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)

Atomic Data makes search engine dominance possible

Online retail is not the same as brick and mortar retail.  When a brick and mortar store launches online they fall into this biggest trap.  Take an apparel shop… when you first walk in you find a men’s department and a ladies department.  The store is physically trying to demographically segment you.

If you create a data model that matches this, you will end up with the first <xml> node being <gender> which is a highly limiting path to follow for a search engine even though it may make the most sense for a human being.  You would then add data for teams, sports, colors, sizes, variants, materials of manufacture, and many other “parameters” for this data.  To avoid 3rd normal database limitation, you would start to peel this data out into separate tables… one for colors… one for teams…one for sports.  Then you would need to create many-to-many crosslink tables.  Over time, your table count just gets larger and larger as new needs arise.

The Root Object Classification

There is certain data that “hangs” off each sub-classification.  In this example the Item class stores who the manufacturer is (because most items have manufacturers).  The Apparel class contains the style information (because style is global to all apparel objects), whereas the Shirt class contains collar styles, sleeve variants, etc.

By localizing this information to class levels, once I define a “field” for the Apparel class, all future objects that inherit from that class will inherit that field.  Any objects that do not inherit from the Apparel class will not have the field at all.

Note how different this is from a traditional 3rd normal representation of data where we would have fields like “color1” and “color2” and “color3” simply to leave enough fields available just in case we might need them for a particular product application.

Maximum Flexibility for Customer Paths

Now that our data is structured with infinite flexibility while still retaining a core hierarchy (for default navigation purposes), when a customer walks into our store, we can simply ask Google “how they sent them” to us… and what keywords they used.  Now when the customer enters our “store” we can toss all of the inventory up into the air and literally rebuild our store to match the words they used in the order they used them.  Now they can enter as “ladies yellow tank top” and we structure our product data in terms of gender first, color next and product class third… but we also can welcome customers that ask for “white womens Nike shirt” which we do by scanning for aliases of class nodes, parent classes, and other permutations of the item for maximum comfort to the customer and higher conversion rates on sales.

Know a business that would benefit from our whitepaper on how Atomic Data Modeling can make search engine optimization possible?  Download it now:

02-Atomic-Data-Enables-Search-Engine-Dominance-by-FUZION.pdf (369.99 kb)

This is the sixth installment in a series that blends website architecture, data structures, and SEO marketing into a collaborative design pattern continuing from Part 5 - Best Business Practices for Product Catalog Data Structures - SEO Weighted Auto Mapping

It turns out that Property mappings for Products can also lend a hand for search term optimization.  While this is helpful with external search engines through Customer Path definitions, it also becomes helpful with internal search tools built into the site itself.

As you are defining your internal search strategy, you have many considerations that need to be planned out.  Some aspects of internal search could include:

• Related Keywords
• Misspellings
• Alternate Names
• Competitor Keywords
• Plurals
• Multilingual
• Synonyms
• Legacy Phrases
• Synonym Phrases

The diagram below demonstrates some uses of Property mappings dovetailed with internal search terms:

You can see in this model how we can implement various internal search strategies that are directly mapped to Properties.  This helps us because the mapping of internal search terms can be done atomically to each Property value which when mapped to Products can create an aggregate library of internal search terms for each product that is mapped.

Take the Customer Path of "Ladies / Nike".  We have decided to map Synonym terms for "Ladies" that incldues "Womens", "Hers", and "Female".  While the actual value of each synonym should be independently tested (through A/B testing or multivariate), each one of these could be used interchangeably with the term it replaces.  This helps us on the natural search engines that traverse the Customer Path and also contributes to a more effective internal search algorithm as well.  Now the Customer Path can be addressed through "Ladies Nike" and "Hers Nike" at the same time. 

In similar fashion, if a customer was looking for products that were mapped to the White Color Property, even multi-lingual terms could be interchanged such as "Blanco" and "Blanc" which opens up our search results to even more ranges of public and private search engines.

Related keywords enable us to establish corrolary alternatives to common terms, in this case one of the Nike related keywords could be "Velocity" to which the Property of Nike could be mapped.

Misspellings offer a rich range of additional keywords that can be layered onto a particular Property value, such as customers that type in "Lantz" instead of "Lance" when they are searching for Lance Armstrong apparel.  It's useful to mine the "missed" search logs as you let your internal search tool collect them so you can decide which misspellings to incorporate into your Property value mappings.

Alternate names allow you to link various other phrases that can be used interchangeably, in this example the UCI Pro Tour is also referred to as the UCI Tour.

Competitor Keywords layer in the functionality of "borrowing" a bit from the brand equity of the phrases that may be used by your competitors.  If there was a competitor that used a brand name of "Tankz" and you were selling "Tanks" as one of your products, you could affiliate their brand key phrase with your product Property mappings.

Plurals are such an easy keyword combination to miss but they are ever so common.  Because it's highly intuitive that customers will use plurals (or singulars) in everyday use, this should prioritized as one of the best targets for low hanging fruit.

There are other uses of this Property to Product mapping with alternate keyword value definitions that I haven't even thought of, but I hope that the message is clear that utilizing the Property to Product data mapping architecture can provide a high degree of flexibility and utility.  In general the use of highly atomic information that is reconstructed at will based on the needs of the customer without preventing you from implementing edge caching as your front end solution to the client.

We continue to explore how to leverage the atomic data model in Part 7 - Best Business Practices for Product Catalog Data Structures - Comparison Shopping Site Syndication.