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Getting Hits

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the basics of generating traffic and web site promotion

This is a beginner’s guide to web site promotion and search engine placement. Its main advantage is that it will not overwhelm somebody new to this arcane technology. Don Sellers begins with a simple explanation of search engines and what they do. He tells you how to get your site listed, how to understand which links give the biggest hits, and how to get listed with the top search engines, such as Yahoo!, AltaVista, and Excite. He also explains the subtle differences between the major players in this field. [His baseball metaphor is catching].

Getting HitsHe describes how to set up links both to and from other sites, and where to submit your site for free web promotion. He lists plenty of submission sites, announce sites, and how to use them. His lessons on netiquette in newsgroups and mailing lists will be helpful for newcomers to these areas of the Web. He assists you in targeting which newsgroups you should list your Web page with, and identifies some of the pitfalls of using this method of promotion.

He also includes some interesting suggestions for offline site promotion – creating your own press releases and getting listed in magazines for instance.

If you want to spend money, he has sound advice on banner advertising and how to pay for key words, as well as how to analyse the statistics of web logs to interpret the results. Finally there is a useful listing of free and commercial resources to help you.

His overall advice is that there are no easy shortcuts. Success will come from testing and refining your site regularly to stay competitive in the medium.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Getting Hits   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Getting Hits   Buy the book at Amazon US


Don Sellers, Getting Hits: the definitive guide to promoting your web site Berkeley, CA: Peachpit, 1997, pp. 178, ISBN: 0201688158


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Filed Under: e-Commerce Tagged With: Business, eCommerce, Getting Hits, Optimization, SEO, site promotion

Search Engine Optimization

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how to maximise page rankings with search engines

I bought this book on search engine optimisation (SEO) because I trust Peter Kent’s work. His best-selling 2000 work Poor Richard’s Web Site was well-written, clear and friendly advice, and he spells out technology in a way which is easy to understand. He starts out here by explaining how search engines do their work, then provides a quick overview of how to optimise pages. This is an intelligent approach, because the details of SEO can become quite complex, and people fixing their own sites rather than paying an SEO agency will want to get on quickly with the job.

Search Engine Optimization The process is one of gradual adjustment and refinement. It involves choosing the best keywords, creating good content, making submissions to the SEs, and generating incoming links. Each of these topics is then explained in greater detail. He always offers suggestions of free software and services where possible, and the resources mentioned are all listed at the book’s own web site. The only paid-for software he recommends is WordTracker which helps you to identify the most appropriate keywords for your site.

Most of the advice is perfectly straightforward and easy to follow – though it requires a great deal of your patience and time. It involves giving pages accurate descriptive titles, creating content which matches the description of what’s on offer, and avoiding tricks and anything which tries to put one over on the search engines

On the use of frames he is quite unequivocal. Don’t do it! But just in case you have done so, and can’t really change your site, he shows you how to eliminate the worst problems. The same is true for dynamic pages generated from databases, and for cookie-based navigation systems.

But then just to prove that he’s not being unnecessarily stuffy, he does have a chapter on how to trick the search engines – albeit after listing several reasons why you should not use them. These include stuffing keywords, making text and links hidden on the page, duplicating pages, making doorway pages, plus tricks with redirects and cloaking.

Next he deals with the business of submitting your site to the search engines – putting a lot of his emphasis on creating a sitemap. Once again he gives lots of convincing reasons why you should use the free submission systems and avoid the paid-for services.

He explains the way the system of page ranking works and why it is important that the pages of a site contain as many links as possible. This leads naturally to the difficult business of finding people who will link to your site. We get several link-swap offers a day on this site, but most of them turn out to be from what are called link farms – which search engines don’t like.

By the time he reaches the shopping directories he has to admit that all this link-building and site-promotion is a labour-intensive business. So there’s a section on how to get other people to do it for you!

© Roy Johnson 2010

Search Engine Optimization   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Search Engine Optimization   Buy the book at Amazon US


Peter Kent, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, Indianapolis: Indiana, Wiley, 4th edition, 2010, pp.382, ISBN: 0470881046


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Filed Under: Computers, e-Commerce Tagged With: Business, e-Commerce, Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Web design

The Art of SEO

October 31, 2010 by Roy Johnson

Mastering Search Engine Optimization

The Art of SEO seeks to explain an arcane issue. Search Engine Optimization is the art of getting more visitors to a web site. You can do this in a number of ways: by making it look more attractive, advertising its existence, or persuading more people to make links to it from their own sites. But the number one method which beats all of these put together is to make it come higher in Google search results. If somebody types washing machines into a Google search box and your site Wash-o-Matic comes up first, the chances are you will get more visitors. All you need to do is construct pages that Google will rank more highly than all your competitors – and this five hundred page compendium explains the equally large number of things you need to know to achieve it.

The Art of SEOThe book starts with a complete explanation of how search engines work, how they spider sites, and what they do with the information they gather. The same principles apply to all search engines, but the authors can be forgiven for concentrating almost all of their attention on Google, so predominant has it become. Quite apart from all the very technical matters of keywords and search algorithms, there’s a splendid chapter on creating a search engine friendly web site. This covers sitemaps, information architecture, site structure and navigation – all aimed at maximizing the effectiveness of every single page on a site. And you probably do need to start thinking of your site in this way – because that’s how your visitors will arrive, via a single page.

There are lots of free tools available – the best being at webmasters.google.com – but be prepared to go into a lot of technical detail if you wish to optimize your pages. I sat down and went through a number of the recommended steps, and after a while felt like scrapping my site and starting again from scratch. But in fact it’s very unlikely that any site starts out from a state of complete efficiency: they need to be tweaked and evolved to reach this condition. Fortunately on the issue of information architecture, many sites are now run from a content management system that will do the spadework for you. But it still pays to be aware of the underlying principles.

There are lots of subtle and complex issues – ‘keyword cannibalization’, ‘longtail of search’, and ‘thin affiliates’ – and something that had not occurred to me before – ‘self plagiarism‘. Two versions of the same page, even if they are on different parts of a site performing different functions, are dangerous as far as your rankings are concerned for two reasons. The first is that they are regarded by Google as duplicate material and are therefore given lower rating. The second is that the two pages are competing against each other for visitors, and Google will not know of any way to give priority to one of them.

The issue of creating, exchanging, and marketing links is complex almost beyond belief – but the principles on which the page ranking algorithms work is well explained. However, be warned that they are always ‘evolving’ – that is, changing. There’s also a warning on dubious promotional practices and an explanation of why many ‘guaranteed ranking improvement’ schemes aren’t worth a bean. The advice is to ignore all gimmicks, shortcuts, and sharp practice. Concentrate instead on producing lots of good quality content:

Content is at the heart of achieving link building nirvana

There’s an interesting discussion of how ‘link juice’ is generated, and some rather hair-raising warnings about link marketing. To stay on the safe side of Google acceptability policies, you are advised to run an extremely tight and clean ship indeed. Even some of the most innocent-seeming strategies for boosting the popularity or ranking of your pages can result in search engines doing the exact opposite, downgrading your page rankings behind the scenes – unbeknown to you.

In terms of promotion every course imaginable is examined – Google vertical search, local search, image, product and news search, plus all the well known social media services – Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, and so on. To do this as thoroughly as suggested would become a full time job for most site owners, but it’s possible to pick and mix, choosing those opportunities that will best suit your own business.

This leads to the art of SEO ‘campaigns’ in which goals and objectives are closely specified, then the results tracked, measured, and analysed. At this point you are dealing with the sharp end of analytics, and you need a combination of IT skills and commercial single-mindedness to stay the course.

The scariest part of all comes last. What do you do if somebody steals your site’s content? Or even worse, if a competitor reports you to Google and asks for your site to be de-listed? Both of these things can easily happen. Fortunately there’s guidance on how to deal with such situations – plus enormously long lists of things to avoid in order to stay out of trouble. These are all the seemingly innocuous tricks people use to increase their site rankings, such as ‘repurposing’ material from other people’s sites, embedding keywords in hidden text, buying popular keywords that are not related to the publisher’s site, using ‘entry pages’, and so forth. The advice – as ever – is to avoid these easily detectable tricks and stick to producing rich original content.

This is one of O’Reilly’s masterful publications that covers a single but enormously complex subject in a thorough and authoritative manner. It’s written by experts in the field of site promotion, and even though several authors are involved it has a consistent tone and approach that makes it both clear and surprisingly readable.

The Art of SEO   Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Art of SEO   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


Eric Enge et al, The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2010, pp.574, ISBN: 0596518862


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Filed Under: e-Commerce Tagged With: e-Commerce, Publishing, SEO, serach engine optimization, Technology, Web page rankings

Website Optimization

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

speed, search engine, and conversion rate secrets

Andy King scored a big hit in 2003 with his first book Speed Up Your Site. It’s a guide which still has its own live web site where you can analyse the effectiveness of your web pages. His latest magnum opus Website Optimization goes way beyond that in scope and depth. It’s a guide to maximising every aspect of a website and its performance. It’s an amazingly practical manual, with page after page of ideas, suggestions, and strategies for getting your pages more widely known and read.

Website Optimization On the whole, it’s not too technical, and he supplies snippets of code only when necessary. All the tips are within the grasp of anyone who is used to running a web site, and along the way he explains the principles of search engine optimization (SEO) as well as briefing you on how SEs treat your site. This is an up-to-date account of how search engines such as Yahoo and Google rank your pages and deal with search requests. He also presents real-life case studies in which he shows ‘before and after’ makeovers of professional sites. These are most instructive in that the ‘before’ pages look attractive and professional enough – until their underlying weaknesses are analysed and rectified. The improvements give what are claimed as up to fifty times more site visitors per day, and in the case of a cosmetic dentist the need to employ more staff and move to bigger offices in Philadelphia.

The first half of the book deals with search engine marketing optimization, which can be expensive as one enters the world of paid advertising. But the second concentrates on things which anyone can do and afford – making pages smaller, lighter, and faster by trimming off the surplus fat. In an age of faster and faster broadband connections, web users are simply not prepared to wait more than a couple of seconds for a page to appear – so you’ve got to make important pages lean and speedy:

Web page optimization streamlines your content to maximise display speed. Fast display speed is the key to success with your website. It increases profits, decreases costs, and improves customer satisfaction (not to mention search engine rankings, accessibility, and maintainability).

All of these issues are dealt with in detail – and I particularly liked the fact that he was prepared to repeat some of the techniques when they occurred in different contexts. It’s not always easy to grasp some of these technologies in one simple pass. Especially as – in the case of optimizing images – he explains no less than sixteen possibilities for cutting file size and speeding up downloads.

He’s also keen on the optimization of style sheets and shows an amazing variety of techniques for creating what he calls ‘CSS Architecture’. Here too there are no less than ten strategies explained which offer cleaner, tighter, coding and the use of structural markup to beat browser peculiarities and rendering delays.

Most of his explanations are clearly articulated, but occasionally he lapses into less than elegant repetition and jargon, which could deter the inexperienced:

By converting old-style nonsemantic markup into semantic markup, you can more easily target noncontiguous elements with descendant selectors.

Fortunately, this sort of thing only happens occasionally.
There are some very nifty tricks for creating buttons and rollover techniques using style sheets, which saves the time to download a graphic files button, and thus once again speeds up page rendering.

He puts in two chapters on advanced web performance and optimizing JavaScipt and Ajax on your site which I have to admit went beyond my technical competence. But then it’s back to terra firma with understanding the metrics of your site’s performance – that is, knowing how to analyse the statistical data returned by website analysers such as Google’s Analytics and WebTrends.

I’ve never been able to understand before what page ‘bounce rate’ was until it was explained here – and I was astonished when I saw the results from some of my own pages!

As the search for more detailed information and for planning campaigns goes on – so the process becomes more like a science. There are graphs and formulae scattered around these pages to prove this. It’s the same for Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). All I can say is that if you are in this league, Andy King is your friend, and his advice is here thick on the ground to help you.

© Roy Johnson 2008

Website Optimization   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Website Optimization   Buy the book at Amazon US


Andrew King, Website Optimization, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2008, pp.367, ISBN: 0596515081


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Filed Under: e-Commerce, Web design Tagged With: Computers, e-Commerce, Optimization, SEO, Web design, Website Optimization

WordPress Search Engine Optimization

May 23, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tips on settings, plugins, and page tweaking

WordPress SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the art of improving the quality of web pages in order to increase their rankings in search engines – and thereby obtain more site visitors. And it is an art, because despite the mathematical complexity of the algorithms used by Google and others to calculate page rankings, there are many variable features which decide the ranking of a web page. This means that experience and fine judgement are required in deciding which are most important. That’s true even for WordPress, which has plenty of ib-built assistance on SEO.

WordPress SEONevertheless, there are basic principles that can be followed, and this manual offers a guide to what’s required. The first part of the book is an explanation of how SEO works – the manner in which search engines measure the value of your web pages; what information about them they store; and most importantly, which features of your pages can be tweaked so that they will receive a higher rating. This is all delivered in a thorough, clear, and jargon-free style.

Michael David covers the main content of your site, how pages are built, and how its navigation is arranged. It’s very reassuring to have the basics explained – particularly because of the ambiguous terms WordPress uses for its features. You need to know the difference between a ‘post’ and a ‘page’, even though they both look the same. And it’s helpful to learn that an ‘excerpt’ of a post only becomes a chunk of your page if you don’t fill in any text during the creation process. If there’s nothing in the excerpt box Google will grab the first 55 words of the page – and this will create duplicate material, which search engines penalise. With clever SEO however, the excerpt can be used as the summary of a post – or even an advert for it, using key words.

Michael David claims that the issue of key words is the crucial part of SEO. There are plenty of free sites and software to help you determine the search terms customers are using to locate the products or services you have to offer. The important point here is to put on one side the terms you use, and look at the terms your customers choose.

If there’s a weakness in Michael David’s approach it’s that in the practical examples he creates for discussion, he repeatedly chooses local businesses. ‘Denver Air Conditioning Units’ might be an easy company to get to the top of the search results – because you are limiting the reach of your web site to only that city area. But a company called ‘H.P Lightbrown Ltd’ that sells paper technology or architectural design services to a worldwide audience is a different matter. Nobody is going to search on the company name and you are competing with similar businesses throughout the world.

Many of the topics he covers are amazingly simple to effect – especially with all the help that WordPress offers – but they require careful thought. For instance a post contains a title, a permalink (URL), a slug, a description, an ‘excerpt’, and of course key words. All of these should be as brief as possible, but – here’s the rub – they all need to be slightly different to avoid repetition, for which your pages might be penalised.

There’s a short section on Google Analytics, explaining the information they feed back from spidering a site. This would have been more useful if it contained some practical examples of how this information could be used to tweak pages and increase their rankings.

He also includes a good chapter on writing the content of web pages with SEO in mind – the importance of being succinct and accurate, and how to include keywords without undue repetition. It’s all excellent advice – though it has to be said that this very little to do with WordPress.

All of this is only a prelude to the real business of improving your page rankings – which must be done by generating inbound links – in other words, getting approval from other people’s web sites. This is not easy, because it involves a very laborious process of making multiple submissions (requests for inclusion) to directories such as Yahoo.com and DMOZ.com. Alternatively you can try to attract links by generating content which is irresistibly popular or focused on something very popular or controversial.

The most common help you will be offered to deal with this issue is an invitation to join link farms. These are sites that are composed of nothing but links to other sites. Don’t bother – because as Michael David explains, they are valueless. He also provides other warnings again what are called ‘Black Hat’ techniques.

There is the by now almost obligatory chapter on using social media tools to promote your website. This too involves generating content that will ‘go viral’ (attract millions of viewers) which is much easier said than done – and it’s another chapter which has little to do with WordPress.

Fortunately Michael David finishes with a really useful appendix listing a selection of the most valuable WordPress plugins (all free) that can help you automate the processes he describes. I was mightily relieved to note that I had most of them installed on this site.

If you’ve got a WordPress blog or a full web site, you need to understand all the marvellous features WP offers to deliver good SEO. This guide not only shows you how to configure the software; it also explains why the strategies recommended are to your advantage.

WordPress 3.0   Buy the book at Amazon UK

WordPress 3.0   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011


Michael David, WordPress 3.0 Search Engine Optimization, Birmingham: Pakt, 2011, pp.318, ISBN: 1847199003


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Filed Under: CMS, e-Commerce, Open Sources, Technology Tagged With: e-Commerce, Media, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Technology, WordPress

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