Month: July 2009

A higher search ranking is the vision of many Internet site owners. What they do not realize is that, if done properly the optimisation of their site for the search engines can also see it optimised for site visitors. Quite simply, search engines love content — the more content on a page, the simpler it is for search engines to work out what that page is basically about.

Search engines may struggle to work out the point of an internet page which has less than 2 hundred words, and may finally penalize that page in the search rankings.Include pages that are bigger than this, and search engines may throw in the towel on those pages as simply being too large. As I discussed in Part two of this series, it is not unusual for sites to experience important traffic increases after they switch from a table-based layout to a CSS layout. Search engines may like CSS-based sites and can score them higher in the search rankings.

The advantages of clean code, flexibleness of vital content placement, and larger content density make it simpler for search engines to access, consider, and rank CSS-based pages. Using CSS for layout is also highly advantageous for usability. If you know anything about search engine optimisation, you can know that many search engines place more significance on the page title than on any other of the page’s attributes.

If the title adequately describes the content of that page, search engines will be ready to more accurately determine what that page is about. A significant page title also helps site visitors work out where they are, both in the site, and online as a full. Search engines frequently say that the text contained in heading tags is more crucial than the remainder of the document text, as headings ( in principle, at least ) summarize the content right away below them. Many search engines allot the most significance to, then, and so on. Headings are also incredibly helpful for your human site visitors, as they help scanning significantly.

Talking generally, we do not read online : we scan, trying to find the info we are after. If we, designers and developers, break up pages with sub-headings that effectively describe the content underneath them, we make scanning way easier for users. We’ve already established that search engines love content, but many engines are particularly fond of the first twenty-five words on each page.

When we arrive at a web page the very first thing Web users must know is whether or not this page has the data they are after. ) way to discover is to scan thru the 1st paragraph, which, if it adequately describes the page content, should help out.

However, there are several parables about how Google works and, while reasonably safe in themselves, these fables have a tendency to permit folk to draw wrong conclusions about how Google works. This parable is frequent, and is the source of many grouses. Folks often notice a site with a lower PageRank than theirs is noted above them, and get upset. While pages with a higher PageRank do have a tendency to rank better, it is completely standard for a site to appear higher in the results lists though it’s got a lower PageRank than competing pages. To clarify this concept without going into too much technical detail, it’s best to think about PageRank as being made up of 2 different values. This is also the price shown in the Google Toolbar. This price is used to figure out the weighting of the links leaving your page, not your search position.

The toolbar does not show your tangible PageRank, only an estimation of it. It gives you an integer rank on a scale from 1-10. We don’t know precisely what the diverse integers correspond to, but we are certain that their curve has similarities to an exponential curve with each new “plateau” being harder to reach than the last. I have personally done some research into this, and so far the results point to an exponential base of four. So a PR of six is four times as tricky to reach as a PR of five.

This parable is a typical source of wrong expectations about Google. Folk will most likely see a site with less backlinks than their own site has a higher PageRank, and say that PageRank isn’t based totally on inbound links.

The reality is that PageRank relies on inbound links, but not just on the quantity of them. Instead PageRank relies on the price of your backlinks. To find the value of an incoming link observe the PR of the source page, and divide it by the number of links on that page. It’s completely feasible to get a PR of six or seven from only a few inward links if your links are “weighty” enough. The cause of this is that Google does not list all of the links that it knows about, only those that contribute above a specific amount of PageRank. This is particularly obvious in a brand spanking new site.

By default, all pages in Google have a minimum PR. So even a page without any inbound links has a PR worth, even though a little one. If you’ve got a new site with twenty or thirty pages, all of which Google has spidered, but you don’t have any backlinks from other sites, then your pages will still have a PageRank coming from these internal links. As your default page is likely linked to from each page on your internet site, it would even get a PageRank of nearly one or two from all of these tiny boosts. However, in this situation hunting for inward links will probably yield zero results.

Likewise , the keyphrase “tail light covers” would not produce conversions if you conducted automotive sales only. The phrase may bring visitors to your website, but if they do not find what they are trying to find when they get there, they will leave just as fast as they arrived. Don’t trick yourself into believing that broader is better. Before you implement your AdWords campaign, you need to understand precisely what it is that makes your organization stick out from the competition.

I’d counsel that you perform a research of your competitors. Look and see what they are doing, and which phrases they are using. Few site owners trouble to choose which destination URL should be applied to each ad. Instead, they point all ads in a campaign to the site’s homepage, then question why they are not getting decent conversions. Let’s image that you own a sporting products store. You could start by grouping all of the adverts you’d focused towards hockey skates into a single ad group.

You’d then create another ad-group which would contain adverts that centered hockey sticks, another that contained advertisements for hockey gloves, and so on.Organizing your ad group structure in this way gives you the facility to create in-depth reports on each ad-group, and to make real changes having a serious effect on those ads’ performance over a period of time.