“Take a look at our website to get more information! The address is on my business card.” Using your website as an extension of your sales force is about the last thing you want to use your website for. A website is NOT an extension of your sales force; it actually is quite the opposite.

What’s the goal of your website? Often the reply to this question is: “To show what we do.” If that is your answer too, you couldn’t be more wrong. The goal of your website is to get visitors to contact you. Your website should be the first impression a client gets of your company and it should convince him to contact you for more information or even to already discuss a purchase or contract.

Your sales people are actually the ones that follow up on the first impression a potential client gets from the website. Leads obtained from your website make the lives of your sales people easier. They will be standing in line for leads obtained through the website.

Why are these leads so powerful? Well, chances are that they “found” your website through a search engine and that means they were searching for your product or service. They want what you provide; otherwise they wouldn’t have found your website.

That being said, obviously your website needs to be set up for the goal to have visitors contact you. Otherwise they will simply visit and leave.

Search Engine Optimization is not enough. You also need to optimize for the goals of your website. The high rankings obtained, often hard worked for or they came at a price by hiring a search engine optimization company, should convert into sales.

Don’t explain, but lead!

Biggest mistake you can make in your website is to explain what “we” do. Expecting the visitor to come to the conclusion that your company is the best because you explained all the benefits of your product or service is just an ego booster at first and a disappointment later: “Why nobody contacts us???”

Help the visitor by first understanding what he wants. You can do so by focusing on the needs of the visitor. You can derive these from what your product or service provides to a customer. Then show what possible solutions are and that you have them (very important part that is also often forgotten since it seems so obvious.) The next step will be to invite the visitor to contact you.

SEO, text, images, links (site navigation), all these factors are involved to achieve the goal of the website. If you don’t have the resources to do these things your self, you can find a company to do this for you. Any company that focuses on beauty should not be hired. Any company that focuses on high rankings only, should not be hired. Ask about what they think is the goal of your website and how to achieve these goals. If you like what you hear, you may have a good chance on achieving your goals.

Yahoo got more pages indexed than Google. And an enormous amount more. It seems that the Yahoo index is more than twice the size of the Google index. Recently this was also announced by Yahoo, even though they generally don’t comment on index sizes.

However, a simple search for the word “the” in both engines shows a huge difference. Where Google comes up with approx. 3,320,000,000 results, Yahoo spits out the huge amount of 10,200,000,000 results.

Ungoogle like, a couple of weeks later Google responded. Not by word, but in silence. An enormous crawl of the net was performed and even though it still says “Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages” on the google home page, it is obvious that they have indexed a lot more pages.

These new pages actually were ignored by Google before but it seems that the spider rules of google have been changed in order to increase the index. Obviously this could not happen unnoticed. And noticing it we did. Many sites are seeing reduced traffic since Friday, August 19th, 2005.

Considering that Google has special rules for newly indexed pages, (Simply said: no PR so PR is not taken into account when determining the position of the page*) you can see lots of PR0 pages rank high that weren’t there before. Some of the sites I monitor show a decrease in traffic of about 20 to 30%. If Google indexed about 20 to 30% more pages then this explains the decrease in traffic. These new pages get found, but the number of searches has not increased. In other words, the amount of traffic Google generates now is spread over 20 to 30% more pages. High ranking sites lose traffic (especially content rich sites) to all these new pages that have been indexed. In a next PR update this lost traffic should be recovered partly I believe, though all these new pages also contain new links so it is a swag (Silly Wild Ass Guess) to predict what will happen in the next PR update.

It is interesting to see how Google now made the fairly commercial decision to respond to Yahoo’s increased index. A leader sometimes needs to punch a challenger in the face in order to maintain the respect of the group. They did this, though for now it seems to be just a small punch, which makes me believe we can expect more from Google.

*Controversial, not generally accepted, theory of mine.

Mr. Ethical: There is no need for link building if you know how to optimize a website properly. It’s all on-site work and some basic submissions to some directories.

Mr. Links: Yeah that’s what it starts with, but you have to admit that once you’re done with on-site optimization and the results are not there yet, you need to do link building in order to increase the rankings.

Mr. Ethical: Nothing of the sort, Mr. Links. Links will come by them selves if you have enough content that will attract links naturally.

Mr. Links: So how are these people going to find your website if links are what you need to be found in the first place? Those couple of basic submissions won’t give you high enough rankings, if at all, to be found by people that want to link to your content. It’s a chicken and the egg problem.

Mr. Ethical: Most websites already have a bunch of back links so that’s not really an issue. All you have to do is optimize the site and eventually enough people will find the site to get even higher rankings.

Mr. Links: But what about a site that is in a very competitive market and most top sites have many back links already? Wouldn’t you want to get some more links?

Mr. Ethical: Link schemes are unethical.

Mr. Links: Unethical link schemes are unethical.

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Mr. Ethical: Natural links are ethical.

Mr. Links: And links obtained through other types of ethical marketing?

Mr. Ethical: Other types of ethical marketing?

Mr. Links: Yes, advertising for example. Isn’t advertising a very natural business?

Mr. Ethical: Bought links are unethical because links need to be relevant.

Mr. Links: What about relevant bought links?

Mr. Ethical: Natural links don’t cost anything.

Mr. Links: And how much time does it take for links to naturally occur?

Mr. Ethical: Doesn’t matter. You have to do everything ethically. And obviously you don’t know how to optimize a website because you think you need links to get high rankings.

Mr. Links: But you do too. You just said that most sites already have a bunch of back links. In fact, you said that natural links will help you get higher rankings. So you actually agree that for high rankings you do need links.

Mr. Ethical: Everything needs to be done ethical.

Mr. Links: Does that include selecting clients that are in not the most competitive markets?

Mr. Links: Never mind answering that.

How to do search engine optimization is one of the best kept secrets in the world. Even though you would think it is all out there in forums and other websites, when you try to figure it out, you will find you can’t find the forest for the trees.

Let me put it plain and simple. The secret of search engine optimization is not about keywords, or titles, or meta keyword tags, or meta descriptions, or heading tags, or keyword density, or alt attributes, or what ever other on-the-page factor you can find. Even links aren’t the secret.

The real secret of search engine optimization is Harmony!

Harmony between all the factors I just mentioned and many more other factors as well. And that is exactly why it is not easy to find a great SEO company for your website. Every SEO can talk about the importance of a title, or any of the other factors, but try finding one that talks about how it all works together.

Harmony is the real power of SEO and it needs to be supported by lots of hard work, especially focused on link building. But here too harmony comes into play.

Many SEO’s that I talk with about harmony tell me that of course I am right and that it is so obvious it isn’t worth mentioning. But the truth is that not that many people (SEO’s included) are able to bring real harmony to their pages and website.

Putting keywords in title, meta keywords, meta description and heading tags, that’s easy. But that’s just the most basic form of harmony in a web page. Just think of how keywords fit into text found in the title, description, heading tags and the copy. Should you just place the keywords in there somehow, or may it be better to be a bit more considerate when choosing what to write in all these places?

What about topical structure? Is your site completely structured according to a logical topical structure? There are so many indirect factors that are as powerful as link building. And it is hardly possible to put it into words as it is more an art than a science to get it right.

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Peter Faber is the Implementation Director of www.i-brane.com; a search engine optimization company located in Brazil with a focus on Brazil, the USA and Europe. He also has his own SEO Blog in www.seo-works.com.

Google doesn’t stop innovating their search engine, and there where others try to follow, Google is not just 1 step ahead, but 10 steps ahead. Their latest innovation, which actually may already be in place for a year or longer, can be found in the patent: “Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data.”

The abstract of the patent is: “A system identifies a document and obtains one or more types of history data associated with the document. The system may generate a score for the document based, at least in part, on the one or more types of history data“.

This article has the goal to give a simplified representation of this patent” This article is the opinion of the writer and following recommendation in this article is done at your own risk.

Google’s search results have been increasingly difficult to explain and many theories have been developed on what is going on. Most popular is the “sand box” theory, which says that a new site is put in a virtual sand box and has to wait until it has aged before obtaining high rankings. This patent has some excellent information that can explain this phenomenon.

Information Retrieval

The information that this invention of Google is claimed to retrieve based on the historical data are:

1. Age/Time
2. Change
3. Trends

A score is calculated based on the above 3 factors which can then, at least partially, be used to rank the selected pages.

Historical Data

The patent describes a huge amount of historical data. The following is an overview of most items for which historical data can be measured:

• Pages/sites
• Links
• Anchor Texts
• Content
• Query
• Traffic
• Ranking
• User
• Domain

Ranking Based On Information Retrieved From Historical Data

The patent describes in quite a lot of detail how selected pages are ranked based on the information retrieved from historical data. This chapter will describe the basic logic applied.

Age/Time

Of all historical data a date of inception is used to determine 4 important values:

• Age
• Average Age
• Date
• Average Date

These factors can be determined for pages, links, anchor text, content, topics, queries, etc. Comparing the age or date of a page to the average of the site for example tells the search engine if this information is relatively new or old. Comparing the average age or date of a page to the average age or date of all pages selected for a query (keyword phrase) tells the search engine if the page is relatively new or old. This information can be used to rank the selected pages.

Comparing to an average has the advantage that there is no preset base of rules that determine the rankings of a page. For one query 6 months may be considered new (product descriptions for example) while for another page 6 days may be considered old (news items for example). It all depends on the average age.

This same logic applies to links. In order to determine how popular a page or site is, the average age of all back links tells the search engine if the popularity of the page is recent or not. It makes sense that if most back links have been obtained 4 years ago and that hardly anybody has been interested to link to this page/site since then, that the page is not as popular as the existing back links would suggest.

The patent goes even as far as determining age factors for anchor texts of links.

Change

Information changes over time. Opinions change, knowledge changes, popularity changes, etc. Like mentioned before, a page that was popular 4 years ago, may be totally forgotten now, but still have most of its backlinks that were obtained when the page actually was popular. However, if this page all the sudden becomes popular again, and new back links start showing up, the average age of the backlinks will remain high. This will prevent the page of ranking high.

Detecting changes is crucial to give old information the chance to rank high again. Consequently, the lack of change can be a reason to lower the rank of a page.

Trends

Even though comparing to averages is a great way to get information about freshness, it fails to recognize smaller events like a sudden increase in popularity of a page. Though detecting changes do help to recognize smaller events, more information can be obtained by detecting trends.

Sudden increases of popularity can be caused by seasonal events like Christmas or the Super Bowl. For this reason the search engine will try to determine trends within pages links, anchor text, content, topics, queries, etc.

Detecting trends makes it possible to rank pages higher that would not be ranked high with the standard ranking methods or with comparing to average ages or dates. Google has recognized here a very important fact of information: Relevance and importance of information is (con)temporary.

Detecting Spam Using Historical Data

Having all kinds of historical data available can be used to detect search engine spam. Unexpected events that happen to a site can be an indication of spam. Obviously a strong improvement of 1 single factor would not be a direct indication of spam, generally multiple factors are showing strange behavior when a site is using spam to increase rankings. It would not be in Google’s interest to penalize a site for advertising. However, excessive advertising in sites/pages that are totally unrelated will not do your site any good.

What to do?

Keep links related
Related links matter, unrelated links can be considered spam.

Build links on a continuous moderate bases
As the patent describes, the average age of your backlinks should not be too high. It is therefore wise to continue adding backlinks to secure a reasonable average age of all your backlinks. How many you need to add over time depends on your market.

Spread links over multiple sites (unique backlinks)
A very important factor is the number of unique websites in your backlinks. Google seems to put a strong emphasis on this factor.

Add new content on a regular basis
Depending on how much need there is for new content, it is wise to add content on a regular basis. It keeps the site young so to say.

Be better than the average
Very important is to be better than the average, but don’t overdo it. It would be expensive and unnecessary.

Focus on seasonal events
A good way to increase the success of your website is to set up text link campaigns for seasonal events. Start your advertising campaign 2 to 3 months before the actual event to give Google the time to find the links and update your site’s information with it. After the event you can let these links go again.

I´m not sure yet how I will develop this blog. In any way, I´m no longer providing SEO services through this website. I joined forces with 2 people with expertise in finance and sales. No more consultancy from home but a from a real office.

When our new websites are ready I will publish them here. Yes,. websiteS because we will have 1 for our local market Brazil and one in english for the rest of the world. We should be easy to find after a while,.

For now, the previously available information is still findable through the menu above, but some things will be taken out. The previous blog I had in the site was unfortunately not very well protected against comment spam and so the comment spammers had the time of their life and spammed me with over 500 comments. So that has all been deleted and I am now working with worldpress. Probably the king of all blogs.