| LED Digest 1506: Do File Names Affect Rankings? |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest ................................................. January 29, 2003 Issue #1506 ................................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ===== NEW ======================= -=File Names Affecting Rankings?=- ~ John Smart "...this proves that file names and paths do affect rankings." ==== CONTINUING ================= -=Darwin and the World Wide Web=- ~ Vicki Lambert "[Many businesses] just don't seem to be interested in the small business owner..." -=Search Engine Optimization (SEO)=- ~ Mike Jacobs "...most of the engines that tried to define what a 'good' page looks like... have fallen..." ~ Gonzo Ryder "I'd like to see a little more human intervention in reviewing the sites..." ===== GEEK TIPS ================== -=Multiple Browsers=- ~ Stephen Mareches ==== BILLBOARD =================== -=Understanding Internet Advertising Pricing=- ~ Peter Warnock ====== NEW ======================================= From: John Smart Subject: Site paths getting ranked I have read many comments (here and elsewhere) about what counts and what doesn't count for search engine optimization. I learned something interesting this week, that I thought I would share with you all. I bought my in-laws a domain name recently - it is going to be a fun place to put some family pictures - when I get around to it! The index page has next to nothing on it at the moment, and I have not told the search engines that it exists - as far as I can tell, no one had it before me (www.fasulos.com). My brother-in-law is in the dry-wall business, and his company does something called "limewash" - very popular from what I hear. He wanted me to put some pictures of his work online so he could show the pictures to a few others. The images have odd names (jf70.jpg for example), and there is no real text, but the folder they are in is called "limewash" (fasulos.com/limewash). So fare this month (these images went up in late November) Google has sent 4 people, Yahoo 2, and Lycos 1. The search word for all of these? "limewash". His ranking in Google? 24 of about 2,550. I have thought for a while that the search engines like my server - we seem to get listed quite well, without telling them we exist. Some sites obviously do better than others, but this one is unprecedented! I guess this proves that file names and paths do affect rankings. Does anyone else have any similar experiences? John Smart, Technical Director InternetDesign.com - A Human Touch in a Digital World (TM) ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Vicki Lambert Subject: Darwin > ... most business owners... are still in deep > denial about the capability of the web to drive > low-cost business. - Dirk Johnson, LED 1505 I do agree with some of what you have said but I think I can also put a quite different personal slant on it. As a business owner, I am very web savvy on the user end. I was one of the first 200 people on the IRS's new website when they went from BB to Web so many years ago. I spend 6 to 8 hours a day researching government regulations both federal and state on the web. I teach online classes for a local university. I even shop online and use chat rooms. But I did not know the first thing about building a website. Using yes, but no idea how to make my own. So I did what most business owners would do. I went looking for a company to build my site. Yes, I had examples of sites I liked. Yes, I had a plan on what I wanted the site to do. Yes, I had publications and products and information and newsletters. But could I get it built? NO! I tried local webbuilders. I tried contacting friends, other businesses, web sites that touted they could build my site. But no one was interested in such a small site. Or they would get back to me and never did. This was very frustrating. So much in fact that I (to my now dismay and disbelief) put off building my site until last year when I got my new computer and just used the Microsoft Publisher that came with the computer. Of course now I have bcentral but I am now savvy enough to build and maintain my own site. Did I lose out on business, sure I did. Did I have to take time away from doing my business to learn? Yes. But was it because I was dragging my feet or changing my mind or had too high or low of expectations or drove my webmaster crazy with changes etc? NO. It was because though there are lots of people who claim to have web building businesses, they just don t seem to be interested in handling the small business owner Vicki M. Lambert, CPP Lambert and Associates http://www.vickimlambert.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Mike Jacobs Subject: SEO > The search engines want people to design > and write for end users, not purely for the > search engines. - Shari Thurow, LED 1501 And the search engines don't always get what they want. With the volumes they deal with, they have to use proxies. As much as they claim "pages should have x or y", they can only build algorithms that *attempt* to judge on these characteristics. They have never been even close to being as accurate as an intelligent human with a few seconds to look at a page. Notice how most of the engines that tried to define what a "good" or "ideal" page looks like, and rank accordingly, have fallen by the wayside. Google and the directories have pretty much taken over the space (Inktomi is dying a slow death). What's left is Google, and what's on the page isn't nearly as important as what points at the page. So, in the end, pages that are "user-friendly" and little else don't win in the engines. Of course, what you present to the user can be as important, if not more important. But with search engines being the primary traffic driver out there, failing to do proper SEO may not leave a whole lot of users to real the "ideal" content you gave them. Your site's goal should be sales or conversions or profit - actual business metrics - not traffic and not "friendly" pages. Price x Quantity is an equation many designers should have learned years ago, but never did. Leave out a factor at your own peril. Mike Jacobs WebMogul - Online Marketing that Works www.webmogul.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Gonzo Ryder Subject: SEO Pay Per Click rankings are cool... if you have deep pockets. But what about the small companies that offer superior products / services? I'm in the aftermarket motorcycle industry and the PPC's are starting to hurt a lot of businesses. I'd like to see a little more human intervention in reviewing the sites, provide reviewers that have a clue as to the information on the site. That way the little guy with a good product will be able to compete with the deep pocket company with the same product and the el cheapo crap businesses will fall to the sidelines... just like in the real world. Gonzo Ryder ===== GEEK TIPS =================================== From: Stephen Mareches Subject: Multiple browsers > I've got 3 browsers running on my machine... But > I've never managed to get the AOL browser to run > alongside these, on my Win98 SE machine, without > everything crashing or hanging. - Philip Chave, LED 1505 During our first venture in East Atlanta we had set up a small shop with six machines networked together and a T3 line from our Internet provider. Things were going along merrily after our initial set up and one afternoon one of our partners installed AOL on one of the machines because he liked to use it to retrieve his email. Were we in for a surprise! The AOL software binds to TCP/IP protocols wreaking havoc when it is removed. One machine had to be taken completely out of the mix, we never could get it to work properly after uninstalling AOL. It's a pity that one of the largest Internet providers feels the need to safeguard future business by trying to make theirs the only software a machine can run successfully after installation. For this reason alone I'd say check it out on the machines of clients who've opted for AOL, and while building your sites do pay close attention to how your works fair in the Netscape 4.7 browser. Generally speaking if you're doing well in IE 5.5 and Netscape 4.7 you should be fairly certain of browser compatibility issues not making your work look foolish. Stephen Mareches, Web Consultant Sophia Solutions www.sophiasolutions.net ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Peter Warnock Subject: CPM 101 > I'm a novice in Web-based marketing. Can somebody > explain the pricing model for Banner Ads... What does > CPM mean? - Partha Chatterjee, LED 1503 Adding to Ivan's very good summary of advertising tools (issue 1505), I wanted to mention the power of affiliate marketing (aka Pay-For-Performance). If selling a good or service, affiliates drive traffic to your site and are only compensated for actual sales. Commission Junction ( www.cj.com ) is a service I use to obtain links to products I want to offer and make commissions on. Membership is free and there is a wealth of information at this site. I obtained the following definition from their glossary for "CPM": "(Cost Per 1,000 Impressions [M is the roman numeral for 1,000]) A metric for online advertising where a rate is set for every thousand impressions." While cj.com is an excellent source for obtaining affiliates for your product, it is expensive to setup; it's reserved for bigger sites. I'm setting up a shopping cart from virtualhosting.com that has affiliate taacking software built in. Peter Warnock, technology webstructor webstruction.com ------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1995-2003 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Beware of the young doctor and the old barber." - Benjamin Franklin |
