6 (common sense) things that you should know about SEO

Below are some of the points that I keep telling my clients about SEO over and over again, but unfortunately, many of them just don't get it. "Get me on the first page of search results, money is not a problem", is their favorite quote.

Only a fool would ever dream of fooling Google and its team of top-notch engineers. I have explained on too many countless occasions that there's no such thing as effective Black Hat SEO, no matter how much money you spent. But sure there is something called Blacklisting from Search Engines, so do yourself a favor, by saving your money and investing it on building an honest and down-to-earth SEO campaign, keeping always in mind the 6 common sense SEO facts listed below courtesy of Axandra.

* Please note that this article is about SEO, not about SEM.


1. SEO takes time

You cannot optimize your website today and expect results tomorrow or next week. Search engine optimization takes time. Search engines have to find your new optimized pages, they have to find the new links to your website, they have to update the index, etc.

2. You must change your web pages

If you want to get high rankings for certain keywords, then these keywords must appear on your web pages. It is possible to get high rankings for a keyword that is not listed on your website if lots of other websites link to your website with that keyword. That's the exception, though.
In general, the keywords for which you want to be found must appear on your web pages and they must appear in the right elements on your web pages. For that reason, you have to change the HTML code of your web pages to make it as easy as possible for search engine spiders to parse your site.

3. You need links and you need the right links

Good backlinks are the key to high rankings on Google. Automatically created backlinks usually won't help your rankings and they even might get you banned from Google's index.
As a general rule, the easier it is to get a link, the less is its influence on the position of your website on Google. The links to your website should be from related websites and they should contain your keywords in the link text.
The more attractive your website is, the easier it will be to get good links. Your website should offer linkworthy content that other people can talk about.

4. It's crucial to choose the right keywords

If you optimize the website of a rock band than you might think that it would be cool if their site was found for the keyword "mp3". That might be cool but it does not make sense.
People searching for "mp3" can be interested in anything: mp3 players, mp3 decoders, the latest Justin Bieber song, general information about the file format, etc. If these people come to your rock band website, they won't find the information they are looking for.
Optimize your website for keywords that attract the right kind of people. For example "unsigned rock band" or "rock band london".

5. You must be realistic

Getting on the first result page for a highly competitive keyword such as "mp3" is possible but your competitors will be old and established websites with a lot of backlinks. It is very difficult to outrank these pages.
If you have a website with just a few pages and your competitors have large websites with forums, communities, blogs, etc. then you must improve your website if you want to compete. Search engines want to show the best sites on the result pages.
If you absolutely want to get high rankings for a term such as "mp3", start with less competitive keywords and then proceed to the more competitive terms. Search engines must trust your website before they give you high rankings for very competitive keywords.

6. You must set the right goals

Search engine optimization is not about getting a high Google PageRank (the green bar in Google's toolbar). It is about getting high listings for the right keywords so that the right people will come to your website. The goal of search engine optimization is to increase your sales.
You don't have to be listed for any possible keyword even if they are related to your business. You have to be listed for keywords that will bring buyers to your site. It usually takes some time to find the best keywords for your website. Running PPC ads and tracking their conversions will help you to find the best keywords.

The Importance of being Number One in Google

Chitika Research has recently revealed that the first search result in Google gets twice as much traffic as the second, and three times as much as the third.

“The Value of Google Result Positioning” looked at a sample of traffic coming into Chitika's advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement.  The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 5 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together.

Google Result	Impressions	Percentage
1	2,834,806	34.35%
2	1,399,502	16.96%
3	942,706	11.42%
4	638,106	7.73%
5	510,721	6.19%
6	416,887	5.05%
7	331,500	4.02%
8	286,118	3.47%
9	235,197	2.85%
10	223,320	2.71%
11	91,978	1.11%
12	69,778	0.85%
13	57,952	0.70%
14	46,822	0.57%
15	39,635	0.48%
16	32,168	0.39%
17	26,933	0.33%
18	23,131	0.28%
19	22,027	0.27%
20	23,953	0.29%

Numbers are based on a sample of 8,253,240 impressions across the Chitika advertising network in May, 2010.


These results took by surprise even seasoned SEO experts such as the own Chitika's research director Daniel Ruby, who commented that:

“Obviously, everyone knows that the #1 spot on Google is where you want to be.  “It’s just kind of shocking to look at the numbers and see just how important it is, and how much of a jump there is from 2 to 1.”

But also remember that becoming number one is easier than remaining number one, and this is specially true for Google.

---

Headed up by research director Daniel Ruby, Chitika’s research department has its fingers firmly on the pulse of the Internet.

By analyzing data from Chitika's publisher network – over 80,000 sites and always growing – Ruby and his staff can spot trends ranging from operating systems to ad click rates.


More Info:
Daniel Ruby
Research Director, Online Insights
Chitika, Inc.
+866.441.7203 x966
press@chitika.com

Peter Norvig deems PageRank "over-hyped"

Google's Director of Research Peter Norvig says that the search engine's hallowed PageRank link-analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set, is overrated. And apparently, it has always been.

"One thing that I think is still over-hyped is PageRank,"

Norvig said last week during a question and answer keynote at the search-obsessed SMX West conference in Santa Clara, California.

"People think we just do this computation on the web graph and order all the pages and that's it. That computation is important, but it's just one thing that we do.

People [webmasters and SEOs] always said, 'We're stuck if we don't have [a high PageRank].' But we never felt that way. We never felt that it was such a big factor."

Google describes PageRank as:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".”

Late last year, Google added so-called "real-time search" to its engine - serving up links to fresh Tweets, news, and other recent web posts. When asked if this was a far more difficult undertaking, considering that PageRank doesn't work well with Web2.0rhea. Norvig was quick to say "no," explaining that even with core search, PageRank isn't as important as people think it is.

"[PageRank] has a catchy name and the name recognition. But we've always looked at all the things that are available [when ranking search results]. We look at where do things come from, what are the words used, how do they interact with each other, how do people interact with them,"

"[Real-time search] is more similar [to core search] than dissimilar, in that you're grabbing every available signal and trying to figure out the best way to combine them. The fact that there aren't legacy links from a long time ago - we don't think of that as that much different."

The key to real-time search, Norvig said, is Google's famously distributed back-end infrastructure, which is able to re-build its web index with relatively little delay. When Norvig first joined the company, the Google web index was built once a month. Then the company moved to once a day and then to once an hour. Now, its distributed infrastructure - using proprietary technologies like the Google File System and MapReduce - can update its index in "10 seconds," according to Norvig.

When the hourly index was rolled out, Norvig remembered, Larry Page insisted on calling it the "3600 second" index.

"If it was hourly, it was just going to stay like that," Norvig said. "But if you talk about it in seconds, people are going to push it down to 1000 seconds and eventually you get it down to 10. And that's where we are now. His vision has come true."

Supplemental Results Hell

What are supplemental results?
Supplemental results usually only show up in the search index after the normal results. They are a way for Google to extend their search database while also preventing questionable pages from getting massive exposure.

How does a page go supplemental?
From my experiences pages have typically went supplemental when they became isolated doorway type pages (lost their inbound link popularity) or if they are deemed to be duplicate content. For example, if Google indexes the www. version of your site and the non www. version of your site then likely most of one of those will be in supplemental results.
If you put a ton of DMOZ content and Wikipedia content on your site that sort of stuff may go supplemental as well. If too much of your site is considered to be useless or duplicate junk then Google may start trusting other portions of your site less.

Negative side effects of supplemental:
Since supplemental results are not trusted much and rarely rank they are not crawled often either. Since they are generally not trusted much and rarely crawled odds are pretty good that links from supplemental pages likely do not pull much - if any - weight in Google.

How to get out of Google Supplemental results?
If you were recently thrown into them the problem may be Google. You may just want to give it a wait, but also check to make sure you are not making errors like www vs non www, content management errors delivering the same content at multiple URLs (doing things like rotating product URLs), or too much duplicate content for other reasons (you may also want to check that nobody outside your domain is showing up in Google when you search for site:mysite.com and you can also look for duplicate content with Copyscape).
If you have pages that have been orphaned or if your site's authority has went down Google may not be crawling as deep through your site. If you have a section that needs more link popularity to get indexed don't be afraid to point link popularity at that section instead of trying to point more at the home page. If you add thousands and thousands of pages you may need more link popularity to get it all indexed.
After you solve the problem it still may take a while for many of the supplementals to go away. As long as the number of supplementals is not growing, your content is unique, and Google is ranking your site well across a broad set of keywords then supplementals are probably nothing big to worry about.

Note: 
All of the text above has been copy&pasted from:
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001545.shtml
so, if those points are correct this post should go Supplemental in no time, right?
Wrong. Wait and see ...

Matt Cutts, a well known Google engineer, asked for feedback on the widespread supplemental indexing issue in this thread. As noted by Barry, in comment 195 Matt said:

Based on the specifics everyone has sent (thank you, by the way), I'm pretty sure what the issue is. I'll check with the crawl/indexing team to be sure though. Folks don't need to send any more emails unless they really want to. It may take a week or so to sort this out and be sure, but I do expect these pages to come back to the main index.

In the video below Matt Cutts answers questions about Supplemental Results,

Should I worry about results estimates for:
1) supplemental results
2) using the site: operator
3) with negated terms and
4) special syntax such as intitle: ?

Answer: No. That's pretty far off the beaten path

Getting Out of Google Supplemental Results

Getting out of the Google Supplemental Results may be possible by improving your website navigation system. To get more pages fully Google indexed, the prominence of important website pages can often be boosted by linking to them from pages within your domain having the highest Page Rank, such as your homepage. The reason for this being that Page Rank is passed from one page to another by links and the most common cause of Supplemental results is lack of Page Rank.

Start by determining your most important web pages which have been made supplemental - for example those promoting lucrative products and services, and then improve your website internal linking by adding links to these pages from more prominent fully Google indexed pages of your site including your homepage. At the same time, ensure that your website navigation system is search engine friendly using a website link analyzer.

Site Link Analyzer Tool © SEO Chat™ URL Valid URL Type of links to return: External (links going to outside web-sites) Internal (links inside the current web-site) Both types Additional Info Show nofollow links? Enter Captcha To Continue To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below Report Problem with Tool.

By improving website navigation and getting more inbound links from other Worldwide Web sites, you may be able to get more website pages fully Google indexed, solving the problem of partial Google indexing and Supplemental pages.

Where the Google Page Rank of your website homepage is PR4 or PR3, improving your website navigation system and in particular the prominence of internal pages may help to get out of supplemental results. This can be done by including static hyperlinks from the homepage to your 'problem supplemental result pages'.

However, where your homepage is PR3 or lower and you have a large website, internal navigation improvements alone may still not be enough when it comes to getting out of the Google Supplemental Results. At PR3 or lower, your homepage Page Rank is probably too low to pass on enough Page Rank to your internal pages to completely get out of Supplemental Results.

To fully solve the problem of partial Google indexing, get more one way links to your site from quality web directories and sites of a similar theme and wait patiently to become fully Google indexed. In addition, getting more quality one way links pointing to internal pages of your website (rather than just targeting your homepage) is another powerful way of boosting the ranking of those pages against specific keyword terms, and it will also assist in getting them out of supplemental results. This is often referred to as "deep linking".

Note:
Google states that they have now removed the label "Supplemental Result" from their search result pages:

"Supplemental Results once enabled users to find results for queries beyond our main index. Because they were "supplemental," however, these URLs were not crawled and updated as frequently as URLs in our main index.

Google's technology has improved over time, and now we're able to crawl and index sites with greater frequency. With our entire web index fresher and more up to date, the "Supplemental Results" label outlived its usefulness."

Right, that is correct. It is called now "Omitted Results". Same thing really, and same side-effects, at least from this non-Google point of view.

More Info

• Condemned to Google Hell"
• What happened to Google's supplemental results? My pages no longer show this label. " on Google's help center for webmasters.
• Google Hell? from Matt Cutts blog.
• Supplemental Results? Still a problem?
• Exploring Supplemental Indexing and website trust

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