product and potential users in mind. In fact, the work they invest in their website is divided between work optimizing for users and work optimizing for Google – when in fact these two are almost one and the same.

Google and you have the same agenda

Google wants to know what your website is about – so do we. Think of your new free Flash website as a well written essay. You’d have to ask yourself first what the essay is about and if you can’t summarize this concept in a sentence, you aren’t doing your job well. What is your website about? Is it about selling t-shirts? Is it a business website for a dentist’s office? Is it your band’s fan page? Make sure this message is clear and comes across fast. There were over 183 million websites on the internet as of early 2009 and this number just keeps growing. If a visitor reaches your website and doesn’t know what it’s about he has no reason to stay. It takes a lot less time to click your mouse than it does to walk out of a store.

Google has the same agenda. It wants to be able to give the best search results and this depends very much on how you present your website. It uses algorithms that are meant to discover your website’s purpose and subject. That’s why it reads the titles and gives them precedence over other types of texts. That’s why the description is so important. That’s why it crawls the links leading to your website to understand what subjects are relevant to your website. If you’re website’s message is clear to Google, it will most likely be clear to an actual human visitor.

Define your website’s message clearly

Many people have searched and found ways to outmaneuver Google’s algorithms and get their website listed on the first page. However, Google continuously updates its algorithms and these websites don’t last very long. Spamming is basically a waste of time at the end of the day. You aren’t serving your users/visitors by offering them shitty content, and you aren’t going to get very far with Google either. Playing the game however, may be a little harder and more complex, but it will improve the quality of your website and get you the right kind of traffic.

So make sure you define your message clearly. Notice our header: ‘Learn. Optimize. Get Your Wix Ranked’. Bing.  You know exactly what this blog is about. So does Google.

Are you being Google friendly?

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…