Proper SEO techniques will allow humans and robots to see your site

There is always a conflict between how accessible your website data is to Humans and to Robots.  The ability to “convert” a human to finalize a purchase is paramount so keyword spammy webpages that reduce conversions are simply not worth it.  However you also can’t convert humans unless the #1 lead source to your website is being catered to as well, whether overtly or behind the scenes. 

This method of targing both the human conversion and the robotic discovery is accomplished by implementing proper SEO techniques.  Many people ask me what the “trick” to Google is.  I can summarize it very succinctly.

TELL THE TRUTH

Google can spot a fake and if you are going to rely on black hat tricks and schemes, you’re simply going to see a short-term boost in ranking which will wither on the vine.

Humans and Robots have different needs

The example on the right demonstrates a clone avoidance technique using the NOFOLLOW rel parameter on anchor text (<a href> hyperlinks).  In a traditional website we tend to let Google see EVERYTHING which is not effective.  Think of a typical brick and mortar store.  We have a nice front entrance with customer-oriented displays that are less organized but are beautiful and pleasing.  We also have a back door that opens to highly organized inventory warehouse with bare cement floors and barcoded shelving units. 

Humans should enter our website through the front door and see things like the customer service counter and the privacy policy and featured items… and the checkout aisle.

Robots don’t need to see any of this.  They aren’t going to buy anything, they don’t need to see our investor information, and they don’t need unorganized but pretty FLASH movies or glamorous pictures.  Not only can they not see them… they simply don’t care.  The diagram above illustrates how we set NOFOLLOW on portions of our website that may be visible to humans but we want the search engines to ignore them. 

Avoid Cloning through NOFOLLOW

We also want to ensure that Google indexes our website in the proper order and we channel the “juice” as concentrated as possible to our “money pages” and the hierarchies that go with that.  Take a product where the customer can navigate there in two separate paths.  They may come to my Nike yellow tank top through /Nike/Tank-Top/Yellow or through /Tank-Top/Yellow/Nike.  This creates two separate URL signatures that land on the same, exact product… effectively a clone.

To avoid this, we set a “weight” on each parameter as to its importance.  In this case we believe that more conversions will be determined by Brand and then Type and then Color.  Any other “path” to this item is “NOFOLLOW” enabled so Google will only see the one path… however the humans will see both.

Protecting your paths will ensure SEO dominance and conversions.

Moving Your Website to a New Location?

When you move your business, you make sure that you shut down your utilities, forward your mail, change your billing address, and above all, you make sure that you put up that nice sign in the door that says to any loyal customers that may be returning that you have permanently moved to a new location.

This “permanent redirect” is a very special instruction that is also used by Google to identify pages that have moved their location as well.  Online a “street address” is a website “uniform resource locator” or URL.  You type in URLs all day when you enter in addresses like http://www.google.com/ or http://www.fuzion.org/.  What most people don’t understand is that every single “landing page” on your website has a similar address that is a bit more complicated such as www.FUZION.org/Web_Marketing for example or even more complex:  www.Tire.biz/page/Tires.aspx.    Many people will “bookmark” a home website address, but often enough they bookmark pages deep in your site with these complex URLs.  We call this “deep linking”.

These deep links are very valuable because, compared to your homepage there are hundreds of times more of them, and they tend to be links that reside on message forums (“Hey, check out this item”) or are linked in web email client systems (links in Gmail, Ymail, or Hotmail).  Because these links come from very high page rank value (PR value) websites, they are extremely powerful and should not be abandoned lightly.

Normally when you update your website with a new look, or a new content management database, the “home” address or “root” address (http://www.yourwebsite.com/) rarely changes… and when you move to the new site you think your work is done.  However, what actually has happened is you’ve lifted up that business building, severing all of the existing customer relationships, bookmarks, and back links to your business (or website) to deep linked pages (www.YourWebsite.com/page/specificpage.aspx) like wires and pipes dangling beneath it and you’ve dropped in a brand new building at the same address.  What’s actually happened is that all of those severed wires are still there… only now they go to web “dead ends”.   If you compare the diagram to the right.

Customers that liked your website enough to bookmark a very specific page are now finding dead links and frustrating error messages which makes them sever the link completely.

Forward Your Phone Number

It makes sense then to use a tool built into web servers called the 301 Permanent redirect or the 302 Temporary redirect.   These two tools allow you to permanently move or temporarily switch pages and notify the search engines that you want them to “forward” the customers while preserving the history and value that has built up over time in the search engines for that page’s value.

Forwarding makes a lot of sense because now, a customer that had a URL “bookmarked” will be redirected to the new, replacement page.  Search engines will also start the slow process of transferring the original pages PR value to the replacement page, giving you a nice boost in your search engine rankings for your new pages that would have taken a long time to earn a new ranking.

It’s Not Too Late

Already done a remake (or two) on your website without doing the proper redirects?  It’s not too late to fix it.  Just install Google Webmaster Tools - www.google.com/webmasters/tools and verify your site.  This tool is provided by Google which will give you a listing of all of the “404 not found” errors found on your website.  They will also let you know which websites are linking to each page and will help you find ones that you may have forgotten.

You can load 301 Redirects into your htaccess file if you are using Apache webservers or you can install the IIS 7.0 URL Redirect plugin and modify your URL mappings in the IIS editor or directly in your Web.config file.  If you are using IIS 6.0 you can install an ISAPI URL Rewrite handler and edit the .ini file for those as well.  You have invested in your website over time... don't throw it all away by not forwarding the traffic to your new pages!

12-Forward-Your-Phones-When-You-Move.pdf (206.68 kb)

Jared Nielsen will be Speaking at SQL Saturday

This event is hosted by the great folks at SQL Saturday including Brian Knight of Pragmatic Works and many of the top industry leaders.  I will be giving a presentation on SQL and SEO - Data Modeling and Web Marketing with an emphasis on how proper SQL database design can make search engine optimization even more powerful and flexible.  I will be reviewing such topics as the Atomic Data Model™ and Exclusionary Dominance™ techniques.

Make sure you attend or send your webmaster or DBA to be there and enjoy the event.  My speech is at the UNF Computer Conference Center at 10:15am on Saturday, April 17, 2010.  You can find out more information on my session at the SQL Saturday Website

To consult with Jared Nielsen you can reach him at the FUZION Agency at www.FUZION.org or you can call him at 904-638-2455

Seminar Materials for the SQL Saturday Event

01-Exclusionary-Dominance-on-Google-by-FUZION.pdf (673.09 kb)

02-Atomic-Data-Enables-Search-Engine-Dominance-by-FUZION.pdf (367.28 kb)

03-Advanced-Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO-by-FUZION.pdf (215.98 kb)

Atomic-Data-Model-Presentation-Jared-Nielsen-FUZION.pdf (2.85 mb)

CustomerObjectives.pdf (398.88 kb)

Jared Nielsen will be Speaking at SQL Saturday

This event is hosted by the great folks at SQL Saturday including Brian Knight of Pragmatic Works and many of the top industry leaders.  I will be giving a presentation on SQL and SEO - Data Modeling and Web Marketing with an emphasis on how proper SQL database design can make search engine optimization even more powerful and flexible.  I will be reviewing such topics as the Atomic Data Model™ and Exclusionary Dominance™ techniques.

Make sure you attend or send your webmaster or DBA to be there and enjoy the event.  My speech is at the UNF Computer Conference Center at 10:15am on Saturday, April 17, 2010.  You can find out more information on my session at the SQL Saturday Website

To consult with Jared Nielsen you can reach him at the FUZION Agency at www.FUZION.org or you can call him at 904-638-2455

Seminar Materials for the SQL Saturday Event

01-Exclusionary-Dominance-on-Google-by-FUZION.pdf (673.09 kb)

02-Atomic-Data-Enables-Search-Engine-Dominance-by-FUZION.pdf (367.28 kb)

03-Advanced-Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO-by-FUZION.pdf (215.98 kb)

Atomic-Data-Model-Presentation-Jared-Nielsen-FUZION.pdf (2.85 mb)

CustomerObjectives.pdf (398.88 kb)

They call it a website for a reason

Most first-time websites are designed with some flawed theories in mind.  The theoretical flaw is that the homepage must lead the customer quickly to what they were looking for which assumes that the customer enters at the homepage and then discovers what they need by clicking.  This “rapid funnel” concept is based on the idea that a customer doesn’t have the patience to “click through” too many pages and the site should be designed to streamline that as much as possible.  While the idea has some merit for the customer interaction, the biggest flaw is that customers simply do not enter your website through the homepage at all (at least the vast majority of them).

The Homepage is the Least Important Page of your Site

We will use the www.JaxTires.com website as the example to illustrate this.  If a customer owns a car in Jacksonville, Florida, they might think to type in www.JaxTires.com, but the vast majority are simply going to visit Google and type in “new tires Honda Accord” to find the specific product that they want.  If a website were a funnel, we would force them to enter at our homepage, click on Vehicles, then Honda, then Accord, then Tires.  In actuality, they click on Google, enter their search, find the results, and then they land directly on the specific item page for the Honda Accord at www.JaxTires.com.  Instead of the website funneling the traffic to the specific page, the tens of thousands of specific pages expanded out from the center like a web, trapping the web surfing customer with a highly specific keyword that best matched their search.

You can see now how the homepage’s job is not to be all things for all people… It’s simply the very center of the web that spawns out threads in circles around it in a web form with the purpose being to “capture” every possible web searcher and land them on the most specific, most highly targeted page.  The larger the expansion of that web and the more comprehensive the possible combinations, the more apt your website is to trap the flies that are buzzing around.

The Most Lucrative Keywords are the Most Specific Ones

Let’s take a look at an alternate way of looking at a website.  Here we have a diagram that more clearly explains how entry into the website actually happens.  Instead of making our homepage a “catch-all” with tons of keywords loaded onto that one page (a common mistake), we have a tightly focused homepage whose subpages lose focus and their specific targeting the closer to the outside that we get.

We now have millions of possible combinations of keywords that interlink like a spider web, lying in wait for a web searcher to put in that highly specific keyword combination… and once they do, they are landed artfully onto the very specific page that matched their search… not some general purpose “inbox” like most homepages.

Focus less on your homepage, and more on your specific micropages…

06-A-Website-is-a-web-Not-a-Funnel-Jared-Nielsen-FUZION.pdf (390.99 kb)

I'm pleased to be speaking to the Miramar group of the Florida Dot Net group at www.FlaDotNet.com.  You can register for this event at the following website:  Click here to register.  I will be discussing how proper search engine capabilities start at the database level using atomic data modeling practices.  The samples of the atomic data model will include how to layer in object inheritance at the SQL Server level, utilizing some new features in SQL Server 2008 including the intrinsic Hierarcy data type and a nice overview of search engine techniques that can benefit from a highly optimized and atomic database.  I hope to see you there!

You can get a head start by reading my blog series on the topic at:

www.NielsenData.com - Atomic Data - Best Business Practices for Product Catalog Data

There are other resources that ascribe to the Atomic Data Modeling concept which you can find at:

Zimbio.com - The Atomic Data Warehouse

Wikipedia.org - Data Warehousing and the use of Atomic Data within the Data Mart

Other announcements of this event include:

• CommunityMegaphone.com
• DeveloperFusion.com
• Upcoming.Yahoo.com
• TechVibes.com

I'm pleased to be speaking to the Miramar group of the Florida Dot Net group at www.FlaDotNet.com.  You can register for this event at the following website:  Click here to register.  I will be discussing how proper search engine capabilities start at the database level using atomic data modeling practices.  The samples of the atomic data model will include how to layer in object inheritance at the SQL Server level, utilizing some new features in SQL Server 2008 including the intrinsic Hierarcy data type and a nice overview of search engine techniques that can benefit from a highly optimized and atomic database.  I hope to see you there!

You can get a head start by reading my blog series on the topic at:

www.NielsenData.com - Atomic Data - Best Business Practices for Product Catalog Data

There are other resources that ascribe to the Atomic Data Modeling concept which you can find at:

Zimbio.com - The Atomic Data Warehouse

Wikipedia.org - Data Warehousing and the use of Atomic Data within the Data Mart

Other announcements of this event include:

• CommunityMegaphone.com
• DeveloperFusion.com
• Upcoming.Yahoo.com
• TechVibes.com