In Search of Optimization

Click through rates or CTR is often mentioned when talking about Pay-per-click or PPC because better CTR results to lower Cost-per-click or CPC. Now, before you get confused with all those terms, let continue to what this post is all about.

Free search or organic search is said to be the best way to get traffic to your website. All you need to do is optimize your website for your targeted keywords and you get instant free traffic. Furthermore, it is said that the number 1, 2, 3 and 10 spots are the best spots to be on the search engine results mainly because 1, 2 and 3 are the first thing that the searcher sees and number 10 is the last that he sees when he scrolls down.

While that’s mostly true, I also noticed one thing while checking my Google Analytics report for my science blog. I noticed that I’m getting quite some traffic for the search phrase “why is the sea color blue” so I went to Google and did a search for that phrase and this is what I saw.

My website “Mike’s Science and Nature Blog” wasn’t on any of the sweet spots mentioned above. It was ranked as number 5 for the search phrase mentioned and yet I’m getting lots of traffic. If you take a good look at the screenshot above, you’ll probably notice why. Just in case you didn’t notice it (or maybe you don’t have enough time to take a good look at it), here’s why…

* Item no. 1 is about HTML color codes
* Item no. 2 is about why the sky is blue
* Item no. 3 is a Wikipedia entry on the color blue
* Item no. 4 is about a list of stuff on the moon
* Item no. 5 my website, is exactly what the searcher is looking for

The result therefore is that my site gets visited even though if it’s only number 5 in the SERPs. While the first four may still be getting traffic from that search phrase, I believe that my site is probably getting more traffic then them for this particular search phrase.

In other words, I get more click-thrus because my site delivers what the searcher is looking for even though it’s ranked only at number 5. In other words, it’s not just about ranking but also grabbing a person’s attention with your page title and meta description/page content that brings in the wanted traffic. The same can be said if the first 5 websites are all about the same topic but one of them has a more attractive title that grabs the user’s attention.

In the end good copywriting especially in titles still helps a lot in free search traffic as it often equates to good click through rates.

There are times when the guys at Google chooses to blacklist a website for various reasons and if you own one of these websites, then you might want to know how to check if Google really blacklisted it. There is one command that will check if your site was blacklisted and that is the “site” command.

All you need to do is:

1. Go to Google (google.com)
2. In the search box, type site:yourdomain.com

If Google doesn’t return any page then that means that the site is not indexed by Google. If you’re sure that the domain has been previously indexed then chances it has been blacklisted.

That’s how you check if Google has blacklisted your website.

How do you make yourself invisible on a Google search? While most people want their sites to come up on Google when searched, there are those for some reason who want to stay invisible. There is actually more than one way to do it.

1. You can simply request Google to remove the site from their index. More info on that can be found here.

2. Add “Disallow: /” on your robots.txt file. More info on robots.txt here.

3. Remove your website or the individual webpages.

4. The previous 3 solutions require that you have direct access to the content you want removed. In cases that you don’t, all you have to do is email the webmaster of the website containing the reference to you and ask them to remove it.

So, that’s my answer to the question “how do I make myself invisible on a Google search?”

So, how much is Google website submission? Before I answer that question, I wish to inform you that I’ve decided to put up a Q&A category to this blog for the simple purpose of answering questions about or related to search engine optimization.

Now, back to the question. Google website submission is free. To do submit your website to Google, you can do one of the following:

1. Go to http://www.google.com/addurl/ and submit your site there.
- or -
2. Have your website linked to from another website that is already in Google.

If you’re always in tune with what’s new then you might already know that Squidoo lenses rank well in the search engines, well at least it used to be that way. I’m new to Squidoo and I only have a handful of lenses but honestly, I don’t see any of them ranking well in the SERPs. On the contrary, I see my non-squidoo sites optimized for the same keyword ranking better. Some even getting to number one.

So, what’s wrong with Squidoo? Here’s what I think has happened - Lots of spammers jump into Squidoo and starting filling it with spam. Google might have noticed it and probably decided to reconsider the ranking of Squidoo pages. Apparently, it’s just not me who has observed this. Another article called “Squidoo Rankings Drop” also posted about it and a few others.

I wonder if Squidoo will remain to be of value to search engine ranking.

I’m no Adobe Flash developer but I do love websites that have good Flash interfaces that helps users navigate more easily. Until recently, search engines are known to ignore Flash animation which is the reason why SEOs always recommend using plain text and ordinary html links to make a site more rank well in the search engines. That however will soon be among the “old ways”.

Google Engineer Matt Cutts announce on his blog that Google and Adobe are working to make Flash more search engine friendly. Add to that, Google has just rolled out new code to allow its spiders to index Flash animations on websites. Here’s the post from Matt:

Google gets better at Flash with Adobe’s help

That said, I guess that the demand for Flash developers will skyrocket in the coming days, months and years and we will probably see more and more websites running purely Flash. This definitely pushes the interactivity of the internet a step higher.