Recently the Google Webmaster’s Blog has had a few newsworthy posts:
Blogs: Read articles from some of the leaders in Search Engine Optimization and learn how you can improve your website.
www.seomoz.org/blog
www.seo-scoop.com
www.mattcutts.com/blog
www.seroundtable.com
http://blog.outer-court.com/
Search Engine/SEO News: Stay up-to-date with the latest search engine and SEO news.
Here are some articles that we have been reading this week.
CSS:
70 Expert Ideas for Better CSS Coding from Smashing Magazine
Blogging
Four Reasons to Write Extraordinary Articles When You’re Starting a New Blog from Dosh Dosh.
How Long Should a Post Be? from ProBlogger
How to Get Traffic for Your Blog from Seth Godin
Turning Visitors into Subscribers from Andy Beard
7 Things that Every Blogger Should Know About Tax from ProBlogger
WordPress Plugin: Blogroll Page from The Wrong Advices.
How to Create a Home Run Post from John Chow
SEO
Proof Google is Using Behavioral Data in Rankings from SEOmoz.
WordPress SEO Title Tag Plugin for Better Search Rankings from Dosh Dosh
RSS
The Ultimate RSS Toolbox from Mashable.
Anyone who runs a website or a blog quickly learns the importance of traffic from search engines. While SEO basics are becoming common knowledge for designers and marketers, blogs face different issues with search engines than traditional websites.
With blogs you have less control over the coding that is used. Depending on what blogging platform you are using, you are probably typing directly in an internet browser to add a new post. The program then generates the coding. Most modern blogging programs have been designed to create blogs that are built with search engine-friendly code. However, some control is lost for the blogger.
There are a few areas that can often be troublesome for bloggers who are attempting to optimize for search engines.
1 - URL Structure
Of the major blogging platforms, WordPress has the most resources available to its community. WordPress users have access to thousands of themes, plugins, articles and tutorials that make it the most customizable and flexible option for bloggers. Because there are so many resources out there it is sometimes hard to know what is available and where to find it. Hopefully through this article you will find some new resources that will help you to make your WordPress blog more effective.
Themes
If you have been using WordPress for any length of time you are no doubt familiar with the use of themes (essentially templates that control the look and layout of the blog). There are literally thousands of free themes that you can download for use on your personal or commercial blog. Additionally, you can customize a theme or create your own (or hire someone else to do it for you).
This week I am happy to be participating in a five-day series of posts about growing your blog. This post is the 1st and each of the next 4 days there will be posts by other bloggers on their own blogs. Each of the bloggers involved in this project has been experiencing growth and all have valuable information to share that will help you with your own blog. I personally subscribe to all of the blogs in this project and I highly recommend that you do the same. Here are the participants in the series:
Monday: Vandelay Website Design
Tuesday: Blogging Tips - Be Selfish and Help Someone
Wednesday: Blogtrepreneur - What is Your Best Source of Web Traffic?
Thursday: Super Blogging - Be Community Involved to Get More Traffic
Friday: SiteFever - Drive Traffic By Commenting First
Be sure to subscribe to each one to learn about strategies that are working for other bloggers.
New bloggers and website owners can easily get frustrated with the lack of search engine traffic that they are receiving. Typically, search engines take several months before they will show new sites very prominently in the SERPs (search engine results pages). If your website or blog falls into a very competitive market (like this one does) the situation can be even worse.
From the time period between July 1 and August 31, I experienced a substantial growth in search engine traffic, especially from Google, and I’d like to share the results and my conclusions with you. I think this information will encourage you and show you some ways that you can increase search engine traffic to your own blog.
Google is by far the most frequently used search engine, so naturally ranking well in Google is important. However, ranking well and maximizing your traffic requires getting and keeping your pages out of the supplemental index.
What is Google’s Supplemental Index?
Google’s goal as a search engine is to provide the user (searcher) with the most relevant search results possible. In order to produce the best search results, Goggle excludes certain pages from appearing in the SERPs (search engine results pages). The pages that are excluded are then thrown into what Google calls the supplemental index.
The supplemental index is just what it says, a supplement to the main index. Pages in the supplemental index may show up in search results, but pages in the main index will be given priority.
Why is it Important to Keep Your Pages Out of the Supplemental Index?
With the incredibly massive (and growing) number of searches done through Google, it’s not uncommon for websites to get 60% or more of their traffic from Google. Obviously, if you have more pages from your site being indexed and displayed by Google, you’re likely to get more traffic. Decreasing the number of pages that are in Google’s supplemental index can significantly increase your traffic virtually overnight (see Nathan Metzger’s article about how he increased his traffic by 20%).
Why Do Pages Get Put Into the Supplemental Index?
There are a number of reasons that a page can get thrown into the supplemental index. The most common reasons (and more importantly, solutions) are discussed below.
1 - Duplicate content
The most common cause of a page being condemned to the supplemental index is duplicate content. Google wants the pages in its search results to be unique. Searchers are likely to become frustrated if the information they find through a search is nothing more than the same exact content on different pages and sites. In order to avoid this, Google eliminates pages with duplicate content from its search results by keeping them in the supplemental index.
Solutions:
Duplicate content issues are especially common with blogs. A page on a blog that contains a blog post is duplicated when the post reappears on the homepage, category pages, and date pages. You can get around this by:
- Displaying only excerpts of the posts on the homepage, category pages, and date pages. This shows the search engine only a portion of the post, which is usually not enough to have it flagged as duplicate content.
- Use a robots.txt file to tell search engines to ignore parts of the blog/site that are duplicated. This will help to make sure that the original post page is not caught in the supplemental index. For more information on your blog’s robots.txt, see Not So Boring Life.
- The Duplicate Content Cure plugin is another option for WordPress users. This plugin tells the search engines to ignore the pages that contain duplicate content. By default the plugin prevents search engines from indexing category pages, but that can be changed (which I recommend doing). Category pages can contain strong, related keywords that will produce good search engine rankings.
2 - Lack of text on a page
Pages with little text/content are more likely to be placed in the supplemental index. Pages that only contain links are also likely targets.
Solution:
Add more valuable content (not just links) to any important pages that are in the supplemental index.
3 - Long URLs
Pages with longer URLs and with more variable characters (question marks, hyphens, etc.) are frequently placed in the supplemental index. This is not always the case. Plenty of pages that rank well in Google (especially pages on a blog) have long URLs. The long URL is not always a problem, but when combined with some of the other items on this list it is more likely to cause Google to question the page.
Solution:
For static websites you can give your files shorter names or decrease the number of folders that are used, which can also add to the length of the URL. WordPress users have the option to specify the URL structure that should be used. From your dashboard go to “Options and Permalinks”.
4 - Repetitive page titles
Every page on your website should have a unique title. Simply using the company name or website name for the title on every page does not help the search engines to determine the subject/topic of each individual page.
Solution:
Give each page a unique and descriptive title. WordPress users can download the All In One SEO Pack plugin that will allow you to enter the page title as well as the meta tags for each post.
5 - Orphaned pages
An orphaned page is a page on your site that has no links from other pages on your website. If no other pages link to it, Google assumes it is not important or it has no valuable information.
Solution:
Every page that you hope to have indexed by search engines should have links pointing towards it. One way of accomplishing this is to use a sitemap that includes a link to every page. A sitemap alone is unlikely to make enough of a difference, though. Use links throughout the site wherever they are relevant.
If you have no links to a particular page because you don’t want it to be found, include it in your robots.txt file.
6 - Buried pages
Google takes into consideration how close or far a page is from the site’s homepage (meaning how many clicks from the homepage it takes to reach a certain page). As a general rule of thumb, all pages on your site should be able to be reached from the homepage in two clicks or less (not always possible on larger sites).
Solutions:
- The key is to improve the links to a page throughout the site. Look for relevant pages that can link together. This is the most powerful way to show search engines that the page is important.
- Use links in the text of articles, as well as at the end of articles (to related posts)
- Link to your most important pages from your homepage.
- The sitemap, mentioned under “Buried Pages”, also helps here. Link to the sitemap from your homepage and every page on the sitemap will be only 2 clicks from the homepage.
How can I see which pages are in the supplemental index?
There used to be an easy search to see the pages in the supplemental index, but a few weeks ago Google disabled the search. For now the best way that I know of is type the following in the Google search box: “site:www.yourdomain.com”.
When the search results come up you will see all of your pages that are indexed by Google. This includes pages that are in the main index as well as the supplemental index. The pages from the main index will be listed first. The pages from the supplemental index will say “supplemental result” in green text next to the URL. You will need to click through the pages to find the point where the pages from the main index end and pages from the supplemental index begin. [UPDATE: GOOGLE NO LONGER DISPLAYS WHICH LINKS ARE IN THE SUPPLEMENTAL INDEX]
From my recent personal experience with this site and with a client’s site the robots.txt file, post excerpts, and internal linking have made a huge difference (getting some inbound links from external sites has helped as well). On this particular site we have increased the number of pages in the main index by over 100 in the past 2 or 3 weeks.
Try some of the methods above and you should be able to get your most important pages in the main index and bring in the traffic.
Part of having a successful website or blog is targeting the right keywords and phrases. This sounds like it would be an easy task, but with endless possible combinations of words and phrases it can be quite difficult to find keywords that will generate traffic from search engines without putting you in competition with too many other sites.
Fortunately there are a number of tools available online (some free, some not) that can help with the process. I’ve included some basic information about 30 of these tools in this article. Some of these tools are designed specifically for creating and managing pay-per-click campaigns, but they can also be helpful if you’re just trying to optimize your site.
Last month I posted an article with some pointers for new blogs that are trying to generate traffic from search engines. In that post I covered some of the methods that have helped me to quickly increase the traffic that comes from search engines, specifically Google. Since another month has passed, I wanted to give a quick update.
Here’s a quick recap:
In July I received
- 587 visitors from search engines
- 563 visitors from Google (#4 traffic source)
In August I received
- 2,217 visitors from search engines
- 2,173 visitors from Google (#2 traffic source)
And now, the new stats from September
- 3,073 visitors from search engines
- 2,974 visitors from Google (#4 traffic source)
Although the growth wasn’t as drastic as it was in the previous month, it still is steady growth. The most commonly found posts received about the same number of visitors as they did in August, but the growth came from newer pages that didn’t exist in August.
In the original post I explained my strategy for growing search engine traffic, and I think my experience still indicates that creating more content and getting links are two of the most important things you can do as a new blogger.
If you’re new to search engine marketing you may be confused by the contradicting information that you see online. If you’ve attempted to optimize and market a website you’ve probably learned from experience who is providing valid advice and who is pushy hype. Although this is by no means a complete look at the subject, here are ten things that I have learned to be true about search engine marketing.
1 - SEM Requires a Solid Foundation
While there are a lot of factors that play a role in determining your website’s chances for success, you’re very unlikely to achieve and maintain high rankings for competitive words and phrases if your site is poorly constructed. Search engine optimization includes far more than page titles, headers and alt tags, but a website built with a properly optimized foundation will have a much better chance for success.
