Did your website get its ranking penalized by
the Google "Florida" Update (11-15-2003)
Webmasters and online business owners in outraged!! In the middle
of last month (about 11-15-2003), search engine Google.com shook
up thousands of webmasters and small businesses right before the
christmas shopping season, with a major change to their website
ranking algorithm. Named Florida, it appears
this update has enforced an aggressive spam filter to block sites
that appeared to be tricking it into gaining a higher ranking
via "spam" tricks. Basically it's a filter run against
the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP'S) which looks for overly
Search Engine Optimized pages and drops them
from the listings, or buries them in the search results.
Google Tune Up. What's a Google Tune Up?
A Google Tune Up is a 20 point analysis of your
web site to determine if 1. any penalties were
applied after Google's Florida update algorithm
and 2. Recommend steps to eliminate penalties
applied OR recommendations to help improve non-penalized web sites
for higher search engine ranking. Each Tune Up,
is performed by a real Search Engine Marketing expert on our staff,
with over 4 yrs of experience each. We will generate a custom
web based report for your web site based on the following SEO
points. CONTACT US IF YOU LIKE A GOOGLE TUNE-UP
PRICE QUOTE
- Google penalty assigned- Yes or No
- Over optimized Yes-No
- Under optimized Yes-No
- Analysis of your site statistics *
- Hosting - Virtual or Dedicated IP
- Hidden Text Yes-No
- Hidden Links Yes-No
- Keyword stuffing
- Keyword Density Violation Yes-No
- Keyword accuracy assessment
- Back Links analysis - Good or Bad
- Content Check
- Link Farms-Free For All- FAA Yes-No
- Use of Frames
- Use of Flash
- HTML quality
*Raw Logs analysis is an additional charge.
CONTACT US IF YOU LIKE A GOOGLE TUNE-UP
PRICE QUOTE
Building High Quality Web Pages for Google
Title Element
The page title element (some refer to it as the title tag which
is incorrect) is one of the most important factors for ranking
highly in the search engines.
Page title elements are normally 3-9 words (60-80 characters)
maximum in length, no fluff, straight and to the point. This is
what shows up in most search engine results as a link back to
your page.
Make sure your Page Title Element (title tag) is relevant to
the content on the page.
References
W3C - 7.4.2 The TITLE element
W3C - <title>: the most important element of a quality
Web page
META Description Tag (Metadata)
The META description tag usually consists of 25 to 30 words or
less using no more than 160 to 180 characters total (including
spaces). The META description also shows up in many search engine
results as a summary of your site.
Directories like Yahoo! and the ODP (Open Directory Project -
dmoz.com) show the page title and description that you entered
(and the editors modified) on their manual submission form.
Make sure your META Description Tag is relevant to the content
on the page.
References
W3C - 7.4.4 Meta data
W3C - Resource Description Framework
META Keywords Tag (Metadata)
For those search engines that are META enabled, the META keywords
tag used to be one of the most important areas after the page
title and page description. It has been abused by both marketers
and consumers alike that there is very little weight given to
the META keywords tag.
Don't fret over your META keywords tag. Utilize keywords and
keyword phrases from your title element, META description tag,
heading tag and first one or two paragraphs of visible content.
Try to limit it to 15 to 20 words if possible.
Make sure your META Keywords Tag is relevant to the content on
your page.
References
W3C - 7.4.4 Meta data
W3C - Resource Description Framework
Heading Tags
At least one heading tag <h1> should appear at the top
of your page and be well written using prime keywords and keyword
phrases.
You can use CSS to control the appearance of the heading tags.
I prefer using external style sheets (file.css).
Make sure your Heading Tags are relevant to the content on the
page.
References
W3C - Use <h1> for top-level heading
W3C - Use headings to structure your document
W3C - 7.5.5 Headings: The H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 elements
Alt Attribute
Alt text is the line of text you see pop up (in Internet Explorer,
see note below) when you place your cursor over an image. It also
displays a text representation of the image when the user has
images turned off in their browser (this is the intended behavior).
It is highly recommended that you utilize this area as it is required
under accessibility laws and, is indexed by the search engines.
Note: Internet Explorer (IE) will display alt text when you hover
your cursor over an element that utilizes the alt attribute. This
is incorrect behavior as the alt text is designed to be displayed
when the user has their images turned off while browsing. Other
browsers such as Opera and Mozilla will not display the alt text
on hover.
Alt tags are not to be stuffed with irrelevant keywords or phrases.
The alt text should mirror the content of the image. If it is
a graphic header, then your alt text should mirror the text in
the graphic header.
Alternative text values should not exceed 80 characters in length.
If more than 70-80 characters are required one should use the
longdesc attribute as an alternative to alt text.
Make sure your Alt Attribute is relevant to the content for that
image.
References
W3C - Use the alt attribute
W3C WCAG - 7.1 Short text equivalents for images ("alt-text")
W3C WCAG - 7.2 Long description of images
Hyperlinked Text
This area is overlooked by many when promoting a web site to
the search engines. Many web sites utilize graphic representations
of links. These are visually appealing, but the text in the image
cannot be indexed by the spiders.
I always recommend an additional text navigation bar (SSI - Server
Side Includes or Front Page Includes) somewhere on the page, usually
at the top, right, bottom or left hand side. Link text should
be concise, use keywords and phrases, and follow the same structure
as the graphic navigation.
References
W3C - Use <link>s in your document
W3C - 12 Links
W3C - 12.3.3 Links and search engines
Visible Copy - Content is King
Content (visible copy) weighs heavily and is considered one of
the primary areas of search engine optimization and marketing,
hence the expression, Content is King.
Your content should be written in a way that grabs the users
attention, while utilizing your targeted keywords and keyword
phrases. There is a method to placement of the keywords and keyword
phrases that will help your web site gain better placement in
the search engines. Balance is essential and creating that balance
takes knowledge and experience.
You should make it your goal to add at least one new page of
content daily if possible. If not, then once a week is acceptable.
You want to keep your website content fresh and give your visitors
something to come back for on their next visit. Stale website
content may not perform as well as fresh website content.
I strongly suggest that you utilize last modified dates on your
pages so that visitors to your site know when the page was last
modified and how fresh the content is.
Last modified: 2003-12-15T07:43:19-0800
Note: I utilize the ISO International Date Format.
File Naming
I've seen many of the search engines indexing file names and
have found that using relative keywords in this area will play
a role in your overall search engine marketing strategy.
Instead of naming your file pagename.asp, you would name it keyword-phrase.asp
or page-name.asp. Always use hyphens (-) to separate the words
in your file names, use all lower case for file naming, this includes
images too.
Visitors to your site will appreciate the clean URI paths which
are easy to remember and bookmark. Always try to provide the visitor
with the shortest URI path.
This is not an area to stuff keywords. Files should be named
appropriately as part of the overall theme and should be relevant
to the on page content.
Directory Naming
I've seen many of the search engines indexing directory names
and have found that using relative keywords in this area will
play a role in your overall search engine marketing strategy.
Be descriptive with naming directories. Don't get carried away,
but make sure at least one keyword or keyword phrase appears in
the directory name. Don't forget to use hyphens (-) to separate
the words.
This is not an area to stuff keywords. Directories should be
named appropriately as part of the overall theme and should be
relevant to the directory content.
<!-- End the Basics of Perfect Page Development -->
There is much more to it than that! The above are just the basics
and something that all newcomers may want to study carefully.
There should be an understanding of page layout, positioning of
elements and balancing the use of html markup.
More info on the Google Florida Update
- Google
Ranking Tune Up
Did your web site get penalized or de- listed from Google? Do
you need a better web site ranking?
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