Feb

22

Getting Your Site Indexed By The Search Engines - Get Links!

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DON’T Submit Your Site To Search Engines

One of the big mistakes that people new to SEO will do is they will spend many hours or worse, pay for software or services that will submit your website to tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of search engines – don’t! It’s a waste of time and money and will get you nowhere.

Instead of spending time doing this, spend it productively by getting links to your site. This is the only way you will ever get better search engine results.

Getting Your First Links - For Free

So how do you do get those first links in order to get your site indexed? Easy! Go to Google, type in the broad topic of your website and then start contacting the Webmasters of websites in the top 10 or 20 results. This might mean telephoning or sending an email to the Webmaster – do anything to persuade them to link to you. One thing you should always do when trying to get links to your site is to try your utmost to get links from relevant sites, i.e. websites that have the same or similar topic as you own website.

The hardest task for a new website is to get those first links. A popular method of getting inbound links is to set-up link exchanges with other websites i.e. you provide a link to their website and ask that they then provide one to you (this is also known as reciprocal linking). The reason it’s hard is because if you contact the Webmaster of another website to see if you can set-up a link exchange, then the Webmaster of the other website can see your website’s PR is 0 and won’t be interested in exchanging links – after all what’s in it for them? It’s a catch 22 situation, they won’t link to you because you have low PR, but to get a higher PR you need people to provide links to your site. It’s tough, but stick at it and soon enough you will start to see results – Rome wasn’t built in a day!

Also, if you have any other websites be sure to interlink these sites – a great method of getting those first few links!

If you’re finding it tough getting these initial links there is another option….

Buying Links

You can buy pretty much buy anything in life, this also includes links. Yes, it’s possible to buy links to your website from link broking services. There are three major link brokers on the web, these are: -

http:///www.text-link-ads.com

http://www.linkadage.com

http://www.textlinkbrokers.com

You can even considering submitting your site to some web directories like http://www.dmoz.org/ or http://www.yeahdir.com/

So if you’re finding it very difficult to get indexed by the search engines, then you can simply buy the links to your website.

Questions to ask when purchasing about the quality and value of a link:

1. What is the value of the theme?

Is it a high competition/ highly monetized industry such as pharmaceauticals, gambling, or finance?

2. What is the overall power of the link?

Is it helping any other sites to rank high? How links from unique C-class IP addresses does it have?

3. What is the linking neighborhood theme of the site linking to you?

The “Topic” of the links that link to that site. - and a comparision of how close of a “linking neighborhood” is to your site’s theme.

4. How many outbound links are on the page giving the link, and who else do they link to?

Lower the better and quality counts - skip the site with poker plastered all over it.

5. What is the format of the link, how many characters for anchor text and description do you get, and do you have control to change it?

Footer Link? Sidebar link? Run of site? Body text link? Pre-sell page?

6. Where is the link deriving it’s power?

Does it have any .edus or .govs linking to it? How many unique domains and C class IP addresses?

7. What is the age of the site?

Older the better

8. Will the link pass any direct clickthrough traffic?

(Alexa is a litmus test here)

9. How many pages will the link be placed on?

Don’t go overboard with run of site links now

10. Will the link go to a subsection of your site or your homepage?

Help your deep link ratio

11. Does the link “pass power”?

This is where the “gut feel” comes in. If a link is not passing any power, it is potentially worthless. It’s no fun flushing money away, so develop an intuition for when a link is passing it’s value and when it isn’t.

Feb

22

PR Is Not The Be-All and End-All!

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At one time PageRank was the most important factor when calculating the search engine results. Nowadays it’s less important, and other factors have now become more important (which I will cover in later lessons).

One thing I try to avoid is PR-watching. Many webmasters are so obsessed with PageRank that they lose site of more important factors such as obtaining links from relevant websites that are in the same topic theme as yourself. One phrase I say to people who ask me about PR is,

“PR is vanity, Rankings are sanity”

What would you rather have, a website with a high page rank but a bad position in the results, or a low PR with a good position in the results - I know which I would choose!

I personally never take PageRank into consideration when I link to a website, or request a link from a website. The only things I consider are; is the website’s theme similar to my own website? and, is the website a ‘quality website’ that provides useful content that people on my website would find useful? If you stick to this system then there’s no way you can fail.

Feb

22

How Do I Increase The PageRank Of My Website?

Filed Under SEO and Strategies | 1 Comment

How Do I Increase The PageRank Of My Website?

There is only one way to increase the PageRank of your website: get more inbound links. Before you dash off and start trying to get more links to your website there a few things you should know about how PR is calculated. PR is not calculated based on a simple count of the number of the links that point to your website, it also takes into consideration the PR of the web page that provides the link to your website and how many other outbound links there are on that webpage. So the higher PR-rated web page you obtain the link from, the more PageRank will be transferred to your website! So for example, a single link from a PR6 website might be worth 30 links from PR1 websites.

This table shows an approximation of the number of links you will need in order to obtain a certain PageRank.

PR of page Links for PR4 Links for PR5 Links for PR6 Links for PR7 Links for PR8 Links for PR9
1 3,055 16,803 92,414 508,277 2,795,522 15,375,371
2 555 3,055 16,803 92,414 508,277 2,795,522
3 101 555 3,055 16,803 92,414 508,277
4 18 101 555 3,055 16,803 92,414
5 3 18 101 555 3,055 16,803
6 0.61 3 18 101 555 3,055
7 0.11 0.61 3 18 101 555
8 0.02 0.11 0.61 3 18 101
9 0.00 0.02 0.11 0.61 3 18
10 0.00 0.00 0.02 0.11 0.61 3

You can see that to get a website of PR5, there are different combinations to do it. For example, you’ll get a ranking of PR5 if you have 16,803 links from PR1 websites, or 3,055 from PR2 websites, or 555 links from PR3 websites etc etc….

But wait, there’s even more to it! Not only does Google take into consideration the PR of the web page that provides the link to your website, it also looks at the number of other links on the web page that provide the link, in effect the more links the the page provides the more the PageRank is diluted. So, if you manage to get a link from a PR6 website then that’s great, but if that web page also provides links to hundreds of other websites, then it might actually be as effective as a link from a PR1 or PR2 website.

Feb

22

How Do I Find The PageRank of a Web page?

Filed Under SEO and Strategies | 1 Comment

You can find out the Google page rank from http://www.mywebpagerank.com/

Feb

22

What is Google PageRank (PR)?

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The whole concept behind the Internet is the ability for documents to provide hyperlinks to other documents. Google was the first search engine that defined how popular a particular website or document (web page) was by looking at how many other websites linked to it. It then ranked how popular this web site/page is by giving it a rating between 0-10, 10 being the most popular.

Feb

22

Can Site Down Time Remove You From Google Index

Filed Under General Issues, SEO and Strategies | 1 Comment

Well Yes. I was under impression that google would not deindex your site if your site is down temporarily but today while i was browsing a Google Group thread and found this:

Problem:

I’ve been having problems with downtime from my hosting company (am
moving tomorrow as this is the final straw) and I’ve now practically
disappeated from Google. I was in 3rd position for 5 of the more
popular searches for my business and now - nothing.

Vanessa Fox of Google replies:

If the host is down when Googlebot tries to access your pages, then
those pages may disappear from the index until Googlebot can crawl
them again. In webmaster tools, do the pages you want indexed appear
in the crawl errors section? If so, then Googlebot was unable to
access them.
If you are moving the site to a new host and the pages are available
the next time Googlebot tries to access them, then you should see them
in the index again soon after that.
You’re right that requesting reinclusion is only for sites that have
violated the guidelines. This isn’t the situation in your case, and
there’s no need to contact us to let us know that your site has moved
and is available again, as Googlebot will keep rechecking for it
automatically.

So beware even a little downtime could cause your site to deindex, though it will get indexed again, but it does takes time. So stick with stable host.

Feb

16

Finding that Host that Offers the Most

Filed Under General Issues | Leave a Comment

Whether you already have a website or are thinking of setting up shop online, sooner or later you’ll have to deal with the issue of web hosting. Although it may seem like a “no brainer,” there are actually many factors you’ll need to consider before making this important decision. Your first inclination may be to look only at the cost, thinking “cheaper is better.” However, that old saying “you get what you pay for,”is especially true in this situation. Here are some of the more important points you’ll want to look at when considering your next host.

UNIX/ NT/ The two most popular hosting platforms to choose from are UNIX and NT. UNIX is by far the favorite, as it was the only choice way back in the early days of the Internet. It is easy to configure, great for setting your own file permissions and the platform for most of the free scripts available for download. It is flexible, reliable and supports scripting languages like Perl and PHP3.

NT is Microsoft’s baby. One problem that I have found with NT servers is a lack of readily available scripts that work on this platform. Also, (unlike UNIX) many NT users need assistance from their Web Host Administrators to set file permissions. NT supports MS applications such as ASP, Access, FP and scripting languages such as Perl, Cold Fusion and ASP.

TECH SUPPORT/ When you need help you’ll want to make sure you can get it. Some web hosts offer phone support or even live chat. Make sure they have good tech support in place as there’s nothing more annoying than needing assistance with your site and not being able to get it.

SET UP FEE/ MONTHLY FEE/ Some hosts charge an initial set up fee to get your site set up and running on their server. Make sure you check on this when comparing prices. I’ve seen monthly fees ranging from 9.99 to 39.99, depending on the plan and services offered. My advice to you would be to look past the cheapest and most expensive ends of the scale and go with a mid-range pricing plan to be on the safe side. You should be able to pick up a reliable web host for 20 to 25.00 per month.

HARD DRIVE/ SPACE/ How much space they’re willing to give you is important if you’re going to compare apples to apples. You need to keep in mind the size of your site when deciding how much space you really need. Generally, 20 to 30 MB is plenty for a small site. You might want to ask if you can pay for more space should your site ever outgrow its present state.

FTP ACCESS/ TELNET ACCESS/ Even if you plan on using Frontpage to manage your site, you’ll still need to have FTP access. It is usually standard, but it never hurts to ask. Make sure you keep your user name and password in a safe place. You’ll use FTP to set file permissions and to upload your files to the web server.

Telnet can be very useful for troubleshooting CGI scripts and changing server configurations. There are some servers that will not grant telnet access.

CGI-BIN/ A very important component if you’re planning on adding any sort of interactivity to your site like forms, shopping carts, etc. Usually comes as standard equipment, but I’ve seen some of the cheaper hosts leave it out entirely.

EMAIL BOXES & POP 3 ALIASES/ One thing that’s very important to me is the ability to use different aliases with my domain name. For example, if your domain is ezineadauction.com, you may want to set up separate addresses to sort your mail like service@ezineadauction.com or support@ezineadauction.com. They may all funnel into the same mailbox, but you can set up filters at your end, making customer service a whole lot easier.

If you have a “wildcard” account, you can set up as many aliases as you like. If you have other employees who will need their own private box, check with the web host to see how many boxes they will allow.

STATS/ Once you start getting traffic, you’ll want to know where it’s coming from and what pages of your site are being visited. Some web hosts will throw stats tracking in with their standard package or at least give you access to your log files, which you can then use with third party software to run reports on the traffic your site is receiving.

MISCELLANEOUS THOUGHTS/:

1) If you want to use Frontpage: Do they have the FP server extensions installed?
2) Do they offer autoresponders?
3) How about a secured server option for payment transactions?
4) Do they back up all websites in case of disaster?
5) Do they offer assistance in programming or design work if needed at an hourly rate?
6) Do they offer shopping cart software if you’re going to be selling products?
7) Do any customized forms come standard with your account, like feedback or order forms?
8) Bandwidth- Be aware that bandwidth is how much data can be transferred in a month’s time. This shouldn’t be a concern unless you’re getting a ton of traffic, but be aware that most hosts do have limitations on what they’ll allow.

As you can see, there are many factors to take into account when choosing a web host. Your host is essentially the spine of your site,so you want to make sure that the one you choose is reliable and solid. Nothing can ruin a site faster than an unreliable host. I know; been there, done that.

Remember, choosing a good host is essential to the success and reliability of your online business. Do your homework and choose the one that’s right for you.


About the author: Merle http://www.EzineAdAuction.com “Where some of the
BEST Deals in Ezine Advertising are Made” Buy & Sell Ezine Ads in a
live auction setting! Publishers sell off your excess inventory and Buyers pick
up some Fantastic bargains. Go now.

Feb

16

Frequently Asked Web Hosting Questions

Filed Under Companies, General Issues, Hosting Software, Server Hosting | 1 Comment

Congratulations! After much thought and consideration, you finally took the plunge and decided it was time to have your own web site. That’s a great accomplishment in itself. However, now you’re left with another daunting task — selecting a quality web host.

Selecting a good web host is of the utmost importance. However, with all of the technical mumbo jumbo, knowing what to look for can be very intimidating to say the least.

For this reason, I have devised a list of the most frequently asked web hosting questions.

Question: I’m not exactly sure what a web host is. Can you please explain?

Answer: A web host is a company that provides you with server space for your web site. This includes all of the files associated with your web site. When your web address is typed into a browser, the web host displays your pages.

Question: Is it true that a good web host will cost me a lot of money each month?

Answer: Although the old adage “you get what you pay for” still holds true, there are many quality web hosts that are reasonably priced. You can expect to pay $20 - $50 a month for up to 50MB of space depending on the company and your specific needs.

Question: I have been considering hosting my site with a free hosting company, but I’m a little concerned with their reliability. Can you shed some light?

Answer: NEVER host an ecommerce web site with a free hosting
service. These services are highly unreliable and could care less if your site goes down. Their main concern is with their advertisers. As long as their ads are up and running, for the most part, they could care less about you or your site.

In addition, sites hosted with free services look very unprofessional. If you’ve taken the time to get your own web site designed and your own domain name, why would you risk your success and host with a free service? It’s just not worth it.

Question: I’m at my wits end. I’ve been to so many hosting companies and am completely overwhelmed. I have no idea what
company to go with. Can you please tell me what I should be looking for in a good host?

Answer: Selecting a quality hosting company can be an intimidating process. Your first consideration should be the company.

• Do they offer fast connections?
• Do they have a back-up system in place to protect your
data in case there is a power outage?
• Do they require you to make payments in advance?
• Do they require a long-term contract?
• Do they charge set up fees?
• How is their customer support? Test them.
• Do they provide you with free access to a secure server
for order processing?
• Do they offer shopping cart software to process
your orders?
• Do they provide you with an online Web Site Manager?
• Do they provide you with an online support manual?

Ask for references. Talk with some of their customers and ask them if they have been satisfied.

Here are some basic features you should look for when
selecting a web host:

1) 24/7 reliable tech support
2) Your own domain name (www.yourname.com)
3) At least 10GB of monthly transfer (traffic)
4) A minimum of 20MB - 50MB of server space
5) Unlimited true POP email accounts - name@yourdomain.com
6) Unlimited email aliases
7) Email forwarding
8) Unlimited autoresponders
9) Your own unrestricted CGI-Bin
10) Access to SSL Encryption for secure transactions
11) MySQL Database
12) Perl
13) htaccess password protection
14) Server Side Includes (SSI) support
15) Design (and upload to) your site using Netscape or
other HTML editing software
16) Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions for those
utilizing FrontPage
17) Unlimited free access to your server via FTP/Telnet
18) Easy access to your log files
19) Statistics on visits to your site
20) Referral Program

When selecting a web host, you must look at the entire
picture prior to making your decision. You may find a host
that charges $5.00 - $15.00 a month to host your site,
however, their technical support may be poor, or your web
site may be slow or down a lot.

A lower monthly payment may look appealing, but how much is
it actually going to cost you in lost sales? Most likely much more than the amount you’ll save.

Feb

16

Creating Keyword Rich Pages

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Once you have established the keywords for which you should optimize your site for the search engines, it is time to figure out how you can get a high ranking in the search engines for those keywords. The solution is to create Keyword Rich Pages (KRPs) - pages which provide good content and in which a particular keyword is repeated a number of times so that the page gets a top ranking for that keyword.

This article is focused on how you should create these KRPs. I am assuming you have a working knowledge of the different HTML tags like the Title tag, the Meta Description tag, the Meta Keywords tag, the Heading tags, the Alt Tag etc.

Now, let us assume that your company sells packaged tours to Australia, and that you are targeting the keyword “travel to australia”. Here’s how you create the KRPs:

The Title Tag:

The first and most important tag to consider is the Title tag. You should always begin the Title tag with the keyword that you are targeting. Also remember that the search engines are going to display the Title tag while they are displaying the results of a search. Hence, you need to make the Title tag attractive to humans as well.

Here is one Title tag that I may have used: “Travel to Australia and discover its scenic beauty”. Have a look at the Title tag - it uses the keyword right at the beginning and also tells people how beautiful a place Australia is.

Of course, all Titles need not be like the one I used. The Title that you use depends on the subject matter of your site. However, you should follow all the general rules that I have outlined here.

Meta Description Tag:

The Meta Description tag is used by many search engines to provide a short description of the page that is listed in the search results. Hence, like the Title tag, it is important that the Meta Description tag be keyword rich as well as attractive to humans.

The rules for the Meta Description are more or less the same as those for the Title tag. However, the content of this tag will generally be longer than that of the Title. Here’s what I may have used in the Meta Description tag:

“Travel to Australia - We take care of all the details of your trip so that you can travel with complete peace of mind.”

Note how this description repeats the keyword and also the benefit that it stresses - it says that the customer will be able to travel without having to worry about the intricate details of the trip - you will take care of them.

Meta Keywords Tag:

The Meta Keywords tag has become less and less important as far as search engine optimization is concerned. In fact, you can get top rankings without having anything in the Meta Keywords tag at all. However, just to be on the safe side, you would want to include some keywords in the Meta Keywords tag. You should also include some of the common upper/lower case variations of the keyword. The rules for the Meta Keywords tag are pretty simple - don’t repeat any keyword in the Meta Keywords tag more than three times and don’t repeat any keyword one after the other. Here’s what I may have used in the Meta Keywords tag:

“Travel to Australia, tourism, travel to Australia, Down Under, TRAVEL TO AUSTRALIA”

Note how I have introduced “tourism” and “Down Under” just to separate the different instances of the keyword.

Body of the page:

Now we come to the actual body of the page. Begin by getting hold of a nice (but not too large) picture which is applicable for the page that you are creating. In the present case, I might include a picture of the lotus shaped Sydney Opera House. Place this picture at the top of the page. In the Alt tag for the picture, just mention your target keyword once, i.e. the Alt tag would be “Travel to Australia”. You can include other words in the Alt tag, but it should start with the keyword you are targeting.

Once you’ve put up the picture, it is time to create a Heading for your page. Use the H1 tag to do so. Again, in the H1 tag, mention your target keyword once, i.e. like the Alt tag for the picture, the H1 tag could be “Travel to Australia”. Again, like the Alt tag, you can include other words in the heading, but the heading should start with the keyword you are targeting.

Now it’s time to create the actual text of the page. The way you create the text of your page would depend largely on what you want the visitor to do after reading this page. In some cases, you may simply want the visitor to go to the home page or another specific page in your site after reading this page. In this case, you should write the text in such a way that the visitor is attracted to the page that you are targeting. You would also want to provide links to the home page or the specific page that you are targeting at strategic places in the KRP. Or, you may want the visitor to click on the link to an affiliate program that you are a member of. In this case, you would stress the benefits that the visitor gets by purchasing the product or service that the affiliate program is selling. You would also want to provide links to the affiliate program at strategic places in the page and/or at the end of the page. Whatever it is that you want your page to do, there are some general rules to follow:

1) The first thing to remember is that some search engines don’t recognize the Meta Description tag. These search engines will often simply take the first few lines of text in the body of your page and display that as the description. Hence, you must ensure that the first few lines of text in your page are attractive to human beings.

2) Ensure that as many sentences as possible in the page contain your target keyword once. The keyword shouldn’t just be placed on an ad hoc basis - the way the keyword is placed in every sentence should actually make grammatical sense and the repetition should be such that your human visitors do not feel that you have deliberately repeated a particular phrase throughout the page. This is not only important from the point of view of ensuring that your readers don’t get a bad impression of your site, but also from the point of view of search engine optimization - the search engines may penalize your page for spamming if they find that you have randomly repeated the keyword throughout the page. Also, while repeating the keyword in the page, try to repeat the keyword once near the top of the page and once near the bottom.

3) Make sure that your paragraphs are not too long - each paragraph should be no more than 3 or 4 sentences long. This is because people on the web simply don’t have the time or the inclination to read long paragraphs.

4) Try to ensure that the page contains links to other pages with the keyword being present in the text under the link. This can often lead to a higher ranking for your page.

5) If possible, link to other pages which have the keyword in the file names. This can again lead to a higher ranking for your page.

6) There is no hard and fast rule regarding the total number of words that should be present in the KRPs. As a rule of thumb, try to ensure that there are between 500-600 words. However, if the number of words falls a bit short of or exceeds this limit, don’t worry too much.

Once you have created the page, ensure that the name of the file in which it is saved contains the keyword and that the individual words of the keyword are separated by hyphens. In this case, the name of the file would be travel-to-australia.html. This will get you a higher ranking in the few search engines which give a lot of emphasis on the keyword being present in the file name.

That’s it! When you want to target another keyword, simply create another KRP for it using the procedure outlined above.

After you have created the KRPs, you cannot simply upload them to your site and submit them to the search engines. This is because the search engines take a rather dim view of pages which only contain outgoing links to other pages but do not contain any incoming links from other pages. The search engines may penalize sites which have such pages.

What you need to do is to directly or indirectly link the KRPs with your home page. If you are going to create many KRPs for your site, it will be impractical to link the home page directly with all the KRPs as this will needlessly clutter your home page. Hence, what you should do is to create a separate page in your site called a Sitemap page (name it something like sitemap.html). Add links to all the KRPs from the Sitemap page. The text that you use to link to a particular KRP should be the same as the keyword that the KRP is being optimized for. Hence, the link to the travel-to-australia.html file should say “Travel to Australia”.

Now, some search engines refuse to spider pages which only contain links to other pages and nothing else. Hence, if the Sitemap page only contains links to the KRPs but contains no other content, the search engines may ignore this page. Hence, what you can do is to add a short description of the content of each of the KRPs after you have added a link to that KRP in the Sitemap page. This ensures that the search engines will not ignore this page.

After doing all this, simply link the home page of your site with the Sitemap page using a text link. Then, submit your home page, the Sitemap page and each of the KRPs to the search engines. When you are submitting these pages, to be on the safe side, make sure that you submit no more than 1 page per day to any search engine - otherwise, you run the risk of some search engines ignoring some of the pages you have submitted. You can submit your site by going to the individual “Add URL” pages of each engine.

Article by Sumantra
Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected and recognized search engine
positioning specialists on the Internet. For more articles on search engine
placement, subscribe to his 1st Search Ranking Newsletter by sending a blank
email to mailto:1stSearchRanking.999.99@optinpro.com
or by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.net

Feb

16

Search Engine Optimization SEO No-No’s Site Redesign

Filed Under SEO and Strategies | Leave a Comment

Search engine optimization consists of some relatively arcane issues that are not obvious to anyone. That I can be thankful for, I suppose, or I wouldn’t continue to be in demand as an SEO specialist. But why do clients throw money out the window with developers who don’t understand they are bulldozing down site naming structure and careful page architecture when they do a site redesign?

Today I got a call from a very good client who was excited to have me see his site redesign and sent me off to visit while he was on the phone. I typed in the domain name and watched the page load in my browser. Nice color scheme, interesting scrolling header, clean design, good navigation. “Looks Good,” I said, and then my heart sank when I noted that my carefully crafted title tag was missing from the browser title bar.I clicked to the sitemap and noticed that my naming convention for pages, subdirectories and image files had been discarded like yesterdays trash. I went to the source code and saw that all the javascript we had neatly pulled off page and assigned to independent off-page .js files was back on the page again, along with the CSS styles. Oh, and no description metatags.

I began to groan audibly as I made each of these discoveries, forgetting that my client was on the line. My heart leapt back into my throat as I looked for all the great articles, press releases, additional text content I had conscientously added and found them missing from the site entirely!

My client responded to my noises with an exclamation that his new site was “State of the Art!” and “Completely Automated” as he pointed out the cool new functions and slick scripts. “Only one problem,” he said, still gushing about the expensive toys, goodies and googaws on his pretty new baby - “We dropped from our first page rankings in the search engines, what happened?”

I won’t detail what I said as I exploded in anger at the havoc his developer wreaked upon my lovingly optimized pages, but after I calmed a bit (thank goodness he’s a good client and a friend) I detailed the developer’s unknowing destruction.

Do you realize that ALL links to previous pages will generate “404 Not Found” errors from links in the search engines until these new pages are crawled? Do you realize that EVERYTHING I did to get top rankings has been destroyed?! Do you understand that ALL the money you gave me to optimize your site will have to be spent AGAIN?

This exchange has happened with several clients over the past few years. Even though I warn each new client that they must take care to avoid exactly this scenario when they have a site redesigned or upgraded. DON’T CHANGE FILENAMES, DON’T OVERWRITE TITLE TAGS, KEEP JAVASCRIPT & CSS STYLES OFF THE PAGE, ETC.

This week I had a client call asking why the site changes he had agreed to a month ago had not been completed. I reminded him that he’d asked me to send those changes to his developer so that the changes were in-house rather than giving me server access.

I’ve got a new excuse to use now. The developer did it, or in this case - didn’t do it. This developer saw no need to post my thoroughly researched title tags, based on keyword density of each page, to every one of the site’s 300 pages. No matter that I’d spent days researching keywords, adjusting page text and massaging all title tags to match. The developer was busy.

The last straw for me came today though. A client called to find out if we could avoid the extensive rework of his site needed to do the “URL re-writes” that he’d agreed to do in the contract we signed recently. Why? “My programmer tells me it will take him a month to do this without breaking the site scripts.” I reminded him that this had been discussed in our meeting last month when the programmer balked at all the work that would be required of him.

No problem, I said, we can go another route, but it will cost you twice as much for my immediate work and ultimately more than three times as much in your Pay-Per-Click budget forever. You won’t rank nearly as well in the organic search listings.

Most of your site will never be indexed by most search engines unless you pay for mass URL inclusion, and that only works for one search engine - Yahoo, since everyone else has stopped the paid inclusion programs. Google doesn’t offer paid inclusion. (Google and partners send nearly 70% of search traffic to him and most other sites.)

“Oh!”, he exclaimed. “Well, ultimately the programmer will do what he’s paid to do, like it or not.”

Hmmm. Well I like it! Maybe my best weapon against developers and programmers opposed to SEO requirements will be reminding their employers of those PPC budgets and Google’s lack of paid inclusion program.

by Mike Banks Valentine

Mike Valentine is SEO at http://InsuranceDirectory411.com and at http://Auto-Accident-Lawyer-Directory.com where he had some of the experiences detailed in the article above.

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