Experience and Age Matter for SEO

Experience and Age Matter for SEO

 Google's continuing mission is to deliver the best search results possible to its end users. So how can a search engine like Google differentiate between a company that is brand new (and might be a fly-by-night operation) versus an organization that has years of experience in the field?

The answer: Google looks at the age of your domain name (along with several other varibles). If your domain name was registered last week, chances are good that your site won't even appear in Google's rankings for several months. (This is called the Google Sandbox.)

But if your domain name was registered eight years ago, Google uses this information as a clue that you've been around for a little bit.

In a nutshell, Google looks at the month and year when your domain was registered — and uses this to give more weight to companies that have been around for several years versus several weeks.

Google also looks forward to see how long you have registered your
domain; if you have registered your domain for five or ten years in the future, you've made a subtle, yet important economic decision that you're still going to be around and in business in 2018. Here's an instance where being frugal with domain name registration can actually hurt your rankings.

That said, Google does place more weight on the past versus the future. I have one domain that's been continously registered for 14 years (since 1994).

Along with many other factors, this site, www.rmiug.org, has a very high Google Page Rank of 6/10.

So, what can you do to increase your rankings?

First, make sure that your company's domain name is registered for at least a few years from the present date.

Second, make sure you know who is the contact person for your domain name. We've recently seen several instances where the person in charge of the domain name moves to a different organization, goes on vacation, or even passes away. And then, if the domain name comes up for renewal, it can be a mad scramble to keep your website and corporate email up and running.

IMAGES FOR SEO SUCCESS

NAMING YOUR IMAGES FOR SEO SUCCESS

Even though search engines can't read words inside graphics, they do use the name of the file and other contextual information to increase your rankings. One of the biggest missed opportunities is not naming images with search engine optimization in mind.

I can't tell you how many times I see a site that has the logo named:
logo.jpg 

While that's sufficient to display the logo in a browser, it's much better to name the logo with descriptive keywords, such as: customer-paradigm-logo.jpg

Another way to look at this is to look at this image name out of context: pass-med-425.jpg
The image name, pass-med-435.jpg doesn't tell you much about what is in the image.

However, this image does seem to give a search engine a bit more
information: passover-in-moab-utah-2008.jpg

If you search for "passover in moab" in Google, see what comes up first. If you want to further increase the relevancy, you can create a folder (also with keywords) that can help you increase keyword density on a page.

For example, placing an image in a directory like this will give you more relevancy than in a more non-descriptive folder: /search-engine-optimizationservices/seo-services-header-logo.jpg

Yes, it takes a little bit more time and effort for someone to type out a longer image name and keep it organized into different folders on your website.

But our research has found that increasing the relevant keywords in your images is a sure fire way to increase your search engine rankings.

Keyword Density

It's All about Keyword Density

What is keyword density? It's a percentage, calculated this way:

Number of times keyword appears on a page / Total word count on page = Keyword Density

Keyword density is usually displayed as a percentage. So, if you have a page that has 100 words on it, and you have a keyword appear 5 times on the page, your page would have a keyword density of 5%.

(5 / 100 = 5%)

In a real life example, the search term "personalized URL" has an overall keyword density on this page of 3.05%:

(15 instances of the keywords /981 total words on the site = 3.05%)

However, not all keywords on a page are treated the same. Keywords in the title tags, page name and section headings are often given higher weight than keywords that appear in the regular content area of the page.

Here's how the keywords break down in the different areas of the site:

Title Tag: 1 Keyword, 8 total times, Keyword Density: 25.00%

Page Name: 1 Keyword, 3 total words, Keyword Density: 66.00%

Linked Text: 1 Keywords, 61 total words, Keyword Density: 3.27%

URLs in Links: 2 Keywords, 237 total words, Keyword Density: 1.68%

Visible Text: 7 Keywords, 627 total words, Keyword Density: 2.23%

Total: 15 Keywords, 981 total words, Keyword Density: 3.05%

This keyword term currently has a ranking of #2 in Google: 

So, how much keyword density is too much? It depends on which study you read, but it's generally best to keep your keyword density between 3-6%.

Anything more, and you'll be penalized for trying to spam the search engines.

As a general rule of thumb, if the copy of the site makes sense to a human reading it, you should be fine. But if you repeat the same keyword five times in a row (Personalized URL, Personalized URL, etc), then you can be banned from search engines or penalized.

SiteMaps Important for Search Engines

Sitemaps are Like a Baby Food for Search Engines

Just a few years ago, the philosophy about sitemaps went something like this: If your customers need to use a sitemap to find their way around your website, you haven't done your job organizing your content and creating a navigational system that is easy to understand.

But sitemaps are now back in favor. Why? It's less about human visitors and more about search engines.

What is a sitemap? A sitemap is page that lists all of the other pages on your site, usually in a bullet list.

Here's an example of a sitemap:

As I've discussed before, search engines are easily confused. Many pages of a website are often 'hidden' behind tricky menus or drop-down lists. Or, the links to reach a specific page are too deep (i.e. more than a couple of pages down from the home page).

A sitemap, linked from the home page of the site, will list every page of your site in one convenient place.

When a search engine visits your site map, it's very easy for them to then get a list of every page on your site, and then crawl, digest and include all of your content in their system.

We generally recommend having the link to your sitemap on the bottom footer navigation of your site. But you need to make sure that as your site changes, your sitemap is updated. Otherwise, Google and others may not index the latest pages placed on your site. Our Content Management System, for example, automatically
updates the sitemap each time a page is added, or the name of a page is changed.

And even better than an HTML sitemap is an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is a sitemap that is specifically formatted for search engines like Google. It's a machine-readable version that allows you to specify all of the pages of the site.

Adding an XML sitemap ensures that a site will get indexed much more quickly and more rapidly than not using this method at all

WHAT DOES A SEARCH ENGINE LOOK FOR?

At the end of the day, a search engine is in business to help you find the most relevant results possible when you conduct a search. Search engines make their money by selling relevant advertising to supplement the natural, organic search results.

Because a top ranking in Google or another search engine can translate into a great deal of business, it's important to know how search engines determine who gets placed at the top of the list.
 

The two biggest ways search engines rank you are based on:

Relevant Content: Search engines are really good at reading text. The more relevant copy you have on your site, the better chance you have getting your page indexed. Search engines love pages that have more than 500 words of text on them.

Why? 

A page with a lot of content is usually more beneficial to the end
user. (Though for every rule like this one, there are many exceptions.)

Adding articles, press releases, detailed information about your products and services all can help quickly increase the amount of relevant content that you have on your site.

Inbound Links: 

The more sites that link to you, the more important your site becomes to search engines. If sites that link to you are very relevant
and/or important, those inbound links worth more. And domains that end with .gov, .edu often perform better than .com for inbound links.

It's kind of like a high schoul popularity contest. If the most popular kids all point to you and say that your website is better than anyone elses, in the eyes of the community, your ranking is elevated.
 

There are many other things as well that affect search engine ranking. I can't go into great detail for the entire list, but even small changes can translate into higher rankings.
 

Title Tags: See Title Tags for SEO

Page Names: Keywords in page names in crease the relevance of the search and are displayed in a Google search result.
 

Image Names: 

Putting relevant keywords into image names helps your ranking.

Alt Text for Images: 

If you hover over an image, this is the text that appears; also used by the blind to understand what an image represents.
 

Keyword Density: 

How often specific keywords appear on a page as a percentage of all of the words on a page.
 

Section Headings: 

In the HTML code, section headings like H1 or 

H2 are treated as more important content than the information on the rest of the page.

Words contained in links: A link like: "Customer Paradigm offers Web Marketing and Search Engine Optimization Services" can help boost rankings.
 

Clean HTML code: Search engines are easily confused if your websites' code is a mess.

How often pages are updated: Search engines like new content, but also have a bias toward pages that have been up on the web for a long time.

Site Map: If you have a site map (and an XML site map as well), it's easier for search engines to crawl through all of the pages of your site.