| LED Digest 1872: SEO Tunnel Vision |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ............................................... September 22, 2004 Issue #1872 ............................................... .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== The Future of SEO ==-- ~ Martha Retallick "For lack of a better name, let's call it Marketing Tool Fixation." ~ Steve Pronger "A page within a site will inherit PR from the parent page." ~ Michael Martinez "Stop relying on search engines alone to bring you traffic." --== Alternative Browsers & Design ==-- ~ Viggie Bala "CSS, XHTML and using table-less design...are the things the web designers cannot avoid." ~ Deke Hammel "...I set up a little CGI program...Plug in the numbers... and then decide how many users you want!" ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Site Optimization Companies? ==-- ~ Rebecca Neilson --== The Web Hosting Thread ==-- ~ Peta Scarbrough ~ Tom Aman ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Martha Retallick Subject: Future of SEO > Perhaps PageRank and incoming / outgoing links are > not the holy grail. Maybe writing search engine friendly > pages really works. Maybe SEO is not dead. - John Barendrecht, LED 1870 The trouble with ranking high on the search engines points out an even bigger problem. For lack of a better name, let's call it Marketing Tool Fixation. This tends to happen when one puts all, or many, of his / her eggs in that one proverbial basket. Folks, there is more to ranking high on the search engines. And couldn't the enormous time and energy spent on that task be put to better use, such as embarking on an offline advertising campaign for your site? Or why not try some direct mail? Or maybe try incorporating your Web URL into your company uniforms, or putting it on your company car. The list goes on! Martha Retallick "The Passionate Postcarder" http://www.postcardmarketingsecrets.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Steve Pronger Subject: Future of SEO > But if 1000 people who don't agree on techniques but > do agree on tools suggest to the newcomer to use the > same broken tool, they're going to use it. - Jack Baillie, LED 1871 The Google backward links tool displays links that Google considers important i.e. links from pages with a relatively high PR. Call it "broken" if you will, but if Google considers those links important then you should too. You can have hundreds of links on PR0 pages but they will not show up on backward links and contribute little to your SEO efforts. Links from relevant, high PR pages with keyword optimized link text are well rewarded. If a broken tool helps you achieve that, so be it. > This page has PR of 5 but 0 incoming links, > and no links outside my site. - John Barendrecht, LED 1840 > This is not possible. If there are no incoming > links to your site, your site has no PR. - Jack Baillie, LED 1871 It's important here to differentiate between sites and pages. A page within a site will inherit PR from the parent page. It does not need any incoming links of its own. Steve Pronger http://www.stevepronger.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Searching for the Holy Grail > If there are no incoming links to your site, > your site has no PR. - Jack Baillie, LED 1871 That is not correct. PR is NOT based solely on inbound links. When people stop worrying about inbound links and PR (which many of you continue to confuse with a measurement of link popularity despite years of being told not to by Google and others), they will simplify their SEO efforts. It is easy enough to get into Google. You get one or two links from sites that are already listed in Google (they do NOT have to be important sites, but important sites will be crawled more frequently). After Google crawls your site, you can improve your site's rankings by adding content, updating content, increasing the size of your site, and keeping your site well linked internally. You can speed up the process by submitting your site for crawling and by asking for more links from other sites, but those links are NOT going to help you the way you think they should. If you don't provide fresh content, then you are trying to push a heavy rock up a steep hill. Google wants FRESH CONTENT, FRESH CONTENT, FRESH CONTENT. Fresh content is more important for a highly competitive search phrase (more than 200,000 results) than for a hardly competitive search phrase (less than 100,000 results) because the fewer pages which contain the search phrase, the less likely there will be fresh content anyway. Update your main index pages with new announcements. Add new product pages to your catalogues. Get rid of the hype-laden sales spiels and just focus on telling people about your products and services. Add more content to your sites. And broaden your resources. Stop relying on search engines alone to bring you traffic. Make sure you are effectively broadcasting your URLs through all possible media: include them in all advertising, on all literature and stationary, in your banner ads (if you run banner ads), etc. Building a Web site is only a part of your business. Building links to your Web site is only a part of the most efficient SEO strategies. SEO is only part of the most efficient Web site promotion strategies. Stop worrying about links and PR. Focus on creating great content. Michael Martinez ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Viggie Bala Subject: Alternative browsers Looks like the browser wars will be one of the repeat topic till either IE regains it's supremacy or lose out to someone else (Firefox! Who else?) convincingly. Since IE visitors were still above 90% we definitely cannot ignore them. The thing is, some 4 years back, if we design a site in an editor, it will work perfectly in IE and then we make it work in Netscape. Now, when a site is designed using current requirements, the site design works correctly in other browsers, but more often than not, we need to add workarounds to work in IE. If you are a site owner, you can afford to design only for IE. For designers who design other's sites for a living, we cannot say we don't care for non-IE browsers. The professional designers have three issues to consider. 1. We cannot afford to miss CSS, not to mention the hours you save by modifying a single code to accommodate modifications preferred by the client. 2. Standards compliance helps avoid errors that consume browser rendering time. Designing for XHTML will also force a designer to close the tags correctly. 3. And table-less design can reduce the HTML code by 25% - 40% while retaining the same design previously made with tables (BTW, I take it that people are aware that nesting more than 3 tables and merging cells in a table delays the browser while rendering the page). So CSS, XHTML and using table-less design wherever possible are the things the web designers cannot avoid. Also, clients sometimes gather specifications from other sources and demand that a site be made using CSS2, XHTML etc. Making it working in all browsers is not impossible, but we find that only IE makes it difficult. Since the designers generally stay connected to the net all day, we cannot afford to run IE all day and risk stealth attacks through security holes. So with either Mozilla or Opera as the default browser, the IE incompatibility looks more irksome. Finally, there was another thread in LED about drop down menu problems in Mac. We don't have to use javascript for drop down menus. We can use CSS which will also help search engine robots. CSS drop down menus are not in practice only because IE still does not support it. Almost all other browsers render it correctly. Viggie Bala Helping websites to work http://www.viggie.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Deke Hammel Subject: Alternative browsers > Or, (much less facetiously) would the big powerful sites > do better if they were designed more simply? - Jim Gatton, LED 1870 You might want to note that Google works well in any browser. The problem with incompatible sites is that you not only lose the current visitor, but you also lose any referrals he might give you. It's like compound interest - it's hard to convince someone without them seeing the numbers - so I set up a little CGI program that will allow you to do just that. http://amishhosting.com/cgi-bin/compat.cgi Plug in the numbers you think appropriate - and then decide how many users you want! Deke Hammel AmishHosting.Com http://amishhosting.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Rebecca Neilson Subject: Optimizing your Web Page Ranking? Have any of you tired Internet Advancement or similar companies that are supposed to optimize your web page ranking? This company is supposed to submit my site twice a month to the top 15 search engines, put key word metta tags on my web site and do XX number of directory info pages and guarantee my page ranks in the top 10 or top 20 on search engines for XX dollars to set up and XX dollars a month to maintain. Are these companies worth spending money on? I currently do my old submissions on a somewhat irregular basis I admit. I use my website as a tool to refer customers to that can't come by my shop for business and instead of a hard copy catalog that I have to mail out. My website is used to compliment my brick and motor store. I currently get 600-1000 hits a day on the site. Rebecca Neilson H.L. Supply Co. www.hansons.net hansons, succeed.net ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Peta Scarbrough Subject: Hosting > What I'd like to find is a host that offers reliable up-time, > plenty of disk space, shopping cart with secure processing, > tracking, e-mail accounts with autoresponders... And, does > anyone know of hosts I should avoid at all costs? - Tom Anson, LED 1871 The hosting company that we recommend for our clients is WestHost http://www.westhost.com/ They offer a lot including a shopping cart, reliability and all for a great price. Good luck! Peta Scarbrough Hot Pepper Media www.hotpeppermedia.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Tom Aman Subject: Hosting Would help if you defined "affordable price", but check out http://www.valueweb.com/. They provide both shared hosting and dedicated servers in a wide range of prices. Their "Commerce" hosting package is $49.95 a month, includes 1000MB of disk space, email with autoresponders, shopping cart, plus a lot of other goodies. Tom Aman http://www.cyberspyder.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live." - Flora Whittemore |
