Climbing the Beanstalk
October 3, 2004
Welcome to the October 3, 2004 edition of “Climbing The Beanstalk”,
the bi-weekly newsletter on search engines and search engine positioning
from Beanstalk. In this edition we will explore the changes in the
Google algorithm over the past week, some basic tips on reciprocal
link building, as well as a special feature on search engine friendly
design and the importance that it can play in your rankings.
If you have any questions regarding any of the areas covered in
this newsletter please don’t hesitate to contact
us.
The Google Shakedown
It happens as regularly as you change your calendar and yet, changes
to the Google rankings never cease to cause panic among many, and
confusion from others. While it’s simple enough to understand
why people panic (watching your site drop in the rankings is never
fun) it’s rarely the enormous cause for alarm the some make
it out to be.
For the past few months Google has been tweaking their algorithm
at around this time each month, about two weeks later they do their
backlink update in which new links to your website will be factored
in, and a few days after that the ranking fluctuate based on these
new links. And then after a week or two we watch it all happen again.
It seems to be about a 4 to 6 week cycle.
The key, it seems, from this update is links and more to the point,
anchor text. Anchor text is the actual verbiage used to link to
your website. For example, a link which reads:
Visit us online at www.beanstalk-inc.com.
Will be far less effective than a link which reads:
Visit Beanstalk Search
Engine Positioning.
The use of the phrase “search engine positioning” in
the actual link text adds weight and relevancy between those keywords
and the page they are linking to.
This factor has become more important in last week’s shuffle.
An example of this can can be viewed with a search for “whitehat
tactics”. The results show that the #1 ranking page is
one from the beanstalk-inc.com domain. If we then click on the cached
version of the page the point is clearly illustrated. You can
see that the word “tactics” appears periodically throughout
the page however the word “whitehat” does not even appear
once. The word “whitehat” appears only in text linking
to that page.
Prowling for Links
So links and link text have increased in importance after the last
shuffle but what does that mean to you and your site. The best course
of action is to work first on your sites internal linking structure
and then to move on to building additional links using the keywords
you are trying to target. The value of these links is also important.
A link from a site with PageRank 3 if FAR less valuable than a link
from a page with PageRank 5. Find high PageRank site related to
yours and work to attain links from them.
It can be difficult to find high PageRank sites that exchange links.
The best of the tools I’ve found to accomplish this is PRProwler.
You can view details on this in our tools section at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/resources/tools.htm.
It’s in our “tools we use” section right at the
top.
Feeding The Spider
While links and text link are definitely important it’s always
important to have good site optimization and that begins with a
solid design. If one understands that a search engine spider reads
your website very much link you would read a book. It starts at
the top left, reads across, and moves down a row and begins at the
left again.
The key then, is to structure your site in such a way that the
spider reads the important content as quickly and easily as possible.
An article was recently written on this topic by Mary Davies, the
authority on search engine friendly design at Beanstalk Search Engine
Positioning.
The article can be read in its entirety at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/se-friendly-design/table-structure.htm.
Thank You
Thank you very much for subscribing to “Climbing The Beanstalk”,
the bi-weekly search engine positioning newsletter. If there are
any areas of search engine positioning that you would like to see
covered please don’t hesitate to contact
us. We want to write what you want to know.
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