Mordheim Blog - Update

It has been under two months since I have started my Mordheim Blog, and we are seeing lots of good progress in the Search Engine Rankings.

For almost the entirety of the last 7 weeks, my blog has been ranked on the second page for the keyword "Mordheim" at Google. Just this last week, I've arrived on the first page! My blog has been sitting in the #10 rank for about 3 or 4 days now.

My blog is very content heavy on the word "Mordheim" and is included in the title of my website and in almost every post title and keywords. Many of my categories also begin with the word Mordheim. I currently have 42 posts in my Mordheim blog. That is almost .9 posts a day!

Merry Christmas,
Ashton Sanders

Google Index Spasm (Google Dance)

I call this the Google index Spasm (other's call it the Google Dance):

After a couple weeks in existence, my new blog found itself on the second page for it's main keyword. After fluctuating between rank 12 and 18 for another two weeks, it fell to rank 80+... If I didn't know better, this would have caused me to be very disgruntled.

I don't know the purpose is of the Google Spasm, but it's kind of funny and annoying at the same time.

Today my blog is back up to rank 19 for its keyword. I think some call this the "sandbox" but my site wasn't in it for very long. Although that could be because it is a blog.

-Ashton Sanders

Google's Indexing Delay: Update

As of today, Google knows about 35 pages of my Mordheim blog. The last time the Googlebot hit this blog was on the 22nd, and my post on the 21st of November is up second when I check to see how many of my pages Google has added to it's search index.

It looks like Google has a fondness for blogs, as I've never had a page on my website get into the Google index that fast. Usually it takes at least a couple weeks.

Another thing to note: this blog is a subdomain of www.ashtonsanders.com, and Google already knows about this site. Even thought it is only a one page site, I'm sure it helped the speed into Google's index because it already knew that that domain existed.

-Ashton Sanders

Google's Indexing Delay

I created a new blog about Mordheim on the 10th of November. I worked on the design of the blog for about a day, and then linked to it for the first time on the 11th. I linked to it from a couple different sites: Websites in a Flash on the 11th, my Website Design Blog on the 17th, and Board Game Geek on the 17th.

By adding this new blog to my Google Webmaster Tools account, I could tell that Google Accessed my new blog on the 11th of November, 11 days ago. I have checked my site in Google's Index everyday for the last week, and yesterday, the 21st, I got my first click through from organic search results. Today, I have 5 pages in the Google index; the same five pages that were my only pages on the 12th of November (Home Page, About the Author and the entries for the 10th, 11th and 12th).

From this, it seems that it takes 10 days from the time that the Google-bot sees your page/site till the time that it gets entered into Google's search index.

I'll keep my eye on how Google reacts to my blog, and will keep you posted.
-Ashton Sanders

Update: This blog shows up at #23 for the keyword term "Mordheim"

SEO - Where to Host Your Blog?

I know that a blog can really help to increase your website content. A blog shows the Search Engines that there is actually someone behind this website, and they actually care about their website.

When I started this blog at the beginning of this year, I was trying to research whether it was better to have two medium-content heavy sites that link to each other, or one site with all of the content.

The Setup

My main Website Design Website is Websites in a Flash. This site has 20-30 pages of content, and got approximately 400 unique visitors a month. (This is primarily from Search Engines.)

I knew that this blog would have many pages of website-terms, so I decided to host it on my Ashton Sanders website as a subdomain. The purpose of this was to see if two medium sized sites linking to each other would create an increase in unique visitors for both my Main Website and my Blog.

Results

Obviously, my Blog had an increase in visitors (because it didn't have any before). Surprisingly, it has totally surpassed my normal website, although I guess it shouldn't be surprising.

My Websites in a Flash website increased to about 650 Unique visitors. It also finally got back to PR4, but I'm not satisfied with that product. So, I've moved my blog to my Websites in a Flash Site, 301 redirects and all. I will now be testing my statistics/results on this new server, and will give you another update after 4 or 5 more months.

My findings, so far, from this test lead me to believe that it is best to have your blog on the same domain as your main website, but a final verdict will come in early 2008.

Note: After this Search Engine Optimization test, the only thing I have to test for myself if whether a blog on your website is better as a subfolder or subdomain.

-Testing the Bounds of the Internet
-Ashton Sanders

How to Create XML Sitemaps

The purpose of XML sitemaps are to help tell the search engines about all of the pages on your website. It also helps to tell the search engines which pages you think are most important. (They won't necessarily listen to you, but you can tell them.)

I recently found a great website that will create XML sitemaps for websites of up to 500 pages! And the best part is, it's absolutely Free! You can by the program they made as well if your site has more pages, etc.

Check it out:

XML Sitemaps

-Ashton Sanders

Search Engine Optimization vs Website Design

Earlier I wrote a post about the Basics of Search Engine Optimization.

In this post I'll be delving a little deeper into the basic principles that are used to create the basic rules of Search Engine Optimization.

Text is King I mentioned earlier how Search Engines can only index text. They can't see pictures, movies, music, etc. Pictures can become a very easy substitute for text if you are not careful. Many clients want that button to have a unique font with a nice shadow, which is totally fine... but not as good as having straight text.

So there is definitely a balance between Design and Search Engine Optimization. You want your site to be aesthetic enough for visitors to not be repelled, but you don't want it so picture heavy that no one finds your site as the search engines can't tell what your site is about.

"But you can add alternate text (alt attribute) to your images!"

Yes you can add alts, so that if you image doesn't load, you can have text appear in its place... but search engines know that there is really no way for visitors to see that text. So alt text will never have as much power as straight text or a "h1".

On the other hand, if your site is entirely text, with no images, you won't ever create a conversion. Images are needed to add live and personality and style to a website.

The Balance of Search Engine Optimization and Website Design.
-Ashton Sanders

How Do Search Engines Think? SEO Basics

Search Engine Optimization is fairly easy to understand. All you need to do is put your self in a Search Engines Shoes.

Let's start with Google's Mission:

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

-http://www.google.com/corporate/

Nice and Simple. But it gives you a good understanding of what you are working with and helps us to realize some very basic truths about Search Engines.

Search Engines Truth:

Search Engines want to find useful, informative sites for every search term.

Duh... And they do that by using robots (or bots) that are programmed to "index" websites and decide how useful/informative they are. So our job as Search Engine Optimizers is to make it obvious to search engines that your site is useful and informative. Here are some basics to Search Engine Optimization:

Use Valid Code: The search engine bots don't have eyes, so they can't see your website, but they can read the code that makes your website, and they do know how to read valid HTML. But if your code isn't valid, the bot can get confused and ignore parts of your site.

Content is King: Anyone can make a site that says, "Hello World!" Search engines don't value sites that don't have any content. You need to have relevant content on your website. If your site is about fixing Race Cars, but you never say race cars on your site, don't be surprised when you never find your site under the search term "race cars."

Don't Hide Text: An old search engine "cheat" was to have white text on a white background. This would allow you to have lots of keyword heavy content on your site without actually having to bug your visitors with the large amount of text. This will damage your rankings much more than it will help.

Basic Principles: Google recommends that you don't do anything solely for search engines, which isn't to say that you shouldn't get your site search engine optimized, but rather, don't waste time and money trying to develop tricks to deceive the search engines. Just make a good, quality site that people will find informative and useful.

Links:If someone likes your site enough, they'll link to it. Duh. So if your site is extremely useful, and a lot of people like it, you'll have a lot of links to it. The number of links you have to your site is one of the biggest things that the search engines will judge your site on.

That's a nice overview of how search engines think, and the basics of search engine optimization.

-Use it wisely
-Ashton Sanders

.htaccess - AddHandler

There is a very common problem when trying to upgrade sites made by "newbie" website developers or when you realize that html isn't the only language on the internet, and you need to upgrade your site.

Problem:

You have a site where every page has a *.html or *.htm extension, and you want to add a dynamic, server-side programming language like PHP.

Solution #1:

Go through your entire site, and change every file name to a *.php extension. Then go through every page and correct all of the hyper links. Then do testing on your entire site to ensure that you haven't missed any links. Also, if you know anything about search engine optimization and websites, you'll know you need to create 301 redirects from your old pages to your new so that you don't lose any Rankings you may have gained. Then you have more testing to do to make sure all of your 301 redirects work....

Solution #2

Add this one line of Code into your .htaccess:

AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php .htm .html

That's all it takes to add PHP to my html files?

Yep, that's it. That little line of code has saved me hundreds of hours of work, and I'm sure it's not as commonly known as it should be.

-Spread the Wealth
-Ashton Sanders

SEO - Table Trick

It has been said that Search Engine Optimization "is not yet a science -- it's still an artform."

I totally agree with that quote. Search Engine Optimization is hundreds of little things that you with your site to make it more search engine friendly. The table trick is one of those SEO things you can do to improve your rankings (however slightly) in the search engines.

Theory

Search Engines don't usually index your entire page. They usually have a KB limit of how much it will index from each page, and it will probably value the information near the top of a page more than it does the information at the bottom.

Unfortunately, it is the style of the internet to have menu/navigation bars on the left side of the screen. Usually this means that the menu/navigation bar shows up in your code before the content of your web page. So the search engines have to sift through a bunch of formating code in your navigation before it gets to the meat of your site.

Here is where the table trick comes in:

Using this code, you will be able to have a left navigation bar that shows up below the content of your code. Here is the code:

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<table>
<tr valign="top">
<td><!-- leave this TD empty - it will disappear --></td>
<td rowspan=2>Put the text for the page here. </td>
</tr>
<tr valign="top">
<td>Put the Navigation Bar Here</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

That's it! If you want to see a website that is currently using this trick, go to Front Sight.com.

The above quote and this table trick supplied courtesy of Jere Matlock of Words in a Row. Jere is the best SEO resource anyone could ask for. His site is full of useful Search Engine Optimization tactics and ideas. You can also check out his blog: JMblog.

Another fun quote he has on is blog is:

"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing."
-Kingsley Amis

-Ashton Sanders

Google Webmaster Tools

Yet another reason why Google is awesome: Webmaster Tools.

Webmaster tools is the greatest tool for anyone wanting to get their sites up in the search engines. Search Engine Optimizers who don't know about this tool, aren't really search engine optimizers.

You prove to them that you own your website in one of two ways: 1) uploading an .html document to the server with a certain name like Google2903ncvd90nk30.html or 2) add a meta tag to your home page with a similar random name. After that, Google will get you all the information that they have about your site!

The program will tell you all of the crawl errors that the Google bot has while crawling your site! So if your site has gone through a couple redesigns or upgrades, I guarantee there are pages that used to exist that Google can't find. And everyone of those pages create a 404 error for the Google bot - which, by the way, is not good. But you'll never know unless you get this tool and find out!

Its got endless tools like that. It has a robot.txt analysis page that will tell you if you have any problems with your robot.txt.

It will tell you how your pages are ranked by Google. It will tell you like 50% of your pages have medium page rank and the other 50% has low page rank. It will also tell you how many links you have directed to your website, and where they are coming from.

Google Webtools also has a place for you to submit your website's site maps! (Get gsite crawler to create your sitemaps... It makes it as easy as pie.)

And I barely scratched the surface on all of the different tools available to you through webmaster tools.

Check it out
-Ashton Sanders

Cheating the Search Engines?

On the topic of Search Engine Optimization, there are many ways to "Cheat" the Search engines. (Most of these ways are very detectable and you will get penalized for it today, but it was a "good idea" back in the day.)

White Text on White Background: This will alow you put lots of heavy keyword content on your page without having to bother your visitors with them.

Hard to find links: This is where you link a space " " or a couple letters and force it to not underline. This way you can direct the search engines to a content heavy page without showing your visitors.

All of these "cheats" will get your site penalized on the Search Engines. This is Google's first "Quality guidelines - basic principles":

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

(Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/...)

But what about link farms?

A link farm is a system or program that links thousands of sites to your website. Since number of links to your site is one of the main things that Google and other search engines look for, It probably isnt' a bad idea.

But note, if you get 10,000 links from sites that all have pagerank of 0, your website's going to have the page rank of 0. So you have to be careful about which program you choose.

I would recommend Link Farms for today, but keep an eye on your page rank, and if it disappears one day, it may because google devised a way to detect link farms.

-Enjoy,
-Ashton Sanders

PHP 301 Redirect: Moved Permanently

Through years of programming websites and Internet database software, etc. I've decided to work mostly with PHP. PHP is a server-side scripting language that helps to create interactive websites. It is very useful for creating dynamic pages. (Pages that have one format but fill in different information depending on what information it is given.) This is common in any online store. Every product has the exact same layout, but it has different pictures, and words.

A great thing about PHP is it's free. It's largest server-side scripting language competitor, Microsoft's ASP, isn't. The PHP syntax is widely used and is very similar to C and Perl.

If I ever have a question about PHP or need information, I always go to http://W3Schools.com. It's also a great place for beginner programmers to get their foot in the door.

Here is how to us PHP code to make 301 Redirects:

301 Redirect: Moved Permanently
This code is for page redirecting. If you ever change a page name on your website, or take it down, you need to redirect that link to another page. This is because if you've had that page up for any period of time, the search engines like google.com or yahoo.com still think that it's there. Or another site may be linking to it. This will save visitors from getting lost and never seeing your site when they cliked on your link.

Here is the PHP code:

<?
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("location: http://www.yoursite.com/newpage/newfile.php");
exit();
?>

301 Redirect to "www."
This code I programmed because I wanted to make sure that whenever someone comes to my site, they come to the "http://www.websitesinaflash.com" (NOT: "http://websitesinaflash.com") So now whenever someone types in my website name without the "www." It will automatically redirect.

"Who Cares if there is a 'www.' in front of your website or not?
The biggest reason for this is so that search engines don't index two version of the same page. For example, if a Search Engine's bot find a link to my sight that doesn't have the "www." It will index the entire site without it. And if that happens, I'll have two exact duplicates of my website.

"Wouldn't that be a good thing?"
No. Search Engines will ding you if you have duplicate content. They see it as an attempt to cheat the system. I knew a man who changed the hosting and domain name for his website. But he didn't take down his old site. After a couple months, his old site which had had 3-4 Google Page Rank, now had 0 (zero). He realized this and took down his old site, and after half a year, he was back to normal.

Here is the PHP code:

<?
if($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] != "www.websitesinaflash.com")
{
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("location: http://www.websitesinaflash.com" . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
exit();
}
?>

And there's my two cents on 301 Redirecting with PHP.

-Enjoy
-Ashton Sanders