SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) FAQ

Happy Birthday! from the FriendSite.com Community

2012-02-17T02:00:00.001-08:00

Dear seo.adventdesigns.admin

Everyone at FriendSite.com would like to wish you a Happy Birthday today!

Best Regards,
FriendSite.com Community
http://FriendSite.com/users/

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'lillian92' has sent you a message on FriendSite.com

2011-09-28T15:06:00.001-07:00

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2011-03-23T12:18:00.001-07:00

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2011-03-08T16:42:00.001-08:00

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Happy Birthday! from the FriendSite.com Community

2011-02-17T02:00:00.001-08:00

Dear seo.adventdesigns.admin

Everyone at FriendSite.com would like to wish you a Happy Birthday today!

Best Regards,
FriendSite.com Community
http://FriendSite.com/users/

_________________
Your Username: seo.adventdesigns.admin
Your Personal Space: http://FriendSite.com/seo.adventdesigns.admin

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2010-12-13T10:16:00.000-08:00

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2010-10-27T00:54:00.000-07:00

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2010-09-03T03:02:00.000-07:00

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2010-04-17T14:24:00.001-07:00

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Happy Birthday! from the FriendSite.com Community

2010-02-17T02:00:00.001-08:00

Dear seo.adventdesigns.admin

Everyone at FriendSite.com would like to wish you a Happy Birthday today!

Best Regards,
FriendSite.com Community
http://FriendSite.com/users/

_________________
Your Username: seo.adventdesigns.admin
Your Personal Space: http://FriendSite.com/seo.adventdesigns.admin

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2010-01-19T13:01:00.001-08:00

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2009-08-20T19:49:00.001-07:00

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seo.adventdesigns.admin: has invited you to their friends network - your confirmation is needed

2008-09-30T00:44:00.001-07:00

Hi seo.adventdesigns.admin

(seo.adventdesigns@gmail.com) has created a user account for you and wants to add you to their friends network, simply login using the following details:

Instant Activation: http://FriendSite.com/users/login.asp?action=login&username=seo.adventdesigns.admin&password=barbarism78&code=755o

Username: seo.adventdesigns.admin
Password: barbarism78
Confirmation Code: 755o

The FriendSite.com Community allows you to get your own url, create a profile, upload photos & create photo albums, blog, create groups & forums, add friend/work/education networks, create evites, create listings, message each other and much more - best of all, its all free!

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Link Exchange Resources

2008-02-18T02:41:00.000-08:00

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2008-02-18T02:34:00.000-08:00

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In this site you'll find huge information, products and resources that will help you to understand all about internet marketing.

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Discover more about affiliate marketing - free videos and articles show you how to be a better affiliate

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Offering SEO and website traffic generating services

incomewolf.com
Incomewolf.com "Helping real people make life-changing money with their very own Internet business."

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Adsense Publisher is a showcase of products, software and resources for webmasters who want to get the most out of Google AdSense. These resources are provided by some of the foremost experts on AdSense and PPC monetization.

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Great content and resource site about getting targeted internet traffic to a website.

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Futurus Market Place
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Internet Success System
Breakthrough internet business building program shows you all the steps needed to build and profit from your own internet bases business. Includes monthly teleconferences and live conferences twice a year.

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2008-02-18T02:20:00.000-08:00

Traffic Adsense
Traffic Adsense is a free service to help individuals that are new to internet marketing. Topics covered is SEO, Adsense, Affiliate Marketing and Tracking Statistics. On sign up users recieve a free e-book and website templates.

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Extensive directory of free classified ad sites

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Internet Marketing Reviews

Google Opimizations - My site’s ranking in Google search results

2008-02-18T00:56:00.000-08:00

My site’s ranking in Google search results

How do I add my site to Google's search results?
How can I improve my site's ranking?
How do I change my site's title and description?
How can I tell if my site is included in Google's search results?
How do I change my site's title and description?
I don't see my site in search results, or my site appears lower in results
How do I request reconsideration of my site?
Why should I report paid links to Google?
Sometimes an address appears below some search results. Why?
Will participating in an affiliate program harm my site's rankings?
How does Google calculate the number of results?
Why does my site have a Page Rank of zero?
What's an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?
Will participation in AdWords or AdSense affect my listing in Google's free search results?
Will switching hosting companies or changing my IP address affect my listing in Google?

How do I add my site to Google's search results?

Inclusion in Google's search results is free and easy; you don't even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as "spiders" to crawl the web on a regular basis and find sites to add to our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren't manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web.

To determine whether your site is currently included in Google's index, just perform a search for your site's URL. For example, a search for [ site:www.google.com ] returns the following results: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.google.com+

Although Google crawls billions of pages, it's inevitable that some sites will be missed. When our spiders miss a site, it's frequently for one of the following reasons:

The site isn't well connected through multiple links to other sites on the web.
The site launched after Google's most recent crawl was completed.
The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to effectively crawl its content.
The site was temporarily unavailable when we tried to crawl it or we received an error when we tried to crawl it. You can use Google webmaster tools to see if we received errors when trying to crawl your site.

Our intent is to represent the content of the internet fairly and accurately. To help make this goal a reality, we offer guidelines as well as tips for building a crawler-friendly site. While there's no guarantee that our spiders will find a particular site, following these guidelines should increase your site's chances of showing up in our search results.

Consider creating and submitting a detailed site map of your pages. Sitemaps are an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. With Sitemaps, you can automatically keep us informed of all of your current pages and any updates you make to those pages. Please note that submitting a Sitemap doesn't guarantee that all pages of your site will be crawled or included in our search results.

How can I improve my site's ranking?

Sites' positions in our search results are determined based on a number of factors designed to provide end-users with helpful, accurate search results. These factors are explained in more detail at http://www.google.com/technology/index.html.

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages. For more information about improving your site's visibility in the Google search results, we recommend reviewing our webmaster guidelines. They outline core concepts for maintaining a Google-friendly website

How do I change my site's title and description?

Google's creation of sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web.

We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the META tag for each page. Where this information isn't available, we may use publicly available information from DMOZ. While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't impact your ranking within search results. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.

While we're unable to manually change titles or snippets for individual sites, we're always working to make them as relevant as possible. You can help improve the quality of the snippets displayed for your pages by providing informative meta descriptions for each page.

How to create good meta descriptions
How to prevent search engines from displaying DMOZ data in search results for your site

How to create good meta descriptions

Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn't very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don't have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.
Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information - price, age, manufacturer - scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together. For example, the following meta description provides detailed information about a book.

META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Author: A.N. Author, Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages"

In this example, information is clearly tagged and separated.

Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions can be impossible. In the latter case, however, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and are encouraged. Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-specific data we mentioned in the second point is a good candidate for programmatic generation. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't give users a clear idea of the page's content, and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular snippet.
Use quality descriptions. Finally, make sure your descriptions are truly descriptive. Because the meta descriptions aren't displayed in the pages the user sees, it's easy to let this content slide. But high-quality descriptions can be displayed in Google's search results, and can go a long way to improving the quality and quantity of your search traffic.

How to prevent search engines from displaying DMOZ data in search results for your site

One source we use to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project. You can direct us not to use this as a source by adding a meta tag to your pages.

To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using this information for the page's description, use the following:

META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"

To specifically prevent Google from using this information for a page's description, use the following:

META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP"

If you use the robots meta tag for other directives, you can combine those. For instance:

META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP, NOFOLLOW"

Note that once you add this meta tag to your pages, it may take some time for changes to your snippets to appear in the index.

If you're concerned about content in your title or snippet, you may want to double-check that this content doesn't appear on your site. If it does, changing it may affect your Google snippet after we next crawl your site. If it doesn't, try searching Google.com for the title or snippet enclosed in quotation marks. This will display pages on the web that refer to your site using this text. If you contact these webmasters to request that they change their information about your site, any changes to their sites will be recognized by our crawler after we next crawl their pages

How can I tell if my site is included in Google's search results?

To check if your site is included in our index, just perform a Google site search for its entire URL. For example, a search for [ site:www.google.com ] returns the following results: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site:www.google.com. If your site is displayed as a result when you perform a Google site search for your URL, it's included in our index.

How do I change my site's title and description?

Google's creation of sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web.

How to create good meta descriptions
How to prevent search engines from displaying DMOZ data in search results for your site

How to create good meta descriptions

Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn't very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don't have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.
Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information - price, age, manufacturer - scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together. For example, the following meta description provides detailed information about a book.

META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Author: A.N. Author, Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages"

In this example, information is clearly tagged and separated.

Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions can be impossible. In the latter case, however, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and are encouraged. Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-specific data we mentioned in the second point is a good candidate for programmatic generation. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't give users a clear idea of the page's content, and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular snippet.
Use quality descriptions. Finally, make sure your descriptions are truly descriptive. Because the meta descriptions aren't displayed in the pages the user sees, it's easy to let this content slide. But high-quality descriptions can be displayed in Google's search results, and can go a long way to improving the quality and quantity of your search traffic.

How to prevent search engines from displaying DMOZ data in search results for your site

One source we use to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project. You can direct us not to use this as a source by adding a meta tag to your pages.

To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using this information for the page's description, use the following:

META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"

To specifically prevent Google from using this information for a page's description, use the following:

META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP"

If you use the robots meta tag for other directives, you can combine those. For instance:

META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP, NOFOLLOW"

Note that once you add this meta tag to your pages, it may take some time for changes to your snippets to appear in the index.

I don't see my site in search results, or my site appears lower in results

Our goal is to return highly relevant results for every query. Search results are returned from our search index. Our search index is constantly evolving as content is added and modified on the web. The changing content, as well as updates to our ranking algorithms, can cause URLs to change position in search results, and possibly, though less likely, be removed.

Occasionally, fluctuation in search results is the result of differences in our data centers. When you perform a Google search, your query is sent to a Google data center in order to retrieve search results. There are numerous data centers, and many factors (such as geographic location and search traffic) determine where a query is sent. Because not all of our data centers are updated simultaneously, it's possible to see slightly different search results depending on which data center handles your query.

We understand that these changes can be confusing. If your site is well-linked from others on the web, it's likely that we'll add it again during our next crawl. While we can't guarantee that any page will consistently appear in our index or appear with a particular rank, our Webmaster Guidelines offer helpful tips for maintaining a crawler-friendly site. Following these recommendations should increase the likelihood that your site will show up consistently in our search results.

If your site isn't appearing in Google search results, or it's performing more poorly than it once did, check out these steps to identify and fix potential causes of the problem.

1. Check your site is in the Google index
2. Make sure Google can find and crawl your site
3. Make sure that Google can index your site
4. Make sure your content is useful and relevant

1. Check your site is in the Google index

Do a site: search

When a webmaster tells us that his or her site has fallen out of our search results, we often find that it's still included. To quickly determine whether your site is still in our index, just perform a Google site search for its entire URL. A search for site:www.google.com, for instance, returns the following results: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site:www.google.com Note that you shouldn't include a space between the site: operator and your domain name. The Site Status Wizard lets you check the index status of your site, and also tells you when your home page was last accessed by Google.

If your site is displayed as a result when you perform a Google site search for your URL, then it's included in our index.

However, if your site used to be indexed and no longer is, it may have been removed for violations of our Webmaster Guidelines. Review the guidelines and then, once you've fixed any issues, submit a reconsideration request.

Verify that your site ranks for your domain name

Do a Google search for www.[yourdomain].com. If your site doesn't appear in the results, or if it ranks poorly in the results, this is a sign that your site may be penalized for violations of the webmaster guidelines. If we find certain problems with your site - for example, malware - we'll let you know via the Message Center You should also review your site against the webmaster guidelines and, submit a reconsideration request.

Alert us to your new content

If your site is very new, we may not know about it yet. Tell Google about your site. One way to expedite Google's discovery of new pages is to submit a Sitemap. Even if your site is already in the index, Sitemaps are a great way to tell Google about the pages you consider most important.

2. Make sure Google can find and crawl your site

Crawling is how Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. Our crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits of each these websites, it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Check for crawl errors. The Web crawl errors page in Webmaster Tools provides details about the URLs in your site that we tried to crawl and couldn't access. Review these errors, and fix any you can. The next time Googlebot crawls your site, it will note the changes and use them to update the Google index.
Review your robots.txt file. The Analyze robots.txt tool lets you analyze your robots.txt file to see if you're blocking Googlebot from any URLs or directories on your site.
Make sure that the URLs haven't been blocked with Meta tags.
Review your site structure and make sure that it's easily accessible. Most search engines are text-based. If navigation or links are created using JavaScript, DHTML, images, or Flash files, Googlebot and other spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
If you have recently restructured your site or moved to a new domain, pages that previously performed well may now rank poorly. To avoid this, use 301 redirects ("RedirectPermanent") in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.) For more information about 301 HTTP redirects, please see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt.
Consider creating and submitting a Sitemap. Even if your site is already indexed, Sitemaps are a way to give Google information about your site and the URLs you consider most important. Sitemaps are particularly helpful if your site has dynamic content or other content not easily discoverable by Googlebot, or if your site is new or does not have many links to it.

3. Make sure that Google can index your site

Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as title tags and alt attributes. Google can process many types of content. However, while we can process HTML and PDF files, we have a more difficult time understanding (e.g. crawling and indexing) Flash.

Check your site's index stats. These stats show how your site is represented in the Google index.
Review your site's structure. Google, like most search engines, is text-based. This means that Googlebot can't read text included in images or in most Flash files, or pages that are hidden behind JavaScript or require sign-in. Making sure your content is text-based and readable helps make it more accessible to humans and to Googlebot.

4. Make sure your content is useful and relevant

Understand how users are reaching your site by reviewing the Top Search Queries page. The first list shows the Google searches in which your site most often appears. The second list shows the Google searches from which users clicked through to your site. This information is particularly useful because it gives you an insight into what users are searching for (the first list), and what they find compelling enough to click on your site (the second list). For example, your site may often appear in Google searches for espresso gadgets and coffee widgets. If the query coffee widgets doesn't appear in the second list, it could be because it's not clear to users that your site contains information about coffee widgets. In this case, consider revising your content to make it more compelling and relevant. Avoid stuffing your site with keywords, though, because this can cause your site's ranking to suffer, as well as degrading the user experience for your readers.
Understand how Google sees your site. The page shows the keywords and phrases other sites use when they link to yours. Understanding how other people see your site can help you figure out how best to target your audience.
Check the Content Analysis page in Webmaster Tools. Descriptive information in title tags and Meta descriptions will give us good information about the content of your site. In addition, this text can appear in search results pages, and useful, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on by users.
Tell the world about your site. Incoming links to your site help Google determine your site's relevance to the user's query. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors

How do I request reconsideration of my site?

If your site has previously violated our webmaster guidelines, and you've made changes to it so that it now meets our guidelines, you can ask Google to reconsider your site for inclusion in the index.

In addition, if you recently purchased a domain that you think may have violated our guidelines before you owned it, you can use the reconsideration request form to let us know that you recently acquired the site and that it now adheres to the guidelines.

To request reconsideration of your site:

Sign in to Google webmaster tools. The webmaster tools Dashboard opens.
Under Tools, click Request reconsideration and follow the steps

Why should I report paid links to Google?

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the a tag
Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank. If you see a site that is buying or selling links that pass PageRank, let us know.We’ll use your information to improve our algorithmic detection of such links

Sometimes an address appears below some search results. Why?

The address link shown below some sites in our search results (in an expandable area called a Plus Box) is meant to help searchers locate businesses and compare search results. We show the address link for results that are local in nature and for which we have an associated address. If we don't have an address for your business, or we don't think that an address is relevant to your site we won't show it.

If an address for your business's web site doesn't appear in Google search results, please add your business information to our Local Business Center and make sure your address appears in your site in plain text and Google is allowed to crawl your site

Will participating in an affiliate program harm my site's rankings?

Our Webmaster Guidelines advise you to create websites with original content that adds value for users. This is particularly important for sites that participate in affiliate programs. Typically, affiliate websites feature product descriptions that on sites across that affiliate network. As a result, sites featuring mainly content from affiliate networks can suffer in Google's search rankings, because they do not have unique content that differentiates them from other sites on the web.

Google believes that pure affiliate websites do not provide additional value for web users, especially if they are part of a program that distributes its content to several hundred affiliates. Because a search result could return multiple sites, all with the same content, they create a frustrating user experience.

If you participate in an affiliate program, there are a number of steps you can take to help your site stand out and to help improve your rankings.

Affiliate program content should form only a small part of the content of your site.
When selecting an affiliate program, choose a product category appropriate for your intended audience. The more targeted the affiliate program is to your site's content, the more value it will add and the more likely you will be to rank better in Google's search results and make money from the program. For example, a well-maintained site about hiking in the Alps could consider an affiliate partnership with a supplier who sells hiking books rather than office supplies.
Use your website to build community among your users. This will help build a loyal readership, and can also create a source of information on the subject you are writing about. For example, discussion forums, user reviews, and blogs all offer unique content and provide value to users.
Keep your content updated and relevant. Fresh, on-topic information increases the likelihood that your content will be crawled by Googlebot and clicked on by users.

Pure affiliate sites consisting of content that appears in many other places on the web is unlikely to perform well in Google search results and can cause your site to be negatively perceived by search engines. Unique, relevant content provides value to users and distinguishes your site from other affiliates, making it more likely to rank well in Google search result pages

How does Google calculate the number of results?

When you perform a search, the results are often displayed with the information: Results 1 - 10 of about XXXX.

Google's calculation of the total number of search results is an estimate. We understand that a ballpark figure is valuable, and by providing an estimate rather than an exact account, we can return quality search results faster.

In addition, when you click on the next page of search results, the total number of search results can change. In this case, we realize that some of the query results are duplicates, and collapse those duplicates so that you can find the specific result you're looking for more easily. Collapsing the duplicates decreases the estimated number of results, as well as the overall number of results pages.

To expand your results, click the link to the last search results page. At the bottom of the page, click In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries... .

If you've created and submitted a Sitemap, you can use the Sitemap details page to see how many of your listed URLs have been crawled and indexed by Google

Why does my site have a PageRank of zero?

A page may be assigned a PageRank of zero for a variety of reasons, such as:

Googlebot hasn't yet crawled this site, or the site has only been developed recently.
There are no or few trusted links to the site.
Google believes the site violates our Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

To learn more about PageRank, please see http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

What's an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?

SEO is an abbreviation for "search engine optimizer." Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, from writing copy to giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories to which a site can be submitted. However, a few unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results.

While Google doesn't have relationships with any SEOs and doesn't offer recommendations, we do have a few tips that may help you distinguish between an SEO that will improve your site and one that will only improve your chances of being dropped from search engine results altogether.

Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.

Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:

"Dear google.com,
I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."

Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or through the Google Sitemaps program, and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.

Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do.

Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to "help" you.

You should never have to link to an SEO.

Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don't affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.

Some SEOs may try to sell you the ability to type keywords directly into the browser address bar.

Most such proposals require users to install extra software, and very few users do so. Evaluate such proposals with extreme care and be skeptical about the self-reported number of users who have downloaded the required applications.

Choose wisely.

While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html. While Google doesn't comment on specific companies, we've encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.

Be sure to understand where the money goes.

While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they "control" other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn't work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.

Talk to many SEOs, and ask other SEOs if they'd recommend the firm you're considering.

References are a good start, but they don't tell the whole story. You should ask how long a company has been in business and how many full time individuals it employs. If you feel pressured or uneasy, go with your gut feeling and play it safe: hold off until you find a firm that you can trust. Ask your SEO firm if it reports every spam abuse that it finds to Google using our spam complaint form at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Ethical SEO firms report deceptive sites that violate Google's spam guidelines.

Make sure you're protected legally.

Don't be afraid to request a refund if you're unsatisfied with your SEO's performance. Make sure you have a contract in writing that includes pricing. The contract should also require the SEO to stay within the guidelines recommended by each search engine for site inclusion.

What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?

One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

What are some other things to look out for?

There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It's far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:

owns shadow domains
puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
offers to sell keywords in the address bar
doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear in search results
guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scum ware
has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google

If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.

Will participation in AdWords or AdSense affect my listing in Google's free search results?

Google's advertising programs are independent of our search results. Search results display on the left side of our results page; ads appear on the right and in the colored box at the top.

Participation in an advertising program doesn't positively or negatively affect inclusion or ranking in the Google search results. Inclusion and ranking are free services; we don't accept payment to expedite inclusion or improve a site's ranking for particular keywords. To learn more about how Google ranks pages, please visit http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

Will switching hosting companies or changing my IP address affect my listing in Google?

As long as your URL stays the same, your site's listing in Google shouldn't be affected if you switch hosting companies or change your IP address. We recommend migrating a site to a new IP address with the following steps:

1. Bring a copy of your site up at the new IP address.
2. Update your name server to point to the new IP address.
3. Once you see search engine spiders fetch pages from the new IP address (typically within 24-48 hours), it's safe to take down the copy of your site at the old IP address

Google Optimization

2008-02-18T00:53:00.000-08:00

Google Optimizations

My site’s ranking in Google search results

Creating a Google-friendly site

How Google crawls my site

Preventing content from appearing in Google search results

My mobile site in the Google index

SEO Tutorials - How to Optimize for Yahoo!

2008-02-18T00:49:00.000-08:00

SEO Whitepapers and SEO Tutorials

How to Optimize for Yahoo!

Written by Ross Dunn and published at 1:05 AM

With a reported 22.1% of search traffic Yahoo is second only to Google’s 64.4% (src: Hit wise) for search user volume so it is extremely important not to forget that attaining a top ranking in Yahoo can be a big boon to the bottom line. As a result, I decided to write this update on how to attain superior rankings in Yahoo using today’s useful tools and tactics.

OVERVIEW: Optimizing for Yahoo!
Algorithmically Yahoo is Google’s much younger sibling. I say this because many of the requirements for a successful ranking mirror Google’s requirement about 4 years ago and they sum up to one distinct fact; optimize your content boldly on Yahoo and you will be rewarded. When I say “boldly” I do not mean use SPAM; by nature SPAM and optimization do not mix… they are two entirely separate concepts (black and white in fact).

The following are the current generalized specifications for achieving solid rankings in Yahoo.

WEB SITE OPTIMIZATION
SEO tactics have not changed a great deal over the past 10 years I have been an SEO. In general a term the only effect time has had on SEO is to vary the intensity of the optimization for particular page elements. That is the rub of course; some search engines appreciate the optimization of particular page elements over others. In the case of Yahoo, this old property with a relatively young algorithm tends to favour the following elements:

Title Tag: Keep your title tag as short as 5 small-medium sized words and include one complete incidence of your keyphrase. Yahoo! blatantly favours sites that include the key phrase in the title tag. For an example check out “car sales” or for that matter any phrase. Within the top 10 results you will notice that the majority of sites listed will include at least one incidence of the keyphrase or a crucial portion of it (i.e. “cars”). The ones that do not include the key phrase tend to be sites that have are extremely popular so even basic title tag optimization is not required to attain a top ranking.

Meta Description Tag: Start this tag with an incidence of your keyphrase and then produce a short 15 – 18 small-medium sized word sentence clearly describing your site. Include one more incidence of your key phrase in the sentence. Keep in mind that the description tag is often utilized as the description for any rankings you achieve so it is best to make it alluring.

Meta Keyword Tag: Keyword tags have long been considered ineffective and no longer have any importance on Google; however Yahoo does still consider the keyword tag so it cannot hurt to include it. The keyword tag should start with the keyphrase and then all following words or phrases should be ordered according to their relevance to your website; place the most important ones up front. The max size of a keyword tag should be 250 characters – comma-delimited. Do not over repeat words; no more than 3 repetitions of a single word within the tag.

Keywords in URL: Create keyword-based filenames that closely represent the content within the file. Yahoo rewards keyword-based filenames a small amount – perhaps enough to push past your competition.

Headings: Heading 1 and 2 tags should be applied on every page where appropriate to embolden the relevance of the page. In other words, use the page’s keyphrase within a Heading 1 tag to further enhance the visibility of the keyphrase on the page.

Alt text for images: Don’t forget to provide appropriate ALT text for each image on your website. The ALT text must not provide information that is already written on the website. ALT text is supposed to provide a clear and concise description of what the image is. Fortunately this means that adding an incidence of the keyphrase or a portion of the keyphrase is totally appropriate which can add slightly more credibility to your page score when Yahoo’s crawler (Slurp) indexes the page.

Inline Links: In the midst of your page it is beneficial to include links to related pages from related content. These links will apply relevance to the linked page; which is optimized for the same keyphrase you linked from.

Site Structure: Site structure is a vital component to ranking success on Yahoo; especially in competitive marketplaces where every advantage is required to reach the top. One method that would be successful at Yahoo (and happens to work as well on the other major search engines) is a tried and true technique that revolves around the linear progression of related content throughout the website; it is commonly known as Themeing. The following example should shed some light on this subject:

Your site is a car sales site focused on Audi. In order to create a linear site structure you would focus each section of the site on an individual relevancy. Say you pick “Audi A5” as the relevant topic (see Figure 1.0). As you move deeper into the Audi A5 section you only see A5 relevant content. The search engine spider and your users will not be distracted by links to other vehicles – only information on the A5. This progresses as you proceed deeper into this arm of the website and because this section of the site is utterly focused on the subject “Audi A5” the odds of achieving a ranking for that term increase considerably.

LINKS
When building links for Yahoo concentrate on quality not quantity. Quality links would be one way links from sites that specialize in content directly relevant to the content on your own website. Building these links can be done by creating content and syndicating it to your own industry for link love and to build credibility. In addition, if your website is a worthwhile resource it is entirely reasonable to tell the world about your site in order to build links; hopefully they will link to you because they like your site so much.

Finally, there is another tactic that has mixed results; send out press releases once a month using PRWeb or an associated press release agency. A good press release can easily build the links you need in no time at all. Unfortunately the mixed results I noted occur when press releases inevitably become archived, at which point the link relevance will fade. As a result, link building with press releases is only useful as an ongoing practice and should be considered a small facet of a robust link building campaign.

SITE EXPLORER SETTINGS
Yahoo’s Site Explorer is a fantastic tool for monitoring your website(s) and running basic link reports. If you have not already done so you should create an account at Site Explorer and then validate your website (prove you own it) so that you can manage the information Yahoo has for your website. Once you have validated your website I have noted some Site Explorer functionality that may help your website perform on Yahoo:

Make certain to create a sitemap and submit it to Yahoo:
If you haven’t already done so use a XML sitemap generator to create a sitemap for your website and then submit it to Yahoo using the “Add Feed” form within your website’s Site Explorer profile.
Removing unnecessary dynamic content from your URLs with new add-on within Site Explorer:
Does your URLs content session ID’s or other dynamic content that is unnecessary within the URL? If so, this information can be indexed by the search engines and ultimately can cause havoc with your rankings. Thankfully Yahoo has implemented a new tool within the Site Explorer domain management section called “Dynamic URLs Beta”. Here are the instructions to use the Dynamic URLs tool.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
After reviewing our notes from current and previous Yahoo promotions and taking a look at a variety of top 10 results the following points appeared noteworthy:

Ensure open indexing by using Robots.txt wisely
A lot of our client’s older content appears to be sticking to top rankings with little or no monthly tweaking. As a result, I think it is fair to assume that fresh content is not currently gaining much weight in the Yahoo algorithm.
In many cases top ranking sites have pushed the envelope and their sites border on SPAM. Considering the top ranking these sites have it appears Yahoo’s SPAM filters are far less sensitive than Google’s. I expect Yahoo will change this in the near future but then again I have been surprised how long this has been the status quo.
One common claim throughout forums is that achieving a placement in the Yahoo Directory provides an instant boost to Yahoo rankings. Unfortunately we have not seen conclusive evidence that the annual $299 fee will increase rankings dramatically in the short term. That said, I strongly believe that a Yahoo Directory placement is a very reputable incoming link that does pay dividends in the long run at any search engine that weighs incoming links (the ones that count).
Yahoo Search Submit was re-introduced back in February 2007 to significant criticism due to the potential favouritism to those who pay to get into the Yahoo index. Despite the negative feedback there appears to be some potential benefits to paying for submission. For one, in July I noted an interesting story where a website was banned from Yahoo and the webmaster got the site back into Yahoo’s index by paying for inclusion (“Banned from Yahoo?”). A second reason Search Submit may be worthwhile is the guarantee that your site will be indexed. Furthermore, the Yahoo’s Search Submit Pro service allows you to recommend your own title and description tags for each page submitted and to submit pages that may not normally be indexed by Slurp.

Basic SEO Questions

2008-02-16T01:47:00.000-08:00

Basic Search Engine Optimization Questions

What is a Search Engine?
A search engine is an online database of websites that allows Internet users to search for information contained on websites contained in the database by "Keywords". Keywords are words that Internet searches are likely to use when looking for information on a specific topic. For example, the words "grad schools" would likely be used when looking for information on continuing post-secondary education. Each search engine has slightly different behaviors and characteristics.

What is a Directory?
A directory is a search tool much like a search engine but with a few major differences. Directories tend to employ human editors to review and rank websites submitted to their database. Yahoo! is the most well known example of a directory. Most directories catalog websites based on a variety of topic categories such as Business and Economics, or Arts and Culture. Most directories demand payment before assigning a website review to one of their editors.

What is PPC or Pay Per Click?
Several Search tools are now offering Pay Per Click (PPC) rankings. Companies such as Google and Yahoo Search Marketing allow webmasters the chance to purchase placement in an auction system. StepForth has PPC Management services and keyword research services designed to find the best performing keywords to bid on.

Is there a simple solution to top placement?
There is no simple solution to attaining high search engine rankings. Search engine optimization (SEO) is time consuming work and requires current knowledge of the latest search engine guidelines, SEO tactics and web site structures that are most likely to improve rankings.

Are not all search engines the same?
Each search tool has its own unique characteristics. As businesses differ from one another, each search tool has found ways to make its service slightly different from other search tools.

Will my website stay at the #1 position once my website is placed there by StepForth?
Search Engine rankings fluctuate frequently, however, if your site is properly maintained by search engine specialists month to month then it is likely that the movement will be confined to within the top10 positions.

TIP: Step Forth offers a monthly maintenance service which is designed to maintain optimal positioning for existing clientele. Check it out!

My website did not get accepted last time I submitted to the search engines... why?
Search Engine listings are not guaranteed to everyone who posts a website to the Internet. Search engines are for-profit businesses and have the right to refuse to list any site for virtually any reason. At Step Forth we specialize in getting sites listed on search engines. We ensure all bases are covered and all necessary elements are present before submitting the finalized site to the search engines or directories.

How long does it take to see results?
It can take between 2 - 12 weeks to see results, depending on each search engine. StepForth starts tracking your website's performance 14 days after submission. We will forward all results as they come in over time. Ask about our SEO services.

How does the Search Engine find websites?
There are two ways a search engine can find a website to add to its database. The first and most direct method is to accept submissions from website designers and optimizers. Most search engines have a "submit your URL" section inviting submissions from Internet users.

The second, and least obvious method of finding websites is to send a "spider" to follow each and every link on, off, and through a website. New URLs encountered by the spider will be added to the database. In this way, some search engines will grow very rapidly.

What is a "Spider"?
A "spider" is an electronic robot that travels the web examining websites in order to add them to a search engine database and rank them according to the specific ranking criteria for that search engine. Most search engines use spiders to quickly and efficiently canvass the web for information.

What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization is the process of making websites search engine friendly. The process often involves minor modifications to, or additions of, several standard elements of a website.

What do you mean by Search Engine Friendly?
We use this term to describe a website that has specific elements added or modified to attract and please search engine spiders or live directory editors. Here is a link to an article that will provide you with more information: "Is Your Web Site Search Engine Friendly? Your Personal Checklist" - A StepForth SEO Tutorial

Why might I need to have extra elements added to my website?
A search engine spider is an automated program that electronically probes every URL submitted to its database. As the spider is a computer program, it is designed to look for and rank very specific items on each page it probes. If those elements are present, the spider computes a higher ranking than it would if those elements were not present.

If these elements are so important, why didn't they get added when my site was originally designed?
Most website designers haven't learned the importance of search engine friendly design. In almost every case we've encountered, the site designer is a highly skilled and creative person whose job is to put your ideas on the web. More often than not, the designers have not received any training in search engine optimization and don't think about it while pursuing a cool looking design. Search engines are also constantly changing their ranking criteria. They do this to prevent gross manipulation of their search tools. Often, website designers are not fully up to date with changes at search engines. For an example, ask your website designers about Theme Engines. At StepForth, we spend a good portion of our time studying how search engines work and how any sudden changes might effect our clients.

Why don't I just do the work myself and save money?
You can do the work yourself. You will need to continuously update your knowledge of how the various search engines work and any changes made in the way they work. This shouldn't take you too much time. Once you get the hang of it, search engine optimization (SEO) can be as simple as re-shoeing the brake pads on your car or replacing the motherboard and system bios in your computer.

You should know that if you make a mistake in optimization and submission, it can take months to find the mistake and fix it, resubmit the site and obtain the search engine ranking you desired. Our 10+ years of experience with search engine optimization helps us avoid most mistakes.

SEO FAQ

2008-02-16T01:43:00.000-08:00

SEO FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions about SEO

What is SEO?

Trust level: Believed but not fully confirmed

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is defined as (in my own words):

"The process of finding out the best keywords for a web site and by the use of optimizing the web site along with other off-page work making that web site attain a higher position in the search engine result pages (SERPs) for those selected words."

Although the exact calculations used by the search engines are kept secret, there is lot of knowledge and observations in this field from thousands of webmasters worldwide.

It could be said to be a branch of online marketing. In general terms you can say that it means to make a web site more visible and make it look important in the eyes of search engines.

Not being familiar with SEO and not applying it compared to actually doing the right things can make a huge difference in terms of visitors to your web site.

How do I find out the best keywords to target?

Trust level: Proven and confirmed

The "best" keyword depends on the following main factors:

1.) The amount of traffic it will generate.
2.) The difficulty of attaining a top ranking.
3.) The profitability of that keyword.

In this answer I will address each point and give recommendations on tools to use to help you in your assessment.

The Amount of Traffic it Will Generate
Often people choose keywords based on how popular they think they may be. Mostly it is based on "real world" factors rather then fact which is readily available. For instance, I recently saw someone who proposed they were going to go after the term "nursing homes" due to the aging population.
Although this area may be growing quickly, those interested in finding out more information often do not use a computer or if they did, would not be researching it online. Although they would still get visitors, they would find there are much better keywords to target with profit in mind. When it comes to traffic, the best measurement is actual searches. This will tell you how many people search in a day or month for that term and it can be a great indicator. By far, the most popular tool for finding this out is the Keyword Suggestion Tool. This tool combines the two most popular ways of judging popularity, Word tracker and Overture. In addition, it suggests related keywords and lists their traffic. Always remember however, that this is total searches. These search numbers will always be divided among the SERPs.

The Difficulty of Attaining a Top Ranking
If you simply chose the keywords with highest amount of traffic, you could still lose money. This is because these keywords typically warrant a lot more work to rank for. A perfect keyword is one that has a lot of searches but little SEO competition and moderate too easy to rank for. The best tool I have found for this is the Keyword Difficulty Tool created by Rand Fishkin. It will give you an indication of the amount of SEO work required which you can balance against the number of searches.

The Profitability of that Keyword
There are also keywords where you may get 1000s of visitors with only one conversion while others where you can achieve 1 for every 100. This should be factored in as unless you make your money per impression, you want the highest number of conversions per visitor. The best way I know to evaluate this is to run an Ad Words account. The amount of data you receive by starting a campaign can be very useful in establishing the conversion rate. I believe it is always better to spend $10 to find out a keyword isn't profitable then to spend 6 months getting it to number one, THEN find out it’s a dog.

The moral of the story is although there is no such thing as a "perfect" keyword; you can find the best ones for you by using a combination of the factors above.

What is KEI and how do I use it?

KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index. KEI is a ranking system based on how popular a key word is and how much competition it has on the Internet. The higher the KEI number, the more popular your keywords are and the less competition they have. It also means that you'll have a much better chance getting ranked high on a search engine. A low KEI score means not many people are searching for that keyword and it has too much competition. Hence, eliminate all KEI scores with a low number and choose those with a high KEI score. The higher the score, the more profitable your keywords will be to your web site.

What are the most important things for on-page optimization?

On-page optimization is the part of SEO where you deal with the pages itself, opposite to off-page optimization and keyword analysis.

Here is my opinion on the most important elements in on-page optimization and some brief information about them.

Content

It has been said over and over since years that a successful way of establishing a web site is by adding more good unique content to it on a regular basis. It cannot be stressed enough although still people are not doing it and want some "magic" to happen.

Make sure that you have your targetted keywords included in the content on your web pages in a natural way. My rule of thumb is that you write without thinking about it and when you finish you can look over the text and add the keyword maybe on one or two places extra where it fits in. If it looks spammy or too much in any way then reduce it. You are writing for the visitor and not for the search engines - never forget that.

Also make sure that the text is unique as if it is the same as on other web pages it can raise a red flag at major search engines and duplicate web pages and even whole domains gets erased from the index.
Weight factors

By placing your targetted keyword in places such as the title, H1 and H2, Strong tags and Emphasis tags you put more weight on those words and for the search engines it becomes more relevant for those words.

But don't overdue it because if you place the same word or phrase on all the weight tags on the same page you can get hit by the over-optimization penalty which means that basically the search engines figured you tried to cheat them and push you down the rankings.
Navigation structure

Make sure that the search engine spiders can follow the internal links on your site. If you have a site based on a database it is recommended that you use mod_rewrite to get the best benefit.

If you have lot of pages on your site and they are buried down in the navigation tree of 3 or more clicks away than I recommend the use of a sitemap and a link to it from each page of your site. A sitemap makes is easy for search engines to find all your pages and it can also be a great resource for your visitors to find a specific page quickly.

If one or more web pages of your site is more important than the other ones, like the home page, then get more links to it from the other web pages of the site. A good example is to have a link, "home", on each web page back to your home page. That is also useful for your visitors and it gives more power to the home page in the search engine rankings.

Is the use of meta tags dead?

Yes, in fact they have not been relied upon since many years. An article from Danny Sullivan stating exactly this was released in October 2002.

There is still some minor “stone age” search engines around that uses them.

The main reasons why they have been ceased to work are mostly from these factors:

Most webmasters tried to fool the search engines with meta tags unrelated to their content and services.
With improved FTS (full text search) tool kits from verity and many other companies, search engines can index your web pages and know the theme of your web page. With such advanced APIs, search engines like google can easily decide, what your website is about and what your website offers.

Some of the basic features of FTS API are that they can filter out text of your webpage and get important statistics such as:

How many times a word gets repeated
How far each repeated words are from each other
How many times a particular word gets repeated in a particular sentence
How far a word 'Online' appears from words like 'Party', 'invitations' to
see if that sentence makes any sense.
They can easily figure out, if you are doing keyword dumping.

So with such API's the webmaster should concentrate on the content/layout and not put the meta tags as a main concern.

However it has been tested that the meta keyword tag still has a minor influence on the rankings and the meta description tag should be used as it is some times shown in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

Where in my code should I put the keywords?

We all know it is not enough to have your keyword in the meta keyword tag.

Here is a list of places to put it in the source code, ordered by estimated weight:

Title tag.
H1 and H2.
In paragraphs and general text on the site.
In STRONG tags: STRONG Keyword STRONG
In the file names of the web document: www.domain.com/keyword.html
ALT description attributes on image tags: IMG SRC="" ALT="A picture about Keyword"
TITLE attributes on anchor tags: A HREF="" TITLE="Here you can get info about Keyword"
SUMMARY attributes on tables: TABLE SUMMARY="In this table you will see keyword"
In the file names of images: IMG SRC="keyword.gif"
Meta description tag.
Meta keyword tag.

SEO FAQ 1

2008-02-16T01:41:00.001-08:00

How is the best way to write the title?

The title is most probably the single most important place to put your keyword.

Have the word in the beginning of the title and also in the end. Try to vary it in different forms as well.

If you want to brand your company name you should keep that name in the end.

Try to follow this and at the same time make it look natural and appealing for the visitors. Remember that this is what is most visible in the SERPs for the visitor.

What is the best way to write the URL's?

In regards to Google it has been stated by two of their staffs involved in the SEO community (GoogleGuy and Matt Cutts) that the dashes (-) are better than underscores (_) when writing the URLs. This has also been confirmed by my own tests on the matter.

In regards to Yahoo, MSN and other search engines I actually don't know but I think it varies.

Which factors are considered unethical or black hat SEO?

Page cloaking is a BIG one, which basically consists of using server side scripts to determine whether the visitor is a search engine or a human and serving up different pages depending. The script would serve up a keyword rich, totally souped up page to search robots, while giving humans an entirely different page.

Linkfarms are considered black hat. Linkfarms are basically sites which consist of masses of links, for the purpose of getting rankings in search engines and turning a profit (usually off of affiliate program advertisements on the website).

Duplicate content can keep a page from getting indexed, and some people have even reported trouble with entire websites being duplicated by unethical webmasters, causing problems with their rankings.

Spamming keywords, in meta tags, title tags, or in your page's content is a black hat SEO trick that used to work well back in the 90's. It's long since been basically exterminated as a useful trick.

Linking to "bad neighborhoods", or sites that have been banned from search engines for using the above tricks, while not particularly black hat is definitely unhealthy for your own sites rankings.

How should good navigation look like?

Good Navigation can be broken down to one word - "Breadcrumbs"

If you remember the fairy tail "Hanzel and Gretel" you will recall that when the children were kidnapped, they dropped breadcrumbs so that their rescuers would be able to find them. In our situation, imagine its your site that has been kidnapped and the Search Engines are your "rescuer".

An example of Breadcrumbs would be the following

*Home-->Sublevel1-->Sublevel2

This type of navigation allows the Search Engines to find all of your pages in the most efficient and thorough way. It also aids "Deep Crawls" which are crucial to dynamic sites which may have 100,000 or more pages. Not only should you use this style of navigation behind the scenes but displaying the Breadcrumbs somewhere on the site will help both the Search Engines and visitors alike. A perfect example of this is www.dmoz.org

The second part of navigation is the "site map". This is a page which contains a link to every one of your pages. To be fully optimized, the links should have a descriptive anchor text to further help the page you are lining to. In addition your site map should always be within one click of the index page as this will help the Search Engines find it quickly.

Using these two methods of navigation will ensure your site gets fully indexed and will add to your users experience

Types of Links
The major type of navigation to avoid or to at least compensate for is Javascript pulldown menus. Because Search Engine bots will not follow these, it is important to compensate by having text links somewhere else on the page. These can be in the footer or worked in elsewhere in the content. In fact, Javascript as a navigation in general has been shown to hinder indexing. There are a few alternative ways to code your javascript however if you always code a backup plan, you will enjoy easy indexing without the worry

A very important point to remember is that always link to your main pages from your home page and if possible from other pages as well.
If you have a link from your home page to another page of yours then you are telling the search engine that this page is also important and needs to be indexed soon. Same goes for pages linked from many pages within the website . A good practice is to add a link to sitemap from your home page . The sitemap contains link to all other pages and helps in faster indexing.
Additionally all your pages should also have a link to the home page so people can return to home page in case they find lost .
This also adds weight to your home page from a search engine's point of view.
The text in the link should describe the page as closely as possible and if using image links you must add ALT tags in the image .
If you really need to have a javascript navigation then you should also add text links at the bottom of the page

What should my domain name look like?

This is a dilema that webmasters have faced more and more as there are fewer prime domains to choose from. There is a difference between the optimal domain name and the one you have to settle for. In general, if you are picking a domain for SEO purposes, it should contain the keywords you are targeting. Many will say because there is an extra bonus in the SERPs for this (File that under Theory, Assumption, or Speculation), but the true power is in the SEO power that your natural links will garner. When people link to you on their own, they may use the name of your website. Most of the times they will get it from your URL. If your keywords are there, they will then be in the anchor text used.

As far as the other factors of the domain, unless you are after a local market (ie. UK and therefore .co.uk), always go for the .com . This is trusted in general by newbies who may hesitate at a .net (Hard to believe but true)

The last important factor is the use of "-"'s. Avoid them if possible but if you have to, use them conservatively. More then 2 may be viewed as Spam so don't cross that threshold.

If you aren't choosing your domain for SEO reasons, pick something unique. After all, who heard of www.google.com 7 years ago?

What is PageRank and how does it work?

One big way in which search engines are granting importance to web pages are based on how many other sites are linking to it.

PageRank is a system implemented by Google that measures web page's importance with only taking into account the links and links related factors. The other big search engines (Yahoo, MSN) probably have a similar system but without an official measurement.

The basics are that each web page is giving votes to the links on that page and the power of the vote is determined by the number of links pointing to the page that gives the vote.

The votes are divided among the links on the page so the lesser number of links, the more share of the vote is given to each link.

Internal links are given a higher share than external.

The scale is between 0-10 but in fact it has many decimals which we cannot see.

0-3 is the most common, 4 is obtained by getting an amount of links and 5 takes some work to get. Only a short list of sites on the internet has PageRank 10.

What are some recommended ways to get more links to my site?

The best way to get more links to your site is through hard work.

In order to find sites that are relevant to yours and allow you to post a link on, you can perform the following searches:

Replace the keyword with the phrase you are targeting.

keyword "add url"
keyword "add site"
keyword "submit site"
keyword "submit url"

If you perform these searches for various keywords you will find plenty of sites that will allow you to post your link on and that are related as well.

You may also submit to directories. This is a long and hard process but it is an easy and free way to get some incoming links to your site

2. Another way that I just discovered is the following query on Google:

intitle:add+url OR intitle:submit+your+site OR intitle:add+your+site "your keyword"

That will list sites in which you probably could add sites related to yours.

3. Another proven successful way is to write an article about a subject you know. When you finish the article you write a short bio about yourself in the end with a link to your site and then you submit it to article submission sites. You can find lists of such sites on various places with up to 100 places you can submit your article. If you are lucky many will accept your article and publish it on their site and each one will have a link back to you.

If you provided a high quality article and are lucky it is likely that your article will get published on authority pages and your page with the article will have some PageRank as well.

The trick here is to write something good and useful and also to submit it to many places.

It is an excellent form of marketing, not only with the backlinks you get but also from the readers who reads your name and bio.

SEO FAQ 2

2008-02-16T01:40:00.003-08:00

Can incoming links hurt me?

Personally I don't think so.

But there has been some recent speculation that links to your site that looks spammy may hurt your rankings.

So how do spammy links look like?

Thousands from the same IP.
All the same anchor text.
Only up temporarily and have no real age.
Coming from spammy/questionable/not-so-good sites.
Has a set pattern.
Unnatural growth, like suddenly thousands overnight.

What is a Link Farm?

A linkfarm is any type of website in which there is no real content, service, or purpose, but rather just a load of non-related reciprical links to other places. Generally linkfarms are built to increase search engine rankings and turn a profit, which means they're also generally littered with advertisements from affiliate programs the site owner has partnered with.

Linkfarms are not to be confused with Linkdumps, which are simply places people dump all kinds of links to content on various websites

Can I get my site accepted faster into DMOZ?

DMOZ (www.dmoz.org) has the ability to frustrate webmasters with its opaque site selection process. Though the guidelines are clear and fair, the actual implementation is not.

The only 3 things you can do to possibly get into DMOZ faster are:

1) Follow all the editorial guidelines
2) Choose the right subcategory
3) Submit a meaningful site.

Despite following all 3 of these instructions, you might be in a position where your site is not added for years, if at all. This has more to do with the availability of editors for the site, and their choice.

There are stories about people managing to "bribe" editors into getting their sites into DMOZ faster. These are unverified, and I would not recommend this route.

Despite all its faults, the popularity of the DMOZ data is so high that DMOZ submission is well worth the 15 minutes it takes. Good Luck

Does the web host have anything to do with the ranking?

As such, a web host can not help to improve the rankings. Search Engines will not rank you higher because your site is hosted on a particular web host (means buying hosting from Yahoo does not means your site will rank well in Yahoo) but yes if you choose a web host that remains down a lot that can certainly have a negative effect on your rankings.

So do keep in mind that though a web host will not help to improve your SE rankings but yes a bad host can have a bad effect on your rankings

What is relative vs absolute links?

When designing a site, you will always face the question of whether you should use relative or absolute links. Later in this answer I will explain the benefits of each but first here is a definition:

Relative: Relative links usually look something like index.html or /folder/page.html. The way the page knows where to go is all relative to the page the link is placed on. A link to index.html for example, will only work if the file is found in the current folder.

Absolute: Absolute links usually look something like http://www.example.com/page.html. This is a full url and the linked to page will be found regardless of where that link is located on the site.

Which you use depends on the following:

Speed: When your browser goes to find a page with a relative url it looks within the existing site. When it uses an absolute url it leaves the site for an instant and "refinds" the page. This means when it comes to speed, relative is the way to go.

Ease of Design: When you are designing a site using notepad, the danger with relative urls is that if you move a folder, it can break your entire site. As each page depends on another, if you are not a find and replace whiz, absolute may be your best bet.

SEO: This is the one area that I would place firmly in "Theory or Assumption". The truth is that we know broken links can hurt you so the most important is to choose a technique of linking that works best for your site. One of the better case for Absolute Links can be seen here

How do I get my web site to show up in the search engines?

As you might have noticed the submit URL function on the major search engines does not really help that much.

The best way to get your web site listed faster in the search engines is to get links to it from authority web sites (those with high Page Rank).

By getting a great link from for example the home page of an established Page Rank 7 web site can make your new web site and it's subpages indexed in a matter of hours.

If this is not an option for you then other good ways is to put a link to it from big forums signature, directories, friends sites etc.

If you wonder why only the home page is listed and not the rest it is because the search engine spiders first visits one time and then comes back for a "deep crawl". To speed up this process, the solution is to get more links to your site.

What are poison words?

Poison words are those which Search Engines will decrease your ranking for if found in your Url, Title, or Description. These can be a disaster when it comes to ranking and therefore you should be very careful to avoid them.

Poison Words Can be Divided into three categories

Ranking Killers (Adult Words and Obscenities)
Use of these words will cause the major Search Engines to analyse the website as "Adult". For a mainstream website this can mean your visitors never find your site. If one of these words is necessary, its always best to star out one of the letters. The most popular forum software and CMS systems will allow you to do this through their Admin panels

Ranking Decreasers
These include words the the major Search Engines associate with a lower quality site. These include but are not limited to Links, Search Engine, Bookmarks, Resources, Directory, BBS, Paid-to-Surf and Forum. The pages containing these words will still be indexed however they will find it very difficult to rank for their main keywords.

Speculative
These words are similar to Ranking Decreasers except they are merely theory at this point. They include words like "Free" or "Offer". Many of the pages using these words seemed to take a hit in the Bourbon Update.

The moral of the story is that you should be very careful with your Keyword choices, especially when writing your title and description. If you have a forum or a CMS system, use the profanity filters whenever possible

We can also make some assumptions on Google in particular by referencing the stop words used by their AdSense PPC program. These can be found on Vaughn's Summaries. There you will see a comprehensive list of Keywords that stop AdSense ads from showing. Although this isn't a direct correlation, it does give some insight into the way Google views Keywords

What are stop words?

Stop words are the small common words that the search engines are ignoring.

They should be avoided as much as possible in places like the title, headings and maybe some other places

How do I create a sitemap?

A sitemap should contain links to all your pages. A good rule of thumb is to limit the number of links to under 100 per page, so you may consider splitting sitemaps up by topic, alphabetically, by brand or other logical grouping.

A useful tool to create a basic sitemap is the Xenu's Link Sleuth, a free site crawler that produces an HTML sitemap that can be edited to fit your site's design.

If your content is dynamically driven from a database, you should also create your sitemap(s) from the same data

SEO FAQ 3

2008-02-16T01:40:00.001-08:00

What is the best way to redirect a site?

The best method is the so called 301 redirect as in this way you also tell the search engines that the page in question has been moved permanently (302 is temporary and is very risky for SEO purposes).

Here are the ways to do it:

Examples using .htaccess

Redirect 301 /oldfolder http://www.toanewdomain.com
Redirect 301 /oldurl.html http://www.yourdomain.com/newurl.html

If your server has windows then use it this way on the file that is being moved:

For windows server

<%@ Language=VBScript %>

<%

Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.dindomän.se/och-kanske/nya-dokumentet.html"

%>

You can also use PHP or ASP for this and then just add these lines at the top of the file:

PHP

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.newdomain.com/newdir/newpage.htm");
exit();

ASP 301

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.newdomain.com/newdir/newpage.asp"
response.end
%>

Redirect using meta refresh or javascript is not recommended and may even be harmful as this method has been used a lot by spammers and is most likely making the search engines penalising your site.

What is TrustRank?

TrustRank, as defined in a whitepaper by Jan Pederson (Yahoo!), Hector Garcia-Molina (Stanford), and Zoltan Gyongyi (Stanford), located at http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF, is a system of techniques to determine if a page is reputable or if it is spam. This system is not totally automated, as it does need some human intervention.

TrustRank is designed to help identify pages and sites that are likely to be spam or those that are likely to be reputable. The algorithm first selects a small seed set of pages which will be manually evaluated by humans. To select the seed sites, they use a form of Inverse PageRank, choosing sites that link out to many sites. Of those, many sites were removed, such as DMOZ clones, and sites that were not listed in major directories. The final set was culled down to include only selected sites with a strong authority (such as a governmental or educational institution or company) that controlled the contents of the site. Once the seed set is determined, a human examines each seed page, and rates it as either spam or reputable. The algorithm can now take this reviewed set of seed pages and rate other pages based on their connectivity with the trusted seed pages.

The authors of the TrustRank method assume that spam pages are built to fool search engines, rather than provide useful information. The authors also assume that trusted pages rarely point to spam pages, except in cases where they are tricked into it (such as users posting spam urls in a forum post).

The farther away a page is from a trusted page (via link structure), the less certain is the likelihood that the page is also trusted, with two or three steps away being the maximum. In other words, trust is reduced as the algorithm moves further and further away from the good seed pages. Several formulas are used to determine the amount of trust dampening or splitting to be assigned to each new page. Using these formulas, some portion of the trust level of a page is passed along to other pages to which it links.

TrustRank can be used alone to filter the index, or in combination with PageRank to determine search engine rankings

What is the sandbox?

The sandbox is a kind of filter implemented by Google in March 2004 that applies to maybe 99% of all new sites.

It's function is to push down new web sites in the SERPs.

My theory is that it was Google's solution to stop new spam sites that was created to rank high in the SERPs. It took probably some time before the Google spiders could detect such as a site and ban/penalize it and by that time the creater probably made several new ones.

When this phenomena was first noticed in March 2004 it was seen that it could take two months before a new site was "released" and could rank normally again. However by now October 2005, a time of half a year or more is normal and as long as more then a year has been reported.

By my own observations I have seen in Google that new sites can rank unusually high in the Google SERPs for some weeks before the sandbox filter gets activated

How do I get out of the sandbox faster?

One theory is that it has to do with link aging.

This means that as soon you put your site live, start getting quality links to it and try to keep them there forever

The sandbox is a collective filter that still has a lot of confusion and speculations surrounding it. One of the biggest areas is how one can "escape" it or at least make your stay there shorter. The theories (and I stress they are theories) break down into the following areas.

Link Speed
Some SEO's claim the sandbox actually has nothing to do with time and is actually more a function of linking. There is a double edge sword here. To rank high you need lots of links, but to avoid the sandbox you can't get too many links. As a compromise its proposed that you build your links exponentially which basically means if you get 10 the first week you would get 15 the next week and 20 the following, etc. Its believed it is this slow, steady and consistent increase in your number of incoming links that causes Google to see it as a legitimate and emerging site. So in the first month you may have accumulated 300 links but by spreading them out over the month you have avoided the sandbox filter. Alternatively, you can buy your domain before you even start designing your site and slowly accululate links. This way by the time you are completely up and ready, you will not be subject to the sandbox.

Link Quality and Relevance
Majority of SEO's and Webmasters tend to go after reciprocal and directory links when starting their first campaign. After all they are most likely a PR0 with a site no one has ever heard of, so they go with the one technique where these factors have little importance. What results is 100's of unrelated and unimportant links. Google has been devaluing the importance of directories over the last year and with the addition of hundreds a day, this trend seems here to stay. In many theories it is believed that if Webmasters get the majority of their links from "Authority" sites, they will be viewed as important and therefore not subject to the filters reffered to as the Sandbox

Purely Age
There are still those that feel that age is still the most important factor. If you are registering a new domain name, there is no way around this. However, many SEO's buy old and existing domain names and add their own content. If you are able to get a DMOZ listed domain, you may help your chances even more as it will have an existing link structure. There are many services on the web that offer lists of upcoming expirations so you may be able to grab one at a bargain price. Be aware though that there is a number of SEO's that believe that these domains will be "reset" when ownership is changed so you may be subject to the sandbox anyway.

Good Luck with your pending escape for the Sandbox

SEO FAQ 4

2008-02-16T01:39:00.001-08:00

How do I write the robots.txt?

As you may, know the robots.txt is a tool used by the search engines to see which pages not to index. It is useful if you have sensitive information or other pages you don't wish to get indexed - that is all it does.

It is simply a text file names robots.txt located in the root.

It contains a line for user-agent and then what to disallow or allow.

Example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /password.html
Disallow: /temp/

As the * is a wildcard the above means that all user-agents will index all pages except the file password.html and the directory temp and it's content.

Here is another example when disallowing all from a bad spider.

User-agent: badspider
Disallow: /

Does a site keep its PR when ownership changes?

The good thing about PageRank is that it is blind. Unless something inappropriate is going on with an individual, Google does not care about the humans who own/buy/sell websites. They focus entirely on the domain name and the website behind it. Changes in ownership are inconsequential to Google.

Pagerank rises and falls entirely on the merits of the website and Goggle's algorithms. The risks of PageRank falling or rising is purely technical.

If anything, Google is very forgiving of websites that go inactive. There is a huge aftermarket of entrepreneurs seeking inactive domains with PageRank attached for its reaale value. Google often times is slow to identify inactive domains. This is mostly due to the fact that just because a PageRanked website goes inactive, it's links can remain active for years.

Last year I purchased an inactive domain name with a PageRank of 6 with several hundred links showing up in Google/Yahoo/MSN. Six months later, its PageRank dropped to a 4. It all honesty, it really should have been a 4. I just got to enjoy a PageRank of 6 for a few months. What this tells us is that Google is going to sooner or later correct a website's PageRank. But Google isn't the bad guy here, they are just applying the rules as strictly as they can with what they know. Google doesn't really worry about buying and selling because they know that the technical factors will keep everything even in the long run.

Purchasing a website in itself is no more risky than having owned it for years. A potential buyer needs to understand what the websites SEO strategy has been and how it gets its traffic. If the former owner spent a fortune purchasing traffic and the new buyer isn't planning on pursuing the same kind of traffic then it isn't unreasonable to expect the performance of the website to degrade. If the former owner was engaged in "black hat" or other inappropriate activites in creating traffic and search engine visibility and Google catches on, then the website will suffer along with whoever might own it. When purchasing anything of value, (including websites) the buyer must be diligent to protect themselves

What are all the Google Operators and what do they do?

Trust level: Proven and confirmed

The advanced operators, as far as SEO is concerned can be divided into 2 categories: Alternate Query Types and Query Modifiers.

Alternate Query Types

cache: If you include other words in the query, Google will highlight those words within the cached document. For instance, [cache:www.google.com web] will show the cached content with the word "web" highlighted.

link: The query [link:] will list webpages that have links to the specified webpage. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list webpages that have links pointing to the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the "link:" and the web page url.

related: The query [related:] will list web pages that are "similar" to a specified web page. For instance, [related:www.google.com] will list web pages that are similar to the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the "related:" and the web page url.

info: The query [info:] will present some information that Google has about that web page. For instance, [info:www.google.com] will show information about the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the "info:" and the web page url.

This functionality is also accessible by typing the web page url directly into a Google search box.

Query Modifiers

site: If you include [site:] in your query, Google will restrict the results to those websites in the given domain. For instance, [help site:www.google.com] will find pages about help within www.google.com. [help site:com] will find pages about help within .com urls. Note there can be no space between the "site:" and the domain.

allintitle: If you start a query with [allintitle:], Google will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title. For instance, [allintitle: google search] will return only documents that have both "google" and "search" in the title.

intitle: If you include [intitle:] in your query, Google will restrict the results to documents containing that word in the title. For instance, [intitle:google search] will return documents that mention the word "google" in their title, and mention the word "search" anywhere in the document (title or no). Note there can be no space between the "intitle:" and the following word.

Putting [intitle:] in front of every word in your query is equivalent to putting [allintitle:] at the front of your query: [intitle:google intitle:search] is the same as [allintitle: google search].

allinurl: If you start a query with [allinurl:], Google will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the url. For instance, [allinurl: google search] will return only documents that have both "google" and "search" in the url.

Note that [allinurl:] works on words, not url components. In particular, it ignores punctuation. Thus, [allinurl: foo/bar] will restrict the results to page with the words "foo" and "bar" in the url, but won't require that they be separated by a slash within that url, that they be adjacent, or that they be in that particular word order. There is currently no way to enforce these constraints.

inurl: If you include [inurl:] in your query, Google will restrict the results to documents containing that word in the url. For instance, [inurl:google search] will return documents that mention the word "google" in their url, and mention the word "search" anywhere in the document (url or no). Note there can be no space between the "inurl:" and the following word.

Putting "inurl:" in front of every word in your query is equivalent to putting "allinurl:" at the front of your query: [inurl:google inurl:search] is the same as [allinurl: google search]

SEO FAQ 5

2008-02-16T01:36:00.002-08:00

I lost my rankings, what could have happened?

Trust level: Proven and confirmed

It can be a frightening experience. You check your rankings and suddenly they have either plummeted or are non-existent. Your swallow hard and feel sick to your stomach. It's happened to all of us and here are a few possible explanations.

Fluctuation
This is the most common explanation and happens on a daily basis. Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) are in a constant state of flux with Google leading the pack. Gone are the days of the "Google Dance". This has also meant, unfortunately, that you can be Top 10 one day and disappear the next. The only thing you can do in this case is be patient and give it a few days to see if your ranking reappears.

Stop or Poison Words
Have you added new content lately? It is possible you have added what Google calls "Stop" or "Poison" words. These may include Adult words or commonly words like Links, Search Engine, Bookmarks, Resources, Directory, BBS, Paid-to-Surf and Forum which although won't knock you out of the SERPs, they can drop you a few spots

Broken Links
The major Search Engines view a site with dead end links as "broken". In some cases this can cause a major hit to your rankings. It is always advised to run a check using a tool like a Broken Link Checker and fixing them. I have seen a site rebound time after time within days of fixing this issue

Links to Bad Neighborhoods
A single link to a banned site or a bad neighborhood can torpedo your rankings. A banned site can usually be shown by a site that had previously been indexed but is no longer in Google. A grey toolbar can indicate either a new site or one that has been banned. A bad neighborhood is one that employs black hat tactics. This may include a link farm. Link Farms are one of the most often asked about things and the general rule of thumb is "If it looks like one, it is one". Avoid linking to sites with hundreds of links on its pages with little to no content

Use of Black Hat Methods
This will usually result in an all out ban and includes things like Hidden Text, Cloaking, etc
To get back into the index usually requires you to remove the offending method and email Google (or whichever SE banned you) asking to be reindexed. In most cases you will be successful although be prepared to wait several weeks if not months

These are just a few of the reasons for a sudden loss in rankings though the most common. The best rule of thumb is to always build and SEO for visitors first and Search Engines second. If you try to stick to this, you should enjoy more stable rankings without the fear of your site dissapearing overnight

A few more reasons other than those mentioned are as follows:

An algorithm update.

An algo update is different from a "regular database update". In case of a database update, you will possibly regain your positions without doing anything in a few days. However in an algo update, you will have to study the new ranking criteria’s based on the search results. This could be very difficult if you are unfamiliar of SEO practices and this is the reason why it is said that SEO is an ongoing process and not a onetime thing.
Site update at your end.

You would have added new content on your webpage that is in search engine results. Generally a change of about 5-10% is considered as fine and you will not see a fall in your ranks. However a change much more than that might be an indication that some large amount of data has been added / replaced and is needed to be reindexed / analysed. In this time of reindexing, the search engine may not put your web site on the position that you have seen it earlier on. This is possibly viewed as a "site redoing" by search engines and to maintain the quality of the SERP's they may drop your page for a very short time from the position. The retaining of positions will depend on factors like the relevancy of the data to the keywords, richness of the data popularly known as content value, uniqueness (no duplicate content), and use of black hat seo techniques on the pages. The percentage calculated includes the html coding, javascripts, content, and other factors. An example I can mention here is "adding many pages to a web site suddenly". The listings are generally dropped and only if the content is found qualitative, the position retained. But if found to be some automatic generated content, then it's possible that the listing be dropped for a long time. Search engines list pages and not web sites in SERPs but do consider the whole web site when listing a single page in the SERPs. If adding poor content to a website can drop a quality page from that web site, then it is sure that if poor content be added to the page itself, it drops in listings.
It is best to consult your SEO before making changes to your pages. If you have not followed any black hat techniques, then this could be a possible reason for a drop in listings.

What is ModRewrite and when should I use it?

Trust level: Proven and confirmed

Mod_Rewrite is a set of functions built into .htaccess, an Apache module which allows for all sorts of nifty tricks with URL's, Error Pages, etc.

Mod_Rewrite specifically is used mostly for changing dynamic links, such as:

http://www.example.com/shop.php?cat=4&id=123

into search engine friendly static URL's, such as:

http://www.example.com/shop/4/123.html

While the dynamic link won't get indexed easily, and likely not at all without external sites linking directly to that URL, the static link will get indexed with simple internal linking.

Mod_Rewrite is a very powerful tool for creating static links for content management systems, forums, and the like. From personal experience, after converting dynamic links on a games website I run to static links using .htaccess, my search engine results have multiplied many times over

In the long run, how do I get enough or more visitors?

Trust level: Proven and confirmed

Good content, and lots of it updated regularly over a period of months/years
Onpage optimization (static URLs, proper title and meta tags, use of H1, H2 tags, etc)
Offpage optimization (link popularity, building up inbound links)
Community building tools (forums, article comments, whatever applies)
Viral marketing (release something people want for free with some tag to your site on it)
Promotion and Advertising (promote your site whereever you go however you can)

SEO FAQ 6

2008-02-16T01:36:00.001-08:00

What are "Supplemental Results" in Google?

http://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html

3. Why is my site labeled "Supplemental"?

Supplemental sites are part of Google's auxiliary index. We're able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there's no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears. Please be assured that the index in which a site is included does not affect its PageRank.

How can we attract GoogleBot?

First of all, the GoogleBot must find your page through links from other pages that are already indexed by Google.

Then to get GoogleBot to visit again and again you should add fresh content frequently - for example by using a blog

What is the Future of SEO?

The future of SEO is undoubtedly one where:

one-way text links from relevant pages continue to be the most valuable links
reciprocal linking continue to decline
the 'shotgun' approach to link buying declines
mass email link requests decline
free directory submission declines
niche directory submission increases
article PR (article submission) increases
article submission sites (e.g. EzineArticles, GoArticles, and ArticleBlast play a much bigger
and more important role in helping online publishers locate quality articles (due to the increasing article volume)
user popularity is just as important as link popularity, which means:

the quality of article PR improves in order to increase site traffic, credibility, and loyalty
the quality of website content improves in order to convert traffic and encourage repeat visits

Clearly, the choices for SEOs will be pretty much limited to paying for links at niche sites and/or engaging in article PR. Being
an SEO copywriter, I may be a little biased, but for me, article PR is the hands-down winner in this comparison:

It satisfies Google's criteria for relevance and importance. Linking site owners include your article and link because, in
doing so, their site becomes more useful to visitors, and their business gains credibility and authority.
It generates hundreds of free links quickly enough to make it worth your while, but not so quickly as to raise red flags at
Google (in the form of link dampening).
Links are permanent and you don't have to pay to keep them there.
You get a lot of qualified referred traffic who already trust you and your expertise. This satisfies Google's visitor
popularity criteria, while at the same time bringing you a lot of extra customers

What is Google Analytics?

Trust level: Proven and confirmed

Google Analytics is a free web-stats solution which not only reports all the regular site stats, but also integrates directly with Google AdWords giving webmasters an insight into the ROI of their pay-per-click ads. According to Google, "Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site."

Why is this such a landmark move? Because for the first time ever, Google will have access to your real web stats. And these stats will be far more accurate than those provided by Alexa. Furthermore, Google's privacy statement says: "We may also use personal information for auditing, research and analysis to operate and improve Google technologies and services.". Now let's put two and two together:

Google is 'giving' every webmaster in the world free access to quality web-stats.
Millions of webmasters will accept this 'gift', if only because it integrates directly with their Google AdWords campaigns.
Google will then have full access to the actual web stats of millions of commercial websites.
Google will have the right to use these stats to develop new technologies.
What's the next logical step? Google will use these statistics to help determine its rankings

What is the difference of IP delivery and cloaking?

IP delivery: delivering results to users based on IP address. Cloaking: showing different pages to users than to search engines.

IP delivery includes things like "users from Britain get sent to the co.uk, users from France get sent to the .fr". This is fine-even Google does this.

It's when you do something *special* or out-of-the-ordinary for Googlebot that you start to get in trouble, because that's cloaking. In the example above, cloaking would be "if a user is from Googlelandia, they get sent to our Google-only optimized text pages."

So IP delivery is fine, but don't do anything special for Googlebot. Just treat it like a typical user visiting the site.

Why does Google hate my site?

My site is showing up for my major keyword phrases in Yahoo and MSN but I'm nowhere to be found in Google. Why does Google hate me? (Or alternatively, my site was doing well on Google but its rankings have suddenly plummeted. Am I penalized?)

If you're going to be in the SEO biz, or even if you're just trying to get your own personal business site more exposure in the search engines, you need to realize that rankings (and the traffic they may bring) are not static. You may get comfortable seeing your site rank highly for your most coveted keyword phrases, but don't ever assume it will remain there forever.

Sites do not get penalized or banned unless something has been done which deceives the search engines. Deception generally comes in the form of hiding stuff or trying to artificially inflate link popularity. If you're not playing games with the engines, then you don't ever have to worry about penalties. If your site is suddenly gone, it's most likely because of a major algorithm shift. The search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms, and new sites are always being created, so ranking fluctuations are part of the normal course of business.

Because of this, it is crucial to optimize your site for lots and lots of related phrases. This will ensure that when some phrases go AWOL, the others will perform well for you. I can't stress enough how important this strategy is to your SEO campaign, as well as your piece of mind. Never be married to any 1 or 2 specific phrases. Yes, it's cool to rank highly for the most coveted ones, but if they're that important to you, then you should purchase PPC ads that are triggered by them.

The best advice I can give you is to change your mindset from "rankings" to "targeted traffic and conversions." I know I sound like a broken record with this, and it may even seem like a convenient excuse; however, if you don't want to make yourself crazy, it's best to ignore rankings, and instead work hard at making your site better and better. While your various keyword phrases are on an emotional roller coaster at Google, you won't even notice a blip in your traffic or sales if you've got all your bases covered. It may be cliché, but it really does work and it does pay off in the long run.

SEO FAQ 7

2008-02-16T01:34:00.002-08:00

Should I bold and/or italicize my keyword phrases in my copy?

I heard from the dogcatcher that I need to place my keyword phrases in: [bold] [italics] [H1s] [alt tags] [Meta tags] [anchor text] [Title tags] [body text] [the first few words on my site] [the first paragraph of my site] [the last paragraph of my site] [my cousin Vinnie's site]. Is this true?

The most important places to utilize your researched keyword phrases (anywhere from 3-5 of these per page) are 1) your Title tags, 2) in the visible copy that people read, and 3) in onsite and offsite links (aka the "anchor text").

Whether they're in the first paragraph, first words, last words, or whatever really doesn't make all that much difference. I've long ago stopped worrying about specific places and coding and simply use them where they make sense from a reader's perspective. I would definitely avoid using them in "ALL the right places" such as listed in the question above, however. This is because if you pull all the tricks out of your SEO bag, your page will simply reek of SEO.

If it makes sense to have a headline that uses a keyword phrase, then go for it, but don't feel that you have to create headlines where none were needed. If it makes sense to describe a graphic with a keyword phrase, then you shouldn't hesitate to do it. The important thing is not to do anything just because you think you have to in order for the search engines to like you. There are very, very few "have to's" when it comes to SEO. This is because SEO is an art, not a science.

Why do many top-listed pages have no content?

If you're so smart and keep telling everyone that content is king, then how come the top pages for the keyword [insert any word here] don't have lots of visible content?

I do believe that content is king, because that's what the people who visit your site are looking for. However, content doesn't necessarily mean 250 words (or whatever) of text. Content means different things for different sites. Content can simply be your product offerings. For instance, sites from well-known brands very often have no visible copy on their home pages, but still rank highly for some very general keywords. This is often due to their strong brand, which brings in tons and tons of natural links to the site.

Natural links are those that people add to their own websites just because they found them relevant to whatever point they were trying to make. Bloggers do this often, and so do people on forum threads. Let's face it; well-known brands are talked about a lot, both in real life, and online. It makes perfect sense that if you're searching for something general like "pizza" that Pizza Hut and Domino's will show up at the top of the results. It's not necessary for them to say all over their site that they are all about pizza because that's a given.

For those of you who don't have a big brand, you can certainly create a home page that doesn't describe what you offer in clear words, but you'd better be prepared to put all your faith in a link-building campaign.

Always remember that there are tons of ways to obtain targeted search engine traffic, and the methods I espouse are just one way. They happen to work for my clients and me, and I like them because they focus on making the site better overall. However, every site is unique and you have to decide what the best overall strategy is for YOUR site. There's no sense in compromising your message for search engine rankings, as you'll be less apt to convert your visitors into taking your desired action. On the other hand, if you have no visitors, it really doesn't matter what your message is, now does it!

Can search engines index dynamic sites with ? and = (query strings) in the URL?

I have a dynamically generated site which places question marks and equal signs in the URL. My mother's hairdresser told me that I need to create static HTML pages in order to show up in the search engines. What do you think?

For the most part, the search engines no longer choke on query strings (those question marks and equal signs) in URLs. Just try to make sure that your content management system (CMS) doesn't put more than 3 parameters in, and you should most likely be okay. Whenever I'm asked this question, I check the person's site in Google and Yahoo -- and 99% of the time just about all of their pages are indexed already. In those cases, there are not any technical issues; they simply have to do a better job of optimizing their pages for their appropriate keyword phrases.

The most important thing to do with a dynamic site is to create links to the important, optimized pages of the site. Sometimes the only way to find certain information on one of these sites is to fill out a form which then conducts a search of the site. A page that has what you're looking for is then created for you and displayed in your browser. Unfortunately, that type of page will not be accessible by the search engines because it doesn't actually exist on the server. If there are specific pages that are created through specific search criteria that many people would be looking for on your site, those are the ones you should create links to in your site navigation and your site map.

You'll also want to make sure that your CMS is capable of generating unique Title tags for every page of the site. If not, you'll have to fix this in the system because this is actually one of those things that will be critical to your search engine success.

Can I change the font size of my header tags (H1, H2) without getting into trouble?

I want to put keywords in header tags such as H1 and H2 because my mail carrier told me that this would give me High Rankings® in the search engines. Will I be penalized if I use style sheets to keep the font down to a reasonable size?

As mentioned in a previous answer (Where Do I Place Keywords?), it may not actually even be necessary for you to put keyword phrases into header tags. That said, we've definitely found that the use of headlines and subheadlines in your copy really helps people get the gist of your site very easily. Therefore, if you can work them into your content, also using H1 and H2 tags as specified by the W3C, is certainly a good idea. If it makes sense to also use keyword phrases within some of these headlines, then that's all the better! (If they don't make sense, then it's no big deal. Really!)

Adjusting the size of your headlines to fit with the overall look and feel of your site through cascading style sheets (CSS) is absolutely, positively fine. The search engines aren't out to force you to use a huge font size just because that's the H1 default size. Don't worry another second about that one.

If I submitted my site and it's not showing up, does this mean it's been banned?

I submitted my site [manually] [automatically] [last week] [last month] [3 days ago] and it's not showing up in any of the search engines. Have I been penalized/banned?

If the site you submitted doesn't have any deceptive qualities, then no, you're not banned or penalized. However, all the submissions in the world won't get your site listed or bring search engine traffic if there aren't links pointing to it from other sites -- and if it's not optimized for specific keyword phrases. As I've mentioned elsewhere submitting to search engines is not necessary nor even helpful. The search engines automatically find new pages on their own.

As with everything SEO related, the keys here are patience and time. If you don't have both of those, you might as well get out of the SEO game right now and simply buy your way into the search engines through PPC ads.

How can I automate the link building process?

Link building is hard and I don't like it. I send out tons of emails requesting reciprocal links, but barely get any responses. How can I automate the process?

You can create something so great and wonderfully unique that people naturally link to it. This won't happen overnight, and of course there will be lots of hard work to get to that point and to keep it up, but at least you won't have to worry about link building. (See my site for an example of this at work. I've never once asked for a link, nor do I ever plan to.)

I would highly suggest some means of constantly adding information to your site, such as through a weekly or monthly newsletter, a frequently updated blog, or articles that relate to the products/services you provide. Because even if you do have a completely unique and great site, you still need a means of letting others know this.

SEO FAQ 8

2008-02-16T01:34:00.001-08:00

Should I buy numerous keyword rich domains?

The guy who fixed my roof told me to purchase a minimum of 10 keyword-rich domains for various aspects of my business. What's the best use of these for search engine optimization purposes?

Unfortunately, there's no good use for those when it comes to the search engines. If you try to gain an unfair advantage in the engines by blanketing them with lots of different sites, you will then be into that "deceptive" territory I'm always talking about.

In my opinion, your best bet is to simply park them all at one domain, and then forward the whole lot via a permanent 301-redirect to your main site, while telling your roofer to stick to roofing. ;-) (See "How To Redirect Multiple Parked Domains.")

The only other viable option for the domains would be to truly build completely different sites at some of the domains. There's nothing wrong with having a few sites, but they really should each provide different info in order for them to be effective. Just remember that keeping and maintaining many sites is a lot more work than just having one site that is the best it can be!

What should I do about competitors who spam the search engines?

My competitors are spamming the engines with multiple sites for the same company. [Can I have them killed? ;-) ] What can I do about this?

You can try reporting them to the search engines either via their spam report email address, or through the "dissatisfied with these results" link that most engines have on their results pages. If you decide to do this (and I generally don't bother) be sure not to complain that "it's not fair," and that your site is better or that you're losing money, etc. Simply mention that the search results for the particular search query you tried is bringing up multiple domains for essentially the same product, service or company, and that you thought that the engine might want to know about this.

The results may or may not change over time, but at least you can feel good that you tried to help them to improve the quality of their results. They really do want that info, but it's unclear as to whether they will agree with you and also act upon your report.

(For the record, I don't recommend having the competitor killed!)

Why doesn't my Web site rank very well in the search engines?

Having your website rank high in the search engines is a science and the rules for search engine optimization (SEO) are always changing. Here are some reasons why you may be having poor ranking:

Incorrect usage of the TITLE tag or no TITLE tag content.
Too many occurrences of the same word in a page (spamming).
Missing H1 and H2 heading tag content.
Missing ALT tag content in your graphic links.
No meaningful content in the first 250 characters on each page.
Less than 200 words per page.
Very few pages on your website.
No links from other websites to your website (link popularity).

Also, you should always submit your site to any search directories manually. Please do not use automated submission services.

How long does it take for SEO results to kick in?

The amount of time required to see results of search engine optimization work range anywhere from 30 days for existing sites in local or niche markets to 24 months for new websites in a competitive of national/global market.

What is my site ranking dependent on?

Site ranking tends to be "cumulative" and is dependent on the following factors:

The specific keyword phrases (search terms) that have been targeted
The overall competitiveness of your industry - how many players are there
Whether you are targeting a regional, national, or international market
How well ranking is monitored and the site tweaked over time for SEO improvement
The progress of your reciprocal linking campaign
number of competitor sites achieving new ranking themselves

Does every page of my website really need to be optimized?

In a word - yes. Every page of a website can be a potential entry point for visitors. You can't predict which page or pages will be ranked the best for specific keywords. As such, each page must be individually optimized to for optimal ranking. Collectively, all pages of your website reinforce the common "theme" of the site, which also can help boost ranking. Don't assume that your home page is the most important page on your site.

Why are SEO services so expensive?

SEO is a highly-specialized craft requiring much research, forethought, skill and can be extremely time-consuming to implement correctly. However, compared to offline and print advertising, SEO is quite cheap. The cost of having your website SEO optimized is by far the best advertising dollars spent and the return on your investment (ROI) can be very great.

Can you guarantee a number #1 position in the search engines?

Nobody can guarantee a number #1 position or specific ranking for your site for a given keyword phrase. There are simply too many factors beyond anyone's control - the search engines changing their ranking algorithms, efforts made by competitors, and new sites being added to the Web.

Obtaining a specific ranking is analogous to managing a portfolio. Your financial advisor will do their best to monitor the stock market and other indicators and to make sure your portfolio is managed to the best of their abilities. However, your advisor cannot guarantee that your portfolio will be at a specific dollar value or even that the amount will be up at all by a given date.

Do I need to make sure my files are not buried deeply in multiple directories on my server?

I read an article from 1997 that said all my files should be in the "root" directory on my server so that they are not buried deep within the site. Is this still true?

It actually was never true, although I may have been one of those spreading that myth back then! This is one of those things that many people confuse because it's sort of half true.

It doesn't actually matter where a page physically resides on your server, but it does matter how difficult it is for a search engine to find it. So when we talk about not "burying" pages on your site, we don't mean that you shouldn't have it 10 directories/folders deep on the server; we simply mean that it shouldn't be 10 clicks away from the home page. The fewer clicks it takes to get to any given page, the more important a search engine (and your user) will deem it to be. And of course, the more important they deem it to be, the more apt they are to find and index it.

Beyond just having a link to it from the home page, pages that are in the main navigation will be naturally given more weight by the engines, as you are essentially telling them that those pages are the most important in the site.

SEO FAQ 9

2008-02-16T01:33:00.001-08:00

Should I create a blog for SEO purposes?

This parrot that I talk to in the pet store told me that I should create a blog for search engine optimization purposes. Can you speak to this?

Blogs have no special powers of high rankings. What they do have (if done correctly) is fresh, unique content. Search engines do tend to like that, regardless of the format. If they know any given site is adding new articles on a frequent basis, they will come around often to index it. Blogs are certainly one way of easily adding new information to your site. Newsletters archived on your site can provide a similar benefit, as can archived press releases, or a popular forum.

The "pinging" done by most blog software these days also seems to help get blog posts spidered and indexed very quickly, which is a plus. In addition, blog posts will also show up in blog searches such as Google's Blog search, and Technorati Blog searches.

Can SEO companies really have special relationships with the search engines like some of them claim?

A company called me while I was cooking dinner and said they have a special relationship with the search engines, and they will place my site in the first position at all of them for X amount of money. I couldn't talk to them because my dinner was burning, but I'm curious as to how they can do this and whether it's something I should learn more about.

Most likely this company is simply buying the sponsored PPC ad spots and will then resell them to you with a high markup. Nobody has a "special relationship" with Google, and you can't buy your way to the top of the natural results. I would suggest politely hanging up on any telemarketer that tries to tell you otherwise.

How can I find out how much traffic my competitor's site receives?

Our minister told me that I can find out how much traffic my competitors get. Do you know how to do this?

It's impossible to find out exactly how much traffic your competitors get unless they somehow have their log file statistics out in the open. Sites such as Alexa.com can give you some comparative data, but they will never give you the exact amount of traffic that your competitors receive. The only sites you can get that info from are those to which you have log file access, or those on which you have installed some tracking code. Nobody can just install this sort of thing on their competitors' sites, as they'd need server access to do so.

That said, there are some tools that can provide you with some competitive analysis such as Comscore, KeywordDiscovery competitive Intelligence, and Hitwise.

Should I optimize for the plural or singular form of my keyword phrases?

Both the plural and singular form of my keyword phrase are searched upon often according to Wordtracker. Which one should I choose?

Both. Keyword phrases such as the singular and plural forms of your words, which are related, are extremely simple to use within the visible copy on your pages. When we naturally write or speak, we use both plural and singular forms of words, so why restrict yourself to one or the other?

Never optimize a page or a site for just one keyword phrase. That is the equivalent of SEO suicide in my opinion. Every site has hundreds if not thousands of phrases that someone might use to find it. Figure out what they are, and then use them to your advantage to bring highly targeted visitors to your site.

If I have an all graphical page, where can I place keyword phrases for the search engines?

My boss has a gigantic head and has spent $50,000 for an all-graphical home page. Will it help if we place keyword phrases in [alt tags] [comments tags] [a hidden layer] [text the same color as the background at the bottom of the page]?

I'm afraid that using keyword phrases in any of those places won't help get your home page found in the search engines. Alt attributes (alt tags) are ignored on images that are not clickable, so those won't help. Comment tags have nothing to do with search engine optimization, and are not indexed by the spiders, so don't bother with those either.

Hidden layers may actually help, but would most likely be considered spam by the search engines unless the content in them is exactly the same as on the graphical images on the site. If you simply hide keyword phrases in a hidden layer, be sure to look over your shoulder constantly, because your paranoia about one day getting penalized isn't all that paranoid; it could very well happen! If you like to sleep at night, this may not be the best route for you to take.

Your alternatives are to simply use the power of your Title tag and the power of the links pointing to your home page. You could also concentrate more on the inner pages (assuming they are not all graphical) and optimize them for the keyword phrases that are important to you.

Don't forget that you can always just use PPC ads and not worry about the organic/natural results. That is a very real option these days, and for those not willing to compromise a wee bit to gain natural rankings, it's probably the best one.

SEO FAQ10

2008-02-16T01:29:00.000-08:00

Will switching server hosts affect my search engine rankings?

I get no respect from my current Web host so I'm switching providers. Will this affect my search engine rankings?

No, it won't affect your rankings, but it wouldn't hurt to leave your site up on the old host for about a month to ensure that the DNS propagates across the Web and that the search spiders are indexing the pages at the new host. Once you see the spiders in your log files at the new host, it should be safe to take down the site at the old server.

How do I get my files indexed by the search engines after a redesign where file names have changed?

I've finally redesigned my circa-1997 Web site, and all the file names have changed. What should I do to ensure that the search engines index my new pages?

You should redirect all the old URLs to the new ones, via a 301-permanent redirect. If you're on an apache server, this can be done via the .htaccess file. There's more information in our 301-redirect forum.

You may also want to submit a sitemap to Google with the new URLs. Or, you could try Greg Boser's method of redirecting the old files to the new ones via a 301, and then actually submitting a sitemap to Google with the old URLs. This apparently causes Google to try to reindex them, and the 301 immediately tells them their new location.

Should I add robots follow Meta tag to my pages?

My chiropractor said that I should add a "robots follow" tag on all the pages of our site in order for it to be spidered deeply by the search engines. She also said that I should put the "revisit after" tag on as well, to let the bots know how often they should stop by. What do you think?

The default for all search engine spiders is to automatically follow the links that it finds on any given page, which makes any "robots follow" tag redundant. If you *don't* want the search engine spider to follow the links, you can try the "no follow" tag, but it may or may not be obeyed by all robots.

The "revisit after" tag is not necessary, nor is it helpful. The search engine spiders work on their own timetable, and couldn't care less what your revisit tag says. I've heard that the tag was actually created for one specific search engine a long time ago, but I've never bothered to confirm it. At any rate, there's no need to clutter up your code with it as today's engines ignore it.

How can we minimize traffic loss after a domain name change?

We are changing the name of our company and therefore must change our domain name to reflect our new brand. Our Website has been around for many years and has hundreds of links pointing to it. How can we minimize any loss of traffic or search engine rankings once we go live with the new domain?

Normally, this would not be a major problem with the search engines as you could simply park the new domain name at the same DNS and people could use either domain to get to your Website. However, there are some issues that you may want to try to avoid or minimize.

For instance, if you simply park your new domain, there's really no way to tell the search engines to start using that one instead of the old one. Most likely, the engines will simply keep indexing the old domain. That's not a problem in and of itself as people will still end up where you want them to be, but it can be a branding nightmare.

Eventually if you get more links pointing to the new domain than the old, your new one may start to be preferred by the engines, but this could take years, and it's not a given that it will actually work that way. You could also send emails to all your old linking partners requesting that they point their links to your new domain, but that could be a ton of work, and most likely only a certain percentage of them will bother to do it. Even trying to get a large directory such as Yahoo or DMOZ to change the URLs can be "iffy" at best.

Because of these minor headaches, I'd suggest that you set up a permanent 301-redirect at the server level from the old domain to the new. This is the preferred method of search engines, and it directly tells them (through the http headers) that the old domain has permanently moved to the new one. On Apache servers, these 301s can be easily set up through an .htaccess file. On Windows servers, it may be slightly more complicated, but your server/host should be able to help you do this correctly.

Be aware, however, that it most likely will take a good 2 or 3 months for the search engines to fully understand that all your files have moved. For a while you may find the old domain is still indexed, or some of both domains, or even neither of them. Don't panic when this happens. Just ride it out, and eventually all will be well. Google is especially good at understanding what to do with the 301s. Yahoo has traditionally been slower to come around, but may be doing a better job with it these days.