Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

I wrote a couple years ago about a neat little trick I figured out for getting my dynamically generated web pages listed in the search engines by converting id references from numerical to alphabetical characters. Eventually the search engines caught up and it was big news when Google and MSN started including dynamically generated web pages in their search results, making this hack interesting but not terribly useful.

I wanted to revisit this concept in light of our current testing to find out not just if a page with a numerical id query string would be indexed but whether search engines had any kind of preference with regards to query strings. The answer, while not exactly shocking, is interesting nonetheless. Here’s the set-up:

Two pages, each with similar keyword density, title tags, etc. but each with a unique query string: one is page.php?id=123, the other is page.php?id=abc. Based on our tests, both pages were indexed by Google at the same time but the alphabetical query string (abc) is listed as the first result - meaning, Google prefers query strings that look like words. Of course once again, Yahoo! takes the opposite track and prefers the ‘123′ page so you’ll have to decide which search engine is more important to your site

If you already have pages with numerical query strings I don’t recommend converting to an alphabetical scheme because it will take time for your pages to be re-indexed (and you may run into duplicate content issues in the interim). Rather, consider what types of query strings your pages will use when creating your next website to maximize your search engine ranking success!

Sports One Source posted a good article about the importance of consumer reviews in the ski and snowboard industry. The article is available via subscription only but here are some highlights:

(T)he majority of snow sports participants (86.4%) said that they take the time to read online product reviews that other consumers have written before purchasing new products … More than 88% of panel members said they seek out and read these reviews before purchasing expensive snow sports equipment and apparel.

Wow, 88% seek out product reviews before making a purchasing decision! While those interested in high end snow gear are generally younger and more comfortable seeking information and advice online than average, this certainly signals an important trend.

Almost 7 out of 10 consumers have decided not to purchase a product because of a review another consumer has written. On the other hand, the impact of a bad review only goes so far, 61.6% have purchased a product even after it received bad consumer reviews.

Retailers are concerned that bad reviews can tank sales - and this seems to reinforce that concern. Since retailers are often unwilling to give consumers the ability to post potentially negative product reviews it is important for review sites to remain independent in an effort to provide the best information to consumers.

Consumer review web sites provide tremendous transparency to markets for goods and services that simply could not have existed before the Internet. Today, anyone can create a consumer review web site using Review App - what will your Review App be about?

I wrote last week about the power of Top 10 lists and how they’re a great form of word of mouth and search engine marketing. Today I’d like to highlight one of the features included in Review App along the same lines: Custom lists. With Review App you can create lists for your users to keep track of virtually anything: campground wishlists, favorite running shoes, BBQ restaurants visited, bike trails ridden, etc. You name the list, choose the listing section your list applies to, and you’re done - it’s that easy with Review App!

Lists can serve several purposes on a Review App site. First, lists give your members a fun way to interact and collect items on your website. If you don’t think this is a powerful motivation in itself, just take a look at all the popular Facebook applications out there that are little more than favorite or collection lists. One of the most popular Facebook applications, “Where I’ve been” allows users to create a list of countries they’ve visited or want to visit. With Review App you can have a similar list up and running on your site in just seconds. Members enjoy collecting and communicating their personalities through their “lists” and Review App custom lists give you endless flexibility in creating lists your users will love to keep.

Custom lists can also be great at motivating your members to submit even more content (listings) to your site. Say a member wants to add Dusty’s BBQ to their list of “BBQ I’ve eaten.” If Dusty’s isn’t listed on your site yet, the user will be motivated to first add a listing for Dusty’s so they can add it to their “BBQ I’ve eaten” list. Sweet.

Finally, custom lists expand the number of internal links on your site and help improve search engine visibility. Keeping with the BBQ example, if 10 people have eaten at Dusty’s, your site will have at least 10 links pointing to the Dusty’s listing - and you didn’t have to add a single line of HTML! The individual user lists are unique content pages as well which increases your indexed page count - more gold!

Custom lists are a great feature to add to any website and Review App makes it simple to add as many lists to your site as you like. Caution: Review App custom lists may be addictive

Okay, since it’s Monday I thought I’d toss a softball lob SEO question: How important is the page title in improving your search engine rankings? I’ll give you a hint - the answer rhymes with “berry”.

Yup, our tests confirm what you probably already know to be true: A page with your target keyword in the title will be listed above a page without the keyword. Search engines love page titles for a number of reasons - they are descriptive, they’re near the top of your markup, and their capacity for gaming is limited.

Obviously title tags are meant to be descriptive of your page content but clearly they don’t have to be. Of course your human readers will be confused when the title bar in their browser says something like “German Shepherds make great pets” but your page is about semiconductors.

Search engines also really like title tags because they’re at the top of your page, meaning their crawlers don’t have to read the whole document just to understand what your page is about. I’ll write about this later but it’s usually best to assume search engines work in the simplest way possible - that their spiders are written to be as fast and uncomplicated as they can be. Title tags are near the top so they have priority over the stuff that comes later (your content).

Finally, title tags are technically limited in length by the W3C (the web standards org) to 64 characters. Of course this is just a guideline and some browsers may display much more in their title bars. The point is that search engines are free to truncate your title tags wherever they like meaning you need to place only the most relevant words into your page title. Search engines are also more comfortable ignoring titles over a certain length than they are, say, ignoring your content if it goes too long. The title tag is certainly important but its power is limited by nature.

Take a look at your site and make sure all your pages have unique, descriptive titles and watch your indexed pages soar!

One cool feature we included in Review App is the ability to add pre-built categories to organize your listings. Say, for example, your website is about places to bungee jump around the world. Instead of typing in a list of world countries or searching online for a list to load via an Excel spreadsheet, just click on the ‘Countries’ pre-built category link and voila - all the world countries will be added to your site. Review App includes other pre-built category lists including US States and the top 100 US metro areas with more lists on the way. If you have a suggestion for a pre-built category list, let us know - we’ll include it in the next revision of Review App!

The best part about adding pre-built categories is that once they’re added you can edit and delete them just as if you had added the categories manually yourself. You can even place your pre-built category list as a subcategory to any of your existing categories. So, for example, if you have categories for the US, Canada, and Mexico you can plop the US States category list under the US category leaving Canada and Mexico as top-level categories. Simple, huh?

We’ve built enough websites ourselves to appreciate the time pre-built categories will save when setting up a new consumer review website - we think you’ll appreciate it as well.

Although the “top 10″ list may have been developed by David Letterman many years ago, the concept has been embraced on the web in recent years to become an important marketing tool for many sites. Just look at some of the most popular articles on digg.com (itself, a sort of top 10 list): The Best 10 All Purpose Laptops, The 7 Greatest Home Shopping Network Screw-ups of All Time, etc. The Internet is a vast and complex information resource and as humans we need a way to categorize and rank the most important (or most bizarre, most ridiculous, most expensive, etc.) to make sense of it all.

We’ve certainly seen the power of top 10 lists on Review App sites and have benefited from the associated search traffic those lists have generated. On TripleBlaze.com, our outdoor information site, by far the most popular page on the site is the “Top 100 Campgrounds in the US.” Of course the list is automatically ranked based mostly on the number and quality of campground reviews but our users take the list pretty seriously. Just today I received an email from one reader who felt like the list was somehow biased and unfair but the truth is the algorithm decides which campgrounds make the cut, not the webmaster Oftentimes controversy can be even more beneficial to generating online traffic.

On Fresh Bible we have a list of the most popular verses in the Bible; on singletracks we have lists to see who has ridden the most mountain bike trails and which trails are most popular. Of course we’re also seeing the power of top 10 lists on sites like Facebook where it seems like every other application is some type of competition to see who (or what) is #1. It’s all in good fun but a dynamic list that changes often keeps users coming back to see what is on top.

Most internet searchers want to find the best of what they’re looking for and adding a top 10 list to your site can give them exactly what they’re looking for!

This is one of my favorite myths about search engine rankings because it cuts to the heart of early attempts at “search engine gaming.” The story goes that in the early days folks would place words like “sex” in a white font on pages with white backgrounds so their readers couldn’t read the text but search engines would. Common wisdom said at the time that you would be penalized for such a stunt because it just wasn’t fair or in the spirit of legitimate search engine marketing.

I’ve always been suspicious of this myth myself, especially today when things like font and background colors can be hidden deep within pages of CSS or locked up in complicated background images. Even in the old days an industrious designer could simply set a page background to #000000 (black), place a white background image (.gif) over the top and then write all the “hidden” white text he or she so desired. Were we to believe that the search engines were employing some type of screen capture tool to see how pages actually rendered, images and all? I think not.

Anyway, to our test results. For this test we built two pages: one with black text on a white background, the other with white text on a white background (no css or images involved), both with the same keyword. Both of our pages were indexed by Google around the same time and guess which one came out on top? The black text on a white background - no big surprise. What is surprising, however, is that the white on white page was fully indexed by Google just as if it were a normal page. No penalty for hiding text.

In our Yahoo! test, the white on white page was actually indexed at the expense of the black on white page which was not listed at all. Apparently Yahoo! prefers search engine gaming.

Seriously though, while it is possible to get hidden text indexed by the search engines it is not a strategy we recommend, except in moderation. If you have a sentence or a few words you’d like to have indexed but don’t necessarily want your readers to see, you probably won’t be penalized - just don’t overdo it. Unless of course you’re trying to get listed in Yahoo!

By now we all know that search engine optimization is a must for virtually any website. In fact, natural search traffic should generate the bulk of a mature website’s visits or that site may quickly find itself out of business. On singletracks.com, our mountain biking website, unpaid search engine referrals generate 87% of our visits - more than 100,000 in just the past month.

Clearly search engine placement is important for traffic generation yet what I’ve seen from search engine optimization (SEO) consultants has left me unimpressed. There are countless SEO forums, blogs, and corporate sales sites that espouse certain SEO “truths” but rarely seem to back these rules up with little more than statements like “in our experience” or “as far as we can tell.” SEO is just too important to leave up to gut feel and subjective experience.

Search engine crawlers and ranking engines are computer programs which means they don’t run on feelings and subjective rules. To understand how search engines view and rank webpages, it’s important to use rigorous and controlled scientific testing so we can base SEO “rules” on the results of these tests. To that end, we’ve been running our own highly controlled tests over the past several months to see how some typical SEO myths stack up against reality. In several cases, we were pretty surprised at the results.

We won’t bore you with any more of the details of our strategy or our testing methods - suffice it to say we’ve taken out all the noise in our tests to answer individual SEO questions like this one: When placing keywords in a URL, where are they most effective - as part of a ‘directory structure’ or as the name of the document? For example, which is better: domain.com/keyword/ or domain.com/keyword.html?

In this test, our page (domain.com/keyword) was indexed by Google first by almost a week, though this is not always an indication of a better ranking. Over more than two months of testing, however, domain.com/keyword remained the top result for our test keyword - a result that surprised even one professional SEO consultant we spoke with. Remember, we used a highly controlled test keeping keyword density, title tags, etc. constant while changing just one variable - the page name - to achieve this result. So if you have a choice - go with domain.com/keyword over domain.com/keyword.html.

We have more than a dozen such test results we’re dying to share on this blog over the next several weeks - come back soon to see what else we found!