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facethemusic
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Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 4:16 pm
Post subject: SEO Confusion for Newbie (kind of)
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Long story short, I'm a previous publisher of an entertainment-related news site that in my former life didn't pay attention at all to SEO.
Despite this the site I created in the leading news website in its field. For sake of example, it?s somewhat similar to a "Star Trek" news site (though its not).
Type "Star Trek news" into any search engine and despite my previous non-efforts, it's the first or 2nd site listed (which a competitor always being the first or 2nd other listing).
Here's my concern now that I'm thinking more about SEO. Type just "Star Trek" (sans the "news"), and my competitor remains at the top position, but my former site drops down to page 10-13 (on Goggle, for example), even though there isn't a single site listed before me that's as highly trafficked. Sites that just get a fraction of my traffic are listed well before me.
I recently adjusted the title tag, the meta tags and added a permanent block of text to try to be sensitive to key phrases, and it's helped a little bit, but not much.
The part I don't get it, obviously the search bots and algorithms are sensitive to the term "Star Trek news" and I get ranked accordingly, but that phrase includes "Star Trek", so why would I drop off the map if searching on just that phrase?
I?ve studied the competitor extensively and the only thing I can think of is they have the phrase (?Star Trek? ? though again, not the actual term), in their URL whereas mine does not. But many of the sites listed before me in a search on ?Star Trek? do not as well, so I?m stumped.
Any insight?
Thanks,
ftm |
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Voasi
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Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 5:37 pm
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Check your competitor's sites on backlinks. Anchor text is a big deal with ranking a site for a specific term. Get some inbound links pointing to your site with "Star Trek" as the anchor/link text.
The power of anchor text and variation of anchor text is extremely important and can not be stressed enough. Spend a few bucks and get some good incoming links. Use a link broker if you must. You can try www.text-link-ads.com .
LSA/I is also becoming, or has been, a big deal at least for Google ranking. I have posted about it in my blog (check my sig), but a quick way to understand would be to do a search on Google with ~Star Trek and see what other words are associated with Star Trek and sprinkle the bolds words within that particular search onto your pages.
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facethemusic
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Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 6:26 pm
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| Voasi wrote: | | Check your competitor's sites on backlinks. |
Sorry to have to ask, but how does one do that?
| Quote: | | Anchor text is a big deal with ranking a site for a specific term. Get some inbound links pointing to your site with "Star Trek" as the anchor/link text. |
So if I understand you correctly, you're suggesting I have a lot of links coming into the site with the anchor/link text "Star Trek news", but NOT "Star Trek" itself.
It's THAT specific and string sensitive? The fact that the text string I want to do well on is a subset of the string I do very well on doesn't matter?
Its tough to make sense of. In the industry I'm in ("Star Trek" as an analogy), I have the highest trafficked site, bar none. I'm the most visited "Star Trek" related site, news specific or otherwise. But obviously could be doing even a little bit better were the people who typed "Star Trek" into Google and Yahoo finding my site, in addition to the people who are typing "Star Trek News" and finding me on top of the pack.
btw - I've run the "Link Popularity" tool at Marketleap.com and I have nearly twice the number of links 100k to 50k than the competitor I mention.
That said, when I use the Search Engine Saturation report, they beat me 2 to 1, 200k to 100k.
So I'm just more confused than ever... |
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robertb
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Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 9:27 pm
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| facethemusic wrote: |
It's THAT specific and string sensitive? The fact that the text string I want to do well on is a subset of the string I do very well on doesn't matter?
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Yep, it's that specific. For "Star Trek News" the words "star" and "trek" are each 33% of the link text, or 66% total.
If you do "Star Trek" by itself, each term has 50% of the link text, or 100% total.
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Voasi
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Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 9:36 pm
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| facethemusic wrote: | | Sorry to have to ask, but how does one do that? |
You answered your own questions...
| Quote: | | btw - I've run the "Link Popularity" tool at Marketleap.com and I have nearly twice the number of links 100k to 50k than the competitor I mention. |
| facethemusic wrote: | | That said, when I use the Search Engine Saturation report, they beat me 2 to 1, 200k to 100k. |
The saturation tool at Marketleap refers to the amount of pages indexable by the various search engines. Since they are beating you 200k to your 100k, there are 2 possible solutions to fix.
1 - Get some more content. It would seem that they have more (obviously with 100K more pages indexed  ) then your site does. You need more content.
or.. 2 - You have over 200k pages, but they aren't indexable. This I would have to look at your URL to see if your pages are indexable. Generally, you want to try and keep the URL's clean. Something like www.example.com/products/basketball/nba/jersey/lakers/Karl-Malone-Jersey.htm ...something like that. 
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facethemusic
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Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 9:48 pm
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| robertb wrote: | | If you do "Star Trek" by itself, each term has 50% of the link text, or 100% total. |
Understood and that makes perfect sense of course, but that said, for every time the term "Star Trek news" appears (66% percent of the total string I want to perform better on), "Star Trek" appears 100% of the time.
In other words, but every 100 instances of the term "Star Trek News" on my site, "Star Trek appears 100 times as well, and it appears MUCH more than that ("Star Trek movie", "Star Trek toys", "today, Paramount announced the cancellation of Star Trek", etc.).
"Star Trek" by itself will appear expodentially moe by nature of my content than "Star Trek news".
That make any sense? |
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facethemusic
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Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 10:03 pm
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| Voasi wrote: | The saturation tool at Marketleap refers to the amount of pages indexable by the various search engines. Since they are beating you 200k to your 100k, there are 2 possible solutions to fix.
or.. 2 - You have over 200k pages, but they aren't indexable. This I would have to look at your URL to see if your pages are indexable. Generally, you want to try and keep the URL's clean. Something like www.example.com/products/basketball/nba/jersey/lakers/Karl-Malone-Jersey.htm ...something like that. |
I think we have a winner. I have very few static html pages in relation to dynamically created content pages (database). The specific results of the Saturation tool. I have higher saturation on All the Web, Alta Vista, Hotbot and Yahoo.
I get beat on MSN about 2.5 to 1, but get MURDERED on AOL/Google, by a factor of like 15 to 1 (accounting for MORE than the difference between us).
[just to backtrack a bit, neither site's main source of traffic comes from search engines, as leaders in our field most traffic is from regular repeat vistors of course and links from the community - message boards, other sites - to our news stories/features/interviews]
This said, despite leading in saturation with all search engines but MSN and AOL/Google, it's not like we do well Keyword Verification on the more generic term (Star Trek) with any of the search took either. The results are very similar, this despite leading my competitor in overall staturation AND link popularity.
We beat this competitor handily in both categories for Yahoo for instance, but the search results on "Stark Trek" are almost identical to Google. |
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robertb
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Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2005 3:23 am
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| facethemusic wrote: |
In other words, but every 100 instances of the term "Star Trek News" on my site, "Star Trek appears 100 times as well, and it appears MUCH more than that ("Star Trek movie", "Star Trek toys", "today, Paramount announced the cancellation of Star Trek", etc.).
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I understand what you're saying, but keep in mind that the anchor link text is going to have MUCH more weight than the text on your page. After all, it is what someone else is saying about your site, not you. Google values opinions more highly from other sites than the actual content on the page, generally. If I was to copy your Star trek site completely, I wouldn't be able to rank at all without the links.
From what I've read up on, you're more likely to incur a penalty for going over on keyword density than to get a boost for hitting it dead on.
But back to the issue at hand. My point is, the "news" portion of the anchor text is diluting the power of the links that point to your site.
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facethemusic
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Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2005 5:19 am
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| robertb wrote: | | I understand what you're saying, but keep in mind that the anchor link text is going to have MUCH more weight than the text on your page. |
So what we're literally talking about is the words or phrase that is hyperlinked from another site? I didn't know bots we're that sophisticated.
And since they (my competitor) has the magic phrase in their title/URL, then that's a good reason why they do so well on rankings...
Well, good to know what the problem is, but that said, I don't think its surmountable. Unless I go ahead, change the official name of the site, and everyone changes their link to reflect the name change.
| Quote: | | But back to the issue at hand. My point is, the "news" portion of the anchor text is diluting the power of the links that point to your site. |
Right, in our analogous example, the name of my site is the "Enterprise Gazette", the name of my competitors is "Star Trek Log". So overtaking any position on "Star Trek" is going to be difficult.
Thanks for the insight (assuming I've understood it correctly). |
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Voasi
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Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2005 5:35 am
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| facethemusic wrote: | | And since they (my competitor) has the magic phrase in their title/URL, then that's a good reason why they do so well on rankings... |
This is probably one of the reasons why your competitor is ranking so well for "Star Trek", but it doesn't mean you can't surpass them and rank above them. It comes down to the quality of the links. You want to get more quality incoming links to your website with "Star Trek" as the anchor (hyperlinked) text.
Create a link page, so that if someone wants to link to your website you give them a suggestion to link to your website. You can give them a title (which would be STAR TREK) and description of your site. That way, when someone wants to link to you, they can just copy and paste onto their website with the appropriate anchor text. This will be a good start in the right direction.
I think you'll notice a big increase in traffic once you can get all those non-indexable pages indexed. Google is your main traffic source and if they can't index your site, then your losing out on traffic that could/should be yours.
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facethemusic
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Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2005 7:23 am
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| Voasi wrote: | | This is probably one of the reasons why your competitor is ranking so well for "Star Trek", but it doesn't mean you can't surpass them and rank above them. It comes down to the quality of the links. You want to get more quality incoming links to your website with "Star Trek" as the anchor (hyperlinked) text. |
Boy that's a tall order. Both sites are HIGHLY trafficked, and my competitor is a good site too. They've earned their links, and in terms of that particular term, I'm way behind on the search engines, page 9 to 13 as compared to their #1.
And I can't even imagine the number of links we're talking about. Every time someone links to a story of theirs, "Star Trek" is in the anchor text because its in the name of the site. We're so established no one thinks to write and link "Star Trek website the Enterprise Gazette" anymore, it's just the "Enterprize Gazette" or even just the "Gazette" (analogously speaking of course) at this point.
I'm not being pessimistic. This information is good and will help shape plans to improve rankings in the future, but its a long, long climb up and they'll be establishing new links at the same time.
| Quote: | | This will be a good start in the right direction. |
On that subject, if I were to create banners and buttons for links, how do the search engines factor those? What's the anchor term? The alt tag?
| Quote: | | I think you'll notice a big increase in traffic once you can get all those non-indexable pages indexed. |
How do you get old and existing pages that exist on a dynamic database indexed if Google's bots aren't picking them up themselves?
Are you suggesting recreating them as Html pages manually? We're talking 10s of thousands, literally...
Or is there some method by which I can get Google to "see"/record pages they've previously overlooked?
That would be fabulous if possible. |
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Voasi
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Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2005 7:38 am
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| facethemusic wrote: | | Boy that's a tall order. Both sites are HIGHLY trafficked, and my competitor is a good site too. They've earned their links, and in terms of that particular term, I'm way behind on the search engines, page 9 to 13 as compared to their #1. |
Ultimately your goal will be to reach #1, it's OK if you rank at #2.
| facethemusic wrote: | | On that subject, if I were to create banners and buttons for links, how do the search engines factor those? What's the anchor term? The alt tag? |
Banners, or any kind of image/photo link, aren't subject to the power of anchor text. Depending on if the link through the image/photo is HTML and isn't banner rotating software (probably through CGI script), the link will count as a backlink. So, search engines factor in banner/image links, but they don't give your site the 'credibility' as with an anchor text link.
| facethemusic wrote: | How do you get old and existing pages that exist on a dynamic database indexed if Google's bots aren't picking them up themselves?
Are you suggesting recreating them as Html pages manually? We're talking 10s of thousands, literally... |
Yes...I am suggesting that. Re-creating the pages so that they are indexable is going to make your site much more search engine friendly and will garner you tons more traffic.
You can make the links at least "appear" to be HTML based through .NET . You'll need to know some programming and as most casual webmasters don't, I would suggest jumping over to www.RentACoder.com and hire someone to do the job for you. Pay someone a couple hundred bucks and make all your pages static. Having over 100K more indexable pages should get you alot more revenue (if thats how your running your site) and paying a programmer a couple hundred dollars is well worth it.
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facethemusic
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Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2005 8:03 am
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| Voasi wrote: | | Ultimately your goal will be to reach #1, it's OK if you rank at #2. |
#2 would be great. Much better than being in the middle of page 10, which is essentially worthless.
| Quote: | | How do you get old and existing pages that exist on a dynamic database indexed if Google's bots aren't picking them up themselves? |
So I literally want hyperlink text that reads "Star Trek news site the Enterprise Gazette", and the more trafficked sites those links appear, the better.
Do I finally have my head wrapped around that right?
| Quote: | | You can make the links at least "appear" to be HTML based through .NET . You'll need to know some programming and as most casual webmasters don't, I would suggest jumping over to www.RentACoder.com and hire someone to do the job for you. Pay someone a couple hundred bucks and make all your pages static. Having over 100K more indexable pages should get you alot more revenue (if thats how your running your site) and paying a programmer a couple hundred dollars is well worth it. |
Hmm, well, as of the moment, the existing site in question gets revenue based on flat monthly fees as opposed to CPM or PPC, and search engine traffic really is not a major portion of where its traffic comes from.
That said, the NEW site will likely be supported to some degree via CPM, PPC and affliate ads, so this is all very helpful.
Now, this converting all the pages to html, is this to increase search engine ranking/link popularity or saturation?
My content for the most part is VERY topical/disposable. Meaning in a few months there would be very little interest most old articles, because (again, sticking with the analogy), they'd be about an episode of Star Trek that aired last season.
I'm not sure how having these pages indexed in Google will lead to more hits in the direct sense. No one will be searching for or clicking through on an out-dated piece of news. |
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robertb
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Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2005 2:46 pm
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| facethemusic wrote: |
So I literally want hyperlink text that reads "Star Trek news site the Enterprise Gazette", and the more trafficked sites those links appear, the better.
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I would trim it down if you're going for "star trek." I would do something like:
| Code: | | <A href="http://www.site.com">Star Trek News</a> - The Enterprise Gazette is your source for...... |
| Quote: | | Now, this converting all the pages to html, is this to increase search engine ranking/link popularity or saturation? |
You don't necessarily need to manual convert the database pages into HTML pages. You can have a programmer write some Server Side rules, that when someone puts in
yoursite.com/episode1.html
the server servers up the page at
yoursite.com/database.cgi?topic=episode1
The visitor and search engines are oblivious to this. I believe a programmer did something very similiar for this Forum for Allan.
This will most likely increase the number of pages you have in Google. This will also help your other pages, because those additional articles probably link to your other pages as well (Google counts links from your site and other sites for ranking purposes). This would increase the backlinks for your other pages.
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Voasi
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Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2005 3:05 pm
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| facethemusic wrote: | | So I literally want hyperlink text that reads "Star Trek news site the Enterprise Gazette", and the more trafficked sites those links appear, the better. |
Like Robert said, cut it down to just "Star Trek" as the anchor link text.
| facethemusic wrote: | | Now, this converting all the pages to html, is this to increase search engine ranking/link popularity or saturation? |
Both. Internal linking (linking between your own pages) as an effect on ranking to. Essentially, all page should be linked together to form a web, network of pages for the search engines spiders to follow and index. Once indexed, then your saturation levels will raise: the more pages you have indexed more satured you are within that search engine.
| facethemusic wrote: | | I'm not sure how having these pages indexed in Google will lead to more hits in the direct sense. No one will be searching for or clicking through on an out-dated piece of news. |
Ahh...never underestimate the casual searcher. They search for anything and everything. Millions upon millions of searches are done...every day...and your site, being the hub of information that it is, should have all the outdated information available for the searchers/search engines.
I think you'll be pleasantly surprised once you get all those pages indexed and see where you traffic is comming from. To give you a great example, like Robert said, a few months ago Allan made this forum more search engine friendly. Because of his efforts a few months ago, he received a ton of traffic because of a little post about the GoDaddy Super Bowl commercial. If he hadn't recoded the forum, that traffic would've not been coming his way.
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