~~~High Search Engine Rankings~~~
From: Kelly
Jill,
I just found your website through one of the About Forums that I visit
weekly, and have enjoyed your articles. I have been doing my own
submissions for about 1.5 years now, and use most of the techniques
that you say to use, and have had relatively good success. My "sales
copy" is not long enough, but I can live with it (averaging 350 -500
unique daily, depending on time of year).
The question that I have today, I could not find on your site. I am
currently offering a program to generate websites for coin dealers,
and I put in an option to link the pages by buttons (images). Do
search engines have problems following links that are in images?
I feel that they do not, and here is my reasoning. 1. a spider or
robot cannot read the page that we visually see, they have to read the
HTML. 2. a HREF statement is the same whether it is attached to a
graphic or plain text. It is read the same, and works the same. If I
am mistaken, please let me know.
I also have one other question. Are absolute links better than
relative links? I have never given this to much thought until now. If
you are not sure what absolute and relative links are, here goes. An
absolute link is the full address of the page: (http://www.TheDomainName.com/FlyingEagleCents.htm). Relative
link is one where you give it the location of the page from where you
are at. i.e.: (FlyingEagleCents.htm)
Thanks
Kelly
~~~Jill's Response~~~
Hey Kelly,
Great questions!
It has been my experience that the search engines have no problem
following links that are referenced with a graphic. I agree with your
reasoning; the spiders read the HTML and an HREF link is an HREF link
regardless if it's used around text or an image. Plus, when using
images in your navigation, you can also use keyphrase-rich alt tags
(where appropriate) for even more of a boost. The only time you might
find buttons to be a problem is if they're part of an image map or are
created through a java applet. Then they are not spiderable. The
only benefit you might get if you use text links instead (or in
addition) is being able to put keyphrases into the hyperlinks. You
might think about putting some navigational text links at the top or
bottom of your page in addition to the buttons, for maximum benefit!
With regard to your second question, in my experience, you can use
either relative or absolute links. I've never studied it, but both
ways appear to work fine. Most of my sites use relative links and
have not had any trouble being spidered. I've also used absolute
links at times, and again, they don't seem to have any problems.
Good luck!
Jill
Guess what? We've got an extra Q&A for you today. I recently sent a
post into
I-Design about keeping your high rankings when redesigning your site. Since this is such an
important topic that we haven't covered here, I figured it would make
a nice addition to today's issue. Enjoy!
Jill
~~~~Extra Bonus Question!~~~~
From: Duane Forth
I have a home-built site for my hobby business. Thanks largely, I
believe, to following advice from outstanding forums like this one, I
do remarkably well with the search engines for my prime keywords (bike
lights, bicycle lights, mountain bike lights, etc.). I'm getting ready
to overhaul my current plain and simple site but I'm afraid that I'll
do something that will jeopardize my standings with the SEs, where the
majority of my traffic originates.
How much latitude do you think I have, or am I fairly secure because
of my site's age and the links to it?
Thanks. Ride Happy.
Duane Forth
Seize the Night with
Trail Head Mountain Bike Lights
http://www.trailheadlights.com/
~~~Jill's Response~~~
Duane, this is a great question, and one I wish more Web site owners
would ask before attempting a site redesign. I've seen lots of clients
take a high-ranking site and totally mess up its search engine
optimization because they wanted a *better* design. Where the search
engines are concerned, simple is usually better. However, keeping your
site looking fresh and up-to-date is also important and we SEO geeks
do acknowledge that!
Here are some redesign tips to help you maintain your existing high
search engine rankings:
1. Keep your existing file names. Whatever you do, don't delete
current files for new files, i.e., if you have a high-ranking page
that is named bikelights.htm then do not delete that page and create a
new one called bl.htm. If you do this, all of the links to
bikelights.htm will be dead and eventually all of the search engines
will delete this page from their databases. Creating redirects won't
help much because these won't contain the information the search
engines use to determine rankings. Once the redirected pages get
crawled, the high ranking for that page will surely be lost. If you
listen to only one of these tips, listen to this one!
2. Do not change your existing high-ranking site into a highly
graphical or all-flash site with little-to-no visible text on the
page. Keep your existing copy on each high-ranking page as much as you
can. Most likely, you have a lot of good keyword-rich content on your
pages that has enabled you to rank highly in the first place. Don't
change it now! Sure, if you reread it and don't like the way it
sounds, or it's inaccurate, then by all means edit it. However, be
sure that you keep your keyphrases intact throughout any new copy you
may write. Never forget that a big reason you have high rankings is
due to the visible text on the page. Try not to mess with it!
3. Don't change a non-framed site to a framed site, unless you are
well aware of how to optimize a framed site for the search engines. A
framed site doesn't have to be certain death for your site, but there
are special considerations to keep in mind in order for them to rank
highly. There's more info on this in my article,
"Getting Your Framed Site Listed With Search Engines".
4. Keep all existing Title and Meta tags intact. Be sure to copy and
paste your old Titles and Metas into your new design. This is kind of
a no-brainer, but I've seen designers totally forget about this in the
excitement of putting forth a new design. If you did tweak your
visible copy a bit as in number two above, then it's okay to tweak
your tags accordingly. Just be careful, because you don't want to do
anything to mess up your existing rankings.
Also, don't forget to go through and add keyphrase-rich image Alt
tags, where appropriate, and if you previously used Header tags such
as <H2> or <H3>, try to use these in the new design also. There are
ways of doing this with CSS that keep the fonts from being too large
on the page. (Read Shirley Kaiser's article, "Designing for Search Engines and Stars" and scroll down to the section on Creative Style Sheets. Actually, be sure
to read this entire article, since it discusses many useful search
engine friendly design techniques!)
5. Older pages seem to rank higher in many search engines; therefore,
don't resubmit your changed pages to the engines. Since you're already
ranking well, let those previous rankings carry you for as long as
they can. Eventually, the search engines will refresh and your new
site will get crawled, but don't rush the process. Don't worry about
it too much. If you did everything correctly, your rankings should
remain the same or perhaps be even better!
All in all, you shouldn't be afraid to redesign your site. A more
professional look can encourage other sites to link to your page.
This alone will bring more traffic, plus it can possibly help out your
search engine rankings through the wonders of "link popularity!"
Good luck with it!
Jill
~~~Send Us Your Questions~~~
If you have questions about online copywriting or search engine optimization (or both!), just zip us an email to questions@rankwrite.com. We've had some folks ask if their question
was "too basic" to be printed - and you don't have to worry about
that! There are no "stupid" search engine optimization or copywriting
questions, so ask away!
