Everyone is looking for a competitive edge in the Search Engine Page Results (SERP’s), and to get there the competition lies in the Page Ranks given by the search engines, well how does one get the edge?
Search Engines have dramatically changed the web and the way we design and develop our website content for that matter. The revolutionary algorithms and techniques that have evolved over the decades have given birth to a new domain: Search Engine Optimization (SEO). According to wikipedia, SEO is defined as "the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results."
Google has the winning edge and is clearly at the top of the list when it comes to search engine usage and popularity. Yet, while Google is no doubt in lead with its most accurate and comprehensive search engine, I do believe other search engines such as Microsoft Bing and Yahoo are still viable contenders that should be considered when optimizing your website.
SEO in itself is not that big a deal... any website developer can jump into it quickly thanks to the large volume of beginners guides available online from various blogs and forums. However, optimizing for all leading search engines at the same time is not an easy task. It is important to note that when you optimize for Bing or Yahoo, keep it simple so that your rank standing in Google is not hurt.
I have waded through a lot of SEO blogs, forums, consultants, and other web references so that I could complie the following checklists for each of the top 3 search engines.
Optimizing for Google
The following list is based on Google's started guide, “Google Search Engine Optimization” which can be downloaded in pdf format from: http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
- Create Unique, Accurate Page Titles: A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The <title> tag should be placed within the <head> tag of the HTML document. Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site.
- Make Use of the "description" Meta Tag: A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph.
- Improve the Structure of Your URLs: Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines.
- Make Your Site Easier to Navigate: The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the webmaster thinks is important. Although Google's search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a
page plays in the bigger picture of the site.
- Offer Quality Content and Services: Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means.
- Write Better Anchor Text: Anchor text is the clickable text that users will see as a result of a link, and is placed within the anchor tag <a href="..."></a>.
This text tells users and Google something about the page you're linking to. Links on your page may be internal—pointing to other pages on your site—or external—leading to content on other sites.
- Use Heading Tags Appropriately: Since heading tags typically make text contained in them larger than normal text on the page, this is a visual cue to users that this text is important and could help them understand something about the type of content underneath the heading text. Multiple heading sizes used in order create a hierarchical
structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document.
- Optimize Your Use of Images: Images may seem like a straightforward component of your site, but you can optimize your use of them. All images can have a distinct filename and "alt" attribute, both of which you should take advantage of. The "alt" attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason.
- Make Effective Use of robots.txt: A "robots.txt" file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site. This file, which must be named "robots.txt", is placed in the root directory of your site. You may not want certain pages of your site crawled because they might not be useful to users if found in a search engine's search results. If you do want to prevent search engines from crawling your pages, Google Webmaster Tools has a friendly robots.txt generator to help you create this file.
- Be Aware of rel="nofollow" For Links: Setting the value of the "rel" attribute of a link to "nofollow" will tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn't be followed or pass your page's reputation to the pages linked to. Nofollowing a link is adding rel="nofollow" inside of the link's anchor tag.
- Promote Your Website in the Right Ways: While most of the links to your site will be gained gradually, as people discover your content through search or other ways and link to it, Google search engine understands that you'd like to let others know about the hard work you've put into your content. Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject.
- Google's Webmaster Tools: Major search engines, including Google, provide free tools for webmasters. Google's Webmaster Tools help webmasters better control how Google interacts with their websites and get useful information from Google about their site. Using Webmaster Tools won't help your site get preferential treatment; however, it can help you identify issues that, if addressed, can help your site perform better in search results.
- Google Analytics:
If you've improved the crawling and indexing of your site using Google Webmasters Tools or other services, you're probably curious about the traffic coming to your site. Web analytics programs like Google Analytics are a valuable source of insight for this.
Optimizing For Bing
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Backlinks are of Less Importance: If you compare the first 10 results in Bing and Google, it is noticeable that all equal, the winners in Bing have less backlinks than the winners in Google. It is unclear if nofollow matters with Bing.
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Inbound Anchor Text Matters More: The quantity of quality inbound links might be of less importance for Bing but the anchor text certainly matters more. Actually, since anchor text is one of the measurements of the quality of inbound links, it isn't much different. Get quality anchor text and you will do well in both Bing and Google.
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Link Spamming Won't Do Much For You on Bing: Since the quantity of backinks (even if they are of supreme quality) seems to be of less importance to Bing, link spamming will be even less effective than with Google.
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Onpage Factors Matter More Than With Google: This is one of the most controversial points. Many SEO experts disagree but many also think that onpage factors matter more with Bing than with Google. Still, it has nothing to do with the 90s, when onpage factors were definitive.
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Bing Pays More Attention to the Authority of the Site: If this is true, this is bad news for bloggers and small sites because it means that search results are distorted in favor of older sites and/or sites of authoritative organizations. Age of domain is also very important with Bing – even more than with Google.
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PR Matters Less: When you perform a search for a competitive keyword and you see a couple of PR2 or even PR1 sites among the top 10 results, this might make you wonder. On Google this is hardly possible but on Bing it looks quite normal.
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Fresh Content Matters Less: Bing looks a bit conservative – or maybe it just can't index sites that quickly – but it seems that fresh content is not so vital as with Google. This is related to the age of domain specifics and as a result you will see ancient pages rank high (but these ancient pages are relevant to the search query).
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Bing is More Flash-Friendly: Optimizing a Flash site for Google is a bit of a SEO nightmare. It is too early to say but it looks like Bing is more Flash-friendly, which is good news to all sites where Flash is (still) heavily employed.
Optimization for Yahoo
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Search Submit Program: The fastest way to show up in Yahoo's search results is to pay Yahoo to join their Search Submit Program. Once you've submitted your site, Yahoo will send out a SLURP crawler to index the site and put it up for review by one of Yahoo's editors. If you're after Google, expect to see rankings on Yahoo before you see them on Google.
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Links and On-page Factors: Yahoo places more value on on-page factors than Google does. Google will usually aim to filter out pages too aligned with a targeted keyword in inbound anchor text, title, H1 and H2 headings, while Yahoo is more forgiving. Yahoo is also much easier on link quality than Google. While Google is top-heavy on power links, Yahoo will count many spammy links that Google would drop. Be careful though, since too many spammy links can hurt Google rankings.
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Cloaking Link: Cloaking links so that MSN and Yahoo see different links than Google. For example, if you had a site with thousands of pages, add a site wide link to one of your other sites. then do some simple cloaking so that Google didn't see the site wide link, but MSN & Yahoo did. This allows you to be really aggressive with link building for Yahoo & MSN and not raise any flags with Google.
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Link Relevancy: Yahoo also looks at links that go to a page vs links that go to a site when determining its relevancy. The down side of the technology is that they don't count link age and link domain as much as Google does, so it's easier to manipulate their results. Pages from a new site can do well as long as there are inbounds with targeted anchor text.
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Site Age: Yahoo places some weight on site and domain age, but not as much as Google does.
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Human Editors: Yahoo is known to review its index and adjust search results for some popular categories. When you use Search Submit, the site is reviewed by human editors by default. If a site is of good quality it can be given a boost in the search results, while low quality or spam sites can be easily dropped. It's not clear how the review process works in Yahoo. Yahoo may go in 100% manual and do section reviews without regard for algorithms.
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Content Quality Guideline: You can check Yahoo's Search Content Quality Guidelines to see what Yahoo considers spam. If a site gets flagged, you'll need to clean it up and then ask Yahoo to put it back in the search results.
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Crawls & Spam: Yahoo is pretty good at crawling the web. One of Yahoo's better features is Yahoo Site Explorer and Search Command, which help with competitive link analysis. It's not as good at detecting spam, so it crawls far more spam. Yahoo needs to focus more on search technology than on content-based products to decrease Google's lead in the search arena.
List of Best and Worst Practices for Designing a High Traffic Website
And finally, here is a checklist that I find to be very helpful. It outlines all of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, Bing, Yahoo! and the other search engines: http://www.webconfs.com/15-minute-seo.php
Information for this post was gathered from the following sites:
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/
http://www.seochat.com/
http://www.blackhatdigest.com/
http://www.webconfs.com/