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Secondhand SEO: How to Optimize a Site Already ‘Optimized’ by Someone Else. Part 1

As the manufacturer of a popular SEO software suite, from time to time we are asked how to best optimize a completed Web site that someone else has already attempted to optimize. Disappointed with the results of some self-proclaimed ‘SEO Specialists,’ Web site owners often decide to optimize and market their sites themselves.

That’s where we come in. In this issue of SEO MixTour, we offer you key recommendations as to which site aspects should be checked carefully for mistakes; mistakes that might be impeding your site’s search engine visibility.

First, check if your site is crawlable. In other words, you need to find out if search engine spiders can access all of your site pages that you want presented in search engine results. How?

• Open robots.txt (http://www.yoursitedomain.com/robots.txt) and see if there are any instructions for robots that are wrong (For example: User agent: * Disallow /). If your site has no robots.txt file, then all robots are able to crawl your entire site, which is OK unless you want certain specially protected site areas to be hidden from random visitors.
• On all important pages of your site, check for the presence and content of a Meta robots tag. A Meta robots tag should not use ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ commands.
• On all important pages of your site, check for the presence of a Meta refresh tag. Google doesn’t recommend them, so remove any Meta refresh tags and redirect visitors to a different URL with a server-side 301 redirect.
• Check if your site has a valid Sitemap. Typically, you can find your site map at: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, but may be placed in a different location. If you have no Sitemap, create one—see more details in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines . You can perform all of the above suggestions using your Web CEO Editor and Optimization tools.
• If you have a pure Flash-based site, you can’t hope for a good site ranking unless you have enough descriptive, keyword-rich text in your videos. Find more information about Flash site optimization on Adobe’s Site and in the previous issue of SEO Mix Tour. You might also want to create keyword-rich static alternatives of your most important pages.

Second, make sure there are no technical mistakes that may be costing you good site ranking.

• Ensure all your links have a consistent URL syntax, i.e. your links always begin only with http://www.yoursitedomain.com/ and never with http://yoursitedomain.com/. Make sure your server correctly translates requests for http://yoursitedomain.com or yoursitedomain.com to http://www.yoursitedomain.com  (Google names it ‘a canonical URL’) with the help of a server-side 301 redirect. You can also create a Google Webmaster account and use its tools to tell the preferred domain syntax specifically for Google.
• Check all of your important pages for repetitive titles. The content of your title tags should be unique and contain the key phrases for which each particular page is optimized. This is especially important if you have a CMS-based Web site. The same check can be performed to detect repetitive content in your Meta description tags, although this is not as critical these days as it was in the past.
• If your site pages are dynamically generated, make sure your site uses a solution for creating SEO-friendly page URLs that contain keywords. Typically, this task is completed using the .htaccess file, mod_rewrite or product/article/book/any meaningful name variables in the URL structure. If you have no idea of what kind of substitution for a dynamic URL would be a more readable static alternative, you can get a general understanding by reading the following Wikipedia article. With a static site, it is even easier for you to create keyword-rich page URLs.

SEO Experiment

This time we’ve requested from the most popular search engines the number of pages within specific domains that are included in their indices. As in our previous test, we took sites from Alexa’s top 1,000,000 popular sites.

Google indexes sites of all sizes best of all with a definite preference for the most popular sites (does the site authority come into play?) None of the other search engines comes even close to the results Google reports.

However, comparing the shares of specific search engines, we can see that Yahoo! indexes the middle and the end of the Alexa list better, and Bing does the best job of indexing the least popular sites.

Web CEO Metrics

Here we are sharing the generalized numbers from our HitLens Web Analytics service. It covers 300,000+ websites from all over the world.

Global Search Engines (%)

This chart gives the idea of the market share of each of the three major search engines. Innovations take their own: Bing has increased its market share. And it seems, in some cases it was increased at the expense of Yahoo’s fall.

Visitor Referrers (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites. It looks like people’s faith in organic optimization has been shaken a bit, so its share decreased in comparison to the October 2008 point. Webmasters resort to the help of backlinks and paid advertising more and more.

Web Marketing Tip:

Some people will say: “I’m in a very competitive industry, so top positions for my targeted keywords are just a dream”.

Get a new angle on SEO: it’s very important to have your site crawlable, logically structured, clearly focused, and keyword-rich. Even if you create it basically for PPC marketing – Google’s Quality Score depends on your site content. Let alone the fact that visitors will like it.

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Website content: to borrow or not to borrow?

All webmasters who take care of a site’s content often rack their brains trying to find a fresh idea or perfect words for an article. In many cases, it seems easier to find some content elsewhere on the Web and re-use it. But will it be good for a site? And can the aim be achieved without violating a copyright?

Let’s make clear what ’stolen content’ means.

According to US copyright law (see http://www.copyright.gov for detailed information), content becomes ‘owned’ the moment its author publishes it on the website. So, if someone then uses it on another website without the author’s permission, it’s a definite case of a copyright infringement.

If you are able to prove that you were the first to publish something (with the help of the server logs or web archives cache with the publication date), you are considered its owner. You can go further and officially copyright something to prove ownership. Keep in mind that to apply for the copyright registration, you should refer to the copyright office in your country.

How can you find out if your content has been illegally used by someone else? Go to Google and search an excerpt of your text as an exact match (in double quotes). If there are crawlable sites that use your content, you will learn quickly from the search results. You can try the same syntax on all of the major search engines. Alternatively, use the plagiarism revealing service by Copyscape.

In many cases, search engines properly define the original texts and filter the duplicates out. But unfortunately, it may happen that the original website appears in search results lower than the infringer’s site or is even filtered out. In that case, ensure that robots.txt allows crawling for your page; that the page is properly optimized and present on the sitemap. Then, follow our advice:

• First step: contact the website owner politely asking them either to mention the author and the original page or remove the content. Sometimes this works.You may also try the Seomoz offer: ‘If you get a response from the website owner and she is resisting the removal of the content [or not replying at all – editor's note], it may be worth considering whether you can turn the infringer into an affiliate. Since it’s your content that’s driving ad sales, you may convince the infringer to give you a share of the ad revenue.’
• Second step: send a Take-Down Notice to the host and to the domain registrar of the infringer.Find their contact details in the whois lookup services. Explain in detail what happened and provide the proof of your authorship.
• If the worst comes to the worst, send a Take-Down Notice to Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Some people may ask: what if I just place a copyright sign © after my site’s name and will not really bother registering each and every article on it? Well, you can do that, but if it comes to the point when your authorship is disputed, you will not be able to use the copyright privileges. It’s the same as if you write ‘beware of a dog’ on a door where there’s no dog behind.

Indisputably, writing original content is always your best option because it’s valuable both for your visitors and from a search engine optimization perspective. Besides, pages with duplicate content may be filtered by search engines more often than the original ones. It’s a general practice to corroborate your idea with an expert citation. What if you need to discuss some news or someone else’s idea in your blog? How do you do that the right way? The answer is: make such borrowing a fair use:

• Use excerpts. If you place a text extract and add a link to the original complete article, this will hardly be considered a copyright violation.
• Comment. Comment about somebody’s thoughts, add your personal insight, criticize them, or refer to them to describe something very specific.
• Research. Collect a few opinions referring to an issue, and mention their authors.
• Analyze. You cannot grab someone else’s ideas. But you can analyze them! Predict, forecast, in a word – think!All the above suggestions support the same idea: be creative even if you borrow other people’s ideas. Add value for your visitors; don’t just compile your content from other people’s hard work.
• Finally, take care to read the privacy rules of a website you want to borrow from. Authors often describe their requirements for material usage: ‘use only with author’s permission’ or ‘use only with the link to the source’.

Even if you place a link, the fact of borrowed content from someone else still remains. However, link presence is a positive factor, so people will most likely not bother to complain. Just keep in mind that the search engines might punish your page for overdoing it.

Links on this theme:
Copyright Law: What Search Marketers Should Know
Copyscape – Preventing Plagiarism of Your Online Content

SEO Companies’ Visibility Rate

Are SEO companies as good as they claim to be on their sites? Will they return the efficiency they promise? Are their skills qualified? The only way to find it out is to check how they optimize and promote their own sites.

Here we share Top 10 SEO Companies according to their search visibility rate for September 2009.

Web CEO analysts use objective evidence to rate SEO firms according to their search engine visibility. SEO companies’ visibility rate is calculated using a special formula that considers the positions of SEO companies’ sites in search engines results pages for the keywords their potential clients use, popularity of these keywords and number of competitors. Learn more about the formula.

What Experts Recommended

Most spammers use RSS feeds to scrape your content, placing anchored links within your feed will bring the benefit of not only getting credit for your work but possibly building valuable links back to your blog/website. It won’t stop the scrapers and it won’t protect your content, but it will ‘beat the scrapers’ at their own game.

Roberta Rosenberg,
Mariareyesmcdavis.com

Dear Reader,

This issue of SEO MixTour is special. From now on, we will include a new section dedicated to SEO experiments performed by SEO MixTour analysts. Read on to familiarize yourself with our research.

Web CEO Editorial Team

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Checklist for Image Search Optimization

Nowadays, professional search engine optimizers give much greater attention to image search visibility. Image search optimization is especially interesting to website owners or publishers with a particularly visual product (for example, art galleries, clothes designers, or furniture manufacturers). What is more, everyone knows a picture is worth a thousand words.

There are a limited number of factors that influence image positioning. Print out the below check list and be sure you’ve done all you can to have your images well-optimized.

• First of all, your image should be an inherent part of a page and share the same theme. I.e. the page’s title, headings, body text must tell visitors the same story that the image tells.
• Create an Images folder on your server to save all your pictures there. Make sure search engine crawlers are allowed to index it.
• Use descriptive keywords in your image files’ names. Separate words in the file names with a hyphen, not an underscore.
• Provide a small description of an image in the alt attribute of the img tag, but do not fill the alt attribute with tons of keywords, even if they are relevant.
• Think of also using a short image title with keywords in them.
• Place the keyword-rich text in the body around the image that describes it.
• If the image constitutes a link, its anchor text is quite powerful in terms of optimization for high image-search rankings.
• On the other hand, if you have other pages of your site linking to the page with important images, create keyword-rich link anchor texts to such pages with images.
• Use high resolution images, if available. Provide different resolutions of images.
• Avoid putting a ‘click to see larger image’ link inside of a JavaScript link. Scripts may cause difficulties in the link indexing.
• Check how your image looks in thumbnail size. Stronger contrast is needed to better discern an image, which might lead to more people clicking on and linking to the image.
• Save photos as .JPG files, and other graphic image types as .GIF. Search engines tend to interpret a GIF image as a standard graphic image with 256 colors, while JPGs as photos with millions of colors.
• Re-upload your pictures from time to time, since image freshness is a contextual clue for the search engines and might affect relevancy.
• As promotional tactics, you may watermark your images with your site address — if they are linked to, people on other sites will learn about yours.

Analysis of Backward Links Information Provided by Google, Google Caffeine, Yahoo! and Exalead

First, we’ve tried to find out which of the search engines gives more information on the number of pages linking to a site.

To make the test more interesting and representative, we’ve analyzed three groups of websites from the alexa.com top 1,000,000 sites list (http://www.alexa.com/topsites) assuming such groups will represent well 1) the most popular sites, 2) sites of medium popularity and 3) less popular sites.

So, our three groups each consisting of one thousand sites belong to: 1) 1-1,000 (top 1,000), 2) 500,000-501,000 (middle 1,000) and 3) 999,000 – 1,000,000 (last 1,000).
For each site in those groups, we have requested Google, Google Caffeine, Yahoo! and Exalead for a number of backward links.

To our surprise (as we bet on Yahoo! :), Exalead left others far behind having indexed the largest number of links, i.e. 76% (top 1,000), 63% (middle 1,000), and 56% (last 1,000).
In our eyes, Yahoo! lost its reputation as the most extensive indexing engine and came second with 21%, 23%, and 26% correspondingly.

Google and Google Caffeine show us the smallest numbers of backward links — from 1 to 5% in all cases.

What’s interesting: An additional analysis shows that Google’s index does include most pages that place links to the analyzed sites (as we know from Yahoo! and Exalead results), but Google didn’t report such pages as linking pages.

Which means, Google indexes many more links than it reports to us. Is this a big surprise to us? No. We understand very well why Google is hiding the backward link information from its users. And Exalead can — if not arm the reverse engineers with valuable info — but at least give us the signals we need to obtain to understand if our sites progress well.

Web CEO Metrics

Here we are sharing the generalized numbers from our HitLens Web Analytics service. It covers 300,000+ websites from all over the world.

Global Search Engines (%)

This chart gives the idea of the market share of each of the three major search engines. The situation of search engine referrers is predictable. Google with its 79% remains the leading referrer and strenghtens its position by improving search options. Yahoo does not make progress, and Bing keeps its position.

Visitor Referrers (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites. September 2008 is remembered as a critical point of the world economic depression. Since that time we’ve been watching a constant decrease of paid advertising. Instead, search engines and bookmarking became more popular visitor referrers.

Experts comment on image search optimization

“The more control you have over the images on your site the better. You can brand them with your logo, url or trademark. It also allows you as the retailer to present the product in the best possible way that will convert with your own audience, not to mention allowing you to present the features in a different way than other competitors.”

Liana Evans
Search Marketing Gurus
Contributor