If you’ve noticed that Google seems to be updating their index more frequently than once a month, you’re not alone. Clint Dixon observed this as well. In this article he discusses how this changes the world for website owners, search engine optimizers, and anyone else trying to get on the front pages of popular search engines.?

Google.com took a step forward in offering the most relevant information available by beefing up their mission statement. For a long time Google has updated their database of information by indexing the World Wide Web once per month. In light of recent events I have come to the conclusion that Google is now updating their index much more frequently, as evidenced by server statistics from my clients, and from my own server.?

With the November 2003 Florida Update, Google dropped many of the offending webmasters who employed black hat SEO techniques off of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This upset a great many webmasters whose sites sat on the front pages of Google.com for years, and who felt smug without preparing for the future.?

Google needed the Florida update in order to convince investors that “spammy Web sites” would no longer rank on the front pages of their searches, in preparation for the company’s IPO. Since that time Google has gone public, and its shares of stock have risen in price significantly. This brought up Google’s next move, one that also hurt webmasters. These webmasters weren’t using black hat SEO tactics, but instead were buying, trading, and selling links with other websites–in fact, entire websites were built for brokering links. The latest Internet Back Link Update allowed Google to check the links from sites and rid its ranks of websites trying to manipulate their Google Page Rank Technology using questionable tactics.?

Other updates included Google’s technological steps, such as having bots sit, so to speak, on servers continually looking for new fresh content. Recently, while speaking with a client about getting their website listed on the front pages of Google, I did a search for one of their keywords. (Ironically enough, it was the word “website.”) What I found startled me was very different from what I remembered, since for years this word returned mostly those who designed or built websites. The notable changes were the two new websites for George Bush and John Kerry. I can only imagine the faces of the webmasters whose websites were knocked off the SERPs by the candidates for president.?

This move toward continuous indexing will revolutionize search, and the businesses of those of us who strive to get clients listings on Google’s front pages.?

How will Google’s decision to index websites more frequently change the way search engine optimization is performed? SEO will become less of a need in order to obtain front page listing results, and search engine marketing will grow to be the main focus for marketing and optimization firms, and for website owners.?

The days of putting up a site and coming back once a month to update the website and keep the spider bots happy are gone for good. We live in the age of immediacy, and because of this the search engines are working to establish results that are the most current and therefore most relevant to users’ search queries. The days of submitting your website and waiting more than thirty or sixty days just to get a listing are history. For the SEO, this means it’s time to change the focus of his or her business; for the website owner, this can be a blessing–and a curse.?

If you have been paying attention to your stats, it would almost appear that the googlebot is sitting on your server. In a way it is! In order for Google to provide relevant results, those results must be current. Returning results that are already a month old is not a smart, long term business model if Google plans to stay in business. Advertisers are looking for performance, and they don’t care what worked in the past; they want immediate results for their advertising spend.?

I came upon this while speaking to a friend in British Columbia in early October 2004 about the possibility of getting his website listed on Google’s front page natural results listings. His chosen keyword term was, again, “website.” This made me laugh a bit, knowing all the competition and how entrenched this keyword term was for the many designers and developers who had resided on the front page of Google for so long. Any idea of moving most of them was funny. Or so I thought. When I typed in the term and saw the results I sat and felt my jaw hit the floor. The listings had changed!?

What was now on the front page was a shock. Two new entries had found their way to the front-page results, the web pages of both George W. Bush and John Kerry, the two candidates running for the office of President of the United States at the time. Why were they listed so highly for the word “website??? when these sites had nothing to do with the search term, other than the fact that each was a website??

This made sense to me when I thought about what people were searching for at the time. The terms I figured were being used were “bush website” and “kerry website,??? meaning that the two politicians, by virtue of searches, would show up for “website.??? Millions of people were typing that into their queries about each candidate. To Google, these two websites were the most current and heavily searched terms; therefore the websites belonged in the front page results for search queries using “website.”?

The blessings come in many ways, with the curses probably outweighing the blessings. Those who are in the search marketing business, and who do not know how to keep sites current and relevant will soon be among the unemployed. Those website owners who use software to optimize their sites and believe that is enough to keep them on any search engine’s front page for long will soon learn different. No longer will SEOs be able to sit down, do some keyword research, optimize the coding and content, and sit back and watch each month as the client’s site sits on the search engines’ front page results.?

SEO consultants and marketing firms will need to move their clients to updating their websites more frequently and with relevant content, or they will need to implement this strategy into their services offerings. Additional strategies will need to be implemented in moving clients onto the front page of the major search engines.?

Another area where freshness and relevancy are coming into play is in the reciprocal links that so many mistakenly think are the basis for good search engine results listings. Judging from what Google did during the Internet Back Link Update last month, any links that are developed will need to be fresh and relevant as well. The thinking behind this is based on Google’s current strategy of presenting fresh, relevant content. Links that are several months old will no longer have as much relevancy or weight as links developed recently. Google treats links like votes. Each link is a vote for the page to which it links. Using rational thinking, votes from the past do not count in the present. The votes that George Bush received in 2000 do not count, and are irrelevant to, the Presidential election in 2004. Therefore links that are old and outdated will most likely have little value after a month or two.?

The future of search engines and how your website will rank in the search engine results pages will be determined by popularity as well as the steps involved in search engine optimization. This goes hand in hand with our current lifestyle and its extreme breakneck speed. What is popular today will undoubtedly be out of fashion soon. If your website content or links are stale, you will not rank as well in the search engines as a site that stays current by presenting new or changed content frequently.?

Due to the changes at hand in the search engines, (MSN states it will crawl daily and weekly) the work that search engine optimization specialists perform now will need to change dramatically. No longer will keyword density and weighting inside the content matter as much as how new the content is presented, and how relevant it is to your overall website theme.?

I recently read in a forum a particularly harsh dissertation on how Google destroyed businesses by dropping websites during its notable indexing updates, such as the Florida update, where a great many websites that had previously employed black hat SEO tactics as well as overt spamming and other manipulations of the search results to gain the front pages results listings on Google, were dropped from Google’s database or sent so far down the listings that they would not be back anytime soon. I had to think for a minute before responding. Would people build a business based on the assumption that their website would live eternally on Google’s front page? It then occurred to me that my business is built on getting websites to the front page of Google. And in that thought I went on to answer the post, “If anyone builds a business solely dependent on front page results listings from Google, they don’t deserve to be in business.” It is never a good idea to place all your eggs in one basket.?

No matter which business you are in, whether you’re the webmaster who runs another’s website, a website owner who handles day to day operations, a search engine optimization specialist, or an advertising agency, your business will need to redevelop itself to one that stays fresh in technique, presentation and the overall strategies employed.

By John Borthwick

I created my first website in 1995 - it was so long ago I built it out of rock and wood, not HTML.

Shortly after it went live I realised that nobody apart from me could see it and it started to dawn on me what this ‘Internet thing’ is all about. It is not about having a stand-alone website plonked somewhere that nobody will ever see - it is about being part of an INTERconnected NETwork of other websites. INTER-NET. The penny dropped - I needed to start getting connected to other websites.

Much has changed since then (my hair got longer, shorter and has since started to recede further up my head for one thing) but it seems the desire and pressure you face as a website owner to exchange links shows no signs of fading. But link swapping is killing your website! Here’s 5 Reasons why…

Reason No. 1 - It’s Addictive!
It’s true. You might not be that far down the link-swapping path yet but I promise you it will happen sooner or later. One day you’ll find yourself laughing like a maniac as you run a report to see how many in-bound links you have and start rubbing your hands gleefully as you reach that magic milestone you set yourself six months ago. You’ll start mainlining reciprocal links:

“Just one more link. Please - all I need is one more link!”

Take a deep breath, step back from the precipice and think for a moment. Why do you want all these links pointing to your website? No, honestly - why do you REALLY want all these links pointing to your website? To improve link popularity? You’re falling into the trap. Do you want it to boost that little green bar that Google assigns to your page? (see toolbar.google.com) Wise up!

Reason No. 2 - It Is Eating Away At Your Time Like A Hungry Hippo!
Just take a look at the last time you went out looking for a link and got it. How long did it take you? Not long? Well, let me put this another way - how long did it take you to find the right type of websites, look through those and find ones that even have a links page, find the contact information for the websites you wanted to contact, create the email, send the email, respond to the email, place their link on your website, check that they reciprocated with you, email back and forth a few times more and so on…?

If you add up all the minutes that each of these elements takes you could be looking at half an hour per reciprocal link established - maybe even longer!

And don’t think you’re cutting corners if you’re using software. It might be quicker to find possible linking partners using software but it’s a false economy as, to my knowledge, people are still cleverer than machines.

What I mean by this is I can tell if you email me using software rather than using your own fingers. If you go looking for reciprocal links using software you are FAR less likely to get a response so the whole process will probably take you as long in terms of time spent per link established.

Reason No. 3 - Are Spending More Time on Other People’s Websites than Your Own?
If you spend a lot of your time researching and creating reciprocal links you’d better make sure that your website is perfect. Remember - all that time you’re spending developing reciprocal links could be spent adding new content to your website, sending out an up to date newsletter to your mailing list or even sitting down and writing out goals for your website.

If you spend all the time on improving your website, adding great content, providing excellent service, keeping it up to date, testing different headlines and homepage layouts INSTEAD of spending the time building links guess what? You will magically find that more people link to you anyway!

In fact - your website will become such a great resource because of all the time you’re dedicating to it that people will go OUT OF THEIR WAY to link to you! How ironic is that?!

You go hunting for links and your site suffers and therefore hardly anybody links to you. You spend time on making your website THE BEST IT CAN BE and everyone starts linking to you as, shock horror, you have a brilliant website that is worth referring to..

Reason No. 4 - You Don’t Have a Multi-Million Dollar Budget to Beat the Boffins
Those white-cloaked geeks over at Google towers and the like have millions of dollars at their disposal to create the latest technology that can sniff out the merest whiff of dodginess when it comes to link swapping.

If they think something is suspect you might get penalised. First you started to see sites that used the same phrase for their inbound links get penalised. Then it was sites that engaged with link farms. Who knows what’s next?

Ultimately you can bet your bottom dollar that the search engines will change their tack with reciprocal links and their importance - some of them are already starting to look at the words that appear before and after each link to make sure it is on a relevant page and not just created as part of a reciprocal linking deal.

It’s a risky game we’re all playing and my money’s on the guys with the white coats and millions of dollars.

Reason No. 5 - You Are The Weakest Link, Goodbye!
When push comes to shove this whole ‘game’ of website marketing is about balance.

Imagine you are a tightrope walker. Fifty metres beneath you is a huge vat of boiling hot lava. To help you across the rope from the podium of “website launch” to the podium of “website success” you get a balancing rod.

Spending too much time and effort on reciprocal link building is like having a large sack on one end of the rod. This sack has an elephant in it. The elephant is wearing boots. Made from concrete. Get the picture?

By Michael Cheney

A Web site’s information architecture can greatly affect a site’s search engine visibility. Specific page elements, such as the site navigation scheme, and design technologies, such as CSS (define) and JavaScript, can interfere with a search engine’s ability to spider a site.
?
Site architecture has been poorly addressed by search engine marketers (SEMs). Many of them have limited knowledge about information architecture and site usability. Some only specialize in search advertising, focusing on the media buy and the bidding process. Many SEO (define) firms specialize in cloaking (define). Nowhere in this skill set is information architecture. That’s a shame. A top Google position is useless if visitors aren’t converting into buyers. That’s where usability and site architecture become important. This column looks at the six building blocks of a successful site architecture that addresses the needs of both search engines and visitors.
?
How Directories Are Set Up on Servers
As a general rule, pages closest to the root directory are considered the most important pages on your site. The two most important documents that should be in the root directory are the home page, commonly named index.html, and the Robots Exclusion Protocol, commonly named robots.txt.
?
A widespread SEO myth is search engines won’t crawl past the third subdirectory. Not true at all. So long as related pages are linked to each other in a spider-friendly manner, search engines will crawl deep content. Generally, I keep around 100 to 200 pages in the root directory, the pages that are most important to my target audience. Most of these root-directory pages are category pages, because a category page directs site visitors to more specific pages on a site, usually products or services.
?
Site Navigation Scheme
Another element of site architecture is a site’s navigation scheme. Some site navigation schemes are more spider-friendly than others. For example, a set of navigation buttons is often more spider-friendly than a DHTML pull-down menu. And a set of hypertext links is often more spider-friendly than a set of navigation buttons. Another widespread SEO myth is that text links are “the bomb.” Though text links are easy for programmers and developers to format (via CSS), they often forget whom the site is designed for: end users.
?
Through usability tests and focus groups, I sometimes find visitors show a marked preference for multimedia effects and pull-down menus. In fact, visitors in the computer/software industries actually use pull-down menus, even though usability experts might not recommend them. Are pull-down menus a spider-friendly navigation scheme? Sometimes they are. Sometimes they’re not. When I wear my usability hat, I give the target audience what it prefers. When I wear my SEM hat, I recognize the drop-down menu may not be 100 percent effective. I know I can put spider-friendly links throughout a site without taking away from usability. SEMs shouldn’t fall into the “text-links only” trap when a target audience clearly prefers a different type of site navigation.
?
Subdirectories, File Names, and URL Structure
Many Web developers like to divide different site sections into subdirectories to keep related pages close to each other (on a Web server). On a larger site (250-plus pages), this site architecture makes sense. On a smaller site, this so-called SEO strategy may confuse site visitors.
?
When I do focus groups on URL structure, I typically ask, “Which URL do you remember?”

• www.domain.com/boots/hiking.html
• www.domain.com/hikingboots.html

Over 90 percent of the people queried prefer the URL without the subdirectory. It’s easier to type and easier to remember. “Too many forward slashes” is a common complaint.
?
Many SEMs create that extra subdirectory just to add a keyword in the URL, hoping it will help with ranking. I’ve never experienced this phenomenon. I find a keyword-rich title tag is more important than a keyword-rich URL.
?
Remember your end users when you create an URL structure.
?
Types of Web Pages
According to some usability professionals, there are seven types of Web pages. Others claim there are 11. Regardless of the number, it’s important for SEMs to understand different types of Web pages do exist. How you write, design, optimize, and promote a Web page depends on the page type.
?
Some Web page types:

• Home page
• Category/gallery page
• Product page
• Form page
• News/media page
• Services page
• Advertising (landing) page
• Search/search results page
• Shopping cart page

Credibility page
Should SEMs optimize a product page the same way they optimize a credibility page? Optimization and design strategies are different because the calls to action (CTAs) are different on each page type.
?
Page Layout and Structure
Since there are different page types, it naturally follows the layout strategies for one page type, such as a product page, may not work for a different page type, such as a press release (news page). Likewise, the keyword phrases on a category page may be more general than the keyword phrases on a product page. Yet there might be some overlap.
?
Cross-Linking
If I had to pick one component of Web site architecture developers and SEMs do incorrectly, I’d have to pick cross-linking. Cross-linking is not only important for search engine visibility; it’s also important for up-selling and usability.
?
Basically, there are two types of cross-linking: hierarchical (vertical) and related (horizontal). One only need look at the breadcrumb links of an online clothing store to see the vertical hierarchy:
?
Home > Men’s Clothing > Shirts > Casual > Polos
Cross-linking is evident in this text-link navigation. To view the categories in Men’s Clothing, site visitors can click on the “Men’s Clothing” text link. If they want to see the types of shirts available on this site, they can click the “Shirts” text link.
?
Here’s another example: If prospects find your site’s press release through a news search engine or ad, what do you want them to do when they view the press release page? View your featured product or service? Contact your PR rep? Request more information? Call you? What are you doing to ensure prospects reach the information they searched for?
?
A few well-placed hypertext links can enhance both search engine visibility and page conversions.
?
Conclusion
Successful site architecture is a must for any Web site. Not only can it improve the ability of a search engine to access keyword-rich content on a site, it can increase site conversions as well.

By Shari Thurow