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High Rankings Advisor: Site Won't Stay Put in Rankings - Issue No. 072September 24, 2003 ________________________________________________________ ~~~IN TODAY'S ADVISOR~~~ *Search Engine Marketing: ----> Site Won't Stay Put in Rankings *This Week's Sponsors: ----> High Rankings Seminar with Jill and the Gang ----> Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines *Guest Article: ----> Digging Deeper into Search-Friendly Design - Part I *Other SEO News: ----> Shopping Engines Rev Up for the Holidays *Stuff You Might Like: ----> Recap of Past Stuff *This Week's Sound Advice: ----> Professional SEO *Advisor Wrap-up: ----> A New Office for Me -- Eventually! ________________________________________________________ ~~~Introductory Comments~~~ Hey everyone! Today I have some information about rankings, plus Part 1 of an interview with "Search Engine Visibility" author Shari Thurow. Let's get right to the good stuff! - Jill ~~~Search Engine Marketing Issues~~~ ++Site Won't Stay Put in Rankings++ Hi Jill, I'm an avid reader of your newsletter and have gained much from your advice, for which I thank you very much. My question is one that I have not seen addressed, unless I somehow missed it. I tried to apply your suggestions to my web pages and decided to check the results on several major search engines back in June. I was pleased with some rankings and not so much with others, but then got sidetracked on one of our other websites. As a result, I did not make any changes to improve the original website. But I still kept checking the rankings once a month and the numbers have me confused. Why do the numbers on some search engines fluctuate so wildly from month to month? I've seen my site go from number 83, to 96, to 67, to 226 in Google, from June to September. I can understand why my rankings would go down in a given month because I have made no changes to my site while others may have made strides to improve their sites. If I remember correctly, you have also stated that leaving your pages static over too long a period of time will lower your rankings. What is confusing to me is the constant up-and-down movement of my rankings. Why is there such fluctuation and can anything be done to try and control it? Thanks for your help. Ross Haynes, WebMaster Textile Industries, Inc. ~~~Jill's Response~~~ Hi Ross, I'm glad you've gotten a lot out of my newsletters. That's what makes it all worthwhile. (As a side note, I'm starting to get mad at myself for giving out all my secrets every week. I'm really beginning to notice a difference in the search results these days, with more and more pages being optimized. This is a generally a *good* thing for the Internet as a whole, but not when the optimized sites are competitors of my clients! <grin>) As to the topic at hand, I'm really glad you asked this question. I still send ranking reports to my current clients once a month, and very often they ask me the same thing. Since I've been in this biz for so long, I forget that most people don't realize that ranking fluctuations are totally the norm. Sure, there are times in some engines when your site may sit at a given position for a search phrase for many months. But it's more "normal" to see positions change at any given time. The Internet is very much a dynamic medium. That's what makes it great. Sites come and go. New pages are being added to the search engine databases at astonishing rates. Google claims to have 3,307,998,701 pages in its index today. I remember a couple of years ago when it was 2 billion instead of 3 billion. That's a billion more pages that can come in and push your rankings up or down at any given time. Rankings are not static, nor have they ever been. In fact, when you see your rankings *not* changing position in any particular engine, it's often because that engine hasn't been updating its database. That's a bad thing. The engines that update frequently will always be in a state of constant change, as will your rankings. Regarding your comment about your rankings going down because you didn't work on your site, that's a fallacy. If your site is optimized to be the best it can be, there's no reason to work on it any more, as far as optimization goes. (You may want to work on it for other reasons, of course!) Sure, if you're not in the top 2 pages of results, then you may not have it optimized as well as it could be and you may want to tweak things. But once you hit the top 10 or 20, leave things alone for a while and see what happens. Don't be scared if you go from 3 to 8, or even to 17. Very often, even if you drop from 1 to 17 at some point, you may very well find that you're back to 1 soon enough. Since the search engines should never be your sole form of marketing, these fluctuations should not make or break your business. The thing with SEO is that there is no way to choose your position. Nobody can buy a particular position in the engines, unless they're using pay-per-click ads that show up in the sponsored results. This is what drives many people crazy with SEO. They want to understand exactly why their page is at a certain spot in the results, but since it's fluid, there's no way to be exactly sure. All we can do is understand and implement the fundamental things that will give our pages the best chance of showing up high in the rankings for our targeted keyword phrases. The rest is up to the search engines. They have to agree that our page is indeed the most relevant, and they have to then rank it accordingly. Sometimes it happens just as we'd like it to, sometimes it doesn't. Just be sure to use all your knowledge and do the best you can. Never think that you have to redo your site just because it doesn't stick in any one position in the search engines. That is the roller coaster that we call SEO. Jill -----------High Rankings Seminar with Jill and the Gang----------- Learn Search Engine Marketing from the Ground Up __________________________________________________ Looking for a complete overview of search engine optimization? Join Jill and her merry band of search engine marketing experts in sunny Tampa, Florida on Nov. 7 for a full day of learning and fun! Learn SEO copywriting, Titles and Meta tags, search engine no-nos, choosing keywords, link pop., PPC, measuring success and more! Save $50 -- Register early! </72seminar> Still time to submit your site for review by our experts. __________________________________________________ ~~~Guest Article~~~ ++Digging Deeper into Search-Friendly Design - Part I++ Scottie Claiborne caught up with Web designer and search engine optimization guru Shari Thurow after her Search Engine Strategies session on search-friendly design. Shari and Scottie discussed her "5 Basic Rules of Web Design" in the interview below. Today we will cover the first 2 guidelines, and next week we will cover the other 3. Digging Deeper into Search-Friendly Design - Part I Interview with Shari Thurow By Scottie Claiborne Here are Shari's 5 Basic Rules of Web Design: 1. Your Web site should be easy to read 2. Your Web site should be easy to navigate 3. Your Web site should be easy to find 4. Your Web page layout and design should be consistent throughout the site 5. Your Web site should be quick to download. [Scottie]: Shari, why did you come up with these guidelines? [Shari]: One of the funniest things about my 5 Basic Rules of Web Design is that people think that they are so obvious, that it's quite silly of me to point them out. However, if these 5 rules are so obvious, then why aren't designers and search engine marketers following them? The majority of sites I encounter do NOT follow these rules. And when we get a new client that requests a site analysis or usability testing, the first things we analyze are the 5 rules, especially legibility. [Scottie]: #1 is "easy to read." How do I know if my pages are legible? It seems like a very subjective thing. Do you have any techniques or suggestions for measuring this? [Shari]: Actually, knowing whether or not copy is easy to read is part objective and part subjective, part art and part science. We can figure out the subjective part through focus groups, usability testing and Web analytics tools. We use science to determine which color palettes to use. For example, for optimal legibility usability experts recommend a color contrast of 90% or more, especially for sites that target an older age demographic. We also know that yellow is the first color the eye registers. So we know to use yellow as a highlight color, (a) because it is the first color the eye sees, and (b) because of the color contrast against navy blue, dark gray, and black. A great site for color information is Lighthouse International: <http://www.lighthouse.org>. Since Verdana is a font specifically created for a computer screen, we use that one a lot. For the font tag (<font size="2">), Verdana at a pixel size of 12 to 13 is a good match. For breadcrumb trails and text links at the bottom of the page, a smaller pixel size of 9 to 11 is good. Another legibility issue involves XHTML strict and CSS (cascading style sheets) compliance. We have designed and viewed many sites that adhere to these standards; however, when we view these sites on multiple browsers and platforms, all too often we (and usability testers) cannot read the page. This is because the CSS layers overlap each other so badly that words often appear on top of each other. All design firms should view a site on all of the major browsers and platforms. Personally, I have 3 computers in my office: two PCs and one Mac. For one of my PCs (which we purchased from a major brand), I took it out of the box and did not reset the default settings. The other PC is a notebook computer because that's what a lot of business people use instead of a desktop computer. And Macs are not that expensive. When our Web analytics tools show that over 20,000 visitors a month are using Macs, we will not ignore those people in the site design. Legibility is so important. If people click on a link from a search engine to your site and they cannot read your content, they will leave your site with a very poor impression. That poor impression will not help with a link development campaign, either. So don't assume your site is legible because of personal experience; always test and analyze. [Scottie]: #2 is "easy to navigate." Beyond the basics of making sure that the navigation is easy for crawlers to follow, what makes a site easy to navigate? [Shari]: We always recommend having at least two forms of navigation: one that is designed and written specifically for site visitors and one that the search engine spiders can follow. Nine times out of ten, that means having a text-link navigation scheme somewhere on the site. Usually, text-link navigation is the most search-friendly of all navigation schemes. It's not foolproof, though. To determine whether a site is easy to navigate, we ask usability testers the following 6 questions: 1. Where are you? 2. Are you in the right place? 3. Where do you want to go? 4. Where have you been? 5. How do you return to pages you have previously visited? 6. What do you want to do? If site visitors cannot easily answer these questions, then we know the site design is not as intuitive as we would like it to be, and the sales conversions will be low. A descriptive Title tag and headline will let users know what page they are visiting and will help with search engine visibility. A logo on a page helps with branding and lets visitors know the name of the company Web site they are viewing. Breadcrumb, or contextual, links let people know where they are and give visual cues for visited and unvisited pages. Plus, they help with search engine visibility as well. When we usability-test, we constantly ask our testers: Where are you? Whose Web site is this? Are you in a section of XYZ's Web site? If so , what section are you in? How do you know you are in this section? What is XYZ trying to sell? What do you want to do next? The easier it is for visitors to form a mental model of your site, the more likely the site will have good sales conversions and link popularity. [Scottie]: Thanks Shari! We'll talk about the other 3 guidelines in Part II of this article next week. ----------------------------------------- Scottie Claiborne Right Click Web Services http://www.rightclickwebs.com [Thanks Shari and Scottie! For those of you who want to learn more about search-engine-friendly designs, be sure to grab a copy of Shari's book, Search Engine Visibility </searchenginevisibility>, when you get a chance. - Jill] _____________Nitty-gritty Special Report_________________ Want to learn how to write for high rankings in the search engines? __________________________________________________ If you don't have the time or money to see Jill's Writing for the Search Engines presentation at conferences or seminars, for only $49 you can learn it all in her informative, quick-read report. Download the Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines today! </nittyhra72> __________________________________________________ ~~~Other SEO News~~~ ++Shopping Engines Rev Up for the Holidays++ Lots of stuff happening in the world of shopping engines this week. DealTime, which recently bought Epinions, has now become Shopping.com <http://www.shopping.com> and introduced a number of new features. At the same time, Yahoo Shopping <http://shopping.yahoo.com> has also come out with many new features. I haven't checked out (get it...checked out!) either of them yet, but I like Shopping.com better because they had cool stuff in their press kit, and Yahoo just had papers full of boring information. <grin> Both sites have a paid-inclusion program, which may be worth looking into if you have an ecommerce site. Plus both sites appear to be a great way for the consumer to do some comparison shopping online. ~~~Stuff You Might Like~~~ ++Recap of Past Stuff++ <http://www.stuffyoumightlike.com> ~~~Sound Advice~~~ ++Professional SEO++ </soundadvice> ~~~Advisor Wrap-up~~~ This week I'm working to the sounds of hammers and saws as the builders are turning my old screened porch into a full-fledged office for me! They ripped down the old stuff really quickly, but putting things all back together seems to take longer. Should be really cool when it's done. I currently work in my dining room. I do have a desk, but other than that, everything ends up making a mess on the dining room table. We don't actually use it that much (if ever), but it looks pretty messy. Okay, who am I kidding...even when the office is complete and I'm all moved in, I'm quite sure that dining room table will still manage to get covered up with junk. It seems to attract it somehow. I guess it feels lonely when there's nothing on it. Yeah, that must be it. Catch you next week! Jill  del.icio.us
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