Google has always maintained that for a site to appear in “pages from that country” results (i.e. - pages from India or Pages from UK), it needs to be hosted in that country. This meant that for a site to appear in the search results of Google.co.in with the “Pages from India” option selected, it needed to be hosted in India.
A few months back, this criterion was diluted and sites that were either hosted in India or had a country specific domain (.co.in, .in) would both show up in the country specific results.

Since the last few days, we’ve noticed another change. Sites which are neither hosted in India nor have a country specific TLD are now showing up in the Google “pages from India” results if their WHOIS data shows that the registrant is from India. This just shows that Google is not only reviewing but also giving much more importance to the WHOIS data.

So what happens if one uses an identity protector and does not reveal his/her name in the WHOIS? Also what happens to a TLD with a foreign registration address (i.e. - Suppose I own a .co.in domain but my registrant address shows I stay in the US)? There will be a lot of people who must’ve noticed the recent Google changes and must be working out ways to use these factors to improve their site’s search engine placement… The future sure looks interesting!!!

There has been a lot of discussion on what determines if your site is displayed in the “pages from a region” result page of Google. i.e. - what determines if a site will show up in the “pages from UK” or “pages from India” Google results?

While we’ve been pretty sure that your site qualifies for listing under this section only if your site pages are hosted in a particular country, we’ve noticed that there is still a lot of discussion going on with people speculating whether other sources determine listing.

Another question that I am frequently asked is whether a .com domain can rank on a regional Google result i.e. - A result page on google.co.in or google.co.uk. There had been an issue about ranking a .com in a regional Google result page, but I believe that that has been sorted out in January this year. A major factor that determines if your site ranks high on Google.co.uk or Google.co.in is your WhoIS data and not the .com or .co.uk or extension of your domain.

Anyways, since there is still a lot of noise out there with a lot of people speculating, we have now decided to go out there and run a comprehensive test to determine the major factors that dictate if your site will appear higher on a regional search result page and if a site will show up in the country specific page results. Stay tuned for more…

I read a very good article (http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/stop_the_slaughter_of_innocent_copy/) on SEO copywriting in the wordtracker newsletter today. Aptly titled “Stop the slaughter of Innocent Copy”, this article talks about how great copy is destroyed due to keyword stuffing.

I completely agree with the author that people today are obsessed with stuffing in keywords in the text of their pages. The obsession with keyword stuffing generally means that we’re reading the keyword being targeted 3 times in each sentence. The author mentions several great ways of incorporating keywords in your website content without making it look terrible to your user.

I think that every aspiring SEO copywriter should read this article before optimizing that first page of website content.

These days, I have been hearing the term website optimisation quite frequently. Most of the times people use the term website optimisation instead of search engine optimization (SEO). However, I tend to disagree there.

I think that a website optimisation campaign should include all aspects of website improvement, be it making it search engine friendly or making is better from a user’s perspective. Some of the important things that a website optimisation campaign should include are
1 - Code review to identify and remove spider stoppers
2 - Code review from browser compatibility
3 - Internal link structure review to improve indexing and ease of navigation for a user
4 - Review of the conversion process to increase the conversion rate

Further, a good web analytics application with well defined rules to track conversions and goals should be implemented. website optimisation campaigns, ideally, should be dynamic in nature i.e. - They need to be continuously reviewed and goals redefined depending on the data gathered by the web analytics software implemented.

I often get asked about web site submission to Google. Most people believe that submitting your site your Google ensures search engine rankings on arguably the best search engine today.

Well, the Google spider crawls through the internet and finds majority of sites via links from other sites. So optimizing your site and getting some great incoming links from directories and other related sites would ensure that your site is indexed by Google. If you still want to do a web site submission to Google, you can do that using their online form at http://www.google.com/addurl/.

One does not need to submit each individual page to Google. Submission of your web site’s front page will do that job. However, you need to make sure that your inner pages are linked well from the front page.

Another method to submit your web site to Google is through Google Sitemaps (now a part of Google’s webmaster tools). Web site submission to Google using sitemaps requires an XML file to be generated. This XML sitemap file contains all the URLs that you want crawled. It can also contain other data like the last modified date for each page, change frequency of each page and the priority of the page. Priority is the relative importance of that page as compared to the other pages of the site.

I’ll discuss the Google webmaster tools in details in another post. Hope this post has helped clear some myths of web site submissions to Google and helped understand the basics of indexing by Google.

Today, search engines play a very important role in getting traffic for a website. Even big sites like Amazon and ebay are trying to improve their search engine placement by working on their internal site structure and pages.

A case in point that shows how important search engine rankings are for bigger sites is ebay. WayBackmachine shows that the title of Ebay’s front page in Jan 2001 was “eBay - Your Personal Trading Community”. Compare this with today’s title that incorporates their primary keywords - “eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices”.

Further, the ebay product pages are now all without querystrings (i.e. - all the pages have their URL rewritten thus enhancing spideribility).

There are a few very simple things that can be done to improve your search engine placement -

1 - Make sure you have unique titles on every page. The title should be crisp but should contain your keyword.

2 - Have a short meta description in place. Again this concise description should contain your keyword.

3 - Its best to use text links to link all your pages. If you have a flash or JavaScript navigation panel, try to link those pages using text links that can be placed at the bottom of your page.

4 - Write unique content. Spiders like to see unique content that offers information about your products and services.

5 - Upload pages close to the root directory. A simple site structure with pages close to the root (www.domain.com/directory/, www.domain.com/directory2/) enhances chances of getting spidered quickly.

6 - Get links from similar sites and link to sites that will offer value to your users

7 - Submit to DMoz and other major directories

Though just doing the above will not help you get search engine placements for really competitive keywords, they are steps essential for every site and would give you a good advantage over other sites right from the day your site is launched.

How many times have you cursed the major search engines because they show your site’s listing with its DMOZ title and description? Most of these DMOZ listings are years old and more often than not don’t describe your site the way you want it. This generally leads to your site losing out on quite a lot of clicks.

To counter this issue Google & MSN introduced a tag -
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”

Having this tag in the HEAD section of your page meant that the search engines will not use the DMOZ titles and description when displaying your site in their search results.

Now Yahoo has announced that they will start using this tag. Having
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP” or META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOODP” in the HEAD section will now ensure that the DMOZ attributes are not displayed in the yahoo results.

Personally, I would like yahoo to introduce a similar tag that would inform Yahoo not to display the Yahoo Directory Description for the site’s listing. I guess we’ll need to wait before that becomes a reality…

As a SEO consultant, one often gets asked whether it is better to aim for a select few primary high-volume keywords or aim to get higher search engine ranking for a wide range of secondary keywords.

Well, my answer generally is that, while you have to aim to get primary keywords up in the search engine results pages, it would be unwise to restrict your search engine optimization efforts to a select number of keywords. Along with each primary keyword, there should always be a bunch of variations that may individually not amount to much traffic, but together will result in sizeable amount of good traffic. Further, the lower competition for these secondary keywords will ensure faster results.

While, generic keywords tend to bring in much more traffic than specific keywords, it is often the specific keywords that amount to better return on investment.

Not convinced? Read on…

A travel site gets 40% of its traffic from very generic keywords. And by generic I mean really generic… couple of million competing pages types. These were the keywords that we specifically wanted to improve search engine ranking of the site for. But along with these keywords, we worked on creating content that targeted a couple of 100 secondary keywords. Once ranking on search engines, each of these secondary keywords, individually amount to hardly any traffic, but together they now contribute to over 60% of the search engine traffic of the site.

Further, since these keywords are highly specific, the users tend to know what they want and this results in much better conversions compared to generic high volume terms.

Had we, like many search engine optimization companies, worked on only the top 20/30/50 keywords, this site would have lost valuable traffic.

So now are you convinced that ignoring low traffic low competition keywords in an SEO campaign can result in you missing a lot of good quality traffic???

Pagerank, in plain vanilla terms, is the function of the incoming links to a site. That means that essentially, the higher the number of links the higher is your pagerank. Of course there are other factors like the pagerank of the page where your link is placed and the number of outgoing links on that page that affect the end value of your site’s pagerank.

However, the theory that higher page rank means higher rankings and better search engine placement is absolutely false. If that was the case, then Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and all other PR 10, 9 and 8 websites would be ranking for every keyword searched for.

Hence, it would be a folly to aim for just a Pagerank, without focusing primarily on optimizing the site for key terms that will result in quality traffic.