Internet Marketing, Web Design and SEO

Click distance and the importance of a sitemap

Click distance is basically the number of clicks from the home page to find a certain landing page.

Example: if you want to navigate to a certain page but literally need to click on a link from the home page then on a link to the secondary page then to a link to a third page just to find the page you are looking for then KNOW THIS… the search engines spiders have to as well.

Now many SEO’s might be saying why does this matter? What matters is most spiders only go 1-2 levels deep which means that if they have to follow a link 3-5 pages deep most likely they are NOT being cached and indexed unless these pages have inbound links to them.

What this means is that you may have hundreds or thousands of pages that are very possibly not being indexed and cached and could be affecting your rankings by. This means less of your pages will rank for certain keyword terms and less traffic to your site.

Needless to say us SEO’s need a way to get around this because we cannot always put a link to all of our pages on the bottom of our homepage. What we CAN do though is create a sitemap PAGE and link that from the home page. This sitemap page is essentially a spider bit for all of your internal page’s. I have attempted and tested this solution and it seems to work very well for me.

tip: if you want to step up your seo game and really see some results, try getting some inbound links for your internal pages. Now you wont need many but if you can get a few then you will surely see a great result for your site!

If you would like some verification on “click distance” please check out a patent put out by MSN. Click here.
SEOTEAM

Page rank search worth vs. Page Rank paid advertising worth.

I read an interesting post by Matt Cutts today which included a few great points on page rank which is pretty widely accepted by most seo’s but hasn’t caught on by the general public.

Google’s algo is always changing and it’s ability to update the Page Rank of sites is most USUALLY out of sync with its search engine updates. Just because you see a brand new PR number on that great little toolbar doesnt mean that your search engine results are going to be any better. PR does not influence a sites ranking and results in the SERP’s. Here is how matt put it.

“At any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm. From time-to-time, that internal PageRank value is exported so that it’s visible to Google Toolbar users. […]

By the time you see newer PageRanks in the toolbar, those values have already been incorporated in how we score/rank our search results. So while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it’s not as if that causes a change in search results at that point.”

Matt also goes on to discuss how “You don’t have to care about PageRank”. Why would he say something like this? It’s because page rank is just a number that does not influence you in the serps like most people think.

Inbound links, Page Copy, Site structure, keyword density and proximity are just a few of hundreds if not thousands of things that rate, rank and apply a site page rank.

One thing I would strongly recomend is first looking at your target audience and the competitiveness of your keywords. If you have a PR6 site but your terms are “auto insurance” or “blue bear winter home schooling” the most important thing is to evaluate how the site is doing in general and not base it on PageRank.

While doing my work for a major dot come I thumbed through thousands of SERP’s and one thing that amazed me is that some sites with little to NO PageRank came up above sites with low to mid PageRank. Here is what Matt says about PageRank.

“I think that’s a perfectly healthy attitude. If you don’t care about PageRank and your site is doing well, that’s fine by me. ”

Now this is the fun part. Because most people don’t know this or are to hard headed to believe this we have a group of people out there exploiting paid linking for sites.

An example would be a PR5 site that does NOT rank for any of its keyword terms and backlinks are not that decent but may have many links OR may be using black hat techniques. This type of site might charge you 100$ or more dollars to place a text link on there site BUT is definitely NOT worth it but because people believe (especially link popers) that the higher PR a site has, if we place our link on it then it will help our site more. This is FALSE!!!!

The best way to increase your own PR and your OWN SERP’s is to maintain a strong quality linking campaign. Text link ads put out a pretty good checklist and is pretty similar to the one posted at www.directoryrevolution.com. I would check it out because it might save your sites LIFE!

Meanwhile people will continue to make a fortune off of selling text link ads based on PR.

Till next time,

SEO TEAM