What You Should Expect From A Manchester SEO Professional

Speaking as someone who provides search engine optimization services, I can tell you there is a lot of confusion regarding the role of a Manchester SEO professional. Much of this results from the acronyms and phrases used in the field. Businesses will pick them up and throw them around without really knowing what they mean. Even worse, many businesses do not know what the really want or even that they should be asking the question.

A Manchester SEO professional can fill a number of roles for a business. The simplest situation is one in which the business simply wants the Manchester SEO wizard to crank up the rankings. This sounds obvious, but rarely is the case. Instead, the business is really looking for improved rankings and a little more.

It never fails to occur. A client just wants you to move them up in the rankings. You come to an agreement on price, suggest some changes to the site and then head off to build links, etc. A week later, the client is calling with questions on conversions, purchasing banner ads and so on. Next week, they call with questions about pay-per-click and so on. This is all fine, but the hand holding can be very distracting and frustrating.

When retaining a person or business to handle your search engine optimization efforts, it is important to step back and think about what you really need. Are you looking just for top rankings or do you want insight into your site? Are you, in fact, willing to take some advice, particularly if it is critical? Clarifying this with the Manchester SEO person from the outset makes things run much smoother and keeps feelings from being ruffled.

Some companies believe they are retaining a person to simply get them high in the rankings. Others believe they are retaining a person to get them high in the rankings and advise them on their products, site, etc. The only correct answer is what you agree to when the pen is put to paper at the outset of the agreement. As a person on the Manchester SEO side, I only ask that you be clear in indicating what you want from the outset.

Some simply say that search engine optimization is the generic term for making sure your site is optimized to appear as one of the top ranking web sites on a search.

Others get more detailed with their definition and say search engine optimization is the term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a web site to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken.

A number of factors are important when optimizing a web site, including the content and structure of the web site’s copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process.

Is it important? That also depends on which definition you believe and who you ask that question to. If you ask someone who runs a business and charges for search engine optimization, they will tell you it is the most important thing you will ever do for your website.

At each Birmingham SEO website, they will tell you they are the number 1 Birmingham SEO company on the web, even though each of them has a completely different method of optimizing your website.

If you ask many self-appointed webmaster gurus in some of the webmaster forums, they will tell you the same thing, then each one will tell you a different way to do it and they will all disagree on the most important aspects of search engine optimization.

So the confusion continues for the average user and the Birmingham SEO companies love it that way. If the consumer doesnt understand what you are doing, you dont really have to do very much and just say you are doing a lot. Most of them would never work on your website on a contingency payment plan, one based on actual results and performance. Some say money back guaranteed, but read the fine print.

A lot of these businesses are based on the fact that people who are new to the web and even some of those who have been online for awhile do not know what search engine optimization is. They know that with more and more people coming onto the web for the first time, their business is secure. They can continue to tell people that without their service the website will fail.

Im not saying all search engine optimization companies are rip-offs. Some of them really do their best to get good rankings for their clients and know what they are doing. A lot of them still really believe that search engine optimization is the key to success on the web.

It isnt. Hows that for a statement? I know a lot of web designers will disagree. I know a lot of Birmingham SEO companies will disagree. But simply put, search engine optimization of your WebPages is not the most important thing you need to do to succeed on the web.

Lets break down some of the things that are included in the phrase search engine optimization.

Metatags are one of the things these gurus tell you is important. Metatags are all but dead. Search engines, especially google, ignore metatags for the most part.

Having them in does not hurt you, but go do a search on any topic besides web design or search engine optimization, etc. and youll find that IF the websites at the top of the search results have metatags at all, they usually only have the description and keywords metatags.

Well they also have the title tag, which is sometimes referred to as a metatag, but it is actually the only metatag you need to have.

Keyword Optimization is something the gurus will tell you is very important. Some will tell you they know the exact percentage of text that should be your keywords. Yes, keywords are very important. Do they know what percentage the search engines will want to read for the best results? No.

When writing copy for your website, you must be conscious of the keywords you wish to promote. Dont pick too many keywords and try to optimize each page of your website for twenty different things. If you do, it will not be relevant for any of them. That isnt guru talk, thats just plain old fashioned common sense.

Remember that search engines crawl web pages, not web sites. If you choose just one or two keywords per webpage that you wish that page to be optimized for, then you can optimize the page easily and write text the user will want to actually read.

Write your sales text the way you would with only the user in mind and with making sales in mind. Then go back and reread the page.

Find places where you can add in your keyword without destroying the flow you created when you wrote the text in the first place.

Now, do you need to hire an Birmingham SEO company to do that? Do you know your product? Do you know how to sell your product? Then you need to write the text. If you do not wish to write the text, then hire a writer. You still dont need a search engine optimization guru.

Some search engine optimization experts will tell you they can increase your link popularity. They use a variety of methods. They create websites where they put all of their clients website links so you will have links to your website. The search engines call these link farms and discount any value they may have had in the past.

Those methods, along with many others, are simply tricks that temporarily work. Alot of search engine optimization companies all keep up with the latest tricks and shortcuts. They may even get you some good results in the short-term. But what happens when the search engines catch onto the trick?

Im glad you asked. They stop letting that trick or shortcut work. They may even penalize the websites that used it. They penalize you, the customer, not the search engine optimization guru who used the trick and charged you for it.

Whenever one of these companies tells you it has inside information, ex-search engine company employees, guaranteed search engine placement, guaranteed top 10 placement, or secret methods, a red flag should go up in your mind right away.

If you start a business offline, like a restaurant or a store, you know that besides the money you will have to put up, you will also have to work to make it a success. It is no different when you start a business online. You have to work at it, if you want to be successful.

If search engine optimization is not the most important thing you can do to become successful, what is? Again, Im glad you asked.

Promotion. Do not depend solely on being found by the search engines. Search engines are fickle creatures and what is todays #1 can be tomorrows #100 just because they decided to change the way they give relevance to websites. Continually chasing this dream is a total waste of time.

There are other sources of traffic out there. Would you rather have 1000 hits from a search engine for one of your minor keywords or have 100 hits from someone who read an article you wrote and came to your website because they liked what you had
to say?

If you chose the thousand hits, you dont get it yet. Out of that 1000 hits you might convert 2 of them into sales. Out of the 100, you may get as many as 20-25 people who want to buy from you. Conversion rate is more important than how many hits you get to your website.

Write articles about your website, about your products, about relevant topics to your products or services you wish to sell. Distribute or submit those articles to article submission websites that provide free content to webmasters.

You may write one article like the one I am writing now and have 100 webmasters want to use it as content for their website. That would mean there is suddenly 100 other websites on topics related to your product that now contain a link to your website. (see the footer below contains links to my website and is to be included when this article is reprinted.)

That increases your link popularity without the need for a company to optimize you. Just by submitting your article to several article submission websites, you increase your link popularity, but when those webmasters start to republish your articles, you will see a huge increase in your page rank and the quality of your traffic.

Some people write one article per month and others write one or more per day. It depends on you. How fast do you want your website to grow?

How much time do you have to invest? If you are not good at writing articles or do not have the time, hire a writer to ghost-write them for you with your byline and your links in
the footer.

So that we are clear. Search engine optimization is necessary, but by no means the most important thing you can do for your website to make it successful. I would not pay a lot of money for this service. Promoting your website IS the most important thing you can do. Articles are just one of the methods you can use to promote your website.

Advertising, buying links on relevant websites, posting in forums and blogs with related topics, putting your link in your signature line, are some of the other ways you can promote your website.

My Checklist:

1. Be conscious of the keywords you wish to target with each webpage you build. Write your text for the reader, then go back and add your keywords without destroying the flow of your text.

2. Make sure the website is easy to navigate and user-friendly. Dont assume the customer knows the web site as well as you do. Make it simple. Make it easy to find the buy button!

3. Once the website is built, quit worrying about the newest search engine trick or optimization technique as some like to call it.

4. Search for blogs and forums with related topics and sign up for them and participate in discussions with your link in your signature line.

5. Write articles about related topics and submit them everywhere or buy a service like isnare.com that will do the submissions for you. If you cannot write the articles, hire someone to do it for you.

6. Dont do link trades with websites that have less traffic than you do. Buy links on websites that have more traffic than you and are on a topic related to your products or services.

This article in no way claims to have listed all the ways you can use to promote your website. What I have done here is tried to explain to you what is or is not important to creating and maintaining a successful website. I hope this helps you.

There is a bit of confusion about search engine optimization. Some people think that Birmingham SEO (the abbreviated form) is nothing more than tricking search engines into giving a high ranking for a particular site. Others think that search engine optimization is so complex that they could not possibly understand it. Neither of these views are correct. Search engine optimization is best defined as the art and science of building web pages that are both search engine friendly and user friendly. Below are four basic steps that you should take when optimizing your web pages.

1. Your web design should emphasize text and not graphics.

Search engine friendly means that search engines should be able to find data on your site that they can put in their data bases. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a search engine is trying to classify pages by text and not by images. If you have an opening page with a beautiful picture of the sea and only two words of text saying enter here then this page will not rank high in searches for Florida Vacations. Similarly if you have a headline with important text containing your sites keywords it should not be displayed as a gif or jpeg image. Pages that are all flash or all images are not search engine friendly, and often are not user friendly as well.

2. Links to your interior pages should be easily found by search engines

An important thing to remember is that you want not only your main page, but all of your interior pages to be included in the search engine index. While most people will probably enter your site through the main page, many will enter after doing searches which lead them to your inner pages. The best way to make sure that search engines will find and index your inner pages is to include text links to these pages. If you have navigation system which uses Java script or images, then it is best to add an additional text link navigation bar at the bottom of the site to ensure that the robot follows the links to your inner pages.

3. Your pages should be built around specific keywords or keyword phrases

Robotic search engines and human users have one thing in common: they are trying to figure out what your site or your particular web page is all about. It is not possible to get high rankings for thirty different search terms with only one web page. However it is possible to build separate web pages which explain and give importance to various aspects of your organizations activity. These sub pages can be optimized so that they perform well in searches for your various keywords.

4. Once your material is organized, then your keywords should appear in strategic portions of your web pages

If your site is about Florida Vacations, then these words should appear in the following places of your html pages:

a. In the file name or the url.

If your site is called www.floridavacations.com then this will give you a head start in any searches for this term. Similarly if your company is called XYZ Travels you may have a web page with this url: www.xyztravels.com/floridavacations.html

The url or file name is an important indicator to a search engine, so dont miss the opportunity to put your important term either in your main domain name or in your file names.

b. In the title tag

The text that is displayed in the blue line at the top of your browser is your title tag. The title tag is located in the section of the document. If your main phrase is Florida Vacations then the title tag in your html document should look something like this: Florida Vacations: Florida Vacation Information by XYZ travel

c. In the Description tag

The description tag is not seen on the web page but search engines often display it as the text which gives the searcher an idea of what your page is about. The description tag should be compelling, and make someone want to click and see your page, while also containing the keywords that are in your url and your title tag. A description tag for this site might look as follows:

d. In the headlines

Just as someone reading a newspaper looks at headlines to find out what is important, a search engine robot looks at the headlines of a web page in order to pick up the essential feature of that page. Put your main phrase in a headline and place it near the top of the page. Your headline text should be enclosed with special header tags such as , , . A headline tag for our hypothetical page could be written as follows: Florida Vacations: Plan Your Vacation Now And Save Money or Accommodations, Entertainment and Transport in Florida

If you dont like the look of the h1 tag, then use a smaller tag, h2 or h3, or adjust your site
s style sheet so that the h1 tag is displayed in a small font which better matches your body text.

e. In the body text of your page

Your main keywords or key phrase should appear in the first paragraph of text and in a natural way throughout the text and also at the end of the page. In normal writing you would first introduce your subject, then explain what it is about and then summarize at the end. Follow this same procedure when you start writing your web page. Pages written in this style will automatically have correct keyword density and distribution.

f. In anchor text on your page

Anchor text is the clickable portion of links on your web page. Suppose you are describing your Florida Vacations and you want to direct your web visitors to an inside page with more information about this subject. Instead of making a link that says click here, it would be better to have a link that says Click here for more information about Florida Vacations or even better, the link text will only be Florida Vacations and the click here will be rendered as normal text.

If you follow these search-engine-optimization steps when building your website you will end up with web pages that are easily understood by your visitors, and easily classified and indexed by search engines.

Before you can understand Search Engine Optimization you must first learn how the search engines work. First you need to know the definiton of a few terms that are used to describe how we get the search results. You need to know the difference between a search engine, a directory, a search site and search system. There is a lot of confusion among these terms. The good news is I am about to de-mystify it.

Search Engines:
They obtain their information from a database that has been feed to them by a search system. When you enter a search term, for example:” small business in Vancouver” the search engine sends out robots or spiders to scour the database for those words. They use complex algorithms to hopefully give you the most relevant information first. A search engine also provides you with information that was in individual sites as opposed to information about the site. For example I searched in Google for “small business in Vancouver” and the third listing that came up was “Soho.ca – Grow your business- small business medium businessThe most popular roundtable event in VancouverLast month sold out.” Soho.ca – Grow your small business is the title of the website and the rest is actually text from within the site.

Directory:
A directory is usually broken into categories. You can submit your site usually to directories by entering your site’s information and choosing an appropriate category. A Directory supplies information about the website as opposed to information that is in the website. An example of a directory would be the BC business directory. I searched it for “website design” and one of the results I received was “Destination University- An educational resource website designed by an Abbotsford student for Canadian high school students looking for higher education in Canada”. This result told me who made the site and who its target audience was but, not any information from within the site.

Search Site:
A search site is a website that allows you to search through an index or directory of websites. It could let you search through multiple indexes or directories. The difference between a search site and a search engine is that the search site usually uses the results of a search engine, not its own results.

Search system:
A search system is an organization that uses software and hardware to index or categorize websites on the world wide web. An example of a search system would the Open Directory Project.

Now that you understand the terms used and what exactly they mean, we can move on and show you why this all matters. People on the web use Search Engines, this is fact and why not? This is an extremely easy way to find information you are looking for at your fingertips.
Everyone has heard of Google, MSN, Yahoo and AOL. Let’s look at how they get their results when you search from their sites.

Google has its own search system. It is the largest search engine and its results actually feed other search engines such as, AOL, Netscape and Ask Jeeves. Now you know when you search AOL where your results are coming from. They are coming from Google’s search system. AOL also gets results from the Open Directory Project. MSN has it’s own search system on top of getting results from Yahoo. Yahoo also has its own search system and gets results from the Open Directory Project. The bottom line here is that The Open Directory Project is a very important search system because it feeds a lot of other smaller search engines. Although not that many people have heard of it getting your site listed in it would be a high priority. Google also would be priority to have your site listed in. Yahoo would be one of the top search engines to be listed in as it currently only feeds MSN but, is still very competitive and many people use it.

Now I know you are wondering what about some other the smaller search engines. The truth is don’t bother with them as they are feed by the larger search systems and if they get listed then they will be automatically included in the smaller search engines anyways. You may be thinking, why do I need to know all this? Trust me, you do if you would like your site to rank high and if you are doing it yourself. Knowing this information will make it easier for you to understand how to get your site up in the search engines and you’ll need visitors for your website, and what a better way to get them but FREE.

Utilizing your website as your business tool is simultaneously an art and a science. To learn it, there are a few key tips. Those are very important to look in your site, so that it comes in more views and attracts more visitors.

HomePage: Keep it easy and simple: —

1.Do not put all the information on the home page of your site. It causes confusion in visitors mind. Have tips and roots with just enough descriptions, so that visitor finds root of everything they demand.
2.Home page should be looking like the center of the site from where, a visitor can go anywhere in easy steps of clicks.
3.Home page can contain some of the most important products of your business, which are the centralized attraction of you firm or website.
4.Do not overcrowd your homepage with the words; there must be brief content, which is navigating, informative and not too much to read.
5.Few striking lines like- most comfortable for beginners or Step by step learning guide for novice are good to put with you products.

Links: –

1.There should be links on your home page so that every visitor finds it very easy to reach directly any section he wants. Never put other sites link with those otherwise your visitor can be diverted from you site.
2.A proper made and attractive sitemap is very necessary for the website; it gives the facility to novice as well as expert users to watch whole details of your site at once. In addition, the site maps are very necessary to be submitted to all main search engines so you get traffic from the search engines as well.
3.Links of other sites are very necessary because those links increases your ranking in search engines. Those links should be put in the lower parts of you pages or with the product details, where the link provides the relevant site.

Content: –

Web Content is the life of Website. Web Content is the most important factor in attracting more visitors to your site. Here are things to look in it: –

1.The competition between the same product websites is chiefly won by the best quality web content. Visitors find it easy to understand and like to use the same site repeatedly. Even such visitors like to tell the site address to their friends and family, so that others also use the facility and it results into permanent visitors of you site.
2.Keywords and links are necessary to increase you ranking,, but it must be looked that your content is not compromising with the quality for other reasons.
3.Content should be brief and effective, it should offer all information in less words. It should not be so brief that it results in a tough to understand content and visitors deflect.
4.It should always be relevant to your website and products.
5.Content should not be describing history, technical details, and greatness of inventors or irrelevant absurd. Visitors come to use the site as shop. They do not like education until the site is a guiding one, E-book site or explanation website.

Search Engine Optimization: –

Even A perfect Website cannot get enough visitors, until it is not related to the big Internet linkage system.

1.Most of the visitors come to your site by the search engines or the ads you provide on others sites.
The biggest number of you visitors is from the search engines.

2.The website should be submitted to all big search engines.

3.The website should contain keyword rich and links rich contain so that it results in higher search engine ranking and attract more visitors.

4.You should decide the keywords by assuming, what your visitors will type, when they will need to find a site like yours one.

5.Links also higher the ranking of your website, so put the relevant links on your pages, which adds more arms in the octopus of your sites connections. The bigger the octopus, easier it is to reach for the spiders and robots of search engines.

Ads: –

1.Ads are always very important in marketing. Your ads should be appearing on all the relevant main websites, where your visitors have a large probability to go.
2.Ad should have a strong punch line, which appeals the visitor. It should not have wordy outline, but just some lines should be creating fascination and suspense as if you provide some thing very important.

Other tips: -

There are some more things which are important in getting visitors to your website.

1.The URL of the website should be easy to remember and better if it is attractive, so visitors put it on their tong easily.
2.There should be availability to bookmark your website. Once a visitor bookmarks you, you get a permanent customer.
3.Website should be regularly updating, people like to see new things whenever they enters the site again.
4.You should learn and understand the traffic increasing tips and procedures also, and should go to increase traffic.

Those are the main basic tip, which helps you to get visitors to your site and to increase your products sell as well as improve you business in this E-age.

There are 2 ways of calculating density.
The basic method consists of measuring the number of times a keyword appears on the page as a percentage of the total word count of that page. The complex method consists of measuring keyword density of the page plus the text components in meta tags: Title, Keywords, Alt Text, Description, and Comments. Most London SEOs refer to the first method when talking about keyword density though. But, how do search engines measure keyword density? They actually use the complex method to measure it. I will explain later how to adjust to this.

Were should the keywords be used?
Diversify the density of your keywords in different areas of your page. Starting with the Title, and following with the beginning of the page, like in the headings, other sub-headings, and in the introductory paragraphs would certainly be of benefit. Every search engine algo is different, so you must choose an average keyword density that can make your site rank well in the top ten positions in the SERPs.

The importance of keyword density.
Keyword density can be very beneficial when done right, but it can also have a very negative influence when overdone. This is known as “keyword stuffing”. When you stuff keywords in your page, this will be detected and your site will get penalized for doing so. This could go as far as getting your entire site blacklisted from a particular search engine, if you are found keyword stuffing too many times.

There is no secret keyword formula.
No matter what you may think, or read on forums or even articles by such London SEO Gurus, there is no secret formula for keyword density. There are, however, certain guidelines that need to be followed, and they are available to the public form the search engines themselves. Keywords density is one of most critical elements in London SEO, and if you can master it you get higher rankings for your site.

So what is the right keyword density?
Your keyword density must be right to improve your search engine ranking. The ideal keyword density will always help to achieve high rankings. But how much is too much? If too low, you will not get the maximum benefits, if too high your site might get flagged as spam Ok, there is no one number fits all here, but based on real case studies, the average top ranking Google site averages basic 1.9% keyword density. I wouldnt go over 2%. This is an average value, and I am talking about basic percentages here, not complex. But it translates well to their complex values.

By Utah London SEO Jose Nunez

Neither of those are actually true. It’s rather a combination of those. This confusion has lead many to pay way to much for there bid position because they don’t see the necessity in monitoring bids.

Let me give you an example:

Bidder 1: Max Bid is .55 but pays .51 per click.
Bidder 2: Max Bid is .50 but pays .21 per click.
Bidder 3: Max Bid is .20 but pays .06 per click.
Bidder 4: Max Bid is .05 but pays .02 per click.
Bidder 5: Max Bid is .01 and pays .01 per click.

Hopefully you are seeing a pattern here. The truth is that you actually pay only 1 penny more than the person below you’s Maximum Bid.

But then why is it important to monitor bids you might ask if Google makes you only pay 1 cent more than the Max Bid of the person below you?

In the senario above the best value position is being in #2 because #2 is paying 30 cents less per click than bidder #1. The bid gap difference between position #2 and #3 is only 15 cents.

So you can have nearly as many clicks as position #1 for over half the cost. If you have 1,000 clicks position #1 is paying $510 and position #2 is paying only $210. You are saving over half which means increased profit margins for your company.

But here a bidder can use a dirty trick to raise how much you are paying per bid with a little known technique which I call Bumping!

Let’s say you are Bidder 2 and you get used to paying 21 cents per click.

If Bidder 3 is savvy (and more and more bidders are) he could Bump up what you are paying.

He/She can increase their Max Bid to 49 cents, while still only paying 6 cents per click. All of the sudden you are paying over double per click than what you were paying before.

With Google being more and more competitive this is happening more frequently and is used to cause you to over pay for your clicks, put you out of business or drop your position, so that they can take over position #2 for a lower cost than what you are paying.

To avoid having this happen to you, you really need to monitor all of your bids to make sure that no one is “BUMPING” you. However, since everyone is always changing their bid prices over the many keywords you have, it is nearly impossible to keep up with monitoring this without a specific software…

I recently received another ‘please help’ email from a gentleman named Ian who runs an adventure company in Tanzania (http://www.betheladventure.co.uk ). Ian was concerned about the effect of a variety of issues including indexing and link dampening, and was desperate for help. Unfortunately, he had read some fairly misleading articles in the past, so he had a somewhat mixed up understanding of the factors at play. Because I suspect he’s not alone in his concern and confusion, I decided to publish the details of our discussion.

Ian’s email consisted of several questions. I’ve listed each separately below, followed by my response.

Q: When I search for the number of backlinks to my site using “link:www.betheladventure.co.uk”, I see only 23 results. It appears that only 23 of our backlinks have survived Google’s dampening link filter. Is there a time delay before they are credited to a site? ”

A: Firstly, I think you may have the dampening link filter a little confused. According to the dampening link filter theory, your links are found and recognized by Google, you just don’t get the full benefit from them until a given period of time has elapsed. The dampening link filter (if it exists) doesn’t stop links from appearing in Google’s results when you search for them. (The only reason your backlinks might not appear in a Google search is if Google hasn’t yet indexed the pages containing the links.) Also, don’t worry too much about things like the dampening link filter. For a start, it’s far from established / accepted fact. Many well regarded Bristol SEO experts don’t believe in it at all. Furthermore, even if it does exist, it only affects those businesses with the budget to generate the huge numbers (hundreds or thousands probably) of links reputedly required to trigger it. If your number of backlinks suddenly increases by 20, that’s no problem.

And secondly, don’t believe everything Google tells you. By searching for “link:www.betheladventure.co.uk”, you generally only see a small percentage of actual links to your site. The best way to search for links is to search for just the URL “www.bethaladventure.co.uk” , then on the page that displays next, select “Find web pages that contain the term “www.bethaladventure.co.uk” “. When you do it this way, you’ll see all the pages that contain your URL. In most cases, the URL will be an active link (or at least it should be, and you should ask them to make it so). When you do this search, you’ll see that your site has about 169 links, not 23.

Q: Another question is about indexed pages (using site:www.betheladventure.co.uk). I understand this is a record of pages that have been changed. I had 32, it went down to 28 and now this morning it is down to 26. Do they only keep the pages for a month or is there more to the indexed pages than I realized?

A: The number of indexed pages is simply the number of pages on your website that Google ‘knows about’. Theoretically, the only time the age of a page comes into play is when the page is too young*, i.e. Google spiders haven’t visited it yet, or Google hasn’t updated its index. As to why the reported number of indexed pages is reducing, I suspect it’s just a temporary shift. The number of results in Google’s searches varies pretty much constantly.

*Actually, technically speaking, it has been suggested that Google is not capable of indexing all 11.5 billion pages currently believed to be online (and the 10 million more that are added every day), and that as it indexes new pages, old pages are pushed out of the index. (This is a very rough description of the theory – if it’s happening at all, it’s likely to be far more complicated than this.) If this is happening, it may explain why the reported number of indexed pages is reducing. Although I think it’s a long shot, a good way to deal with it is to maintain high quality content, to keep increasing it, to keep generating backlinks, and to generate a Google sitemap. To find out more about sitemaps, go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login . To download a free – and very useful – tool for generating a sitemap, go to http://johannesmueller.com/gs/ .

I know there’s a lot of confusion surrounding these issues, so I hope you’ve found this exchange helpful.

Happy indexing!

My Catherine Bach posters page used to be on my site at www.kruse.co.uk/ but for various Bristol SEO reasons I moved it and all my other poster pages over to my web space at my broadband provider NTL so her posters landed up at my ntlworld homepages. Around this time I registered www.here-be-posters.co.uk/ and pointed it from the registration company using a 302 temporary redirect to my ntlworld web space.

This was a far from perfect solution to anything at all. I was rushed with this, flustered with that and I didn’t take time to do a proper job. This threw up an unlikely benefit, though, one I may not have noticed otherwise.

What I should have done was to move the posters, as soon as they began to get successful in their own right, over to their own dedicated web space under their own domain name. Which, just recently, I did, I’ve been kind of busy with my Bristol SEO work plus, of course, there’s always a ton of optimisation-related study to be done. So I just recently got round to this and now my SERPS are in great confusion.

Plus, of course, a lot more than is usual is affecting Google’s results just now. We’re experiencing the end of the Big Daddy Data Centre upgrade. Some say we’re still suffering the aftershocks from the Jagger algorithm update from last year. So the SERPS are turbulent. You can input a query into Google one minute and get a certain set of results, try the same search a few minutes later and the returned results will show a significant difference. This makes life quite extra-ordinarily difficult for the practicing search engine optimiser as clients will most often judge results purely by the position that they see their site returned in Google’s results in a search for their keywords or phrases. It doesn’t look good if you inform a client that they’re now at position three and when they look for themselves they’re at position thirty-three.

Those of you who have the Google toolbar can probably check the variations in the results for yourselves. Open your browser to a Google search page and input a phrase where you know a particular site should normally be returned in the top ten. Examine the SERPS. Then try the same search in the search box in the Google Toolbar. It’s increasingly probable that, while the returned results won’t be wildly, hysterically at variance with the ones you’ve just seen, they will be different to a significant degree.

Google doesn’t give its results out from just one place, it distributes them from a series of data centres which are located around the world. When a new set of results is sent to the individual data centres the nature of telecommunications being what it is they don’t all arrive at the same time. This results in what could be described as a series of mini-Google Dances across the range of data centres. In practice this means a search will produce different results from different geographical locations around the globe at different times. This wasn’t a problem when it was a regular and predictable occurrence but now it’s so frequent it can be confusing for searchers. Worse, of course, if my client’s in the States and I’m here in the UK. I can click through to Google America but still there’s no telling which data centre I’m going to get, and I’ve no idea what my client’s going to get either, which complicates matters even further. Not to mention, of course, the problem of the Google “Sandbox” causing sites to appear briefly at the top of some SERPS thus muddying the search waters still more.

The practical consequences of all this are that in one set of search results I get my old page about Catherine at ntlworld appear and the page at www.here-be-posters.co.uk/ isn’t even anywhere in the SERPS. In others, neither appear, while in some the ntlworld page is in the top ten with here-be-posters nowhere in evidence. Encouragingly, though, in some others the here-be-posters page is rising rapidly through the ranks. So, if I can’t rely on a stable ranking for input, what can I do to determine if I finally now have the content and link strategy right?

Noting an increase in traffic could well be part of the answer. With SERPS fluctuating the way they are an accurate rank is difficult to pin down but a significant rise in properly targeted traffic should make its presence felt by an increase in ROI – and that, after all, is what Bristol SEO is all about. High ranking itself, in all the confusion, is starting to take a back-seat to what should have been foremost in our endeavours all along, an increasing volume of interested visitors.

Indeed, the good news for Catherine Bach is that, judging by her traffic, her poster page seems at last to have found a home at www.here-be-posters.co.uk/. Her stream of visitors, quite justly I say, rises as I speak. I mean, Jessica Simpson is fine but hey! She’s no Catherine Bach!