WMS Australia

Domain Checker

mmotherwell — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 01:00:42 +0000

Monte Heubsch

mmotherwell — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:17:33 +0000

I know Monte from speaking at the same SEO conferences, and he is frequently trying to pick up ladies so I hope he has better luck with this new venture, the opening of UK Local Search.

This is built on the success created by AussieWeb Local Search in Australia, which is a
HitWise Top 10 local search engine in Australia.

All ready the site is showing up on the first page of a Google search in the UK for Local Search, so things look promising!

If you need to find businesses to work with in the UK, this is a great resource, and we wish him the best of luck. (With the ladies too!)

404 Error Handling

mmotherwell — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:51:00 +0000

A 404 “Page Not Found” error page looks after expired pages, URLs that are misspelt, cropped by email programs (extremely common) or any other request that comes to the web server that there is no file set to handle.
Having good 404 error handling as a catch-all is recommended, as 404 error pages are almost always amongst the most visited pages on a site.

An excellent 404 error page, and one that we recommend copying, is the Apple 404 error page: www.apple.com/not-real.

This page has the following excellent features:

The standard navigation
A search box to find stuff on the Apple site.
Links to common sections and areas.
An explanation of the problem.
Ads – it is usually a popular page, so use it to sell!

Robots.txt Howto, Tutorial And Reference

mmotherwell — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 11:39:32 +0000

1.1 Robot.txt File

A robots.txt is the first file a crawler will grab from a site, and this file will indicate where ona site the crawler is not allowed to go.

The robots.txt must be placed in the root of a site and be called robots.txt, e.g. http://www.webmasterworld.com/robots.txt, which is a particularly thorough robots.txt. This is true for any top-level domain name, including sub-domains. As such, example.example.com needs a robots.txt file of its own, as does www.example.com.

There are only three elements that make up a robots.txt protocol, and these are:

- This indicates which user agent or bot the following directives are aimed at, e.g.

User-agent: Googlebot

This indicates that the commands on the following lines are aimed at Google. Every bot has their own UA, and there is also a generic command, * that indicates all bots.

- This command indicates what areas a bot is not allowed to index. For example:

User-agent: Teoma

Disallow: /

Tells Teoma, Ask Jeeves bot, to not index anything. (see below for more detail).

– Everything after a hash (#) is commented out.

There also exist several non standard robots.txt commands, such as Allow (which implicitly allows a search engine access to a folder or file), Yahoo and MSN’s crawl delay, and a number of regular expression based disallow commands supported only officially by Google. It is probably best to avoid such commands, as they may cause issues, although as Google has such a strong market share in Australia, the Google specific commands may be OK.

1.2 Disallowing Pages

The following are examples of disallowing pages based upon different commands:

1.2.1 Disallow Indexing of Whole Directories

Adding a trailing slash indicates that all the files in a folder are disallowed, e.g.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /pdfs/

Would disallow the robots from indexing anything in the www.example.com/pdfs/ folder.

1.2.2 Disallow Indexing Specific Pages

Similarly, individual pages can be indexed, e.g.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /embarrassment.htm

Would disallow www.example.com/embarrassment.htm from being indexed.

1.2.3 Disallow Indexing Anything That Start With A Set Prefix

The command

User-agent: *

Disallow: /dog

Would stop anything that started with www.example.com/dog from being indexed, e.g. www.example.com/dogybag.htm, www.example.com/dog/dog.htm or www.example.com/dog.pdf. This is a useful command to utilise, but has obvious problems as it can be hard to track all the disallowed prefixes. It is far better to simply lock of a directory than to use this method, which is fraught with problems.

1.2.4 Proprietary Commands

These are all unsupported and non-standard commands, and should only be used with an understanding that they may cause issues with other crawlers.

1.2.4.1 Crawl-Delay

This is a command that both Yahoo and MSN accept that slows down their crawler, e.g.

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp/slurp-03.html

User-agent: Slurp

Crawl-delay: 20

This command supposedly slows requests down to slower than one per 20 seconds. It is the opinion of WMS that this is ill-advised. The hardest part of SEO is getting all a site’s pages indexed, and anything that makes a crawler change their crawl schedule is likely to be bad. If search engine crawlers are clogging a server, it is better to look at optimising code, database calls and issue 304 response codes than it is to attempt to slow the crawlers down.

1.2.4.2 Allow

Some crawlers accept the allow command, which specifically allows directories to be crawled. Although this has some merit, it is probably better to simply put excluded material in password protected or disallowed directories.

1.2.4.3 Regular Expressions

Google and MSN both allow regular expressions to be used in commands. This can be useful in banning specific filetypes, e.g.

User-agent: msnbot

Disallow: /*.PDF$

Disallow: /*.jpeg$

Disallow: /*.exe$

Would disallow msn from indexing PDFs, jpegs and executables found in the root folder.

This is a very useful feature addition, but as a non-standard, it is problematic (especially the use of special characters in the commands) and there are simply better ways to achieve the same goal (e.g. putting PDFs in a disallowed folder).

1.2.5 Disallowing Crawling and Indexing

There can often be some confusion as to how a URL can be excluded but still indexed. This is due to the semantics of robots.txt, and the timeframe between finding a URL and downloading a site’s robots.txt file.

Robots.txt does not as written exclude a Search engines from having a specific URL in its index. The robots.txt protocol bans a search engine from accessing a page, but not from having it in their index. With the rise of off-page analysis, a Search Engine can build quite a bit of context for a page without ever visiting it, and as such a search engine can conceivably have a lot of URLs in their index without ever visiting them.

The only way to ensure a page or URL is not indexed is to use the robots meta tag, to specifically ban the indexing of a URL. Even then, before a page is visited, it may still reside in the index.

1.2.6 Additional Robots.txt Resources

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/appendix/notes.html#h-B.4.1.1 - W3c 4.01 HTML standard

http://www.robotstxt.org/ - The robots.txt information site. this hasn’t been updated in a very long time.

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion-admin.html - A How to for Web Administrators on creating robots.txt files

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html - information on excluding Search Engine robots

http://www.google.com/webmasters/3.html - Google’s Information about robots.txt and the robots meta tag.

help.yahoo.com/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-03.html – Yahoo’s information on robots.txt and deletions.

search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_RestrictAccessToSite.htm – MSN’s information on their robots.txt implementation.

Anchor Text

mmotherwell — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 03:25:31 +0000

Searche engines,, ina never ending quest to better rank pages, use a technique in which the words in links pointing to a page count towards the page’s relevance. That sounds complicated, but a quick example will make it quite clear. A link like this:

Google Search Engine,

would increase the rankings for the page being linked to (http://www.Google.com) for a search that used any of the words Google, search or engine. This is true of every link on every page, and can have an extremely powerful effect on the total traffic a site can generate.

Link reputation is most effective if used to target generic, high volume searches. For example, most of the top ten sites on big-ticket searches, like mortgage, are a result of aggressive link building campaigns utilising Link Reputation.

The real beauty of Link Reputation lies in the fact that while there is a limit to the number of words that can be used on a page, there is virtually no limit to the number of links with anchor text that can be generated to a page, with each link increasing the page’s ranking for a specific phrase.

In practise, there are two man ways to utilise Link Reputation:

Create a standard piece of linking code to provide to partners. This is an ideal way to utilise Link Reputation, and should be a part of every site’s marketing mix. Every sponsored site, every partner site and any additional sites owned by a business should all be provided with this code. If necessary, in return, a link back can be provided.
Use keyword within text. For example, instead of “Click here to find out more”, use the destination pages primary keywords or title, e.g. “seo australia”

As a rule of thumb, a link taken out of context should convey what a user can expect from the linked page. Click Here isn’t nearly as obvious as SEO australia, and it is the later types of links that are favourable. Thankfully, due to the fact that virtually no reads online content, preferring instead to skim, the later types of links also have a Usability benefit, as they offer information on the content linked to. With both a Usability and SEO benefit to keyword rich links, they really are an absolute no brainer.

Anchor text is a very effective and easy tool to utilise, and as much as possible, all links should be keyword rich and relevant to the destination page.

Good Qualifiers To Use In SEO Copy

mmotherwell — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 06:29:54 +0000

Plurals and non-plurals - e.g. dog and dogs
Adjectives - strong, thick, light, heavy.
Hyperbole - Good, better, best
Buying Qualifiers - cheap, good, buy, order, deliver, delivery, delivered, free, affordable, deal, deals, order
colours - white, red, black etc
regionalise - Country names, states, territories, cities, large regions (e.g. Europe), regions in a city (e.g. Hells Kitchen) and suburbs as well as zip/postcodes
Disqualifieers, e.g. terms that get search but aren’t possible - Cure (there is no cure for menopause), features not included (not available in black)
Errata -

Colour Tester

mmotherwell — Tue, 29 May 2007 09:01:22 +0000

Check what a colour looks like in a browser. Simply enter the colour into the text box, and press the “Show Me This Colour” button.

SEO Site Clinic - CeBit 2007 eMarketing And SEO Conference 2007

mmotherwell — Tue, 01 May 2007 15:11:44 +0000

Above is the SEO Site Clinic presentation given by Michael Motherwell and Guy Wayland at the CeBit 2007 eMarketing And SEO Conference 2007.

Online Help And Tools: CeBit eMarketing & SEO Conference

mmotherwell — Tue, 01 May 2007 09:15:53 +0000

Above is the presentation given for the CeBit emarketing & SEO conference.

A list of all the links from the presentation is available after the jump.

Google Webmaster Central

https://www.google.com/webmasters/

Yahoo Site Explorer

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Keyword Research

Online Tools

Desktop Programs

Xenu Link Sleuth
Arelis (waste of time)
Zeus (waste of time)
Webbug
Optilink (waste of time)

Toolbars / Browser Add-Ons

Be Careful

Google Toolbar (recommended)
Yahoo Toolbar (waste of time)
Alexa Toolbar (waste of time)

Firefox/Mozilla

SEO-For-Firefox
SearchStatus
Web Developer Toolbar

RSS Readers

Rss Feeds

Newsletters

Forums

In Order of Michael’s Personal Preference, with any personal affiliation in brackets for full disclosure.

How To Be Found On The Net: CeBit eCommerce Stream

mmotherwell — Tue, 01 May 2007 09:12:02 +0000

Above are the slides from the presentation WMS SEO Bloke Michael Motherwell gave on outlining the basics of Search Marketing at the CeBit 2007 eCommerce Conference.