I told you I would answer questions for chocolate! Advisor subscriber Jim took me up on my offer and emailed me a laundry list of SEO questions with the caveat that there would be a box of chocolate in it for me if I answered them. (Little does Jim know that I answer them all the time for nuthin....shhhhh!) So, here are Jim's questions, with my answers.

++Jim's Numerous SEO Questions++

Jim: Yahoo! I just can't figure them out. When I first submitted I ranked 35 for my keyword. I made a slight editorial change to the description, which was accepted, and then I ranked 37. So I figured I was stuck there and didn't want to tick off the editor again by asking for another change to the description. Eventually I was looking at my traffic and noticed some sales increasing and traffic increasing. I looked up my listing in Yahoo thinking this is weird because I stopped paying the Overture gods who were emptying out my bank account faster then I could apply for a second mortgage to pay them off. Low and behold I am ranked 4th for my keyword. How could this be? Especially since the 3 sites listed above me don't even have the keyword in their title. FYI: I did make changes to my site taking it out of frames entirely and redesigning the site structure overall. All of my pages are interlinked and I use a global header that can bring visitors in and out of the site and back to my home page quite easily. I also use the same global header for my products listed in Miva, which is about 180 items. Is it possible that by making these changes I pleased the Yahoo gods?

Jill: At times, Yahoo! does change their algorithm for ranking sites. This way you're never stuck at any one ranking forever (and yet there's nothing you can do to make it go up or down either). Basically, once you have an accurate description, you will move up and down depending on their algorithm at any given time. There's been some talk in the SEO forums that your Google PageRank (PR) can play a part in your Yahoo! directory ranking also, but I haven't studied it enough to fully support that theory. Those that have noticed it say that the sites with a higher Google PageRank are usually listed first in the Yahoo! directory.

As to the changes you made to your actual site, they wouldn't affect your Yahoo! ranking because it is not affected by changes to your site. Yahoo! is simply a directory and the title and description they have in their database are all they have to go on. That said, if your changes affected your PageRank somehow, it's possible that this could have been what pulled your site up. Click-through popularity is also taken into account at Yahoo! and that could possibly have been the cause. (If lots of people click your site at Yahoo! and stay there awhile, it *may* boost your Yahoo! ranking.)

Jim: I use the Google toolbar to check page rankings and am stumped by this one. Throughout the day my PageRank consistently changes, sometimes it's a PageRank of 3 and sometimes it's a PR 4 for my index page. The other pages have a PR of 2, and currently I come up in Google on page 7 or page 8 of the search engine results for my keyword. As of yet I have no links pointing back to my site and I am trying to establish some good credible links.

Jill: All of that PageRank shifting is the inaccuracy of the Google Toolbar. It's simply a best "guesstimate" of your approximate PageRank. Many times (especially with inner pages), the PR number is a total guess based on the other pages within your site. For instance, you can create a brand-new page that Google doesn't have indexed, and the toolbar will still show it with a PR of whatever the other pages of your site are. It doesn't mean anything, however. I recommend not even looking at or worrying about PageRank. Please read my "PageRank Mania" article for my thoughts on PageRank.

Jim: My thinking is that I can't achieve a good ranking until I get some good links pointing back.

Jill: That's not necessarily true. Perhaps it is for the very competitive one-word keywords; however, have you done any keyword research? There could be hundreds of related words that you could easily get top rankings with. Of course, it's always important to build up credible links to your site, so I'm definitely not discouraging you there!

Jim: I'm thinking of investing $100 to purchase the reciprocal links software [name deleted], which supposedly makes it a lot easier to contact webmasters and track links pointing in to your site. Any thoughts?

Jill: I don't know anything about that software, but personally, I think your money would be better spent on hiring a link-building specialist. For $300-$400, he or she will find you 20 or 30 high-quality links which should bring in traffic in their own right, plus help out your link popularity. You can read more about how to initiate a link-building campaign here.

Jim: Also, I was under the impression that when creating new pages or redesigns it is better for the engines to find you than to resubmit.

Jill: It's not so much that it's *better*, it's more that resubmitting is fairly useless. The search engines pretty much seem to ignore any submissions that aren't paid submissions these days. You can submit all you want, but it won't speed anything up. I occasionally still submit a newly optimized page to Google, but only because it makes me feel like I am taking a proactive approach. In my heart, I know it's really just going straight into Google's trash bin!

Jim: So I did [resubmit], but when I looked at Google one day it had my new site title and description listed on page 7. Then I looked over the past several days and it is going back to my old title and description and the new index page title/description is no longer listed. Why are they using a cached copy which is no longer active?

Jill: This happens to many sites and new pages. It's nothing to be alarmed about. It seems that Google's standard procedure is to get your new page listed right away, but then it's gone again in a few days. Within another few weeks it's usually back in. The good thing is, when it's first in, you can get a good idea of how it will rank when it eventually does "stick." If you've done a good job with your keyword-rich copy and Title tag, you'll usually find that it has moved up quite a few notches in the results.

Jim: Dmoz has a section that my site needs to get listed in. Problem is, it needs an editor. How did the other sites get in without an editor? Anyway, I think I know the answer but should I try submitting to another section only to get rejected? I tried submitting, but since it has no editor I feel it will never get reviewed. I also tried becoming an editor for that section but was rejected. Thoughts?

Jill: In all likelihood, your submissions were bumped up to the editor in the category above yours. But you are right that it is often harder to get listed when you're submitting to a category without an editor.

If the site fits within the other section, then go for it. What I have heard from my ODP editor friends is that they get sooooooooo much spam and crap sites that it can take them forever to wade through it all. And on top of that, the sites that might be good don't always submit good descriptions. They're usually full of marketing hype or are too long, or have spelling errors or whatever. When editors get those kinds of submissions, they're apt to ignore them because they take a lot of work on the editor's part. If they get a submission that they don't have to change in the least, i.e., one that's short, to the point, and not hypey or full of keywords, then it's apt to get added faster. Of course, they have to be able to find your submission among all the spam submissions they get. So nothing is a given where ODP is concerned.

From what I understand, it can be pretty difficult to become an editor. They prefer that people start in a category that is very deep within the directory. You're more apt to get accepted if you apply to one of those. If you do good work there, you can then work your way up to an upper-level category.

Jim: I purchased WebPosition Gold (WPG) several weeks ago and haven't used it much yet as I can't seem to find enough hours in a day left. I understand the tool and what they recommend, but have questions. It seems that it is designed to optimize pages for you to rank well in search engines, but I don't want to create doorway pages as I am hearing negative comments. I am also a firm believer of creating pages that are user friendly, and receive numerous comments from shoppers, which are the ones I want to rank well. So how do I optimize pages to rank well in all the engines? i.e., index is optimized for AOL, now I want index to be optimized for MSN but the criteria is different for MSN. How do I optimize the same page to do well for all the engines?

Jill: I personally love WPG, and have been using it since it first came out many moons ago. However, I don't use their PageGenerator function. I'm a firm believer that nothing can create a page for the search engines better than a human being. To me, optimizing a page is an art form, not a science. However, some people need to have numbers and percentages and all that, and for them, the PageGenerator helps them understand how many times they should use their keyword phrases within their copy (plus a whole lot of other stuff). Personally, my feeling is that you just write the copy so that it makes sense, and do the same with your tags. But that method doesn't work for everyone. I feel that WPG is a great tool for checking your ranking in the search engines, and I couldn't live without it. But that's the only function I currently use it for.

As to creating different pages for different search engines, I say pooh to that! Every single search engine in the whole world wants the same kinds of pages. That is, pages that are full of great content and are useful to those who visit them. I'll repeat my mantra once again:

If you create great pages that are professionally written and that "naturally" utilize your keyword phrases within their visible copy, PLUS create great Title tags and Meta tags to match, your pages *will* rank high in all the search engines. Oh yes, they will!

Sure, there are other factors such as having outside links. But if you're targeting the most appropriate keyword phrases and you do it through pages that the search engine can easily find, you will get high rankings. You don't think that Google wants good pages and AOL wants bad pages or anything like that now, do you? What would they want that would be different? They all want pages that are relevant to their searchers' queries. So all you have to do is make your pages relevant to user queries and you'll be all set!

Jim: Lastly, is it better to have shallow pages in the same path as the index page, or is it ok to have the pages one level below the index? i.e., my-site.com/pages/facts.htm or my-site.com/facts.htm. Thoughts?

Jill: From what I've seen and heard, it's my opinion that the closer to the root directory your files are, the better chance they'll have of ranking high. You may have noticed that Google gives a higher PageRank to pages in the root directory than to those in a subfolder. That's why I believe closest to the root is better. Also, AltaVista mentions in their Webmaster FAQ that pages should be as close to the root as possible. That said, if you do have them in subfolders, I don't think it will make all that much difference; given the choice, however, I would use the path structure of "my-site.com/facts.htm." (And I did see that article in another publication recently that says the opposite, but I just don't buy it.)

Jim: If you find the time to answer these questions then expect a box of chocolate truffles, ok?

Warmest Regards,

Jim Tarabocchia
Founder and President
www.Just-Binoculars.com
Net Shoppe, LLC

Jill: Hope that earns the candy!