Archive for December, 2007

My new website shows up on Yahoo, but not on Google. Why?

In our answer to Question #1, we mentioned “each search engine uses different algorithms to determine the relevance of a website’s content, the objective is the same: to find text within the site that correlates to a specific set of search terms.”

When your site shows up on one search engine, but not another, the reason can usually be traced to the difference between those algorithms.

Another possibility may be at play here, as well. Perhaps your site shows up in a highly-ranked position on one search engine, but it’s so low in another search engine’s rankings, you can’t even find it. Why?

It’s simple. Yahoo (for purposes of this discussion) thinks your site is relevant. Google, on the other hand, doesn’t think your site is any more relevant than all the other websites that do show up in higher             positions.

There are several things you can do to get your site listed higher in all search engine rankings, and these steps are the essence of all Search Engine Marketing activities:

1. Optimizing your site to target specific search terms your prospects
would use to find your product or service. These terms need to be within
the visible text on the home page (the first place search engines will
look). Google isn’t going to consider your site relevant if those terms
don’t even appear on your most important page.

2. Building your site’s “link popularity” with other thematically similar sites.
According to the editors of the website MarketingTerms.Com, link
popularity (also known as “link pop”) can be defined as “a measure of
the quantity and quality of [other] websites that link to your site. It is an
example of the move by search engines towards ‘off-the-page’ criteria
to determine quality content. In theory, off-the-page criteria adds the
aspect of impartiality to search engine rankings.”

3. Improving and adding to your site’s content on a regular basis, including
more information that’s valuable to your target prospects. This will result
in your site becoming more popular among potential customers, as well
as being considered more relevant to search engines.

How can links help my SEO efforts?

It’s been mentioned elsewhere that search engines can only determine relevance through a website’s text. Beyond that, search engines are blind to all other efforts by site owners to create beautiful websites. Complicated Flash animations don’t get search engine’s attention. Beautiful photographs or illustrations won’t cut it either. Text is the only thing that registers with them—except links.

Why do links matter to search engines? They offer a level of impartial validation. Search engines can only match specific keywords against text on your website and decide your site contains relevant information. But what happens if many other sites also contain information that’s just as relevant?

Search engines assign brownie points for all the links from your site to other thematically consistent websites, and from those other sites linking to yours.

The reason for giving brownie points to these links is because each one effectively serves as a citation (as when one scholarly text references another), validating the worthiness of your site’s information. If the content of your site wasn’t any good, why would another site owner want to link with you? There would be no “What’s in it for me?” benefit. Search engines algorithms are designed to account for this, and so they consider the number of links on your site as a measure of credibility.

For more about how links can help you achieve higher search engine rankings, look for the section on Google’s PageRank program (elsewhere in this blog). You’ll learn how PageRank works, and how you can take advantage of its parameters to improve your ranking by developing solid links with other related websites.

Why doesn’t my website show up in search engine rankings?

This question can be dealt with on many different levels. At its most basic, it’s not any easier to get your website noticed by search engines than it would be to get customers to a store in the middle of nowhere, just by opening the door. Just as it takes an effective advertising campaign to draw customers into a store, there’s an analogous process for getting search engines to pay attention to your website. Accomplishing that goal is the reason why Search Engine Marketing was developed.

On a deeper level, there may be problems inherent in your website that make it difficult for search engines to find. As an example, one client came to us with an existing website that had been created almost completely as a collection of Photoshop elements. Even the text blocks were composed in Photoshop! The site looked beautiful, but there was virtually nothing in their site search engines could recognize. Search engines can only search through text, and if the text is technically a piece of artwork, every search engine in the world will pass it right by.

There is a process for submitting your website to search engines. Many companies offer this as a paid service, but it’s relatively easy to do. When a site is submitted, the search engine sends out a “spider” to review the site’s text and assign a mathematical value to the keywords appearing on your website.

A “spider” in this case isn’t an eight-legged creature; it’s a piece of software used to index all the pages on a site. Yahoo calls its spider the “Content Acquisition Program.” Although each search engine uses different algorithms to determine the relevance of a website’s content, the objective is the same: to find text within the site that correlates to a specific set of search terms.