Effective Search Engine Submission Strategies

Now that you've got a website it's time to start thinking about promoting it. Search engine listings are the number one way to generate traffic to your website.

stevenforsyth.com (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

The Google Sandbox and How To Get Out

The Google Sandbox is a filter that was put in place in about March of 2004. New websites with new domain names can take 6 to 12 months to get decent rankings on Google. Some are reporting stays of up to 18 months. The Sandbox seems to affect nearly all new websites placing them on probation. Similarly, websites that have made comprehensive redesigns have been caught up in this Sandbox. Does this Sandbox Really Exist, or is it just part of the Google algorithm? This has been a big controversy with many different opinions. Most now believe that this is an algorithm. In either case, the Sandbox functions to keep new sites from shooting to the top of Google in just a few weeks and overtaking quality sites that have been around for many years. This appears to be an initiation period for new websites.

Williams, Doug. stevenforsyth.com (2006). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

Google Search Engine Optimisation and their 80/20 Rule

Google's increasing use of anti-spam features has meant that optimising websites for Google has become much harder and it's now not just a case of opening your websites source files in notepad, adding some keywords into your various HTML tags, uploading your files and waiting for the results. In fact in my opinion and I'm sure others will agree with me, this type of optimisation, commonly referred to as onpage optimisation will only ever be 20% effective at achieving rankings for any keywords which are even mildly competitive. Those of us who aced maths in school will know this leaves us with 80% unaccounted for.

Callan, David. stevenforsyth.com (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization: Getting Started

Explain some of the first steps to get your website not only optimized for the search engines, but to push your website up in the rankings war.

Garite, Joe. stevenforsyth.com (2006). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

SEO Outbound Link Relevance

Outbound links' anchor text affects a page's search engine ranking in much the same way that inbound links' anchor text affects search engine ranking.

Walsh, Joel. stevenforsyth.com (2006). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

Strategies for Improving Enterprise Search

Acquiring and installing a search engine is just the beginning of creating an effective enterprise search system. John Ferrara walks us through strategies for addressing critical aspects of the user experience often overlooked or ignored.

Ferrara, John. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

Intelligent Site Structure for Better SEO!

Search engines are one of the most important traffic drivers to sites these days, which is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming more and more important. SEO is often thought to be just a set of some technical tricks, and as a professional SEO, I confess to spending a lot of time with clients fixing technical issues. A site's structure though, is just as important. Your site's structure determines whether a search engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index content relevant to your site's purpose and intent. By creating a good structure, you can use the content you've written that has attracted links from others, and use your site's structure to spread some of that "linkjuice" to the other pages on your site.

De Valk, Joost. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

Indexing the Web—It’s Not Just Google’s Business

Web databases do much more than passively store information. Part of their power comes from indexing records efficiently. An index serves as a map, identifying the precise location of a small piece of data in a much larger pile. For example, when I search for “web development,” Google identifies two hundred million results and displays the first ten—in a quarter of a second. But Google isn’t loading every one of those pages and scanning their contents when I perform my search: they’ve analyzed the pages ahead of time and matched my search terms against an index that only references the original content.

Mullican, Lyle. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

Is Your Key Content Drowning in News?

Many web editors spend a lot of their time writing news stories for the company web site. However, traffic analysis frequently reveals that this content is not very popular - and that users may in fact miss the key content they come to find (product data, addresses etc.) because it's practically drowning in news stories.

Furu, Nina. Content Strategy (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization