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!

Following my rant yesterday a number of emails have come in asking for better explanation of why links are so important and why Google et al. places so much weight on them. The explanation is in fact easy.

When Sir Tim Berners Lee designed the Internet it was meant as a method of sharing scientific documents for review and contribution. Each document was in effect a web page. The first Internet browsers then grew out of this as a means of publishing documents (known as web pages), but without the ability to contribute to this documents (see me article on What is Web 2.0 for an explanation of why). The Google algorithm amongst others is rooted in this premise of documents; when any article is published say in a scientific journal it is published for consideration by others experienced in the appropriate area. Other articles are subsequently published with references back to the original article. The more references in subsequent articles the more we consider the original article to be of importance - to be an authority on the particular subject.

Search engines apply this basic principal - the more links that a particular page has from other web pages the more important that page must be. Search engine algorithms obviously have to take into account an enormous amount of factors that we as humans either consciously or sub-consciously take in when we read an offline article and consider its’ references to other articles: is the other article relevant to the information we seek and should we read that article, being probably the most considered. Search engine algorithms therefore have to be able to consider the content of the web page that is making the link to original page and therefore give weight to the relevancy of that content and reference. This is the basis of the page rank notation.

It is no surprise that we are all trying to “beat” the search engines - achieve higher search results through creating a perception that our web pages are of more relevance than others on a particular topic - so it is also no surprise that the search engine algorithms are having to continually develop at such a fast pace to keep up with the ongoing manipulation battle. Take for example the process of reciprocal links - if links are the most important in a web pages ranking, then I will swap you a link from my page for one from yours. Not what Google had in mind- solution, deprecate reciprocal links. How about I buy a link then? Again not the idea - links are supposed to be based on your content quality - solution, Google now has the ability to report sites that are buying links in the webmaster toolbox.

There are some clear rules on how to get good quality links. Firstly, create good quality content that other sites want to link to. Secondly, seek links which have your keyword phrases in the anchor text, that is, links that explain with relevancy the nature of your content. Thirdly, get links that link exactly to the page that has the content that is relevant to the page that the incoming links are from. Finally, in the same way that a reference to your offline article from a well know professor on your subject is worth more than lots of references by his students, so too is one good link from a reputable site of relevance to your website subject than lots of links from completely irrelevant link farms.

It seems a regular occurrence the mis-understanding, or worse mis-representation, of companies involved in SEO of what is actually involved. In the past few weeks I have seen a number of proposals from so-called SEO experts to partner and client companies of Xebidy’s for Search Engine Optimisation programmes. Most of these seem to amount to little over $99 per month.

This is simply ridiculous! SEO involves the preparation of your website for indexing by search engines. In essence this invovles keyword research, competitor analysis and the reworking of onsite elements such as the code, image names, links, heading titles and meta-data. Sure you can probably do this for $99 per month, but is questionable whether it is being done well, and certainly very questionable if it is going to make that much of a difference to your search engine rankings. There might be a short term boast, but it is certainly not going to lead to exceptional, sustainable results. What’s more, it strikes me that companies that are charging so little are in fact doing their keyword research properly. Even using the exhaustive list of free (and not so free) tools available on the Internet it takes us days to narrow down the best list of “right” keywords for your business. Keywords to target vary by country, target customers and exactly the goals of your website (that is, what you are selling). Discovering the keywords that drive not just traffic but qualified buying customers to your business is not simply a stab in the dark once off task.

Then there are other SEO steps that are integral such as submitting your domain name to search engine and industry directories. Many companies will offer this through an automated service - this is bad!! Most search engine submission forms expressly say, don’t use an automated service. Automated services do not examine the rules carefully, they do not give due consideration to which category or sub-directory your website should be in. In fact, they amount to little more than spamming the search engines. Search engine and submission directory is laborious as one of our favourite clients Aventure Linguistique in Geneva found out recently. We researched a host of Swiss industry and search engine directories with Denis and he went about examining each one, researching the appropriate listings for each directory and submitting. About 60 submissions took about 3 days - certainly makes a charge $99 per month hard to get a meal ticket.

I have discussed before the distinction between Search Engine Optimistation and Internet Marketing, but they can not be considered mutually exclusive. Internet marketing can probably best be described as the going out and getting customers to your website. At the very heart of Internet marketing is getting quality links back to your website from other reputable and highly ranked websites on complementary topics. The easiest way to achieve this is to provide good quality content that others want to link to. But usually this alone is not enough and a good SEO and Internet marketing company should work with you to identify an extensive list of potential links and go out and actively pursue them. I have talked about this before, particularly in my articles, there is then a plethora of parallel marketing opportunities that will raise the numbr of high quality links and traffic to your website. Such tools might include setting up Squidoo Lenses, article syndication, press releases, setting up You Tube channels or videos on OE.TV etc, hosting company images on Flickr and Photobucket, getting involved in social networking sites (see some of my earlier posts on the success of Oz Experience on Facebook), and getting involved in forums and discussion sites. These are just some of the myriad of steps that a “real” SEO company would tackle to achieve top search engine rankings for you - and that is, search engine rankings that are sustainable over time, not just a flash in the pan short term rise.

Unfortunately, companies continue to get burned choosing the cheap option over the laborious expensive route; but those that do see the light are dominating the search engine rankings and increasing the chasm that others will struggle to cross. The ongoing investment being made by the knowledgeable ones is delivering search engine and financial rewards.

Accessing your bookmarks from any computer was always a problem until the social bookmark sites such as De.licio.us and Digg.com came along. On these sites you simply create an account and save web pages to your account accessible from any website. But in practice you find that you end up saving lots and lots of web pages with no real rhyme or reason. Certainly not like the bookmarks in your browser, which are clearly labelled and highly organised into relevant categories.

I always thought the issue of bookmarks across multiple computers was a real problem, and although I have dumped lots of sites into Digg I hardly tag them with much thought. But, the other day I heard about Foxmarks via the Techcrunch blog. It seemed like the solution to all problems - a free plugin for Firefox that allowed you to synchronise your browser bookmarks across numerous computers. To make this product even more exciting Mitch Kapor (the guy who launched Lotus 123 in the 80’s) is heading it up and the stated plan is to use the intelligence of the collective masses bookmarks and ordering of these bookmarks by the user with some considered relevancy to create a human powered search engine. Perhaps this is the competitor to Google that everyone is waiting on with baited breath.

Recent interest in the launch of the Mahalo search engine, which is completely human powered, continues the debates over Google versus the rest of the world - which is ongoing and if Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia) ever gets his human powered search engine off the ground it will only be even more heated. Those anti Google argue that the search results are not relevant enough to the search terms, that there are simply too many erroneous results and then there is the cheating of the results. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that purely human driven search engines can ever become a ‘real’ competitor to Google. There is a critical mass of results that need to be achieved before the search engine is usable and users very quickly lose interest in a search engine that does not have enough relevant results to provide them with what they are looking for - therefore, despite the numerous irrelevant results we are immediately drawn back to Google. I submitted Xebidy Strategic Design to Mahalo over 6 weeks ago and it still has not been catalogued - let alone many of the major serach terms that I deal with ever day in the travel industry.

To me Foxmarks provides the alternative. A human powered, automated search engine based on taxonomies created for your very own personal use and therefore with greater relevancy and consideration - unlike the folksonomies of the social bookmarking sites with are plagued with throw-away terms.

But is has been interesting watching the comments section on the Tech Crunch post as many people have bought up examples of other such products which have existed in the past or exist now. That is, cross computer bookmarks. The most obvious one is Google; first there is your personal page which allows you to create bookmarks neatly organised into categories, and then there is Google Browser Sync which is also a plugin for Firefox syncing bookmarks and even cookies if you want. Then there are a whole host of others such as Yoono, ULinkIt (which became Quiver), Smarky, and Hot Links - which dates back to 2000.

What is the difference? With the exception of Google there is a big difference. Firstly, being a plugin for Firefox Foxmarks will gain a much faster pickup than other similar offerings, and that pickup will only grow as the exponential growth of Firefox continues. Smarky is also a Firefox plugin, but in my opinion Foxmarks will outstrip it overnight because of the weight of the guys like Mitch Kapor and Todd Agulnick which will create the necessary marketing hype.

But is Foxmarks the angelic competitor to Google? No! Those that see the Google algorithm as purely a construct of Page Rank are missing a very important point. There are so many factors that go into this complicated algorithm, such as inward and outward links, traffic, onsite optimisation techniques such as keyword density, keyword positioning within paragraphs, image naming and so on and so on. If Google believes that Foxmarks creates a database of any relevance they will simply include some level of weighting for bookmarks in Browser Sync and Google personal pages - overcoming this critical mass is surely nigh impossible.

I have come across an interest fact being reported on an application called Web CEO. I use Web CEO to do analysis of a website for onsite optimisation amongst other things. It is a good tool - and although you can do everything it does manually it simply speeds everything up. The interesting fact is that according to Web CEO top ranked websites usually have a word count of no more than 1,320 words and generally no less than 113 words.

With this sort of certainty I thought it appropriate that I do some greater research and I found a few more similar stats. Voila Fair says that your content should be between 300 and 600 words; but the most interesting one I found was a company called Internet Marketing Solution gives a very accurate breakdown by Search Engine:

• Google US between 521 and 715
• Yahoo US between 559 and 962
• MSN US between 506 and 711
• Google Oz between 637 and 792
• Yahoo Oz between 617 and 1,175
• MSN Oz between 448 and 601

So I guess the answer is somewhere between 500 and 700 words per page should see you in the right area.

It is important to add to this that while word count is an interesting consideration, it is your keywords that count and in this regard keyword density should be evaluated. That is, your selected keyword phrases should appear in your page content between 3 and 6% and as a percentage of your overall page construction including HTML code as about 4.5%. Your keyword density (the number of times your keywords appear relative to content) should rise to as much as 7% on internal pages, which are obviously optimised with greater specificity for your keywords to match content.

So, there we have some interesting tips based on word count. An few important provisos, and I stress again IMPORTANT, first don’t specifically right your content for search engines - search engines don’t book bed nights or go on tours, people do. Write your content with the purpose of attracting the right customers and converting them to sales (keeping in mind these great little helpers - also see my earlier posts regarding The Art of Writing Web Content). Secondly, on-site optimisation (which includes amongst many other factors the number of times your keywords appear, how many are bold, how many make up anchor text links etc) is only a small part of Search Engine Optimistation and Internet marketing - while it is important, there is so much more to the whole process. You can get a bit of a better feel for it in my February article which introduced a few more aspects of SEO.

A question in today from Denis Baker at Aventure Lingusitique in Geneva - “can you have too many meta tags?”
Yes, you can have too many meta tags. The actual use of meta tags are deprecated by most search engines; and we are unsure as to their relevancy these days. There are sites with top rankings that have no meta data and sites with top rankings that do. What we are sure of is that the Google database only holds 250 characters for each meta tag - which amounts to 5 to 8 keyword phrases.

You should be targeting only that many.

An important point though is that different pages can have different keyword targets; your home page will be most generic - “study English overseas” etc., but your pages about your US schools will have different focus - “learn English in the US” - and hence variations of the met tags. Denis’ strategy of a core set, plus page specific keywords is exactly right. The core set should be quite specific and selected for search volume and competition.

I actually did some work with Denis on researching his keyword bundle. It was very interesting as his site is targeted toward French speakers and my French can get me a coffee, a beer and a lay (theoretically). What transpired though was that the language and indeed the word was irrelevant and we were able to build up a great set of keywords through following methodical steps researching search volumes and competitor numbers. Good luck with the business mate!