Ask Kalena

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Dear Kalena…

I have recently optimized a friend’s website. The site was already listed with Google and Yahoo etc. I have noticed that since uploading the site a few weeks ago the new description and title for the home page is now listed and a few of the new page extensions.

In the SEO 201 course, you recommended submitting different listing descriptions for each search engine/directory. However, all the search engines are just using the title and description from each page they have listed.

1) Should I be listing pages not listed on the popular search engines or wait till the find them.

2) Should I only submit alternative descriptions where the site is not currently listed and do I only need to submit the home page?

With thanks

Peta

Dear Peta

You generally don’t need to submit sites to search engines as they will be discovered, provided there is at least one site pointing to them. But what you should make sure of is that each page on your site is being indexed. You can do this by creating an XML sitemap of your site and submitting it to Google via Webmaster Tools (also via Yahoo). More info is available at www.sitemaps.org.

Regarding different descriptions and titles - search engines will use whatever they think is the most relevant snippet from a page in relation to the search query. This could be taken from the title tag, the description or from the text on the page itself. You can control this to some extent by making sure each page on your site is optimized for a small range of target keywords/phrases so that each page has the opportunity to rank on it’s own merit.

When I talk about submitting different descriptions, I am generally talking about when submitting your site to niche directories and search engines that don’t automatically crawl sites to discover new pages.  If you use different descriptions for these submissions, you can easily track keyword referrals in your log files and recognize which sites are bringing you the most traffic. I hope this answers your question.

Popularity: 18%

Dear Kalena

I am hoping that you can help me as this has been driving me crazy! Certain search keywords such as “buy Taser” from the Index (home page) goes to page 1 in google for ONE day, then jumps to page 13 and climbs up to page 20 or so, then goes back to page 1 for one day. So, about once every two weeks those two keywords are on page one in Google for one day!

I do not have this problem with MSN. I am totally baffled. I was running Google Base thinking maybe there was a connection, but I inactivated the product search a few days ago, so I guess that is not the problem. The site is about 9 months old. Is it because I have a yearly expiration domain and Google thinks it will expire soon? I tried so many things. Please help ASAP. Thank you SO much!

Terri

Hi Terri

Ack, I seem to be a magnet for Yahoo SiteBuilder issues this week. First up, please read my recent rant about Yahoo SiteBuilder.

Secondly, to answer your question about shifting rankings, in a nutshell it’s because Google uses different datacenters to show results and shuffles between these datacenters (they each have slightly different ranking algorithms). So on one datacenter your site might be on page 1 for a search query but then for that same query done a day (or hour) later you might be on page 4, because they are showing results from a different storage facility.

Different pages from your site and your competitor’s sites might also be stored on different datacenters, meaning that pages that normally rank well may not appear at all depending on which datacenter Google is using to fetch search results and whether or not all your indexed pages are listed in that datacenter. Your competitors may have more pages indexed by Google across all datacenters so they seem to be consistently outranking you. Or else they have simply done a better job of optimizing their pages to match search queries.

But the datacenter issue is the least of your worries. Here are just some of the problems I see with your site:

• The Title and META tags are poorly constructed and not optimized for performance on search engines. This can partly be blamed on the tag limitations of Yahoo SiteBuilder, but mostly it is just poor keyword choices and incorrect formatting. For example, your META Description tag contains a bunch of keywords instead of a readable sentence! Your poor Title and META tags are limiting the ability of each of your site pages being found in search engines.
• You’ve got the worse case of code bloat that I’ve seen in years, thanks to excessive code added to your HTML pages by the SiteBuilder program and the page author. Code bloat happens when unnecessary code snippets are added to your HTML code during the editing of your pages. A very common way this happens is if you cut and paste text from one program into your web editing software. For example, if you cut and paste from MS Word into your web editor, you can often find extraneous code (such as span tags) added. These snippets build up and add to your file size and can often lead to invalid code, meaning that Googlebot and other search robots may have problems indexing your pages and abandon the site, meaning fewer pages are indexed and included in their datacenters. Apart from that, code bloat impacts the ranking relevancy of your site because it impacts the keyword density of your pages. For example, if your competitor mentions “buy taser” in their page text the same number of times as you do in your page, but their page has less code to wade through, it is likely that their page will rank higher than yours for the search query “buy taser”.
• As I suspected, your code does not validate. When I ran it through the W3C Markup Validator, it spat back 236 errors, including a missing DocType! Now Google and other engines are pretty forgiving these days when it comes to invalid code, but even if some pages are being successfully indexed, the errors could well be sabotaging your site’s ability to rank well.
• I’m betting that Google hasn’t indexed many of your site pages. Read this post about how to get more pages indexed and how to monitor your site’s performance in Google.
• You’ve got keyword repetition ad infinitum happening on your home page. The excessive keyword reps are almost certainly going to trigger search engine spam filters if they haven’t already. I think you’re breaking practically all Google’s Webmaster Guidelines!
• There don’t seem to be many internal or external links pointing to your site. You should try to gain some links from other web sites in your industry as theme-based links will help boost your position in Google.

There’s lots more wrong with your site, but I think I’ve given you plenty to get on with for your $10 coffee donation. The rest is up to you. As I always say to businesses using free or cheap web design and hosting tools online, you get what you pay for. If you want potential customers to take your business seriously, YOU need to take it seriously and spend some time and money addressing your site’s compatibility with search engines.

You should consider paying a site designer to build you a better looking site that can be properly optimized. If you can’t afford a professional site design, consider installing the (free) WordPress blogging platform on your server and taking full control over your site that way. Teach yourself - it’s free - and then hire a search engine optimizer to get your site ranking better. If you can’t afford a search engine optimizer, consider posting your requirements on our Search Engine College jobs board as there are a lot of SEO students just itching to sharpen their skills on a real site.

I’d also recommend downloading the free Search Engine Optimization lesson from Search Engine College so you can better understand what makes a site rank well in search engines and take control of your own site’s destiny. Good luck!

Popularity: 42%

Hi Kalena…

I would like to optimize a website for its geographic location. In order to do so, I think I should preface certain home-page keyphrases with the name of the city. I’m wondering if I should repeat this practice throughout the website for better effectiveness, or would this be unnecessary? I’m also wondering please, what is the purpose of the Distribution Meta tag. Please let me know.

Thank-you
Peter

Dear Peter

First up, you should be aware (or perhaps you already are) of Google’s new feature that allows webmasters to associate a web site with a region/country.

Regarding how best to optimize a web site for different geographic locations or languages, sub-domains seem to be the way to go, as recommended by Matt Cutts of Google.

But if you are only optimizing for a single city, you should treat that city as another keyword on your page. That is, don’t repeat it ad-nauseum, only where it makes sense to do so. I would recommend no more than 5 repetitions of a target keyword or phrase on a single page. If your whole site content is about the city then it should naturally rank well for city-related phrases anyway as people will be linking to your site using the city name.

Regarding the Distribution META tag, as far as I am aware it is not a valid META tag, is unsupported by any search engine and the myth that you should include one has simply hung around like a bad smell like the Dublin Core META Tags. Skip it - otherwise it will simply contribute to your code bloat.

Popularity: 100%

Hi Kalena…

Is it true that only the first 65 characters of the title tag will be seen in a searcher’s browser even though about 200 will be indexed?

Diane

Dear Diane

Yes, around 65-70 characters (or 8 words) will be displayed and up to 300 characters will be indexed (by Google at least).
More info here:

Best Practices for Title Tags and

The Title Tag Experiment

Popularity: 44%

Dear Kalena…

I just came across ‘Geo Tags’ that allow you to identify the geographical location of your business. I’d like to incorporate them on our local office pages like Boston, Charlotte, Houston, etc.

[meta name=”geo.position” content=”35.2287 -80.8458 “]
[meta name=”geo.region” content=”US-NC”]
[meta name=”geo.placename” content=”Charlotte”]

Is this worth doing? What do you think?

Kelly

Dear Kelly

I’ve done a bit of research into geo tags and it appears that Google is now supporting geo-tags for Google Earth.

Google has also added geo-tagging ability to YouTube videos, so the location functionality is obviously part of their algorithm now. In addition, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search all now support GeoRSS. GeoRSS is a format that extends RSS by adding location data using Google Maps and the Google Maps API.

So yes, I would say go ahead and add them to your pages. The code additions are fairly small so they shouldn’t bloat the code too much.

Popularity: 47%