Search Engine Optimization Tips, SEO for Blogs, Search Tips

In my experience working with new as well as established sites, I have found that making too many changes in a short span of time can affect the traffic to that page. The page gets pushed down from Google Search results and at times, even banished. Albeit for a few months.

I’m not talking about frequent content updations to your page or site. I’m talking about frequent changes in titles, keywords, descriptions, changing of copy, changing of other links on page, html changes, addition or deletion of copy, frequent optimizing of copy or on-page factors.

How can we avoid being penalized, in case we need to do a lot of changes on a page?

The wisest way is to do all the changes at the backend and then take it online in one shot. Many keep publishing the changes online after every change and it spells serious trouble.

Seo4google.org’s Tip: Imagine if a store were to keep changing its products/ services every second day. Customers would turn a little wary and wonder what the store is up to. Traffic is most likely to fall when a store does many changes in a short period of time.

Whether you are changing the title, keywords, description, adding more content, adding links or introducing new services, please do all of them at the back end and then make it online. I find many bloggers keep changing their tags, titles and keywords as often as once a week. Often it has resulted in a fall in traffic for those pages and at times loss of page rank.

And to regain the page rank and traffic takes up a lot of time and effort. Because search engines tend to place you under a scanner and understand what you’re trying to do. Whether you are doing something unethical or trying to play with their algorithm.

Seo4google.org’s Tip: Why search engines look suspiciously at large scale or frequent changes to a web page? Would you not suspect your neighbour of something unethical if you found scores of cars driving in and out from his home Monday to Friday? Most certainly you would.

Search engines look at unusual and frequent changes to a web page or site much the same way. So, you must always plan what you’d like to do, weigh its implications, and execute changes in one phase. Unless your website has hundreds of pages and you may want to do the changes in two or three phases, studying the effect of each change on your rankings and traffic.

Google has improved its ability to crawl and index flash files. And also read the urls in the flash banners on your site. Five cheers to Google’s indexing team.

Google Flash Indexing Interview

Google Flash Indexing Announcement

All text files in any type of SWF whether banners, buttons or ad slots. They can read and crawl all the text and index them. This largely helps sites which may have have important content on those SWF files. Goolge’s algo can’t yet read the images, but I guess that’s not way off. This June 2008 update is a boon to webmasters who for long wondered what to do for getting flash content indexed.

However if your flash file is getting uploaded via a javascript, Google may find it difficult. If the flash file is

Adobe Flash Technology work in making things searchable helped Google in indexing flash content. Web designers would be a delighted lot and can continue their creative work.

Why Google Search Engine handles dynamic content best. Google recently announced that it can take care of Dynamic Content and webmasters need not worry about rewriting dynamic urls to shorter static urls.

This is a significant improvement in Google Search advancements. ecommerce, job, shopping sites amongst others serve users varied content depending upon the search parameters (location, price, brand, category etc).

Dynamic content is content created on the fly, such as when a user searches on a ticketing site, for a low cost ticket to LA, it searches the database of information and throws up best results. These results are not actually available as static html page content anywhere on site.

Earlier site owners and webmasters had a tough time getting these indexed. They would resort to creation of thousands of static pages or rewriting their urls using modrewrite softwares. Now, Google’s ability to crawl and handle dynamic content is a boon to webmasters and users.

Should I then redo all static urls
No. Don’t be confused by this announcement. Google SEO team only means to say that Google algorithms can handle changing content much better than before. The existing static urls created on sites with dynamic content should just let it be there. Google will still crawl, index and show them in relevant search results. That’s not a disadvantage at all.

Yahoo though still recommends a different method for authenticated site users.
Yahoo Dynamic Content Rules Though I don’t recommend that.

In case you’re a large site, I recommend reading Arnold’s Indexing dynamic content

Host good content and inform Google, which allows you to submit your site or blog for indexing.
Google crawls all over the net and will sooner or later find your site. But to index quicker in the search engine, go to http://www.google.com/addurl/ and add your website url.

Although this does not guarantee that it’ll crawl your site or show it in the results, it’s better than not submitting.

You can add the home page url and also put in a few sentences about the content of your site. Or you could submit the keywords of your blog or site.

Seo4Google.org’s Tip: To index faster in Google, write an article in a site that gets crawled frequently (news sites etc). Get your author’s bio at the bottom with your url and when Google search engine visits that page, it will also visit your site from there.

Another way to get Google to visit your site is to request bloggers or webmasters (friends or otherwise) to review your site. So that search engines can crawl through your website url from that blog.

Social media is another option to get your site indexed faster in Google. Submit good quality pages to Digg, Reddit or propeller. Since these sites are visited many times in a day by search engine bots, chances of indexing are higher.

Getting Google to index and crawl through your blog content easily will mean more traffic for bloggers like you. The SEO trick here is to understand how search engines like Google read web content. I’m letting you in on some simple and easy to implement secrets of search engines.

How do users reach your blog content? How do search engine crawlers arrive at your blog?

Well users and Google arrive on your blog by navigating through hyperlinks somewhere on the internet. These can be links on another blog or site, forum, social media, delicious, digg, directory and the like. From there they click (or crawl) to land up on your blog post. So if you’re a webmaster or blogger, your hyperlinks must be neat and navigable.

Important content on your blog is better placed via simple static html links, than the Ajax, Flash or Javascript. Google can crawl html hyperlinks easily, then the above technologies. People use different browsers and HTML text is compatible and accessible by all of them. So it’s important that you link all critical blog content via html hyperlinks.

To make content useful to readers and search engine bots, publish them as html documents. Use less of scripts and make it easy to navigate to your articles.

Making images indexable, accessible

Images, Photos, Pictures, Graphics must all either have alt and title tags that explain the content and context. The titles and alt tags must be useful, meaningful and relevant to the content on the page. The context of the picture to the page content is important for ranking it better. Otherwise they turn useless from the point of view of search. You can also write some content on what is there in the images to help users and crawlers identify and understand the content. This helps Google to rank your pages better. And assign a better quality point to your content.

Clean up broken links, duplicate content

Broken links, empty pages, duplicate content, affiliate articles with no value aditions and 404 errors – all interfere with indexing your site or blog. Avoid all these by checking and publishing unique, fresh, value added and useful content for readers and crawlers.