Back in the last SEO workshop, I consulted Shi Heng Cheong over a problem with our article directory: less than 20% of the pages were ever indexed (there were lots of supplementary results, but consider them ‘bastard’ pages).
I showed him this page, where if you scroll down and look to your bottom right, you see some links to 5 articles. That’s how we reckoned the spiders will dig deep via a “front door” page and index more pages. Anyway, the page is never meant to be a direct-response page and it will be deleted at an appropriate time. Learn what NOT to do from us gooroos!
Whether it was a coincidence or not, Shi mentioned something that relates to how article directories work. To solve the problem as best as we can, we must bring up the article links as a top-fold section AND include a writeout of the first paragraph as a snippet so that spiders can easily ‘look’ at the content for its indexing decisions.
To increase the ‘originality’ degree of the article, rewording the first and last paragraphs is just fine. That reminds me of an urban myth about teachers. During the busy exam season, teachers don’t read from start to end of every student’s essay. They scan through the first few paragraphs and give a mark according to that.
But can’t spiders look at every single link of a page? Aren’t they machines? What Shi said next completely knocked me of my chair and I have yet to find evidence of his explanation. Google is actually modeling spiders as closely to human eyeball movement as possible (surely that has to do with heat maps). Now…not one of us have any idea how googlebot can not only determine your page layout but also how visitors read through it just by ‘looking’ at your HTML code, but at least that gives us an insight into why Google loves blogs.
And the truth is layout and culture are the blog’s 2 best assets.
For one thing, the blog has an elaborate archiving system that takes away non-techies’ fear and hassle of uploading web pages via FTP and linking to them from the “front door”, so they can happily post away as frequently as they wish. The more frequent a blog (or site) is updated, the more often spiders come to look for food. The blogging culture precisely promotes originality because blogging motivates original opinions, thoughts and comments too. Chances are, when there is original content, would not readers scroll all the way down to read what they have missed out before? Would not spiders emulate readers’ behavior by ‘looking’ all the way down? And index new posts along the way? 1 post per page. We know spiders are more than happy to index 3 posts a day instead of penalizing you if you are that hardworking. As a saying goes, “The more pages you get up in the search results, the bigger your online presence.”
It’s true, as reflected by our own tracking of blog pages. We hope blogging may be an activity you would resolve to do more consistently to build up credibility, relationships and SEO too as you go along. We will type something concerning the Long Tail of SEO. This is amazing stuff, and it works. You will know how to get ranked on the first page for every possible key phrase combination. The “how to get noticed on myspace” in the previous post is one example.
Last but not least, the 4th run of the SEO workshop, to be conducted by Shi, commences on March 2nd and 3rd. There will be a lot more covered in the areas of on and off-page optimization, including press release optimization and social media marketing plus continual support and opportunities for idea exchange within the community. Register on this page. Having this SEO skillset will make things easy for you in the future.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4
