Google’s Sandbox

One of the algorithms Google uses  for ranking Web pages is the SandBox algorithm. Pages that haven’t been updated for a long time will gradually lose their positions in the rankings even if they initially had high positions. Google adds thousands of new web pages to its index. The freshness of the page data by date & content influences where that page ranks. Notice it is the page of the web site it judges not the whole web site.  Google assumes that newer pages have more updated information than older ones. This process will gradually “dissolve” your site ranking against your competition, while your old pages get “crowded out” by the new additions from the top results.

Retaining high positions requires adding content on a frequent basis. Or adjusting the content of the page. Important because a few words changed on a page could show it up as changed and keep your spot.

Upkeep and update your site frequenly or you can lose your spot. Getting to the first page of a Google search is very important but maintaining it there takes time and effort. It’s free online advertisement and losing your position can be costly.

The longer your site stays static the more likely your site will get put into Google’s Sandbox don’t let this happen.

Cobwebs may be growing on your web site if you haven’t maintained it. Things keep changing in the search engines on a weekly basis. Leaving your web site on automatic without an occasional maintaintence run can leave you out of the loop. Have a professional look into it. Take the pulse of your web site.

It can happen to even the best designed web site. Web sites need new content too! Cobwebs mean your web site is old and out of date.

Development without SEO

Just got through working on a site developed with lots of nice graphics. The design of the site showed that the developer had no concept on the search engine function. The owner has no concept that the web site was that bad. All he knew was the site didn’t seem to help his business in any way. The problems with SEO are hidden and without the proper tools and training your site could also have this problem.  The sites functions worked fine (almost) but without the SEO the only way to find the site was to use the name of the store. The site should be found by searching for items within the site. Beware your site could have these perils and you would never know it. Also see Google’s Sandbox for other problms

Perils :

1.  The only page that the search engine showed was the index page. The links to the rest of the pages were buried in JavaScript. The Index.html was the source of this peril. While the site worked from a user perspective the rest of the site was invisable to the search engine.
2. No Robots.txt file or Robots meta word in the HTML. Result the page could not be tracked by the search engine even after the first problem was fixed.
3. All page titles were set up using the name of the site not the function of the site. No focus for the search engine.
4. The same meta keywords were set up for every page. Might not be a big deal but every bit helps.
5. The site also has a 42Meg audio playing upon loading every page of the web site. Removed that. Even if the other problems were gone this was an unneccessary load for the site.

Final step will be to put in a site map function. Results of the changes caused the site to go from unlisted to page 1 for the selected key words.

Also see: SEO Tidbits

It’s going to be very interesting to see what traffic the site gets now. It has been rescued from it’s perils.

Pictures and videos don’t exist without descriptions. The search engines don’t get much information out of the name of the picture. After all one Dunbar122210.jpg looks just like another Dunbar122211.jpg picture.  Now expand that concept to a page with 10 pictures without any ALT text. The search engines know that the pictures exist but have no idea about the content. Not putting ALT text descriptors into the pictures wastes a chance to help your page get the right kind of attention from the search engines.   Adding ALT text to the two Dunbar pictures with “Ice Cream Cones” and “Chocolate Ice Cream” tells the search engines attention these pcitures are part of your “Ice Cream” subject. It will help your SEO value for the page.

Just a little trick to help your Pictures and Videos get more attention.

Search Engine basics

Crawler-based SEs, also referred to as spiders or Web crawlers, use special software to automatically and regularly visit websites to create and supplement their giant Web page repositories.

This software is referred to as a “bot”, “robot”, “crawler”, or “spider”. All these terms denote the same concept. Adding your site manually to the search engines listing is not enough there is code that needs to be installed on your site to enable the “spider” to properly scan your site. Settings can be made to disable the search engine from going into your site.  Make an error on those settings and the search engine and world will never find your site.

After a spider has found a page to scan, it retrieves this page via HTTP (like any ordinary Web surfer who types an URL into a browser’s address field and presses “enter”). Just like any human visitor, the crawling software leaves a record on your server about its visit. You can find out how often the search engine has been to your site. If the search engine quits for a bit no problem but if it drops out for a  month you may need to perform some maintenance actions.

Your Web server returns the HTML source code of your page to the spider. The spider then reads it (this process is referred to as “crawling” or “spidering“) and this is where the difference begins between a human visitor and crawling software. The human reads the screen and goes on while the “spiders” extract the data for immediate use.

Spiders concentrate on the content of the Meta tags and the text in the web page. Where a user would be impressed by a fancy flash display the spider can’t see it. The result can be that even though you have the most mind blowing animation on your web site the spiders won’t give you any credit for the content. The spider gives value based on the position of the text on the screen. Repeating the same keyword on the top and bottom of the screen (called prominance I’ll cover that later this week)  lets the spider know it’s important.

Images draw the user into the content of the page but the spider has no idea what the content of the image is. Unless your web site designer has a handle on SEO principles your fancy graphics won’t help your site at all. There is a ALT description setting within image that 99% of the users will never see but the spider reads it for keywords. The spider sees things the users will never look for and uses that information to draw users to your site.

SEO (search engine optimization)  makes your page more search-engine friendly. The optimization is mostly oriented towards crawler-based engines, which are the most-popular on the Internet. The search engine basics presented here represent the tip of the iceberg in terms of knowing how to format a page to get the best results. 

Spiders work by copying your site into a large repository of  Web pages called a search engine index. The data stored in the search engine index in a the way that makes it possible to quickly determine whether this page is relevant to a particular query and to pull it out for inclusion in the result page shown in response to the query. The process of placing your page in the index is referred to as “indexing“. After your page has been indexed, it will appear on search engine results pages for the words and phrases most common on the indexed Web page. Its position in the list, however, may vary. Achieving a top of first page output by the search engine for your web page is the goal of every SEO. Sometimes all it takes are little changes to tweak the concentration of the page data so the search engine ranks the right words  the way you want it to.

Later, when someone searches the engine for particular terms, your page will be pulled out of the index and included in the search results. The search engine now applies a sophisticated technique to determine how relevant your page is to these terms. It considers many on-page and off-page factors and the page is given a certain position, or rank, within other results found for the surfer’s query. This process is called “ranking“.

While search engine basics just scratches the surface a little knowledge can help your standings immensly.