Jig Jag Blog – Random Pieces of Text

How does Google treat PDF documents ?

Google treats PDFs the same way as it does html and text. It will spider and index PDF documents (so long as they are not locked), and report them in the search engine results page. The rules about on-page optimisation for web pages also apply to PDF documents. Use headers, footers, headings, links and other devices to your advantage. It is a good idea to make a PDF copy of the entire web site and have it available as a download for people to read at their leisure and to forward as an e-mail attachment to others. You could have multiple versions of the document with emphasis on different keyword phrases.

 

If there isn’t much time or budget, what three things can you do to improve page ranking ?

Assuming you know what keyword phrase to focus on, the 3 most important elements would be:

1. Work your title tag and description tag
2. Make sure the page has the keyword phrase at the right density on the page AND it is included in headings and sub-headings
3. Work on getting quality incoming links via link exchanges, article submissions and directory submissions and make sure those links include the keyword phrase in the anchor text. In most markets just doing these three things will get you better search engine results over time.

How long does it take to notice an improvement in page ranking after SEO has been performed ?

This seems to be totally random. Google is reported to perform a major index update every 100 days or so. I have seen new sites get spidered, indexed and get good rankings in as little as 2 weeks. I’ve seen blog pages spidered, indexed and appearing in the search engine results pages in as little as 30 minutes (I kid you not). I have also seen sites wait for 5-6 months before they appear in the search engine results pages. Google will play with your mind, or so it appears. Be warned.

 

If I move a web site to a new domain, or change web page names, do I lose all my SEO weight ?

If you know how to arrange a 301 redirect, you should be able to maintain your rankings and PR. Contact your hosting provider for details. Make sure that you check it once in place to make sure it works. Here is a tool to help.

Will the file type on my web site affect my search engine ranking?

Google can only spider and index files of the correct format. These include .html, .txt, .pdf, .doc, .xls, .ppt There is no preference given to any of these formats. Google cannot index the contents of mp3, video, flash and so on.

 

Do search engines reject pages if they find questionable words? ie. Sex, bomb, Bin Laden?

No, sex, bomb and Bin Laden are all legitimate search terms depending on the context of the search.

 

Why when I do the same search over and over (within the space of a few minutes) do I get different results each time

Google and the other search engines have thousands of data centres (computers), all these computers are constantly being updated and may not have the same version of database tables.

 

Why when you do a search some companies appear 3 or 4 times on the first page? How can I achieve this for my web site?

Because they have different pages that include the search term. To achieve this have more than one page optimised for the same search term.

 

Am I best to have one page with lots of information or split long pages up into 3 or 4 pages?

Aim for a page length of 300 words and optimise that page for one search term.

Will the number of pages my web site have help my ranking?

Yes, Google likes big sites and sites that change their content regularly. Don’t rely on a brochure site if you want good search engine rankings.

 

If yes to above can I create a hundred dummy pages or just copy contents from a few of my pages onto many?

Yes, you can but you run the risk that someone will report you and all the pages on your domain will be deleted from the index.

Does having advertising (ie Google Adwords) on my web site help my ranking?

Theoretically no, but I have noticed that Google does index new pages linked to Adwords faster than if there is no Adwords.

 

Can having lots of pictures with relevant titles help my ranking – ie especially when people do image searches?

Yes. And try to put the keyword phrase in the image file name as well.eg. Blue_Nike_sneakers.jpg

 

Will Having video on my web site help results? How Much?

No, not from a search engine indexing point of view. It may, however, get you more incoming links, which is good for SEO.

Will having surveys help my results? How much?

No, not from a search engine indexing point of view unless the words in the survey add to the page’s keyword density. It may, however, get you more incoming links, which is good for SEO.

 

Is it best to have key words repeated through the text on my web page to help results

Yes, aim for a keyword density of 2-5%, but make it seem natural.

 

Can I hide a competitor’s company name in my web site so I get high ranking when someone enters that name as a search?

Yes, but there are legal implications in doing so. You are better off doing a product review on the competitor’s product on a personal blog.

 

Will a search engine pick up the names of images I have on a page and use these to lift results?

Yes and yes.

 

If I was creating a web site for Vodaphone could I have images hidden in my web site called “Telstra” and one “Optus” in the hope that seach engines would tag these when someone searchs on Optus or Telstra? Is this ethical?

Yes, but it is doubtful that you would outrank such big brand sites. As fas as ethics are concerned, look deep into your SEO heart and then get a legal opinion.

 

What are unethical SEO tricks I should avoid?

Anything that you are not comfortable with or could result in you having your web site banned by Google.

 

What tricks do clever search engines now find and discard when they find them

• Duplicate content
• Keyword stuffing in the meta tags
• Duplicate title tags
• Hidden text
• Interlinked domains are registered around the same time
• Forum, blog and guestbook spamming

 

 

 

Yes, all other SEO factors being equal, product_name.html would rank better than page_1.html for the same search term.

 

Do search engines consider the page names in their ranking and look for specific words in the pages titles?

Yes and yes. Your key phrase should be in the following elements wherever possible:

• Domain name (sometimes difficult and only applies if all your business comes via the Internet0
• Page Title tag
• Page heading
• Body copy at the right keyword density
• Image file names and alt tags
• Page name

 

Do you need to refresh pages so the date is recent so that the search engines pick them up?

No, but it is a good idea to add pages to a web site frequently. Google loves fresh content and big web sites.

 

Will me clicking on my own link in a search engine make the engines move me up?

No. Here’s a web site that makes fun of the concept.

 

Do search engines record which entries are getting clicked on and use this in their analysis? Can I make a robot that will do this?

Only on paid advertising, not on organic search results. You could build a robot, but it would be a waste of energy. You would be better off hiring some Click Monkeys !

 

Will the length of my web address have any affect on my ranking ?

Yes, overly long or complicated addresses are a disadvantage. Some database driven content management systems create dynamic urls, the url changes depending on a search term.

 

If I have the option should I use an abstract company name or something related to my industry ?

From a branding point of view, go for the abstract, from an SEO point of view, go for keywords in the domain. If all of your leads will come via the Internet, then go with the key phrase in the domain and company name.

 

What two suggestions can you make when picking a web name that will help my ranking in the long run?

• 1. Base in on the search term
• 2. Make it short, easy to say,easy to remember and easy to spell.

How does the “Similar pages” in Google work – Does this link you to the most similar pages to the topic you clicked on?

It is supposed to find pages that are close in content to the one you clicked on (competitor offerings and so on). Unfortunately it doesn’t work very well. Here is some background on it.

 

Does anyone ever click on “Similar pages“

Yes, the bored, the lonely, SEO practitioners and Google staff. Personally, I think it’s a waste of time.

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Instructions: Just fill in the blanks on the form and hit the generate button. You will be presented with your completed script that you can then print out, or copy and paste into your teleprompter software.

This script uses tried and proven AIDA (attention – interest – desire – action) method. This method has generated billions of dollars in direct response revenue and you can have it all here for free. Here’s an example of an infomercial script that was written in about five minutes.

CLICK HERE TO BUILD YOUR OWN INFOMERCIAL SCRIPT

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The exponential rise of blogging as part of the web 2.0 phenomenon has taken the Internet by storm. Smart online and offline marketers and business owners are now using blogs as an additional tool to generate leads, add credibility and improve their search engine rankings. Here are eight reasons why you should set up your own blog:

Blogging gives you products and services personality. People like to do business with people they like. By blogging you show your target market that there is a real person behind the company or product you represent. By reading you blog posts they get an idea of what you’re all about – warts and all. The personal aspect of blogging is one of it’s most powerful characteristics.

Blogging is entertaining. Yes, blogging can be great fun. Just open you posting window and go for it without the restrictions of corporate style guides and other impediments to creativity. Got something to say? Just say it. The other fun aspect of blogging is that people can post comments about your blog posts. You posts plus reader comments all become valuable food for the search engines.

Blogging encourages community. Bloggers love to talk online to other bloggers. If you join blogging communities and make a worthwhile contribution you will see your traffic skyrocket. It’s all about content – fast, useful and entertaining content that people enjoy reading.

Driving traffic to blogs is easy You’ve probably heard about social bookmarking sites like digg.com and reddit.com ? A large proportion of submissions to these sites are blog entries. Want to promote you product? Write an honest review of your product on your blog then submit that blog entry to a social bookmarking site and see what happens.

Blogging is inexpensive. The most powerful blogging systems are free. Wordpress is one of the blogging standards and now comes bundled with many cheap web hosting packages. For less than $100 per year anyone can get their own domain with blogging included.

I wouldn’t use one of the free blogging services unless you are really desperate. You can’t be sure if they will always remain free and your posts will be building up someone else’ asset rather than your own.

It’s fast and easy. If you can use Microsoft Notepad you can blog. The user interface is very intuitive and allows you to add and edit, text, pictures, videos, whatever you want. Want to change the look and layout of your blog? There’s literally hundreds of themes available that take less than a minute to upload and install.

Your blog site becomes another Internet asset. Some blog sites get thousands and thousands of readers each day. This traffic can be converted to hard, cold cash through Google Adsense advertising, affiliate programs and straight advertising space sale. Some people make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, from providing excellent content through their blogs. Once you blog increases it’s Google PageRank, you also get the benefit of linking out from your blog site to other web sites you want to promote.

Search engines love blogs, I mean really love them. It is said in many SEO forums that Google staff are great bloggers and subsequently Google spiders and indexes blogs more frequently that normal web sites. This may just be a rumour, but I have found it to be true in my case. If you blog every day there’s a good chance Google and the other major search engines will spider your blog every day looking for that new content. I have seen blog postings get spidered and indexed and ranking well in as little as 30 minutes. It seems the blog RSS feeds go straight into the search engines’ data centres. Go to Google and do a search on Blue Nike Sneakers and you will see what I mean.

Convinced? Give blogging a try. There’s stacks of free resources listed in article directories like this one that will help you get into blogging.

John Hacking is Marketing Manager for a web site design Brisbane company and Product Manager for a Brisbane SEO firm. He has just started an SEO blog .

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I’m disappointed with Auction Ads. It has been experiencing outages the last two days – ever since I installed it. I have taken the ads down from my friend’s military news site, but I have left them here on this blog.

Maybe the exponential growth in AA publishers has overloaded their servers? Now around the 22,000 affiliates. I’ll check the ads again tomorrow to see what’s happening. What’s the story shoemoney? (I’ve sent him an e-mail, but I doubt he will get to it).

It seems that there have been outages before. If you do a search in Google for auction ads outages, you will see other problems.

Jesus, Google is fast. I’ve just posted this and it has already appeared in the search engines. I suspect the RSS fed from this blog goes straight into the index. Very spooky.

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A friend of mine wanted to give some affiliate marketing a whirl so I suggest he try Auction Ads.

He runs an Australian Defence News site that gets between 70 – 130 unique visitors per day.

Auction Ads allows you to embed live ebay auction listings in your web pages and then get paid a share of the revenue generated from that auction. I quote from the FAQ: When your site’s visitors click on an Auction Ad listing and take an action on eBay you earn cash. Actions are defined as a Winning Bid, a Buy-it-Now or a confirmed user registration.

It will be interesting to see how much he makes in 3 months. I’ll update this post on the 4th November 2007.

The sign up process was very straighforward as was the ad creation. Just select the ad style, customize the colours, select your keywords and away you go.

Keyword selection can be problematic depending on your niche. I had originally chosen the word “navy ” as one of the keywords. Unfortunately navy is a very popular colour for many items on ebay. I removed that word and replaced it with RAN (Royal Australian Navy).

The only technical problem I had was getting the code to work in the Mambo content management system. I finally worked out I had to turn off the WIZIWIG editor in the global options for the javascript not to get screwed up. I also had to put <center> tags around the code to make it look balanced.

The other problem I had was in using the banner facility in Mambo. I had to settle on a half-banner because the javascript put in a space under the banner when the page was viewed in FireFox.

Here’s a sample ad (and I’ve throw a blog related ad in the header of this page) :

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There’s are things that you can do to keep Google happy and improve your search engine rankings. In a nutshell they are:

1. Add new content. If Google notices that you add content on a regular basis it will visit your site more regularly. If Google does not see a change in your web site in a 90 day period, it will set a flag not to visit for another 90 days.
An easy way to add new content is to have an industry news section on your web site. Add a new story every week or so. This is why Google is in love with blogs – blogs change regularly and tend to have relevant and useful content rather than just corporate patter and spin.

2. Make the content interesting and relevant. By creating good content you will encourage people to link to your web site. This will improve your Google PageRank, improve your search engine results AND generate natural traffic. This is called link baiting.

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READER QUESTION
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Stephanie from Coffs Harbour asks: “Does online video marketing work?”

Answer: Yes, most definitely and very quickly too. There’s over 100 ideo streaming sites that are desperate for new content. The better known ones being Google Video, Youtube, Metacafe and DailyMotion.

Google will pickup video’s within 48 hours of posting. The secret is to put the key phrase is in the video. I
suspect that Google ranks video content higher than most other content because of the extra effort involved in producing it. And the video doesn’t have to be full motion either. A simple recorded PowerPoint presentation, with or without narration, will rank equally as well.

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I listened to a bunch of SEO podcasts yesterday and learnt something very interesting. The speaker, who’s name escapes me, is a Google Adwords expert. That’s what he does for a living.

The interesting thing he said that was the second most important element of a Google Adwords ad, next to the headline of course, is the domain name. Yes, the domain name.

He said in split tests a change in domain name can increase click-through by 300 – 400%. To the right is a graphic of the concept. The only text that changes is the domain name. After a few weeks of automatic ad rotations you would probably have enough data to work out which domain names pull best.

So the idea is if you rely on Adwords for most of your business, it may be worth your while investing in extra domain names to increase click-through rates. And for $15 per domain it’s a pretty good investment.

What you may think is the best domain name may not be what your customers think. Only testing will tell you.  Which one of the ads in my example would you be inclined to click on? Please let me know by leaving a comment. 

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If you love words as much as I do, check out this dictionary of arcane words. Let us obarmate ourselves against the oversimplification of the English language.

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Google have a nice little service called Google Local which integrates into Google Maps. You can register your business for free and if someone does a search on your business type, you will be listed with a map of the local area and a flag pointing to your location.

The process works as follows:

1. Sign up here (you may need to get yourself a free Google account). Make sure you write down your username and password. You will need these details in 3-4 weeks.

2. Register your business details – remember it is free.

3. In about 3-4 weeks you will receive a nifty little postcard in the snail mail post all the way from the USA. It has a secret code on it to activate your account. This is a listing security measure.

4. Go back to your listing and activate the entry.

That’s it !

The thing that I love about Google Local is that you can easily select a service provider by location. The example I’ve put here is for pizza in Brisbane.

It’s not without it’s flaws though. The top listing for brothels in Brisbane is  a Rover Cars web site. The 4th listing is for soccer uniforms.  Maybe some evil marketing genius knows something we don’t.

Sign up today, it’s free and it’s cool.

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