http://www.mysite.com/(A(XobqNFPtxwEkAAAAMzk3ZTU
4NzQtZGFjZS00OGUxLWExYzYtZDBiYjc1Mzg1N2YwP7fq1em0HKYJ5
vYMP8lm4NCf3241))/subdirectory/Default.aspx

I found out that this works on any IIS server. Even on www.microsoft.com. I have no idea what this is. I do know it is a bad thing for SEO and any site hosted on IIS needs to address this. This goes back to what I say about site architecture. Your site needs to have a URL policy set up and enforced. Nobody can go to any page unless that URL is already known to the site owner. This means no page can be access from 2 or more differnt urls. The site owner needs to redirect any rogue URL to the correct one and 404 anything you can’t predict. What this does is create duplicate content that the search engines do not like and can even hurt a sites rankings.

From my testing I found that it follows rules. (A(this-is_a-test) The capital A can be any capital letter but will not work with lower case letters. You can put that inbetween any 2 forward slashes in a URL on IIS. Here are some tests using www.microsoft.com

You can do this on any IIS website from what I can see. I even got it to work on myspace.

http://www.myspace.com/(A(asdfa-123))/Modules/Search/Pages/Search.
aspx?t=208,&q=related:www.microsoft.com/default.aspx

The Long tail

to me is a phrase typed into a search engine that is 4 or more words. 3 words I consider medium tail. There are some 3 word phrases that are easy to get and some that are very hard. One of the things that goes with long tail is that most of the time you may only get 1 visitor a month or even one visitor from that term ever. I used to run some pretty busy spam sites that were auto generated from lots of keyword research. One of the things I would see in the logs was that over 50% of my traffic over a month period were from phrases that were only typed in once that month.

One of the armature mistakes that most SEO make is that the focus all their time and effort into ranking for what they think their “money word” is. People think “man if I could just rank for “auto loan” or “debt consolidation” I would be rich”. Yes you will get lots of traffic and make some good money but your conversion rate will suck. It will take a lot of time and effort to get those terms if you can even get them at all. You could spend your initial time and effort going after lots of smaller terms. The long tail terms have a much better conversion rate. Instead of “auto loan” you might go for “no money down auto loans”. If you know what you are doing and can get the big terms go for it. Once you get the big term most of the long tail will just happen. Problem is most people can’t get the big terms.

There are lots of ways to get your terms. Wordtracker is a great place to start. Also it is worth it to invest in some PPC. You will lose money on this but the keyword list it will give you will be worth it. Just make sure you have log files and a program to read them. You can also build your own keyword list. You already know the root phrases that are in your industry. I used MS Access to build keyword lists. Of course it is always good to have lists of cities, countries, zip codes, states, and neighborhoods.

Next you want to have all your pages pointing to other pages on your site. If you have a small site with 10 pages or less you can just have each page point to each page. If you have more you will need to pick a number of links you want on each page. Then you will need to make sure that each page has that many internal links plus the link from the front page or directory page. So if your number is 6 then each page should have at least 7 internal links. Be sure that the links to each page have the right anchor text for that page.

This will give you the power of keyword rich anchor text to help boost each pages rank. It will also make sure that when you do rank for something you will get a second indented result in the SERPS because you have that keyword on at least 2 pages. It is good to organize the links into groups so that you also get more keyword density on the page that has the links.

search engine marketing
maritime law
data structures
Mathematical logic

Also DaveN on the Webmasterradio show www.strikepoint.co.uk pointed out that Ask is now showing the ads with a blue background instead of making them look like the organic results. I have no idea what kind of deal Ask has with Wikipedia but I think this is new.

Many people talk about backlinks and anchor text and that it is the most important aspect of SEO for the Google search engine. Don’t get me wrong they are important but on-page SEO is still very important. If you do the on page stuff right you will need much less PR and anchor text.

Here is a list of important factors. I will discuss each one further down. They are not in any particular order. Some people like to order them and give the values of how important they are but I just make a list and do all of them.

• Title Tag
• H tags
• kw early in the content
• kw repetition (I don’t worry about kw density)
• kw in bold, italics, underline
• Content that supports the kw (relevance, themeing)
• Grammatically correct
• Internal linking
• Stemming

Title Tag
I cannot stress how important this tag is. If you don’t have a good title tag you will not get traffic. You want to get your kw in the tag. Some people like to stuff this tag and I can’t say if that is good or bad. I generate a lot of pages that are extremely targeted to one kw phrase so I never worry about it. I would not repeat any word more than twice.

H Tags
I try to get a H1 tag to be the first thing on a page. I just put the same thing that is in the title. If you are making pages by hand it is good to put more than just the H1 tag. If you generate pages like I do that is much harder to do. It is also good to have H2 and H3 tags further down the page if your content warrants it.

KW early in the content
Try to have your kw’s early in the first sentence but try to keep it at least several words from the beginning of the first sentence. This is very important in optimizing for your Google snippet. Once you see your snippet indexed in Google try to make changes that make it read better. This is going to be part of why people click on your URL.

KW repetition
I would not worry about kw density unless your sites are just pure SE spam. It just does not help that much and is very ugly and hard to read. If you have an adsense sight you will get an email from them asking you to make changes if your kw density is too high. Trust me I got one. Just try to repeat the word several times. Write an article first then go back and add your kw in places where it fits. Don’t just repeat it a bunch of times trying to get 50% kw density or whatever. Don’t buy those programs that tell you use your judgment. KW density plays such a tiny tiny role in rank. Plus it can hurt your conversion. You can rank number one for your term but if everybody leaves your site without doing anything what have you gained.

KW in bold, italics, underline
This is not huge factor but hey how hard is it do this. Just look through your page and randomly add these tags to some of your kw’s.

Content that supports the kw
This is very important these days. You need to write an article then take out your kw’s and ask somebody to read it and see if they can guess what your kw is. Your content needs to match your kw’s. If you are auto generating lots of pages separate your kw’s into categories and write articles for that category. When you are auto generating you can’t be perfect but try to be on topic and not just say “learn more about kw”, “kw’s are great” , I love my “kw”. Write an article and try to keep your pages at least 15% different.

Grammatically correct
This goes along with the last point. Write a real article about your subject. There is evidence that Google is looking at grammar or will be in the near future.

Internal linking
This is another very important factor. It is one of the most ignored on site SEO tactics out there. It can also help with themeing. If you have one page that you want to rank well write 10 more pages about the same subject but emphasize longer kw’s. Have each of the 11 pages use the same root general kw but come up with 10 more kw phrases using programs like word tracker. On the bottom of each of those pages link to each of the other pages. You can just separate them by commas or pipes. Don’t link a page to itself. So if you have 11 pages there will be 10 links at the bottom of each. This will give you some more kw repetition and internal anchor text. You would be amazed how useful this is. Try not to have too many links. I keep it at 10.

Stemming
Stemming is where an SE will consider all words that share the same “stem” or root of a word to be similar. So try to use your kw’s different ways. Singular, Plural, add ing, ed, or ly.

General front page rules

When most business owners decide they want a web page they go with the attitude that they want a site that they think is cool. They want to show their friends and others. If somebody asks you what you think of their site you look at it differently than if you were on a mission to find something. So don’t ask somebody what they think of your site. Instead tell them to go to your site and try to sign up or do whatever your call to action is. Your goal is to accomplish your call to action not to get someone to tell you how cool your site looks. This does not mean you need to have a text only site using only basic html. Just don’t do anything that gets in the way of your goals. Your goal should be to get visitors to click on something, call a phone number, leave a comment, submit a form, download something, or do whatever your call to action is. Please don’t forgot a call to action. I have been to sites that have elaborate front pages extolling the virtues of the company but I can’t find out how to contact them or do what they have talked me into.

Before you put anything on the page you need to ask yourself, “Does this distract from the call to action?” One of the worst things that people do is put music on their front page. Please don’t do this. People hate this. Plus the music adds to the download size of the page. This brings me to page size. Load time should be important to you. According to CNN 76% of Internet users in rural areas still use dial up and 61% of urban users are on dial up. The amount of text and image size are one part of a pages load time. The number of objects that load is the other. One hundred 1K files load a lot slower than one 100K file. Google has 3 requests and 13,757 bytes and loads in 2.74 seconds on a 56K dial up modem. This is the best case scenario but most people want a little more on their front page. Amazon has 50 requests and 212,760 bytes and loads in 42.6 seconds. That would be the max I would have on my site. There would have to be a very good reason to have a site this big or bigger. Amazon can get away with it because people are going to put up with it because they really want to come to that site. Some people will say that dial up users are used to this so why be different. The only way to stick out is to be different. If your site is just like some major site then why would somebody come to your site.

Be careful not to overwhelm the visitor with too much stuff on the front page. Very few people are going to read a bunch of text. If they want more information they can go to sub pages. Link to sub pages with more information on your site. This is one point where your site is like a TV commercial or radio ad. You want to get their attention and convince them not to hit the back button. Also while we are at it don’t make a page that breaks the back button. Don’t do anything that will make the visitor mad. When a visitor is looking for something they are visiting several sites until they find what they want. You may not be the first site they have been to. You want them to stop searching. If I am looking for something I will skip over sites that have tons of text and links. People have very short attention spans. You need 4 bullets or 4 things that are easy to read. You don’t have to use bullets. I am using that term generically. It just has to be 4 things visitors will see that gets their attention quickly. Your call to action needs to be very easy to find and use. If you have a phone number don’t have your line set up to reject anonymous phone calls. If you have a phone number or you get emails respond to them now or very quickly. People want help now. Live chat works as well. A lot of people will go down the list until the first person answers the phone or gets back with them. If you have a large site and need a big menu that is ok just make sure it does not get in the way. If you have an ecommerce site then have the main category headings easy to find. It is ok to use those DHTML menus but make sure you have them repeated in text at the bottom of the page in a tasteful way.

SEO Rules

There are many ways to get visitors to your site like links from other sites, type-in traffic, and of course search engines. One part of SEO or search engine optimization is to design your site so that search engines know you exist and what your site is about. For this to happen you have to have text on your page. You can’t have a splash page comprised of one image or flash. Search engines can’t read pictures or flash. They can only see text.

You have to decide what keywords you are going to optimize for. If you think you can rank for your big money term then by all means pick that term to optimize for. Don’t try to optimize your front page for a bunch of terms. It is best to pick one term to focus on. It is pretty hard to rank for most 2 or 3 word money terms. I try to optimize for a term that my site ranks well for already just from text on my front page or some sub page. I might be low on the first page or on page two on the search engines for this term. I can use the high link popularity of my front page on that term. Why waste your front page.? You can easily rank for some terms with your front page. They may not be your big high traffic money terms but you probably will not get that anyhow.

The most important thing you can do to rank for a term is to put it in your title. Every web page has a title so use them. I went to Google and typed in allintitle: “untitled document” and there were 87 million results. There are a lot of people out there wasting the traffic they could be getting to their front page. It is possible to rank for a term without having it in your title. You have to get a lot of links with the term as the anchor text of those links to do this.. Next you need to repeat that term on your page. You don’t need to spam your site up by repeating the term a ton of times or getting some magic keyword density. Just repeat the term where it fits. You can create a heading tag. The tags are quite ugly so it is best to use some CSS to make them look like you want them to. Use a h1 and a h2 tag. Don’t just copy the title. Use the tags as headings like they were designed to be used. You can also use them at the beginning of a section or group of bullets. If you have any images on the page use the alt tags. Don’t stuff them with keywords. Make sure the alt text is appropriate; just fit it in the root of the phrase or the whole phrase. If you have images as your navigation, put what is written on the image in the alt tag. Put the keyword you are trying to optimize for in the alt tag with what is on the image unless what is on the image already has the keyword in it.

Conclusion

Each site is different. A lawyers site or dentists site will be much different than an ecommerce website. Remember to keep it simple. People are in a hurry and want to get in and out. Your links to sub pages that have more information are for the people who want to hang out and read more. Put those links on the side or top of the front page. The middle of the screen is where their eyes hit first. Put the stuff that grabs them there. Design the page in such a way that the search engines can find it. The title is very important. It is the first step to any SEO work. Make your pages easy to find and easy to use. Of course there are exceptions to these rules but they should work for most people.