Whoops! What’s that? Some hands are up. Questions?...
“How is this different from gateways or doorway pages?”
Tons of people use gateway or doorway pages. In general, these low-value
pages fail to deliver good content, and do not address the best interests of the
SEs or prospective visitors. Worse still, such sites are in danger of being banned
by the SEs. The engines take a dim view of any Web page that has no inpointing
links, even from its own domain (a tell-tale sign of a doorway page). As
a result, people who use such pages are constantly in jeopardy of losing their
businesses overnight.
Your Theme-Based Content Site, on the other hand, creates real content,
easily accessible from your home page or TIER 2 pages. You’re creating value,
not simply spider bait! You’re addressing the needs of the visitor and of the SEs.
Those are huge differences.
http://buildit·sitesell·com/MYLW·pdf
Another question?...
“What do the Search Engines look for?”
Answer…
So glad you asked! DAY 7 will examine this question more closely but for now,
here’s a quick answer…
Search Engines want to satisfy a visitor’s need by delivering the best possible
results for his/her search query. And why does a Search Engine care so much
about this? The Search Engines must satisfy its clients.
To determine who the SEs’ true clients are, just follow the money. Advertisers
pay the SEs, not surfers. Therefore, advertisers are the true clients!
So the #1 goal of a Search Engine is to provide lots of exposure to their
advertisers’ ads. If search results are relevant and of good quality, satisfied
surfers will return to search another day, generating more ad impressions. If they
are not, the surfer will leave to search somewhere else. If this happens enough
times… well, you see where this is going. Ad revenues fall, advertisers go
elsewhere, and the SE slowly dies or fades away.
Bottom line?
The SEs’ primary mandate is to deliver relevant and quality search results to
surfers. It’s WIN-WIN-WIN all around…
The surfer wins by finding what she needs. The advertisers win by getting lots of
exposure to prospective new clients. And, the Search Engines win when they
generate the revenue they need to survive and remain competitive.
And how does a Search Engine recognize relevance and quality?
Except for the top executive and a few select professionals at each individual SE,
nobody knows the exact algorithms used to evaluate page relevance. However,
we do know for certain that on-page and off-page criteria form the backbone
of any SE’s ranking algorithms.
Much of what we’ve been covering so far in this course has to do with on-page
criteria. Now for a brief note about off-page criteria…
Obviously, an SE will always have to examine the elements of any Web page to
determine its context. A page about porcupines, for example, would have the
word “porcupine” in the TITLE and heading tags, in the META keywords, and
sprinkled throughout the page text. The word “zebra”, on the other hand, would
be conspicuously absent from such a page.
And what about off-page criteria?
As Search Engines become more sophisticated, they track more external
factors to determine a page’s relevancy. For example, if a high-value, topicrelated
site links to your site, the Search Engine considers your site more
credible by association. If a dozen sites do the same, your site appears even
more so.
I’ll talk about link strategies in much greater detail in the next chapter. For now,
recognize that credible links are an important measure of human behavior. Any
Tom, Dick, or Jane can use software to create a perfectly optimized page about
porcupines, for example. But only a high-quality, relevant document written by a
porcupine expert will garner in-pointing links from credible porcupine authorities.
It is this combination of off-page criteria that reflect human behavior and on-page
criteria (as outlined earlier) that most SEs use to determine relevance.
I was just about to call it a day, but let’s go with one more question…
“Just how important is design?”
Hmm. This changes the direction of our discussion a bit but it’s a good question
all the same!
Design is not as important as most folks think. Words do the PREselling, not
graphics or colors or font styles.
Start with a clean and welcoming Look & Feel. Add a simple but professionallooking
logo. Make your site easy to navigate. Then get out of your own way
and let your words do the talking.
(The role of design in PREselling is well covered in Make Your Content
PREsell!.)
Geez, I’ve really got to leave. My wife is conceiving a baby tonight, and I wanted
to be there. (Actually I stole that from a guy who got off a speeding ticket with
that line!)
“Can I follow the C T P M approach on a free Web hosting
service?”
Answer… Absolutely. But remember that success is much more than just
putting up a site. Don’t be caught by the “cheap-quick-easy” advertising lure…
http://www·sitesell·com/index-advertise·html