I’ve been away from the WebSage blog trying to recover from a hard drive failure. In addition, I’ve been busy updating the QSSI SEO blog dedicated to helping government web managers understand the impact search engines have on information availability and outreach programs. I will renew the blog postings soon! Thanks for your patience!
PositionTech, the company I have been using for my clients’ paid submission to Inktomi, FAST, and AskJeeves, has redesigned its site to match the new offerings in time for the Overture Site Match launch.
The site offers detailed description of the categories which will define the cost of clicks through the Overture Site Match program. The following is a sample of categories and their associated pay-per-click fees:
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On March 1st at 6 pm Pacific Time, Yahoo! launched a new paid inclusion search program which combines and replaces the paid inclusion programs of Inktomi, AltaVista, and FAST, and distributes search results to Yahoo Search, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, MSN, CNN, InfoSPace, and other partners of its search distribution network.
While everybody in the search engine optimization industry is trying to understand and intepret how this new program will change the way web sites are marketed via search engines, stay tuned for more details. Google, not surprisingly, reacted quite negatively to the new program which essentially forces web marketers to pay for search engine traffic without an alternative. This week, I am going to the Search Engine Strategies in New York City and should have more updates on Friday.
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In its standard meaning, search engine optimization focuses on making web sites rank highly with the main commercial search engines. The other side of it all is making sure content which is not supposed publicly available does not get indexed into the search engines’ massive databases.
Today’s Washington Post has on its front page an article on the importance of knowing how to properly secure information from being scanned by commercial search engines like Google. This is the type of information you wish government web managers would know when approaching search engine optimization.
Knowing the flip side of things, i.e. knowing how NOT to show in the search engines, is as important as knowing how to rank highly with search engines — all based on the type of information you have on the web of course…
Recently I was approached by a web developer who inquired about guidelines for optimizing a shopping site build on osCommerce’s ecommerce solution, for search engine rankings.
The following is a summary of my email exchange with the prospective client:
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FirstGov is not a sufficient resource for search engine marketing of a government website.
Just because government websites have monopoly on .gov domain names, it does not mean they have monopoly on providing information about certain government-related subjects or locations. Unlike the case with yellow/white/blue pages where the way to differentiate between government and commercial information is by the color of the pages, on the web things are much more seamless.
Whether they realize it or not, government websites do compete with commercial sites in providing information and should, just as commercial sites do, invest in search engine optimization — beyond listing with FirstGov!
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The most popular way for finding any information online is through search engines. The search for government information is no different than the search for any other type of information – search engines are the most popular means of finding information. Thus, government agencies should consider optimizing their web sites for search engines. In fact, search engine optimization would ensure that the heavy investment in usability and accessibility improvements of government web sites have not gone to waste.
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I decided to practice what I preach and to share my knowledge of what I have learn about best practices in web development and web marketing over the past seven years. So, here is my attempt to write a few paragraphs a day by studying a random website and analyzing its shortcomings.
The choice of the site is, of course, not completely random – the gentleman who used to successfully run WAMMO (Washington Area Macromedia Organization), has just moved to a new company, PerformTech, so I am trying to put myself in his position and to predict what he would have to do to improve their website. By the way, since my message on the WAMMO forum suggesting to discuss search engine optimization at a WAMMO meeting, somebody has removed the meta name=”GENERATOR” content=”Microsoft FrontPage 4.0″ line which was adorning the front page’s code earlier today.
My focus today is search engine optimization. I have no idea if this company relies on search engine marketing, but looking at the way they treat their website, it seems they do not care if anyone can find them through a search engine. However, the following analysis should be helpful to them:
First, the front page title:
No page title or “Untitled document†() is not the best way of introducing a company on the web. If a search engine were to index the page, the search result would show “Untitled document†as the page title – not very appealing! To illustrate, try making a search for performtech on google.com and the result is:
Untitled Document
Description: Computer company based in Alexandria, VA. designing and producing high impact technology solutions…
Category: Regional > North America > … > Business and Economy > Computers
www.performtech.com/ - 2k - Cached - Similar pages
The site description that the Open Directory has listed for PerformTech would be a good starting material for writing a descent page title. Putting something as simple as “PerformTech - high impact technology solutions for commercial and government clients†would be a good beginning (although cutting the marketing lingo would be beneficial but this goes into the copywriting realm and today we care only about the poor search engine spider!)
Second, the text links:
The front page has a nice logo with nice albeit generic tagline “Capturing knowledge†(how about releasing the knowledge after its captured :-). It also offers two options – for the high bandwidth and low bandwidth versions of the website – presented through an image map: one of the links would open, through a JavaScript function, a new browser window for the Flash version of the site.
This is all cool, but the problem is that the majority of search engine spiders do not read image maps. They are not much better about reading JavaScripts either. On top of it all, the site does not have alternative text for the images used on its front page (not very good in terms of usability and accessibility).
Since the search engine spiders are able to follow only text links, to see the site through the eyes of a search engine spiders, either try to select the text on the page and then copy and paste it into a text editor (if there is nothing to paste, then it is all graphics), or disable the JavaScript and kill the images (what is left is a big rectangural broken image which will not lead you to any other page, whether you click on it or not).
No wonder, then, the site is not indexed – the search engine robot cannot go beyond the front page (unless introduced to the site front some other site pointing to an internal page). If you go to Google and make a search for link:www.performtech.com you will see only 3 pages linking to PerformTech’s front page, and none of them from within the site:
Mayo-Wells Media Workshop
1220 L St NW PMB 290 Washington DC 20005 1 + 2 0 2 - 6 6 7 - 4 9 4 8.
Provider of quality Web Development, Multimedia Consulting, and …
www.mwmw.com/ - 6k - Cached - Similar pages
Potential Employers
In an effort to provide our students and graduates practical experience and hopefully
employment, we are creating a list of companies who may be interested in …
it.gse.gmu.edu/internships.shtml - 34k - Cached - Similar pages
Scrap Files Can Tear You Up
Scrap Files Can Tear You Up Wednesday, 10 May 2000 Last updated Sunday,
9 July 2000 What if there were a type of file that could …
www.pc-help.org/security/scrap.htm - 29k - Cached - Similar pages
What this means, from a point of view of the search engine spider, is that the PerformTech site is actually a single page with no unique content that can be of value to somebody searching the web and to which only three other pages have linked.
The only reason a search for PerformTech generates any result is because the site was listed on the Open Directory and because others used the word “performtech” in their webpage copy. Of course, one could continue with the analysis of the rest of the site but this should be enough for a free report 
Catch of the day: