3 Steps to a Search Engine Compatible Site

Is your web site search engine compatible? Despite all the misinformation out there, it's very easy to design a web site that search engines will love. All you need to do is follow 3 simple steps:

1) Obey the Search Engine Guidelines

Nearly all search engines publish their own guidelines regarding the submission of sites, the type of sites they will accept and recommendations for optimized content. Google recently updated their Webmaster Guidelines which cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative search engine behavior that they consider to be 'spam'. They also published SEO Guidelines – advice for webmasters to heed when choosing an SEO. Google was the first search engine to publicly acknowledge search engine optimizers in this fashion.

It's not just Google publishing anti-spam guidelines. You'll find them at the following search engine sites as well:

Yahoo terms of service
Yahoo guidelines on search engine spam (covering AltaVista and AllTheWeb as well)
Yahoo definitions of search engine spam (covering AltaVista and AllTheWeb as well)
Yahoo content guidelines
MSN Search webmaster guidelines
AltaVista terms of use (AltaVista is a Yahoo-owned company)
Ask.com terms of service and spam policy
Ask.com editorial guidelines

2) Don’t Use Spammy Search Engine Tactics

Often, webmasters will use search engine spam techniques without even being aware that they are doing so. Or worse, web designers can - advertently or inadvertently - integrate techniques that could cause a site to be penalized in the site's rankings in one or more engines, without the site owner's knowledge of such penalties. The key to avoiding spamming the engines is research.Keep track of the various search engine guidelines via the links above. Watch for any changes they make to these guidelines and tweak your site accordingly. Trawl the various webmaster and search engine forums regularly to ensure your site doesn't use any of the latest optimization methods that appear to be penalized. If you suspect your site has been penalized, remove the offending content, contact the engine concerned and ask to be reinstated.

Google actually encourage you to file a re-inclusion request via their Help Center and this post by Google staffer Matt Cutts outlines what should be included.Alternatively, here is a sample email template you can use instead:

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Sample Re-inclusion Request Email

Dear [search engine name],

I am the owner of [your site URL].

I did not realize that participation in [spammy method] and

[spammy SEO name] programs could cause problems for my website. I was

assured that these techniques were search-engine-friendly by [your source for using spammy method].

I now understand that the practices used are not acceptable. I apologize for having allowed them to be placed on my website. I've removed the questionable pages and links from the site. I promise not to repeat such mistakes.

I am asking you to please consider reinstating my website,

[your site URL] into the [search engine name] Index.

Sincerely,[Your Name]

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To assist them to provide a high quality service, search engines encourage people to report search results they are dissatisfied with. If you spot some content spam or techniques that are clearly in breach of the search engine's public guidelines, you can report it using these links:

Google spam report or via search-quality@google.com
AllTheWeb relevancy problem report (AllTheWeb is a Yahoo-owned company)
AltaVista search results manipulation report (or via Yahoo's spam report)
Yahoo spam report
Ask.com spam report or via information@ask.com

3) Build Sites for Visitors Rather than Search Engines

The methodologies may have changed over the years, but the same principles have always applied to "good" or "white hat" SEO. Build sites for humans, not search engines. Make the site as user friendly as possible, avoid the bells and whistles and include high quality, relevant content.

Wherever possible, include text-based content and navigation menus with simple, descriptive, well-written copy designed to convert your visitors into customers. Include keywords and phrases your audience would logically type in to search engines to find sites like yours. Only link to sites that are relevant to your target audience and spend some time on usability, making sure all your forms and shopping carts work.

Remember that what pleases a visitor is almost always what pleases a search engine too.

Evaluating your Web Site Performance

Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals.


If you don't know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven't been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.

However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website.

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100 (25 ?00 X 100).

If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate.

This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier.

You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you.

In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for.

For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it's too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.

Your Alexa Rating - Is It Really That Important?

Alexa is a company owned by the Amazon group and it aims to rank every single website on the Internet in terms of how much traffic it is receiving.

Quite simply, the lower your Alexa ranking, the more traffic your website gets. The ideal scenario would be to have an Alexa ranking of '1'. This would mean, in theory, that your website receives more traffic than any other website in the world. Currently this position is held by Yahoo.com and as you would expect, other top sites include Microsoft, Google and eBay.

It is generally considered that a website with an Alexa rating of 100,000 or less is receiving a reasonable level of traffic but Alexa can be wildly misleading and very easily manipulated.

To understand why the rankings are misleading, you need to understand how Alexa gathers the data that it uses to create the rankings in the first place. This is really very simple - Alexa has a free toolbar that you can download and install within your Internet browser and this reports back to Alexa with the details of every single website that you visit.

Alexa can then use this information to see how many users are visiting a particular website. Then, because not every Internet user has the Alexa toolbar installed, Alexa will multiply the number of visitors by a specific margin to estimate the total number of visitors that a site may typically receive. The important word in the last sentence is 'estimate'.

Let's assume that the above multiplication margin is ten - that means that for each Alexa toolbar user that visits a specific web page, Alexa assumes that another nine non-toolbar users will also visit the same page. This means that if 100 toolbar users visit a specific web page on a given day, Alexa will take this as meaning that a total of 1000 people visited the same page in that 24 hour period.

This is where the figures can get distorted. If you have a website that attracts a higher than average number of Alexa toolbar users, then you are going to gain a lower Alexa rating because Alexa doesn't make any allowance for the fact that their toolbar users visit certain types of site more often. A typical example of this is Internet marketing sites. Most Internet entrepreneurs will have the Alexa toolbar installed because they like to see the Alexa rankings for sites as they visit them (the toolbar shows you this information as soon as you visit a site). But this means that if your website attracts a lot of Internet marketing-type visitors, then your Alexa rating will be inflated above what it should be.

Here is a true-life example:

There was a popular Internet marketing site for sale last year and it had an Alexa rating of about 19,000. I figured it must be getting heavy traffic but when I discussed the matter with the owner/seller, I found that it was only receiving 6000 unique visitors a month! The reason that the Alexa rating was so low was because the majority of these visitors had the Alexa toolbar installed and therefore the calculations were being thrown out massively.

It is also possible to purchase software that will generate false hits to your site using the Alexa technology so that Alexa is fooled into believing that more people are visiting your site. This pushes your Alexa ranking down.

At the end of the day though, what is the point of having a low Alexa rating if you are not making any sales? Sure it is nice to be able to say that your site is in the top 20,000 websites in the world but if the site isn't earning you an income, this ranking means very little (assuming that it was your intention for the site to earn you an income of course). Personally, I would much rather have a high Alexa ranking but a good income than a low ranking and minimal income.

Of course, there are benefits to the Alexa service and it can be worthwhile installing their toolbar. The toolbar will give you an indication of how busy a particular site is and in turn, how popular it is. This can be helpful when making a decision as to whether to make an online purchase for example. It is also handy for checking out your competitors :-)

Just don't get too hung up on Alexa as a measure of how well your business is doing. The real statistics that you should be watching are actual traffic numbers, conversion rates (ie. how many visitors actually buy something) and overall sales. These are the figures that will help you put cash in the bank and improve and grow your business.