Is the Yahoo-Bing change relevant to your website?

According to the latest comScore data, Yahoo and Microsoft sites had a combined search market share of 31.6% in June 2010.

Yahoo sites had 3.2 billion search queries and Microsoft sites had 2.2 billion search queries in June 2010. That’s a total of 5.4 billion search queries in one month.

If your website is listed for the right keywords in the Bing results, you will get a lot of website visitors that are interested in what you have to offer.

Getting visitors from Bing will also make your website less dependent on Google.

How to optimize your web pages for Bing

Optimizing your web pages for Bing is not much different from optimizing your web pages for Google. Just like Google, Bing requires optimized web pages and good inbound links if you want to see your website on the first search result page.

The difference is the weight that Bing puts in the different ranking factors. Things that work well with Google might not have the same effect on Bing and vice-versa.

Here are some tips that will help you to get the best possible results for your website:

• Optimize some pages of your website for Google and other pages of your site for Bing. By targeting the exact algorithm of a search engine, you increase your changes of getting listed on the first result page.
• Do not optimize the same page for more than one keyphrase. It is much better that a web page is highly relevant to one keyphrase than somewhat relevant to many keyphrases.
• If possible, optimize each page of your website for a dedicated search engine/keyword combination. The more targeted the optimization, the more likely it is that the web page will be listed in the top results.

Check if your web pages are ready for Bing

You will lose a lot of traffic if your web page currently has high rankings on Yahoo but not on Bing. Yahoo’s own results will be dropped after the transition to the new Bing results. The sooner you start to optimize some of your web pages for Bing, the better.

If Google puts your website in the wrong category, it will be very difficult to get high rankings for your keywords.

How to find out what Google thinks about your website

To find out what Google thinks about your website, perform a “similar” search for your domain. Enter the following in Google’s search box:

related:www.domain.com/ ~domain.com

Replace domain.com with your own domain name and make sure that there is no spacer after the colon. On the result page, Google will show you websites that it finds related to your site.

If the websites on the search result page are related to your website then everything is okay. If the websites are about totally different topics, then you have a problem and Google probably won’t display your website in the search results for the right keywords.

Why does Google put your website in the wrong category?

Suppose your website is about selling shoes. If your site is linked by other websites that link to your website and other websites that are about frogs and toads then Google might think that your website is related to frogs and toads.

It’s important that the other links on the web page that links to you are related to your site. If you’re listed in the “Shoes” category of an Internet directory then all web sites in the same category are usually also about shoes.

When search engines look at this page and check the links to other sites they will think that your web site is related to shoes. That means that it will be much easier to get high rankings for search terms that are about shoes.

Is your website in the right co-citation category?

The other websites to which your link partners link influence the ranking of your website on Google.

Here’s an example: web sites 1, 2, 3 and 4 all link to the web sites A, B, C and D. Although A, B, C and D don’t link to each other, Google thinks that A, B, C and D are related to each other because the same web sites link to them:

If A, B, C and D are all linked from 1, 2, 3 and 4 they might be related to one another, even though they don’t directly link to each other.

If A, B, C and D are all linked by many other web sites, they have a strong relationship. The more web sites they are linked by, the stronger the relationship.

If you are the owner of website A, you should make sure that web sites B, C and D are related to your site.

What does this mean for your website?

When you build links, make sure that the page that links to your site also contains other links that are related to your website topic. The more pages of the other site are about your topic, the better.

If the link to your website is in a good neighborhood then it will be much easier to get high rankings for your keywords.

Related backlinks and optimized web page content will bring your website on Google’s first result page.

Step 1: make your web pages accessible

Search engines must be able to access your web pages. If search engines cannot parse your web pages then they will ignore your site and you won’t get good rankings. Check the following points to make sure that search engines can access your web pages.

• Your web server must not return an error code when search engine spiders visit your web pages. If your server returns an error code, search engines won’t index your site.  Your web server should return a “200 OK” code to search engine spiders.
• You should also check the HTML code of your web pages. While most HTML errors don’t cause problems with search engines, some of them can prevent search engines from indexing your site.   The fewer HTML errors your web pages have, the better.
• The content of your web pages must make sense to search engines. Don’t use images or Flash to present the main content of your web pages.
• Your robots.txt file must allow search engines to index your web pages. If you accidentally blocked all bots or all directories of your website (this can happen with a simply typo in the robots.txt file), search engines won’t list your website.

Step 2: use a meaningful site and information architecture

A good site architecture shows search engines that your website is more than just a collection of random web pages.

Use folders and logical linking to show search engines which pages of your website are related. Search engines should be able to find out that a group of web pages on your site is related to a certain topic.

Step 3: choose your keywords wisely

Choosing the right keywords is one of the most important steps that determines whether your SEO campaign is a success or not.

It’s best to focus on longer keywords for search engine optimization. One word keywords are less likely to convert to a sale and they are also much more competitive.

Step 4: work on your website content

Web sites that only offer articles and affiliate links that can be found on dozens of other web sites will have a hard time to get good search engine rankings.

Try to create unique and trustworthy content that separates your web site from the others.

Write about things you know. If you’re an expert in a special field, write as much as possible about that field to make sure that your web site becomes the best resource for that topic.

Step 5: work on your backlinks

Without good backlinks, it is impossible to get high rankings on major search engines. The links that point to your website have a major impact on the position of your web pages in Google’s search results.

Try to get as many links as possible from related web sites. The more targeted the link, the more it will help your search engine rankings.

Search engine optimization can be tricky because a small error in one element can destroy all of your other efforts.

It is recommended that you work with a search engine optimization company who specializes in Google rankings.

The first result in Google gets as many visitors as position 2-4 combined

“In order to find out the value of SEO, we looked at a sample of traffic coming into our advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement.

The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 4 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together.”

Result number 10 gets 143% more clicks than result number 11

“The biggest jump, percentage-wise, is from the top of page 2 to the bottom of page 1. Going from the 11th spot to 10th sees a 143% jump in traffic. However, the base number is very low ? that 143% jump is from 1.11% of all Google traffic to 2.71%.

As you go up the top page, the raw jumps get bigger and bigger, culminating in that desired top position.”

Here are the numbers:

How to judge the financial value of your Google rankings

A number 1 ranking on Google is great but it won’t help your business if it is for the wrong keyword. To judge the value of a keyword, you can do the following:

1. Start a Google AdWords campaign for the keyword, select “exact match” and point the ad to the page on your website that is most relevant to the keyword.
2. Track the impressions and the conversion rate of the ad. To get useful data, you should track at least 500 clicks.
3. With that data, you can make a guess about the value of a visitor that finds your website through that keyword.

For example, your ad might have had 10,000 impressions during a week and 200 visitors have come to your website. Six of them purchased something of your website and the total profit was $500.

That means that the average single visitor who finds your website through that keyword is worth $2.50 to your business ($500 / 200). The 10,000 ad impressions in a week can create a click-through rate of 34.35% (see table above) if you have the number 1 ranking for that keyword.

That means that you would get about 3,435 visitors per week. Based on the average value of $2.50/visitor you would earn $8,587.50 per week or $446,500 per year just with a single keyword.

That is why businesses love search engine optimization.

Being listed on Google’s first result page for the right keywords greatly contributes to the financial success of your business.

For example, if many people use the text “buy blue widgets” to link to your website, then it is very likely that the linked web page will get high rankings for the keyphrase “buy blue widgets” in Google’s search results.

The link text (also called anchor text) is the text that is used in text links. Example:

<a href=”http://www.example.com“>this is the link text</a>

Unfortunately, not all anchor texts will be used by Google. Check the following things to make sure that the links to your website pass the correct anchor tag:

1. The nofollow attribute

This is a no-brainer. Links to your website that use the rel=”nofollow” attribute don’t pass the link text to Google. Example:

<a href=”http://www.example.com” rel=”nofollow”>great keyword</a>

2. Invalid characters in the URL

If an URL contains invalid extra characters then chances are that search engines won’t be able to index the link correctly. Example:

<a href=”http://www.example.com “>great keyword</a>

In this example, there’s a space at the end of the URL. Some webmasters found out that anchor text is not passed to Google if the link contains an extra space character.

Note that most browsers are able to correct this link and they will display the web page correctly. Unfortunately, search engine spiders seem to have more difficulty with malformed links (or they take them as a signal of low quality).

3. The links use 301 redirects

Google’s Matt Cutts recently confirmed that Google won’t consider all anchor texts that are used in 301 redirected links. Example:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/page.htm“>great keyword</a>

The web server redirects “http://www.example.com/page.htm” to “http://www.example.com” with a 301 redirect. In that case, it’s likely that Google won’t use the link text.

4. The first link passes the link text

If a page links twice to the same page then Google will use the first link text and discard the other link texts. Example:

<a href=”http://www.example.com“>This</a> is an example. The link text <a href=”http://www.example.com“>great keyword</a> will be ignored by Google.

The first and the second link go to the same URL. In this example, Google will use the link text of the first link, which is “This”. The link text of the second link will be ignored by Google.

If the second link points to another page of the linked website, then both link texts will be used by Google:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/page1.htm“>This</a> is an example. The link text <a href=”http://www.example.com/page2.htm“>great keyword</a> will be ignored by Google.

Links are the most important factor when it comes to getting top 10 rankings on Google and other major search engines.

What exactly has happened?

Many webmasters have seen a huge drop in traffic from Google for keyword phrases that are three or more keywords long (so called “long tail keywords”).

Some webmasters have lost 90% of their traffic from Google because they cannot be found anymore for the long keyword phrases.

The ranking drop did not happen to spammers. Among the affected websites was a 13 year old site with a Google PageRank of 7 and 400,000 backlinks.

Why did it happen?

It seems that this is not a penalty but a change in Google’s ranking algorithm. Google might now be able to index longer keyword phrases more accurately. There’s a new Google patent that deals with this topic.

Identifying phrases requires a lot of computing power and a lot of memory. A webmaster explained it in the discussion:

“For example, on the assumption that any five words could constitute a phrase, and that a large corpus would have at least 200,000 unique terms, there would be approximately 3.2.times.10.sup.26 possible phrases.

Clearly more than any existing system could store or otherwise programmatically manipulate.”

It seems that Google guessed the best pages for long keyword phrases until recently based on other signals and keywords on the indexed pages.

The new Google patent indicates that Google now has the computing power to index longer keyword phrases on web pages instead of guessing them.

Do you have to change your web pages now?

If you experienced a decline in traffic to your website from Google you might have to change your web pages. For example, if you want to be found for “personal injury lawyer london” then these words should appear in that order on your website.

If you use other variations such as “london lawyer personal injury” then you’ll probably get listings for that variation but not for other word combinations.

Depending on how your website’s navigational links are structured, some pages can get higher rankings than others. Here are eight things that you can do to guide search engines to the most important pages of your website:

1. Make the web pages easy to find

Make sure that the most important pages on your site can be reached with as few clicks as possible from your home page. The fewer clicks you need to get to a web page, the more important is that web page.

2. Link from your own pages to your own pages

The easiest way to get related links to a web page is to link from your own website. Link to the pages for which you want to have high rankings from all pages of your website that are related to that page.

3. Use the right keywords in your navigational links

If you want to see a certain page of your website on Google’s first result page for the keyword “blue widgets” then the links that go from other pages of your website to that page should contain the keyword “blue widgets”.

This does not guarantee that the linked web page will be listed for that keyword but it increases the relevancy of the page for the keyword.

4. Use absolute links on your website

Do not link to mypage.htm but to www.yoursite.com/mypage.htm. If other people scrape your web page contents, you’ll get backlinks from these sites.

5. Use the nofollow attribute

Add a nofollow attribute to all links that aren’t important for your search engine rankings. For example, your privacy policy page or the web page with your terms and conditions probably needn’t be listed in search engines.

6. Remove unnecessary links

The fewer links you have on a page, the more important is a single link to another page on your site. Remove unnecessary links from your web pages.

7. Exclude irrelevant and duplicate pages from indexing

Use your robots.txt file or the robots meta tag to exclude duplicate or irrelevant pages from indexing. If search engines don’t have to parse your unimportant pages the other pages of your website will get more attention.

8. Recover lost pages

Check your website for 404 not found errors and redirect these old links to the most appropriate pages on your site.

Optimizing the links on your own website improves the position of your web pages in search engines. In addition to optimizing the links, you should also optimize the content of your web pages to make sure that Google and other search engines list your website for the right keywords.

“As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. [...]

We’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

Will your website rankings drop?

Google’s Matt Cutts says that the change will affect only some websites:

“Fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking. That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page.

So please don?t worry that the effect of this change will be huge. In fact, I believe the official blog post mentioned that ‘We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing.’

The fact that not too many people noticed the change is another reason not to stress out disproportionately over this change.”

While 1% does not sound much, it can be a problem if your website belongs to the pages whose rankings will drop.

At this time, Google’s new site speed signal only applies to visitors searching in English on Google.com.

How to keep your web pages listed in Google search results

There are several things that you can do to improve the speed of your web pages:

1. Choose a fast and reliable web host with a good connection to the Internet. A “cheap” web host could cause problems.
2. Combine external JavaScript code files into one file. The fewer files the server has to request, the faster your web pages will load.
3. Compress your JavaScript code to make the JavaScript file smaller.
4. Combine external CSS files into one file and compress your CSS files.
5. If your web server supports it, enable gZip compression (your web host can do that for you).
6. Use as few images as possible on your website and compress your images. Most graphic tools enable you to choose the compression rate when saving an image for the web.
7. Put tracking codes and other JavaScript snippets at the end of your web pages.

The faster your web pages load, the more visitors of your website will be able to see the contents of your pages. Web surfers are impatient people. The average web surfer wants immediate results.

Page speed is not Google’s most important ranking signal. The end of Google’s page speed announcement contains a very important sentence: “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page.”

It is important to optimize the speed of your web pages but it’s also important to optimize all other elements of your web pages if you want to be listed on Google’s first result page.

Can you increase your website rankings by buying links?

Yes, you can. Links that point to your website are the most important factor that influences the position of your website in Google’s search results.

If you buy backlinks, you can quickly get high rankings for your website on Google. However, that’s only one side of the medal.

If buying links works, why shouldn’t you use it for your website?

Buying links is against Google’s terms of service: “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

Google’s anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts recently announced that Google has been working on new algorithms and tools to detect paid links.

Google has a report form for paid links. If one of your competitors finds a paid link that points to your website, he might report it to Google.

Google actively searches for paid links and it’s likely that they will detect all paid links sooner or later. While you can get away with them for some time (that’s why paid links work for some time), your website will be penalized as soon as Google finds out that you tried to game the system.

Buying links leads to quick results and strong penalties

If you use spammy SEO methods such as buying links, you will quickly get high rankings on search engines. Unfortunately, Google will completely remove your website from the search results as soon as they find out that you use these methods:

If you use ethical SEO methods, it will take longer until you get high search engine rankings. However, your rankings will grow steadily and you’ll get a much better performance in the long run:

Do not use spammy SEO methods to increase your rankings on Google. It will backfire on you.

There are better ways to get inbound links

As mentioned above, the links to your website are the most important factor that influences the position of your website in Google’s search results.

For that reason, it is very important to get as many good backlinks as possible to your website. The quality of the backlinks is more important than the quantity.

You can get links from related websites, links from blogs, links from social bookmark websites, links from Internet directories and more.

Why images can help you to get more visitors

Depending on the search query, Google displays several images above the regular search results. For example, try this search for German Shepherd Dog:

The images can be found at the top of the search results and they are linked with web pages. If someone clicks on the image, the person will be taken to the web page that shows the image.

How to optimize your images so that they can be found

If you have a website about German Shepherd dogs, then wouldn’t it be great if an image from your website was listed above the regular results? You’d get many additional website visitors then.

There are several things that you can do to improve the position of your images in Google Image Search:

1. Use a file name that contains the keywords for which you want to be found. In this example, the file name german-shepherd-dog.jpg would be a good idea. Separate the words with a hyphen.
2. Use a descriptive Image Alt attribute text. It usually makes sense to use the same keywords that have been used for the file name. In this example, the Image Alt Attribute would be “German Shepherd Dog”:
   <img src=”german-shepherd-dog.jpg” alt=”German Shepherd Dog”>
3. In the same way, you should use the Image Title attribute:
   <img src=”german-shepherd-dog.jpg” alt=”German Shepherd Dog” title=”German Shepherd Dog”>
4. The textual content on the web page before and after the image also impacts the position of your image in Google’s Image Search. In this example, the text “German Shepherd Dog” should appear close to the image.
5. Bigger images seem to get featured more often on Google’s first result page. The bigger your image, the easier it is to get at the top of Google’s regular result page. Include the Width and Height attributes in your image tag to show search engines the size of the image:
   <img src=”german-shepherd-dog.jpg” alt=”German Shepherd Dog” title=”German Shepherd Dog” width=”600″ height=”400″>
6. Optimize the rest of your web page for the chosen search term. If the complete web page has been optimized for a keyword then it is easier to get good listings for images that are on the page.

Make sure that the image that you optimize for your keyword also looks attractive. If no-one wants to click on the image then it won’t help your website if the image can be found on Google’s first result page.