You have a beautiful website with great products, great guarantees, many comprehensive pages and great customer service. Unfortunately, Google and other search engines won’t give your website high rankings.

There are several reasons why search engines do not list websites although they look great and offer quality content:

1. Your web pages are meaningless to search engine spiders

Search engines use simple software programs to visit your web pages. In general, search engine spiders won’t see anything that is displayed in images, Flash elements, JavaScript (except for a few exceptions) and other multimedia formats.

If the main content of your website is displayed in images or Flash then your website can be totally meaningless to search engines. If your website navigation is pure JavaScript then chances are that search engines won’t find the pages of your website.

Your website will look like a single page site although it consists of many different pages.

Solution: Check your website with IBP’s search engine spider simulator to find out how search engine spiders see your website.

2. The HTML code of your web page contains major errors

Most web pages have minor errors in their HTML code. While most search engine spiders can handle minor HTML code errors, some errors can prevent search engine spiders from indexing your web pages.

For example, a tag at the top of your web pages could tell search engine spiders that they have reached the end of the page although the main content of the page has not been indexed yet.

Solution: Verify the HTML code of your web pages with an HTML validator tool. You can find an HTML validator in the free IBP demo version (IBP main window > Tools > HTML Validator).

3. The HTML code of your web pages doesn’t contain the right elements

If you want to get high rankings for certain keywords then these keywords must appear in the right places on your web page. For example, it usually helps to use the keyword in the web page title.

There are many other elements that are important if you want to have high rankings. All of them should be in place if you want to get high rankings.

Solution: Analyze your web pages with IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer. The optimizer will tell you in detail how to edit your web pages so that they will get top 10 rankings on Google and other major search engines for the keywords of your choice.

4. Your web server sends the wrong status codes

Some web servers send wrong status codes to search engine spiders and visitors. When a search engine spider requests a web page from your site then your server sends a response code. This should be the “200 OK” code.

Some servers send a “302 moved” or even a “404 not found” response code to the search engine spiders although the web page can be displayed in a normal web browser.

If your web server sends the wrong response code, search engine spiders will think that the web page doesn’t exist and they won’t index the page.

Solution: Use the search engine spider simulator mentioned above to find out which response code your web server returns to search engines. If the response code is not “200 OK”, the spider simulator will return a warning message.

5. Your robots.txt file rejects all search engine spiders

If your robots.txt file does not allow search engine spiders to visit your web pages then your website won’t be included in the search results. Some robots.txt file contain errors and search engine spiders are blocked by mistake.

Solution: Check the contents of your robots.txt file. In general, it is not necessary to use a robots.txt file if you don’t want to block certain areas of your website.

Search engine spiders must be able to understand your web pages if you want to get high rankings on Google, Bing and other search engines. The tips above help you to make sure that search engine spiders see what you want them to see.

If your business website doesn’t have a blog, get one. A blog, if done right, can act as a direct and indirect mechanism that brings large amounts of qualified visitors to your site, many of whom may become customers.

This is mostly related to the way blogs interact with search engines and the traffic I am speaking of will come from search engines, mostly Google.

Before I explain how you can do this to help your website, let me first give some background on how search engines work, Google in particular.

When it comes to optimizing your website (or blog for that matter) for search engines you must always keep in mind two things: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is the elements of a Web page that better optimize it to be found and ranked well in the search engines. These elements can include on-page content such as the actual sentences and paragraphs on the page, the headlines (or headers or Hx tags), the links, the links’ text, the title tag and much more.

Off-page optimization means the things that are done on sites besides your site, namely link-building. Off-page optimization is the process of creating links (or causing others to create links) on other websites that point to your site. Inbound links as these are often called have a major impact on how well you rank in search engines. Generally speaking, the more inbound links, the better. But the quality of the sites with these inbound links, or the way the search engines perceive the sites, is even more important.

To rank on the first couple of pages on the search engines requires work on both on-page and off-page optimization.

Two additional and important pieces of information that you’ll need to understand are related to site content and internal links.

Search engines also very much love new, original and quality content, and they like to see your website regularly adding this kind of new content. You don’t need to add pages every day, just add pages at the same rate over time. So if you add a page a week to your site, keep it at around that same pace, or increase or decrease gradually.

A website can be considered a living entity in a sense. It certainly shouldn’t be static. It should grow over time. And the fantastic thing about content is that the more of it there is on your site, the more chances you have of getting found in the search engines.

The idea that inbound links help your search engine rankings that I explained above can be extended to your internal pages as well. In other words, the more links to a particular page coming from other pages within the same site will boost that page’s rank as well.

Think of it this way. If you had a ten page site, including a product page and every page on the site contained a link to your product page and, if all other things were equal, your product page would rank higher than the rest of your site’s pages (besides the home page which is given a little extra weíght).

Now let’s consider what would happen if there were only you and your competitor in your industry (if only that could be true!) and your site still had those ten pages while your competitor’s site contained one hundred pages. Furthermore, your competitor set it up the same way as you where he added a link to every page on his site that pointed to his product page. If all other things were equal, his product page would outrank your product page every time. Why? Because he had 100 internal links pointing to his product page and you only had 10.

If you put all these pieces together now, on-page optimization, off-page optimization or link building, content creation and internal linking, can you begin to see why a blog may be a good thing? A blog helps with all of these.

A blog that is regularly updated is providing a mechanism for adding fresh content on a regular basis. Plus, it’s so easy to use a blog that anyone can use them, so even if you or your employees don’t know a thing about Web pages and HTML, you’ll still be able to add new content to your site.

Consider this. If you add fresh, quality content to your blog on a regular basis by writing posts, something the search engines love, and within each post you link to an important page within your site, let’s say your product page for instance, you’re now building links to help your rankings using your blog. With this additional link your product page gets that much more boost in the search engines.

Remember how I explained that links from within your site help your rankings? Adding links within your blog posts pointing back to your other important pages that you want to rank well is a great way to help your rankings.

And every time you publish a new post, you’re giving the search engines one more entry point into your site. Your site will quickly get bigger, and with each new page your site gets more visible.

Keep in mind that the links you make within your blog posts should be relevant. Only link to your product page from a post that has to do with your products. And also, blog posts ought to be useful to your site visitors. The less you talk about your products and instead offer useful, free information that people can use, the more traffíc and repeat visitors you’ll get.

Remember that people really don’t care about you, your website or your products, they only care about how you can help them. If you sell furniture, a blog post about how to find the best deals on furniture would be far better than a post about how your chairs are the best in the world.

One important thing to remember is that if you plan on creating a new blog for your business as a way to augment your website be sure you put the blog on your actual domain. This means that you would not use a remote service like Blogger.com. Instead, you must have the blog on your business website’s address (or domain). For example, if your website address is http://www.yoursite.com/ then your blog should be located at http://www.yoursite.com/blog or http://blog.yoursite.com/

By adding a blog to your business website you are creating a way to get additional traffic. You’ll get direct traffic from your posts, which get indexed by the search engines and drive traffic to your site from searches. And, you’ll get indirect traffic from your other site’s pages ranking well in the search engines because they have links pointing to them from your blog posts.

You’ll be regularly adding fresh content to your site, which search engines love, thereby creating more ways to be found in the search engines at the same time. And each post provides a new chance to create a link or two to other pages and blog posts on your site, thereby boosting those pages’ rankings.

Like I suggested at the beginning, if your business website doesn’t have a blog, go get one.

Duplicate Content Detection, the process of detecting and scoring the correlation between two or more documents on the Web, is one of the more complex problems that Search Engines solve. Webmasters tend to overlook this issue because of its complex nature. In this article, I will briefly discuss how a Search Engine views Duplicate Content, and explain how you can take steps toward eliminating Duplicate Content issues, thus elevating your Webpages in the Search Engine rankings!
How Do Search Engines Detect Duplicate Content?

Search Engines utilize various methods to analyze Duplicate Content. Basic approaches include utilizing the so-called Levenshtein distance, or “edit distance” – i.e. how many changes need to be made to one document to make it look like the other. More complex approaches identify and eliminate common duplicate elements (Navigation Bar, Footers, and Headers) before running a vector-based comparison between two or more documents. On a large-scale, sorting documents into similar groupings and comparing those groupings tends to provide similar results.

Are Duplicate Content Penalties Fair?

From a Webmaster or SEO professional’s point-of-view, Duplicate Content is typically seen as something that is “unfairly” penalized – after all, rarely do most Websites purposefully contain duplicate Webpages. For a Search Engine, when two or more Webpages are identified as “too similar”, one or more of those Webpages usually disappear from the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), because duplicate information is not beneficial to the Search Engine user. This often leaves Webmasters asking: what went wrong? Unfortunately, the typical corrective approach to the Webpage’s disappearance tends to be overly simplistic and inadequate.
How Can I Easily Correct Duplicate Content Penalties?

Fortunately, there are tools out there that can help to identify Duplicate Content within a Website and assist in restoring the Webpage in the SERPs.

Here are some important factors to consider when selecting a tool:

1.Choose tools that identify the exact percentage amount of correlation between large sets of documents, and allow you to compare each Webpage to the other Webpages in the Website. Stay away from tools that only allow you to compare two Webpages at a time.

**TIP: Correlation is best done in the context of the larger picture of the Website as a whole, as most Search Engines process at a macro scale and not a micro scale.**

2.Use a tool that can quickly re-analyze the entire grouping of Webpages as a whole after you make the changes.

3.Test tools with your own set of test Webpages. Create a bunch of similar Webpages and play around with content to see how the tool’s algorithm works. This will let you see the limitations of the tool.

Here are some simple things that you must avoid:

1.Do not write additional content and place it in a common area that is shared. Examples of this pitfall are content placed in the Footer, Header, or Navigation Bar of a Website. This will only decrease the margin of error for Duplicate Content penalties.

2.Avoid simply changing words to their synonym counterparts. Search Engines have solved this issue long ago, and the word “bike” is typically counted as a duplicate to “bicycle”.

3.Simply re-arranging words will not help either. Search Engines calculate Duplicate Content with a vector-based approach – that is, when the calculation is executed it is usually done without respect to the ordering of words.

4.Make sure each Webpage has content! Less content on each Webpage decreases the margin of error, because there are fewer words that need to be compared. Common areas like the Header, Footer, and Navigation Bar naturally dilute some of the correlations and more unique content is needed to overcome this issue.

How Serious Is Duplicate Content?

There is an even more insidious problem with Duplicate Content than the wrong Webpage being shown in the SERPs, or penalties being assessed on a Website-level. In my opinion, Link Loss is the major reason why you should avoid Duplicate Content within a Website.

Link Loss is simply the loss of Link Flow™ within a given set of Webpages (typically within a given Website or set of sub-domains). When hundreds of duplicate Webpages exist, hundreds of Link Flow “black holes” are created.

For example: If you have 100 Webpages that are too similar, Search Engines will typically show the Webpage with the highest Total Link Flow in their keyword results. The other 99 Webpages are relegated to the “scrap heap” – in other words, the other 99 Webpages will never see the light of day on the SERPs. But where does all of this scrapped Total Link Flow go? The answer is NOWHERE! The Total Link Flow of the other 99 Webpages (which mathematically could be well more than the Total Link Flow of the 1 Webpage being shown at the top) is essentially wasted.

So watch your Duplicate Content, not from a human’s perspective, but from a Search Engine’s perspective. After all, it is a Search Engine that ultimately “looks” at your content, and if it doesn’t like what it sees, neither will you!

Author

Maura Stouffer

As the web gets bigger and bigger it is becoming more of a battle to ensure your website gets listed higher up in the search engines. Local businesses can sometimes get lost or struggle to get listed at all for relevant keywords or phrases. As you will already know it is important for your website to appear as high up in the search engine results as possible. This is a technique known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short and this process can take anything from a few months or even longer depending on the competitiveness of the keyword or phrase you want your website to get listed for. Google has recently made some changes to its algorithms so that when you search for something Google will display local results on the page allowing you to find local businesses relevant to your search query. Internet users will be looking for local businesses when searching on the Web Internet users are becoming more savvy and will learn to broaden their search phrase e.g. locksmith services becomes locksmith services London. This will allow the search engines to deliver content that is more specific and relevant to the user. Research has shown that around 70% of household users perform some kind of search for a local product or service on a daily basis. Do you know if your website is being found for Google Local results? Most internet users will want to deal with a company based in their local area first before dealing with a company based further away. Why not perform a search on Google for a keyword or phrase relevant to your business along with your geographical area and find out if your website is being listed or not. Your listing should appear next to the location map (on the right hand side) being displayed underneath the Local business results on the page. There are currently two search engines Google and Yahoo! who offer local result listings as part of their service. How to get your business listed in Google Local listings? To create your business listing in Google Local you will need to register an account first. When you first login into your Google Local Business Center account you will be asked to enter your username and password. Once you are logged into your Google Local Business Center account you will be asked to enter your business details such as company name, address, telephone number, website URL address, opening hours, payment options and a brief description about your business along with the categories you would like your website to appear under. You will need to verify your business listing before it goes live. To do this you will need to enter your pin number and this can be retrieved either by phone, SMS or postcard. After verification you should start seeing your business listings on Google within one day. Your business listing may not always appear on the first page because of your proximity to your location. However some useful tips to get your listing to appear higher up or on the first page is to make sure your title contains keyword phrases and also ask your customers to leave a review about your business. How to get your business listed in Yahoo! Local? Unfortunately Yahoo! Local listings is not a free service and prices may vary depending on your area and the keyword phrase you want your website to be listed for. Why not visit the Compass SEO website to request a quotation on how much it would cost for your website to be listed in Yahoo! Local. You may think to yourself why should I pay to get my website listed in Yahoo! Local when it is free to get listed with Google? There is one advantage with Yahoo! Local. All BT users have Yahoo! installed as their default web browser on their PC or laptop and this will help you to introduce your business to an entirely new market who may not use the Google search engine to find what they’re looking for online.

Google is traditionally the main area of focus when it comes to search engine optimization. With the search engine giant so far ahead of the game in terms of search market share, it’s not hard to understand why.

Search is changing though, and there are always new elements coming into play. Since social media has come into its own, more opportunities and questions have come along with it. Now Microsoft is going for Google’s throat with a new search engine and an aggressive marketing campaign. What this means for the future of search market share is yet to be determined, but there’s no denying Bing is capturing some attention, and that means there are people searching with it. Altered your SEO strategy for Bing? Tell us why.

SEO for Bing

Microsoft’s stance on search engine optimization really doesn’t appear to be all that different from Google’s. You’re not going to get the same results on both Google and Bing in many cases, but that is after all why the two can co-exist. The real difference is in how the results are presented, and not as much in how the two determine quality and relevancy.

Bing and Google have separate algorithms, but both like quality, relevant links and good content, as opposed to deception and spam. Bing in fact, hasn’t really changed much (from Live Search) in terms of crawling.

“There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing,” Microsoft says in a Bing white paper for webmasters (pdf). “However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn’t changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBog.”

Sidenote: Webmasters will want to acknowledge that Microsoft has increased the size limit of sitemaps from 10,000 URLs to 50,000. Google is also now supporting up to 50,000 “child sitemaps” of sitemaps index files.

Like I was saying, the biggest difference between the two search engines is in the presentation. Bing of course separates (some) results into categories. This has worried some search marketers, but Microsoft says good SEO will work just as well with this set up. Bing also has the explore pane (navigational menu on the left-hand side of search results), which corresponds with the categories in the SERPs. In some ways, this is similar to Google’s recent addition of “search options.”

I discussed what Google’s search options would mean for SEO here. Basically, I just broke it down section by section, and you could do the same thing with Bing I think. Look at the keyword phrases you want to rank for, and see how Bing breaks it up. Let’s say “cell phones” for example. Bing gives you categories like shopping, brands, buying guide, providers, accessories, images, videos, and local.

This tells me that you want to play up the appropriate categories on your site, so that it shows up in the relevant categories on Bing. If you sell accessories, place emphasize that, and you’ll probably have a better shot ending up in that category. With Bing, it’s not about getting to the top of the SERP. It’s about getting to the top of the right part of the SERP. I’ll let you in on a little secret. Having quality and relevant (to that part of the SERP) content is the best thing you can do. Incidentally, this will probably help your cause in Google (and other search engines) at the same time.

“Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design,” says Microsoft.

Curious About What Bing Looks for in Links?

Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center recently posted a pair of blog posts looking at what makes some links good and some bad. You may find some of these things familiar:

- “If you don’t feel you can endorse the quality of the content at another site, you shouldn’t be linking to them.”

- Don’t seek links from sites whose content isn’t worthy of your endorsement.

- Links to and from your site should be relevant to your site (or at least the page you’re linking from/to)

- Focus on quality, not quantity. Few highly relevant links are better than a bunch of crap links

- Avoid “bad neighborhoods” like dedicated domains or IP ranges that do nothing but set up meaningless link exchanges.

- Avoid hidden text