I found one such banned link today on my site, on a page I hadn’t updated in a a while; I updated it with all the info I have on how to effectively get links to your site.

The article is here: How to Get Links To your Site

Good luck on using it. If you have questions about link building, I’ll be happy to answer them below.

Best,

Jere Matlock

Hi there,

I have a question about search engine friendly sites in regard to your article here about SEO of Database-driven Websites. I’m trying to make a website search engine friendly, using descriptive urls. Currently every link to a subpage looks like this: www.dom.ain/?visit=cat

So I only have 1 index file that provides information the user wants. Is there any way to improve this without creating a new php for every page on the site?

I thought about creating a *.htm that will route to the corresponding php url.

E.g. company.htm file routes to /?visit=comp

But I gathered that search engines don’t like links that are opened via Java Script.

Thx for any help, it would be greatly aprechiated.

Kind Regards, Jan

I replied:

When we have a website that uses variables in the domain names, we usually
use a system called Mod Rewrite on a Linux/Apache/mySQL/PHP (LAMP) server
to make more user-friendly URLs. This doesn’t work the same a Windows IIS
server, but works well on a LAMP server. Most websites nowadays are on LAMP
servers.

It works like this:

In the .htaccess file put these lines for each of the pages of the site.
(Contact a web programmer for a quote on doing this if it is beyond your
technical skills — it should be fairly fast and cheap to get done.)

—-
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^airport.php /community.php?unit=airport.php&language=english [L]

—–
You only need to tell it “RewriteEngine On” once. For every page you want to rewrite like this, you add another line.

So when someone goes to airport.php, what they actually get is the community.php page, with all its variables. What Google “sees” is airport.php. What a visitor “sees” in his browser address bar is airport.php.

What’s actually displaying to both Google and your visitor is

community.php?unit=airport.php&language=english

This allows you to have a shorter URL that is more search engine friendly.

Here’s a better example:

RewriteRule ^big-green-widgets.php /product-display.php?productid=widgets&productstyle=blue&productsize=big[L]

There IS no page named big-green-widgets.php on the server. (Like Neo learns in The Matrix movie, “There is no spoon.”)

The server sees a request for the page “big-green-widgets.php” and because of this line in the .htaccess file, the server goes and gets the info it
needs to create the page on-the-fly.

Also, don’t use JavaScript for your links. In your navigation menus, link to the names of the pages you set up in the .htacess file, like “big-green-widgets.php”. Even if that actually mod rewrites over to www.dom.ain/?visit=cat1324, it doesn’t matter. As far as Google and your visitors are concerned, you have a page called big-green-widgets.php.

Mod rewrite is a wonderful tool for anyone trying to optimize a site that is built using only a single page with variables, or using a long string of variables and a database.

Make sense?

Best,

Jeré Matlock

http://www.wordsinarow.com

Website Design & Marketing / SEO

Their CMS system was really getting in the way of doing things like adding a “canonical” meta tag to each page of the site.

Over the years I’ve optimized several smaller drug rehab sites; yesterday I received a nice SEO testimonial from a drug-rehab SEO client in Canada, who is now #1 for her drug-addiction-related search phrases in Google Canada. It’s always great to receive these enthusiastic success stories and realize that what we do actually *does* help people reach the top of Google, and in this particular case, it helps the people searching for help for their drug-addicted loved ones, as well.

I like it when everybody wins.

Every so often I receive a thank-you email from a random user of my main site about SEO, Words in a Row:

Just wanted to thank you for the incredible information about SEO on your site. Everything was so easy to understand/well written for the non technical user. Thank you! ~~ Cheryl Palange
Heard about through a Google search on “SEO tutorial“.

There IS a lot of info about SEO on my site; it’s nice to be appreciated.

For the off-site SEO, which is mainly various methods of link building, I bought a new SEO tool (something I rarely do) that does a pretty good job of data gathering on the backlinks to her main competitor’s website. Her main competitor within the last couple of years basically copied the format of her site, and her business model, and then went out and contacted all her advertisers to get them to advertise on his site. Pretty slimy. Then he’s done a better job of link-building over the last year or so, but that’s about to change based on the information I gathered using the SEO Spyglass program. It looks through all the Yahoo backlinks, and allows you to see which pages linking to a competitor have how much Google PageRank so you can contact them and get links from the same pages. It also notes whether those links are rel=nofollow, so you can ignore those. It’s a pretty handy tool for that one task. I have about half a dozen SEO programs that I use for various features when doing these SEO audits – none of them do an adequate job all by themselves, and the automated recommendations they make are often silly. (Such as, “Your top competitor has a keyword density of 7.2%. Your site only has a keyword density of 6.5%. You need to raise your keyword density by 0.7%”. I pay little attention to keyword density; as long as the keywords are used in the right places on a page, keyword density has not proven to be important to good rankings.)

Among the list of action items that this directory needs to take are:

1. Channeling the PageRank through her site; there are about 30 category pages, and they all linked to each other. I advised her to use rel=nofollow on many of those so that the link juice flows down to her main categories for her main keywords, instead of being spread all over the site.

2. Putting rel=nofollow on all links out to affiliate sites.

3. Fixing all Google crawl errors. There were a few.

4. Using actual page names of categories instead of cat=32, etc. So the page names will have a chance to help rank at Google for the keywords of the page.

5. Setting up canonical meta tags on all pages

6. Setting up internal authority “hubs” for her main keywords, where page A links to page B using a main keyword, and page B links back to page A with the same underlined link text. That often results in a double listing in Google for that keyword.

There were a lot more points but I’m not going to list them all out here. I use our proprietary checklist of about 60 points that we are certain can make a difference to a site’s Google ranking in the natural search results.

If you have specific questions about how to optimize a large, database-driven website such as this directory, feel free to contact me.

Jere Matlock

You can have up to 10 buttons in one account, for different websites. There are many options of button colors to choose from. I like the black one above. I’ve already added it to the header of all the pages on jmblog by editing my WP template. (Yes, this is a WP blog despite the Art Nouveau theme we created five years ago when we started this blog!)

Raffy called me to tell me he was launching a few minutes ago, because I asked him to, so I could be the first person to mention it on Twitter. The site is live and making buttons now for the first 500 users to arrive. So don’t dally! Go there now!

I liked (from an SEO viewpoint) that the link within the button to his site is JavaScripted, so Google won’t follow it. So it doesn’t leak any page rank from your site over to Social Follow.

I’ve long been an advocate of the “Add This” social bookmarking tool. But this tool is different and makes it easy for others to follow you on their favorite social networks. It was, I think, very needed and wanted, and now is available, FREE.

Now to see how they will ever monetize this…. Even Google Adsense ads on their home page should generate some income as people show up to start using this new tool.

There are some good things about CMS:

1. It makes it easy for the customer/end user to go in and add pages, modify pages, etc.

2. Can’t think of any others.

There are some bad things about CMS from an SEO perspective:

1. It makes it very hard, for example, to add the canonical meta tag to all pages. Since the info is all in templates, I have to go in and modify the templates. But then all the templates would have the same canonical tag. Not good – those are supposed to contain the URL for reaching an individual page on the website. So we’ve had to go ask the CMS provider to add the canonical meta tag to this site, and allow us to modify each one on every page of the site. They want money to do this, even though it will improve their CMS system and allow them to figure out how to do this so they can sell it to other of their clients.

2. It makes it difficult to find and fix broken links. Are they in a template? Are they in content that is only in one page? When you are used to editing HTML by hand, as I am, it becomes a royal pain to have to figure out where the code actually resides (can be in one of 3 places) and then to find and fix it without breaking something else.

3. It’s difficult to set up a staging area where you can see changes before they go live on the site. Everything is live, as soon as you do it. So it’s unforgiving of any errors.

Other than that, it’s all puppies and sunshine.

It is in no particular order:

What is EVERY visitor to your site worth to you?

If you don’t know anything else about your visitors, it is essential to know the dollar value of each visitor to your site; how much each visitor is worth to you. You calculate this by dividing the value of your conversions (those doing what you want them to do on the site, i.e., signing up for your newsletter, or buying your product, or calling you on the phone), divided by the number of visitors.

Value of conversion divided by number of visitors needed to get that conversion, equals the value of each visitor.

You should already know the VALUE of a conversion if you’re doing any Google Adwords marketing. This is different than the COST of a conversion, which is what each conversion costs when you pay Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing at the end of the month.

The Value of a Conversion is figured this way: If it takes 100 conversions to make one sale of one product, sold for $1000, then each conversion is worth $10. So how many visitors does it take to make one conversion? If it takes 100 visitors to get one conversion (each conversion being worth $10) then each visitor is worth ten cents.

We have one client getting a 17% conversion rate from visitors to his site (signing up for his newsletter). That’s a really high conversion rate; he’s been tweaking his offers and the landing pages for several years to get there.

On average, over time, 1% of all conversions (on that site) will result in a sale of about $6000 worth of services. So each conversion (newsletter signup) is worth $60 (and costs us $3.43 to produce, using Google Adwords).

So if 17% of all visitors are conversions, then (where’s my college algebra when I need it?) how much is one visitor worth? It takes 588 visitors to make 100 conversions and thus make one sale. So 588 visitors is worth one sale of $6000. That makes each visitor worth (tada!) $10.20 on that site. ($6000 divided by the 588 visitors needed to make one sale = $10.20.)

That’s a stat we need to track and manage for each of our clients.

What does a site look like with Javascript disabled?

One of the speakers at SEMpdx brought up something I will be using when doing future analyses (SEO audits) of websites. What does the site look like when you disable JavaScript? Can you still navigate it? Do sections of it disappear? Google, by design, does not read JavaScript (which is client-side technology, meaning it only works at the browser level, not at the server level). So if your copyright date is supplied by a Javascript looking for the year and inserting it into your copy, then Google won’t ever know what the copyright date is.

If you want to hide links or cut all PageRank flowing from one page to another, then the best way to do that is by hiding the link inside JavaScript.

I’ve been told (don’t know if I believe it yet) that use of a rel=nofollow tag on a link to page can result in that page not being indexed at all by Google, even if there are some links to that page that are NOT using the rel=nofollow.

For example, if your home page links to your services page several times (perhaps through the top navigation tabs and the side navigation menu, and in the body of text on the home page, that would be three links to the services page) then, as I understand how it works, Google is only going to count one of those links anyway. But if you put rel=nofollow on two of those links, then the third link may also be considered rel=nofollow by Google. So we shouldn’t use rel=nofollow with complete abandon. I’d love to hear from anyone with data confirming or disputing that assertion.

But if you put two of those links into JavaScript, then Google won’t even see them or know they exist as links. (We’ve done that for many years.) Google will only find the link that uses a standard a href= anchor tag to create the hyperlink to the services page.

Don’t use the old Urchin Google Analytics code

If the Google Analytics code you are using contains the term “Urchin” in it, upgrade it to the new code available from Google Analytics. It will give you much more statistical analysis capability.

What happens to 404 pages on your site is important

Some sites do not do anything about 404 errors. So if a link breaks within their site, they don’t have a system set up to catch and handle such broken links that result in a “404 Page Not Found” error.

We have for many years used a simple piece of php code that returns a 404 error code (so Google knows the links is broken) and then routes to request over to the sitemap.html or sitemap.php file, so that a visitor trying to get to a page that no longer exists is routed to a sitemap, so he or she can select where to go next. We do this just because it is helpful to visitors; a blank page that only says “404 page not found” is not very helpful.

However, if you don’t set it up to use something like our system above, then many servers will route 404 page not found errors over to their own default page not found error — which transfers all the page rank from those pages to their default 404 page, removing the PageRank from your site and giving it to them.

If you have thousands of pages and many 404 pages, this can become a severe leak of PageRank.

For help on how to set up 404.php and 401.php pages that will route correctly to your sitemap, and still return a 404 error to Google, contact us

Link System Too Confusing?

One gal from Google, Susan Moskwa, said that if your internal linking system (navigation) is confusing to visitors, then it will be confusing to Google. She also reiterated what most SEO people know, “Don’t have more than 100 links on a page”. She stronly advised SEO types like me to “Make usability for visitors the top priority of your navigation system and linking structure.”

Her advice ties in with “siloing” — the recommended SEO practice of “containerizing” content. Instead of having a flat site with everything at the root level, break things up into folders, and link down into them from the home page, and link between pages in the same “silo” or “container” but don’t link between the sub-pages of different silos. That will flow the maximum PageRank down to each category (aka silo or container). Organize your site around your keywords, and you will have a better chance of Google figuring out what each section of your site is about, and thus ranking better for it.

Press Releases need an RSS Feed

Doug Hay of Expansion Plus brought this up, and while it is obvious, I hadn’t thought of it. (D-oh!)

Press releases sent out by PRWire or MarketWire need to be placed on your own website, with an RSS feed, about half an hour prior to going out on PRWire or MarketWire. (We also use the article marketing services of SendArticles.com.)

We are contacting our clients and advising them that they need an RSS feed on their news/press pages on their sites.

Doug also mentioned that putting a link to a video in a press release is a good idea.

Why does Wikipedia Rank so High at Google?

Dan Boberg quoted Google CEO Eric Schmidt as saying, “Wikipedia is mankind’s greatest gift to mankind.” I can’t find that quote online, so make no guarantee of authenticity; I am quoting Dan Boberg, not Eric Schmidt.

But if true, that is certainly revelatory as to WHY a lame Wikipedia article, written by people with an axe to grind or an apple to polish, rank so highly.

Because Eric likes Wikipedia.

MSN.com is busted

Derrick Wheeler of Microsoft gave a great short presentation on handling large problematic websites.

Microsoft.com (MSN.com or “msncom” as it is called at Microsoft) is a combination of about 200 websites, containing about 1.5 billion pages. That’s Billion with a B. Many of the pages no longer exist. Many pages are available through different paths, so have up to 500 different URLs pointing to the same page. Things are shifting all the time, and there’s no standardization of technology in use, site architecture, or anything else really.

It’s just as hit-or-miss as it seems.

I don’t envy Derrick his job – he’s trying to get that gargantuan site organized and sorted out, and working with about 200 different groups to do so. Ugh. I thought I had problems.

The good news is, he recently implemented some restructuring that got rid of half a million unnecessary pages from their index. Yippee! Only 1,499,500,000 pages to go!

————–

And there you have it, what I learned from 8 hours of seminars at SEMpdx.

Jere Matlock

Some clients want their website to sell things, and we set up shopping carts for them. Google Analytics is great for tracking those conversions that result in a sale. Although when you track the sales directly–how many orders actually came in–it doesn’t always line up exactly with what Google Analytics tells you. But Analytics provides a pretty close approximation.

Other clients want their website to collect email addresses so they can promote their bigger-ticket items to them, and Google Analytics does a pretty good job of tracking those kind of conversions too. Again, it’s not a perfect system, but Google Analytics is a fairly reliable conversion tracking program for these kinds of conversions.

But what if the objective of a Google Adwords campaigns is to make the phone ring? How can you track that? One of our clients, a very pragmatic dentist with an office in Beverly Hills, wanted proof from us that our Google Adwords campaign is driving people to his site that then call him and schedule appointments.

Obviously there’s no “conversion code” for “making the phone ring” in Google Analytics.

Now, my dentist client has enjoyed #1 through #4 rankings for some of his top search terms in Google’s natural search results for the last couple of years, since we built and optimized his website; we’ve also used the marketing services of SendArticles.com to help maintain his top rankings by getting great links to his site. It’s been a joint effort.

This dentist likes to use every possible service that makes sense to him, to market his site – he’s a very smart man.

Without my knowledge, another internet marketing firm whose name I shall not sully here, approached my dentist client with a method to achieve this objective for him (verifying the Google Adwords campaign was making the phone ring) by setting up a mirror site that was in every respect the same as his regular website, except for the phone number, and they sent the Google Adwords traffic to that mirror site instead of his regular site, and answered the phone for him so they could track the conversions.

In essence, they set up a .net domain name registered in their name (!) for him, and copied the content of his .com site over to it.

This is a BAD IDEA for SEO! Don’t do this!

The mirror site resulted in duplicate content being registered by Google when both sites were indexed and cached by Google, and BOTH sites were dropped entirely from the Google natural search results for trying to spam Google with duplicate content; it was quite a crash from his #1 rankings for his keywords in Google’s natural search results. All traffic to the site dried up.

In all fairness to that nameless marketing firm, they had put in place a robots.txt file that should have kept Google from indexing the mirror site — but it didn’t. Their lesson learned: Google doesn’t always obey what it says in the robots.txt file. I could have told them that, but nobody asked me.

So after his site disappeared from Google’s natural search results, my dentist client called me saying he wanted us to manage his Google Adwords campaign again because he was paying 5 times as much per click as when we used to do it for him, and by the way, could we get him back in the natural search results at Google?’

Well, yeah, I told him, “That’s what we do!”

The first thing we did was take down the mirror .net version of his website and reroute it to his regular .com site, and set up mod rewrites so any crawls by Googlebot only get the .com site, with 301 permanent redirects from the .net site pages to the .com pages. Within a week his site was back in the #1 spot in Google’s natural search results.

But what about his original objective of tracking the phone calls received from his Google Adwords campaigns? How to distinguish those visitors calling off the the Google Adwords campaign from the phone calls he gets from just having terrific placement for his site?

Basically, he needed to know whether it was worthwhile spending his money on Google Adwords, when he has such terrific placement in the natural search results. Is it worth it?

We thought about this for a while and kicked around some php solutions, but we wanted to keep all the pages as static HTML pages.

So we ended up with a simple solution:

1. We set up a second phone number for this dentist that rings on a new line in his office.

2. We used some JavaScript to display his regular phone number across all pages of his site for regular visitors; those who come from natural searches on Google proper, not his Google Adwords campaigns. That JavaScript also displays the new phone number for only those visitors from Google Adwords. Again, this is across all pages of his site. So visitors from Google Adwords will see only the new phone number, which isn’t published anywhere else. They won’t see his regular phone number anywhere on the site.

So if that new phone number rings — it’s gotta be a Google Adwords conversion.

And that’s how we can track them.

1. Would you say its better to have your domain name relevant to the sites content or actual highly searched for keyword that will be optimized on the site?
2. Content –Do you recommend hiring someone to write content if we cant do on our own? how exactly does this work?
3. I’ve been told that a high CPC value is important on those highly searched for keywords that your optimizing. What exactly does that mean? How does it work as far as making money?

Dumbed down answers please! Thanks Jimmy

My reply:

Hi, Jimmy -

1. Example: If your website is only about chickens, then having the domain name of chickens.com (or .net or .org) would be best. If your domain is about barnyard animals, then having a page on it optimized for chickens ( www.barnyard-animals.com/chickens.html ) would be best. I would think more searches would be made every day for “chickens” than “barnyard animals”.

2. It’s not hard to write content for a website. But if you can’t do it yourself, then by all means have someone else write content for you. Contact a writer (you can get bids on what you want by posting a notice on www.elance.com ). Give the writer a list of the pages you want, the keywords to be covered on each page, and have them put at least 250 words of text on the page. If the writer is any good, he will interview you and get the info needed to write the pages by picking your brains, or the brains of whoever has the info you need to go on the web pages.

3. I don’t understand your question.

The cost of CPC has nothing to do with optimizing a website for good natural rankings in the search engines. There is probably *some* correlation between the cost of an expensive CPC term, and how many people search for that keyword. But: one of the most popular searches recently was “Brittney Spears” — yet last time I checked, there’s only one person bidding on that keyword at Google Adwords, so the cost of the CPC for that term is minimal. “Brittney Spears” is just doesn’t seem worth much as a paid CPC term because there’s so much free stuff out there about her.

Then again, “life insurance” is both an expensive CPC term, and a very popular search term.

The external Google keywords tool here:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal will give you actual counts of how many people are searching for which terms every month at Google.

If you want to know what people are paying for certain CPC terms, use the free tool at www.spyfu.com.

Hope this info helps.

Best,

Jeré Matlock
SEO Specialist
www.wordsinarow.com