Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

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!

Since most people using hosting services don’t have access to their web server configuration files there isn’t an obvious solution to making urls like info.php?id=14 more search engine friendly. I even recently read on the google sitemap info page that not only does Google dislike dynamic urls like the one above but that google SPECIFICALLY doesn’t like pages that have an id argument with a number. It appears google would prefer a URL like info.php?state=14 to the URL above.

This really annoys me, especially since this is the most logical way to handle large information based websites since most of the data is stored in a database. I’ve already mentioned my trick of converting numbers to letters and I have had success with this method. Here’s my latest trick and you can use this one in combination with the previous trick if you like.

Using PHP’s GLOBAL variables you can keep track of any text tacked onto the end of a url. This allows you to change your info.php?id=14 URL into info.php/14 by using the following code:

You can place as many modifiers on the end of the URL, just separate each one with a slash then use the split function to get each of your variables. I think the Wikimedia Wiki also uses this method so it appears to be legit. Good luck!

SEOs (search engine optimizers) are all the rage these days as site operators seek a competitive edge in natural search result rankings. I have always been skeptical of these businesses for a number of reasons: they can’t help you when your competition uses them too, they don’t have any secrets, and they don’t know nearly as much about your business as you do.

First off, hiring an SEO is in a way a game theory response. You know your competitors use SEOs so you feel you need to use them just to keep up. But what if you hired the same SEO as your competitor (say you’re CampMor and your competitor is REI). Who wins then? Many SEOs guarantee top ranking for certain keywords but this can get sticky when your SEO is also helping your competitor. Your SEO will probably use the same tricks on both sites and you’ll both end up poorer and in the same positions relative to one another.

But let’s say you actually have different SEO vendors and both claim the ability to get you top ranking for your keyword(s). All SEO vendors claim to improve your natural search rankings but clearly someone’s SEO has to be second (REI or CampMor). So does this mean that the loser’s SEO is unable to back up its claims? You betcha - so don’t fall for guarantees of top rankings.

SEOs also each claim to have perfected proprietary techniques for improving your natural search rankings, but in the end, no one has any secrets. The big search engines work very hard to improve the accuracy of search results and any “secret” that can be exploited will not last for very long, if at all. The big secrets to search engine optimization, lots of topical content, descriptive title tags, and tons of incoming links, are pretty basic and any reasonable web operator already works to address these factors. So what are you wasting your money on when you’re the one who has to do all the work anyway?

Finally, I’ve also heard complaints from internet marketing managers that often SEOs are unable to make helpful suggestions for sites due to SEOs’ lack of specialized knowledge. For example, how many SEOs know the difference between an internal and external frame backpack or a goose-down sleeping bag and a synthetic bag? The fact is that you know more about your website topic than any SEO and you can probably easily list and focus on 20 descriptive words to concentrate on to maximize your search engine presence. SEOs will give you words like “tent,” “sleeping bag,” and maybe “backpack” if you’re lucky, but is this what your users are really searching for?

Unfortunately the answer isn’t as simple as firing your SEO at this point, however. In order to keep up with the competition, it might be a good idea to hedge your bets by sticking to your SEO efforts, despite the problems I’ve outlined. Just be prepared to do alot of the legwork yourself!