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    How to get indexed in Google: Be friendly, predictable for the googlebot

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    This post is for server geeks. Everyone else should flee. Here we are talking about the underlying codes that every server sends along with html of a web site design when a page is requested from your website. There are really only a few httpd server codes that should ever be sent on purpose: 1. Code 200 OK This status code tells browsers (and the googlebot) that everything is a-okay. The content sent with the code appears to be just what was requested. Code 200 says “Yes, I have that content right here. This is the right location for requesting it, and I’m sending it to you now.” 2. Code 301 (A redirect) A status code 301 tells the googlebot that content has moved. There isn’t a penalty applied to 301 redirects in the search engines, which makes it ideal for: – Redirecting traffic to the www version of your domain (to solve possible duplicate content issues) – Redirecting traffic from old or broken URLs 3. Code 404 A status code 404 tells visiting search engine spiders like the googlebot that the content is missing. After receiving a 404 error after several visits, most search engines will remove the page from their listings. These are the HTTP status codes that should be sent to the server in most cases. Other status codes – like the dread 302 redirect – will usually only cause problems. One site we recently analyzed sent these codes when the hompage was requested: 302 (Redirected to another page) 404 (Missing. The page they were redirected to was missing!) Then the HTML of the homepage was returned as the 404 error page. What a wild ride for the Googlebot! Curious about what codes are being returned by your server? Try our new SEO Diagnostic tool, currently in beta.

    4 Google Adwords Tips: Save money by excluding visitors

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    Google Adwords opens your advertisement up to a vast audience. Sometimes it’s an audience that is a little too vast. You can save tremendous amounts of money on adwords by excluding the wrong audience: 1. Exclude surfers during the wrong time of day If your product or service is primarily marketed to businesses, be sure to turn off your ads during off hours. Business products and services are only sought during business hours, and there is little need to show ads in evenings and on weekends. 2. Never use broad match Broad match can be a horrible waste of money. If your broad match is for red widgets, your ad will come up in searches that include the word red, and searches that include the word widgets. With so much of the wrong traffic – searching for red gadgets, red ipods, etc. – there are bound to be costly clicks upon your ad. Instead of using broad match, use phrase and exact match. This will help save your clicks for visitors that might actually buy your product or service. 3. Exclude keywords that are unrelated For most any product, you can exclude some keyword. If you sell boats, you should exclude the word “toy” from most of your ads. Be creative, search Google and look for negative keywords. 4. Exclude other countries Make sure you are not showing ads in other countries. Some continents are also notorious for being involved in PPC fraud. More tips to save money with Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing! Get Joy Milkowski’s “Amazing Results with Google AdWords” course – it pays for itself! Or you can continue throwing extra money to Google. 🙂

    What are Google’s supplemental results and what’s the problem?

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    Google defines supplemental results as follows: “A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it’s pulled from our supplemental index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index. If you’re a webmaster, please note that the index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way to select or change the index in which a site appears. Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesn’t affect its PageRank.” If your web pages are listed in the supplemental results then it is likely that your web pages could not be parsed correctly by Google’s standard crawler. The problem with Google’s supplemental results are that they are only supplemental. If your web pages are listed in the supplemental results then they won’t be returned very often for regular search queries. How to find out if your web pages are in the supplemental results An easy way to find out how many of your pages are listed in Google’s supplemental results is to search for the following on Google.com: site:www.domain.com *** Search for that phrase and then proceed to the last result pages to find the supplemental results. Of course, you have to replace www.domain.com with your own domain name. How to get out of Google’s supplemental results Most web sites have pages in Google’s supplemental results. It means that Google had difficulty to index these pages or that Google had other problems with these pages. 1. Make sure that your web pages don’t contain any spam elements and that you don’t use any spam techniques to promote your web site. Using spam techniques to promote your web site is often the reason why a web site doesn’t get good rankings. Better focus on ethical search engine optimization methods. 2. Make it easy for search engines to index your web pages. If possible don’t use web page URLs that contain question marks or the & symbol. Make sure that the HTML code of your web pages offers what search engines need. Use IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer to prepare your web pages. 3. Make these pages easy to find for Google’s web crawler. The more links point to your web pages, the more likely it is that search engine crawlers fill find your web pages. Use ARELIS to get good inbound links to your site. Most web sites have pages in Google’s supplemental results. The easier you make it Google to index your web pages the more pages of your site will be listed in Google’s normal results.

    Five Ways To Save Money using Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing

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    If you are using Pay Per Click advertising with Google or Yahoo, you are probably aware of what it feels like to light money on fire. If you have a limited amount of money, you get a bad feeling in your stomach. Google and Yahoo have two main ways on displaying the advertisements you are paying for: to searchers, and across their content network. The content network consists of web pages that may have articles containing your keywords, and it is the focus of our five tips. You see, these content ads are shown to a completely different audience than search ads. Search ads are usually shown to visitors actively engaged in the buying process. Whether they are doing preliminary research, evaluating features, or comparing prices, search visitors are on a completely different wavelength than the group being shown your content ads. Here are some tips to make sure your Content ad campaign is as effective as possible: 1. Treat your content ad completely different from your search ad First of all, consider placing your content ad in a new campaign. You want to keep it separate from your search ad, and let it evolve in it’s own direction over time. Don’t let it get too close to your search ad – keep them separated! Be sure to use different ad copy and ad titles: Everything about your content ad should be different than your search ad. 2. Setup Google link alerts to see where your ads are showing Want to know where your ads are showing? Of course you do – It tells you where your money is being burned spent! Sign up for Google Alerts for the search term “domain.com” Using this service, you’ll receive email alerts whenever Google comes across your ad. Sometimes, you will see your ad has shown up on a page that you don’t necessarily want it to. Google’s guess may sometimes be wrong. After all, “Pad Printing” doesn’t always refer to printing on notepads. You should log back into Google AdWords – or Yahoo Search Marketing – and exclude that site from your list of allowed sites on which to show ads. 3. Use different display URLs to split test Your display URL is part of the advertisement. Google recognizes this, and so allows you to choose a URL different from the actual location to display to your prospective visitors. Try different display URLs and watch the results: Is one getting a better “Click Through Rate”? Improve the worst of the two, and test some more. 4. Split test your landing pages, too It might also be that traffic from certain content ads converts better than others. Set up a split test with two identical content ads, but send visitors to two different “landing pages”. These landing pages are just the destinations that your ad leads visitors to. They might be named “Contact-Us.html” and “Contact.html”, if you are selling a service. Using Google Analytics, you can sometimes see which landing page converts best into a visitor clicking your “contact us” form. 5. Make sure display URLs also redirect Google crawls through javascript links, and we’ve seen several cases where links from AdWords get into Google’s index. The URL that you choose for Google to display may actually direct traffic right to your site! We call this effect “PPC leakthrough”, because these links are leaking out of the adwords system and into Google’s main index. For example, on our myKarateStore.com advertisement for “Wing Chun Dummies”, we use “http://www.myKarateStore.com/dummy/” as the URL displayed in the ad. Even though that page is not the exact location Google’s AdWords system directs visitors to, we make sure it goes somewhere meaningful. More tips to save money with Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing! Get Joy Milkowski’s “Amazing Results with Google AdWords” course – it pays for itself.

    Reducing page load times

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    With the ever increasing impatience of internet visitors, it is important that pages load as fast as possible. Here are some quick tips we implement when developing websites to keep the page size to a minimum: 1. CSS and Javascript should be in external files. This way, they are cached after the first page is visited. 2. For large images that cannot be optimized any further, load a placeholder and update it with the full version after the page has loaded. 3. Get faster hosting. 4. Use CSS instead of tables for layout. 5. Be a minimalist. Do you really need a sound on the home page? Are animations really needed to convey your message?

    YouTube as marketing channel

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    Brian Wiener has an interesting post over at AdAge: YouTube as marketing channel. I agree that the TV Networks should be controlling their content by distributing it themselves: 1. Full Episodes should be available online(with Ads, of course). NBC’s Heroes will probably never be bootlegged on Youtube, because there is no need for it to be. 2. Small clips – 2 minute highlight clips – should be purposefully uploaded everywhere on the web. These previews and teasers are perfect to drive increased traffic and gain exposure. I also agree that search optimization should be key. Networks should host blogs to encourage as much juicy user-generated content as possible. And by using search friendly link structures throughout their sites, these media empires could rise to the top of search results – right where their audience expects to find them!

    Broadband adoption in the U.S.

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    The United States is behind other nations when it comes to adopting broadband. According to a recent report, the broadband has finally been adopted by more than 50 percent of residences. Yet, U.S. web surfers have never been less patient: Studies show visitors will not wait more than 4 seconds for an eCommerce page to load. Page load times are vital to your visitor’s experience. We will have an upcoming post with some valuable tips on reducing your page load times. Most do not require a page redesign!

    Nofollow tags

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    Nofollow tags are a fairly recent invention. The history of nofollow goes something like this: 1. Google gives priority to sites with many links. 2. Spammers use blogs and guestbooks to artificially increase their link counts. 3. Somebody proposes that certain places on the web – like blogs and guestbooks – should have a way of devaluing any links that are added. 4. Search engines listened. Well, some of them. Well, Google. Search Engine Journal did a recent  posting: 13 reasons why nofollow tags suck.  I couldn’t agree more!

    Bidding on number 3 Ad spot probably your best bet

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    I recently say another analysis showing that bidding for the number 3 spot  is the best use of money. Brandt Dainow, CEO of ThinkMetrics, after reviewed three years worth(1500 keyword sets!) of click-through trends and found the click-through rates (CTR) were virtually identical between ad positions 1-3 in his campaigns. Others disagree, but in our testing (limited, not 1500 keyword sets!) we have found the same result: positions 3 and 4 are your best use of money. (In most cases. Your mileage may vary. Other standard disclaimers here. Banned where prohibited.)

    Googlebombs have been defused

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    The phenomenon known as “Googlebombing” has been defused by Google. It used to be that if enough sites linked to a site using certain words, that site would quickly rise in rank for that keyphrase. The result? You could search Google for “miserable failure” and see the White House is number 1, with Micheal Moore only slightly behind. Political viewpoints were being communicated, and we all understood a little more about the “Google Algorithm”. With a recent change at google, this “Googlebombing” technique is no more. What technique lies ahead? What is Google’s new strategy for ranking? We’ve seen positive results for many of our clients in this last Google update, but it will be interesting to see what techniques will be found with Google’s latest changes! More coverage on slashdot… And at Google’s webmaster blog