Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

As long as you're doing no more than building free sites and galleries you may not have much interest in anything related to the search engines. While there was a time when it was quite possible to get a free site to rank well on the first page of Google those times are long gone.

These days if you want traffic to your free sites and galleries then you just have to get them listed on link lists and TGPs that will send you a reasonable amount of traffic. But as you develop your business and move beyond those simple sites and the relatively simple traffic sources you're going to have to start looking at the search engines and how to get the rankings you need.

It's at that point that you're probably going to begin looking around the Web for tutorials and advice on how to get those good rankings and that's when you're going to start running into problems.

You see ... most of what you read on the Web about achieving great rankings is basically rubbish. It's been written by people who have no first-hand experience of obtaining great rankings. Instead all they have done is simply taken what someone else has said online and repeated it as if it were their own findings ... and the person they took it from probably took it from someone else who had no clue..

Even when you find what appears to be a great forum or website that's dedicated to search engine optimisation you don't always get the facts and why would you expect to? Sure there are some people out there who like to share their knowledge with others but most of the genuine experts really don't want to share their knowledge with anyone because they know that all they are doing is helping newcomers to develop into their competition.

So do your own testing ... discover what works for you. By all means take what some people 'experts' say as a starting point but don't be surprised to find that your testing disproves their theories. And don't be surprised if what you discover actually works is nothing like what many of those 'experts' claim will work.

Over the last couple of weeks my partner and I have been working on a project for a client that has confirmed what we already knew about a number of 'facts' about search engine optimisation.

We've been looking at the top 10 rankings in Google for three major population centers for 14 keywords and keyword phrases. We've looked at each site's back links ... we've looked at their internal links ... we've looked at the URLs that they use for their pages and we've looked at their use of those keywords and keyword phrases on the ranking pages.

And we've been looking in a highly competitive area where the competition is fierce and involves sites like eBay and Shopping.com. So what have we found that debunks many of those great truths that so many search engine gurus are so keen to tell you must be followed or you will never rank well?

Here are just two things that we've noticed. There are plenty of others but I'll leave you to debunk those for yourself.

Anchor text
This is one that I've never paid much attention to but it's been one of the most widely held beliefs and some search engine people will go to great lengths to ensure that the links that point to their sites have the 'right' anchor text. God forbid that anyone should give them a link from a phrase that says 'Click Here' ... they want the link to include keywords and keyword phrases and nothing less will do.

And what did we find in the vertical that we were looking at? Well there were many thousands of back links ... huge numbers of links pointing to some sites and a relative handful pointing to others ... but there was very little sign of any worthwhile anchor text.

There were plenty of links from 'Click Here' and maybe the name of the website but links that included anchor text that was relevant to the site were few and far between.

Someone else who is doing similar research in quite a different vertical to the one we have been looking at found that in his area of interest the top ranking sites didn't seem to have any anchor text in their back links at all.

You've got to have search engine friendly URLs Well this is one that we always strive for ourselves. In the past we have believed this one to be true and we're not about to stop producing sites with search engine friendly URLs but maybe that they're not as important as we thought it was.

In the vertical we were looking at most sites were dynamic and had the usual rubbishy URLs you would expect to see. There were lots of question marks and other forms of coding in the URLs and the sites still ranked well for the terms we were looking at.

It was interesting to note that for several of the terms we were looking at the dynamic sites with crappy URLs outranked sites that had gone to a lot of trouble to produce the search engine friendly URLs that everyone thinks are so important.

So the take away from today's column is that you should never believe everything you read about search engine optimisation ... no matter where you read it. By all means take some of those statements as a starting point but then spend time doing your own testing to see what really works and what really doesn't.