While everyone desires to get a top ranking on the major global search engines, doing so takes a lot of time, effort, and expense. However any business wants to reach its target market quickly thus regional search engines become very important tools for achieving this goal. The competition is significantly lower when you submit your website to these regional search engines. There are other advantages too such as being able to pinpoint the kind of incoming traffic you want because of niche specialization. Doing search engine optimization (SEO) for regional search engines is not much different from doing it for the major global engines. The main difference is that the geographical region must be considered in all aspects of the SEO process, hosting, and design. Here are some areas that should be covered when doing SEO for regional search engines.
Before you start anything, get the right top-level domain (TLD) name for the region if you can. For example, Baidu is the main regional search engine of China and will only index domains suffixed with .cn. Getting a regional domain name oftentimes means having a physical business address within the geographical region of your target market. This presents complications when a business owner physically resides outside of a region but wants to target its customers. In any case, check the rules of the regional domain name registrar beforehand.
If you cannot get a regional domain name, try registering for a .tv or .fm TLD. The .tv TLDs are sold by the tiny island in the Pacific named Tuvalu and .fm comes from the Pacific Island region of Micronesia. Both of these regions sell their domain names with no restrictions. You can also try applying for domain names covering large geographical/continental domains such as .asia.
Content should be crafted so as to use regional keywords and vocabulary. Likewise, content should be written in the local language and dialect in order to successfully connect with the target market. This is important even if you are targeting only English-speaking customers in the target region. One advantage of writing web content in the local language is that there is no risk of getting penalized for duplicate content as is the risk if only writing in one language.
Keywords should also be carefully researched and chosen based on what users would typically search for in their region. This is where the SEO consultant must be careful and get a thorough understanding of search habits local to the region. Obviously, this could get expensive if targeting multiple regions but the benefits more than likely will pay off in the long run.
When there is not a regionalized TLD, other factors are considered when a site is crawled for indexing. For example, if Google crawls a site it will look for information such as physical addresses in HTML pages, the physical location and IP address of the server hosting the pages, and the source locations of all incoming links. Google has as one of its objectives the prioritization of regionally-relevant results in search engine results pages (SERPS). Thus, there are regional versions of Google such as google.co.th for the country of Thailand and google.ca for Canada. In the latter example, if Google determines that a website is located in Thailand or Canada using these other factors then it more than likely will list it in its regional areas as well as the overall global index.
Part of this process is finding the available entry points into the regional search engine world. SearchEngineWatch.com is a good place to begin when analyzing the regional search engines available. It has information on all of the various regional search engines plus helpful information when it comes to optimization of your site. Google also has its Webmaster Tools that allow a website to be submitted with a country association.
You should also consider some of the large regional search directories like Yahoo!, BTLookSmart, and LookSmart. However these options are not free and you should carefully analyze if there is a good potential for return on investment. The advantage of these directories is that they have very large communities of users who search them each day and their populations continue to grow.
Tags: regional search engines, regional seo, Search Engine Optimization
Hypertext Markup Language or HTML has been the main language of the Internet since it began. It is easy to code in HTML and any designer can have a web page in a matter of minutes. However because it is so easy to code in this language, it is also easy to create pages in such away that they are detrimental to search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. So by following accepted practices of HTML design with regard to standards and optimization, you can achieve an attractive website for both the viewer and the search engine crawler. Here are a few of these accepted practices to help design SEO-friendly pages.
Use CSS (Custom Style Sheets) to separate layout directives from content. Search engine crawlers are not evaluating the layout of your page. They are mainly looking at your content and links. In the early days of web design, the HTML <table> markup was used to do the page layout. Typically, in those days, changing a page’s layout was tedious—especially if multiple pages needed changing. Nowadays, the web designer can put all of the layout directives in the CSS file and place only the content in the HTML file. This allows a search engine crawler to immediately read and evaluate the content for indexing.
Where you place the keywords in your HTML document is important for successful SEO. Keywords have the most impact when they are part of several important places in an HTML document. Places of importance where keywords should go include the <title> (page title), <H1> (heading), and <alt> (image alternate text) tags. Additionally, keywords are significant for successful SEO if they are part of the URL. Link anchor text is also another important place for keywords. And finally, keywords placed towards the beginning of your content are more likely to be picked up than keywords at the end.
Try not to use Javascript inside of the HTML file. In fact, it is recommended that you try as much as possible to replace Javascript with equivalent CSS directives. For example, the Javascript hovering effect can be replaced through CSS. But regardless of what language you choose for coding the various effects, it should be kept out of the HTML file because doing so only complicates the reading process for the search engine crawler.
Avoid using transparent characters inside of your HTML code. What is meant by transparent characters? Usually they are keywords that are rendered with the same font color as the background in attempt to grab the search engine crawler’s attention while appearing invisible in the browser. This is easily done in HTML but it is what is known as Black Hat SEO and the website in violation could get a penalty from a search engine such as Google which ultimately results in delays for indexing.
HTML code always should be validated. There are several free HTML validation tools plus the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has its public version. W3C is an organization that sets standards for HTML programming practices. Validation of HTML is important for SEO because you don’t want HTML errors interfering with the efficient reading of your code by search engine crawlers. Browsers can compensate for many HTML errors unbeknownst to the user however with search engine crawlers error compensation might affect indexing.
Your HTML pages should always contain META description tags. However, META keywords tags are not as significant to search engine crawlers as they used to be. This is because in the early days, search optimization specialists would oftentimes try to stuff the META keywords tag with keywords and attempt to gain an unfair advantage. Thus, search engines like Google reduced the impact they have on indexing. In fact, Google actually ignores the META keywords tag and you can reasonably assume that many others do too. But the META description tag is still important because the text of it will show up in the search engine results page (SERP).
Tags: CSS, html, JavaScript, Search Engine Optimization
As promised, here is the video tutorial of SEO Warrior Keyword Dashboard tool. SEO Warrior Keyword Dashboard can help you in several ways. You can compare search results in the big three search engines (Google, Bing & Yahoo!). While comparing search results side-by-side you can also click on each result to obtain further keyword analysis of the target URL. Watch the video for more details.
For better viewing experience click on the video to open within YouTube.
Enjoy!
John
Ask was founded with the hopes of becoming a powerful natural language search engine. It all started in Berkely, California, USA. Originally, it was known as “Ask Jeeves” with a theme character known as Mr. Jeeves who was supposed to be a virtual gentleman-like personal assistant. He retrieved and delivered the answers to your questions just as a gentleman would. The search engine is powered by the ExpertRank technology (formerly known as Teoma). ExpertRank is a unique algorithm in that it uses clustering by subject methodology In order to group websites together. In many ways it is like other search engines when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but there are differences. Let’s examine what you should consider when working on optimization for Ask.
The ExpertRank algorithm applies additional criteria when getting relevant search results. Other major search engines focus on the popularity of websites when ranking and providing relevant search results. With other search engines, webmasters and SEO specialists try to get a high volume of backlinks on sites relevant to the one being optimized. While backlink volume is not the only favorable factor when ranking a site, it is very important. Ask goes a step further in that it evaluates related sites determining if they can be considered experts in the subject area. Determining the expert level requires an additional level of sophistication in the ranking algorithm and this is what ExpertRank is capable of.
Content containing keywords is just as important in Ask as it is in the other search engines. But considering the extent that the ExpertRank algorithm analyzes content, it should be well-written. Ask also advises webmasters that their pages may take longer to index because of the quality checks that must be done.
Keywords are not the only consideration for SEO with Ask.com. This is because Ask uses and is continuing to develop what is known as semantic search technology. The aim of semantic search technology is for users to be able to enter a search query and find the results the first time without having to rephrase. The components of Ask.com’s semantic search technology include DADS (Direct Answers From Databases), DAFS (Direct Answers From Search), and AnswerFarm. Also part of Ask.com’s search technology is a database of 300 million question and answer pairs.
The purpose of DADS is to provide search results from structured data. DADS was made possible because of the numerous XML structured data feeds from the various websites. It is easy to parse and load into the DADS database from this type of information. Structured data such as this can also be stored in terms of time. This allows a user to search for television, movie, entertainment, sporting events, and other time-sensitive information and have answers returned as to what is current for these areas. However the important thing to remember is that part of the SEO process for Ask is to make sure your site provides an XML feed of current information.
DAFS is similar to traditional keyword search technology but goes a little further. With DAFS technology, the content of your website is read and the Ask software tries to figure out what the topic is plus determine if it can link to any of the questions in Ask.com’s question database. It is one thing to have keywords but Ask looks at the keywords in their context—a more complex job. This is why it is so important to have content written that answers some of the questions people have on Ask.com.
AnswerFarm looks for question and answer pages. A common form of questions and answers on a website is a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions page). This technology links an Ask user query to relevant FAQ pages. It also gives the SEO specialist one more avenue (the FAQ page of a website) to pursue in trying to get established in Ask SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
Ask will not automatically index a new website. There are two main triggers that get a website submitted to Ask. One is that there are backlinks to the new website and the other is that a sitemap has been submitted. But keep in mind that if your site has been indexed by the other major search engines then it will more than likely get crawled by Ask.com. However you should always submit a sitemap as this is the way to directly petition Ask to crawl your pages.
Baidu is the name of the most popular regional search engine in China. It is a search engine specifically for Chinese websites. The process of search engine optimization (SEO) is somewhat similar to general search engines like Google in that content, links, and keywords are important but there are some additional considerations that must be made when optimizing for this engine.
Baidu is a Chinese language search engine. Therefore, if you are trying to get your English website listed in Baidu, you’ll have to get it translated. Consider also that those using Baidu are Chinese and will not be performing searches in English anyways. Having your website converted to any of the Chinese dialects (i.e., Mandarin) requires using a human translator who is a native speaker in the target language. Never trust machine translation software to this job because it is impossible for it to convert the pages into grammatically correct target language.
Baidu prefers sites that are hosted in China. So, you’ll have to obtain hosting space there. Recommendations are to search for hosting and domain services in Hong Kong where web matters are relatively more open than with the mainland. Needless to say, the domain name of the candidate website should end with .cn. or .com.cn. Always make sure you submit your site when doing SEO for Baidu. They have a site submission page just as other major search engines.
Baidu doesn’t allow every kind of website. Don’t even mention the subject of pornography and make no criticisms of the established Chinese government. Baidu practices censorship in these areas. Therefore, the content in your website must be carefully edited to make sure there is no mention of these subject areas.
Keyword densities apply to Baidu just like the general search engines. However the keywords and surrounding content must be in Chinese. Recommendations are that the keyword density should be between 6 and 10% within the content. Keyword trends can also be checked from the Baidu index page. Keyword content should be fresh just as it should be with Google and other search engines. Fresh content indicates that the website is active which gives an indication of relevance.
The quantity of backlinks has more importance than the quality. The opposite is the case with Google. Basically, the more backlinks you get from wherever, the better. Underlying anchor text within the links is important as well and should, of course, be in Chinese. The downside to Baidu’s policy of “everything goes” for links is that there is the potential for link spamming similar to what black hat SEO experts implement. Also, ALT text for images is important just as it is with Google.
Baidu can use Pin-yin for searches. Pin-yin refers to the process of spelling Chinese words in Roman characters phonetically. The process converts the standard Mandarin dialect of the Chinese language into Roman characters that English-speaking people know. The problem is that Baidu does not recognize Pin-yin for keywords. You should also not write web content in Pin-yin because the Baidu indexing robots will not recognize it.
The search engine has a pay-per-click (PPC) program. Part of PPC is getting the right keywords to target and Baidu has a tool for keyword suggestions. This tool is for paid search account holders.
Meta data is very important to Baidu. With Google, meta data is not so important these days but it is still very much so with the Chinese search engine. This includes the title, description, and keywords meta tags. However be aware that they must also be written in Chinese.
In summary, keep in mind that Baidu is not Google. Baidu is used by a significantly different group of users who are still relatively new to the internet. But, if you are doing business with Chinese consumers as your target market, you will definitely have to include this search engine in your SEO strategy and search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns.
Tags: Baidu Search Engine, Baidu SEO, Search Engine Optimization
Yandex is the name of the Russian equivalent of the search engine Google. The name is short for “Yet Another Indexer.” In fact, it is the most popular search engine in Russia. This is probably because it is primarily for Russian websites and text is in the native language of that country. It is estimated that Yandex has between 50 and 60 percent of the market share for regional search engines in Russia.
Like any other search engine, it has its own algorithm for indexing and ranking websites. Search engine optimization (SEO) is just as important for a website listed in Yandex as it is for Google, Yahoo, and Bing and how it’s done is really not that different. Here are a few considerations you should make and some tips when doing SEO for Yandex.
It is helpful to understand a little of the history behind Yandex. By knowing some of the history, you understand the context that you are working in when doing SEO for this engine. Yandex first came on the web scene in 1997 in Moscow, Russia. It was designed to specifically be a Russian language search engine and can handle the semantics of search queries done in the country’s linguistics system. It was founded by CEO Arkady Volozh who had the vision of making the search engine a formidable competitor with Google (which is now the case).
Yandex is somewhat similar to Google in that both use a ranking metric for their pages. Google uses the famous PageRank while Yandex uses what it calls a “Quotation Index.” The quotation index is a metric used to show how trusted a website is in the domain of Yandex. Whereas Google has a very narrow Pagerank (0-10), the Yandex scale ranges from 0 to 150,000. There is really no comparison between the two metrics because those doing SEO in Google desire a higher Pagerank while those doing the same in Yandex seek lower values. For example, trusted, non-public websites in Yandex have values between 150 and 1,000. Just as with Google, Yandex offers a toolbar allowing you can see the quotation index for a site.
Backlinks affect the quotation index of a Russian website. The goal for SEO with Yandex (and with Google) is to get a high number of backlinks to the website being optimized. But volume of backlinks is not the only important factor here. You also want to make sure that the backlinks come from high-quality (trusted) websites already in the Yandex index. Another factor that weighs heavily on backlink quality is the region of the site linking to yours. Not surprisingly, backlinks from Russian websites are given a higher weight. And the same as with Google, relevant backlinks are likewise counted as more significant. In other words, if your website advertises curtains for sale, backlinks from a website selling residential windows would be appropriate.
Keywords are just as important on pages indexed in Yandex. However, Google.ru is not a good source of keyword metrics coming from Russia. In other words, your first choice in getting keyword suggestions would not be from Google Adwords. This is because Google has a significantly lower usage rate among Russian internet users. Yandex has an equivalent to Google Adwords named Wordstat. Wordstat shows trends of searches categorized by keywords allowing you to choose those you wish to target. Another tool used in the Google world is known as Google Insights where internet users can analyze the topmost popular searches and Yandex has covered this area as well with Yandex Interests.
Yandex has also developed their own information tools for SEO specialists. They have also created a set of webmaster guidelines and they have an equivalent for all the Google webmaster tools. Additional tools allow a webmaster to assign a region to a website and to edit site links (Quicklinks).
This search engine has some special priorities. Paid advertising seems to override organic. This is potentially a problem for some who wish to resort to only organic SEO methods. But Yandex has to pay the bills like everyone else. There are also differing opinions as to whether or not Yandex will allow a non-Russian site into its index although it you can find non-Russian sites in its SERPs (search engine result pages).
Tags: Yandex considerations, Yandex SEO
Some of your have asked me to create a tutorial for Mac for running rankingfactors.pl script. This post is the answer to your queries. Without further ado here are the steps:
PART 1 – Installing XAMPP & Copying Files
1> Download XAMPP for Mac at this link
2> Install XAMPP using instructions at: this link (just a couple of steps)
3> At this point you can go to the htdocs folder on your Mac (/Applications/XAMPP/htdocs)
4> You can cleanup this folder by placing all files and folders into a single folder or leave it as is.
5> Assuming you have downloaded the windows version of SEO Warrior (xampp distribution) simply copy all files and folders from the ‘htdocs’ (windows) to your Mac ‘htdocs’ folder.
6> Copy TreeBuilder.pm, Element.pm from the Windows (zip:\xampp\perl\site\lib\HTML) distribution to /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/HTML/
7> Copy Round.pm from the Windows (zip:\xampp\perl\lib\Math\MATH) distribution to /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/lib/perl5/5.10.0/Math
With this step you will avoid getting the following error message:
Can't locate HTML/TreeBuilder.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/lib/perl5/5.10.0/darwin-2level /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/lib/perl5/5.10.0 /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/darwin-2level /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0 .) at rankingfactors.pl line 25.
8> Next we need to setup the path. You can execute the following command in a Terminal window (just for this window session) or place it in your .profile file (as a more permanent solution). Note: this is a single line and the only white space is after the ‘export’ word.
export PATH=/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/lib/perl5/5.10.0:/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/lib/perl5/site_perl/:/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/bin/:$PATH
You are now ready to run the script. Simply go to the /Applications/XAMPP/book/downloads/chapter-4 folder. (i.e. rankingfactors.pl 10 buy shoes)
That’s it! These instructions could also be helpful for Linux installations as well (especially the modules part).
Regards,
John
Tags: mac ranking factors script, mac tutorial, rankingfactors.pl
This is an update to my earlier post. I am currently working (in my spare time) on several items (most are not mentioned in the book):
> Video tutorial for SEO Warrior Keyword Dashboard –> February 21, 2010
> SEO Competitor Research Tool (collaboration with a partner site) –> by the end of November, 2010
> Mouse Tracking (Conversions Helper) Tool (collaboration with a partner site) –> by the end of June, 2010
> Articles –> throughout the year
> SEO Master Cheat Sheet –> April 31, 2010
> and more..
The ’light’ versions of these tools with be free for all owners of SEO Warrior book.
Stay tuned for more information.
Regards,
John
The purpose of the rankingfactors.pl Perl script is to dimistify what it is that makes search engines tick. More importantly it helps you learn about your competitors for your specific (targeted) keywords. It takes the top ten (or one hundred) results from Google (and Bing) and performs an in-depth analysis. You get to see how keywords of your choice are found in (search engine) search results as well as in the actual (search result) page titles, page copy, domain name, URL, META Description, header tags, and much more.
The script can be modified in any way you like. The following short video demonstration shows how you can run the script within the XAMPP environment (which you can download at http://book.seowarrior.net/xampp.zip).
For those that prefer written instructions, here is the step by step tutorial you need to run rankkingfactors.pl as described on page 80 of SEO Warrior. It is assumed that you have succeffully installed XAMPP on your PC (You can see the XAMPP tutorial at this link: http://www.seowarrior.net/accessing-book-materials-with-xampp/)
1> Start Apache by running: C:\xampp\apache_start.bat (if you wish to enable Page Rank queries)
2> Open the DOS Prompt window by doing Start|Run|cmd
3> Change your directory to: C:\xampp\htdocs\book\downloads\chapter-4\
4> Execute the setpath.bat batch file to ensure Perl will see all the required modules
Note: you are now ready to run the rankingfactors.pl Perl script
5a> If you wish to get a report on a specific keyword for the top 10 Google results execute the scripts as follows:
perl rankingfactors.pl 10 buy shoes
Note: “buy shoes” is a sample keyword
5b> If you wish to get a report for the top 100 Google results execute the script as follows:
perl rankingfactors.pl 100 buy shoes
Note: Depending on your selection the report will be generated in a few minutes. Be patient.
You will know when the script is complete by seeing the following lines of output.
C:\xampp\htdocs\book\downloads\chapter-4>perl rankingfactors.pl 10 buy shoes
Starting..
..cleanup done
..getting SERPs
..got the SERPs
..got the real titles
..finished partial title comparisons
..finished keyword title comparisons
..finished title page copy comparisons
..finished domain name exact keyword analysis
..finished domain name partial keyword analysis
..finished description META analysis
..finished header tags analysis
..finished keyword proximity analysis
..finished outbound links analysis
..finished outbound link PR analysis
..finished average page size analysis
..finished optimum number of words analysis
..finished website size analysis
C:\xampp\htdocs\book\downloads\chapter-4>
6a> To see the generated reports (for Google and Bing) browse to:
C:\xampp\htdocs\book\downloads\chapter-4\report\index.html
6b> Alternatively, you could open each report separately by browsing to:
C:\xampp\htdocs\book\downloads\chapter-4\report\bing.html
C:\xampp\htdocs\book\downloads\chapter-4\report\google.html
For information regarding report metrics (what each statistic means) please reffer to Chapter 4 of SEO Warrior.
Regards,
John
Tags: rankingfactors.pl, seo warrior, tutorial, XAMPP
Some of you have had some issues in setting up your environments to run either Perl or PHP scripts. This tutorial will show you how you can do that easily by utilizing XAMPP. In just a few minutes you should be able to run everything by following the steps shown in this tutorial.
To start, here is a short video demonstation of how you can install XAMPP to view SEO Warrior book materials. Please note that I am using a vanilla Windows XP system in the video.
For those that do not wish to see the video follow the following steps:
1> Download SEO Warrior book materials at: http://book.seowarrior.net/xampp.zip
2> Unzip the package to c:\xampp
Note: Check this folder to make sure that you don’t get the “c:\xampp\xampp\” scenario
(if you cut the inner folder and paste it over the top folder at the roor level of drive C)
3) Run Apache by double clicking on: C:\xampp\apache_start.bat
(or by executing the batch file in Dos Prompt)
4) Browse to http://localhost:10000/
At this point you should see a screen looking just like the one below:
Note: If you do not see this screen, chances are your Apache is not running due to a port conflict (which could be caused by a program such as Skype). You can always manually get to the book scripts by going to C:\xampp\htdocs\book\downloads\
I hope this information and video was helpful and if you have any questions you can drop me a note.
Regards,
John
Tags: book, Scripts, seo warrior, XAMPP
