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 Search Engine Bytes #2
Questions & Answers with Sumantra Roy
Q - I have a question that I am hoping you can answer. I am trying to get a website listed in a category that says that there is no editor. I submitted the site anyway, will anyone look at it? Or will it have to wait until there is an editor?
A - If a particular category in the Open Directory does not have an editor at present, it is generally the responsibility of the editor of the category lying just above that category in the hierarchy to review the sites listed in that category. Hence, generally, you will not have to wait too long for your site to be reviewed after you have submitted the site.
However, in some cases, the editor of the higher level category may have a large number of sites that need to be reviewed, which may considerably increase the amount of time it takes for your site to get reviewed. In such cases, you would have to be patient and wait for the editor to review your site.
After submitting your site, go to the category where you have submitted your site every day and see when your site gets listed. If you find that your site is not in that category, it may so happen that you have been placed in a different category. Type in your domain name in Open Directory's search box and see whether your site comes up in the results. I have seen some sites getting accepted within 1 day and some sites in about 2-3 weeks.
If your site is not accepted after 2-3 weeks, to find out what you should do to get your site listed, you should read my article at:
http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/open-directory.htm
You may also consider trying to become an editor of the category you are trying to submit your site to. To learn how you can do that, check out my article at:
http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/odp-editor.htm
Q - I have a site that is non-commercial which I developed several years ago with fellow MBA students at the University of Texas -Dallas. The site is targeted for international business travelers that want more information about the different cultures around the world.
I have a question about why one of the Sites pages has suddenly dropped in the Google page rank bar from 4/10 to 1/10. Yet all the other pages in the Site remain with there previous rankings of 3, 4, or 5/10 (no changes). What could cause this sudden drop?
A - There are times when Google will seemingly play around with your web page's PageRank (PR). Though to most, this may look erratic and make no sense at all, Google is constantly improving it's algorithms and therefore you may find some strange movements in the PR for some pages on your website. In the case pointed above, there are many possibilities for the change in PR:
i) You had changed the internal linking structure of your site. For instance, if quite a few of the other pages in your site were linking to the PR affected page earlier, but are no longer doing so, the PR of this page is bound to decrease.
ii) An external page (i.e. a page on a different web site) that was linking to this page earlier is no longer doing so.
iii) An external page that is linking to this page was suddenly dropped from Google's index for some reason. In this case, the link coming from this page will not contribute to the PR of your page.
iv) An external page that is linking to this page has suddenly experienced an increase in the number of links present in it. With the increase in the number of links, the amount of PR that it contributes to each link decreases. Hence, the amount of PR that it contributes to your page has decreased.
If you are confident that none of the above is possible, then I would attribute this to some temporary problem in Google's index which should be corrected soon. If it is not, you can consider writing to help@google.com and describing your problem to them.
Q - Does page cloaking differ from cloaking your meta tags to prevent competitors from mimicking your work to get good positions? If so, how is it different. If not, how do you protect your meta tags?
A - Page cloaking refers to the technique of presenting a particular version of a page to a human visitor and another version of the same page to a search engine. It is generally used to present a keyword rich page to a search engine and an aesthetically pleasing page to a human visitor. For more information on page cloaking and why you should not use it, refer to my article on this topic at:
http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/page-cloaking.htm
Cloaking meta tags refers to the process of ensuring that the meta tags that you have used in a page are not visible to your visitors when they try to look at the source code of your page. You can find more information on how to cloak meta tags at:
http://fantomaster.com/fafaqcloak3.html#metatags
However, in my opinion, there is hardly any reason why you would want to cloak your meta tags. The reason is that unlike what many people still believe, the meta tags that you have used hardly affect your rankings any more. What is much more important is the Title tag that you have used and the content in the body of the page. Hence, if you are ranked well in the search engines and if competitors think that they can get good rankings by simply copying your meta tags, good luck to them. They must do a lot more than simply copy your meta tags in order to get good rankings.
The only other reason that someone might want to cloak meta tags is to prevent competitors from looking at the keywords for which you want to get top rankings in the search engines. While this may be a plausible reason, when tools like WordTracker are available to anyone on the Internet who wants to know what keywords to target, competitors won't need to look at your source code to see what keywords they should be targeting. WordTracker's keyword research tool is available at:
http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/wordtracker/
Q - I have a site that sells an ebook on losing weight. I get hundreds of visitors every day from different search engines every day for quite a few keywords. Thanks to these visitors, I make quite a few sales per day as well. However, I can't figure out exactly which search engines and which keywords in those engines are generating the sales for me. Are there any programs that can help me track this?
A - There are software solutions that as you asked, help in finding the exact phrases that lead to the sales. Thus, you would be able to tell after the sale, which keyword in which search engine helped you generate that sale. A very good example of one such solution is:
http://www.websidestory.com/products/commerce/reports.html
It's targeted at enterprises and large scale ecommerce websites and you should have fairly deep pockets to invest in such a solution. However, the crisp, detailed and instant insight you get from these reports are well worth the nvestment for any serious online ecommerce businesses.
Let's look at a much more economical though not-as-comparable alternative. First and foremost you must make sure you have access to your sites raw Log files that are saved on the web server. Some web hosting companies do have online log analysis software scripts that analyze and report a plethora of facts and crucial information that's sourced out from the raw logs and presented in a more easy to understand and visually appealing format. So check with your hosting company and get the details on how to access these online stats that they usually provide free
with the hosting service.
In case they do not have an online software script to do the log analysis for you, then you may request them to allow the download of your Raw log files. Save these raw logs to your local hard drive and use Log Analyzer software (find some packages at http://www.webtrends.com or http://www.download.com ) to do the very same thing that online analyzer scripts do.
Running your log file through the software will give you clean, detailed, graphical reports overwhelming with so much information, you could spend the entire afternoon studying the statistics. Frankly your web logs are amongst the best research tools you can get your hands on, and fortunately they are available to you completely free.
To move forward, once you're on the Reports that the software has generated, head straight to the place where you can see the "Search engines" that have referred hundreds of visitors to your website. If yours is a relatively old site then the traffic may be generated from quite a number of search engines. It will help you realize which search engines are most precious to your website and which of them have been sending you the maximum number of visitors.
Next thing you must look at is "Search Phrases" and "Search Keywords". From thism you can understand which of the keywords are getting the traffic. You can always check this by entering the top keyword or keyphrase into the search engine that's giving you the maximum traffic and then on searching you should be able to locate your website in the search engine results.
If you have a trained eye for the raw logs, then sometimes you will be able to locate the exact path your visitor took. So you can view which search engine the visitor came from, using what particular keyword; whether he went to a purchase page and ultimately if he was shown the 'Thank you' page after the purchase. This way you can conclude whether some of the keywords you see are generating sales for you.
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Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. To have Sumantra's company list your site in the major search engines on the Net, go to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/ For more advice on how you can take your web site to the top of the engines, subscribe to his FREE newsletter here:
http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/newsletter.htm
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