through

,

being the largest heading and

being the smallest heading. These tags are pairs, so they must be used both before and after your heading text. Here are examples of the relative sizes of the Heading tags:

We Bring the World to Your Table!

We Bring the World to Your Table!

We Bring the World to Your Table!

We Bring the World to Your Table!

We Bring the World to Your Table!

We Bring the World to Your Table!

Chapter 3: HTML Primer

29

These sizes are only examples. The actual size that they will display depends on many factors, including the user’s browser, the resolution of her screen, and her display settings.

Changing Font Size (Font Tags) The Font Size tags work almost the same way as the Heading tags. There are 12 Font Size tags available, from sizes +6 through +1 and –1 through –6. The syntax of Font Size tags is a little different from the syntax of Heading tags. Here are some examples of using a font tag to specify the size of some text: Silver Platter Foods might display as:

Silver Platter Foods Silver Platter Foods might display as: Silver Platter Foods

Then, of course, there’s an in-between size, where: Silver Platter Foods could look like: Silver Platter Foods

Creating Hyperlinks (Anchor Tag) Hyperlinks are links from one web page to another. For example, a hyperlink to the Silver Platter home page might look like this: Click here to visit the Silver Platter home page n

A stands for “anchor,” specifying that a link will be anchored to the destination URL specified by the HREF attribute.

30

Chapter 3: HTML Primer

n

HREF stands for “hypertext reference.” This is an attribute of the Anchor tag that indicates the destination URL of the link.

n

http://www.silverplatterfoods.com is the destination URL of the link. This is what WebPosition Gold refers to as the “hyperlink URL.”

n

“Click here to visit the Silver Platter home page” is the text that will appear on the page as a link. This is what WebPosition Gold refers to as the “link text.” When a user clicks on this text, her browser window will display the page specified as the destination URL.

n

closes the Anchor tag pair.

Image Tag The Image tag is a single tag that inserts an image (graphic) into your page. The syntax of this tag is: n

Img specifies that this is an Image tag.

n

Src = “Filename” specifies the URL of the image that you want to display.

n

Alt = “Alternate Text” specifies what’s known as alternate text, or alt text. The alternate text is the text that will display if a user has images turned off in his browser settings. Some people prefer to surf the web with images off because pages load much faster without graphics. The alt text will also display if a user places his mouse pointer over an image for a few seconds. Some search engines consider alt text as one of the criteria in their ranking algorithms.

Comment Tag The Comment tag allows you to insert comments into your HTML code. You can use comments to make your code more readable by explaining the purpose of different sections of the document. The Comment tag is a paired tag and its syntax is:

Chapter 3: HTML Primer

31

Open comment: Anything between the open and close Comment tags will be ignored by a web browser when it displays the page. For example: Some search engines consider the text within the Comment tag as one of the criteria in their ranking algorithms.

Saving an HTML Document Just as Word and Excel documents have their own specific filename and suffix (“.doc” and “.xls,” respectively), so do HTML documents. The HTML filename suffix is “.htm” or “.html,” and you should always make sure that you save your HTML documents using one of these suffixes.

Opening Documents in Web Browsers Once your file is saved on your computer, you can immediately open it in your web browser. To do so, follow these simple steps: 1.

Select the File tab in the upper-left corner of the browser screen.

2.

Under File, select Open.

3.

Next, you need to find the file you want to open in the browser. Some browsers immediately open the dialog box that allows you to search and open files. Other browsers, such as newer versions of Explorer, will ask you to select the Browse button to get to the same dialog box. Whatever the case, find the appropriate file on your computer.

4.

Select OK.

32

Chapter 3: HTML Primer

You can now view your page in your web browser.

Default Page The default page of a web site is usually named either index.htm or index.html. Some web servers use default.htm or default.html instead. If you type just the domain name of the site into the address bar of your browser without specifying a page name, the server will display the default page for that site. The default page is the site’s home page. For example, if you enter www.silverplatterfoods.com into your web browser, the home page of the site will be displayed. The page name is actually index.htm, even though it’s not displayed in the address bar. You can verify this by typing in www.silverplatterfoods.com/index.htm. You’ll see that the exact same page loads. You should check with your web hosting company to find out the page name of your site’s default page. You can also figure it out for yourself by entering your domain name, followed by a forward slash (/) and then one of the four page names listed above. The one that displays your home page is your site’s default page name. The others will probably return a “Page not found” error message. Now that you have a basic understanding of HTML, you’re ready to learn how to use WebPosition Gold to improve your site’s search engine rankings.

Chapter 4

Keyphrase Selection

33

34

Chapter 4: Keyphrase Selection

Which Phrases Do You Want to Optimize For? Keyphrase selection is a critical step for effective search engine optimization. Without properly targeted keyphrases, you won’t be able to capture the audience your business needs for a successful presence on the Internet. Choosing keywords and keyphrases can be a challenging part of the optimization process. Once you get the hang of it, however, you’ll have many words and phrases you can use to optimize for the search engines. WebPosition Gold’s role is to analyze your pages based on the keyphrases you choose to target. It will then output detailed reports specifying the exact changes you should make to your pages in order to improve your rankings. It’s important to target words that your audience will actually use when searching for your product or service. But how do you really know which words and phrases people are searching for? If you choose a keyphrase that’s too obscure, your rankings may skyrocket for that phrase, but your traffic will probably not increase. Searchers will not find your site if they’re not searching for that particular keyphrase. On the flip side, if you target keywords or phrases that are too general, you’ll have too many other web pages to compete with for those phrases. It is nearly impossible to get top rankings for a single keyword, and in most cases, it’s not worth your time or effort to optimize for very general words or phrases. The secret to keyphrase selection is to target phrases that are specific to your business or your products. Each phrase should contain three to four words, or two words if it’s not an extremely competitive phrase.

Chapter 4: Keyphrase Selection

35

Let’s begin our story of the Silver Platter Foods company and how they used WebPosition Gold to transform themselves from a small, unknown web site to a leading gourmet food retailer. One morning, Silver Platter’s marketing director, Mike Merlot, was mulling over the fact that their web site was not generating the amount of sales they had hoped for. Mike had spent a ton of money on banner ads, which advertised the site with alluring photographs of French cheese and rich chocolate cakes. Additionally, he submitted the web site using search engine submission software that promised more traffic through mass submissions to thousands of search engines. In actuality, most of these unknown search engines were the so-called FFA (Free For All) sites that collect e-mail addresses for the purpose of sending out junk e-mail. This particular morning, Mike’s boss and CEO of Silver Platter Foods, Marie Brie, was also worrying about the web site traffic they had hoped for but were not generating. She did some research into marketing options and came across WebPosition Gold. After reading a description of the program, she immediately understood how it could help Silver Platter attain better rankings in the search engines. She walked into Mike’s office to find out if he had heard of WebPosition Gold. “Actually, I was going to ask you the same thing!” Mike exclaimed. “I was reading about WebPosition Gold in a marketing newsletter I just received, and I thought it would be worth trying.” With WebPosition Gold, Mike and Marie knew that Silver Platter Foods was on its way to Internet marketing success. After spending several days experimenting with WebPosition Gold and reading through the documentation, Mike felt that he was ready to begin the optimization process. He began by using a web-based service called WordTracker to help him develop a list of keyphrases that would be uniquely targeted to Silver Platter Foods. WordTracker is the premiere service for researching keyphrases. It provides estimates of how many people are searching for particular keyphrases in various search engines and how much traffic it would expect a web site to

36

Chapter 4: Keyphrase Selection

receive in a 24-hour period based on each keyphrase. You’ll find a link to WordTracker on MarketMySite!

NOTE: WordTracker is easy to learn, and it offers a great deal of power and flexibility. This chapter is not intended to be an in-depth guide to using the service. Rather, we will illustrate some examples of how Mike Merlot uses the service to do keyphrase research for Silver Platter Foods. Once you start using WordTracker, you can’t help but put yourself in your customers’ shoes and begin to think about which words they might use when searching for your business. It’s a great springboard to get you thinking about your business from every possible angle.

Chapter 4: Keyphrase Selection

37

Mike began by submitting to WordTracker words or terms that pertained to the Silver Platter Foods site. WordTracker then listed related words and terms that pertained to the business. It did this by querying two major search engines using the search terms Mike typed in, then scanned the first 200 web pages that related to the search term and looked for appropriate meta tags. This initial search is a great brainstorming tool, as it returns a large number of words and phrases, some of which Mike may never have thought of before in relation to Silver Platter Foods’ services and products. WordTracker recommends that you start searching with general terms and then get more specific. Mike began his search with the simple word “food.” The top five related words WordTracker returned were “food,” “nutrition,” “food safety,” “recipes,” and “cooking.”

38

Chapter 4: Keyphrase Selection

These words were all generally related to Silver Platter Foods, but they were also related to thousands of other sites as well. Mike then typed in “gourmet,” which returned “gourmet,” “gourmet gallery,” “food,” “recipes,” and “juicers.”

These words were also not really what he had in mind to target because they were so general that a search on these words would return too many sites. Mike then tried the phrase “gourmet foods.” This returned “gourmet foods,” “gourmet,” “food,” “gifts,” and “foods.”

Chapter 4: Keyphrase Selection

39

These words were more targeted to Silver Platter Foods, so Mike decided to pursue “gourmet foods” further. Once Mike found appropriate keywords, WordTracker showed him the popularity for each word and phrase and gave an estimate of the amount of traffic Silver Platter Foods might receive based on achieving top search engine rankings for those words. Mike chose to look at the phrase “gourmet foods” in more detail. As you can see from the following screen shot, the count on “gourmet foods” is 292, meaning the phrase showed up 292 times in the WordTracker database. It also has a predicted traffic statistic of 290, based on the current 24-hour period, meaning that WordTracker estimates 290 searches per day for that phrase. This is WordTracker’s estimate of the number of daily searches on all major search engines.

WordTracker not only returned popularity results for “gourmet foods” but for 98 other related keywords and phrases as well. These words were all potentially good enough to consider using. To keep track of all the words, WordTracker has a keyword “basket” to place words for further investigation. Mike added the 99 keyphrases to his basket and then ran a competition search on these phrases for Google.

40

Chapter 4: Keyphrase Selection

The competition search ranks the phrases according to how often they are searched and how competitive they are for most of the major search engines and directories such as AltaVista, Google, and Yahoo!. It estimates the competitiveness of each term by how many times it appears on the web for a search on a major search engine. Not surprisingly, Mike found that when doing a competitive analysis, keywords that are searched often but appear on the web fewer times are considered the most valuable. By understanding how this concept works, Mike was able to target popular keywords for which relatively few web sites were competing.

Chapter 4: Keyphrase Selection

41

After Mike decided he had a sufficient amount of keyphrases to work with, he was able to begin working with WebPosition Gold to optimize his pages. WebPosition Gold’s Page Critic module will analyze the keyword concentrations on the Silver Platter Foods web pages. The Traffic Analyzer counts how many people found Silver Platter Foods on each search engine, specifically through the keywords or phrases they used. This can be very helpful in determining which keywords people are using to find your site. Unfortunately, it won’t tell Mike which keywords people are searching on and not finding his site, but it’s a good beginning. In addition, Mike can add important keyphrases to the Reporter function of WebPosition Gold to make sure he maintains good rankings on those words. This may sound unfamiliar to you now, but you’ll soon see how it all ties together.

Keyword Tactics to Consider When you begin to explore potential keyphrases, there are several helpful tactics to consider. The most important is to put yourself in the shoes of the type of customer you want to target. Make a list of the kind of keywords or phrases he is likely to search, or use WordTracker to help you brainstorm different keyphrases. Ask your friends and colleagues about which words they might search for if they were looking for a business similar to yours. Here are additional tactics you want to remember when targeting keywords: n

Concepts — Include concept keywords. Mike’s concept keyword is “gourmet food,” since that’s what Silver Platter Foods sells. Remember to be specific enough so you don’t become trapped by topics that are too broad.

n

Brands — If this applies, include more specific brand names that are applicable to your business. Since Silver Platter Foods sells gourmet cookware, Mike might try to optimize for Calphalon nonstick cookware. If you offer services, then try to use service brand names when possible. Legally, you should put the registered trademark (®) or trademark (™) symbol after the names when mentioning trademarked names on the page.

42

Chapter 4: Keyphrase Selection

n

Company names — If your site offers products from a well-known company, include that company’s name in your keywords. There’s nothing wrong with riding on the popularity of other, more established companies. In Mike’s case, if Silver Platter Foods carries Godiva Chocolate, he shouldn’t be afraid to use their name to promote his company’s gift baskets. Their good reputation may be a big plus for Silver Platter.

n

Your company name — Unless your company has a well-known brand name such as Microsoft or Harley-Davidson, it’s generally less important to emphasize the company name as a keyword. You can, however, create an “About Us” page that repeats your company name several times so that someone searching for your company will find that page. If your company has a catchy name that people can easily remember and that name does become well-known, you may be able to benefit from name recognition alone.

n

Target phrases, not words — With over a billion pages on the web, it’s virtually impossible to achieve top rankings for common words such as “gourmet” or “food.” Instead, try to target phrases of between two and four words in length.

n

Test keywords — Ideally, before and/or after you launch your web site, you should see how many other pages match the keywords people would likely search on to find your site. The fewer matches found for your search, the easier it will be to achieve top rankings. Also important are the quality of the matches. Your keywords may only bring up a lot of poor quality web sites that your potential audience would have no interest in anyway. Therefore, with the proper strategy, your site could be the only one of its type that appears near the top of that search. There may be phrases that are much easier to achieve good rankings on than more common words and phrases. This strategy can gain your site unexpected traffic. Optimizing your page for phrase searches can do wonders in helping people find your site. However, because of the many combinations of keywords and phrases available to attract business, it’s traditionally been an impossible task without a tool like WebPosition Gold to help you monitor your results. WordTracker is a good place to start and

Chapter 4: Keyphrase Selection

43

WebPosition Gold will give you an extra edge to ensure that your pages are competitive for your desired keyphrases. n

Case sensitivity — If the user types the word “Food,” many engines will search for “Food” with an uppercase “F” only. If your page has only “food” with a lowercase “f” in it, it won’t be found. On the other hand, if a user searches for “food” many engines will search for it in both lowercase and uppercase forms. Therefore, it pays to make sure you have at least some of the keywords in uppercase or starting with an uppercase letter if the user might search that way. The easiest place to do this is in the title of the page, in meta tags, and at the beginning of sentences.

n

Bad spelling can be good — Look for obvious spelling and grammatical mistakes people are likely to make and then incorporate some of them into your pages to pick up unexpected traffic. Also, product names can have slight variations. For example, Silver Platter Foods may feature a product called Ghiradelli Chocolate. However, people could easily perform searches on Giradeli Chocolate, or simply Ghiradelli.

Hopefully, this chapter has given you a clearer understanding of how important keyphrases are in relation to your web site and how you can use WordTracker to research keyphrases. The next step is to begin using WebPosition Gold to analyze your existing rankings for these keyphrases.

Chapter 5

Installation and Setup

45

46

Chapter 5: Installation and Setup

trial version of WebPosition Gold 2 is contained on the CD-ROM included with this book. To install WebPosition Gold on your computer, insert the CD-ROM into your CD-ROM drive. After a few moments, a menu should appear on your screen. One of the menu options is to view the introduction from our WebPosition Gold 2 video training course, which is sold separately. Even if you don’t plan on purchasing the video training course, the introduction will be very useful in helping you to understand some of the concepts in this book. Therefore, I would suggest that you view this presentation first. After you view the video introduction, click on the option to install WebPosition Gold. Follow the prompts, and it should install onto your computer and create shortcuts in your Start menu. After the install is complete, click on your Start menu, locate the folder labeled WebPosition Gold 2, and select the WebPosition Gold 2 program icon.

Registering WebPosition Gold When you run WebPosition Gold in the unregistered mode, it will prompt you to register each time you start the program. You have 30 days to evaluate it for free before you have to register. During the evaluation period, you can only work with a few of the search engines. You can register your copy of WebPosition Gold at any time during the evaluation period by clicking on the File menu and then selecting the Secure Order/Pricing menu option.

Chapter 5: Installation and Setup

47

Since WebPosition comes with a 45-day unconditional money-back guarantee, you risk nothing by registering. After you’ve registered, you’ll receive an unlock code via e-mail from FirstPlace Software. This unlock code will convert the trial version into the full version. To enter the unlock code, click on the File menu and select the Enter Unlock Code menu option.

In the Unlock Program dialog, fill in the Registered Name and Unlock Code blocks from the e-mail that you received from FirstPlace Software.

Make sure that you enter the code exactly as it is shown in the Unlock Code e-mail that you receive after ordering the software. I recommend that you copy and paste the code. This will prevent typos and other errors. Common errors include typing in the number “1” rather than the lowercase letter “L” and using the number “0” rather than the letter “O.” If you are copying and pasting the code and it is still being reported as invalid, you may have the wrong version of the software. WebPosition Gold 2 will only accept version 2 unlock codes. If you have an unlock code from a

48

Chapter 5: Installation and Setup

prior version of the software, you will need to order an upgrade from FirstPlace Software in order to receive an unlock code that will work with version 2.

Configuring Internet Connections Before you can begin using WebPosition, you should configure your connection settings. This will enable WebPosition to access the Internet correctly. Click on the Edit menu and select the Connection Settings menu option.

Under Internet Connection method, select the option that best describes the type of connection you have: n

Dial-Up — If you use the Windows 95 or above dialer or the NT RAS dialer, then WebPosition can automatically dial your Internet connection for you. If you use a modem and regular phone line to dial and

Chapter 5: Installation and Setup

49

connect to the Internet, this is the option you’ll probably use. If no entries appear in the list of user accounts and you’ve dialed into the Internet before, you may not have a Win95 or above compatible dialer. In this scenario, select the Dedicated/LAN option or the AOL/CompuServe option. n

Dedicated/LAN — If you’re on a network that has an Internet connection, or you use another type of always-on Internet connection like cable, DSL, or satellite, select Dedicated. This option assumes that WebPosition will find an active Internet connection when it needs to access the web.

n

AOL/CompuServe — If you use AOL, CompuServe, or any thirdparty dialer program, select this option. In reality, this option works the same as Dedicated/LAN in that it assumes you will have an active connection established when you run a WebPosition Gold Mission. This option will open a window when you start WebPosition Gold to remind you to run your AOL, CompuServe, or other dialer so WebPosition Gold will be able to access the web.

If you wish WebPosition to remind you to run your dialer each time before trying to connect to the web, then simply disable the box labeled Always connect automatically.

50

Chapter 5: Installation and Setup

Next, select your proxy options:

n

No Proxy — This is the default setting and is applicable for most people who just have dial-up modem connections. Most connections do not require a proxy server. However, some corporate networks do require that you enter a proxy server address.

NOTE: If you have a proxy server, but your system administrator tells you that entering the proxy server name is not necessary for your network, then leave this setting at No Proxy. If your connection fails, you may need to turn proxy support on and enter a proxy name or address. n

Standard Proxy and/or Firewall — If your system administrator gave you a proxy name or address to enter into your Internet applications, select this option. If you’re unsure whether your connection requires a proxy server, try checking your browser settings (most likely Internet Explorer or Netscape). In Internet Explorer, select Tools, Internet Options, and then the Connections tab. Click on LAN settings

Chapter 5: Installation and Setup

51

or Dial Up settings to see whether your installation requires a proxy. Other browsers and versions may vary on where this information is located. n

Socks 4 — If you have a “Socks 4” proxy server, then select this option. If you know you have a proxy but the connection is not working, you might try connecting with Socks 4 selected. If it fails, try Socks 5. If that fails, put it back to Standard Proxy and see the troubleshooting help.

n

Socks 5 — If you have a “Socks 5” proxy server, then select this option.

n

HTTP Proxy — Do not fill this in unless you know your company requires the use of an HTTP proxy server or firewall on the network to access the Internet. If so, fill in the exact address. If your network requires you to go through a proxy server to access the Internet, then starting your Mission may cause an error if this is not set properly.

n

Port — The default port, if left blank, is 80. Normally, you would only change this if you were using a proxy server that requires a port other than 80.

n

Proxy user name and Password — If your proxy server requires you to log on with a user name and password before browsing the web, then enter that information. This is not the user name and password that you would use to connect to your ISP using a dial-up connection. Instead, it is only entered for those proxy servers that require a proxy user name and password to access the web.

Some proxies require that the system administrator add the application to the list of programs that are allowed to go through the proxy. If you’re unable to connect but your proxy settings appear correct, make sure that your proxy does not require adding WebPosition Gold to an “approved” list of applications. In some cases, you may have to remove WebPosition Gold and add it to this list again after updating WebPosition Gold to a new version.

52

Chapter 5: Installation and Setup

If you have difficulty connecting to the Internet, click on the Help button on this screen for troubleshooting tips. Once you’ve completed these installation and setup steps, you’re ready to begin using WebPosition Gold.

Chapter 6

Reporter

53

54

Chapter 6: Reporter

he purpose of the Reporter is to determine where your site is currently ranked and how its rankings compare with competing sites. The results then serve as a map to guide you in your optimization efforts. By using the Reporter, you can determine which of your competitors are ranking highly in the search engines when searching for keyphrases that are relevant to your business. Then you can use the Page Critic to compare your web pages with your competitors’ and determine which changes you need to make in order to improve your rankings. Take our Silver Platter Foods executive, for example. Mike Merlot had often done research by hand, searching for keyphrases related to the gourmet foods industry to find out where his competitors were ranked in the search engines. Doing this research manually, however — finding out which web sites show up at the top of various search engine lists, analyzing their source code for optimization techniques, figuring out which keyphrases the sites were targeting — was so time-consuming. It was a job in itself! So when Mike found WebPosition Gold and began working with the Reporter, he knew he had found a tool that would save him time and headaches.

Creating a Mission The Reporter uses Missions, which are created completely to your specifications when you enter information into a series of tabs that define the Mission.

Mission Tab A Mission is defined by the web pages and keyphrases you wish to analyze rankings for on the search engines you choose to run searches on. Due to the infinite amount of keywords you can work with and the multitude of search engines, your possibilities are almost limitless. Mike wanted to save time and see what the Reporter could do, so he ran his first Mission for three domain names and ten keyphrases.

Chapter 6: Reporter

55

Domain Names If you are using the standard version of WebPosition Gold, you can run as many Missions as you want. However, you are limited to creating reports for up to five domain names. If you use a domain in a Mission, it uses up one of your five available domains. Even if you delete that Mission or edit it to change the domain name, the domain license is still used up. You can’t get it back. So if you own the standard version of WebPosition Gold, you should be careful not to waste domains. If you have the Professional version, however, you can work with an unlimited amount of domain names. When entering domain names for your, or any other, web site, type in just the domain name, unless the site is actually located within a subdirectory on the domain. For example, for Mike Merlot’s first Silver Platter Foods search, he entered his site, www.silverplatterfoods.com. If the Silver Platter Foods site were in a subdirectory, such as www.hostingcompany.com/silverplatterfoods, he would have entered the domain name followed by a forward slash and then the subdirectory name. Mike was pretty sure that Silver Platter wasn’t in any of the search engines, so he also entered two competitors, epicurious.com and pastacheese.com. That way, he’d be able to see how his competitors were ranked and identify their strengths and weaknesses.

56

Chapter 6: Reporter

If your site does reside in a subdirectory on a domain name owned by your hosting company, I would strongly recommend that you move the site to its own domain name before you begin doing any optimization work. In some cases, your rankings will be severely penalized as a result of your site being hosted on a shared domain name. This is because it’s possible that other companies using the same domain name have already abused the search engines. Additionally, many search engines favor pages that are found in the main directory, rather than in a subdirectory. Finally, you’ll present a much more professional and credible appearance to your prospective customers if you have your own domain name. As an additional step, you should check with your hosting company to make sure that your domain name has its own unique IP address, rather than sharing an IP address with other domains. Every computer connected to the Internet is assigned at least one IP address which identifies that computer on the Internet. Since IP addresses cost money, many hosting companies host multiple domains on a single IP address, rather than assigning each domain a unique IP address. This can potentially result in your rankings being penalized. Therefore, to be on the safe side, you should verify that you have your own domain name, hosted on its own unique IP address. Another important point to keep in mind is that IP addresses are constantly being recycled. If a company cancels its hosting account with a web hosting provider, then that IP address will eventually be used for someone else’s web site. If the prior owner of your IP address abused the search engines in any way, it’s possible that your IP address could be banned from various search engines. This means that no matter what you do, your site will never get listed in search engines. If you find that despite all your efforts with WebPosition that you’re unable to get listed in the search engines, you should ask your hosting company to assign a new IP address to your web site. Then try submitting again. You’d be amazed how often this solves the problem.

Chapter 6: Reporter

57

Unfortunately, there are many misinformed people who abuse search engines by submitting too many pages per day. Therefore, many IP addresses have become blacklisted by the search engines. One of the themes of this book and of WebPosition Gold is that “less is usually more.” It’s not necessary to flood search engines with submissions in order to achieve top rankings. In fact, if you engage in this type of action, you’ll probably end up getting your site banned completely. Sometimes people become frustrated when they submit their sites and the sites don’t immediately appear in the search engines. So, instead of waiting patiently, they submit again after a few days. Nothing happens, so they keep submitting and submitting until eventually their sites become banned and search engines ignore all further submissions. Don’t let this happen to you. We’ll discuss submission strategies in much more detail when we get to Chapter 10, “Submitter.” You can run Missions for a single domain name at a time to keep your results separate, or you can run one Mission for multiple web sites. Just make sure you put a comma between the domain names, and the Reporter will search for all the domains simultaneously. With the multiple result reports it presents at the end of a Mission, you can easily compare and contrast rankings and other information on the same screen. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to run your Reporter Missions individually for each domain or combined into multiple-domain Missions.

58

Chapter 6: Reporter

The Manage Domains button is used to manage all the domains that you’ve used in the various WebPosition Gold modules. When you click on the Manage Domains button, a window will open that will allow you to add new domains or remove domains that you’re not using anymore.

With the standard version of WebPosition Gold, you’re only allowed five domain deletions. After you’ve added and deleted five domains, the next five domains that you add will be permanent. You won’t be able to delete those and add new domains. If you need to work with more than five domains, you should purchase the Professional version of WebPosition Gold.

Report Title After you’ve completed filling in the Domain Name section, a default Report Title automatically fills itself in as “Search Positions for. . . ” You can, however, name your report whatever you wish. In order to describe the purpose of this report, Mike decided to change the title to “Silver Platter Competition Analysis.”

Chapter 6: Reporter

59

Keywords Tab The Keywords tab of the Reporter allows you to type in an unlimited amount of words and phrases to search for. Enter each keyphrase on a separate line. The keyphrases that you enter will be analyzed during the Mission run. If you would like to simulate an exact phrase search, place the words in quotes. I recommend that you do not place the words in quotes, since most people don’t search the Internet that way. During the Mission run, the Reporter will search for exactly what you type in. Make sure your keyphrases are spelled correctly (or incorrectly if you want to optimize for misspellings), have quotes around them if you’re simulating exact phrase searches, and contain the necessary capitalization of words. WebPosition recommends that you enter keywords in lowercase unless you want them to be case-sensitive, in which case you can see the difference in ranking for uppercase and lowercase words. You may be surprised at the results. Mike Merlot’s WordTracker research was very helpful in selecting the top ten keyphrases he chose for his first Reporter Mission. He placed these phrases in the Keywords section of the Reporter: gourmet food gourmet foods gourmet cheese

60

Chapter 6: Reporter

gourmet cheeses gourmet desserts gourmet cooking gourmet coffee gourmet gift baskets gourmet kitchen gourmet chef

While these are good keyphrases to begin with, they are very general phrases. Consider using the most common keyphrases people might use for your business first. These words will be the most difficult with which to achieve high rankings, but it’s a great way to accurately scale your competition. Mike knew that “gourmet foods” was a very competitive category on the Internet. He didn’t expect Silver Platter Foods to be at the top of the rankings right away, but it was worth running the Mission to find out how the competition ranked for some of the more competitive keyphrases.

Chapter 6: Reporter

61

URL Verification Tab The function of the URL Verification tab is to determine if important pages on your web site have been indexed or not on certain search engines. The screen will prompt you to enter any page names that reside at the domain selected on the Mission tab.” Since Silver Platter Foods has not been submitted to the engines yet, I have advised Mike Merlot to run URL verification on one of his competitors for now. Later, Mike will use WebPosition Gold’s Submitter module to submit Silver Platter Foods to the search engines. After the Submitter step is completed, he can return to this tab and use it to determine if Silver Platter Foods was indexed. The URL Verification feature works directly with the Submitter to verify that the web pages you send to search engines through the Submitter become indexed. Mike decided to run URL verification on the pastacheese.com “Pasta and Rice” page. He entered the name of this page into the box and clicked on the Add button.

62

Chapter 6: Reporter

Since many search engines do not provide a way to accurately search for a URL address, WebPosition will instead search for a “unique phrase” that should only be found on your page. WebPosition will perform an exact search for that phrase and then by default scan the first 30 matches for your URL in the results. You can change the number of search matches to scan under the Options tab. Just keep in mind that the larger the number of search matches to scan, the longer the Reporter Mission will take to run. If WebPosition finds your URL in the first 30 matches, it will report the URL as found. If your phrase returns more than 30 matches, then the possibility still exists that your page is in the index, but it is further down the search list. This is why it is very important that your “unique phrase” is actually unique on the web. You can enter the unique phrase manually by typing it into the Unique Text box. You can also click on the Select Text button to have the Reporter display the source code of the page currently selected. Then you can select some unique text from the source code and the Reporter will automatically place that text into the Unique Text box. WebPosition recommends that you select 60 characters of text or less. The text must be in the body or title area of your page and must not contain any HTML tags. Company names, addresses, phone numbers, or copyright notices make excellent unique text phrases.

Chapter 6: Reporter

63

Mike clicked on the Select Text button and scrolled down to the beginning of the body text. Next, he selected the phrase “to PastaCheese.com for delicious imported Pastas and Rice” for his unique text. Since this phrase contained the pastacheese.com domain name, he reasoned that it would not be found on any other page on the web.

For WebPosition to accurately report whether your URL exists, you must remember to follow several important rules when adding the URLs to the URL Verification tab: n

After you type in the name of the page you want to verify, you must add some unique text on the page that is likely to be found only on your page and not on any others on the Internet. This can be your e-mail address, company name, physical address, phone number, or copyright notice. If your site is extremely popular, however, these can sometimes be found elsewhere on the web and therefore do not work well by themselves. In that case, you can use the Select Text button to highlight a longer phrase from the page that would not be common.

n

Make sure the unique phrase you select does not include any HTML tags within it.

64

Chapter 6: Reporter

n

Make sure you do not cut off characters at the end of your unique phrase. For example, if the last word in your unique phrase is “chefs” and you accidentally leave off the “s,” then some engines will not find your page.

n

Make sure that your phrase is actually unique, so that it returns 30 or less matches. Click on the View Actual Results link next to the “URL not found” message on the Reporter Results report to count the matches that came back. If it’s returning more than 30, then you need to refine your unique phrase to make it unique. You can also try searching for more than 30 matches (set from the Options tab) to scan further down in the results. Remember that this will lengthen the time for your Mission to complete.

n

Make sure you are selecting visible web page text for your unique phrase. Do not select text in the meta tags, alt tags, etc., since many engines will not find text in nonvisible areas of the page.

n

If you see your page in the actual search results when you click on the View Actual Results link in the reports, but WebPosition reports it as not found, then double-check that the URL displayed on the URL Verification tab exactly matches what the search engine displays.

Chapter 6: Reporter

65

One of the reports that the Reporter provides is the complement of this feature called the URL Submission Verification Report. You can also find out if any of your web pages have been indexed, not just specific pages you manually enter, by enabling the Report whether ANY page on my site is indexed check box on the bottom of the tab. This box will report whether any page on your site has been added to a search engine database.

Engines Tab As you’ll see when you reach the Engines tab, there are many search engines on the Internet. Some you may be familiar with and others you might never have heard of. WebPosition Gold supports all of the most popular search engines on the Internet. Studies have shown that the top ten most popular search engines provide over 90% of all search traffic. The list of the most popular search engines is constantly changing, but WebPosition will always remain up-to-date in terms of supporting the most important ones. WebPosition categorizes search engines as either global or regional. Global engines include all of the major search engines, such as Google, AltaVista and HotBot, as well as smaller engines such as Jayde and Kanoodle.

66

Chapter 6: Reporter

regional engines include localized versions of the global engines, such as AltaVista Canada and independent country-specific search engines, such as Goo (Japan) and WebWombat (Australia).

If you’re targeting markets outside of the United States, then you should select the appropriate regional engines, in addition to global engines. When you click on the Regional Engines tab, a drop-down box will appear. This will allow you to filter the list to only include engines that are relevant to a specific region. If you use the default setting “All,” then the list will not be filtered and will display all regional engines. If you highlight any of the search engines on the list, the engine properties will appear in the lower-right corner of the screen. This information will tell you the type of search engine (Search Engine, Directory Engine, or Pay Per Click Engine), its domain name, and its link popularity, meaning how many web sites have links to that particular search engine. Link popularity is one way of determining how popular each search engine is. You can also add any of the search engines to your Preferred List, by checking the Add to My Preferred List box.

Chapter 6: Reporter

67

The drop-down menus to the right of the search engine lists will help to filter the engines, since the more you select, the longer the Mission will take to run. The first drop-down menu filters search engines by level of importance, including All Engines, Primary Engines, Secondary Engines, and Preferred Engines.

68

Chapter 6: Reporter

The second drop-down menu filters the search engines by type, including All Types, Search Engines, Directory Engines, and Pay Per Click Engines.

When you select filters, you’ll see the list change in the main search engine list on the left to reflect your filter settings. I want to take a moment to discuss pay-per-click engines. These search engines are different from conventional search engines in that you, as the site owner, have the opportunity to bid for your site’s position. Positions on these search engines are determined by the actual amount that each advertiser is willing to pay per clickthrough at any given moment. The current clickthrough price is determined by an ongoing real-time auction. The company that’s willing to pay the highest amount will have its listing appear in the number one position. The second highest bidder will have its listing appear in the number two position and so on. Since you only pay for the actual clicks to your site, pay-per-click search engines can be a cost-effective and highly targeted method of generating qualified traffic to your site. Remember, however, that your rankings in these engines are determined by what you’re willing to pay versus what your competition is willing to pay. WebPosition Gold’s optimization features don’t apply to pay-per-click engines, but the Reporter can still be very useful in monitoring your rankings.

Chapter 6: Reporter

69

One word of caution: pay-per-click advertising can be very profitable, but it’s also easy to spend a lot of money very rapidly. While most keyphrases are available at reasonable clickthrough prices, some of the very competitive phrases can be extremely costly. If you decide to experiment with this type of advertising, make sure that you check your reports daily to determine how much you’re spending on your advertising. It’s also important that you monitor your bids frequently to ensure that your site is still placed in your desired positions. For some of the more competitive keyphrases, you might literally have to check your bids several times per day, or even more frequently, in order to maintain a top position. MarketMySite! offers a bid management service in which we will monitor all your bids and update them as often as necessary to keep your site at the top of the search engine rankings. For more information on this service, visit our web site via the link on the accompanying CD-ROM. I recommend that you start by running Reporter Missions on the global engines, using the Primary Engines filter. Since there are so few engines that bring a significant amount of traffic, it’s best to put most of your effort into them. Mike Merlot took my advice in configuring his first Reporter Mission. This choice yielded 17 of the most popular search engines: About.com, All the Web, AltaVista, AOL Web Sites, Ask Jeeves, Direct Hit, Google, HotBot, iWon, LookSmart, Lycos, MSN, Netscape, Open Directory, Overture, Yahoo Web Pages, and Yahoo Web Sites. Remember that since search engines are constantly changing, the list that you see in your current version of WebPosition may be different from the list existed at the time this book was published.

Options Tab The Options screen offers additional logistical choices for your Mission. Many of these options have default values already typed in, and in most cases you can use these default settings with no problem.

70

Chapter 6: Reporter

General Options Performance Options

The Number of search matches to scan box refers to how many keyphrase matches will be analyzed by each search engine. WebPosition Gold’s default number is 30 because most people won’t find your site if it’s ranked lower than that, anyway. A keyphrase search on the Internet can return hundreds or thousands of matches, so you want to keep this number as low as possible. Even if your web site doesn’t initially have top 30 rankings, you’ll be able to see with the URL Verification Report whether the site is at least indexed or not. The Search engine time-out in seconds box tells WebPosition how long to wait before giving up if a search engine isn’t responding. This handles situations in which a search engine is not functioning, or there are other technical problems that are beyond WebPosition Gold’s control. The default setting is 50 seconds, and it’s generally not necessary to change this number. In order to complete each Mission as quickly as possible, the Reporter simultaneously searches multiple engines. By default, the Searches to perform simultaneously box specifies eight concurrent searches. If you are running a Mission for ten search engines, and you keep the default number, the first

Chapter 6: Reporter

71

eight engines will be searched and processed, and then the last two engines will be searched. The speed of the searches depends on the speed of your Internet connection. If you find that the Missions are running slowly, it is probably due to congestion from attempting to search too many engines at once. Reduce the number of search engines to be searched, and your searches will probably run faster. If you have a very fast Internet connection and a powerful computer, you may attain better performance by increasing the number of simultaneous searches. If some search engines find out that you’re searching their indexes repetitively, they can actually stop you from doing it. They won’t ban your web site, but they can block your IP address (unique identity on the Internet) from running Reporter Missions, or even searching the engine manually, using a web browser. The Be courteous to each engine by waiting at least . . . option can help to prevent this from happening by slowing down your searches according to a random interval that you specify. The default settings to wait are 5 to 15 seconds between searches. I strongly recommend that you enable this feature. Your Missions will take longer to run, but it will help to avoid the possibility of getting blocked by the search engines.

Display Options

72

Chapter 6: Reporter

If you wish, you can choose to display only your top-ranking pages on the Concise Report, which we’ll discuss later on. If this is the first time you’re using the WebPosition Reporter, you can leave the default setting for now.

Archive Options

Data from past reports can be archived automatically each time you run a Mission. By default, WebPosition Gold archives the last Mission you perform each day, unless you deselect the box allowing for automatic archiving. If you want to archive results from multiple Missions you have run over the course of one day, you need to output them separately to different output directories. When you’re viewing reports, you can find links to the archived data at the bottom of the menu page that loads in your browser each time you view your Mission results. This feature can be enabled from the Options tab under the General Options tab in the Archive Options section. You also have the option to archive the prior day’s unformatted search results from the search engines. Remember, though, that this takes up a lot of disk space, especially if you run Missions often. If you receive a prompt titled Results Directory in Use when running a Reporter Mission that says “The results in directory <user path> appears to contain output files from another Mission. . . ,” this means you have more than one Reporter Mission pointing to the same output folder. For each

Chapter 6: Reporter

73

Mission file you create, you will want to have a unique output folder. You can change the output folder path by going to the Options tab of each of your Missions and entering a unique output folder path in the Output results to directory field. You can also change the output directory by clicking the Change Directory button when prompted with a Results Directory in Use warning window and then entering a new path.

Export Data

The Professional version of WebPosition Gold allows you to export results data from your Missions into Excel or other applications. If you check the Export to ASCII box, you can then enter a date range to specify which data you want to export. WebPosition Gold records all of your positions in a history file starting with your first Mission. n

The default From Date information is the current date. You need to fill in the starting date of your first Mission to have all of your history data exported.

n

The default To Date information is also the current date. You can leave it blank, and all your history data through the last Mission run will be exported.

74

Chapter 6: Reporter

n

When you’re exporting data, you need to choose a filename to export the data to. If you click on Select, you can navigate to the folder in which you want to save your exported data. Choose and enter the path and name of the file you wish to export to.

Upload/E-mail Reports In the Professional version of WebPosition Gold, you have the option to automatically send a customized e-mail to your clients to let them know when the Mission is completed. You can also have the Reporter attach a copy of the Concise Summary Report to the e-mail and/or upload the report files to a web server for your clients to view online.

E-mail Settings n

When mission completes, send E-mail. . . — Check this box to automatically send an e-mail when the Mission finishes running. Enter the e-mail address or addresses in the E-mail To box. If you enter more than one address, place each address on a separate line.

n

Attach Concise Report — Enabling this option will attach a copy of the Concise Summary Report to the e-mail.

n

Remove non-ranking keywords — Any keywords that have no rankings will be removed from the Concise Report in order to make it more “concise.”

n

Include Visibility Statistics — Enabling this option will include the Visibility Statistics in the Concise Report.

n

Customize E-mail — Clicking on this button will open a separate window (shown on the following page) that will allow you to customize the e-mail message.

Chapter 6: Reporter

75

Customize E-mail If you click on the Customize E-mail button shown above, the following window will open:

n

From — Enter your e-mail address in this box.

n

To — Enter the recipients’ e-mail addresses in this box.

76

Chapter 6: Reporter

n

Subject Line — This determines how the subject of your e-mail message will read.

n

E-Mail Template — You can click on the Select button to select a text file containing the text of your e-mail message. The default text file is called emailtemplate.txt. You can also click on the Edit button to edit the text file currently displayed in the box. The text file should contain the exact text that you want the Reporter to e-mail when the Mission finishes running. You can insert the client’s domain name into the text file by entering {domainname} into the appropriate section of the text file. The Reporter will automatically substitute the client’s actual domain name when it encounters this macro in the file.

n

SMTP Server — This should be the same as the SMTP Server setting in your normal e-mail program. Check with your Internet service provider if you’re unsure of what to enter in this field.

Once you fill in all these fields, click on Send E-mail Now to send a test message, or click on OK to save your settings and return to the Options tab.

Upload Settings

Chapter 6: Reporter

77

In addition to notifying your clients via e-mail that the Mission is completed, you can have the Reporter upload the reports to a web server for your clients to view online. To use this feature, enable the check box labeled When mission completes, upload report files. . . Then select an existing Upload Manager Mission by clicking on the Select button, or click on the Create button to create a new Upload Manager Mission.

Customize Tab The Professional version of WebPosition Gold allows you to customize your reports with your company name, logo, and colors. You also have the option to create your own custom headers and footers and delete all references to WebPosition Gold from the reports.

n

Location of company logo graphic — Click on the Select button and locate your company logo graphic on your computer.

n

Company Website — Enter the URL for your web site.

n

Your Company Name — Enter the name of your company.

n

Suppress mention of WebPosition — If you enable this check box, there will be no references to WebPosition or FirstPlace Software anywhere in your reports.

78

Chapter 6: Reporter

n

Suppress tips & recommendations — Normally the reports created by the Reporter are filled with tips and recommendations to help you improve your rankings. However, if your clients are paying you to handle this for them, you may want to remove these tips from the reports. If you enable this check box, the reports will show only the results without any additional commentary.

n

Use Default/Custom Template — If you choose Custom then you can click on the Edit Header Template and Edit Footer Template buttons to create custom HTML headers and footers for your reports. You should only use this option if you’re very comfortable working with HTML. When you click on the Edit Header/Footer Template buttons, a window will open like the one below, which will allow you to edit the HTML for the header and footer of your reports.

The Customize Report Colors area is used to set color preferences. If you select Custom,you can specify your own colors for the background, accent, and alternating rows in the tables.

Chapter 6: Reporter

79

Results Tab The Results tab is the final destination for all of your hard work in setting up your Reporter Mission. This screen shows you the last date and time you ran a Mission. As the Mission is running, it lists the search status for each keyphrase search on each search engine that you specified when you created the Mission.

80

Chapter 6: Reporter

If any searches do not complete, you can tell the Reporter how many times you want to retry the search and how long to wait before retrying. By default, the Reporter will retry searching engines three times and wait fifteen seconds between each search.

By default, WebPosition Gold also checks for the latest WebPosition Gold updates, which ensures that your software will always be up-to-date whenever you run a Reporter Mission.

Chapter 6: Reporter

81

Finally, WebPosition Gold automatically checks all of the boxes in the Reports area. These reports — the Concise Summary Report, Detail Report, Page and Keyword Report, Summary Report, Log Report, Alert! Report, Trend Report, Visibility Statistics Report, Competitive Analysis Report, and URL Verification Report — display your ranking information in various ways. I recommend you keep all of these boxes checked, since they each provide a different perspective on your search engine rankings.

When you’re finished filling in all the fields in the Mission settings tabs, press the Start button and you’re on your way. You’ll find that the speed of your Reporter Mission will vary depending on several factors: n

Number of keyphrases you’re searching for

n

Speed of your Internet connection

n

Number of search engines you’ve selected

Don’t be afraid to test the Reporter out, trying new Missions for various keywords and engines. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to create a new Mission once you become familiar with the Reporter.

82

Chapter 6: Reporter

Mission Results

Chapter 6: Reporter

83

After you have run the Reporter Mission, a window will appear, prompting you to “View mission results now?” If you want to wait, you can always review your search results later by pressing the Results button after opening your Mission file. If you choose Yes, your web browser should load and open a report menu screen so that you can view the reports. This screen gives you the option to view every report WebPosition Gold provides. If you never got the “View mission results” prompt, or the results button is grayed out when you open the Mission, then you need to rerun the Mission. Most likely, it failed to complete or was never run. The Reporter simulates a person running searches using a web browser and then analyzes the results of those searches. As you read through the reports, you may find that some search engines produce varying results when running the exact same searches repeatedly. To confirm this, go to the search engine, perform a keyphrase search, print the results, click on the Back button, and search again. Keep backing up and re-searching. If you notice the search results change on the first page from what you printed out, that is the reason for the occasional difference between WebPosition Gold’s results and what you see when you search the engine manually. Assistance is always available via the WebPosition Gold help files. You can access the help files by pressing the F1 key on your keyboard while in the WebPosition Gold software. Next, click the Reporter link, scroll down to the More Information section, and click the link titled Understanding the Reports.

Concise Summary Report The Concise Summary Report is the best place to begin assessing your Reporter Mission results. This report is easy to read and, like its name suggests, is to the point. The first section of the report is the Visibility Statistics. These statistics encompass all of the keywords being run for the mission for all of the selected search engines. This section will provide you with a good overview of where your site stands in the rankings. The first row of this section classifies the first 30 position rankings for all of the keyphrases and search engines that have been searched, divided into First Place Rankings, Top 5, Top 10, Top 20, and Top 30. The totals for each

84

Chapter 6: Reporter

group are cumulative. For example, the Top 10 count includes the First Place rankings, Top 5 rankings, and the rankings from positions six through ten. Note that these results are for all three sites combined — silverplatterfoods.com, epicurious.com, and pastacheese.com. Since Silver Platter is a new site, it doesn’t yet have any rankings of its own, so the report is really just showing results for epicurious.com and pastacheese.com.

The second row of the Visibility Statistics table displays how many positions have been gained or lost on all engines selected. Moved Up shows how many keyphrases have improved in position since the last time the Mission was run. Moved Down shows how many keyphrases have decreased in position since the last Mission. If this is the first Mission you’ve run, these two numbers will be zero, but after optimizing your pages with WebPosition Gold, you’ll hopefully see some improvements. For the purpose of this illustration, I asked Mike Merlot to run his Reporter Mission on two consecutive days. That way you’ll be able to see how the various reports indicate changes in positions. Also shown in this row is the number of positions that have

Chapter 6: Reporter

85

remained the same and the total number of positions. The last item in this row is a net gain/loss figure for all the positions. The last row of the Visibility Statistics section displays how many keywords you have chosen to analyze rankings for and how many search engines were selected. It also contains the statistics Visibility Percentage and Visibility Score. The Visibility Score is calculated by assigning a point value to the highest position achieved on each engine. A point value is only awarded to positions one through 30. Position one is awarded 30 points, position two is worth 29 points, three is 28 points, and so on through 30, which is given one point. The points are then totaled for all of the engines in the Mission. This total is the Visibility Score. The Visibility Percentage is calculated by dividing the Visibility Score by the maximum possible Visibility Score. Our mission consisted of 17 engines and ten keywords for each engine. So if every one of our keyphrases had a first place ranking in every search engine, we would have 17 x 10 = 170 first place positions. 170 first place positions x 30 points each equals a maximum visibility score of 5,100. Our Visibility Score is 874. 874 divided by 5,100 equals a Visibility Percentage of 17.14%, which agrees with WebPosition Gold’s calculations. A logical conclusion is that the higher the percentage, the higher the visibility. If all 170 searches had returned a number one ranking, the Visibility Score would be 5,100 and the Visibility Percentage would be 100%. Keep in mind that these Visibility Statistics refer to the combined results for silverplatterfoods.com, epicurious.com, and pastacheese.com. When you’re running a Reporter Mission on multiple unrelated domains, such as we’re doing here, the Visibility Statistics are not very meaningful. This is because WebPosition Gold combines the results from all the domains to produce the Visibility Statistics. Since silverplatterfoods.com, epicurious.com, and pastacheese.com are three completely different companies, it doesn’t really make sense to evaluate their combined results. The Visibility Statistics are most useful when you’re evaluating a single domain or multiple domains that are all owned by the same company. The next section of the Concise Summary Report displays the rankings for each of your keyphrases on each of the search engines. Each search engine has its own table which displays the rankings for each of your selected

86

Chapter 6: Reporter

keyphrases on that search engine. Within each search engine table, start at the left with the keyword column and read across the row to the right:

n

Keyword — The keyword (or keyphrase) being analyzed. For example, “gourmet food.”

n

Position — Indicates the current position in the specified search engine for the keyphrase. For example, pastacheese.com is in position #10 on AltaVista for the keyphrase “gourmet food.” If the Position column for a keyphrase contains the text “Not in first 30,” that means your site was not found in the top 30 for that keyphrase search. NM means that no matches were found for that keyphrase search.

n

Page — Indicates which page the keyphrase was found on in the specified search engine’s results. pastacheese.com is on page 1 of AltaVista for the keyphrase “gourmet food.”

n

Last Position — Indicates the previous position (the last time the Mission was run) in the specified search engine for the keyphrase. For the keyphrase “gourmet food,” pastacheese.com was found in position #10 on Alta Visa during the previous Mission run.

Chapter 6: Reporter

87

n

Change — Indicates the change in position from the previous Mission run to the current Mission run in the specified search engine for the keyphrase. For the keyphrase “gourmet food,” pastacheese.com was in position #10 during both the previous and the current Mission runs. Therefore, the change in position is “0.”

n

URL — Indicates the actual URL of the page that was found. For the keyphrase “gourmet food” in AltaVista, the pastacheese.com home page (http://www.pastacheese.com/) was found in position #10.

Each keyword on the report is linked to the appropriate section of the Detail Report, a more in-depth report, which I will discuss later in this chapter. The first time that you run a Mission, the Last Position and Change columns will show NA, or not applicable. This is because there is no prior data with which to compare the current data. You may notice vast differences in the rankings for different keyphrases, and you may find that your competitors have focused their optimization efforts on some keyphrases more than others. By identifying and targeting areas in which your competitors are weak, you stand an excellent chance of achieving top rankings for those keyphrases. For example, notice in the following figures that both epicurious.com and pastacheese.com have achieved rankings for the phrases “gourmet food” and “gourmet foods” in multiple search engines; however, the rankings range from the number one position to number 30. pastacheese.com also has achieved high rankings for the keyphrase “gourmet cheese” and “gourmet cheeses” in many, but not all, search engines. Likewise, epicurious.com is ranked in some, but not all, engines under the more general “gourmet cooking” keyphrase. I can’t stress enough that it’s very difficult to achieve top rankings for all your keyphrases on all the search engines.

88

Chapter 6: Reporter

Chapter 6: Reporter

89

90

Chapter 6: Reporter

For many of your keyphrases, you may find that WebPosition Gold reports that your site was not found in the top 30. This is quite normal and is exactly what WebPosition Gold helps you to correct. Assuming you submitted to these engines and allowed enough time for them to index your pages, you’ll now want to begin working with the Page Generator and Critic to design pages that rank better. You can also do a broader search to find out if your site is in the top 100 or top 200 by changing the number of matches to scan on the Options tab of the Reporter Mission screen. This will, however, greatly increase the time required to run the Mission. Also bear in mind that even if your site does show up in the top 100, few people will look past the first 30 or so matches. The Page Generator and Page Critic modules in WebPosition Gold will help you fine-tune your web pages so that they show up near the top of the results.

Summary Description Report The Summary Description Report builds on the information from the Concise Report. The advantage of this report is that it shows your site’s actual listings as they appear in the search engines. For each listing that appears in the top 30, the Summary Description Report will display the listing, and directly above the listing it will display its position and page in the search results. In the report shown on the following page, you can see how it displays the results for each of the keyphrases Mike selected in AltaVista. If one of your selected domains is found for a keyphrase search, the report will show the position on the search engine and the actual listing. For example, a search for “gourmet food” on AltaVista found the pastacheese.com home page in position #10 on page 1. You can click on View Actual Search Page(s) to view the actual AltaVista search results page. You can also click on View Detail to view the WebPosition Detail Report for that search.

Chapter 6: Reporter

91

If a keyphrase has no listings in the top 30, the message “NONE of your pages were found for this keyword at least within the first 30 matches!” will appear in red.

92

Chapter 6: Reporter

Detail Report The Detail Report is the most thorough report available. In addition to the information in the Summary Description Report, the Detail Report also displays all top listings for each keyphrase search. This provides you with a more detailed view of how your site compares with the competition for the top search engine rankings. You can also see what the rankings look like on the web by clicking on the View Actual Search Page(s) link next to the search engine names throughout the headings in the report. Additionally, the Detail Report provides links to all of your competing web sites. In the figures on the previous pages, you can see the search results for “gourmet foods” on AltaVista. The Reporter found pastacheese.com in position #10 on page 1. It also displays the listings that precede and follow the pastacheese.com listing.

Chapter 6: Reporter

93

94

Chapter 6: Reporter

Alert! Report

Chapter 6: Reporter

95

The Alert! Report will become very useful once you’ve achieved some top rankings for your site. This report has two sections. The first section alerts you to any listings that have dropped in ranking but were still found in the search results. The second section alerts you to any listings that have dropped out of the search results entirely. Note that the Alert! Report only scans as far as you specify in the Reporter Mission setup. If you’re scanning the first 30 search results and a listing drops below 30, then the Alert! Report will indicate that the listing has dropped out of the search results. It’s possible, however, that this listing would be found in position #31. For each listing that has dropped in ranking, the report displays the Engine, Keyword, Position, Page, Last Position, Change, and URL. For listings that have dropped out of the search results entirely, the current Position, Page, and Change will, of course, not be reported. You may wonder why the “gourmet chef” search on AOL Web Sites shows up on this report. We chose to scan the first 30 search results, but “gourmet chef” is in position #38. Another seemingly anomalous listing is “gourmet chef” on Overture. It shows the last position as #37, yet it appears on the Alert! Report as having now dropped out of the top 30. If it was in position #37, how is it possible that it’s only now dropped out of the top 30? Wasn’t it already out of the top 30 before?

96

Chapter 6: Reporter

Most search engines list ten search results per page. AOL Web Sites, however, lists ten results on the first page and 15 results on each subsequent page. Overture lists 40 results per page. When you specify top 30 search results in the Reporter setup, WebPosition will actually scan at least the Top 30 results. If after scanning 30 results there are more results on the last page of search results, WebPosition will go ahead and scan those results as well. In the example of AOL Web Sites, the first page has ten results, the second page has 15 results, and the third page also has 15 results. It order to get at least 30 results, WebPosition must scan the first three pages, which is actually a total of 40 results. When you run a Reporter Mission for the first time, the Alert! Report will be empty because there’s no history.

Trend Report The Trend Report provides the best information to track your ongoing progress. It shows exactly how your site’s ranking has changed over time for each keyword and search engine. It works directly with the Scheduler (discussed in Chapter 12) in order to maintain consistent analysis results. Like the Alert! Report, the Trend Report will be more beneficial to you over time. After running a few reports over a period of weeks or months, you’ll quickly be able to spot trends and use that information to take appropriate actions. The Trend Report is grouped by search engine and keyphrase. Within that grouping, it’s further organized by month. Each row within a given month corresponds to a day within that month when the Mission was run. In the following example, you can see trend results for March 9th and March 10th. The rest of the columns show the Position, Page, and URL of any page that was found for the indicated keyphrase search. For example, for the searches “gourmet food” and “gourmet foods” on AltaVista, the pastacheese.com listings were unchanged.

Chapter 6: Reporter

Now, let’s look at an example in which the listings did change.

97

98

Chapter 6: Reporter

In the previous example, you can see that epicurious.com dropped one position in AllTheWeb, from March 9th to March 10th for the keyphrase search “gourmet cheeses.” After you’ve run a few Missions, if you find that your Trend Report contains garbled characters, one or more of your data files used to generate the report has probably become corrupted. To fix it, you’ll need to restore the data from a backup that you made prior to the corruption occurring. If that isn’t possible, you’ll have to delete the Output Directory indicated on the Options tab of the mission. This will reset your trend data back to zero, but it will eliminate the garbage on the reports. Also, make sure you have the latest version of WebPosition Gold by clicking on the Help menu and selecting Download Latest Update.

You may also find that you’ll be unable to continue to save your trend information. If that happens, your Trend Report has reached its size limit. Don’t worry; you’ll still be able to save new trend info while still keeping old information archived. The solution is to create a new Trend Report through a new Mission. Open the Mission file, change your Mission in Save As to a new name, and then change the Output Directory on the Options tab to a new name. That way, you can open the old Mission and click Results to still view old trend files. Or, you can delete the old Mission and results by selecting Delete from the File menu if you want to free up disk space. Apart from the limit on the size of the file, periodically resetting the Trend Report is a good idea. It the file grows too large, your browser will take an excessively long time to open the Trend Report file and will become essentially unusable. If you run Missions often and wish to keep their history for the long term, rename them based on the month, quarter, or year they were produced so you can keep track of them easily.

Chapter 6: Reporter

99

Competitive Analysis Report The Competitive Analysis Report compares your site’s keyphrase positions with your competitors’ positions. To analyze a competitor’s rankings with this report, you must use one of your domain licenses for each competing site that you want to analyze. Make sure you enter both your domain and your competitors’ domains separated by a comma in the domain field of the Reporter Mission setup. The Report will list your site’s rankings and your competitors’ rankings side by side for each search engine. Read each section individually by engine and read the rows from left to right to see the keyphrase and position for your site and for those of your competitors.

100

Chapter 6: Reporter

In this report, you can see that neither silverplatterfoods.com nor epicurious.com has any rankings in AltaVista for any of the keyphrases. Pastacheese.com, conversely, has some excellent rankings for some of these very competitive keyphrases.

Page and Keyword Report The purpose of this report is to show you which of your actual pages are ranked for keyphrase searches on the various search engines. This helps you determine which of your pages are performing well and which pages need to be better optimized. The report is organized by page and only displays pages that have listings. Under each page, there is a list of the keyphrase searches for which that page was found. The last column of the report shows the specific search engine that the page was found in for each of the keyphrase searches. This first group of listings in this report shows listings for the pastacheese.com home page in AltaVista. It was found in various positions from #2 to #21, depending on the keyphrase that was searched. For the search “gourmet food,” the pastacheese.com home page was found in position #10. Changing just one character in the search, from “gourmet food” to “gourmet foods,” changed the ranking from #10 to #2. This is an example of the importance of optimizing each page for one specific keyphrase. You may, however, wonder why the home page is found in the top 20 for so many different phrases. Doesn’t this contradict my point about optimizing for a single keyphrase? Yes and no. . . Search engine optimization is not an exact science. The research team at FirstPlace Software is constantly analyzing the search engines and attempting to reverse-engineer their algorithms. It is impossible to precisely figure out what those algorithms are. The best that anyone can do is to infer an estimate of the algorithms by observing and analyzing the shared characteristics of top-ranking pages. The algorithms also tend to be somewhat fuzzy, which is actually a testament to their level of sophistication. AltaVista may be smart enough to determine that a page that is relevant to “gourmet cheese” may also be relevant to “gourmet food,” even though it’s not explicitly optimized for that phrase. Therefore, your best bet is to focus on one keyphrase per page. If you’re able to get the page placed for your primary

Chapter 6: Reporter

101

keyphrase, it’s very possible that the page may also become highly ranked for related keyphrases. Consider these to be bonus placements.

102

Chapter 6: Reporter

Another point to be aware of is that the home page is far and away the most powerful page on the site in terms of the search engine’s algorithms. It’s very common to find that the home page of a site has many more listings than any other page in the Page and Keyword Report. Some search engines may consider all the different optimized pages on your site as a means of determining the theme of your site. Once the search engine determines the theme, it may decide to list just your home page, rather than each of the individual optimized pages. However, the home page may be listed for many different keyphrase searches, all of which are related to the site’s theme.

The next group of pages on the Page and Keyword Report shows all the listings for the epicurious.com home page. This page appears to have even more listings than the pastacheese.com home page. Before you jump to that conclusion, however, wait until you see the rest of the report.

Chapter 6: Reporter

103

The group of listings in the preceding screen shot show four different pages on the epicurious.com domain. Notice how each of these pages has listings for just a single keyphrase. It’s very likely that these are optimized pages created for the purpose of targeting specific keyphrases. Later in this book, you’ll learn how to use WebPosition Gold’s Page Critic to analyze your competitors’ optimized pages and create your own pages to compete with theirs. Here’s why I cautioned you not to jump to conclusions before viewing the entire Page and Keyword Report. The last screen shot (on the next page) shows a whole slew of additional listings for the pastacheese.com home page. Why are these placed in a separate group from the first set of home page listings? Look carefully at the URL of the page. The first group was listed under the URL http://www.pastacheese.com. This group is listed under the URL www.pastacheese.com (without the http:// prefix). The reason for this is that AltaVista is the only search engine that displays the full URL of each page in its search results. The other search engines drop the http:// prefix when displaying their listings. Since the Reporter groups pages according to the actual URL as it appears in the search engine, these listings are grouped separately from the AltaVista listings.

104

Chapter 6: Reporter

The Page and Keyword Report is my personal favorite report because it allows me to analyze the performance of each optimized page individually.

Log Report The Log Report displays the status of the last Mission run, reporting all of the details you enter into the Reporter module. It includes the domain names entered, keyphrases, search engines searched, number of matches to scan, and the amount of time that it took for the Mission to run.

Chapter 6: Reporter

105

106

Chapter 6: Reporter

The report also shows when each search was completed for each keyphrase and search engine.

It has a separate section for failed searches. A search can fail if the search engine has just changed its format and WebPosition hasn’t yet been updated to the new format. It can also fail if the search engine was nonfunctional or unreachable at the time the report was run.

URL Submission Verification Report The URL Submission Verification Report is created if you enter information into the URL Verification tab before you run a Reporter mission. This report indicates whether or not your web pages have been indexed in various search engines. Remember that there is a difference between a page not

Chapter 6: Reporter

107

being highly ranked due to poor optimization and a page not being ranked because it’s not even in the index. The URL Submission Verification Report contains a section for each search engine.

Reading from left to right are the URLs that you entered in the URL Verification tab of your Reporter mission, the Submission Date (for submissions that were performed using the WebPosition Gold Submitter, if any), the Time to Allow (the estimated time it takes for the engine to index new submissions), the First Date Found (the first time your URL was found in that engine’s listings), the Last Date Found (the last time your URL was found in that engine’s listings), the Last Status (whether or not the URL was found during this Mission run), and the Recommendation (WebPosition Gold’s recommendation for whether or not you should submit your URL again, based on the information found). For search engines that do not support URL verification, the URL Verification Report results are based on the unique phrase of text that you specified for your page.

108

Chapter 6: Reporter

Take note of the following items on the URL Verification Report.

Submission Date Column A date in this column means that is the last date that you submitted that URL via the Submitter. If Unknown appears in the column, the engine or directory in that section requires manual submissions. Therefore, WebPosition Gold has no way to track the submission dates. If Not Submitted appears, it means you have not used the Submitter to submit this URL to this engine yet.

Recommendation Column If you see No Action Needed, it means your site was found on the search for that particular engine; you do not need to resubmit the page. If Submit appears, it was not found on the search and you have not submitted the page, or you submitted it longer ago than the Time to Allow field. If Submit via. . . shows up, you have not submitted the page and it was not found on the search. You should submit the page via the engines mentioned, as they are portals for the engine in the section. Submit if Necessary means that the engine in this section requires manual submissions, and therefore the submission date cannot be tracked. You should submit if you have not done so already. In this example, the silverplatterfoods.com domain was not found in AltaVista and the Submission Date is listed as Unknown since AltaVista requires manual submission. Therefore, the recommendation is Submit, but Mike Merlot would only follow this recommendation if he had not submitted to AltaVista within the past four to six weeks. URL verification searches are performed independently from keyphrase searches. These searches are run either by searching for your domain name and/or page name in search engines that support URL verification or by performing a search on the unique text phrase that was entered in your Mission. For various reasons, however, you may find that the unique text search will not return your pages (or at least not in the top 30 matches), and it will report the URL as not found even if it is found with a keyphrase search. In these cases, you might try performing a manual search on the engine in question for your unique text phrase and examine the results to determine

Chapter 6: Reporter

109

why your site is not listed. Some possible causes for the URL search not returning your page rankings accurately are that your unique text phrase is too long or it is found on web pages other than your own, making it a nonunique phrase. In these cases, you might add a copyright notice including your company name or add your company’s address to your pages in order to create a unique phrase for the purpose of URL verification.

Getting the Most Out of Your Reports In many ways, each report gives you accurate and easily comprehendible information about where your web site is located in each search engine’s rankings, as well as your competitors’ rankings. Since the reports are HTML documents, they are fully integrated with the online help documents and resources. All of the reports have links with brackets around the search engines you specify, such as [AltaVista] and [Google]. The links will jump directly to these sections of the report.

Additional Tips for Accurate Mission Runs Remember that running several Missions on the same day will not show any changes in positions. Be sure to run the same Mission again on a different day if you wish to see any changes. If you run the same Mission repeatedly, the new results will merge with the older results compiled from the previous run. This will take into account any changes in position (which is noted on both the Concise Summary Report and the Trend Report) and archive the previous results in case you want to see them later. However, if you create and run a different Mission file each time, the program will have no previous Mission results to compare against. Therefore, it is important to save a Mission and reopen and run that same file each time if you wish your last position data to be seen when the new report is created. As long as the archive boxes are enabled, your data will be accurately saved for future use.

110

Chapter 6: Reporter

Position Changes WebPosition Gold’s Reporter calculates the changes in your web site positions based on your page’s last reported position compared with its present reported position. You may find, however, that NA, or not applicable, will appear frequently on your reports. There are various reasons why this might happen. First, the Reporter has no way of calculating positions that are outside the number of matches to scan that you have set. If you have the Reporter’s Number of search matches to scan option set at 30 (which is recommended), any changes in position that put your page lower in the rankings than 30 (numerically greater than position 30) will show up in the change column as >30. If you have a recently indexed page, or one that was indexed lower than 30 that suddenly increased to a number ten position, the change will also be NA. This is because the Reporter can only compare present positions to the last positions. If it has no record of the last position or present position, it cannot make the calculation. If you are receiving an NA in your change of position column and you feel that this is incorrect, make sure you are running the same Mission on different days. Remember that the Reporter doesn’t show any position changes on the same day reports are run. Another possible cause for NA would be if you ran a Mission but only reselected some of the engines that you originally chose during the previous Mission run. If you do this, you will lose any previous information on the original engines you selected. When you select them again and run the Mission, the Reporter will not have any comparison data for engines, other than the last ones you selected. Finally, verify that the URL showing up with an NA matches the URL that was found on the last run of the Mission. If you run a Mission for the keyword “motorcycles,” it may find the URL in the first position on the first page of the engine results. However, the next time you run the report, you notice an NA in the Last Position column. It is possible (especially in the engines that rotate between several databases) that the URL is different from the first URL the search engine found, and the first URL may not be in the search results at all. In this case, the Reporter would report an NA because the URL is new.

Chapter 6: Reporter

111

If you receive an error message when trying to click on the Concise Summary Report or other link on the Report menu in your browser, it generally indicates that your web browser does not support long filenames. You probably have an older version of the browser. You can easily download the latest version of Netscape at http://www.netscape.com or the latest version of Internet Explorer at http://www.microsoft.com.

Do You Think Your Results May be Inaccurate? Why Isn’t Your Site in the Top 30? Even though much work has been put into designing your web site, and you feel that you have been gaining visibility on the Internet for your business, you shouldn’t be surprised to find that your site is not listed in the top 30, or even the top 100 rankings. There are a number of reasons why your site may not be reported as being in the Top 30 or even higher. The most common reason is that you simply need to use WebPosition Gold’s modules to optimize your positions so that your site does show up near the top of the results. However, if you believe that your site should be in the top 30 and WebPosition says it’s not, then it is possible you may have the Reporter Mission setup wrong somewhere. In this case, WebPosition Gold is just not seeing your pages properly. An easy way to test this is to go to the search engine in your browser (via the engine link on the Report) and do a manual search for your web site to make sure it is in fact not listed. Be careful to type the keyword/phrase exactly the same or you’ll get different results. If you use quotes in WebPosition Gold, be sure to use quotes when typing in the phrase in the search engine. Also, search using the same case. Uppercase and lowercase letters will often produce different results. In rare cases, some pages do not get counted in the URL count portion of the Summary/Detail Reports. Don’t forget that the domain name you enter in the Reporter must match the domain name in the search results. This issue comes up if you have an alias domain name http://www.youralias.com indexed and also have http://www.yourwebsite.com indexed on the same search engine. In this case, the domain name is slightly different because of

112

Chapter 6: Reporter

the way aliases are interpreted by the search engine. This can cause difficulties in achieving accurate URL/page counts. If you can find your page listed on the Detail Report, but WebPosition is not reporting any positions on the Concise Summary or Summary Reports, you’ve most likely made an error in entering the domain name. Other common mistakes that result in inaccurate results are: n

Misspelling the domain name on the Mission tab.

n

Including the page name in the domain on the Mission tab.

n

Including a subdirectory name in the domain when the subdirectory is not indexed in the search engine. Make sure it’s just www.yourwebsite.com. It should include a subdirectory name only if you share the domain from your host service rather than having your own domain name, such as such as www.hostname.com/yourwebsite.

The text in the Domain Name field must be an exact match to the domain showing on the Detail Report from the search engine. If the Detail Report shows http://www.yourweb site.com, when WebPosition Gold searches for www.yourwebsite.com, it will find it. However, if you enter www.yourwebsite.com and the search engine only indexed it as http://yourwebsite.com, it’s not going to find your web site, since the “www” part isn’t there to be indexed. The solution is to not enter the “www” or other prefix causing the problem if the search engine has not indexed that portion of the web address. It’s always best to submit domains in a consistent manner whenever possible. You can also list multiple variations of your domain name in the Domain Name box by separating them with commas. If you don’t see your web site on the Detail Report but find your site when you do a manual search engine search, there may be something else wrong. Make sure that WebPosition searches for the exact text that you entered in the search engine yourself. Example: Wine, wine, and wines may all produce different results.

Chapter 6: Reporter

113

Also, as I mentioned earlier, search engines can manipulate search results whenever and however they want, like alternating their results on each search. Therefore, WebPosition Gold’s results may not always match a search done on a particular search engine a few minutes later. If you think this may be the case with your search, go to the search engine, hit the Search button for a keyword, print the results, hit the Back button, and hit Search again. Keep backing up and re-searching. If you notice that the results occasionally change on the first page from what you printed out, then that’s the reason for the occasional difference between WebPosition Gold and what you see on the engine.

Select Engines for Multiple Missions The search engine industry, like any industry in this day and age, is constantly changing. New search engines appear all the time and existing search engines go out of business. If you’re doing optimization work for many clients, you’ll have to create separate Reporter Missions for each client. If you decide to start supporting a new search engine or if you drop support for one of the engines, it can be very time-consuming to manually update each of your Reporter Missions. Fortunately, WebPosition Gold provides a means of globally updating the list of search engines in your Reporter Missions. First, click on the File menu on the main WebPosition Gold screen, and select the Select Engines for Multiple Missions menu option. A search engine selection window will appear on your screen. This window is very similar to the one that we saw earlier in this chapter. The difference is that your search engine selections will apply to multiple Reporter Missions. Select the engines that you want to use in your Reporter Missions and then click on Update.

114

Chapter 6: Reporter

Next, a small window will appear. This window explains how to select the Mission files that you want to update with the new search engines. Click on OK. Finally, you will be presented with a file selection dialog window. From this window, browse to the directory where your Reporter Mission files are saved, click on the Missions that you want to update, and then click on Open. You can select multiple Missions using the Ctrl and Shift keys as described in the Select Missions Instructions window.

Chapter 7

Page Generator

115

116

Chapter 7: Page Generator

he Page Generator uses information about your web site and the keyphrases you want to target to create search engine optimized pages. An optimized page can be an existing page on your site that has been optimized for a particular keyphrase. It can also be a new page created for the purpose of targeting a particular keyphrase on one of the search engines. The idea is to create a number of optimized pages, each one designed to rank well in a specific search engine for a specific keyphrase. Although your optimized pages should contain links to other pages on your site, they should also stand on their own merit and contain content that is directly relevant to the keyphrases you want to target. For example, on the Silver Platter Foods site, Mike Merlot might want to create optimized pages for each of the different cheeses that Silver Platter sells. That way, a user who searches for “Pecorino cheese” will find the Silver Platter Foods “Pecorino cheese” optimized page at the top of the search engine rankings. When that user clicks through and views that page, he or she will find a page that discusses. . . pecorino cheese. From that page, the user will have the opportunity to perhaps order some pecorino cheese or click through to other pages on the Silver Platter site. The important point to remember is that the purpose of the pecorino cheese optimized page is not solely to get the user to click through to another page on the Silver Platter site. Each optimized page must contain substantial unique content that is directly relevant to the targeted keyphrase. Before getting into a detailed explanation of how to use the Page Generator, I want to take a moment to debunk a myth pertaining to optimized pages. You may have heard or read that optimized pages are “bad” and that search engines may ban your site for using them. Perhaps you’re under the impression that optimized pages use certain types of codes in the HTML that search engines can detect. All of this is patently untrue. Optimized pages do not contain any secret codes that identify them to the search engines as optimized pages. A properly optimized page would be indistinguishable from any normal HTML page. It is true that some sites have been banned for making improper use of optimized pages. There is an enormous distinction between using optimized pages responsibly and spamming the search engines irresponsibly. Here is AltaVista’s official policy pertaining to this issue:

Chapter 7: Page Generator

117

In order to maintain the integrity of the search index, we must sometimes exclude submissions that manipulate search results. Examples of such manipulation include, but are not limited to, the following: n

Pages with text that is not easily read, either because it is too small or is obscured by the background of the page.

n

Pages with off-topic or excessive keywords.

n

Duplication of content, either by excessive submission of the same page, submitting the same pages from multiple domains, or submitting the same content from multiple hosts.

n

Machine-generated pages with minimal or no content, the sole purpose of which is to get a user to click to another page.

n

Pages that contain only links to other pages.

n

Pages of which the primary intent is to redirect users to another page.

AltaVista does hit on some important themes you should bear in mind as you optimize your site. Let’s analyze their exclusion policy line by line: Pages with text that is not easily read, either because it is too small or is obscured by the background of the page. This is a major “no-no” on virtually all search engines and should definitely not occur within your web site. Some people try to fool search engines into giving their page a higher ranking by repeating “invisible” keyphrases throughout their web pages. The keyphrases are invisible because they use the same (or very similar) color for the text as for the background of the page; white text on a white background is an example. The search engines are able to see the keyphrases because they read the actual HTML of your page, but the keyphrases would not be visible in a web browser. Most search engines can easily detect this technique and will ban your site for using it. Pages with off-topic or excessive keywords. Some sites try to attain high rankings for very popular search terms such as “sex” or “mp3,” even if the content of their site has nothing to do with these topics. The reasoning is that a top ranking for a popular search term will attract much traffic to their site. There are several major flaws in this

118

Chapter 7: Page Generator

reasoning. First, it’s nearly impossible to achieve a top ranking for very popular single keywords. Second, even if you did manage to get a top ranking for a popular keyword, all the users who came to your site as a result of that keyword would be completely uninterested in the products or services you actually offer. Why would you want that kind of traffic? Duplication of content, either by excessive submission of the same page, submitting the same pages from multiple domains, or submitting the same content from multiple hosts. This is an example of how some people have gotten in trouble for misusing optimized pages. You should design your optimized pages so that each one contains unique content and is targeted to a specific keyphrase. Do not create multiple copies of the same page on the same or different domains, and do not resubmit the same page over and over in an attempt to get it listed. Machine-generated pages with minimal or no content, the sole purpose of which is to get a user to click to another page, pages that contain only links to other pages, or pages of which the primary intent is to redirect users to another page. This is yet another example of misusing optimized pages. A properly optimized page should contain substantial content that is directly related to the keyphrase you are targeting. It should stand on its own merit. Do not try to trick search engines by creating dozens of optimized pages that contain no actual content and simply direct users to other pages on your site. The search engines are primarily concerned with providing relevant search results to their users. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with creating a page that is optimized for the keyphrase you are targeting, provided that the page does in fact contain actual content related to this keyphrase. In fact, this is what search engines want you to do. By creating pages that are properly optimized for keyphrases that relate to the content on the page, you actually help search engines achieve their goal of providing relevant search results to their users. So long as you’re not trying to trick search engines by redirecting users to other pages on your site, or violating the other guidelines we’ve discussed, there is no reason why you would get in trouble. Learn to use WebPosition Gold responsibly and you will reap tremendous benefits in the form of highly qualified traffic to your web site.

Chapter 7: Page Generator

119

Let’s discuss the Page Generator in detail. The Page Generator takes you step by step through keyword placement in various parts of your web pages. It acts primarily as a teaching tool to make sure the basic elements for which a search engine looks are included, such as Title tag, Heading tags, meta tags, and link text. Once the page is generated, you are free to modify colors, add graphics, or change other elements. It doesn’t matter what you change or input in the Generator, as long as the final page is critiqued in the Page Critic and refined for the engine it targets based on its analysis of the page. Optimized pages should be an integral part of your web site. With the Page Generator’s templates feature, your optimized pages will be visually consistent with the style of your site. You might also take a copy of your favorite page (usually your home page) and modify it with your optimized page content. Once you optimize it with the Page Critic, you’ll be ready to submit the pages on any search engine and be in a great position to gain better rankings. The Page Generator pages you eventually create will contain the proper elements to successfully optimize for the search engine you’re targeting. You may find this to be a tedious process, as there are infinite combinations of keyphrases and search engines. For now, try to concentrate on the most important keyphrases and search engines for which you want to optimize your pages. You can always add more pages later, and once you become comfortable with the process, you will create new pages quickly and easily. The Page Generator is a great starting point to create targeted web pages, but you shouldn’t be too concerned about perfecting the pages you create. While this is a very important step, it is also only one step in a larger process. The Page Critic module, which I’ll focus on in the next chapter, will help you fine-tune your optimized pages. Let’s get back to Mike Merlot. After realizing that Silver Platter Foods was virtually nowhere to be found on any of the major search engines, he decided to target three keyphrases and three search engines to see if WebPosition Gold could in fact help him achieve higher rankings. Mike had been concentrating on working with very general keyphrases at first, such as “gourmet foods” and “gourmet cooking,” but he knew that the competition was fierce for those keyphrases. He would have to be more specific with his keyphrases in order to reach his target market via the search engines. Mike

120

Chapter 7: Page Generator

realized that if he targeted specific foods, he’d have a much greater opportunity to achieve top search engine rankings. An additional benefit of targeting very specific keyphrases is that people searching for specific phrases are much more likely to convert into buyers than people searching for more general phrases. This fact has been validated by research that we’ve done on our own site as well as on clients’ sites. Therefore, to promote Silver Platter Foods’ cheese selections, he decided to create an optimized page targeting the phrase “Pecorino Romano.” For wine, he targeted “Pinot Noir,” and for dessert, he targeted “Sacher Torte.” The search engines for which Mike wanted to create pages were AltaVista, Google, and HotBot.

Page Generator Tabs Page Setup Tab The Page Setup tab is your starting point for the Page Generator. Here you will enter your web site address, name the page you’re creating, and save your page. In the Web site domain that page will be uploaded to later box, enter your web site domain name without the “http://,” or select an existing site from the drop-down list box. Include the subdirectory of your site if you don’t have your own domain name. Mike Merlot selected the silverplatterfoods.com domain from the drop-down box.

Chapter 7: Page Generator

121

Next, you need to choose where to save your new pages in the Directory to Output to box. By default, the last file path you used appears. In Mike Merlot’s case, “C:\Program Files\WebPosition2\” appeared.

You can save your pages anywhere you want and create a new folder for the new pages you intend to create later. Just remember to keep all of your work in the same folder. If you don’t, your new pages will be missing elements and will not display properly when you upload them to your web site. You’ll see the need for such consistency as you begin to work with the Page Generator. Finally, you need to fill in the Page Name to Generate box. You’ll want to use a descriptive name for your page. Avoid special symbols, such as “&” or “+” and other nonalphabetic characters. I recommend using part of the keyphrase name and part of the search engine name. WebPosition Gold’s recommended format is: keyword-engineidentifier.htm, where keyword is the primary keyword or phrase for which you’re creating the page, engineidentifier identifies the search engine for which your page will be specifically optimized, and htm signifies the file is an HTML document. However you choose to name your pages, you’ll find your pages will be easier to keep track of if you keep them consistent. Mike Merlot’s first optimized page targeted the “Pecorino Romano” keyphrase on AltaVista, so he named his page “pecorinoromano-av.htm.”

122

Chapter 7: Page Generator

Once your web pages are ready, the Upload Manager program will assist you in uploading the pages to your site. This will happen a little later in the optimization process. For your convenience, WebPosition Gold tracks which pages you’ve generated and gives you the option to add the page to the Upload Manager’s changed file list. If you enable this check box, then the page that you create will be added to the changed file list for the selected domain. Later, when you run the Upload Manager and select a domain name, you’ll be given the option to add pages from that domain’s changed file list into the upload queue.

Chapter 7: Page Generator

123

Mike enabled the Add page check box so that his optimized page would be added to the changed file list for the silverplatterfoods.com domain.

Engine Tab The Engine tab screen is similar to the one with which you worked in the Reporter module. However, while you probably chose multiple search engines with which to interact during the Reporter Mission, the Page Generator works with just one engine at a time. This is because each engine has a unique algorithm your pages must follow in order to be properly optimized for that engine.

Like the Reporter module, the search engines are divided into two categories: global engines and regional engines. Again, if you highlight any of the search engines on the list, the engine’s properties will appear in the lower-right of the screen. Since Mike was creating an optimized page for AltaVista, he clicked on AltaVista in the list of engines. The property information will tell you the type of search engine (Search Engine, Directory Engine, or Pay Per Click Engine), its domain name, and its link popularity, meaning how many web sites have links to that particular search engine. You can also add any of the search engines to your Preferred

124

Chapter 7: Page Generator

List, a drop-down menu option to manage the search engines you work with frequently.

The Engine drop-down menus are also the same as the ones found in the Reporter module. The first drop-down menu filters search engines by level of importance, including All Engines, Primary Engines, Secondary Engines, and Preferred Engines.

Chapter 7: Page Generator

125

The second drop-down menu filters the search engines by type, including All Types, Search Engines, Directory Engines, Pay Per Click Engines, and Only Engines that Need Generated Pages. This last type is unique to the Page Generator module and allows you to focus on building pages for just the engines that index individual pages.

As you change the filter settings, the main search engine list on the left will change as well. After selecting the search engine to build pages for, you can choose either the engine’s Default Settings or Custom Settings.

126

Chapter 7: Page Generator

The Page Generator will only create areas of your web page that are known to be indexed by the particular engine you choose. If you notice that a particular area seems to be missing, select Custom Settings, and then click the Options button.

The Page Generator will then display a window that lists various areas of the page.

Chapter 7: Page Generator

127

These options include Meta Description Tag, Meta Keyword Tag, Comment Tags, ALT Tags, Heading Tags if single keyword is used, and Heading Tags if multi-keyword phrase is used. If a check box is not enabled, it means the engine you’ve selected does not consider that page area in its relevancy algorithm. Therefore, the Page Generator will not add that area to the page. If you wish to override this you can enable the check boxes for which you want areas created and click on OK. The page you generate will contain all of the areas you checked. I do not recommend overriding the default engine settings.

Keywords Tab The Keywords tab is where you enter the keyphrase or keyphrases on which you want the Page Generator to focus when it creates your optimized page. Notice the warning statement on this tab: “Only enter keywords which specifically APPLY to the content of this page and your Web site.”

This warning reinforces the importance of optimizing your pages for keyphrases that are directly relevant to your site. Do not try to trick the search engines by optimizing for phrases that are unrelated to your business. There is also a Keyword Tips button for additional help in choosing which phrases are best for your web site.

128

Chapter 7: Page Generator

In the Keywords section, you’ll enter the primary keyword or phrase to emphasize on this page, as well as optional secondary keywords/phrases for which you want web searchers to find your page. These will be the keyphrases that you’ve put high on your list from your WordTracker research. By now, you’ve probably developed a list of keyphrases you want to target. If necessary, reread Chapter 4, “Keyphrase Selection,” to refresh your memory on the best tactics by which to choose appropriate keyphrases: n

Concepts

n

Brands

n

Company names

n

Your company name

n

Common words and useful phrases

n

Test keywords

n

Case sensitivity

n

Bad spelling can be good!

n

Be regional

Remember that you want to target keyphrases that are queried with some frequency and are specific to your web site, but are also less competitive and

Chapter 7: Page Generator

129

may have been overlooked. This is a tough equation to solve, but you do have the ability to check the competitiveness of a keyphrase before you do unnecessary work. Try running additional Reporter Missions on keyphrases you suspect will work well for your web site. The Actual Results link on the Detail Report will give you the total number of matching web sites reported for that keyword phrase. If you are debating between two keyphrases, and each one appears to be queried with roughly the same frequency but one returns 10,000 matches and the other returns 100,000 matches, you should first target the one with fewer matches. That way you’ll be competing with fewer web sites for top rankings. The Detail Report can also show you which web sites feature the keyphrases you’re considering. Are the top-ranking web sites your major competitors or are they junk results that are not particularly relevant to the keyphrase queries? The keyphrase queries that return junk results may be the ones your competitors are not yet targeting. Consequently, it should be easier to achieve high rankings for these keyphrases. As prompted, enter your Primary Keyword/Phrase. This should preferably be a phrase containing three to four words. You can also use two-word phrases if you’re targeting search terms that are not extremely competitive. You then have three more lines in which to enter more keyphrases called Secondary Keyword/Phrase. There’s no harm in entering some additional phrases on these lines, but when you get to the Page Critic step, you’ll be focusing on optimizing your page only for your primary keyphrase. As you can see from the following screen shot, Mike Merlot entered “pecorino romano” as his primary

130

Chapter 7: Page Generator

keyphrase. This isn’t a very competitive keyphrase, so he felt safe using a two-word phrase. Notice also that Mike entered the keyphrase using all lowercase letters, even though it’s a proper noun. Most people search using all lowercase, so it’s best to focus your optimization efforts on lowercase words. Additionally, most search engines consider lowercase searches to be case-insensitive, meaning that they will return results that contain both lowercase and capitalized forms of the phrase. If you want to specifically target capitalized forms of your primary keyphrase, you can accomplish that by adding different variations to the page later in the optimization process.

Description Tab The Description tab is where you will enter the largest amount of information, including your page title, headings, body text, image, and links. Many of the fields on this screen will already be filled in for you, based on the information you entered in prior steps. You’re free to change any of the fields if you don’t like the way the Page Generator filled them in. Your goal is to create optimized pages with the “correct” amount of text and information in accordance with what search engines prefer. Again, don’t worry about creating the perfect page the first time around — the Page Critic will help you refine your page after you create it.

Title for Page Remember the Title tag from the HTML primer? The Title tag is arguably the most important HTML tag, in terms of search engine optimization. Unlike meta tags and other elements of your site that some search engines overlook when determining web site rankings, almost all search engines recognize the Title tag. They also assign great importance to keyphrases within the Title tag. Remember that most search engines will use your Title tag to determine the exact title of your site, as it appears in the search results listings. Therefore, in addition to being optimized for the search engines, your Title tag must be written in a way that’s compelling enough for searchers to want to click through to your site.

Chapter 7: Page Generator

131

After you determine what you would like your title to be, insert the text into the Title for Page slot exactly the way you want it to appear in search engines. There’s no need to place HTML brackets on either side of the text — WebPosition Gold will translate everything into your new pages accordingly. In this case, the Page Generator automatically inserted “Pecorino Romano” into the title field since this is the primary keyphrase Mike Merlot specified in the previous step.

Notice that the Page Generator automatically capitalized “Pecorino Romano” even though Mike entered it as lowercase in the previous step. This is because the Page Generator assumes that you would want your title capitalized in order to create a professional appearance. This may or may not be true. You must sometimes compromise appearance in order to achieve the best optimization results. If you examine the top-ranking pages for many keyphrase searches, you may notice that the titles often appear in lowercase. Even though lowercase is not technically correct for a title, using it in your title may help you achieve top rankings, since most people search lowercase. The Page Critic, which we’ll discuss in the next chapter, will help you fine-tune your optimized pages. Mike decided to leave the title as is for now and wait for the Page Critic’s analysis before making any changes to his optimized page.

132

Chapter 7: Page Generator

Here are some tips to writing eye-catching page titles: n

As a general rule, it’s wise to include the title of your company or web site in the Title tag. For example, to use the Silver Platter Foods home page, simply putting Silver Platter Foods in the Title for Page slot will result in “Silver Platter Foods” appearing at the top of each optimized page and as the highlighted phrase on the search engine’s results page.

n

Always use your primary keyphrase in the Title tag at least once.

n

If possible, place your primary keyphrase at the beginning of the Title tag. Among other factors, search engines give weight to the location of keyphrases. In general, the earlier a keyphrase appears, the more significance it receives. The WebPosition Gold Page Critic will help you figure out the individual preferences of each search engine in the next step.

n

You can use the same keyphrase multiple times in the Title tag, but avoid putting them in a row. Some search engines might think you’re trying to manipulate them and will penalize your site for it. Instead, consider placing additional text between keyphrases to even out your text.

n

If possible, use the longest or plural form of your keywords in the Title tag. For example, if Mike Merlot placed the word “cooking” into his Title tags, his page could potentially be found in searches for both “cooking” and “cook.” This doubles the chances of Silver Platter Foods being seen by a web searcher. Also think about spelling changes and how they can affect results. For example, Silver Platter Foods caters to “parties.” But if someone typed in just the word “party,” the Silver Platter site might not be found. This is because “party” is not a substring of “parties,” even though they’re different forms of the same word. In cases like this, try to use both forms of the word for maximum visibility.

n

Use uppercase lettering at the beginning of your title and lowercase lettering after the company name or beginning of the title. Although it is thought that most web searchers only use lowercase lettering, it is also generally believed that most people recognize, not read, words. This applies to Internet searching as well. Most of us have perfected skimming text to find what interests us based on the different heights of words. After reading for so many years, we can easily decipher words

Chapter 7: Page Generator

133

just from the shape of the tops of letters. Therefore, something like “Silver Platter Foods features gourmet wines, desserts, and cheeses for all your party needs!” will satisfy both the skimmer and his or her abilities to “read” quickly (few uppercase letters, but strategically placed), as well as the most careful reader. However, keep in mind my earlier comments about focusing on optimization for lowercase phrases. As you’re probably starting to realize, search engine optimization involves many complex decisions and there are few absolutes. You may often find yourself balancing the competing interests of readability and good writing against optimization for the search engines. n

Along those same lines, USING WORDS IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS FOR YOUR TITLE TAG IS A BAD WRITING TECHNIQUE. CAPS ARE TEDIOUS TO READ, AND WEB SITES THAT USE THEM ARE OFTEN QUICKLY DISMISSED.

n

Longer titles are often better than shorter titles, mainly because a longer description of your company or services will allow you to better persuade searchers to visit your site. Keep your title short, however, if you’re trying to emphasize a certain keyphrase that may have a lot of ranking competition.

n

Again, I can’t stress enough that creative and compelling writing is always a plus in getting people’s attention.

Choose a Graphic (Product/Logo) Your company logo or an image relevant to your company or services is an essential element of your optimized page. Click on the Select button to browse your computer for images you have previously saved. Mike Merlot’s images were saved in the following folder: C:\ProgramFiles\WebPosition2\Images\cheese-img.jpg

134

Chapter 7: Page Generator

Heading Text for Page Heading tags are often an important component of your optimized pages. Many search engines assign significant weight to keyphrases found within this page area. Visually, the Heading tag displays text that is larger than normal and/or boldfaced, depending on which Heading tag you use. As a design element, these tags are used to announce the beginning of a new section on your page. Remember, there are six heading commands to choose from:

through

, where

is the largest heading and

is the smallest heading. If the search engine you selected considers heading text in its ranking algorithm, the Page Generator will automatically enable the Heading Text check box. It will also insert your primary keyphrase into the box below. In this case, the Page Generator does not believe that AltaVista supports the Heading tag, so the check box is not enabled. You’re free to override this setting and enter heading text if you like. Even if the search engine doesn’t recognize the Heading tag, you can still use a heading as a design element for your page. Mike Merlot decided that his Pecorino Cheese optimized page would look better if it had a heading, so he added it manually.

Chapter 7: Page Generator

135

Company (or Web Site) Name This is the most self-explanatory section of the Description tab. Enter your company name or the name of your web site.

136

Chapter 7: Page Generator

Body Text for Page which Emphasizes the Keywords/Phrases The text you enter into the body text section of the Description tab will be the most extensive portion of text you’ll have to provide for the Page Generator. This text will be used for both the body area of the new page and for the meta description tag. As I previously mentioned, the text from your meta description tag often determines how your listing will appear in search engines. However, some search engines ignore the meta description tag and use the first several lines of text from your body text area to determine how your listing reads. So, it’s important that the beginning of your body text area is consistent with your meta description tag and gives searchers a compelling reason to click on your listing and visit your web site. Here are some tips to help you write effective body text: n

Always use your primary keyphrase in the body tag at least once.

n

Place your primary keyphrase at the beginning of your body text area and then repeat that keyphrase several more times throughout the entire segment. Search engines like to see consistency in your web pages and the higher the frequency of keyphrase usage, the more your page resembles a significant “theme.” This only works to a certain point. If you repeat your keyphrase too many times, the search engine may disregard your page altogether. Don’t worry about trying to reach the perfect frequency at this point. After you generate your optimized page, you’ll run it through the Page Critic in order to refine its keyphrase frequency and other elements of the page for the search engine you’re targeting.

n

Make sure your text reads naturally. Some people become so focused on the idea of including keyphrases in their text that the text ends up reading awkwardly. Remember that there are two separate and distinct goals for each of your optimized pages. The first goal is for the page to be optimized so that it will score highly in the search engines. The second and equally important goal is for the page to make a good impression on your potential customers when they click through to your site from a search engine. A high ranking will be of little benefit if the page is poorly written. Just like in the offline world, presenting a pro-

Chapter 7: Page Generator

137

fessional appearance is paramount to building confidence in your company among your prospective customers. n

Don’t place keyphrases too close together. As with your Title and Heading tags, some search engines will penalize your rankings for doing this. Since you want to write a more significant amount of text anyway, this should be easy to avoid.

n

Finally, remember to use different variations on the same word, such as “party” and “parties.”

Since Mike wanted to optimize this page for the keyphrase “pecorino cheese,” he wrote a paragraph about this type of cheese: “Silver Platter Foods offers a wide selection of Italian cheeses, including Pecorino Romano, Gorgonzola, Parmigiano Reggiano and Mozzarella. Silver Platter is your one and only stop for the resources you need to cook with the best cheeses, wines, and gourmet foods from across the country and the globe. Whether you’re looking for Pecorino Romano cheese, appetizers, desserts, or anything in between, the foods that Silver Platter Foods features are the perfect gift for any food lover in your family.”

138

Chapter 7: Page Generator

The primary keyphrase appears twice within the body text, but it is written in a way that appears somewhat natural, rather than looking like it was contrived for the purpose of optimization. You may also notice that Mike used the correct capitalization for the primary keyphrase in the body text. The Page Critic may recommend changing this to lowercase, but for the time being, he’ll leave it in the correct form. Ask yourself questions when writing your web site body text, especially the first few lines of text. Think about aspects of your business the way you would in any marketing situation: n

Will reading this text make people want to visit the site?

n

Is the headline compelling?

n

Does the text suggest solving a problem easily?

n

Does the text include prices, times, and/or phone numbers?

n

Does the text include regional information?

n

Has the correct audience been targeted?

Enter URL to Link this Page To In the Enter URL to link this page to section, I recommend typing in your complete home page, such as http://www.yourdomain.com/index.htm. That way, web searchers who find your site through a specific optimized page instead of your home page can reach your home page as well. In this case, the Page Generator has already filled in the silverplatterfoods.com home page.

Chapter 7: Page Generator

139

Another approach is to enter the URL of another page on your site that contains your primary keyphrase. For example: http://www.silverplatterfoods.com/pecorino-romano-2-av.htm. Embedding the keyphrase in the URL links can help to improve the relevancy of the page for that keyphrase. For example, instead of having one long page containing all his “Pecorino Romano” content, Mike could break the page up into several smaller pages. Each of these pages would contain unique content specific to “Pecorino Romano” and would include the keyphrase “Pecorino Romano” in each of their page names. If you take this approach, make sure that you have a lot of unique content for each of your optimized pages. Do not simply repeat the same content over and over again, as the search engines would consider this to be spamming. A third approach is to link to other pages on your site that are related to your primary keyphrase. This helps to improve the relevancy of the site as a whole by establishing a theme. For example, Mike could insert links to pages that describe other types of cheese, such as a Brie cheese page.

Linking Text Yet another way your page can be considered relevant by some search engines is by the visible text within a link. By default, the Page Generator places the primary keyphrase into the Linking Text box. The same caveat that we discussed in the URL Link section applies to this section as well. If you link to another page that targets the same primary keyphrase, make sure that page has enough unique content to stand on its own merit. Do not simply create duplicate or near-duplicate pages in an attempt to maximize your site’s relevancy for your desired keyphrases. If Mike Merlot created another page containing more “Pecorino Romano” content, he could enter “More about Pecorino Romano cheese” into the Linking Text box and link to that page. This would be perfectly valid and could not be construed as spam. However, Mike decided to focus his efforts on optimizing for more keyphrases, rather than trying to create multiple “Pecorino Romano” pages. Therefore, since the URL link went to the Silver Platter home page, he changed the Linking Text to “Back to home page.”

140

Chapter 7: Page Generator

Meta Tags Tab Meta tags are found in the head section of your page, but unlike the Title tag, meta tag content does not display in your browser window at all. Meta tags are used strictly to inform search engine spiders of what kind of data exists on your web page so that it can be properly indexed and searched. If the selected search engine supports meta tags, the Page Generator will automatically create content for your meta keyword and meta description tags as appropriate.

Chapter 7: Page Generator

141

I suggest that you accept the Page Generator’s suggestion for the meta keyword tag. As I mentioned, the Page Generator uses the body text as the content of the meta description tag. If you followed my advice and wrote compelling body text, then your meta description text will also be compelling. If you feel that your meta description text is not compelling, then you should go back and rewrite your body text. This will automatically revise your meta description text as well. Always remember to give your potential customers a reason to click through to your site. A bland description of your company or its products is not a reason to click through. Click on the Meta Description Tips button for help with crafting a sales message that will encourage people to visit your site.

Options Tab The Options tab allows you to configure the operation of the Page Generator to your personal preferences. It has no effect on the actual page that the Page Generator creates. The default settings of the Page Generator are to prompt you anytime the Page Generator thinks you may be doing something wrong. For example, if the Page Generator does not find your primary keyphrase in your body text, it will normally prompt you. As you become more experienced at working with the Page Generator, you may find some of these prompts to be annoying or distracting. If you want to disable any of

142

Chapter 7: Page Generator

the prompts, you can do so from this screen. For instance, if you don’t want to be prompted every time you leave secondary keywords blank, choose the Continue option.

This screen also controls which action the Page Generator takes after it generates a page. The default setting is Prompt for Action. If, however, you’d rather have it immediately analyze the page using the Page Critic, you can choose that option instead. You can also have the Page Generator display the page in your browser, or you can choose Continue to return to the Page Generator itself.

Chapter 7: Page Generator

143

Template Tab The Template tab allows you to customize your optimized pages so they look like an integral part of your web site, rather than pages you added after the site was built. The Template file to use when generating pages box contains the name of the default template file that WebPosition Gold uses to generate optimized pages. This template is generic by necessity. After all, WebPosition Gold has no way of knowing how your site is designed. It’s up to you to modify the default template so that the Page Generator can create pages that are visually consistent with the rest of your site. There are four buttons underneath the template name box:

144

Chapter 7: Page Generator

n

You can create a new template by clicking on the New button. This will load a copy of the current template into your HTML editor (Notepad by default). You can then edit the current template to suit your needs and save it under a new filename.

n

If you click on the Edit Now button, the current template will load into your HTML editor. You can then edit it and save the new version to your computer.

n

The Default button will restore the default template that comes with WebPosition.

n

The View in Browser button will display the current template in your web browser.

The Edit Template in my favorite HTML editor box lets you select which HTML editor to use when creating and editing templates. The default setting is to use Notepad.

On the Template tab you can also select a background color and font color for your page. White is the default background color and black is the default text color. If the color or shade of color you wish to use is not listed in the drop-down boxes, use your HTML editor to select the background color, view the HTML, and copy the HTML color code from the BGCOLOR parameter of the Body tag that represents that color. Copy the six-letter color code to the

Chapter 7: Page Generator

145

clipboard, select Custom Color from the color list on the Template tab and paste it into WebPosition Gold. For example, the color code that represents white is FFFFFF.

Placeholders WebPosition Gold’s template feature uses “placeholders” to tell the program where it should insert various kinds of information when it generates an optimized page. For example, if you look in the default template, you’ll see the following placeholder: {title} This {title} tag is not a standard HTML tag. It is a placeholder. When the Page Generator encounters this placeholder in your template, it will replace it with the title that you entered in the Title for Page box on the Description tab. The {title} placeholder is a stand-alone placeholder, meaning that WebPosition will automatically replace it with the complete HTML Title tag and its content. Recall that Mike Merlot entered “Pecorino Romano” as the title for his page. When the Page Generator encounters a {title} placeholder on Mike’s template, it will replace it with the following HTML code: <Title>Pecorino Romano

146

Chapter 7: Page Generator

Since the {title} placeholder is stand-alone, it’s not necessary (and might actually cause an error in the user’s browser) to include the Title tag in the HTML of the template. In other words, either use the <Title> tag or use the {title} placeholder, but don’t use both. Some placeholder tags are not stand-alone and must be embedded within standard HTML tags. For example, the Background Color tags need to remain in quotes similar to HTML tags: bgcolor=“#{backgroundcolor}”. For a complete explanation of what each placeholder represents, see the “Avaliable Placeholders” section at the end of the chapter. Remember that it’s not necessary to use all of the charted placeholders in your template. You can use as many or as few as you desire. Before modifying the default template, realize that most elements of the template are there for a reason. For instance, the use of an image on the page allows for the insertion of keywords in the Alt tags that some engines tend to favor. Also be aware that the Comment tags and certain other placeholders are only inserted if a particular search engine is known to support them or prefer them when ranking a page. Occasionally, a meta keyword tag is excluded if an engine is known to rank a page better when the tag is removed. If you decide to not use the {Metakeyword} placeholder, but instead use the HTML tag <META NAME=“keywords” CONTENT= “{keyword1}”> in your template, then WebPosition Gold will not remove the tag automatically. This is because it has no way of knowing that the {keyword1} placeholder is part of your meta keywords tag. The {keyword1} placeholder simply substitutes your primary keyphrase at the location of the placeholder. It does not have the intelligence that the {Metakeyword} placeholder has. Here are some additional tips to help you create your optimized pages: n

You can easily emulate the look of your existing web pages by taking your home page or another page you might like and saving it to a new filename in your HTML editor. Insert placeholder tags in all the desired areas similar to the way the default template above indicates. The pages generated will have the exact formatting, logos, structure, etc., that your current pages contain. Read the case study on Mike Merlot and Silver Platter Foods in the next section for an example of how to do this.

Chapter 7: Page Generator

147

n

Once you get used to creating optimized pages, you can be more creative and produce a different template for each search engine you wish to target. You can customize the graphics, style, colors, and text within the page to meet your preferences.

n

Remember, you won’t be able to create a “perfect” page with the Page Generator the first time around. The key to creating perfect pages is by fine-tuning them in the Page Critic afterwards. The Page Critic will almost always have additional recommendations to further enhance your new pages. Advice from the Page Critic will always take precedence over anything that the Page Generator may output.

n

You can modify a page in your preferred HTML editor after it’s been generated. If you want to change elements on a page after it has been generated, it will be easier to do so in your HTML editor rather than attempting to regenerate the page from scratch.

n

You can always skip customizing the Template tab if you find it too confusing at first. Using the default template will be fine until you become more familiar with the customization procedures. Once you familiarize yourself with HTML, the concept of placeholders will make more sense to you. It takes time to learn how to use the program, but it will be well worth the effort.

If the Page Generator starts generating pages with tags or text missing that you feel should be there, there are two possibilities: 1.

WebPosition is excluding the tag because it isn’t recommended for that search engine. You can find out if this is the case by selecting Custom Settings and clicking on the Options button in the Engines tab of the Page Generator. Enable the appropriate check box if you want to force the generation of that tag for the selected search engine.

2.

You’ve deleted the placeholder or text from the currently selected template or have misspelled it. Make sure your template includes either the tag itself or the equivalent placeholder. Make sure the placeholder is spelled correctly and includes the left and right brace characters. Do not include any spacing between the braces and the placeholder name. If text is missing, type the text in your template in the desired location.

148

Chapter 7: Page Generator

Keep in mind that whatever you type in will be output for all future optimized pages that use this template. n

If text or a tag that you do not want to see appears on the page, you need to remove it from the template.

n

Be aware that changing a template will not change any of your existing optimized pages. It will only affect the layout of new optimized pages that are generated later.

n

If all else fails, hit the Default button on the Template tab to restore the default template, and regenerate your page using the default settings.

Case Study: Silver Platter Foods Mike Merlot wanted to create a template for his optimized pages that would mimic the look of the existing pages on the Silver Platter web site. He decided to use the Silver Platter home page, shown below, as the starting point for his template. Mike began by opening the home page in the Notepad program to view its source code. He then immediately saved the file as a different filename in order to avoid accidentally overwriting his home page. Since this template would be used to build

Chapter 7: Page Generator

149

optimized pages for AltaVista, he decided to name the file av-template.htm. This is what the beginning of the source code looked like before any placeholders were inserted:

By using the default template as a point of reference, Mike figured out where he wanted to place the appropriate placeholders. Based on the structure of the Silver Platter Foods home page, he decided to insert placeholders for the Title, meta keywords, meta description, Heading, Body, and Image tags. This is what the beginning of the source code looked like after Mike inserted the placeholders:

150

Chapter 7: Page Generator

If you compare the source code for both pages, you’ll see that there isn’t much of a difference in the writing or structure. The most difficult part of creating the initial optimized page was finding where to remove the appropriate tags and text and replace them with the appropriate placeholders. In the preceding screen shots, you can see that the Title tag was replaced with the {title} placeholder and placeholders were added for the meta keywords and meta description tags. These tags didn’t exist in the original page. Now we’ll scroll further down in the docu- Original Silver Platter home page ment and compare the “before” (above) and “after” (below) for the heading text and body text. Mike Merlot’s AltaVista Chtemplate

Chapter 7: Page Generator

151

Mike replaced all the body text in the original Silver Platter home page with a single {body} placeholder. When the Page Generator encounters that placeholder during the page build process, it will replace it with the body text that Mike entered in the Page Generator’s Description tab. He also replaced the welcome-txt image with a {header} placeholder and the welcome-img image with an {image} placeholder. Finally, Mike saved his template into his WebPosition 2 directory and then selected it in the Page Generator’s Template tab.

While Mike created this template to be used with AltaVista, there’s really no reason why it couldn’t be used with any of the search engines. The Page Generator is smart enough to know which search engines support which tags. When it generates a page based on a template, it will only include the tags that are appropriate to the targeted search engine. Nevertheless, the search engines are different enough from one another that there may be advantages to creating separate templates for each search engine. To minimize confusion, I would recommend that you start out by just creating one template. As you become more adept at using WebPosition, you may find that you can save time and effort by creating separate templates for each search engine.

152

Chapter 7: Page Generator

These template files are used in conjunction with the Page Generator to create completely customized optimized pages for each keyphrase and each search engine. The information you enter in the various tabs of the Page Generator substitutes for the corresponding placeholders you insert in your template files. Once you’ve entered all the necessary information into the Page Generator, click on the Generate button to generate your optimized page. The page will be saved in the directory you specified in the Page Setup tab with the filename you also specified on that tab. Here’s the optimized Pecorino Cheese page that the Page Generator created, based on Mike’s template and his inputs into the various Page Generator tabs:

This page looks like an integral part of the Silver Platter web site. It shares the same design elements as the rest of the pages on the site and is completely professional in every respect. Now that Mike has created his template, it will be relatively easy to go back to the Page Generator and create additional optimized pages by changing the inputs on each of the tabs.

Chapter 7: Page Generator

153

Remember, however, that this is not the finished optimized page. Before this page is ready to be uploaded to the Silver Platter site, Mike must first analyze it using the Page Critic and modify it according to the Page Critic’s recommendations. In the next chapter, you’ll learn about the Page Critic in detail.

Available Placeholders Here is a list of the placeholders you can use in your templates. This list is taken directly from the WebPosition Gold help file and is reprinted here for your convenience: n

{alttag} — Generates keywords in the Alt tag of a graphic.

n

{backgroundcolor} — Inserts the selected background color in the Background Body tag.

n

{body} — Inserts the body text from the description text box.

n

{comment} — Generates a Comment tag with keywords listed in it.

n

{company} — Inserts the company name.

n

{heading} — Generates a Heading tag with the primary keyword in it. The

tag size will be used. Heading tags will be excluded if the heading option is unchecked from the Custom button on the first tab or if the engine’s profile does not call for this tag.

n

{image} — Inserts the tag for the selected image including an Alt tag with keywords listed.

n

{keyword1} — Inserts the first keyword. When {keyword1} is entered as lowercase, then the case of the keyword is not modified from the way it was originally input.

n

{keyword2} — Inserts the second keyword. When {keyword2} is entered as lowercase, then the case of the keyword is not modified from the way it was originally input.

154

Chapter 7: Page Generator

n

{keyword3} — Inserts the third keyword. When {keyword3} is entered as lowercase, then the case of the keyword is not modified from the way it was originally input.

n

{keyword4} — Inserts the fourth keyword. When {keyword4} is entered as lowercase, then the case of the keyword is not modified from the way it was originally input.

n

{KEYWORD1} — Inserts the first keyword. When {KEYWORD1} is entered as uppercase, then the case of the keyword will be converted to uppercase when it’s inserted into the document.

n

{KEYWORD2} — Inserts the second keyword. When {KEYWORD2} is entered as uppercase, then the case of the keyword will be converted to uppercase when it’s inserted into the document.

n

{KEYWORD3} — Inserts the third keyword. When {KEYWORD3} is entered as uppercase, then the case of the keyword will be converted to uppercase when it’s inserted into the document.

n

{KEYWORD4} — Inserts the fourth keyword. When {KEYWORD4} is entered as uppercase, then the case of the keyword will be converted to uppercase when it’s inserted into the document.

n

{Keyword1} — Inserts the first keyword. When {Keyword1} is entered with the first letter capitalized, then the first letter of the keyword will also be capitalized when it’s inserted into the document.

n

{Keyword2} — Inserts the second keyword. When {Keyword2} is entered with the first letter capitalized, then the first letter of the keyword will also be capitalized when it's inserted into the document.

n

{Keyword3} — Inserts the third keyword. When {Keyword3} is entered with the first letter capitalized, then the first letter of the keyword will also be capitalized when it’s inserted into the document.

n

{Keyword4} — Inserts the fourth keyword. When {Keyword4} is entered with the first letter capitalized, then the first letter of the keyword will also be capitalized when it’s inserted into the document.

Chapter 7: Page Generator

155

n

{keywordlist} — Inserts a bulleted list of keywords that all link to the page specified in the URL field of the Page Generator. Many engines like to see keywords in a hyperlink.

n

{linktext} — Inserts the hyperlink text specified on the Description tab.

n

{metakeywords} — Inserts the meta keyword tag filled with keywords. The number of keywords and the case will be determined based on the engine selected. The meta keyword tag will be excluded if the meta keyword option is unchecked from the Custom button on the first tab or if the engine’s profile does not call for this tag.

n

{metadescription} — Inserts the meta description tag that is based on the body text input by the user. The meta description tag will be excluded if the meta description option is unchecked from the Custom button on the first tab or if the engine’s profile does not call for this tag.

n

{textcolor} — Inserts the default font color code.

n

{title} — Inserts the Title tag with the primary keyword in it.

n

{url} — Inserts a link to the home page or the page specified on the Description tab.

n

{year} — Inserts the current year. Normally this is used for generating a copyright date.

Chapter 8

Page Critic

157

158

Chapter 8: Page Critic

he Page Critic module is the heart of WebPosition Gold, and it is the final word on how to optimize your web pages so they can achieve the highest possible search engine rankings. Page Critic works by scrutinizing all of the areas of your web page and analyzing how the page conforms to a search engine’s algorithms. These areas include the title, link text, and body sections, among others. The analysis is based on a number of factors that you will learn about, including keyword frequency, prominence, and weight. You tell the Page Critic for which search engine and keyphrase you want it to analyze your pages. In turn, the Page Critic offers plain English advice on which elements of your pages should be modified, based on its own internal knowledge base. In addition to its internal knowledge base, the Page Critic can compare your page with any of the following: n

Any page found on the Internet.

n

Any page stored on your computer.

n

A statistical average of a group of top-ranking pages. For example, you could tell the Page Critic to compare your page with the top 5 pages that your chosen search engine displays when you search for the keyphrase you’re targeting.

The Page Critic’s advice from its knowledge base will often be enough, if followed correctly, to secure a top ranking for your page. If you’re trying to optimize for a very competitive keyphrase, however, the other comparison options can add an extra dimension to your analysis that can really help to boost your rankings. Think of these comparison options as a “second opinion.” The Page Critic’s knowledge base is based on FirstPlace Software’s research into the characteristics of hundreds of top-ranking pages on the web, representing a wide variety of keyphrase searches. This knowledge base is usually very accurate. Nevertheless, its analysis may not fully reflect the statistical reality of top-ranking pages for the specific keyphrase search that you’re trying to target. By using the additional comparison options, you can discover exactly what your competition is doing at a particular moment in time to achieve top rankings for your desired keyphrases. Always run your pages through the Page Critic and follow its advice before submitting your pages to search engines. The Page Generator helps you build

Chapter 8: Page Critic

159

visually appealing optimized pages that contain all the essential elements required by each search engine. The finished product output by the Page Generator is analogous to a diamond in the rough — it has a lot of potential, but it’s not ready for the jeweler’s showcase. The Page Critic helps you polish that diamond and turn it into an object of beauty in the eyes of the search engines. . . and beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? So long as you keep your knowledge base subscription current, the Page Critic will automatically update to the latest version of the knowledge base each time you run it. FirstPlace Software updates the knowledge base at least once a month in order to keep up with all the changes in the search engines. Optimizing a page to rank well in the search engines involves numerous variables. The starting point is determined by the information you entered into the Page Generator when you created the page. It’s unlikely that the Page Generator will create a perfectly optimized page, regardless of how carefully you enter the information. By now, you’ve probably come to the realization that WebPosition Gold has very little in common with most of the “submitter” software packages on the market. While the submitter software companies boast about the number of search engines that they submit to, they ignore the basic principle that submitting your site is the last and probably least important step in the very complex process of search engine optimization. Unfortunately, many people who purchase WebPosition Gold are either unwilling to do the necessary work required to optimize their pages, or they do not understand the theory behind the operation of the software. So instead of taking full advantage of this powerful and sophisticated software, they use it like a simple submitter program, ignoring the Page Critic altogether. Then they become discouraged by the lack of results and blame it on the software. You, of course, as an astute reader of this book, will not fall into that trap! Now, let’s revisit Mike Merlot and Silver Platter Foods. Mike created optimized pages for three different keyphrases on three different search engines. The keyphrases were “Pecorino Romano,” “Pinot Noir,” and “Sacher Torte.” The search engines he optimized the pages for were AltaVista, HotBot, and Google. Three keyphrases times three search engines equals nine optimized pages. For the purpose of this discussion, let’s continue working with the Pecorino Romano page that Mike created for AltaVista.

160

Chapter 8: Page Critic

Page Critic Tabs Page Setup Tab The Page Setup tab is where you enter the information about the page that you want to analyze and the keyphrase that you want to focus on. You can use the Page Critic to analyze pages you create using the Page Generator, existing pages on your site, or your competitors’ pages. In the Domain Name for the page to be analyzed box, enter the domain name that you want to analyze without the “http://,” or select a domain that you previously used from the drop-down list. Include the subdirectory of your site if you don’t have your own domain name. Mike selected “www.silverplatterfoods.com.”

Next, you need to enter a page name or select a local file. In the Enter a page name found at the above domain OR select a local file to analyze box, enter the filename of the web page you want the Page Critic to analyze. Clicking the Select button will allow you to browse the folders on your computer to locate the page. If you want to analyze an optimized page that you created with the Page Generator, locate the folder where you saved your optimized pages and double-click on the page that you want to analyze. If you want to analyze a page on the web, enter the full URL of that page,

Chapter 8: Page Critic

161

making sure that the URL includes the domain name you’ve selected. Mike selected the Pecorino Romano page that he previously created for AltaVista.

Once your web pages are ready, the Upload Manager will assist you in uploading the pages to your site. For your convenience, WebPosition Gold tracks which pages you’ve analyzed, and gives you the option to add the page to the Upload Manager’s changed file list. If you enable this check box, then the page that you create will be added to the changed file list for the selected domain. Later, when you run the Upload Manager and select a domain name, you’ll be given the option to add pages from that domain’s changed file list into the upload queue. Although Mike already added this page to the changed file list when he created it using the Page Generator, he realized that there was no harm in adding it again. The Page Critic would just overwrite the existing entry in the changed file list created by the Page Generator. The benefit of adding the page again is that this setting will be saved with the Page Critic Mission. So if Mike runs the Mission again in the future and updates the page, it will automatically be added to the changed file list.

162

Chapter 8: Page Critic

Next, Mike entered “pecorino romano” (without quotes) into the Analyze Page for Keyword or Phrase box. He originally created this page to target this keyphrase, so of course it makes sense to analyze the page for the same keyphrase. Mike entered the phrase in lowercase since this is how most people search.

Chapter 8: Page Critic

163

The Page Setup tab also has three check boxes at the bottom of the screen that control the type of keyphrase matching that the Page Critic will use in its analysis: n

Analyze Based on Exact Match Search — If you enable this option, then the Page Critic will perform its analysis based on the exact phrase, rather than just the individual words in the phrase. The Page Critic will also automatically add quotes around your phrase to indicate that it’s being treated as a phrase, rather than individual words. Most search engines favor pages in which the search phrase appears as an actual phrase on the page. For this reason, I would recommend enabling this option at first. When you become more experienced at using the Page Critic, you may want to experiment with creating one version of a page that’s optimized for non-exact searches and a second version for exact match searches.

n

Search is Case Sensitive — If you enable this option, then the Page Critic will consider the “case” (uppercase, lowercase, or title case) of your targeted keyphrase when performing its analysis. As you will soon learn, the Page Critic analyzes your HTML page statistically, looking for occurrences of your targeted keywords (or keyphrase) in various areas throughout the page. Normally, it will consider any occurrence of your keywords in the page to be a match. If you enable the Search is Case Sensitive option, however, it will only consider the keyword to be a match if it matches the case as well. NOTE: Choosing whether or not to enable this option should depend primarily on whether or not your targeted search engine is case sensitive. If the search engine is case-sensitive, then you should definitely enable this option. Fortunately, the Page Critic is aware of which search engines are case-sensitive and it will alert you if you make the incorrect choice for a particular engine.

n

Match on Partial Words — If you enable this option, then the Page Critic will consider partial word matches to be valid. For example, if one of the keywords in your keyphrase is “develop,” the Page Critic would consider the word “development” to be a match, since it contains one of your keywords. As with the case sensitivity option, you should

164

Chapter 8: Page Critic

only enable this option if the targeted search engine supports partial matching. The Page Critic will alert you if you try to enable partial matching on a search engine that doesn’t support it.

Engine Tab The Engine tab screen is similar to the one you worked with in the Reporter and Page Generator modules. As with the Page Generator, you can only choose one engine at a time to analyze your optimized pages. This is consistent with the idea of fine-tuning your pages for each search engine’s unique algorithm. The search engines are divided into two categories: global engines and regional engines. Again, if you highlight any of the search engines on the list, the engine’s properties will appear in the lower-right of the screen. This information will tell you the type of search engine, its domain name, and its link popularity. You can also add any of the search engines to your Preferred List, a drop-down menu option to manage the search engines you often work with. The engine drop-down menus are also the same as the Reporter’s and the Page Generator’s. The first drop-down menu filters the search engines by level of importance, including All Engines, Primary Engines, Secondary

Chapter 8: Page Critic

165

Engines, and Preferred Engines. The second drop-down menu filters the search engines by type, including All Types, Search Engines, Directory Engines, and Pay Per Click Engines. You’ll see the list change in the search engine list on the left. Mike selected AltaVista, since this is the engine for which he designed his optimized page.

Settings Tab This tab allows you to specify various settings for your Page Critic report.

Analysis Settings The first section of this tab is titled Analysis Settings. You will want to keep the Summarize Analysis Data box checked until you’re more familiar with the analysis data. The Page Critic Report will then exclude extra detail lines,

166

Chapter 8: Page Critic

making for a more readable report. By default, WebPosition Gold does not show frequency counts and other statistics for every single link, comment, and heading area on the page. In order to make the report more usable, it combines the totals into averages. If you wish to see this detail for each repeated area of your page, you can disable the Summarize Analysis Data check box and run the mission again. Each area will then be uniquely identified by the Starting Point column, which indicates how far down on the page that the area begins, in terms of number of words. The next box gives you the option to display top average scores for your selected search engine. If you enable this check box, the Page Critic will compare your page’s statistics with the average statistics of hundreds of top-ranking pages. This analysis is based upon the Page Critic’s knowledge base, which is constantly being updated by FirstPlace Software’s research staff. Finally, if your selected search engine supports link popularity checking, the Check the link popularity of my site option becomes available. In that case, I would definitely recommend that you enable this option. As I’ve previously mentioned, link popularity is a critical factor in determining your site’s rankings, so you’ll definitely want to have this information available to you. Mike Merlot wisely chose to enable all three Analysis Settings options.

Compare to Another Page The Page Critic explains this section by stating, “The most effective way to learn how to rank higher than another page is to analyze a page that already ranks high, and compare it to your page.” Enter the filename or the URL of any page with which you wish to compare your page. Clicking the Select button will allow you to browse your computer to locate a page, or you can choose a web page from anywhere on the Internet by entering its URL. The Page Critic will then compare the statistics of your page with the statistics of your selected comparison page. This feature is particularly useful if there’s a specific competitor’s page that you want to try to analyze and outrank. In addition to comparing your page with another specific web page, you can ask the Page Critic to evaluate your page against the top matching pages for a particular keyword search. If you enter a number for this option, the Page Critic will automatically run a special Reporter Mission to determine the

Chapter 8: Page Critic

167

top-ranking pages for your targeted keyphrase search. It will then compare the statistics for your page with the average statistics for these top-ranking pages. Keep in mind that if you have the standard version of WebPosition Gold, you can only analyze up to five domain names. This may limit your ability to compare your web pages with pages from a multitude of other domains. The Professional version allows you to analyze an unlimited number of domains. Mike entered a 3 in the Compare to box in order to compare his optimized page with the top three pages on AltaVista for the keyphrase search “pecorino romano.”

If you compare your pages with a number of top matching pages, you also have the option to exclude any pages from the final analysis that have changed since they were indexed. Many times after a page achieves a certain ranking, the webmaster of that site may be unaware (or may not care) that the page is highly ranked and she may make changes to the page that will affect the ranking the next time the page is spidered. Weeks or months may go by before the search engine gets around to re-spidering that page. In the meantime, the page continues to occupy a top position, even though it no longer conforms to the statistics of top-ranking pages for that search engine. Therefore, I would definitely recommend that you check this box, since doing so will prevent the Page Critic from analyzing pages that may no longer be representative of the criteria for top-ranking pages.

168

Chapter 8: Page Critic

Page Editor Tab The Page Editor tab allows you to edit your page prior to or after analyzing it with the Page Critic. The HTML code of your selected page will appear in the main section of this tab.

Chapter 8: Page Critic

169

You can edit the code directly in this box, or you can click on the Edit Now button to edit the page in Notepad or any other HTML editor you designate.

You choose the HTML editor by entering its filename into the box titled Edit Page in My Favorite HTML Editor. You can also click on the Select button to locate an HTML editor program on your computer.

170

Chapter 8: Page Critic

If you edit your page using the Page Critic’s built-in HTML editor, you must click on the Save Page As button to save the changes.

If you make changes using another HTML editor, then you will need to save the changes within that editing software. After you save the changes, return to the Page Critic, click the Select button, and reselect the page to display the new version. The Find Next button will highlight the next occurrence of your selected keyphrase within the HTML code. The Page Critic finds keyphrase matches based on the options that you selected in the Page Setup screen. For example, if you selected Exact Match Search, the Find Next button will only find occurrences of the entire keyphrase. It will not consider an individual word within the phrase to be a match. This can be very useful to help you understand the effect of the different options in the Page Setup screen. Experiment with enabling and disabling each of these options and then clicking on the Find Next button repeatedly to see the effect of the options.

Chapter 8: Page Critic

171

The View Page button will display the page in your web browser. You have the option of displaying the main page or the compare page, if you selected one in the Settings tab.

172

Chapter 8: Page Critic

Once you’ve entered all the necessary information, click Start and the Page Critic will begin analyzing your page. The Page Critic will alert you if it has a problem with the comparison page you entered or if you forgot to enter any required information. Once the analysis is complete, the Page Critic will display its analysis report in your web browser.

Page Critic Analysis Report Before we begin examining the Page Critic Analysis Report, I want to emphasize this statement from WebPosition Gold: WebPosition Gold’s Page Critic attempts to display the major statistics believed to be used by the search engines to determine relevancy. However, since search engines do not publish their formulas, any statistics provided in the Page Critic are only approximations or estimates based on our research of how search engines score a page. The Page Critic Analysis Report will advise you of the exact changes you should make to your page in order to secure a top ranking in the targeted search engine. However, as WebPosition Gold states, the Page Critic’s advice is based on statistical analysis of existing top-ranking pages. While this type of analysis is usually very accurate, it is still just an approximation of the

Chapter 8: Page Critic

173

search engines’ formulas, and therefore there is no guarantee that following the Page Critic’s advice will result in a top ranking for your page. Additionally, your rankings are affected by off-page factors, such as link popularity (a measure of the quantity and quality of links to and from your site). Link popularity is considered an “off-page” factor because it is not a function of the content of your web pages and therefore cannot be improved by optimizing your pages. Since the web has become so commercialized and competitive, search engines have been forced to adopt off-page factors in their ranking algorithms. For example, if ten web pages are equally optimized for a specific keyphrase on a specific search engine, how will a search engine determine the ranking for those pages? Most search engines will use link popularity as the tiebreaker for these types of situations. For now, let’s focus on learning how to use the Page Critic Analysis Report to properly optimize your pages. Your goal in using the Page Critic is to determine the key statistics for top-ranking web pages and try to emulate (not copy) these pages, making your pages statistically similar to the top-ranking pages. It’s important to remember that search engines are in a constant state of change. They often revise their algorithms in order to provide more relevant search results for their users. This means that the Page Critic’s suggestions and your own analysis of top-ranking pages may be completely different in a few months. In order to maintain your top rankings, you must be diligent about periodically reanalyzing your pages and your competitors’ pages to determine if an algorithm change has occurred and adjust your pages accordingly.

Report Header Although it may look intimidating at first, the Page Critic report is actually easy to understand. First, the information at the very top of the report will help you to remain consistent when you run all of your new pages through the Page Generator. The keyphrase you’ve chosen to analyze is prominently displayed at the top of the page, along with Page Critic setup information pertaining to the Partial Matching, Exact Search, and Case Sensitivity boxes in the setup screens. Next, the report displays the time and date that the Mission ran, the Main Page you’ve chosen to analyze, a link to any compare

174

Chapter 8: Page Critic

pages that you selected, and the search engine for which you’re running the analysis. Finally, this header section offers links to the four main sections of the Analysis report: Page Critic, Analysis Detail, Page Properties, and top-ranking Pages (if applicable). This allows you to quickly navigate around the report.

Factors That Affect Web Page Relevancy The Page Critic analyzes the factors within your page that will affect your search engine rankings. Each search engine assigns a varying degree of importance to each of these factors, but in general, they all consider: n

Keyword placement (area)

n

Keyword proximity

n

Keyword frequency

n

Total words

n

Keyword weight

n

Keyword prominence

n

Link popularity

The numbers you see in the report tables statistically compare your site with top-ranking sites for each of these factors in each of the different areas of the page. These numbers should be taken at face value and not as a percentage indicator of “correctness.” In other words, your objective is not to achieve

Chapter 8: Page Critic

175

100% in every area. Your objective is to make your page statistically similar to the top-ranking pages by altering the word count, keyword prominence, and keyword weight in each of the different areas of your page. Before we get into a detailed discussion of these various factors, I want to make a comment pertaining to the use of the term “keyphrase” versus the term “keyword.” WebPosition Gold prefers to always use the term “keyword,” even if the keyword is actually a phrase containing more than a single word. My personal preference is to use the term “keyword” for single words and “keyphrase” for phrases containing two or more words or when discussing a concept in general terms that calls for the use of “keyword” or “keyphrase.” You can consider the terms “keyword” and “keyphrase” to be virtually interchangeable. When I’m discussing specific parts of the Page Critic Analysis Report, such as the Keyword Frequency column, I’ll use WebPosition Gold’s terminology. At other times, I may use my own terminology, because frankly, I think it makes more sense. To each their own!

Keyword Placement Choosing the perfect keyphrases for your pages is important, but as the Page Critic Analysis will tell you, the placement of your keyphrases within the page is equally important. The Page Critic Analysis Report provides statistics for your page as a whole. It also provides detailed statistics for each area of the page. To properly optimize a page, you must pay attention to both sets of statistics — the statistics for the page as a whole and the statistics for the individual page areas. For example, most search engines assign a lot of weight to keyphrases within the title area. For your page to rank well, you need to make sure that it includes your primary keyphrase within the title area and within other areas on the page. If your page is missing keyphrases within these important areas, the Page Critic will advise you to add them where necessary. Later in this chapter, you’ll learn more about each of the areas that the Page Critic analyzes.

Keyword Proximity One more factor to keep in mind when developing your web pages is keyword proximity. This is related to keyword placement and is a measure of how close your keywords are to one another on the page. If a search engine

176

Chapter 8: Page Critic

grades pages based on keyword proximity, it will specifically look for words that are connected in a phrase, such as “gourmet food,” rather than having “gourmet” in one part of the page and “food” in another part of the page. This is another reason why it’s important to emphasize keyphrases, rather than focusing your optimization efforts on single keywords.

Keyword Frequency In addition to considering the placement of keyphrases within your page, search engines consider how often each keyphrase appears within the various areas of your page. The desired keyword frequency varies from search engine to search engine. In general, the more times a keyphrase appears within a page, the more relevant the search engine will consider that page to be for that keyphrase. However, having an excessive amount of keyphrases may cause the search engine to penalize your site for keyword spamming. Therefore, it’s important that you determine the correct keyword frequency. The Page Critic will help you determine this by evaluating the keyword frequency for the top-ranking pages with which you’re comparing your page. The actual keyword frequency calculation depends on a few factors. For example, if you selected an exact match search in the Page Critic setup, your keyword frequency will be different from the keyword frequency for non-exact match searches. The same is true for case-sensitive versus non-case-sensitive and partial match versus non-partial match searches. You can estimate the keyword frequency for your page prior to running the analysis by using the Find Next button on the Page Critic’s Page Editor tab. Each time you click on Find Next, the next occurrence of your keyphrase in the web page will be highlighted. The Find Next button finds occurrences of your keyphrase based on the criteria that you established on the Page Setup tab. The number of matches from the Page Editor should match the total keyword frequency from the Page Critic Analysis Report.

Exact Matching When you set up the Page Critic, you have the option to choose whether or not you want the Page Critic to search using exact matching. If you decide to enable the Exact Matching option, this will tell the Page Critic to search for matches and analyze only those keywords that appear together as an actual

Chapter 8: Page Critic

177

phrase. For example, suppose that the following sentence was included in the Pecorino Romano web page that Mike Merlot was analyzing: “Silver Platter Foods features an array of Romano cheeses, including the most popular, Pecorino Romano.” Since the phrase “Pecorino Romano” is the targeted keyphrase, the exact match frequency would be 1. With exact matching, only the words that are found together as a phrase will be counted toward keyword frequency. WebPosition Gold warns, however, that search engines may be inconsistent about requiring keywords to appear together with exact match searching. All the words you’re analyzing may be present on a page but in different places, or only some of the words you’re analyzing may be present. Therefore, to be on the safe side, you should analyze your pages for non-exact searches as well.

Non-Exact Matching If you don’t check the Exact Match box on the Page Setup tab, then the Page Critic’s analysis will use non-exact matching to calculate keyword frequency. Non-exact matching will look for any occurrence of keywords and keyphrases within your web pages. You’ll notice that non-exact matching will usually return a higher frequency count because any word located in the keyphrase is counted as a partial “hit,” regardless of where the words appear. The Page Critic analysis formula for computing non-exact matching frequency is: Number of times any keyword appears/total number of words in the keyphrase. For example, let’s look at the same sentence from the previous section: “Silver Platter Foods features an array of Romano cheeses, including the most popular, Pecorino Romano.” A non-exact match analysis returns a frequency of 1.5 because it counts the word “Pecorino” once and “Romano” twice, even though “Romano” isn’t connected to the targeted phrase.

Partial Matching Partial matching, also known as “word stemming,” means that a keyword match can occur from part of the word. When you select the search engine from the Page Critic setup module, WebPosition Gold will prompt you to let

178

Chapter 8: Page Critic

you know if the search engine you selected supports partial matching. If it does, you should definitely enable the Partial Matching option in the Page Setup tab.

Case Sensitivity If you specify the Search is Case Sensitive option in the Page Setup tab of your Page Critic Mission, then words will only count toward the frequency if they match the case of your keywords. For example, when Mike Merlot set up his Page Critic Mission, he entered “pecorino romano” (lowercase) as the keyphrase to analyze. You may recall from the previous chapter that the title of Mike’s optimized page was “Pecorino Romano” (title case). Therefore, if Mike had specified a case-sensitive search in the Page Setup tab, the keyword frequency of his title would be zero, since “Pecorino Romano” would not match “pecorino romano” in a case-sensitive search. By adhering to the recommended keyword frequency in different areas of your web page and distributing your keywords throughout the important areas of your pages, you’ll have taken the first steps toward achieving relevancy for your desired keyphrase on your targeted search engine.

Total Words The Page Critic counts the total number of words in each area of your page. It does not count words contained within your HTML tags. The Page Critic will tell you if you should increase or decrease total word count and the word count for each area of your page, according to each search engine’s preferences.

Keyword Weight Keyword weight is the percentage of words in a page area that are keywords. It is calculated by dividing the keyword frequency of the page area by the word count for that area. The formula WebPosition Gold uses to compute keyword weight differs depending on whether the keyphrase is a single word or a phrase consisting of two or more words. The Page Critic’s keyword weight formula is: (Number of words in the keyphrase x keyword frequency)/total words in area

Chapter 8: Page Critic

179

The keyword weight for a page area will increase if the number of keywords in the area increases or if the word count in the area decreases. Most search engines consider keyword weight to be an important factor in their ranking algorithms. In general, the higher the weight, the better. As with many aspects of search engine optimization, however, if you overstep the search engine’s boundaries, your site may be penalized. Always remember that your goal is to emulate top-ranking pages, not to try to beat them. For example, if the average keyword weight of top-ranking pages on a search engine is 6%, do not assume that you can achieve a higher ranking by using a keyword weight of 7% in your pages. Remember that simply dividing the keyword frequency by the word count in the Page Analysis table will not yield the correct weight when the keyphrase contains more than a single word. For example, if the area had only three words in it: Pecorino Romano Cheese and the keyphrase was “Pecorino Romano,” the following statistics would be displayed: n

Frequency: 1

n

Total Words: 3

n

Weight: 66%

The keyword weight is not 1 divided by 3, or 33.3%, in this case. This is because the keyphrase occupies two of the three “word slots” in the title, resulting in a 66% weight. Let’s try another example. Assume that your title was “Pecorino Romano.” The Page Critic would display the following statistics: n

Frequency: 1

n

Total Words: 2

n

Weight: 100%

In this example, simply dividing a frequency of 1 by a total word count of 2 can’t be correct. That would incorrectly result in a 50% weight rather than

180

Chapter 8: Page Critic

the correct weight of 100%. The weight is 100% because 100% of the words in the area are keywords. Although it’s important that you understand the basis of the keyword weight calculation, you shouldn’t be too concerned about being able to manually calculate it. The Page Critic will do the calculation for you. Just follow the Page Critic’s advice and you’ll be able to statistically emulate the top-ranking pages. If, for example, top-ranking pages have a 6% weight as computed by the Page Critic, then you would want to make your pages have a 6% weight also, regardless of how the 6% is computed. Focus on emulating the frequency and word count of top-ranking pages, and the keyword weight should then fall into the correct range.

Keyword Prominence Keyword prominence is a measure of how close to the beginning of a given page area your targeted keyphrase appears. In general, higher prominence is better, but as with keyword frequency, you should not assume that beating your competitors’ prominence will result in a higher ranking for your page. To increase keyword prominence, you should try to move the keyphrase closer to the beginning of the area you’re working with. If there are several occurrences of the keyphrase in the area, you can also remove one or more occurrences of the keyphrase that appear toward the end of the area. Either method or a combination of both can help to increase the prominence of the page area. Try to balance out the keyphrases in your page area in order to avoid alerting the search engine that you’re crowding all of your important words into the beginning of the area. You can achieve this balance while still increasing the prominence of the area by adding keyphrases to the middle and/or end of the area, while adding more occurrences of the keyphrase at the beginning of the area. For example, adding one keyphrase at the end of the area and two at the beginning will increase the prominence of the area while avoiding an imbalanced appearance. Remember, however, that any time you add or delete keyphrases, this will also affect your keyword frequency and keyword weight. This may require you to take further steps to readjust those factors.

Chapter 8: Page Critic

181

Here are examples of keyword prominence calculations: n

If a keyword appears at the beginning of an area, its prominence will be 100%.

n

If a keyword appears exactly in the middle of an area, its prominence will be 50%.

n

If the keyword appears at the end of the area, the prominence will be 0%.

n

If a keyword appears at the beginning of the area, with a repetition of the keyword at the end of the area, the prominence will be 50%.

n

If an area consists of multiple parts (such as having three heading tags on the page), all three areas are treated as a single adjoining area when prominence is calculated.

Link Popularity If you enable the Check the link popularity. . . option in the Page Critic’s Settings tab, the Page Critic will provide information on your site’s link popularity. It might say something like, “The average link popularity of the top three pages for your search term on AltaVista is 33, so it’s recommended you have at least that many links.” You’ll learn more about link popularity in Chapter 13.

Page Critic The first major section of the Page Critic Report is also entitled “Page Critic.” It explains, “Based on the analyzed data and the current rules in my knowledge base, here are my suggestions for improving the ranking of your p a g e . . . ” The Page Critic section is further divided into three subsections: n

Suggestions for making your page conform closer to the statistical averages for top-ranking pages — This first subsection relies upon hard numbers and data from specific search engines to suggest changes that will improve your page’s relevancy. Examples of these suggested changes might involve writing more body text or placing your keywords in different areas of the page.

182

Chapter 8: Page Critic

The above screen shot shows the suggestions that the Page Critic provided Mike Merlot for the Pecorino Romano page in order to optimize it for AltaVista. All of that increasing and decreasing sounds confusing. But once you understand the concepts of keyword frequency, keyword prominence, and keyword weight, you’ll be able to optimize your pages to achieve higher rankings and more traffic. n

Suggestions based on the analysis of your page — This next subsection offers non-statistical advice relating to your page. It may point out an important area of the page that’s missing or give general advice about the page’s structure. These are very important points to study, and you can make the suggested changes in the Page Critic’s editor immediately. If you enabled the link popularity option in the Page Critic’s Settings tab, the link popularity analysis will appear in this section. Here’s what the Page Critic had to say about Mike Merlot’s Pecorino Romano page:

Chapter 8: Page Critic

n

183

General Suggestions — This final Page Critic subsection provides an incredibly comprehensive list of general suggestions for improving your site’s rankings on the specified search engine. These suggestions include a multitude of links to helpful articles and information from a variety of sources. The Page Critic lists the suggestions first in chronological order and then in a general listing. Once you’ve optimized your pages and have submitted them to search engines, it is beneficial for you to rerun the Page Critic to find out if any new information is available. Search engine information changes very often, but WebPosition Gold’s knowledge base will always provide the most up-to-date information. Here’s a sample of some of the general suggestions that the Page Critic offered Mike Merlot: When you’re viewing your Page Critic Report, you’ll notice how interactive it is. In each of the above examples, words such as “AltaVista,” “H1 tag,” and “read this report” are all hyperlinked. Clicking on these links will send your browser to such publications as the WebPosition Gold help file or FirstPlace Software’s MarketPosition newsletter. There is endless information about search engines, and the more you read, the better you’ll understand how to effectively optimize your pages.

184

Chapter 8: Page Critic

Page Analysis Page Analysis is the second major section in the Page Critic Analysis Report. It is a large table that provides a separate section for each of the two main areas of your page: head and body. Each of these sections is further subdivided into the individual areas contained within the head and body areas. The rows under these sections provide statistics for the following: n

Your page (Main Page)

n

Top pages for your keyword search on your selected search engine (if you specified this in the Page Critic’s Settings tab)

n

Compare page (if you specified one in the Settings tab)

Chapter 8: Page Critic

n

185

Top averages for your selected search engine (if you enabled this option in the Settings tab)

The table’s columns provide analysis for the following statistics: n

Frequency

n

Words

n

Weight

n

Average Prominence

Here’s a screen shot of the head section of Mike Merlot’s report:

Recall that Mike didn’t specify a compare page when he created his Page Critic Mission. Consequently, this report does not contain a row for the compare page. It does, however, have the following rows: n

Main Page (Mike’s optimized page)

n

Top 3 pages on AltaVista for the keyphrase search “pecorino romano” (average of the statistics for all three pages)

186

Chapter 8: Page Critic

n

AltaVista top averages (based on FirstPlace Software’s research into hundreds of top-ranking pages)

You’ll notice that each of the three rows is repeated for each of the areas within the head area (title, meta keywords, meta description). You’ll also notice that the description for each row is followed by the word “Summary” to indicate that the statistics are summarized for each page area. This is because when Mike created this Page Critic Mission, he enabled the Summarize Analysis Data check box on the Settings tab. Below the description of each row are numbers in parentheses which indicate how many page areas were used to create the summary data. For example, under the row description Main Page Title Summary, the report indicates “(1 Total Title, 1 w/keywords).” This means that the statistics are a summary from one title area and that title area did contain Mike’s keyphrase “pecorino romano.” This makes sense since an HTML page normally has just one title area. Under the row description Top 3 Pg Title (Average) Summary, the report indicates “(3 Total Titles, 2 w/keywords).” Again, this makes sense since the Top 3 statistics are taken from the three top-ranking pages on AltaVista. Each of the three pages had one title area for a total of three titles. This table provides the statistics that will help you look very closely at each specific area of your web page. Almost every word in this table is hyperlinked, so you can go straight to WebPosition Gold’s help file if you’re unsure of what a concept means.

Page Areas Head Area The head area of an HTML page is one of the two main areas and is where the Title and meta tags are located. Here’s the HTML code for the head area of Mike Merlot’s “Pecorino Romano” page: <TITLE>Pecorino Romano <META NAME="keywords" content="pecorino romano, Silver Platter Foods, SILVER PLATTER FOODS, Silver Platter Foods">

Chapter 8: Page Critic

187

<META NAME="description" content="Silver Platter Foods offers a wide selection of Italian cheeses, including Pecorino Romano, Gorgonzola, Parmigiano Reggiano and Mozzarella. Silver Platter is your one and only stop for the resources you need to cook with the best cheeses, wines, and gourmet foods from across the country and the globe. Whether you’re looking for Pecorino Romano cheese, appetizers, desserts, or anything in between, the foods that Silver Platter Foods features are the perfect gift for any food lover in your family."> Notice how the head area begins with the tag and ends with the tag. As you’ve previously learned, the Title tag is arguably the most important HTML tag on your page. Unlike meta tags and other elements of your site that search engines may overlook when determining rankings, most of the search engines do recognize the Title tag. They also give keyphrases within the Title tag great importance. Additionally, the content of your Title tag is used by most search engines as the exact title of your site that will appear in the search results. So, your Title tag must be compelling enough for searchers to want to click through to your site. Refer back to the previous chapter for tips on writing a great Title tag. Presently, Mike’s Title tag contains just the words “Pecorino Romano.” Later in this chapter, we’ll observe how Mike uses the Page Critic to optimize the Title tag. The meta keywords tag lists the keywords that you want to emphasize for the search engines. Here’s the meta keywords tag that the Page Generator created for Mike’s Pecorino Romano page: <META NAME="keywords" content="pecorino romano, Silver Platter Foods, SILVER PLATTER FOODS, Silver Platter Foods"> At one time, the meta keywords tag was an important factor in determining search engine rankings. Today, its importance has been diminished to the point where it’s almost insignificant. Some search engines ignore the meta keyword tag, some assign it a small amount of importance, and some may

188

Chapter 8: Page Critic

even penalize your site for using this tag. The Page Critic will advise you when it’s appropriate to use this tag. The meta description tag contains the all-important description that web searchers will see when they find your site in the search engine listings. Therefore, you want to be sure it has the most compelling and descriptive text possible. After all, this may be the one and only opportunity your site has to grab a potential customer’s attention. Here is the meta description tag that the Page Generator created: <META NAME="description" content="Silver Platter Foods offers a wide selection of Italian cheeses, including Pecorino Romano, Gorgonzola, Parmigiano Reggiano, and Mozzarella. Silver Platter is your one and only stop for the resources you need to cook with the best cheeses, wines, and gourmet foods from across the country and the globe. Whether you’re looking for Pecorino Romano cheese, appetizers, desserts, or anything in between, the foods that Silver Platter Foods features are the perfect gift for any food lover in your family."> This is a very long meta description. Most search engines will only display about the first 150 to 200 characters from your meta description tag. If your meta description tag is longer than that, you should make sure that you have the most important copy at the beginning of the tag. The Page Critic will of course advise you of the appropriate length of your meta description tag for each of the search engines. Refer back to Chapter 7 for tips on writing your meta description tag.

Body Area The body area is the other main area of an HTML page and contains all the visible text and images that will appear in the browser window. The body area begins with the Body tag, which is written . The end of the body area is designated with the closing Body tag, . Like the head area, the body area is divided into a number of subareas.

Chapter 8: Page Critic

189

The first part in the body area is the heading area. Don’t confuse this with the head area. The two are completely unrelated. Headings are used to designate the beginning of a new section on your page. Remember, there are six Heading tags to choose from:

through

, where

is the largest heading and

is the smallest heading. Therefore, your page sections can be as large and loud or as small and subtle as you wish to make them. You may or may not think headings are necessary for your pages, but some search engines give the text inside Heading tags more weight than text within the general body area. Recall that Mike Merlot entered “Pecorino Romano Cheese” in the Heading Text box when he created his Page Generator Mission. This is the heading structure:

Pecorino Romano Cheese

” for the date. Each page in the submission list has a check box to the left of the page name. If the box is checked, that page is considered selected and will be submitted in accordance with the Submission Limit setting for the search engine to which the page will be submitted. If a page is selected, that does not necessarily mean that it will be submitted during the next Mission run. Selecting a page only makes it available for submission. Whether or not it’s actually submitted depends on the submission limit for the engine, the number of other pages that are scheduled for submission to that engine, and the “Warn me if I’m submitting too many pages. . . ” option described later in this section. When you initially add a page to the submission list, it is automatically selected. Once a page has been submitted, the Submitter automatically deselects the page in order to prevent it from being submitted again. Underneath the submission list is a series of buttons. If you click Select Multiple, a pop-up window will appear, asking you which type of pages you wish WebPosition Gold to select in your current submission list.

244

Chapter 10: Submitter

Your choices include: n

Pages that have never before been submitted.

n

Pages not submitted since the date you specify in the date box.

n

Pages not submitted within a certain amount of days you specify in the days box.

Chapter 10: Submitter

245

If you enable the Deselect pages not matching criteria check box, pages that do not match your filtering criteria will be deselected. If you don’t enable this check box, pages that do not match your filtering criteria will be left in their original state. If they were selected, they will remain selected.

For those pages you choose, you can also select which search engines to submit them to. You can select all the search engines you specified initially or only submit pages to a subset of the original list. This is a great filtering tool to help you manage your submissions.

246

Chapter 10: Submitter

Clicking Select All selects all the pages in the submission list.

Clicking Deselect All deselects all the pages.

Clicking Remove All results in a pop-up box asking you if you’re sure you want to permanently delete all files from your submission list. If you choose Yes, the pages will only be deleted from the submission list, not from your computer or your web site.

Chapter 10: Submitter

247

In addition to selecting pages individually, the Submitter has the capability to import a list of pages to be submitted. Click on the Import… button to open the Import URLs screen.

248

Chapter 10: Submitter

From this screen, you can import a list of URLs in several different ways. The first import method is to type or paste a list of URLs into the box on this screen.

The second method is to load a list of URLs from a text file on your hard drive.

Chapter 10: Submitter

249

The last method is to specify a starting URL and allow WebPosition Gold to spider through your site and automatically locate all your pages. You can also specify how many levels deep you want the WebPosition Gold spider to search for pages.

250

Chapter 10: Submitter

At the bottom of the URLs/Engines screen are two check boxes:

n

Verify that each page exists on Web site before submitting — If you enable this option, the Submitter will test each page to make sure that it’s actually on your web site before it submits that page. While this feature is highly beneficial, it also slows down the Mission dramatically. Therefore, I would suggest that you enable this option the first time you run a Mission to ensure that all your pages have been properly uploaded. Once the Submitter has verified all your pages, you can disable this option for future Mission runs.

n

Warn me if I’m submitting too many pages for one domain — This is a very important option and should always be selected. As I mentioned, many of the search engines limit the number of submissions they will accept for a domain in one day. If you exceed their submission limits, your submissions may be ignored. Or worse, your domain may actually be banned from the search engine. Selecting this option ensures that the Submitter will not submit more than the maximum number of pages allowed per day to each search engine.

Chapter 10: Submitter

251

Categories Tab Some search engines require you to choose a “category” to best describe the content of your web site. Even though your site content probably fits into several categories, you must select the single most applicable category. Mike Merlot would probably list Silver Platter Foods under “Food” or “Cooking.” The search engines that require a category selection will appear in the box titled Engines requiring categories.

From the list of global engines that Mike selected, only Jayde required him to specify a category for his site. Start by selecting the best overall category for your site. Mike selected “Shopping,” since there was no “Food” or “Cooking” category listed.

252

Chapter 10: Submitter

Next, click on Auto Select Remaining Categories. Based on your initial selection, the Submitter will attempt to automatically select the appropriate category for each of the engines in the list.

When you click on each engine, the list of categories for that engine will appear in the Categories box. The category that the Submitter automatically selected for your site will be highlighted. Be sure to review the Submitter’s selections and correct any that don’t seem applicable to your site.

Chapter 10: Submitter

253

In the previous screen shot, the Submitter automatically selected the Jayde “Stores and Malls” category, since that was the closest match to the overall “Shopping” category. After reviewing Jayde’s category list, however, Mike noticed that Jayde had a “Food Links” category. He thought that “Food Links” would be more appropriate to the Silver Platter site, so he changed the selection manually.

In some instances, the Submitter will be unable to automatically select a category, so you will have to choose one yourself.

Options Tab Performance Options The Submission time-out box specifies how long the Submitter will wait for each search engine to respond after performing a submission. The default value is 60 seconds. You can increase this value if you have a slow Internet connection and you believe that the Submitter is timing out prematurely. If a time-out does occur, the Submitter will skip that submission and move on to the next one.

254

Chapter 10: Submitter

You can also control how many submissions the Submitter should perform simultaneously. The default value is eight. If you have a slow Internet connection, you may need to decrease this value to ensure that all of your pages are submitted correctly. If you have a fast Internet connection, you may be able to increase this value. If you begin to receive error messages, however, you should reduce the number of simultaneous submissions.

Chapter 10: Submitter

255

If you select Slow Submit, the Submitter will emulate a manual submission by pausing a random number of seconds in the range that you specify after each submission. According to WebPosition Gold, “Every aspect of a manual submission is duplicated behind the scenes except for the fact that WebPosition Gold can submit much faster than most people could do by hand.” By using Slow Submit, your submitted pages won’t be submitted too quickly and will never be red-flagged. I recommend enabling the Slow Submit option and specifying a wait period of 30 to 60 seconds between each submission.

Display Options There are two display options. The Professional version of WebPosition Gold allows you to hide mentions of WebPosition in submission reports. This option is beneficial if you’re presenting clients with submission reports and you don’t want them to know that you’re using WebPosition Gold to generate the reports. If you select this option, there will be no mention of WebPosition Gold or FirstPlace Software anywhere in your submission reports.

256

Chapter 10: Submitter

You also have the option to print the submission status of guided submission sites on the Submitter report. This provides you with the convenience of keeping track of your automated and manual submissions on the same report.

Chapter 10: Submitter

257

Archive Options You can archive all of your submission files for as long as you want. The default setting is 90 days.

You can also archive the “actual result pages” of your submissions. These are the pages displayed by the search engines after completing a submission, indicating whether or not the submission was successful. These pages provide the raw data from which the Submitter is able to determine the status of each submission. In most cases, it’s not necessary to archive these pages as the information they contain is largely redundant and they consume a lot of disk space.

258

Chapter 10: Submitter

The Output path box specifies the directory where all your files will be stored. The default output path is: C:\Program Files\WebPosition\Submitter Results\yourwebsitename

By clicking the Select button, you can select a different output path.

Results Tab Once you click on the Start button, the Submitter will begin the actual submission process. If the number of pages you have selected exceeds the daily submit limit for a search engine, and you selected the option to be warned, a warning message will appear. You can then choose to Submit 1, Submit All, Stay Within

Chapter 10: Submitter

259

Limit for All Engines, Submit All for All Engines, or Cancel. In most cases, I would recommend that you choose the Stay Within Limit for All Engines option. When the submissions for the day are complete, you can choose to view the results in your browser. This is another highly interactive report. The first section lists: n

Each page that was successfully submitted.

n

The engine to which each page was submitted.

n

The date of the submission.

n

A link to the actual results page from the search engine.

n

The estimated amount of time that it will take for the search engine to add the page to its index.

260

Chapter 10: Submitter

The next section features all the search engines that require manual submissions. If you didn’t submit any pages to these engines, N/A will appear under the Date column. The Time to Index still appears to give you an idea of how long you might have to wait for your listings to appear. If you do submit to one of these engines, the same information from the above section will appear.

The final section of the report is titled Pages Requiring Special Action. These are the pages that have not yet been submitted. There are two possible reasons why a page wouldn’t be submitted: n

The submission failed because the search engine was down or not accessible.

n

The number of pages to be submitted exceeded the daily submission limit for a search engine.

As you now realize, submitting to search engines is a lot more complex than you may have originally thought. There are many rules and procedures that must be followed carefully to avoid making costly and, in some cases, unrecoverable mistakes. It can also be an organizational nightmare to try to keep track of which pages need to be submitted on which dates. With the help of the Submitter, this daunting process becomes hassle-free and painless. You’ll also come to appreciate the Submitter’s built-in safeguards that prevent your site from getting in trouble with the search engines for over-submitting.

Chapter 10: Submitter

261

Paid Inclusion Before concluding our discussion of the Submitter, I want to tell you about a relatively new submitting concept called “paid inclusion.” Although most search engines still allow you to submit your site for free, more and more engines are starting to offer “paid inclusion,” or “express submission” programs. The advantage of these programs is that they guarantee to index your pages, usually within 48 hours of submission. They also re-spider your pages frequently, so any changes you make to your pages will take effect in the search engines almost immediately. Paid inclusion does not guarantee that your pages will achieve good rankings. It only guarantees that they will be included in the search engine’s index within the specified period of time. In most cases, the rankings are still determined by the relevancy of the pages to the searched-for keyphrases. Paid inclusion can also be fairly expensive. For example, at the time of this writing, Inktomi charges $39 for the first page and $25 for each additional page. These are annual fees. If you create 10 optimized pages for 10 different keyphrases, it would cost you $264 per year to submit those pages via Inktomi’s paid inclusion program (“Search Submit”). Other paid inclusion programs are even more expensive. Should you use paid inclusion? If you can afford it, my answer would be “definitely yes.” Despite the fact that there is no guarantee of top rankings, we’ve found these programs to be enormously beneficial. By combining proper optimization with paid inclusion, you can often achieve top rankings for competitive keyphrases within a matter of days. If you don’t use paid inclusion and rely on the free submit option, you could wait weeks or months before some of the search engines get around to indexing your pages. Also, since paid inclusion results in your pages being re-spidered frequently, you can reoptimize any pages that aren’t performing well and you’ll see the (hopefully improved) results within a couple of days. With the paid inclusion programs, you don’t use the WebPosition Gold Submitter. Instead, you set up an account with each of the search engines and they provide you with a web-based interface to submit your pages. Of course, you still need to use all of the other WebPosition Gold modules to create and upload your optimized pages, and analyze your rankings and

262

Chapter 10: Submitter

traffic. If you choose not to use paid inclusion, you can still achieve top rankings in many of the search engines, but you may have to wait a lot longer to see the results.

Chapter 11

Traffic Analyzer

263

264

Chapter 11: Traffic Analyzer

hile the purpose of WebPosition Gold is to improve your search engine rankings, your ultimate goal is, of course, to increase the amount of qualified traffic coming to your site. What do we mean by “qualified” traffic? As you’ve already learned, traffic from search engines is considered to be the highest quality traffic available. People who actively seek out a product or service using a search engine are, by definition, interested in that particular product or service. There is a significant distinction between a person who arrives at your site via a search engine and a person who arrives at your site via a deceptive banner ad. The former is considered “qualified.” She qualified herself by searching for your products or services. The latter is considered “non-qualified” because he doesn’t even know why he’s on your site. He clicked on a banner out of curiosity and arrived at a site that may be of absolutely no interest to him. Qualified traffic has a much greater likelihood of converting into actual sales. Non-qualified traffic uses up your bandwidth, which costs you money. It could also potentially slow down your server, preventing your qualified traffic from producing sales. WebPosition Gold’s Traffic Analyzer is a powerful tool that will help you analyze the traffic coming to your site. Much more than just a hit counter, the Traffic Analyzer will provide you with hundreds of real-time visitor statistics in the form of detailed reports and charts. These statistics include: Traffic Reports n

Summary

n

By Page

n

Hourly History

n

Daily History

n

Weekly History

n

Monthly History

n

Yearly History

n

30-Days by Hour

Chapter 11: Traffic Analyzer

Visitor Reports n

Latest Visitors

n

Domain Search

n

Repeat Visitors

n

Domains

n

Major Domains

n

Languages

n

Countries

Navigation Reports n

Navigation Paths

n

Entry Pages

n

Exit Pages

n

Reloads

Referrers Reports n

Referring Sites

n

Referring Sites Detail

n

Search Engines

n

Search Keywords

n

Keywords by Engine

n

Major Domains

n

Countries

Client Information Reports n

Browsers

n

Browser Versions

n

Operating Systems

n

Screen Resolutions

265

266

Chapter 11: Traffic Analyzer

n

Color Palettes

n

Script Versions

n

Java Support

n

Cookie Support

Summaries by Hour, Weekday, and Day of Month n

Hour of Day

n

Day of Week

n

Day of Month

The Traffic Analyzer’s features allow you to keep accurate tracking statistics, beyond the number of people viewing your web site. Since this is a hosted service, you won’t have to buy log analysis software or download server log files that can take hours to process. The Traffic Analyzer tracks visitors to each and every page you specify. You can even choose an entire directory of pages for the Traffic Analyzer to track; there’s no need to type in or select individual pages if you have all of your pages in one directory. You can view from which search engines your visitors found your site, as well as the actual keywords and phrases that they searched. The Traffic Analyzer works by placing an invisible Image tag at the bottom of the web pages you want to track. The tag doesn’t slow down the loading time of your web pages. Once the tag is in place and your pages are uploaded to your site, the tracking will be activated. In order to view your statistics, you will have to create an account with HitsLink.com, which is the company that actually provides the tracking service. The Traffic Analyzer will walk you through the setup process; for WebPosition Gold owners, the service is free for the first 90 days and 20,000 hits. If you’re using the trial version of WebPosition Gold, the HitsLink service is free for 30 days. If you want to continue the service after the 90-day trial period, you can pay a small monthly fee, or you can continue to receive the service for free by placing a small HitsLink button on each page you want to track. If you manage multiple web sites for clients, you can create subaccounts for different web sites through the Account menu on the HitsLink web site. Establishing subaccounts will help keep your work organized. Within each

Chapter 11: Traffic Analyzer

267

subaccount, you can assign a unique account ID name and password. Each client will only be able to log into his or her individual account. Your main account and other subaccounts are kept separate so your clients’ information remains private. HitsLink even provides a private labeling option that allows you to provide traffic analysis services to your clients under your own company name. You can customize your private labeled site with your company logo, product name, and other user-interface elements. With the private label option, all references to HitsLink pricing and the HitsLink site name are removed. HitsLink.com is a separate company from FirstPlace Software, the developers of WebPosition Gold. If you are having trouble with HitsLink, you should contact them directly, rather than contacting FirstPlace Software. The HitsLink web site URL is http://www.hitslink.com.

Traffic Analyzer Tabs Setup Account Tab The easiest way to set up your HitsLink account is through the first tab on WebPosition Gold’s Traffic Analyzer. First, click the View Demonstration button to view a demonstration of how HitsLink works.

268

Chapter 11: Traffic Analyzer

Next, click the Setup New Account button to set up your own HitsLink account.

Setting up an account is fast and easy. You’ll choose a user name and password, provide a small amount of information about your web site, and sign up for traffic alerts if you want them. These alerts are e-mails that HitsLink will send you when: n

Your hourly visitors count reaches a certain number.

n

Your daily visitors count reaches a certain number.

n

Your weekly visitors count reaches a certain number.

You can set the numbers individually for each of the visitor counts, and you can always change them if you’re receiving e-mails too frequently or too infrequently.

Log On Tab Once you’ve set up your account with HitsLink, you should enter your user name and optionally your password in the Log On tab. Mike Merlot entered his account ID and password and then enabled the Please remember my password check box. That way, he wouldn’t have to re-enter the password each time he logged in.

Chapter 11: Traffic Analyzer

269

The user name is required in order for the Traffic Analyzer to add the tracking code to your pages. The password is not required, but if you enter it, you can log in to your HitsLink account directly from this screen by clicking on the Log on button.

270

Chapter 11: Traffic Analyzer

Add Tracking to My Pages Tab Once you’ve created your HitsLink account, the Traffic Analyzer takes care of the rest of the work. Enter the domain name you want to track, or choose one from the drop-down list box.

Next, select the pages for which you want the Traffic Analyzer to add or remove tracking. There are four ways that you can select pages: n

Type a list of pages into the box labeled List one or more pages separated by commas.

n

Click on the Select button to the right of that box and select one or more pages on your computer.

n

Type a path to a directory into the box labeled Update all pages found in this directory.

n

Click on the Select button to the right of that box and select a directory on your computer.

Mike had previously created a directory for his Silver Platter Foods pages, so he selected that directory and used the directory update method to add tracking to his pages.

Chapter 11: Traffic Analyzer

271

Remember that in order for the Traffic Analyzer script to work properly, you must add the script to each page that you want to track. The script is different for each page, so you can’t copy and paste it from one page to another. Just to be safe, you should update the script each time you edit your pages. After you’ve indicated which pages to update, select whether you want to add or remove tracking from those pages. You can also select the option to automatically add your changed pages to the Upload Manager’s changed file list. Mike selected the Add Tracking option and enabled the check box to add the pages to his changed file list. Finally, click on the Update Pages button to add or remove the tracking code from your selected pages.

272

Chapter 11: Traffic Analyzer

After Mike clicked on this button, the following message appeared:

This is a reminder for you to double-check that the pages you’re updating correspond to the correct HitsLink account. After Mike clicked OK, another message appeared:

Chapter 11: Traffic Analyzer

273

Once he’d verified that none of the pages were open in any other applications, Mike was ready to update his pages. He clicked on Yes to begin the update process. The Traffic Analyzer looks for certain standard HTML tags in your web pages, such as the ending HTML tag, to know where to place the tracking script. If you find you are having trouble updating your web pages, you can run your pages through an HTML validator to check the syntax of your source code. You can download a free HTML validation program from MarketMySite! via the link on the companion CD-ROM. This program will analyze your HTML and identify any errors in your code. If the validator does not find any errors in your source code, then the Traffic Analyzer should be able to recognize and add the script properly. If it does find errors, make your corrections, save the page to your local drive, and then try to add the Traffic Analyzer script again.

Troubleshooting the Traffic Analyzer The Traffic Analyzer statistics may report fewer visitors than what is reported by analyzing your server logs using a traditional log analysis program. This is due to how each program records a visitor “hit.” Your server records a hit as soon as the page starts to load. The Traffic Analyzer’s script is dependent on the invisible image at the bottom of the page being loaded. If the user hits Stop or moves to another page before the script has a chance to fully load, the Traffic Analyzer will not record that hit. In rare cases, HitsLink’s servers may not respond to your web site to count visitor hits. Any disruptions on the Internet between your visitor’s Internet provider and the HitsLink traffic counting server can result in a hit not being recorded. Additionally, users have the ability to browse the web with graphics turned off. Some users who have very slow Internet connections may turn graphics off in order to speed up their web browsing. In this situation, the HitsLink server can’t count the hits; the Traffic Analyzer script only records a hit when a graphic image loads.

274

Chapter 11: Traffic Analyzer

FirstPlace Software estimates the difference between the hits recorded by your own server log and the hits recorded by HitsLink to be about 10% on average. Therefore, you can estimate your actual statistics by adding 10% to whatever the Traffic Analyzer reports. This will include visitors who clicked through to your page but didn’t necessarily stay long enough to successfully load the script, as well as users who have images turned off. If the Traffic Analyzer script doesn’t seem to be working correctly, check the following: n

Make sure the traffic count script is added to all of your pages. Visitors are only counted on the pages to which you added the script. You won’t be able to accurately track visitors on your site as a whole if only a few pages are set up for tracking. Try removing the script from all your pages by choosing the Remove option for the appropriate directory in the Traffic Analyzer tab and clicking Update. Once the script is removed, add the script back to your pages by selecting the Add option and clicking Update again.

n

If your pages take a long time to load, your lower hit count may indicate that a lot of your visitors are not waiting for your page to completely load. Generally, the text on your web page should load within five seconds, and the page should completely load in fifteen seconds on a 56K modem connection. Web searchers can be very impatient; any longer, and they’ll probably move on to the next page. If your pages are loading too slowly, the easiest fix is to reduce the size of your images. We’ve provided information on a graphic optimization service, which you can access from MarketMySite! via the link found on the companion CD-ROM. This service will help you optimize your graphics for a faster-loading site.

n

The traffic count script by default is located at the end of your page, after the HTML closing tag. You can move the traffic count script to the top of the page if you prefer, just below the Body tag. The script is then loaded first, so there’s less chance the hit will not be recorded if the visitor leaves before the page fully loads. The disadvantage to this is that it could potentially delay the loading of your page. The browser might wait a few more seconds for the script to execute before displaying the rest of the page. Moving the traffic script to the top of your page

Chapter 11: Traffic Analyzer

275

requires knowledge of HTML. If you aren’t an HTML expert, then you shouldn’t try this. n

You may not have successfully added the Traffic Analyzer script to your pages and uploaded them to your web site. In this case, return to the Traffic Analyzer and add the tracking script to each of the pages you wish to track. After adding the script, upload the pages to your web site. Reload a few of your pages, and check your statistics again.

You won’t see significant tracking results for a little while, so be patient. Keep track of your rankings using the Reporter. As your optimized pages move up in the rankings, your traffic will increase as well. If you don’t see an increase in traffic, you might want to re-evaluate your keyphrases and reoptimize your pages. As long as you monitor your work, you’ll be able to see what’s working and what needs improvement.

Chapter 12

Scheduler

277

278

Chapter 12: Scheduler

he WebPosition Gold Scheduler module will automatically run Missions for the Reporter, Submitter, and Upload Manager modules. Once you have set up these Missions, you can add them to the Scheduler queue where they will run at the times you designate. This will ensure that your reports are run regularly and that all your pages are properly submitted to the search engines. Using the Scheduler, you set the time, date, and frequency of the Missions. It’s often advantageous to schedule your Missions to run late at night, when the Internet is less congested and your computer is not being used for other work. You can set the Scheduler to run automatically when Windows starts. When you install WebPosition Gold, you have the option of adding the Scheduler to your Windows Startup folder. If you didn’t choose this option initially, you can always add it by reinstalling WebPosition Gold and clicking on Yes when prompted to add the Scheduler to the Startup folder. Reinstalling WebPosition Gold will not overwrite any of your existing work, including Missions, settings, domain name management, or licensing information. However, you should ensure that you’re installing the latest version so you don’t overwrite your existing installation with an older version. You can always download the latest version from MarketMySite! via the link found on the companion CD-ROM. If you want to remove the Scheduler from the Startup folder so that it doesn’t run automatically when Windows starts, follow this procedure: 1.

Click on your Start menu, select Programs, and then select the Startup folder.

2.

Right-click on the WebPosition Scheduler icon in the Startup folder.

3.

Select Delete from the menu that pops up. The icon should then disappear from the Startup folder. At this point, the Scheduler will no longer run automatically when Windows starts.

If you do not have the Scheduler set to run automatically when Windows starts, you can start it manually by clicking on its icon found in WebPosition Gold’s main screen.

Chapter 12: Scheduler

279

This may sound obvious, but your computer must be on in order for the Scheduler to run its Missions. Also, the Scheduler will only run Missions if it is left running in the taskbar. Shutting down the Scheduler will prevent any Missions from running. When the Scheduler runs its Missions, WebPosition Gold will automatically open and run whichever Missions you’ve scheduled. If you’re using your computer at the time the Scheduler is set to run, you’ll see the Missions run the same way they would if you had run them manually. When the Missions are completed, you have to open the specific Missions from WebPosition Gold and click the Results button. You’ll then see the latest reports and results from the Missions.

Scheduler Tabs Missions Tab To schedule a Mission or a group of Missions to run at a later time, click on New Event in the main Scheduler window.

The “event” is the set of Missions that you want the Scheduler to run. This can include any combination of Reporter, Submitter, and Upload Manager Missions that you previously created. At the top of the Missions tab is the Program to Run box. This should automatically be filled in with the path to the wpgold.exe file, the main executable of WebPosition Gold. You should not edit the contents of this box.

280

Chapter 12: Scheduler

The next box specifies command line options. You should also not edit this box, since the command line options will be updated automatically based on the options you choose. Once your options are set, you can go back to this tab and view the event configuration, but don’t try to configure it yourself.

In order to schedule a Mission, first click the Select button to locate a directory that contains your Mission files.

Chapter 12: Scheduler

281

Note that each Scheduler event can only run Missions from a single directory. If you have Mission files in different directories, you will have to schedule a separate event for each of those directories. The mission path found below the Missions to choose from box identifies the directory that you selected in the previous step.

282

Chapter 12: Scheduler

Since Mike Merlot kept all of his Mission files within the main WebPosition Gold directory, all of them appear in the Missions to choose from box: n

Files that end with the .mis identifier are Reporter Missions.

n

Files that end with the .smis identifier are Submitter Missions.

n

Files that end with the .umis identifier are Upload Manager Missions.

Remember that only Reporter, Submitter, and Upload Manager Missions can be scheduled. That is why other types of Missions will not appear in the Missions to choose from box. Select the Mission or Missions that you want to schedule and click the >> button to move them into the Missions to Run box. If you want to remove Missions from the schedule, select them from the Missions to Run box and click the << button. Mike decided to schedule a Reporter Mission and a Submitter Mission. First, he selected the Missions from the Mission to choose from box.

Chapter 12: Scheduler

283

Next, he clicked on the >> button to move those Missions into the Missions to Run box.

After Mike clicked on the >> button, the two Missions were moved into the Missions to Run box. Also note that the Command Line Options box was automatically updated. Again, you don’t need to be concerned with the syntax of the Command Line Options box. The Scheduler will manage this for you automatically.

284

Chapter 12: Scheduler

Time Tab The Time tab is where you define the schedule for your Scheduler event. You have many options to choose from: n

Daily — Runs the Scheduler at the same time every day. You can select which days you want the event to run by enabling the appropriate check boxes.

n

Weekly — Runs the Scheduler every week at the same time.

n

Quarterly — Runs the Scheduler four times a year, from the time you initially run the Scheduler.

n

Monthly — Runs the Scheduler every month on the same day of the month that the program was initially run. For example, if you first run the Scheduler on the 10th of the month at noon, it will run every month on the 10th at noon.

n

One Time — Runs the Scheduler Mission once, and only when you specify.

n

Every — Runs the Scheduler according to the interval that you specify from the drop-down list box. This box contains numerous scheduling options.

Chapter 12: Scheduler

285

Mike decided to schedule this event to run every day. That way, his pages would be submitted as quickly as possible and he’d be able to monitor his progress by running daily Reporter Missions. He selected the Daily option and enabled the check boxes for each day of the week.

The Start Event at area specifies the next date and time that the event will run. The Scheduler automatically sets this after each event run, according to the schedule that you defined on this screen. The first text box corresponds to the hour and minute (“hh:mm am/pm), starting on the Month, Day, and Year. Clicking Select will display a calendar and allow you to choose the date of the event. Check your computer’s date and time settings to be sure that they are accurate.

286

Chapter 12: Scheduler

Options Tab The Options tab is where you will find the General and Submitter Command Line Options you can integrate with your Scheduler Mission. The options that you choose will automatically appear in the Command Line Options box in the first tab of the Scheduler. The General Command Line Options are: n

Close on Completion — WebPosition Gold will shut down after the scheduled Mission event has finished running.

n

Run Program Minimized — WebPosition Gold will run the scheduled event in a minimized window on your computer, causing WebPosition Gold to appear only on your taskbar. This allows you to use your computer for other work while your scheduled Missions are running.

n

Hangup When Done — WebPosition Gold will automatically disconnect from the Internet after the scheduled event has completed. This only applies if you’re using a dial-up connection to access the Internet.

n

Override Mission retry settings with these settings — If you enable this check box, you can enter values for the number of times to retry failed engines and the delay between each attempt. These values will override the settings you established in the individual Reporter and Submitter Missions.

Mike decided to enable the Close on Completion and Run Program Minimized options.

Chapter 12: Scheduler

287

The Submitter Command Line Options are: n

Allow Repetitive Submissions — WebPosition will normally submit all of your selected pages until they have each been submitted once. After each page is submitted, WebPosition Gold will deselect the page in the Submission list in order to avoid resubmitting it. If you enable the Allow Repetitive Submissions option, then once all your pages have been successfully submitted, they will automatically become reselected in the Submission list. This means that the submission process will automatically start all over again. I do not recommend this option. If you refer back to Chapter 10, you’ll notice that I listed only four acceptable reasons to submit a page to a search engine. After all your pages have been submitted, stop and evaluate your progress. There may be valid reasons to resubmit some of your pages at that point. However, this decision is too important to be left to an automated process. You should decide on a page-by-page basis whether or not each page should be resubmitted. Then, manually select the pages that you want to resubmit.

n

Automatically Run Submitter Missions Daily until all URLs are Successfully Submitted — In order to avoid oversubmitting to search engines, you may want to limit your submissions for any one page to once per month. However, most search engines have limits in terms of the number of pages that you can submit per day, per domain. So, if you schedule a Submitter mission once per month, the Submitter will submit on that date the maximum number of pages allowed per day. This means that it may take many months for all your pages to be submitted. By enabling the Automatically Run Submitter Missions Daily. . . option, you can force the Scheduler to run the Submitter Mission daily until all the pages have been submitted for whatever cycle you define — weekly, monthly, or quarterly. All of your pages will then be submitted within the time cycle you establish. However, this option will prevent any one page from being submitted more frequently than prescribed by the time cycle. If you find this option confusing, I don’t blame you. It’s a complex option and frankly, I find it unnecessary and potentially dangerous. Some people insist on totally automating their submissions. They

288

Chapter 12: Scheduler

wrongly believe that they will improve their rankings by repetitively submitting to the search engines. I suspect that FirstPlace Software included this option and the Repetitive Submissions option in order to satisfy that group of customers. Follow the simple rules that I’ve laid out for you, and you’ll find submitting to be a stress-free and easily understandable process. Mike took my advice and disabled the check boxes in the Submitter Command Line Options area.

In the Other Options section, you can specify the number of days for which you want to maintain the Scheduler log. The Scheduler log will allow you to view events that the Scheduler has run and the results of those events. Normally, the default setting of 30 days is more than enough.

Chapter 12: Scheduler

289

After you’ve configured all your event options, click on the Finished button.

After you click on Finished, you will be returned to the main Scheduler window. This window contains a list of all the events that are scheduled to run. You can also see all of your settings for each event. The frequency of the event, the time, the program to run, and the command line options all appear.

290

Chapter 12: Scheduler

In this example, we need to scroll to the right to view all the options.

There is a 128-character limit for the command line. If the options you select cause the command line to exceed the character limit, WebPosition Gold will create a text file to store all the commands. Before the Scheduler setup is completed, WebPosition Gold will make you aware of the character limit and will suggest a name for the text file. From the Scheduler’s main screen shown above, you can choose from the following actions: n

New Event

n

Modify Event — Select the event that you want to modify, and then click on this button.

n

Delete Event — Select the event to delete, and click on this button.

n

Run Now — Select an event, and click on this button to run it immediately.

n

View Log — View the Scheduler log.

n

Close Scheduler

Chapter 12: Scheduler

291

The Scheduler log shows you the status of your Scheduler Mission events, by date and time. For each event, it shows the name of the Mission file, the command lines, and the status of each Mission. If the status of your Missions is not complete, there may be a problem with either the setup or the execution of the Missions. If any errors occur, WebPosition Gold will let you know and give you instructions on how to e-mail FirstPlace Software’s customer support. If there are no problems, the Scheduler will continue to execute events according to your defined schedule, so long as you leave it running.

Chapter 13

Link Popularity

293

294

Chapter 13: Link Popularity

he content of your web pages is completely created and controlled by you. Search engines will reward good content optimization with high rankings. However, there is another aspect of ranking strategy that doesn’t just rely on optimized web pages but on the relation of your pages to other web sites as well. This is known as link popularity. I’ve mentioned link popularity several times throughout this book, but I think it’s worth discussing in more detail. Link popularity is essential to achieving top rankings on search engines. When people first began optimizing HTML in their web pages, it was possible to achieve top rankings based on the optimization alone. However, the web has become increasingly competitive. At the time of publication there are more than a billion pages indexed by the major search engines. Additionally, many companies are now using tools such as WebPosition Gold or hiring professional optimization companies to optimize their web sites. Search engines have responded by adapting their algorithms to consider off-page criteria such as link popularity to determine rankings for identically optimized web pages. Thus, if you want to achieve top rankings for competitive keyphrases, you must take action to improve your site’s link popularity. Link popularity is more than just a measure of the number of sites that are linked to your site. The actual link count is certainly a large part of the equation. However, some search engines also weigh each link according to the link popularity of the site from where the link originates. For example, Amazon.com currently has over four million incoming links from other sites. Therefore, if you were able to convince Amazon to link to your site, search engines would assign that link much greater weight than a link from a less popular site.

Link Partners Another factor that some search engines consider part of the link popularity equation is link relevancy. When a search engine finds a link from one site to another site, it compares the content of both the sites to determine if the

Chapter 13: Link Popularity

295

sites are thematically similar. A link from a site that contains similar content to your site is assigned a greater weight than a link from an unrelated site. Let’s look at Silver Platter Foods again. Silver Platter is a web site consisting of a number of pages offering gourmet foods and goods. A search engine will look at its web pages and see that they are well optimized and targeted. But how does the search engine know Silver Platter Foods is a reputable company worthy of high rankings? The competition for gourmet food companies on the Internet is intense. How can search engines determine which sites should be assigned the highest rankings for searches relating to gourmet foods? It makes sense for search engines to look beyond the optimization of Silver Platter’s pages and consider the quantity and quality of incoming links to the Silver Platter site. If Mike Merlot perfected a web page pertaining to Pinot Noir wines and also had links to this page from various well-known vineyards in Napa Valley and Italy and from large gourmet web sites such as gourmet.com, that page would probably score highly for a search on Pinot Noir. Search engines would see that other related sites with high link popularity considered the Silver Platter site to be worth linking to. In a sense, having a large, well-known site in your industry linking to your site can be considered akin to an endorsement of your site from a reputable source. The best way to increase your site’s link popularity is to find web sites within your industry and persuade them to become one of your link partners, meaning that they will link to your site in exchange for your site linking back to theirs. Link partners do not have to be limited to commercial sites. In fact, some of the best link partners are educational or information sites. As long as the site contains content that is related in some way to your site’s content, it can be a worthwhile link partner.

Arelis Researching potential link partners, contacting them, and managing a reciprocal link campaign is a difficult, time-consuming process. Fortunately, there’s a software product called Arelis that makes it much easier to build your link popularity by automatically finding potential link partners for your site. Arelis lists all found web sites for review, sorted by relevancy. This

296

Chapter 13: Link Popularity

allows you to concentrate on the web sites that will bring your site very targeted traffic. A built-in e-mail editor and tested e-mail templates help you to contact web sites. In addition, Arelis creates fully customizable individual link pages that perfectly match the design of your site. It scans your link pages for broken links and checks if your link partners really link back. You can learn more about Arelis and download a free trial version from MarketMySite! via the link found on the companion CD-ROM.

Unsuccessful Shortcuts Some companies have tried to take shortcuts to improve their link popularity. There are free services, which with little time and effort will theoretically improve your site’s link popularity. Beware of these services. In many cases, they will do more harm than good. Here are some examples of how not to improve your site’s link popularity.

Link Farms One unsuccessful method of increasing link popularity is by becoming part of a “link farm.” Link farms are networks of sites that have all agreed to link to one another. Each of the sites in the link farm has a page containing links to all the other sites that are part of the farm. One of the problems with this strategy is that the content of the sites that are linked together does not necessarily share any common theme. Therefore, even though your site may have a seemingly high link popularity score, most of the links carry very little weight since they lack relevancy to your site. Some link farms have tried to improve on this by categorizing their members and only establishing links between members that have related content. While this is an improvement, it still does not address the core issue — a link farm is an artificial method of improving link popularity, and most search engines have mechanisms in place to either ignore or actually penalize link farm participants. A couple of years ago, I attended a search engine strategies conference and someone in the audience asked about link farms. AltaVista’s chief scientist was sitting on the panel of experts and he laughed when he heard the

Chapter 13: Link Popularity

297

question. He then proceeded to identify several well-known link farms by name and stated that AltaVista did not consider links from sites in those networks to have any validity whatsoever. If a link farm is promoting itself on the web, chances are that search engines are already aware of it and will ignore any links from sites that are part of that network.

FFA Sites Another worthless link popularity strategy involves submitting your site to FFA (Free For All) sites. These web sites allow you to submit your site to them for free and will display your link on their pages. The idea is that users will go to these pages simply to find links to web sites they might want to visit. In theory, this should help to increase your link popularity, since links to your site could potentially appear on thousands of other sites. However, these FFA pages only display a small number of links at one time. As new web site links are submitted, the older ones are removed without notification. Since it’s a free service, new links are constantly being added. The chances that your link will stay on these pages for any significant amount of time are pretty slim. As I mentioned before, many of the software submitters that advertise submitting to thousands of search engines are actually submitting to FFA sites. The problem is that since so many people use these software tools, you would constantly need to submit your site, possibly even hourly, for the FFAs to be of any benefit to your site. Additionally, it’s unlikely that the content on an FFA site would have any relationship whatsoever to the content of your site. Since the links are completely nonrelevant, they are given very little weight by search engines. You would probably be better off having 25 highly relevant links to your site than 1,000 nonrelevant links. The worst part of this system is your required reciprocation for the service. As I mentioned earlier in the book, FFA sites are actually e-mail address collection engines. They require you to give them your e-mail address when you submit your site. Then they sell your address to e-mail marketing companies, and you receive a deluge of spam mail that never stops.

298

Chapter 13: Link Popularity

Researching As you can see, link popularity is an essential part of your optimization strategy, especially if you’re targeting competitive keyphrases. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to improving your site’s link popularity score. You must be prepared to invest the necessary time and effort to research potential link partners, contact them, and convince them to exchange links with your site. If you make the effort to increase your site’s link popularity, you’ll be amazed at what a dramatic effect a small increase in link popularity will have on your search engine rankings. Since the vast majority of the sites on the web have zero link popularity, you can often achieve great improvements in your rankings with just a handful of highly relevant links. One final point to remember is that in order to realize the full benefit of a link popularity campaign, you must reciprocate the links. Search engines want to see that your site is part of a community of related sites. If your site has many incoming links but no outgoing links, the search engines will consider your site to be more of an island than a community. Being an island is better than not having any link popularity at all, but in order to gain the maximum link popularity boost, you should build your site with many outgoing and incoming links to and from sites containing content that’s related to your site’s content.

Chapter 14

Top 5 Tips and Mistakes of Search Engine Marketing Brent Winters Founder of FirstPlace Software, Inc. and chief architect of WebPosition Gold

299

300

Chapter 14: Top 5 Tips and Mistakes of Search Engine Marketing

s the founder of FirstPlace Software and principal designer of WebPosition Gold, I’ve often been asked for advice regarding the search engines. What are the most important things to know to be successful with the major search engines? That’s a tough question to answer, since there are so many tips and techniques I’ve discovered over the years that work exceptionally well. It’s difficult to boil it down to just a handful. However, I believe the first step toward success comes from the willingness to learn from the mistakes of others.

Top 5 Mistakes of Search Engine Marketing Mistake #1: Buying into the Myth that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) No Longer Works There’s no question that search engine optimization has become more challenging over the years. Many critics have taken this and declared that search engine marketing is no longer effective. However, research from third parties like the NPD Group clearly refutes this idea. The NPD Group study demonstrated that search engine listings result in six times more sales on average than an equivalent number of visitors from banner ads. That means from visitor to visitor, you’ll make six times more money on search engine listings than banners. I personally receive countless testimonials from customers who claim dramatic increases in traffic and revenues after starting their search engine optimization efforts. A recent testimonial from Ryan Morton of www.exploreSC.com, a customer of ours, said he started his promotion efforts “. . . 4-5 weeks ago and have seen our site traffic increase from 200-300 hits per day to 900-1100 hits per day. We have gone from relative obscurity and word-of-mouth advertising to becoming one of the most heavily visited sites for South Carolina Tourism.” Don’t fall victim to the #1 mistake: the assumption that search engine marketing doesn’t work anymore, or it’s a battle you simply can’t win. The key is to arm yourself with the right knowledge combined with the right tools for the job so you will win.

Chapter 14: Top 5 Tips and Mistakes of Search Engine Marketing

301

Mistake #2: Bulk Submitting is the Path to Riches Go on and admit it. We all dream about it. We want to find that perfect product or service where we enter our domain name and then press one button and the traffic magically starts to flood into our web site. You’ve seen the advertisements, such as “Submit to 3500 web sites for just $79.” The reality is that the majority of those sites you’re submitting to are set up for the sole purpose of collecting e-mail addresses from people like you so they can send you junk mail. Within hours, you’ll receive hundreds of e-mails like, “Thank you for submitting to Joe’s FFA Site. Now take a look at our homemade discount Viagra products.” Even if you do land your site in some of the real search engines (there aren’t that many), those bulk submission services generally do little to nothing to optimize your rankings. Your site will simply be buried at the bottom of the results with the millions of other Web sites. That’s where WebPosition Gold will help you.

Mistake #3: Meta Tags Will Solve All My Problems In the press, you may have read about one of the many tutorials on how to create the perfect meta tags so the search engines can find your site. What they don’t tell you is that the majority of the major search engines don’t even read meta tags anymore. The ones that do read them tend to give them little importance when deciding how your page will rank. Some of the “experts” will tell you to simply include your keywords in your Title and meta tags and to create a web site with quality content. The search engines will then naturally flock to your site and rank it near the top. Certainly, Title tags and content quality are important, but don’t make the mistake of believing that this is all you need to do to be found on the web today.

Mistake #4: Believing “Doorways” Don’t Work or Will Get Me Banned There’s been so much negative publicity put out by the search engines about the evils of “doorway pages” that many of the search engine optimization

302

Chapter 14: Top 5 Tips and Mistakes of Search Engine Marketing

experts are coming up with clever new names for the term. You may hear them called informational pages, spotlight pages, gateways, etc., to distance themselves from the term “doorway.” The fact is that every page on your web site that ranks well for any reason is acting as a doorway to your web site. Many people mistakenly believe that everyone will arrive at their site through the home page. However, if you do a focused search on Google, Lycos, or another major engine, you’ll almost always find matches that are not home pages. In addition, each search engine ranks pages differently. Therefore, you may have a page about Product X with 400 words on it. That page may rank well for Search Engine A that likes to see 400 words on a top-ranking page, but it isn’t going to do well for Search Engine B that is looking for 800 words on a top-ranking page. There are other examples, but you see the problem. Lastly, some of the same search engines that condemn the term “doorway page” include tutorials or FAQs on how to create a page to rank well in their index. True, these tutorials are often too broad to be of great help. However, it confirms that optimizing each of your pages to rank better is not something the engines inherently object to. Therefore, regardless of what you choose to call the pages you optimize, do not be deceived that fine-tuning your pages cannot achieve top rankings.

Mistake #5: Submitting Before Establishing any External Links We have customers who use WebPosition Gold’s Submitter and achieve great results. However, we have others who set up a new site and are unable to get indexed. Or, they submit and see their site indexed only to be dropped two to three weeks later. There are many mistakes that can create these scenarios, but one that is easy to fall into is failing to achieve any links from other web sites before submitting. Some engines, such as HotBot, are known to drop pages after a couple of weeks if it finds that no other domains link to it. Google has also stated that it will not index a site that does not have at least one external link pointing to it. Sometimes a link from a major directory, such as Open Directory, LookSmart, or Yahoo!, will suffice. However, you should also try to trade links with other

Chapter 14: Top 5 Tips and Mistakes of Search Engine Marketing

303

web sites that are complementary to yours, then submit the URLs of those pages that are linking to your site. If you can submit the page of one of these external links and let the search engine spider find your site on its own, you’ll stand to rank much higher than if you’d submitted your site directly. The drawback is that it may take a bit longer for the engine to get around to indexing your pages. If you’re in a big hurry, buy a second domain, put some unique content on it, and cross-link your two sites To give the impression of independence, it’s best if you host the two domains at separate hosting services. You might also vary the spelling of the information you submit when you purchase the domains or use a valid P.O. box on one and your street address for the other. This can further the illusion to an automated spider that the two sites have different owners. Now that you know what not to do, the following section discusses the top things you should be doing.

Top 5 Search Engine Marketing Tips Tip #1: Target the Right Keywords For those of you who are new to search engine marketing, a keyword is simply a word or phrase that people would search on to find your web site. You might think that choosing the right keywords to target would be a nobrainer. However, you’d be surprised at how many people jump in, optimize their web site, and achieve top rankings. They then cry out in dismay when their hit counter registers no more visitors than it did before they went to all the work to tune up their site. What happened? They failed to choose keywords that people were actually looking for. Therefore, I recommend you: n

Brainstorm a list of keywords and phrases that apply to your web site’s products and services. Try to place yourself in the shoes of the web searcher. Avoid generalities like “small business.” Yes, you may sell a

304

Chapter 14: Top 5 Tips and Mistakes of Search Engine Marketing

product for small businesses, but who is going to search for “small business” when they are looking for a new Windows accounting program? n

Take advantage of excellent services like WordTracker to tell you which keywords are popular but not so competitive as to make a top ranking next to impossible. There’s a fine line between targeting keywords that are too general or competitive versus keyword phrases that are so specific that few people ever think to search for them. WordTracker handles both with ease. In addition, WordTracker will do much of the brainstorming for you by taking a couple of keywords and producing a broad list of related words and phrases from which to choose.

Again, please don’t make the mistake of picking the wrong keywords. Nothing is more disappointing than taking the time to achieve top rankings and then seeing no increase in traffic from all your efforts. Also, don’t pick keywords that are too popular or broad like “games” or “entertainment.” You’ll not only get visitors that are far less likely to buy your product, but the amount of work needed to gain that ranking will not be worth the trouble. You’ll then join the ranks of misinformed critics screaming “search engine optimization doesn’t work — don’t waste your time!” Search engine optimization works and works well, if you take the time to do it right.

Tip #2: Proper Submission to the Major Directories is Critical One of the most significant changes in search engine marketing in recent years has been the rise in the popularity of human-reviewed directories and catalogs like LookSmart, Yahoo!, and Open Directory. Some search engines prominently display directory listings for many popular searches. MSN is a prime example. Do a search on MSN, and you’ll generally find the first page of results dominated by LookSmart directory listings. Some of the other major engines also list directory results prominently, or at least emphasize them in various ways. You can recognize directory listings since they are often called “Web Site Results” rather than “Web Page Results.” Once you submit to a directory, it’s difficult to go back and correct mistakes later. Some of them, like Yahoo!, charge you as much as $300 for the privilege of simply being reviewed for inclusion. Therefore, it’s of utmost importance to get it right the first time.

Chapter 14: Top 5 Tips and Mistakes of Search Engine Marketing

305

There are many strategies for achieving great visibility with the directories. Some of them involve keyword placement and some involve human psychology. Tips for other directories are found in the directory submission guide in WebPosition Gold’s Submitter. Read all the information you can about submitting to each directory before you submit. Even if you’ve submitted already and ranked poorly, you should find some strategies to help you reverse the damage.

Tip #3: Optimize Your Page Content There are countless tips for optimizing your page’s content so that it will be more relevant to a given search. Each engine ranks pages differently, so most tips are not universal. However, there is one tip that overrides them all: Create pages that emulate the statistics of pages that already rank at or near the top of the search results. These statistics include: n

Frequency of the keywords on the page — This does not mean more keywords are better. Instead, emulate the same number of keywords of top-ranking pages as closely as possible. Be careful not to base your entire strategy on the statistics of a single top-ranking page. The content of a top-ranking page could have easily changed since it was last indexed. Therefore, every page ranking in the Top 10 may not always represent exactly what the engine is currently looking for today. Using averages is one way to combat this problem.

n

Total words on the page — Mimic the approximate number of words of a top-ranking page on your own page.

n

Weight of the keywords on the page (i.e., frequency divided by the total words) — Too high a weight is just as bad as too low a weight.

n

Area or location of the keywords on the page (i.e., title, heading, etc.) — A keyword is given more relevance by an engine when the keyword appears in the engine’s preferred areas.

n

Prominence — Generally, the closer to the front of the area you can place the keyword, the better.

306

Chapter 14: Top 5 Tips and Mistakes of Search Engine Marketing

n

Proximity — The closer that the words of a phrase appear together, the better.

n

Off-page criteria (i.e., link popularity, clickthrough popularity, etc.) — Even when you’ve done everything else right, don’t forget the off-page factors!

Bonus Tip 1: In general, you should try to include your keyword or phrase in the Title tag, the Heading tag, the link text, and to a lesser extent, your meta keyword and description tags. There are other areas in which you may want to include the keyword, depending on the engine. For example, Google is known to give a ranking boost to keywords that are in bold or large print. Bonus Tip 2: Naming your page after your keyword and/or obtaining a domain name with your keyword in it will often boost your rankings. Bonus Tip 3: If you run a regional business where most of your business is local, it’s critical that you include your full company address on every page of your site. Otherwise, people could search for “Ford dealer in Chicago” and your site would not appear if your company address was buried only on your contact page. Also, take advantage of proximity by putting the word “Chicago” as close to the phrase “Ford dealer” as possible. Lastly, make sure the address is in text form since search engines can’t read your address out of a graphical logo on your page. Bonus Tip 4: Don’t spam the engines. Every engine has their pet peeves, so make sure you know what they are and avoid them. Unfortunately, generalized tips will only take you so far. That’s why we developed the Page Critic feature of WebPosition Gold and have continued to fine-tune it over the years. We also update the advice every month to keep pace with the changes at each engine. The Critic gives specific advice for the keyword, the web page, and the engine that you select so you’re not overwhelmed with advice that doesn’t apply to your current goal. It also has the ability to compare your page with other top-ranking pages to see how they match up statistically. Without such a tool, you’d find yourself wasting hours trying to count and locate keywords on your page and your competitors’ pages.

Chapter 14: Top 5 Tips and Mistakes of Search Engine Marketing

307

Tip #4: Increase Your Link Popularity This off-page statistic has grown in importance in the last year, becoming a significant factor for many engines. Your site must have at least one or more links from other domains in order to be indexed by some engines. In addition, if you don’t have high enough link popularity, you’ll never achieve top rankings on many keywords. Therefore, make link popularity a high priority in your web marketing plan. There are many strategies for increasing links to your web site. Links to your site not only improve your rankings, but they will also increase your traffic in a consistent and long-term manner.

Tip #5: Track Your Progress As you learn more about search engine marketing, you’ll discover it is not an exact science. Some of your pages will rank well the first time out, and some will not. In addition, your rankings will fluctuate, calling for tweaks in design from time to time. Therefore, as with any marketing strategy, you need a method to measure your progress. In this case, you need a convenient way to report your rankings for each keyword and engine you’re targeting and to track the number of visitors to your web site, along with where they came from. WebPosition Gold helps you manage and automate both these essential tasks.

Chapter 15

Thou Shalt Not Spam! The 12 Commandments of Search Engine Marketing Brent Winters Founder of FirstPlace Software, Inc. and chief architect of WebPosition Gold

309

310

Chapter 15: Thou Shalt Not Spam!

eriodically, I’ll hear someone say, “I heard WebPosition Gold generates spam and that using it will get me banned on the search engines. Is this true?” Well, that would depend on how you choose to use the product. WebPosition Gold is a tool. For example, you can go to the hardware store and buy a hammer and use that tool to build a fine house. You can also take that same hammer and use it to smash your neighbor’s window. If someone buys a hammer and abuses it, other people may conclude that hammers are bad. However, would that conclusion be correct? In the case of WebPosition, we try to educate you by telling you what you should and should not do in regard to the search engines. We also try to distinguish between what search engines say they want to see and what their ranking algorithm truly reflects. The WebPosition Page Critic helps you in a myriad of ways to build a “search engine friendly” page. Its entire purpose is to tell you how to comply with the search engine’s ranking algorithm so your page will be ranked higher by each engine. You could say WebPosition relates to freedom of speech. The search engines would rather the people not know exactly how they rank pages for fear of abuse. However, the people have an inherent need to know. That’s where much of the “rub” comes between the search engines and online businesses. Web businesses want their pages to rank highly on the engines so that their prospective customers can find them. At the same time, the search engines urgently want to provide a positive search experience to their users. Both sides have a valid viewpoint. The two goals, while certainly different, do not have to be mutually exclusive. At FirstPlace Software, we do our best to try to reconcile the two goals. WebPosition Gold tries to educate you on the best ways to create high quality content that will also be favored by the search engines. To be successful, a page must satisfy both the visitor who will read it and the search engine’s own ranking algorithm. While that is sometimes a challenging task, it is by no means insurmountable. We have many customers who write us each week reporting their successes on both fronts.

Chapter 15: Thou Shalt Not Spam!

311

Critics enjoy pointing to WebPosition’s Page Generator and labeling it as nothing more than a spam generator. Others will contend that the program generates doorway pages with “little useful content.” What’s not considered is that WebPosition is only a tool that can be used to create good content or bad content. Someone can create truly awful pages with Microsoft FrontPage. Based on what I’ve seen on the web, there’s no doubt that thousands of “junk” pages have been created with Microsoft’s tool. However, to be fair, truly great pages have also been created with that tool. What these critics fail to mention are the many ways WebPosition helps to discourage spamming through education. In contrast, products like FrontPage say nothing about how to avoid spamming a search engine. Am I saying WebPosition is then superior to FrontPage? Absolutely not. Each product has its own purpose. WebPosition works beautifully in concert with your HTML editor to optimize and fine-tune pages to satisfy what a search engine wants to see.

What Happens If I Spam? If you’re caught “sinning” against a search engine, you run the risk of incurring one of several degrees of punishment: n

The page is red-flagged for closer inspection by a human reviewer.

n

The page’s ranking is quietly reduced.

n

The offending page is dropped from the engine.

n

The entire site is banned from the engine.

To make things interesting, most search engines are vague as to what they consider to be spam. Furthermore, the rules vary for each engine. You might say what is seen as an acceptable honey-baked ham to one person is seen as a can of spam to another. The extent and intent to which it was used makes a difference as well. Despite rampant ambiguity, I believe I have isolated 12 “commandments” you would be wise to live by.

312

Chapter 15: Thou Shalt Not Spam!

The 12 Commandments of Search Engine Marketing 1. Don’t Duplicate The search engines understandably do not wish to serve duplicate or near-duplicate pages to their visitors. Some unethical webmasters will flood a search engine with thousands of near-duplicate pages in an attempt to dominate every keyword search relating (or not relating) to their site. So, many engines actively look for content that is very similar and will drop pages or domains they find crossing the line. These “dupe-checkers” unfortunately can catch folks who are not even trying to create duplicate content. Even the famous Amazon.com was accidentally banned by AltaVista at one time. They had so many affiliates with similar pages selling books that AltaVista’s dupe-checker dropped them until someone complained. Many catalog sites will offer similar products with similar descriptions. You may not be trying to spam, but a search engine spider may conclude otherwise. Therefore, be sure to vary your content as much as possible. If you still have concerns that a spider might jump to false conclusions, add a random amount of blank space and other “benign” tags to the page to vary the file size by 100 bytes or more. You can also vary your meta tags, Alt tags, title, etc. Don’t misunderstand me though: This is no substitute for failing to create unique content! If you create custom versions of basically the same page for each search engine, you may attract the unwanted attention of a dupe-checker. One option is the use of the robots.txt protocol to prevent Engine B from indexing pages intended for Engine A.

2. Don’t Misrepresent Perhaps the greatest of all the commandments, don’t misrepresent your site! If you optimize for keywords that have little or nothing to do with what the visitor will see on the page, you’re asking for trouble. For help finding the appropriate keywords to target, I highly recommend the WordTracker service.

Chapter 15: Thou Shalt Not Spam!

313

3. Don’t Hide Search engines don’t trust hidden keywords. Even though some engines like Google will say flatly “don’t hide keywords,” this, as with many statements, must be tempered with reality. Keywords in meta tags, for example, will not get your site banned or labeled as spam even though they are hidden. The same goes with other hidden areas like Alt tags, NOFRAMES, hyperlink URLs, and comments. These are some of the “acceptable” hidden areas, so long as you include only relevant keywords and don’t overdo it. Hiding keywords by using the same color text as the background is almost always considered to be spam. Some webmasters will vary the color codes just a little to avoid detection, but you certainly take a risk using this strategy.

4. Don’t Cloak Cloaking takes the “don’t hide” concept to the extreme. In simplest terms, cloaking software serves up one page to the search engine and another page to the visitor. This effectively hides the real page being indexed by the engine from the visitor. If you’ve ever run across a page that somehow ranked high for no apparent reason, it may have been cloaked. The ethics and the dangers of the practice have been hotly debated in search engine marketing circles for years. Most engines today repeatedly speak out against cloaking. Still, the practice continues to thrive since the engines have traditionally done a poor job of finding and penalizing sites employing the technique. Latest news: Google recently issued statements that they have improved their detection of cloaking, so beware.

5. Don’t Stuff If you stuff too many keywords into your page, you could get in trouble for spamming. Repeating the same word multiple times in a row is the worst offense. However, the overuse of your keyword can cause your ranking to drop. What’s the magic number? That varies by the area of the page and the search engine. The WebPosition Page Critic will help you stay within the engines’ preferred ranges.

314

Chapter 15: Thou Shalt Not Spam!

6. Don’t Redirect Some webmasters will try to hide “ugly” content designed for a search engine. As soon as a human visitor arrives, they are redirected to the real page via a meta refresh tag, JavaScript, or other trick. Basically, this is the “poor man’s” version of cloaking. If an engine determines your intent was to trick the engine, you may find your page banned. However, since there are also many legitimate reasons to redirect a page, such as when a page is moved, engines tend to avoid harsher punishments. Instead, they will usually try to index only the page to which the user is being redirected.

7. Don’t Page Jack Most companies will try to mimic the basic elements that make up a topranking page to boost their own rank. This is a perfectly acceptable strategy. However, unethical web marketers will copy the entire text and HTML of a top-ranking page from one of their competitors. They’ll then place it on their own site and submit it. To avoid being caught, they will then cloak it so their own company’s information appears. Before you start thinking “what a brilliant idea,” bear in mind that it breaks the copyright laws of most countries! The best way to detect page theft from your own site is to set up WebPosition to check for a unique phrase or other string found on your pages that would not be found elsewhere on the web. A quick check of WebPosition’s Detail Report will show any pages found matching the query, and thereby bring out a page-jacking suspect.

8. Don’t Build Bad Doorways Ask any search engine what they think of doorway pages, and their first reaction will often be negative. If they think you’re optimizing your page, the immediate fear is whether you’re going to go too far or do something to hurt the search experience for their visitors. Therefore, it’s a good idea to avoid the use of the term “doorway page,” “gateway page,” or any of half a dozen other terms when communicating to a search engine. We have always referred to a doorway page as any page designed to rank well on a search engine, thus acting as a doorway or entrance to your site.

Chapter 15: Thou Shalt Not Spam!

315

When it comes right down to it, every single page an engine displays in its search results is acting like a doorway to that site, whether on purpose or by accident! Obviously, all these pages are not spam, are they? What it really boils down to is not what you call the page, but what type of content the page contains and how you choose to promote it. Because of the negative stereotype put on the doorway page term, you’ll find that I prefer to encourage the building of “search engine friendly” pages rather than doorways. That way you minimize the chances of misunderstandings.

9. Don’t Fail to Cross-Link You should create links that travel from your home page to all other pages you wish to be indexed. If your optimized page has only outbound links and no inbound links, you run the risk of a search engine penalizing it for smelling like a one-directional doorway or entrance page. Although this is not likely to get your site banned, it may prevent the page from being indexed or ranked highly.

10. Don’t Link Farm Reciprocal links are great for improving your rankings. However, be careful of joining link farm services designed to artificially inflate your link popularity. Google and, to a lesser extent, other engines are now said to be blacklisting link farm sites. If you’re caught linking to one of these sites, you’re found guilty through association.

11. Don’t Over-submit It won’t do you any good to submit your URL multiple times a day. While most search engines are thought to be reluctant to ban a site for oversubmission, they will gladly ignore submissions from sites that exceed their limits. Unfortunately, they don’t often tell you what the limits are or warn you when you exceed them. For this reason, WebPosition Gold’s Submitter maintains a database of safe submission limits and warns you if you attempt to exceed those limits.

316

Chapter 15: Thou Shalt Not Spam!

12. Don’t Build Junk Search engines hate pages with little or no useful content since they diminish the search experience for their patrons. Too often, web marketers focus so much on optimizing their rankings that they forget about aesthetics, rich content, and user-friendliness. While the search engines don’t have a magic bullet to filter “junk” pages, this is one commandment we should all desire to follow. What good does it do to bring a visitor to your site only to have them click away in disinterest?

Chapter 16

Hiring a Professional

317

318

Chapter 16: Hiring a Professional

y the time you’ve read this far into the book, you’ve hopefully spent some time using WebPosition, and you’ve undoubtedly gained a better appreciation for the amount of work that’s involved in achieving and maintaining high search engine rankings. As you know, WebPosition is a tool, not a push-button solution. You can’t simply enter some information about your site and have the software automatically generate your optimized pages. It will help you and guide you every step of the way, but each step requires your input and your decision making. There are many fully automated submission products on the market; unfortunately, as you’ve learned, none of them work very well. If a product did exist that could totally automate the entire page creation, submission, and tracking process, then everyone would just use that product, and of course, it would then cease to be effective. Like most aspects of life, the success that you enjoy using WebPosition is in direct proportion to the amount of time and effort that you invest in learning how to use the software and using it regularly. Perhaps you don’t have the time to learn to use the software, or perhaps you’d rather just focus on running your business and pay someone else to do your positioning work. In that case, you’ll need to hire a professional search engine optimization (SEO) company. Fortunately, having read this book, you’ll be a far more educated consumer than 90% of the people who hire optimization companies. Sy Sims, the famous discount-clothing retailer, coined the slogan, “An educated consumer is your best customer.” If that statement is true for clothing, it’s even more applicable to a highly technical service like search engine optimization. Being an educated buyer not only makes it easier to hire an optimization company, but it also makes for a better long-term business relationship. Most of the prospective clients who contact my company have no idea how search engine optimization works. We patiently explain to them all the details of our service and what they should realistically expect in terms of results. Nevertheless, the reality is that even after they become clients, most people don’t really understand the theory behind optimization. This sometimes leads to misunderstandings and unrealistic expectations. It’s always a pleasure when an educated buyer contacts us because we know that there’s an excellent chance of developing a favorable long-term relationship.

Chapter 16: Hiring a Professional

319

Despite the fact that you’re now knowledgeable about the principles of optimization, selecting a company to work with can still be a daunting task. There are so many companies to choose from, and they all seem to promise the world. Where do you begin? I suggest that you start with a broad range of companies and use a process that I call the “Five Cs” to narrow the field to a small group of candidates and eventually to a single company. n

Cost of Services and Choice of Services — Eliminate companies that don’t fit within your budget or that don’t offer all the services that you require.

n

Credibility — Eliminate companies that fail to establish their credibility in the marketplace.

n

Communication and Customer Service — From the group of companies that remains, select the one that you feel has the best communication skills and most responsive customer service.

Cost of Services and Choice of Services There is an enormous variation in pricing for search engine optimization companies. Paying a lot more doesn’t necessarily translate into better results. On the other hand, if a company is too inexpensive, that may be a reason for suspicion. Since SEO firms have many different types of pricing models, it often becomes confusing when comparing one company with another. If the pricing models are incompatible with one another, it may be impossible to make a valid comparison. In that case, you may need to ask yourself which pricing model makes the most sense to you and only consider companies that offer your desired pricing model. Some companies charge a setup fee, plus a monthly maintenance fee. Others charge no setup fee, but their monthly fees may be higher. Then you have the performance-based companies that charge based on the number of top rankings they achieve or the number of visitors that they bring to your site. Your first decision will be whether or not you prefer paying a flat monthly fee or paying your SEO firm based on results. Be careful before you decide. While your initial gut reaction may be that you’d rather pay for results, that

320

Chapter 16: Hiring a Professional

could end up being much more expensive in the long run. It’s like the difference between paying your employees on commission or paying them salaries. Sometimes you can attract more motivated employees by paying them on commission. However, many companies that used to pay their employees on commission have now switched to salaried employees because they realized that a quality individual would provide a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. When you hire based on commission, the employee has less loyalty to the company and turnover rates are usually much higher. Commission-based employees will often leave as soon as they find a better opportunity. There are many reputable optimization companies that charge their clients a flat monthly fee and produce excellent results at a relatively low cost. Some of these companies introduce an element of accountability by guaranteeing a certain number of top rankings before the client is required to pay maintenance fees. I’ll discuss guarantees in more detail in the “Credibility” section. There are also plenty of reputable companies that charge their clients based on rankings or traffic. A potential problem with these companies is that depending on your industry and your keyphrases, it may be easy to achieve excellent results in the search engines. Therefore, you could end up spending a lot more money than you need to. Conversely, if you’re in a competitive industry and the SEO firm gets poor results, at least you won’t be paying for nothing; this brings us back to the loyalty issue that I alluded to earlier. An SEO company that’s achieving poor results for one client may simply look for a better (easier) opportunity to make money and focus its efforts on clients with less competitive keyphrases. So, you pay nothing, but you get nothing. Some pricing models may appear radically different on the surface, but when you examine them more closely, you find that the two pricing models are actually six of one and a half-dozen of the other. What’s the difference between a company that charges $85 per Top 20 placement with a cap of $1,700 and another company that charges a $1,700 setup fee, while guaranteeing a minimum of 20 Top 20 placements? Answer: There is no difference. Regardless of which company you choose, you’re going to spend $1,700, and you’re going to get at least 20 Top 20 placements. Here’s another example: Company A charges an $1,800 setup fee, plus $400 per month for maintenance. Company B charges no setup fee and $600 per

Chapter 16: Hiring a Professional

321

month for maintenance. During the first year, you’ll spend exactly the same amount with both companies. After the first year, however, you’ll spend less with Company A. The downside is that you have to pay the $1,800 during the first month. If cash flow is an issue, you may be better off using Company B. Having read this far into the book, I assume that you’re informed enough to know that a company that charges a $79 annual fee is not going to do anything to improve your rankings. In fact, some of these mass-market submission companies actually do more harm than good. You already know from reading Chapter 10, “Submitter,” that a company which advertises that they’ll submit your site monthly doesn’t have the slightest understanding of search engine optimization. Unfortunately, there are many such companies on the web, preying on uneducated consumers. It’s important when comparing pricing to make sure that you’re comparing apples to apples. We’ve already discussed the difficulty in comparing different pricing models. In addition to evaluating the suitability of the pricing model, you should compare the actual services that are included for the specified price. You should also decide in advance which services are necessary for your situation. Make sure you get all the services you need, and don’t pay for services that you don’t need. Here are some points to consider: n

Optimized pages — How many optimized pages will the SEO company provide you with? Many companies optimize just your home page. Some advertise that they’ll optimize your home page, plus two or three additional pages. Optimizing a couple of pages on your site may improve your rankings, but it’s probably not worth paying thousands of dollars for. With the knowledge you’ve gained from reading this book, you could do this optimization yourself in a few hours. Certainly, the quality of the optimization is important, but don’t be misled into thinking that SEO companies have some kind of secret knowledge that’s not available to the public. If you learn to use the WebPosition Page Critic, you can achieve a comparable level of quality in your optimized pages to any SEO company in the world. The advantage of hiring an SEO company is that they will create and maintain many more optimized pages than you would have the time to create and maintain on your own. As we discussed in Chapter 7, “Page

322

Chapter 16: Hiring a Professional

Generator,” and Chapter 8, “Page Critic,” each page should ideally be targeted to a specific keyphrase on a specific search engine. If you want to optimize ten keyphrases for six search engines, you would need a total of 60 optimized pages (10 keyphrases x 6 search engines) in order to achieve optimal results. When comparing pricing, make sure to ask each company how many actual pages they will optimize or create. If a company tells you “two or three pages,” find another firm to work with. If an SEO firm charges $1,500 for 60 optimized pages, then their cost per page is $25. Would you rather pay $1,500 for 60 optimized pages or $1,000 for “two or three” pages? If you do the math, your conclusion should be self-evident. Sometimes the seemingly less expensive option is actually much more expensive when calculated on a cost per page basis. Note that the ten keyphrase example described above would apply to a small business or to a company that’s just marketing one or two products. As you know from reading the chapter on keyphrase selection, there are usually many different search variations for a single product or service. If your company has a diverse product line, you may actually need to optimize for hundreds or even thousands of keyphrases. Additionally, if you have an advanced, database-driven web site, this may introduce a plethora of complexities that could add cost to the project. It’s usually easier for us to create new optimized pages for a web site than to try to work with the client’s existing pages. However, there are times when it’s more advantageous to the client to optimize the existing pages. n

Directory consultations — You already know the difference between a directory and a search engine. You also know from reading Chapter 8 that directories require a completely different optimization strategy from search engines. Many SEO firms charge separately for directory consultations and submissions. Some firms include directory consulting as part of their standard service. It makes no difference either way, as long as you’re aware of what you’re paying for with each firm. If your site is already listed in Yahoo! and the other major directories, there usually isn’t much value in paying an SEO company for directory

Chapter 16: Hiring a Professional

323

consulting. This is because it’s very difficult to change an existing listing in a directory. The exception to this would be if the SEO company is going to secure additional directory listings and you feel that those additional listings would benefit your business. Ask each firm whether or not directory consulting is included in their quote. If it’s not included, and you want your site listed in the directories, find out in advance how much this service costs. n

Link popularity — As you know, link popularity is critical to attaining top search engine rankings. Unless your site already has great link popularity, you should definitely make sure that your SEO company includes a link popularity campaign in their quote. You should also clarify the exact methodology that the company will use to build your site’s link popularity. As you remember from Chapter 13, there are right ways and wrong ways to build link popularity. Make sure your SEO firm is at least as knowledgeable about this subject as you are.

n

Submission fees — You’ll recall from Chapter 10 that many of the major search engines and directories offer “express inclusion” or “paid inclusion” programs. These programs help your site or your pages get listed faster in exchange for paying a submission fee to the search engines and directories. In some cases, paid inclusion is your only option. For example, Yahoo! currently charges an annual fee of $299 to any commercial site that wants to be included in the directory. Most SEO firms take advantage of these paid inclusion programs in order to get their clients listed faster. Submission fees should always be included in your quote and should ideally be itemized separately from other costs, so that you know exactly what you’re paying for.

n

Bid management — Bid management refers to the idea of managing your bids on pay-per-click search engines, such as Overture. Many SEO firms offer bid management as an optional service. You provide the firm with specific parameters, such as your desired ranking for each of your keyphrases and the maximum amount you’re willing to spend per visitor. The SEO firm will then periodically log into your pay-per-click accounts and update all your bids in order to keep your site in your desired position. The SEO firm will also check each of your bids to make sure that you’re not overpaying for any phrases. Since the

324

Chapter 16: Hiring a Professional

pay-per-click search engines have become so competitive, bid management can be a valuable service for your site. As with all the other services we’ve discussed, find out if bid management is included and the amount that the SEO firm is charging for the service. n

Contractual obligations — Make sure you understand your contractual obligations. Would you rather hire a company that charges $500 per month with no required contract length or a company that charges $400 per month with a minimum of a one-year contract? Are your optimized pages hosted on your server or the SEO firm’s server, and what happens to your optimized pages if you cancel the service? Believe it or not, some companies actually hold your pages “hostage” in the event that you cancel. Then they may take your search engine listings and sell them to one of your competitors. As unbelievable as this sounds, we hear horror stories like this all the time. Ask before you buy.

Credibility While there are many highly credible SEO firms, there are also some fly-bynight operations that take people’s money without providing any real service. Since search engine optimization is such a complex subject, most clients don’t want to be burdened with having to understand the technical details of the process. Therefore, it becomes very easy for unscrupulous companies to take advantage of these people. By now, you probably know enough about the technical aspects of optimization to be able to differentiate between a credible SEO firm and a scam. Nevertheless, before you invest thousands of dollars with any company, it’s important that you take some extra steps to protect yourself against fraud. Here are some factors you should consider prior to hiring an SEO firm: n

How long has the SEO firm been in business? — Being in business for a long time doesn’t necessarily mean that a firm is credible. There are some scam operators who’ve been around for years. Conversely, a company that’s only been in business for a year or two shouldn’t necessarily be disregarded. One year in “Internet time” is a pretty long time. With some diligence, it doesn’t take that long for an

Chapter 16: Hiring a Professional

325

intelligent person to be able to learn and apply the principles of search engine optimization. However, if a company has only been in business for six months, that might give you some pause. n

Call the Better Business Bureau — Find out if the SEO firm is a BBB member and whether or not there are any unresolved complaints against the company.

n

Check references — Many companies are reluctant to give out references and for good reason. They may not want their existing clients hassled with phone calls from prospective clients. They may also be concerned that their competitors will pretend to be prospective clients and then, after asking for references, try to solicit their existing clients. Nevertheless, once you establish yourself as a serious and credible client, you should insist on talking to at least one or two existing clients before sending an SEO firm your money. The policy at MarketMySite! is that we don’t give out references until the prospective client tells us that she’s checked out all other aspects of our company and she’s ready to sign on with us. At that point, we provide references as a final condition of sale.

n

Review reports from existing clients — In many ways, this credibility check is the acid test of whether or not an SEO firm is effective. If the SEO firm can show you reports containing top rankings for competitive keyphrases, then you can have some degree of assurance that the firm is at least competent. Unfortunately, reports are not always what they seem. When reviewing a report for an existing client, check the following items: n

Are the phrases competitive? — Some SEO firms post reports on their web sites and a lot of the time I have to laugh when I see these reports. They often show top rankings for ridiculously easy phrases such as “swimming pool supplies in anchorage Alaska,” or “landscape design specializing in Japanese Bonsai trees.” Some other deceptive tactics include showing reports that include only uppercase keyphrases or using the client’s company name as a keyphrase. How hard is it to get a top ranking for your company name when your site is probably the only site on the web that contains the name?

326

Chapter 16: Hiring a Professional

n

Are the phrases quoted or unquoted? — Remember earlier in the book when we discussed the idea of exact phrase searches versus inexact searches? More than 90% of people search using inexact mode, which means that they do not enclose their search phrases in quotes. I’ve seen examples of SEO firms tricking their clients into thinking they have great results by running their reports in exact search mode. Of course the reports will look much better if you run them in exact search mode. However, this is not consistent with the reality of how people actually search. You should disqualify any SEO firm that sends you reports with quotes around all the keyphrases.

n

Verify the results — Most SEO firms use WebPosition to provide reports to clients. Since the WebPosition reports are in the form of HTML documents, it’s very easy to modify the results and send out fraudulent reports. Therefore, you should always verify the results for yourself by running searches manually and determining whether or not the results are consistent with what you see on the reports. If the results don’t match exactly, this does not necessarily mean that the report is fraudulent. Results can change from day to day, from hour to hour, and can even vary when running repeated searches on the same search engine. However, if you find a lot of inconsistencies between the report and your manual search results, you should point this out to the SEO firm and ask for an explanation. They should be able to provide you with additional reports for other clients or perhaps run an updated report on the same client to show the latest results.

n

Company address — If the company uses a P.O. box for their address, and you’re unable to obtain a physical address for them, you should eliminate that firm from consideration. The reasons for this should be self-evident.

n

Guarantees — Be careful with guarantees. I’ve seen instances of SEO firms that have made outlandish guarantees in an attempt to attract new clients. Unfortunately for their clients, some of these firms subsequently went out of business, leaving their clients with nothing more

Chapter 16: Hiring a Professional

327

than a worthless guarantee. The moral of the story is that a guarantee is only as good as the company that stands behind it. Additionally, some firms achieve their guarantees using some of the deceptive techniques I described above. They run exact search mode reports using lowercase, UPPERCASE, and Title Case variations of each keyphrase and count any occurrence of the keyphrase as a placement. They’ll also convince their unsuspecting clients to use extremely easy keyphrases. Then they present the client with a huge, impressive-looking report showing many top placements. However, all the top placements do nothing to generate traffic to their clients’ sites. Guarantees should really be taken with a grain of salt. Instead of depending on a guarantee to make your hiring decision, look at more tangible factors such as the ones we’ve previously discussed. Our philosophy is that we’d rather under-promise and over-deliver. Most of our legitimate competitors abide by the same philosophy. I hope that this discussion has not completely turned you off from the idea of hiring an SEO firm. It’s true that there are some charlatans in this industry. However, the vast majority of SEO firms are honest, reputable companies that are trying hard to earn a living while providing a valuable service to their clients. Like any business decision, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Before you spend thousands of dollars with an SEO firm or any type of consulting company, do your homework and make sure you understand the kind of company that you’re dealing with.

Communication and Customer Service Once you’ve narrowed your list down to include only firms that are affordable, competent, and credible, the final step is to choose the SEO firm that you feel most comfortable working with. This is the most subjective part of the selection process. As we’ve already discussed, search engine optimization is a highly technical field. Therefore, it tends to be populated by people who are more technically oriented, rather than people-oriented. Perhaps this is an overgeneralization, but you may find that many firms you contact are unwilling or unable to communicate effectively with their clients. You may

328

Chapter 16: Hiring a Professional

get a sense of this when you check references. Their existing clients may say that the firm has done a wonderful job, but they don’t seem to be customerfriendly, or they don’t communicate well. A good SEO firm should function as more than just a mechanism to increase your search engine rankings. A common problem, even among some SEO firms that are excellent from a technical perspective, is that they tend to have a sort of marketing myopia. They focus only on the rankings, without any consideration as to how much traffic the rankings are generating or whether that traffic is converting into actual sales for their clients. When clients complain that they’re not getting enough business, the typical response is “Our job is to get you ranked in the search engines. We can’t force people to click on your listings, and we can’t force them to buy from you.” While that may be true in a literal sense, one of the characteristics that distinguishes great SEO firms from good SEO firms is that great SEO firms will look beyond the rankings. They will work with their clients and proactively make suggestions to help the client’s business succeed. Here are some examples of areas that your SEO firm should be able to help you with: n

Keyphrase research to help you choose the best keyphrases to promote in order to properly target your niche.

n

Copy writing for your search engine listings to help maximize clickthroughs.

n

Copy writing and design modifications for your web site to help maximize conversions.

n

ROI (Return on Investment) analysis for your pay-per-click advertising.

n

Traffic analysis to help you understand visitors’ behavior on your site.

A great SEO firm will function as your online marketing partner to provide you with the guidance you need to succeed online. This doesn’t mean that all these services will be provided for free, nor does it mean that the SEO firm will necessarily perform these services in-house. However, you should always feel like you’re working with a company that understands your needs and is willing to address those needs by helping you in any way necessary.

Chapter 16: Hiring a Professional

329

A final word about pricing: As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, pricing for SEO services varies widely. While paying a lot more doesn’t always translate into better results, firms that charge a lot more money usually do so because they’re providing a much higher level of service. For example, at MarketMySite! we make a distinction between small business clients and corporate clients. These are two completely different types of clients, and therefore we have different pricing models to accommodate each of these groups. Some SEO firms choose to focus on just the high end of the market or just the low end of the market. This is why it’s always important, when you receive a price quote from an SEO firm, to put that quote in the context of the services that are being provided.

Afterword I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading this book as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. I also hope that I’ve given you the necessary information to either perform your own optimization using WebPosition Gold or to hire a professional optimization company. Doing business online can be extremely rewarding, both financially and personally. Nevertheless, many online companies fail just as offline companies fail. One of the main reasons that companies fail is lack of planning, particularly in the area of marketing. Remember that search engine optimization is just one component of your marketing mix. It can be a very effective source of traffic, but traffic alone does not equate with success. If you don’t have a marketing plan, you should definitely consider developing one before you invest any money into marketing. You’ll find detailed information on marketing plan development on the MarketMySite! web site. Best of luck, and best wishes!

331

Index

333

Index --> tag, 30-31 .htm file extension, 31 .html file extension, 31 tag comments, 30-31, 192 company name, including in page title, 132 competitive analysis, 40 Competitive Analysis Report, 99-100 Concise Summary Report, 83-90 cross-linking, 298, 315

D default web page, 32 Detail Report, 92-93, 129 directories, 4, 304 importance of correctly submitting to, 304-305 submitting to, 238-242 directory-based engines, see directories Domain Management dialog, 58 domain name, importance of having own, 56 doorway pages, 301-302, 314-315

334

Index

duplicate pages, 118, 312

E end tag, see tag engine properties, 66 engines, global, 65-66 pay-per-click, 68-69 regional, 66 selecting, 66-68, 123-125, 164-165, 236-237 event, 279 setting when to run, 284-285 exact matching, 163, 176-177 excessive keywords, 117-118 express inclusion, see paid inclusion express submission, 261 expression matcher, 4

F failed searches, 106 FFA sites, 13, 297 File Transfer Protocol, see FTP font size, changing, 29 Font tags, 29 frames, 203 Free For All sites, see FFA sites FrontPage extensions, 208 FTP, 4, 208 status messages, 222 using to upload files, 218-221

G global engines, 65-66 graphic, inserting in web page, 30, 133-134 guided submissions, 238-242

H head area, 24 analysis of, 186-188 Head tag, see tag Heading tag, see tag headings, placing on page, 134-135 help files, 83 Hidden Input tag, 202-203 hidden keywords, 313 hidden text, 117, 202

hits, recording, 273 tracking, 266-267 HitsLink tracking service, 266-267 home page, importance of ranking high, 102 HTML, 22 reading online, 23 tags, 22 see also tag writing, 22 HTML document, opening, 31 saving, 31 HTML Editor, selecting, 169-170 hyperlink URL, 30, 90-191 hyperlinks, creating, 29-30 Hypertext Markup Language, see HTML

I image, inserting in web page, 30, 133-134 Image tag, see tag Import URLs dialog, 248-249 indexing, verifying on search engines, 61-65, 107-109 inexact matching, 163, 177 Internet connection, configuring, 48-52 invisible text, 117, 202 IP address, importance of unique, 56 Italic tag, see tag italicizing, 27-28

J JavaScript, 204 junk pages, 316

K keyphrase positions, comparing, 99-100 keyphrase rankings, 85-89 keyphrase selection for search engine optimization, 34 keyphrases, see also keywords choosing with WordTracker, 37-39 location of, 132 tips for targeting, 41-43 using in body text, 136-138 using in title, 132-133 keyword density, see keyword weight frequency, 176-178, 305

Index

location, 305 matching, 163-164, 177-178 placement, 175 prominence, 180-181, 305 proximity, 175-176, 306 stuffing, 16, 202, 313 weight, 18-19, 178-180, 305 keywords, see also keyphrases consecutive use of, 202 excessive, 117-118 off-topic, 117-118 targeting, 303-304 using in page name, 306 where to include, 306

L length of page title, 133 link farms, 296-297, 315 link partners, 294-295 finding using Arelis, 295-296 link popularity, 66, 173, 181, 294 increasing, 307 unsuccessful methods of increasing, 296-297 link relevancy, 294-295 link text, 191 linking text, 139-140 links, importance of, 302-303 reciprocal, 298, 315 listings, displaying for each keyphrase search, 92-93 displaying for site, 90-92 Log Report, 104-106

M matching, keyword, 163-164, 177-178 meta description, 15-17 meta description tag, 25, 140-141, 188 meta keyword tag, 25, 140-141, 187-188 meta keywords, 15-16 meta refresh tag, 203 meta tags, 15-17, 25, 140, 301 misrepresentation of page content, 312 Mission, 54 checking status of, 79-80 reports, 83-109 results of, 82-83

running, 81 running individually or combined, 57 scheduling, 280-284 selecting engines for multiple, 113-114 setting up, 54-59 using effectively, 109 Mission results, assessing, 83-109 Mission status, checking, 104-105

N non-exact matching, 177 non-qualified traffic, 264

O off-page factors, 173, 294, 306 off-topic keywords, 117-118 online marketing, xii-xiii optimization company, see SEO firm optimized pages, 116 customizing, 143-145 misuse of, 117-118 myths of, 116 tips for creating, 146-147 oversubmitting pages, 315

P Page and Keyword Report, 100-104 page areas, analysis of, 187-193 Page Critic, 7, 18, 41, 158-159, 306 configuring, 160-172 Engine tab, 164-165 Page Editor tab, 168-172 Page Setup tab, 160-164 Settings tab, 165-168 Page Critic Analysis Report, 172-173 Page Analysis section, 184-193 Page Critic section, 181-184 Page Properties table, 202-204 report header, 173-174 Top Pages List, 204-205 Page Generator, 6-7, 116 configuring, 120-145 Description tab, 129-140 Engine tab, 123-127 Keywords tab, 127-129 Meta Tags tab, 140-141 Options tab, 141-142

335

336

Index

Page Setup tab, 120-123 Template tab, 143-145 troubleshooting, 147-148 using, 119 page jacking, 314 page title, 130-131, 187 tips for creating, 132-133 pages, adding to submission list, 233-235 deleting from submission list, 235 importance of regionalizing, 306 naming, 120 optimizing content of, 305-306 oversubmitting, 315 saving, 121 selecting for traffic analysis, 270 uploading, 218-221 paid inclusion, 261-262, 323 Paragraph tag, see

tag partial matching, 163-164, 177-178 pay-per-click advertising, 69 pay-per-click engines, 68-69 phrase vs. word, 42 placeholders, using in template, 145-146 valid, 153-155 position changes, interpreting, 110

Q qualified traffic, 264

R rankings, checking history of site, 96 checking in search engines, 100-104 notifying of change in position, 95-96 tracking, 307 reciprocal links, 298, 315 redirecting, 118, 203, 314 regional engines, 66 relevancy, 14-15, 17 factors for web page, 174-175 Reporter, 5-6, 41, 54, 83 configuring, 54-81 Customize tab, 77-79 Engines tab, 65-69 Keywords tab, 59-60

Mission tab, 54-59 Options tab, 69-77 Results tab, 79-81 troubleshooting, 110-113 URL Verification tab, 61-65 reports, Alert! Report, 94-96 archiving, 72-73 Competitive Analysis Report, 99-100 Concise Summary Report, 83-90 customizing, 77-79 Detail Report, 92-93, 129 Log Report, 104-106 Page and Keyword Report, 100-104 Summary Description Report, 90-92 Trend Report, 96-98 URL Submission Verification Report, 106-109 using effectively, 109

S Scheduler, 9, 278-279 configuring, 279-291 disabling automatic running of, 278 log, 291 Missions tab, 279-284 Options tab, 286-291 setting, 278 Time tab, 284-285 search engine marketing, guidelines for, 312-316 mistakes of, 300-303 tips for successful, 303-307 search engine optimization, x-xi, 12, 14, 34, 300 as part of web marketing strategy, xii-xiii choosing keyphrases for, 34 limitations of, 100-101 vs. advertising, xi-xiii search engines, 2 algorithms for indexing, 3 development of, 4 importance of, 10 reasons for submitting pages to, 227-228 selecting for Missions, 113-114 supported by WebPosition Gold 2, 4-5 verifying that pages have been indexed on, 61-65 searches, failed, 106 SEO, see search engine optimization

Index

SEO firm, 318 advantages of hiring, 321-322 choosing, 319 communication, 327-328 credibility of, 324-327 customer service, 327-328 pricing models of, 319-321, 329 services, 321-324 Silver Platter Foods case study, xiii analyzing pages, 157, 161-172 basic HTML code, 26 building optimized pages, 148-153 choosing keyphrases, 35-41 Concise Summary Report, 84-89 increasing link popularity, 295 optimizing pages, 119-120, 137-138 optimizing Title tag, 193-194, 196-202 page analysis, 181-193 scheduling missions, 282-284 searching for keyphrases, 59-60 selecting search engine category, 251-253 setting up Mission, 55 tracking pages, 270-273 uploading files, 210-211 URL verification, 61 using placeholders, 148-153 web site, xiii source code, 23 spam, 13, 306 spamming, 202 results of, 311 spelling variations, 43 spidering, 4 Submission Assistant, 241-242 submission dates, tracking, 108 submission fees, 323 submission files, archiving, 257-258 Submission Guide, 239-240 submission list, adding pages to, 233-235 deleting pages from, 235 options, 243-247 submission options, 250 submission recommendations, 108-109 Submission Results report, 259-260 submissions, automated, 238

bulk, 301 directory, 238-242 guided, 238-242 Submitter, 8, 226 Categories tab, 251-253 configuring, 228-260 Contact tab, 230-231 features, 226-227 Keywords tab, 231-233 Options tab, 253-258 Results tab, 258-260 URLs/Engines tab, 233-250 Web Site tab, 228-229 submitter software, 157 submitting pages, reasons for, 227-228 Summary Description Report, 90-92

T tag pairs, 23 tags, see HTML tags template, creating, 143-145 using placeholders in, 145-146 title of page, see page title Title tag, see <Title> tag title, tips for creating, 132-133 top page statistics, interpreting, 194-196 total words, 178, 305 tracking hits, 266-267 traffic, 264 traffic alerts, 268 traffic analysis, selecting pages for, 270 Traffic Analyzer, 9, 41, 264, 266 Add Tracking to My pages tab, 270-273 configuring, 267-273 Log on tab, 268-269 reports, 264-266 Setup Account tab, 267-268 troubleshooting, 273-275 Trend Report, 96-98 resetting, 98 Typewriter tag, see tag

U unique phrase, importance of on web page, 62 Upload Manager, 7-8, 122, 208 configuring, 209-223

337

338

Index

Queue tab, 209-214 Reports tab, 214-217 Results tab, 221-223 Upload tab, 218-221 Upload Queue, 209-210 adding files to, 211-213 removing files from, 213 URL Submission Verification Report, 106-109 URLs, adding to URL Verification tab, 63-64 importing, 247-249 linking, 138-139 tips for using in web pages, 191

V VBScript, 204 visibility percentage, 85 score, 85 statistics, 83-85

W web page, analyzing, 160-164, 193 comparing to another page, 166-168 default, 32 relevancy factors, 174-175 title, see page title verifying indexing on search engines, 61-65, 107-109 WebPosition Gold, 5, 310-311, 318 installing, 46 modules, 5-9 reasons for using, 12 registering, 46-48 search engines supported by, 4-5 using to optimize pages, 15 word stemming, 177-178 word vs. phrase, 42 WordTracker, 35-36 using to find keyphrases, 37-39

About the CD The companion CD contains a 30-day trial version of WebPosition Gold 2, along with a demo of a WebPosition Gold 2 video training course, and information about and a link to MarketMySite!. The CD will auto-run when you insert it into your CD drive. Follow the on-screen instructions.

WARNING:

Opening the CD package makes this book non-returnable.

CD/Source Code Usage License Agreement Please read the following CD/Source Code usage license agreement before opening the CD and using the contents therein: 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

By opening the accompanying software package, you are indicating that you have read and agree to be bound by all terms and conditions of this CD/Source Code usage license agreement. The compilation of code and utilities contained on the CD and in the book are copyrighted and protected by both U.S. copyright law and international copyright treaties, and is owned by Wordware Publishing, Inc. Individual source code, example programs, help files, freeware, shareware, utilities, and evaluation packages, including their copyrights, are owned by the respective authors. No part of the enclosed CD or this book, including all source code, help files, shareware, freeware, utilities, example programs, or evaluation programs, may be made available on a public forum (such as a World Wide Web page, FTP site, bulletin board, or Internet news group) without the express written permission of Wordware Publishing, Inc. or the author of the respective source code, help files, shareware, freeware, utilities, example programs, or evaluation programs. You may not decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, create a derivative work, or otherwise use the enclosed programs, help files, freeware, shareware, utilities, or evaluation programs except as stated in this agreement. The software, contained on the CD and/or as source code in this book, is sold without warranty of any kind. Wordware Publishing, Inc. and the authors specifically disclaim all other warranties, express or implied, including but not limited to implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose with respect to defects in the disk, the program, source code, sample files, help files, freeware, shareware, utilities, and evaluation programs contained therein, and/or the techniques described in the book and implemented in the example programs. In no event shall Wordware Publishing, Inc., its dealers, its distributors, or the authors be liable or held responsible for any loss of profit or any other alleged or actual private or commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. One (1) copy of the CD or any source code therein may be created for backup purposes. The CD and all accompanying source code, sample files, help files, freeware, shareware, utilities, and evaluation programs may be copied to your hard drive. With the exception of freeware and shareware programs, at no time can any part of the contents of this CD reside on more than one computer at one time. The contents of the CD can be copied to another computer, as long as the contents of the CD contained on the original computer are deleted. You may not include any part of the CD contents, including all source code, example programs, shareware, freeware, help files, utilities, or evaluation programs in any compilation of source code, utilities, help files, example programs, freeware, shareware, or evaluation programs on any media, including but not limited to CD, disk, or Internet distribution, without the express written permission of Wordware Publishing, Inc. or the owner of the individual source code, utilities, help files, example programs, freeware, shareware, or evaluation programs. You may use the source code, techniques, and example programs in your own commercial or private applications unless otherwise noted by additional usage agreements as found on the CD.

WARNING:

Opening the CD package makes this book non-returnable.