SEO Ranking Factors

Do what I say, not what I do. There is a recurrent idea that keeps coming back to me over the last few months about web marketing geeks preaching everywhere about what to do in the area of corporate blogging, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), social media and so on, but are not following these best practices for their own site. I believe this does not bring much credibility in the long run and we need to clean up our act. Over the last few years, I have been observing how regular business people (non-geek) tend to isolate us in a silo and usually take everything we say with a grain of salt. We are used to see skepticism in discussions with potential clients. Maybe we are partially responsible for this. Potential clients would question our motives since we are not doing for our own sites what we want to do for them. The Association of Internet Marketing & Sales is a very good example.

I was browsing around today and I came across the Association of Internet Marketing & Sales website and notice how bad their page titles are.

Here is why:

Use of the word Home in the page title for their “Home Page” (Home is referred as a stop word)

All page titles are written backwards, with the more specific information & keywords about a page are at the end of the page title

Page titles length not optimized (66 characters)

Choice of keywords for each page title does not increase the likelihood of being found, based on the content of every page

Page titles are the easiest thing you can work on in a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plan. It is also the fastest thing you can change and tweak in order to attract more visitors to your site from organic sources (free traffic). As I pointed out in one of my last posts on the impact of universal search on eye tracking & scanning patterns on a typical SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), it shows how important it is to have the content of any page clearly labeled in the first few words on the vertical axis. That can easily be done by putting the keywords related to any given page of your site in the first few words of your page titles, followed by the common theme of your entire site. It this easy enough? This is the first rule in SEO and I can’t wait to see all web marketing professionals following it. 

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I was a little surprised today when I discovered that the choice of my video titles used on my website (here and there) made a big differences in search results. Everyone knows that Youtube videos are now being indexed in Google but I was not sure if the other providers were, such as Brightcove, our preferred choice. With Dan Beauparlant, my awesome Videographer, we decided to put “Alexandre Brabant, Search Marketing” as the video title, just in case someone would stumble upon it elsewhere than my site. That decision proved to be right.

When I Google myself today, I found the Brightcove link in position #6.

What does this mean to you?
When you make a clip of anything, make sure that the content of the clip is well represented in the title, just like you would do with your site. Use the longest string of words that the video platform allows in order to increase your chances.Your clip then becomes searchable and more likely to be found. A keyword-rich video title can make a big difference in the amount of viewers and therefore generates a positive feedback for your business or anything else you want to promote.

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Eric Lowe, Online Marketing Strategist from the Rick Hansen Foundation sent me an SEO Quiz today. If you think you know a lot about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and consider yourself and expert, please take a few minutes to take the test. It is a serious exam and should be treated as such. If you are looking to hire an SEO specialist, use this as an entry test. I scored 64%. How did you do? Share your results here and learn what you missed.

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A lot of website owners are upset or puzzled when their website’s Google PageRank goes down or does not rise. Is it worth losing any sleep over changes in that green line and number that appear in a Google tool bar at the top of your browser? I think that excessive worry or thought about PageRank is not constructive, and it is better to put it all in perspective by taking a rational look at what PageRank is and what it is not. If you don’t even know what PageRank is, take a minute to download an install the Google Toolbar. Make sure you enable the advanced options, which includes the PageRank bar.

First of all, the concept behind PageRank is indeed at the heart of Google’s ranking process. The Google founders noticed that in many academic documents some sources were continually cited. They reasoned that if a particular document such as a book or research paper was mentioned in many places then it must be important. They applied this to the web and assumed that if one website links to another it is in fact, giving a “vote” for that site. A website that has many incoming links (or vote) must have a certain degree of importance. In the current Google algorithm the quantity and quality of incoming links is certainly a factor in deciding the ranking of a particular website for any given search-query.

Think about it. In the early days of the web people would build websites and then they would tell their visitors to check out other “cool” sites and they would link to these sites. This is the process of natural linking and it still goes on today. If you really have good content people will link to you without letting you know. Similarly if your name is Nickelback and your website is http://www.nickelback.com , thousands of people will link to you without you having to send a cheesy email begging for a link.

Various government agencies, educational institutions, established companies and anyone else who is “big” in the “real world” is likely to also be big on the Internet simply by virtue of their previous fame and accomplishment. This is not always true though. Google’s ranking system took this into consideration and this is one of the reasons why Google is currently the number one search engine. It gives better results and that is the main reason why people use it.

But, does that mean that only the big players can be seen on the net? Far from it. While there is a difference between one guy working in his house with one computer and a corporate giant with a whole staff, and this is indeed reflected in rankings. Prior to 1995 it would have been very hard for someone to spread their news and views far and wide as bloggers do today. It costs millions of dollars to publish a daily newspaper or to print and circulate a magazine, but it costs far less to publish a website or a blog, and lots of “little guys” have taken advantage of the power of the Internet.

But what about PageRank, how much of it do I really need to get my site noticed?

For those who are not familiar with the PageRank system:
Google supplies a toolbar which you can download and install on your browser. If you make a complete installation with all the advanced features, then every time you open a new website you will see a green and white bar with the label PageRank. Put your mouse on the bar and you will see a number from 0 to 10. If a website is not indexed by Google or banned by Google the bar may be grey or all white.

But what do the numbers mean? Is it worth worrying about a number 3 PageRank figure? Based on my observation I answer with my unofficial view on the rankings. Here is how I currently see it:

Page 0-2 shows that a site does not have many links and needs work. However, that does not mean you could not rank well if you have PageRank of 2 for several search terms in a fairly competitive industrial category. Therefore, PageRank is not everything; it may have an impact on your rankings and traffic, but in some cases it may not matter. In any case, if you have a PageRank of 0-2 (out of 10), you can work on it through proper link building activity which I will explain a little more at the end of the article.

PageRank 3 can be OK in some cases but in highly competitive industries you should work to improve it.

PageRank 4 is quite a normal number and indicates that you have enough links in either quantity or quality to make your site competitive.

PageRank 5 indicates that a site has many links or links from authoritative sites, and that Google has good “trust” in the site. It is a respectable and attainable PageRank.

PageRank 6 is very difficult to attain. This rank indicates that the site has many links and links from respected places. Remember the example of http://www.nickelback.com, which I mentioned above, it has a PageRank 6, so you can get an idea of the difficulty involved.

PageRank 7-10 is usually earned by large and established institutions or websites which have tremendous authority, due to the quantity and quality of the incoming links. It is extremely difficult to attain this ranking. You really have to be special to get it.

So, don’t worry excessively about PageRank. First look at your traffic, then look at your sales and finally at your bottom line. They are all important numbers to watch. If you want to increase your traffic and also PageRank, then here are a few steps that you can take:

1. Add content to your website. Make your website is so good and so useful that people will link to you without you asking for a link.

2. Write articles and get them published on other websites and blogs with a link back to your site.

3. Distribute online press releases

4. Judiciously exchange links, or even better, exchange content (containing links back to your site) with other websites.

5. Get your site listed in online directories.

These efforts will certainly help you to build targeted traffic, and they most probably will also help you to increase your PageRank as well. If you want me to get the job done for you on increasing your PageRank, then get in touch with me.

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Marketing Tip: People read from left to right! This may sound obvious but when it comes to writing strong Page Title Tags, which appear prominently in SERPS (Search Engine Result pages), most people are clueless. Since Page Title Tags are considered the most important piece of text on any given page, you should pay attention on how you are doing it.

Web Page Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization & Web Usability

Page Title tags definition: in HTML code, the title tag specifies the title of your Web page. It is code which is inserted into the header of your web page. The World Wide Web Consortium describes the title as a required element in an HTML document: Every HTML document must have a TITLE element in the HEAD section.

Now, here are some tips on how to write effective page title tags:

Page Title Tag Length:
Microsoft’s browser displays the first 95 characters of your title tag
Google shows the first 66 characters of the title tag (crops the rest) - it is not clear if the rest of the sentence is factored in for ranking purposes.
Yahoo shows the first 120 characters
Your page title should be composed of a primary title (Google) and secondary title (for Yahoo) separated by an hyphen (-)

Title Tag SEO Advices:
Make you Title Tags no more than 95 characters in length, even if Yahoo accepts more. The length of the browser bar is more than enough to write something compelling
Every page of your site should have a unique Page Title Tag
Put the most important keywords first at the beginning of the Title Tag (primary title), especially keywords related to the content of that specific page.
Put in your secondary title the information that is relevant for all the pages of the site (site theme)
Consider using Geographically specific keywords, especially if your business is mostly local
2 repetition of the same word is allowed in the Page Title Tag. You can do this twice. Make sure repetition is not side by side. More than this, it is considered spamming.
Capitalize The First Letter of Every Word To Make it Easily Readable.
You Don’t Need to Capitalize *stop* words like: the, of, it etc.
NEVER use the words “welcome” “site” “homepage” “introduction” “bienvenue” as in this example from the Canadian Tourism Commission on its home page
It is not necessary to put your web address in the beginning of the title tag as you can see in this example of bad Page Title Tag

Other examples of unoptimized page title tag usage:
Canadian Tire’s One Word Page title Tag
Starbuck’s Use of the word Homepage on their Page Title Tag
Walmart Canada’s Use of the word Welcome on their Page Title Tag

Here you can find the full description on how to write great Page Title Tags.

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I hate it when it happens. A question arises in a discussion or worse, in an article that needs to be written in no time, and yet, I don’t know the answer. I either shut up or research the topic enough to answer the question. What’s worse than barely understanding a question? It seems like a lot of people are quite comfortable with the concept, and talk freely about anything they don’t know, but I am not. So I turned to a few friends for help.

The question was: I heard someone say recently that search is out and tagging (folksonomies) are in .. What do you think about that?

Being a search expert, I needed to put tagging 101 in perspective with search. Not knowing enough about tagging, it was quite difficult to answer it. So I turn to my top geek friends Monique Trottier & James Sherrett from Work Industries for some help in the article I am about to write. The article is actually an interview about SEMPO Canada‘s role (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization in Canada) and how it contributes to the growth of Search Marketing, coast to coast.

So first of, Monique put the definitions down:
Tagging: tagging systems have, over the past couple of years, been increasingly more popular. Tagging is basically a way to enable users to add keywords (or tags) to their blog posts, webpages, images, videos. The thing about tags is, I as a user gets to decide how to tag my post. It’s not dependent on me selecting from a list of categories that someone else has provided.

Folksonomy vs Taxonomy: in folksonomies--regular humans get to pick keywords that make sense to them, instead of taxonomies--where scientists or experts decide on a hierarchy and set of terms and we are forced to use those terms.

To see examples of tags, we can look at Darren Barefoot’s flickr page:
http://flickr.com/photos/dbarefoot/817524718/
You’ll see in the right hand column a heading: Tags. He’s added in these keywords that help describe what the image is: raw, maple syrup, etc.

Here is another example:
You can see on Kate’s blog posts another example of tags:
http://www.mynameiskate.ca/2007/07/links-for-20-10.html
She’s got (tags: vancouver microsoft)

Blog search engines like Technorati use tags to improve search results. You can read more about tags here:
http://support.technorati.com/support/siteguide/tags

And then some explanation:
According to Monique Trottier, tagging systems have improved search, and in many cases, like on Flickr, I can add other tags to Darren’s tag list. So if I think the photo is also about “glass bottle”, I could add that tag. Then if I’m searching Flickr for “glass bottles”, Darren’s photo will show up in the search results. Tagging and search are thus highly related. In many ways, tagging helps increasing relevance in search results, which is what search is all about. So to respond to search is out and tagging is in: well, tagging is in because search is even more in. We can see from our webstats that 60-80% of the traffic comes from search engines. Tags allows us yet another way to optimize our blog posts, videos, images, etc.

The challenge is that although the tags are about folksonomies there are still standards about the correct way to use tags in order to reap the benefits of improved search. It works in places like Flickr where you enter tags and the tags are built into the search mechanism of that site. It’s more difficult in your own blog where you have to know the correct way to insert your tags.

I would say that tags are yet another way to optimize for search.

According to James Sherrett, President of Work Industries, the question of optimizing a website or webpage for search or tagging is setting up a false opposition. James would never recommend to someone that they optimize for search or for tagging or for voting on Digg, or for video indexing, if that ever arrives. Rather, he recommends that you build a strong website for people. That website should also cater to search engine bots and tagging systems, and anything that might come along. The point to remember is that in prioritizing all those different considerations, people have to come first.

Tagging is in fact very complimentary to search. It’s another way any one of us can enrich the information available about a website or webpage. That’s good for people and good for search bots. On the websites I see and manage, the new traffic continues to come from search. Tags can augment that traffic, but people love to search. And within search, people love to use Google.

For more on tagging, here is a really academic paper on tagging if you want more info.

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So you found yourself with a few minutes on your hands to optimize your site. Now, I honestly believe there are only two MAIN things which support the Search Engine Optimization process and reward your website with high rankings you desire. Put simply, these two things are Keyword Rich Content and Targeted Back Links (with proper anchor text). You have to do both in order to earn your way to the top.

Here are 7 powerful steps you can use to optimize your site (SEO) in order to reach (earn) high search engine rankings:

Step 1: Determine Highly Searched Keywords
Determine highly searched and targeted keywords/keyword phrases related to your site and put them into a list. Here are the free tools to use:
Google External Keyword Tool
Yahoo Keyword Inventory Tool
Wordtracker

Step 2: Register Keyword Rich Domain Names
While there have been contrasting arguments about whether having keywords in your domain helps, I strongly feel it does. The same goes for dashes between words in the domain. As long as you have a domain name that represents what you do, even partially, it will work.

Step 3: Use Your Targeted Keywords In Your Copy
Use the list of keywords in step 1 within your website copy, especially in the title, headline and first paragraph. The important thing is to make them flow smoothly within the context of the copy so prospects will not find it weird.

Step 4: Insert Keyword Rich Relevant Content
Next, build up your site’s content with relevant topics containing your keywords.

Step 5: Aggressively Acquire Targeted Back Links
This is the second most important (some say it’s the first) factor to note after targeted and relevant content. If you are not sure where to start there, I suggest you go here: 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies

Step 6: Hand Submit Your Site To The Top Directories and Search Engines
There’s no point in using those ‘submit to millions’ services as only a few search engines really matter. Using those automatic services may actually cause your site to be penalized by these major engines. Do you really need a list of search engines to submit to? I suggest you start by Google Add URL page. Please note that as soon as you have a few links pointing to your site, Google will find your site anyway, so there is no point submitting it. This may speed up the indexing process though.

Step 7: Tune Your Site For Maximum Optimization
The final step would be to constantly monitor your traffic and analyze your website traffic against rankings. This assumes you have Google Analytics in place. If you don’t, you should. It is free. This is so you can review and tweak for further improvement in your rankings.  I found a great free tool to get this done and monitor your rankings: try Free Ranking Monitor For Google

Let me know if this process works for you. These are the same steps if you want to Optimize your blog and corresponding blog posts for search engines. 

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Danny Sullivan published a great article I stumble upon today about the latest changes at Google about increasing relevancy to their users through personalization & web history. In a nutshell, everyone who has installed the Google Toolbar (and enables the Web History feature) is sending information to Google about which pages they visit. This information is then calculated and the user’s search results get flavored with this increasingly relevant user-specific information. As a result, not all users are seeing the search results in the same order because of this important change. Personalization & the use of Web History then become a new component of Google’s already robust algorithm. According to the article, it seems like web history now has an impact of every site’s ranking where most visited sites get better position.

According to Gord Hotchkiss, who wrote a lot in the last few weeks about Google personalization through web history on his blog at outofmygord.com, this has a much more dramatic impact that most people imagine. Here is an excerpt in Gord’s words:

“With the introduction of Web history, it’s a whole new ballgame in disambiguating intent.  This allows Google to move far beyond the well tred search path and actually taps into your current browsing behavior to try to determine what’s on your mind right now.  If Sep Kamvar’s personalization algorithm is as powerful as I suspect it is, this could dramatically alter the results that you’re seeing.  The promise of personalization is greatest when it can be applied in areas that are new territory for you.  It helps Google interpret just the kind of site you want to see, given your behavior at the present time.”

What does this all mean to you? You have to build better websites with better content that people would visit often and would be calculated in their web history. It is even better if you have a strong repeat percentage of visitors. Make sure you keep adding content to your site, otherwise your web history & PageRank will suffer and your rankings will plummet.  Over the years, Google has made it increasingly more difficult to rank well in search results. This new element is therefore no different than everything they have been doing in the past. It makes a breakthrough though which is why it is worth noticing.

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A while ago, I found a very good document that summarize the ranking factors that contribute to good rankings in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). It is called the Top 93 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) factors. Therefore, as I like to use my blog to store top SEM resources, please feel free to check out the word doc and let me know if you find it helpful. Some more of these pointers can be expected as I find gold nuggets all over the web. Enjoy!

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