Whenever generating an SEO report for any client or a site appraisal I always look at the sites Alexa ranking, both at the time and over time. Over time I use it as a measure of performance.

But, really is there any value in this ranking? After all Alexa rankings are determined by traffic measures for Internet users that have installed the Alexa toolbar in their browser (either Internet Explorer, Mozilla, or Firefox), so isn’t the data completely skewed.

Mat Weir, Xebidy lead developer, believes the data to be completely useless; his argument being that installing the toolbar is more likely in some users than others. For example, he says that You Tube users are more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed, whereas Digg.com users are not, giving Digg a much lower traffic volume than it really has.

I had a brief look at some of our mates sites. Comparing Wayward Bus (ranking of 2,322,699), Adventure Tours (834,129) and Oz Experience (974,589) they all have rankings comparative to each other of about where I thought they would be based on our web analytics. Perhaps there is a value in comparing apples with apples. When I compared Base Backpackers (14 hostels across Australia and New Zealand) with The Park (a hostel in National Park, New Zealand - where you say, exactly!) I find that their rankings are 3,292,826 and 2,522,225 respectively - this is very contrary to my web analytics.

Is there any value in the Alexa ranking as a site comparison indicator. I think there is if comparing two sites in exactly the same market with similar Internet users. I think Mat is right though that comparing sites across markets is pointless.

Is there any value in the Alexa rankings as a site performance indicator? For the time being I am going to say yes, but I am going to investigate further. As a trend indicator it provides another measurement, but, at the end of the day, theoretically the ranking is derived as a measure against all Internet traffic (well, a sample of it anyway) and if, say, The Parks ranking goes worse, but our web stats show our traffic has increased and revenue has increased then surely we are happy; or are we, perhaps it is a fair argument to say that we are under performing relative to the Internet.

Heres’ an issue that everyone faces as more resellers of products appear on the Internet - the issue of duplicate content.

Say you write great content for your website, but then you share that content with all your main affiliates or suppliers, for example, a hostel might give the same content they use on their home page to Hostel World or a tour company might do this for STA Travel, what will Google and other search engines think when they see the same content?

We know that duplicate content is frowned on and we know that those sites that have plagarised content are devalued by Google in the search results rankings even to the point of being banned for sometime. The risk is that by supplying the same copy to your partners you are in fact risking having your content considered as duplicate content and having your own site devalued.

For example, Hostel World, STA, eBookers and so on are always going to be considered more authoritative websites than your own - they have thousands of pages, thousands of links and are good quality sites. They probably have higher page rank than you too. So, when Google reads your content on their site it is highly likely that Google may interpret that content as theirs and penalise you for copying them. Now thats’ not on!

What about if some of these sites even pay for cost-per-click ads on your name. Well it is surely not a bad thing if you are say Base Backpackers and STA Travel are promoting your brand in the search results so as they sell more of your products is it? Perhaps it is. After all the sale always has a cost of commission. If you are coming up in the search engines number one for your brand you are hoping that you will secure the sale yourself - thereby paying back the investment you have made in web marketing and getting that amazing site. You don’t want to be giving away revenue for someone else trading on your name without actually doing anything for themselves.

These are interesting conundrums for the travel (and other industries). Perhaps it is time to turn against the hands that have fed us for so long, the STA Travels, the Hostel Worlds and so on. When it comes to the web you are all on an even footing and perhaps you are right to say no to large commissions and demand that these companies produce their own content about your product or even not trade on your name in the search engines.

This is such an interesting area and at the same time very confusing for all involved. In fact, it is a regular source of hours of debate amongst us guys at Xebidy, no less so the other night at 11 pm after a BBQ and far too many beers at my house.

Mat Weir our lead developer is our guru on expired domains. He buys them with some regularity to use to promote a number of sites he personally develops and promotes. He recently acquired www.queenstowntaxis.co.nz, a fantastic domain with lots of links, to promote his www.experiencequeenstown.com website, after the domain had expired of course - the problem is that Queenstown Taxis is still heavily in use by the previous owner - on their business cards, or their vehicles, everywhere. And they want it back.

Now, my understanding is Mat has done nothing wrong, he has not purchased the domain name to resell back to them nor has he purchased the domain name to trade on their business name or confuse the market, in fact, he has purchased the domain name to promote his business legitimately.

This is quite different to the well-quoted Qantas situation in Australia in which when domains were first really becoming important a couple of guys purchased the www.qanatas.com and tried to sell it back to Qantas at an extortionate rate. In this case a court ruled that they had to give it to Qantas for the same $50 they had paid for it. The ruling was that they had purchased the domain name with knowledge that the name belonged to someone else and that they were therefore attempting to profit on someone elses fortune illegitimately.

I have also seen another recent case in Australia where a large Australian touring company let one of their domains expire and a small operator in the same area purchased the domain and built a site on it. The court in this case also ruled that the domain had to be returned because both companies were operating in the same area and therefore the second company that now was using the domain was confusing the market.

I don’t know what is fair and what is not. Firstly, when a domain expires it sits in a type of state of limbo for about 3 months to give the original owner a chance to renew. So it is not a case of it expiring and then the next day someone else owning it. Secondly, when a domain expires it is available to everyone, surely it is open market. I agree with the Qantas situation where these guys had no other intention but to profit off Qantas. But what about the tour company story? They clearly did not have an intention to profit off the other tour company (I don’t know how public this whole scenario was so I don’t want to be going around saying company names at this time) simply they intended to promote their own business with a domain that was good and because of its’ history and links had good Google rankings. Is there anything wrong with this? And what about Mat, he has purchased a domain to promote his own information website in a completely different market. He has pointed the domain to his page about Queenstown taxis - this is fair is it not.

The one thing I do know is make sure you have got your domain management in order. If your domains are looked after by your web master or similar make sure they know what their doing and that they have in place the processes to know what is happening with your domains at any point in time. If it is managed in house make sure that person is onto it. And, finally until it is clear keep your eyes peeled for good domains that you might be able to acquire to promote your business.

An interesting email came across my desk the other day about some well-known guys in Australia that have been launching a number of new sites promoting Northern Territory travel.

The interesting point pertained to how long a new URL exists before it gets’ any decent Google rankings. Our URL at Xebidy has only be going since February and we have only just gone up to page rank one after the recent Google page rank shuffle. Not exactly a meteoric rise - but it is not something we ever working on.

The interesting thing was that these guys had given themselves at least 8 months, citing the middle of next year to be when they would start to be up the rankings. I personally was a bit surprised by this speed - a bit quick in my opinion. But these guys are good and they do have a huge amount of websites to leverage off.

Then again we also know that Google looks for sites owned or operated by the same web masters etc and discounts the value of their links etc. So perhaps they are being optimistic. I am intrigued to watch.

It is of more interest for my own two pet projects, Breathe and Travel Generation. Both are new URLs and both are due to be launched early in 2008. How long will they take to have any impact on the search engine rankings? 12 months perhaps.

Best we follow out own advice and start comprehensive Internet Marketing now!

This has been around for ever - but it is still brilliant. For all us SEO geeks it is tres amusement. What if you got to build the Google home page? http://www.meangene.com/google/design_for_google.html

We talk a lot in onsite optimisation about the code to content ratio. The advent of CSS has meant that any code associated with styling the way the website looks, from the size of your font and headers to how the actual site is laid out, can be removed from the web page itself and held in a separate file. This has led increasingly to a belief that less code and more content on a web page will lead to better search engine rankings.

The reliance is therefore on the web developer to produce an optimised site - one that makes best use of CSS to remove inline styles from the web page etc. But, the job is half that of the developers - there is a huge responsibility of the website content manager too. A responsibility it would seem to me they are often unaware of.

Most of the sites I have seen in recent times are built on content management servers - it is pretty much the norm these days for good websites. But what this means is that the content managers enter their own content. No problem most are usually trained by their search engine marketing companies (or suss it out through their own research) on the importance of the keywords in the content etc. But what I have discovered recently is that very few have any regard for the tidiness of their content as code. Such examples that continually pop-up are the use of a break tag <br /> within a heading tag say <h1> - this serves no purpose, but to add code to the content without changing the look and feel. Similarly, a break before a closing paragraph tag - same effect, nothing! And the other one that is really painful is the excessive use of a non-breaking space ( ). Sometimes, they are necessary (such when adding paragraph for line spacing to make a particular page work in the content manager - but often they are not - and they only serve to increase the code to content ratio.

A little hint to avoid too many non-breaking spaces in your content: two spaces after a full stop in print documents; only one space after a full stop in web documents.

Much of this happens because content is copied and pasted either straight from one web page to another or directly from Microsoft Word. I advise all my clients when entering content that if they are not writing it from scratch straight into the content management servers themselves then paste the text into notepad first and convert the format it as plain text - which strips any formatting, before pasting it in.

I sound like a broken record as I harp on about the importance of links, but I just want to clarify some very important issues with links that have been effecting so many of your web rankings in the past few months. Many sites have seen a decline in their search engine rankings - yet they have lots and lots of links, why?

As I said in a post last month about the Importance of Links Google has long disapproved of reciprocal links and now they have pounced “bad neighbourhood” links and buying links.

A bad neighbourhood is formed when you have lots of links from sites that have nothing to do with your sites content. Links from fashion websites, car sales, even shoe websites pointing to your hotel or travel site. Google simply sees right through this and simply not counting these links. It has not been established as yet whether your site is also being penalised for actually having these links. Likewise, listing you site on link farms (sites that serve no other purpose than creating links), or the most recent fad of three-way link schemes are definitely heavy frowned upon - they are simply cheating!

Worse, for hostels that have got themselves listed in such sites, I foresee it is going to be one hell of a battle to get yourselves removed.
Also in a post last month I introduced you to a cool tool for looking to the anchor text links of your competitors for your selected keywords. The anchor and title texts in the links to your website are very important. As part of the clampdown on rogue linking Google is placing much greater emphasis on the relationship between the content on your site and the content on the sites linking to you. One of the main methods for doing this is by looking at the title and anchor text in the links. The back link tool I gave you earlier this week is the first place to start in analysing your links and those of your competitors to establish the value of these.

Since Google has introduced these changes many established sites have seen themselves fall down the ratings. On the flip side the opportunity exists for you to improve your rankings now.

There has been a huge amount of focus lately here in the office on what we actually do as part of our SEO process as we have been putting together manuals for our clients and for ourselves internally. We know we are bloody good at it - but we are finding the exact documentation of the process about as laborious as the process itself.

Anyway, this explains the more than normal amount of SEO posts in the last few weeks or so. Today’s post again covers on-site optimisation relative to your competitors. Here’s 12 steps I think are imperative in checking out your competitors.

1. Establish the top 10 sites in the search engine results for your keywords;
2. Compare the web page titles of these sites relative to your own for the quantity, density, position, number of words and number of characters.
3. And then compare the meta data (keywords and description) for the same features - quantity, density, position, number of characters and words
4. Look at the body text of your site against you main competitors. Analyse the first 50 words once again for quantity, density, position, number of words and characters. Also, look at the first and last sentence of the body texts. Look for words that are bold or underlined.
5. Look at in-site links, the URLs they go to, and the anchor text used in the links. Also look for keywords in the alt text and title text of the links. Check the number of times that the title text link tag is used over the plain link ref - we believe it should be no more than 6 times - but check what your competitors are doing.
6. Compare outbound links; the content of the link and where they are going.
7. Compare the physical URLs you are competing with
8. Compare the heading tags throughout the sites using the same categories of density, position, number of words and characters
9. Look at all the alt text on the images on each site
10. Count the number of words on each page (in an earlier post I discussed that top ranked sites seem to have been 500 and 700 words)
11. Establish the theme of yours and your competitors websites, that is, consider all your web page titles together to see which keywords make up the majority of your text
12. And, finally look at the general page properties. These are the HTML size, look for same colour text and background, tiny text, immediate keyword repeats, whether the sites use controls or frames, and the use of internal and external javascript. Here you are looking more that your site is doing the right things.

We have said it many times, no one really knows the construct of search engine algorithms in terms of the weighting given to links, heading tags etc. One of the axioms of on-site optimisation relative to your competitors is that if you at least equal your competitors (for search engine rankings) in terms of all the above then you are at least competing on an even playing field in terms of onsite optimisation.

Competitor analysis for any chosen set of keywords is important for a number of reasons, firstly, to know who you are up are up against and secondly to know whether it targetting those keywords really is achievable. In doing this keyword analysis firstly look at the search engine results for your chosen keyword phrase and see how many competitors there are with page rank higher than 4 (this is at least what I would expect you to need to beat for a good quality keyword). Secondly look at the number of inbound links those competitors have - these are the number of links you are going to need. And thirdly, find out the quality of those links - how many of them have your keywords in the link anchor text. (See my post last month on the Importance of Links for more information)

A short cut for the last step is to type the following into Google: intitle:”keyword” inanchor:”keyword” OR you could use this cool tool I discovered - www.startlaunch.com/research/. It allows you to analyse multiple keywords at once quickly and efficiently.

Nice!

Following my rant last week regarding the amount of work involved in SEO and companies that charge just $99 per month I have been inundated with queries regarding just what is Optimisation (as opposed to Internet Marketing as expressed in my post). See my post here. So, I thought it prudent to give brief summary of some of the elements I consider to fall into the on-site optimisation category.

1. Keywords and content

I have discussed before (see relevant posts here) some of the methods of researching keywords and the importance of selecting the right keywords for your website. The goal is to generate more and better quality traffic to your website. The rule is to focus on 5 to 8 keyword phrases. Your chosen keywords should be contained within the main content generously. The ideal situation is to have your main keywords at the beginning of the page and toward the end of the page. Keywords can also be made bold to emphasise them as long as this is done liberally. The most important rule however about keywords relative to the content is that the content must make sense to the reader (see my earlier posts on The Art of Writing Web Content).

2. Image Optimisation

Images should be labelled with your keywords and the alt text used to clearly identify the image using where possible your keywords. Alt text enables web readers with disabilities to have the image described to them. Search engines can’t view images either and so use the alt text to build up their database of information regarding your site. Using keywords in your alt text helps search engines build up a “picture” of your website.

3. Meta data

The use of meta data in the web page head is believed to influence search engine rankings less and less. However, there is some minimum data that should be supplied; including the author of the website, the date the website was created, the type of content (whether it is general or adult), and a description of the website. One of the biggest mistakes in meta data is to stuff lots and lots of keywords into both the keyword meta tag and the description meta tag. At the most the description and keywords should be about 250 characters long each. The text in the description meta tag may also appear in the search results so consider these carefully.

4. Title and heading tags

Earlier this month I posted a piece on the importance of links in which I discussed how a search engine page rank algorithm mimics the concept of referencing other published articles in a scientific journal or similar. As an extension of this concept search engines place weight to the structure of the document. The title of the web page therefore being considered the most important - that which draws the reader in and is most often referenced. Subsequent headings are given weight at a diminishing rate. Using your keywords in your titles tells the search engines that your keywords are important to the overall theme of your website.

5. Other optimisation techniques

There are other factors which are perhaps the most important. These mainly centre on the physical code of your website. Ensure, firstly, that search engines can index your website thoroughly. Search engines can not navigate flash (and many can not even read the content) or other fancy dynamic menus, therefore, ensure that all pages within your website can be reached through simple text based links. Text based links describe the purpose of the link better to search engines than image links (and once again you should use your keywords here). Moreover, search engines will deprecate the value of your website if they find dead links - that is, links that don’t go anywhere. Likewise, search engines do not like dynamic URL’s nor URL structures that are heavily deep in folder structures. The reason is that search engine programmers fear the search engine spider may become trapped within the website URL structure linking round and round within the site. Websites containing deep folder navigations and long dynamic URL’s (those usually containing the question mark) are often abandoned by search engines before the whole site has been indexed.

Finally, this is probably one of the least talked about elements and one of the most interesting for us at Xebidy. There are a few rules that should be applied to the development of all websites to make the search engine ready. One of the most important ones is the code to content ratio. In my opinion sites should be developed in CSS as much as possible thereby removing any formatting code from the actual web page and storing it in a separate file. Likewise any Javascript code for menus etc should be stored in a separate file. Code order can also be used to advantage. As I said before the higher that keywords appear in your content the greater weight they are given by search engines. If you main content appears higher up the coded page the more important it will be viewed by search engines. In this way if menus etc. exist in the left hand columns techniques such as relative and absolute positioning and floating the divs left and right can be used to not render the website correctly on screen without necessarily coding in strict chronological order.

These are just some of the main techniques we would use in getting your website ready for a search engine to visit and therefore index. However, as I clearly stated in last week’s rant these are only the start of any effort to increase search engine rankings and are certainly not sufficient to guarantee high rankings - nor maintain them!