We Didn't Start The Fire

Here's some Friday fun for you, 50 years of history with photos and lyrics in three minutes set to Billy Joel's great song created by Ye Li at Cal Tech. Flash isn't good for SEO, but it's great for entertaining music videos.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

Ultrasonic Machining Website Needs SEO Help

Bullen Semiconductor is an Ohio based division of Lam Research Corporation, a worldwide wafer fabrication company. In my past life I did a little work in the circuit board and semiconductor industry on the low end of the technology spectrum. I actually worked as an exhibitor on the PC Boardwalk at NEPCON a couple of years where we manufactured multilayer circuit boards right on the exhibition hall floor. Interesting stuff. I did multilaminate board trimming post the lamination press and connector beveling.

Ian at Lam asked me to look at the Bullen website and here is what I see.

• 11 pages in the Google index all with the same page title
• 2 links in in the Google index, one of which is from Lam
• Page titles all start with Bullen Semiconductor, none of the pages are targeted for the services Bullen offers
  
• Meta keywords are spammy and redundant all pages
• No meta descriptions
• No robots text file, which also likely means no xml sitemap and that the web is not registered with Google and Yahoo
  
• No html sitemap
• All of the pages are short on copy
• For local search, the only place the name and address of the company is found is on the contact page

This is a nice little website which could be whipped into shape in a couple of days with results showing in a couple of weeks or less.

The things that are missing from the Bullen site are also missing in the Lam corporate web, except the Lam corporate web has a number of 404 file not found errors in their product category links. This would be easily detected with a thorough outside web crawl which is easy to do. Every time I make a change or addition to web content for my websites or any clients' webs, the next thing we do is crawl the web. Any problems are immediately corrected and can be fixed before the spiders and robots come to the web and hit 404 dead ends.

One thing every good website should have is a custom 404 page. I have one in my website which has created a cult following of sorts. Check out www.roncastle.com/404.shtml.

Might as well have fun if you can't do anything else?

The good news is that all of these issues are easily fixable provided someone can provide some technically correct content to add to the pages.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

Get a free copy of Wordtracker Magic!

My good friend John Alexander's Wordtracker Magic eBook has become the defacto best educational tool for learning to use the Wordtracker search phrase database. John is in the process of updating the book to reflect the many changes made to Wordtracker over the past year. If you act NOW you can get a free copy of the old ebook.

All you have to do is sign up for John's Free SEO Tip of the Day There are no tricks or catches. You will get a link to download your copy of Wordtracker Magic by signing up. This current e-book is offered free as is until October 31. John will notify you when the updated version is available for purchase.

If you need a link to the free eBook, email me.

Never used Wordtracker? Sign up for a free trial here.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

Peak Oil Website Wants Peak Performance

Alex requested my free SEO help file for his website Oil Decline dot com, which is nicely done with lots of good information, easy to read, easy to navigate. Top notch job on the visual appearance and usability of the website.

Google shows 9 pages in the index, PageRank of 5/10, and 310 links in from other web pages, most of which appear to be blogs about peak oil and related subjects about our dwindling fossil fuel energy future.

The website has some deficiencies from an SEO perspective that won't be too hard to fix.

Structurally, the web has a robots.txt file, which is good. The pages also have a redundant robots meta which conflicts with the instructions in the robots text file.

A robots meta is not needed if you have a robots text file (unless you are making some sort of specific exclusion or instruction for a specific page) and the revisit-after meta serves no useful purpose. Robots and spiders will return to the web as they please, you cannot influence the frequency of their return by instruction. You CAN improve your opportunities for being recrawled by continually adding new content of value to your website.

The website does not have a html sitemap. Google says they like to see a html sitemap. Read Google's Webmaster Guidelines. I see no sign that the website has a xml sitemap or that it is registered with Google and Yahoo. This needs to be done SAP.

All of the page titles in the web are the same, the meta keywords are redundant for every page (not differentiated by page content) and the meta description is not "descriptive". You can have good rankings for pages without meta keywords or meta descriptions (I have created a few by accident!) and keywords are presently of zero value for Google, but the description is your sales pitch for the page in the search engine results. Search on Google for free seo help and read the description for my # 1 ranking page as an example. Here is what is shown in the SERP (search engine results page):

Free SEO Help Files Plus SEO Tip of the Day
Need help with SEO? These FREE help files and SEO tip of the day will help get your web found by search engines. Check us out.
www.roncastle.com/free-seo-help-files.htm - 34k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this


The page title should be unique for every page and a supporting h1 tag (or larger text and bold) visible title at the start of the body of the page is also helpful, both for SEO as well as for readership. Any good copywriter knows that a great headline is as valuable for attracting readers as the story itself. Imagine a newspaper with no headlines?

The peak oil graphic cannot be read by spiders and robots and the pages use graphic titles which cannot be read. The pages need a good visible headline or title in text.

Alex's web ranks # 1 on Google for oil decline, which is not a frequently searched phrase. The web ranks #21 (top of page 3) for peak oil, which is frequently searched.

My opinion is, and I am a like minded person to Alex regarding our energy future, that there is only so much to say about a problem. The age of cheap oil has passed and the future of oil is going to be both expensive and constrained.

If this was my website, I would be looking to add new content about peak oil solutions. The opportunity for solutions is limitless and, like it or not, we are all going to need them.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

Silver Jewellery Website Will Take A While to Shine

Samir with Kimera Jewellery in the UK requested a free ranking report today, but a quick look at the website shows that a ranking report will not tell us anything important at the moment.

Google shows 28 pages from this new web in the index and no inbound links. The word jewellery (which is an ok correct alternate spelling to the more common word jewelry) is found in the Google index something over 83,000,000 times. This is a very competitive niche with lots of websites online for a long time.

The search phrases Samir has chosen to target are all pretty generic. "Silver jewellery" has 5,000,000 competing web pages, for example. One of the top ranking pages in the Google index for silver jewellery shows 1,080 links in from other web pages.

Until Samir's website has been online for a while, even with the best targeted and most well written pages about silver jewellery on the Internet, it is not likely that the website will be able to earn rankings for generic phrases without time online (at least a year) and without many good high value links to the website from other web pages.

To generate any significant organic search traffic, Samir will need to focus on niche targets that have fewer competing web pages with the keywords preferably based on search phrase research. You can read more about search phase research on my keyword services page.

The other important thing to do is keep adding content. Many jewellery websites have thousands of pages. An immediate goal of 100 good content pages in Samir's new website is what I recommend.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

Need More Page Copy & Better Targeting for GroutSmart.com

Ron at GroutSmart.com in Phoenix requested a free ranking report for his new website and says he wants to be number one at Google, a worthy ambition. This new website about tile and grout cleaning services has been online a couple of months.

The ranking report shows that the web is now in the index at Google and Live.com. No rankings for Ron's targets at Google, some page three rankings for a couple of targets at Live.com.

When you see rankings at Live and none at Google, most of the time the main reason is that the keyword density of the page copy is too high which means not enough page copy.

This website needs better geographic targeting by getting the name, address, phone and FAX numbers on every page in live html text.

The website also needs a html sitemap to go along with the xml sitemap already in place. The xml file shows that every page in the website is changed daily, which is not likely?

Quick search phrase research does not show geographic searches for Ron's page targets, but there ARE some good general targets related to tile cleaning and grout cleaning that could generate some decent inquiries. Search phrase research does not show all the searches, only the predominant ones. I would take the best general targets and add the local geographics for the best results on local search.

The immediate key issues with this website are more page copy and research to hone in on the best targets.

The next step is to work on inbound links.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

Farmhouse Holiday in Tuscany Uses CSS Drop Down Menus

Many of the websites I look at that are not performing well with organic search are burdened with code heavy JavaScript to create fancy drop down or fly out navigation menus. The code is left in the page and, depending on how the script is done, may or may not work well for search engine spiders and robots.

Take a loot at http://www.tuscanfarmhouse.net This website has an elegant drop down menu created with CSS (cascading style sheets). This is an excellent alternative to JavaScript that works well for spiders and robots.

The Tuscan farmhouse web will be finished toward the end of this week.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

SEO Help for Sea Fun Divers in Phuket, Thailand

Lisa at Sea Fun Divers on the island of Phuket off the south coast of Thailand requested my free SEO help file. Archive.org shows that a website has been online at this domain name since 2003. It looks like the web has recently undergone a design change. Google PageRank is 3, a site search at Google shows 100 pages in the index, a link search shows only 4 inbound links, one of which is internal.

A quick look through the pages in the web shows many pages with no PageRank. I don't see any pages in the supplemental index. What I do see is many pages with duplicate or nearly duplicate page titles.

So, why is someone with a 5 year old web not getting the Google respect they deserve?

Part of the issue may be related to an incomplete sitemap.php, not all the links are there. The home page shows a Google validation code in the head but I cannot find a sitemap.xml or robots.txt file. My guess is that if there is a sitemap.xml it has not been updated in a long time.

The page title is spammy and the home page is not targeted, based on a quick look at search phrase research, to something that shows as a good search phrase in the research database. Diving Phuket does not show in research. This doesn't mean the phrase is not being searched, but if it is it is not being searched frequently. Lisa should be able to see what is working in her web stats.

The home page is 100-200 words short on copy to be a top ranking page in a competitive niche. The disadvantage of short copy is that it is almost impossible to write a good page and have your keyword density in the body low enough to make Google happy. Google does not like spammy copy.

The other issue that may be at play here has to do with Google's "off page" factors. Google probably expects that a website with 100 pages in the index that has been online for 5 years should have more than three links in? No way for me to know exactly, but I expect there is some merit to my assumption.

How to get more links in? Read the bottom half of this new page in my website

http://www.roncastle.com/best-web-site-submission-service.htm

regarding creating an external blog and using online forums in moderation to link to your website. Paid directories are another good alternative.

More than anything, Lisa and the crew need to do search phrase research and look at retargeting all of their pages to things people are searching for. This will make a big difference in fairly short order if they will write good page copy to support their targets.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

Best Web Site Submission Service

Wait a minute! Don't flame me for writing about submitting your website to search engines. There are hundreds of unscrupulous companies offering this faux "service."

Read my ideas about what you should be doing, which is NOT submitting.

The only guy with silver bullets is the Lone Ranger.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

C2P Print & Design Thailand Website Needs Some Help

David and Anthony with C2P Thailand requested my free SEO help file over the weekend.

Google shows 8 pages in the index from this website and no links in from other web pages.

The home page content is in Frames, which is death for organic search (or more trouble to manage than just putting the content in the page rather than in a frame). If you do a View and Source on your Internet Explorer browser (or View and Page Source if you are using Firefox) you can see what the search engine spiders and robots see on this page which is everything other than their important page content. The page that is called into the frame is actually a separate page file.

The website has the same page title for all pages I looked at. Most of the pages are short on content.

The website is not geographically targeted for local search.

There is no robots text file and no xml sitemap that I can find. The website also needs a html sitemap.

The JavaScript navigation is code heavy, would be a good idea to move it off the pages since it appears to be redundant on all pages.

Visually, the web is appealing but a bit graphic heavy with lots of split image files.

This website is off to a good start but will take some redesign to make it work with organic search. And, all the pages need to be targeted to things folks are actually searching for, which can be discovered through search phrase research.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

Search Engine Optimization Help for Mindtree Ltd in Manchester, Lancashire UK

Dave at Mindtree Ltd. asked for a free ranking report and analysis of his website. He gave me a list of single word search phrases which will not produce any meaningful results. The kinds of search phrases Dave should be considering for his website are 2-3-4-5 words long, and most likely geographically targeted to the UK, the Manchester area in the north of England and in Lancashire.

My most fond memory of Manchester was seeing a football match live and in person between Manchester City and Manchester United. The gents in the UK know how to play football!

Dave's website shows 29 pages in the Google index with decent page target differentiation accompanied by geographic targeting. It does not appear that the page targets are based on research. Wordtracker now has a separate database for UK search phrases that is REALLY helpful for UK website owners.

Google shows two links in, gotta have more links.

The web has a robots text file and an xml sitemap. I cannot tell from the outside looking in if the web is registered with Google and Yahoo. It needs to be. The website also needs a html sitemap. Go to Google and search for webmaster guidelines and see what Google tells you about this.

Meta keywords are spammy and not page specific. The meta descriptions could be more descriptive and compelling.

Some of the pages have enough copy to earn a ranking, some do not.

For local search, in addition to having Manchester, Lancashire and UK in the page titles, I also recommend a complete company name and address on every page in the web. This is a credibility issue as well as a geographic targeting issue.

It appears that this website was designed with the new Microsoft Expression Web. The pages show a charset of "windows-1252" which is the Expression Web and FrontPage default. The correct charset, which can be selected by editing the page properties, should be either iso-8859-1 or UTF-8. This helps set up the robots and spiders for easier crawling.

It also appears that this website is a first (and decent) attempt at learning to use CSS. Small serif fonts like the ones used in the top nav bar and the bottom navigation are hard to read. Usability testing shows that reading the screen is twice as hard as reading on paper. Sans serif fonts like Helvetica, Arial or Verdana (this copy is Verdana) are much easier to read on the screen. If you get them to your website, you want to make it easy to read? Yes, you do. Dump the tiny text.

I also note a 1986 copyright date bottom of the pages, which is pre-Internet. The copyright date should be 2007 which shows current content.

This web, which Dave says has been online less than 6 months, if off to a decent start. The pages need to be targeted based on research and the copy on various pages needs to be beefed up to at least 450 words per page. These improvements will bring more relevant traffic which will create more relevant conversions and make the cash register bell ring.

The website has some first page Google rankings for both Google UK and Google worldwide. BUT, if your rankings do not match what people are searching for, you won't get meaningful traffic? Rankings for things people are not searching for are not what will bring success.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

Cavvanbah Beach House Web in Byron Bay, Australia

Paul in beautiful Byron Bay Australia requested my free SEO help file and also a free ranking report for search phrases all beginning with Byron Bay, except for one beginning with bed and breakfast.

This is a really nice looking website, good photos, colors, easy and consitent navigation. Looks like a place I would like to go!

The website has no inbound links in the Google index and Google shows 8 pages in the index. All of the pages are targeted to Byron Bay Accommodation (which many people misspell) which is a highly competitive target with 78,000 plus competitors for the phrase in quotes - and, this is not the most frequently searched phrase related to Byron Bay. The sole targeting exception is the map page.

Get the punctuation "pipes" (vertical bars) out of the page title. No one is searching for on Google for the pipe character that I know of? Word position in the title is important and punctuation is not useful in page <>'s.

The web has a robots.txt file but shows no sign of being registered with Google or Yahoo. The file has one disallow statement which is constructed correctly.

The important titles on the pages are all in graphics so the important words are not readable by search engine spiders and robots.

The pages are mostly short on content and are awkward JavaScript code heavy - the same effects could be accomplished nicely with neat and tidy CSS, with a 90% reduction in page code. Want to stay with Java? OK, put the script in the root and add a link to the script. Why is this important? Because you only get X amount of crawl time from the spiders and robots and you want them to read something that will get you rankings, which is NOT JavaScript.

Mainly, the website needs more content to target the right phrases discovered through research. The information on the links page regarding events, etc. needs to be created in new pages related to these activities, one page per subject, 450 plus words, targeted to the phrases we know people are searching for from search phrase research.

The meta descriptions could be more compelling. The meta keywords are way spammy and not page specific, which could be a penalty from Google - not likely. They need to be cleaned up and made unique for each page based on page content.

And, the web needs lots of links in from other websites, which should be easy to do by cross marketing with friends and neighbors in the community as well as travel agents, etc.

There are links on the graphic titles that do not meet standards, should be to the home page only but you get a surprise on the right side graphic text which takes you unexpectedly to the booking and enquiry page and form. This is not good usability.

For local search purposes, the beach house name, full address, postal code, Australia and phone and FAX including area codes need to be in the footer or left nav column on EVERY page.

Finally, the website needs a html sitemap as well as xml. I would also set up a blog using a program like blogger and post something of interest every couple of days.

One other thing, name the phtotos in the website for what they are separated, words separated by hyphens, and you stand a good chance of being found in image search.

Paul says he prefers Yahoo as a search engine, but it is Google that delivers the traffic. If this web does not rank with Google, Paul will be missing 80% or more of his potential traffic from organic search.

This little website could really be something if Paul and Kay will make a commitment to triple the number of pages in 60 days, which should not he hard to do. If I could spend 60 days in Byron Bay, I would have plenty to write about.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

Home Page Copywriting Tips

One of the hardest copywriting jobs for a website is writing the home page? I have put a new page online this evening that might help.

Cheers,

Ron

We are off and blogging!

If you search on Google for free seo help you will see that my web page on that subject is # 1 and has been # 1 for several years.

I have a 15-16 page free seo help file that I send to people all around the world who want help in determining why their website has no good search engine rankings and who want to know what to do to fix their problem(s).

There are lots of folks who can and do design web pages and websites. This is pretty easy to do and there are many ways to get online: simple wysiwyg do it yourself with FrontPage or DreamWeaver, content management web hosting or web design programs, free hosting services where you can do it yourself, etc.

And, there are lots of folks who do professional web design who make pretty pages and have all sorts of propeller head bells and whistles on the bleeding edge of functionality.

There are NOT a lot of folks who do small websites that work well with organic search. Frames, Flash, intensive graphic content without text, etc. are all death for organic search, especially with Google.

Most web designers apparently do not read Google's Webmaster Guidelines and do not make any attempt to meet the structural requirements in their designs that Google says they like to see in a website.

This blog is an attempt to share the issues and questions of good folks who visit my website and ask for help. I do this for free because it is a way for me to attract prospective clients. And, I do it for free because I use my information that I provide as a means of affiliate marketing - I say this right up front, nothing hidden about this.

I also do this for free because I can and I want to - for every hundred folks who say they are a SEO consultant or provider, there may be 5 or 10 who know their stuff and who have been to John Alexander and Robin Nobles' http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/ training. Some are honest wannabes or, on the dark side of the unregulated uncertified SEO world, they are shysters and scammers - selling magic bullets that don't exist and don't work. They give our profession the worst possible reputation. See you in Gitmo, SEO fakers?

I don't pretend to have all the answers, I am not sure anyone does. But, what I do works for me and works for the vast majority of my clients all around the world. I enjoy helping other people be successful, which makes me a success in their eyes. When my clients are happy, I am happy. SEO is only part of what I do in life. Winning on the web is fun, but there IS life beyond the Internet. If you don't believe me, visit http://www.nealcreekfarm.com/.

Cheers,

Ron Castle