SEO programmes

Are these a waste of time

[davey]

I've just downloaded loads of programmes from zdnet that are supposed to help with search engine submission like WebPosition Gold and also some that are supposed to help with SEO. Are these a waste of time?

[Yidaki]

davey, sou should use the WebmasterWorld site search [searchengineworld.com] ... or google's WebmasterWorld site search [google.com] ;). You'll find tons of discussions about that topic.

And prob the WebmasterWorld Marketingworld [webmasterworld.com] forums are worth to visit if you search for infos about seo software.

[davey]

Thanks a lot.

[ciml]

Just one extra thing...I haven't personally found use for 'SEO software' in relation to Google, but it is very important to make sure that the live software running on the site (eg. CMS, shopping cart) is Google friendly.

[MetropolisRobot]

Also read what Google itself says about these programs before you start using them.

[google.com...]

They are not scare tactics and not to be ignored. Basically much of your ranking depends on hard work rather than tricks. Tricks may help in the short term, but the penalties may doom your placement in the long term.

[davey]

Thanks for that. What about hidden text? Is this doomed in the long term or easy to get away with? I think possibly the latter?

[brotherhood of LAN]

"SEO programmes"

get something like a site ripper, copy what your competitors do and you cant go far wrong IMHO.

I'd avoid the hidden text davey. Maybe more legitimate ways to get the same effect. Others may differ in opinion though.

[Mohamed_E]

Invisible text is difficult to detect automatically, so you can probably get away with it in the short term. If a competitor complains and the site is examined by a human it is, of course, very obvious and may lead to permanent banning.

I would avoid it like the plague.

Let me repeat MetropolisRobot's excellent advice:

> Tricks may help in the short term, but the penalties may doom your placement in the long term.

If you are in this business for the long term, avoid anything that can get you banned.

If you do not believe that people get banned browse through this forum and see how many posts there are from anguished webmasters whose sites have disappeared from the Google map of cyberspace!

[MetropolisRobot]

Mohamed_E is right. Basically invisible text can be hidden in a number of ways that are not immediately apparent to the search engines and their spiders.

However, you have to remember that for every category (unless you sell widgets that really are unique) there are many people just like you who want to be top. If they see someone else who is top then they go to the site, right click, examine source and see what you are up to.

If they should find you up to *no good* (TM) them they'll rat you out. And really they have every right. If you are using something that's "illegal" and you are getting a good placement because of it then...

Anyway, I'll repeat something that I believe and that is placement is a good thing to go for, but, making the customer/browser feel welcome, making it easy for them to buy/subscribe/whatever, and getting repeat business from that experience OR personal referrals because the user had great experience WILL make your site successful. It just may take a little longer.

[davey]

I hear you all and take on board what you have said. I am going to remove the hidden text, however, I fear for my ranking - I can't have any more body text as my site needs to be really simple. I have keywords in my alt tags, but without the same words in my body text I fear for my ranking (which is modest but for a number of keywords is pretty high). I guess there's nothing I can do about that.

One other thing, if I remove the hidden text on my splash page, which is basically just an index of the other pages and has only a couple of words on it, surely this will be catasrophic, or do the search engines take into account that there are other pages on the site which contain the keywords - what i mean is, if the splash page is not optimised but is submitted to the engines, will they look further into the site than that when doing the ranking, the other pages will be better for body text.

[MetropolisRobot]

Davey. That's a tough one to call.

Make sure you have some good inward links to your site, and boost the text as much as you can, making sure your keywords and your page content are in alignment.

Also make sure that internal pages link back to your home page, that will also help.

Also ask yourself if your home page is serving the needs of your prospective clients? Have you gone for design purity over usability? Do people who come to your site know what you are selling?

There are good reasons why Google is designed the way it is. Also why alltheweb changed their screen. Why Yahoo has more text than anything else.

I work for a company that had a designer in residence who put design above everything else. We have a Pr7 site that appears on about page 8 or 9 of google results for our target keywords because there is a lack of text. Hey but the site looks cool...

[davey]

That's a very good point MetropolisRobot. The splash page is really to direct people as to which aspect of the topic they are interested in, before getting too specific on their asses!

What has just occurred to me is that I have a "flashing" affect with different text appearing and then disappearing which I could add my hidden text to (the code is below if you need it - it's pretty primitive but hey it works!). I wondered if this would count towards the body-text quota of the site or whether the search engines would ignore it cos it's not conventional and it's not there all the time? They may still think I'm spamming because the word only flashes up every five minutes and they don't wait that long!

function checkBrowserForVersion4(){var x=navigator.appVersion;y=x.substring(0,4);if(y>=4)strobeEffect();}
var isNav=(navigator.appName.indexOf("Netscape")!=-1);a=0;b=1;ob=1;
var colors=new Array("AEBAE2","AEBAE2","AEBAE2","AEBAE2","AEBAE2","AEBAE2","AEBAE2","AEBAE2","AEBAE2",
"AEBAE2","AEBAE2","AEBAE2","AEBAE2","AEBAE2","AEBAE2","AEBAE2","AEBAE2","AEBAE2",
"AEBAE2","AEBAE2","A7B4DF","ADAEDC","99A8D9","92A2D6","8B9CD3","8496D0","7C8FCE",
"7589CB","6E83C8","677DC5","5F77C3","5870C0","516ABD","4964BB","4660B4","435CAD",
"4058A6","3D549F","38519A")
function strobeEffect(){color=colors[a];
aah="<table width=600><td class=KLTStyleDark><center><font color="+color+" size=+0>";aab="</font></a></center></td></table>"

ob1="This is where:"
ob2="I have the text flashing up."
ob3="I wondered if I added to this."
ob4="whether it would count towards"
ob5="my body text quota!"

obj=eval("ob"+ob);mid=obj;aa=aah+mid+aab
if(isNav) {document.object1.document.write(aa);document.object1.document.close();}
else {object1.innerHTML=aa}
a+=b;if (a==38) b-=2,ob+=1;if (ob==6)ob=1;if (a==0) b+=2;xx=setTimeout("strobeEffect()",20);}

[edited by: ciml at 5:05 pm (utc) on Mar. 22, 2003]

[MetropolisRobot]

I have to admit you got me there. Not sure.

One thing you can do to add text (not as visible as normal page text of course but still helps) is to add comments in your HTML. Some search engines like to see comments as well as keywords and page content text.

Another idea is to look carefully at what phrases etc you are trying to be found for. If you are targetting "specific widgets" rather than "widgets" then maybe you can just make sure that the text in the home page and the keywords are directed that way.

Rather than using a blunderbuss of all keywords that might be found, target the audience instead. I use my logfiles etc to assist me in this and also use the Overture comparative keywords/how many people searched this phrase to assist.

[davey]

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me, you've been so helpful.

Can anyone else out there throw any light on the above dilemma?

[davey]

Also MetropolisRobot, whilst your online - and anyone else for that matter - say i sold widgets and my domain name was www.davey-jones.com, and i bought www.widgets.com to improve my ranking, would i need to have my site hosted on www.widgets.com or could i just point www.widgets.con to www.davey-jones.com and still get the traffic benefits if I submitted to the search engines under www.widgets.com

[freejung]

I know it's hard to compromise your beautiful design, but it might be a good idea to try to redesign slightly and accomodate some text. Or, alternately, if the splash page cannot accomodate content, target the keywords with subpages and try to get deep links to them so that they can rank on their own. Ranking is page by page, and the logic is that if the content for that keyword is not on the splash page, that page shouldn't rank for that word. Instead, the subpage with the actual content should rank. For this you need deep links, but they may not be that hard to get, since people may be more willing to link to the meat than to the splash page.

I'm not sure I think splash pages are a good idea, though, they just put one more click between the user and what they're looking for. I would rather be told right up front what your site is about. And if the navigation coming off your splash page is not totally transparent (which I see all too often, esp with Flash, like buttons which have no text on them until you move the mouse over them), fuhgettaboudit.

Do you have text links on your splash page? If so, can you put your keywords in them? If not, maybe you should have some.

[davey]

Thanks freejung. I'll think about deeplinks, and leave the splash page for direct hits only for them to navigate. Can you throw any light on my previous question three entries up about domain name masking?

[GoogleGuy]

davey, I would recommend against hidden text--it will do more harm than good eventually. And hiding it in an exotic way can be even worse than just normal hidden text.

Hope that helps,
GoogleGuy

P.S. Many SEO programs aren't worth the bits they're encoded in. There are some programs that can ease the task of SEO, but there are many more that stand out like a red flag. It's pretty funny when people think that they can buy a program and magically improve their rankings--it usually just doesn't work like that. :)

[JudgeJeffries]

GG, not sure that comment is entirely fair especially if you're a total amateur but never the less want to have some fun and compete with the pros.
I used WPG page critic and lifted my position from obscurity to respectability, and amazingly enough to number one for a couple of contested terms. Whilst reallising that it does have its limitations for Google due to off page factors, it certainly gave me the encouragement to delve more deeply into SEO techniqes, which is where I stand at the moment, 2 rungs off the bottom and reading this forum every day to find out more, but still making a living. It would help however if Google could make their spam guidelines more detailed and explicit.

[freejung]

davey, I don't know much about this issue of domain names and redirects, but I can tell you that the "party line" around here is that this sort of thing is a bad idea. Why do it? There's a great deal of controversy over whether keyword domains make much difference in the first place. You should be able to rank fine with your davey-jones domain. Redirects are probably a bad idea, I think Google doesn't like that sort of thing at all. Maybe GG could comment more on that, but it sounds pretty shady to me.

IMHO, your best bet is to work on your subpages. If your homepage is being spidered and you have normal HTML links to the subpages (not just Flash!), the subpages will eventually be spidered as well. Even more quickly if the subpages have external inbound links. Then you can have all the text you want without messing up your splash page.

I think the biggest problem with keyword domains is that they only target one keyword. I have a keyword domain, and I have subsequently come to regret it, it may be more of a limitation than a help. I have three keywords in my domain name, and when I chose it, I didn't even know to use hyphens, so it's probably totally useless. My site has been found using over 2000 keyword combos this month. The traffic from the three words in the domain name is negligable compared to all the traffic my subpages are getting from obscure keyword combos.

Think bredth rather than depth. Rank for many different keywords, using the subpages, rather than only one with the homepage. Use keyword text links to link to the subpages and to link them to each other, and try to get your keywords in inbound links from other sites to the subpages.

From Brett's 12 months doc: "It is better to have 50 pages which produce one referral each than one page which produces 50 referrals."

[davey]

freejung, that is extremely helpful, i am still learning as you can tell and to have someone take the time to help me is just great. thank you :)

[freejung]

Oh, I'm still learning too. I learn something new every time I go on this board! I love ww, it's an incredible source of solid info. I only started doing this SEO thing a few months ago, but I've learned a lot by hanging around here.

The basic message I've taken away from all this is, try to think of yourself as an ally of the SEs rather than a foe. Work with them to deliver great content and to help the users find it as easily as possible. Don't use tricks, but do use your keywords liberally and get as many backlinks as you can.

[MetropolisRobot]

Following on from GoogleGuy's comment. One thing that does happen is that these SE/SEO programs do not have a long enough evaluation period to see if they do work as well.

I do agree with the person who mentioned that they can give some idea of *glaring* problems. Alas their statistics and comparisons are based on what the developers think they know about SE algorithms.

Anyways, IMHO to get into Google, then have a fair crack at optimizing etc normally takes about 3 to 4 months IF YOU DO THINGS THE RIGHT WAY.

Anyone who does it (or claims to do it) faster than this with a new site, from scratch is usually pretty lucky, OR using something that may get them into trouble.

[GoogleGuy]

Good comments from freejung and MetropolisRobot. If you make a useful site and follow the advice you'll find around here, within a few months you should do well in Google and you won't have trouble sleeping at night. :)

[JudgeJeffries]

There are however a million and one ways in which you can accidently trip yourself up on the spam front.
How about some specific answers as to what is and what is not allowed. As an example would it be that unreasonable to ask Google to clear up the CSS/h* question once and for all.
There are of course lots of other similar points that are debated here on a regular basis and instead of sitting on the sidelines Google could give some sensible, precise and clear guidance.