Q: What are some of the tools to measure the success of SEO?
A: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/
http://www.netconcepts.com/urlcheck/
http://www.netconcepts.com/linkcheck/
http://www.gravitytrack.com
http://rankwhere.com/google-page-rank.php
http://www.researchbuzz.org/archives/001405.shtml
Q: You suggest having a good call-to-action above the fold on every web page. What does “above the fold” mean?
A: It means viewable on the screen without scrolling.
Q: Is it true that you should not include the same word in your meta keywords more than twice? ex: Hawaii Travel, Hawaii Tours, Hawaii Hotels, Hawaii Lodging
A: I would try to avoid much repetition in the meta keywords. But there is no hard and fast rule about this. I would instead choose to formulate my meta keywords tag as follows: Hawaii, Travel, Tours, Hotels, Lodging. If the word is repeated on its own rather than part of a phrase, then that definitely looks spammy. For example: Hawaii, Hawaii, Hawaii.
Q: How many keywords is the right number to include in the meta keywords tag?
A: I’d suggest no more than a dozen or so. Much more than that and your page starts to look spammy.
Q: You show Sears.com as an example with great text linksâ?¦ but what about the url string with ? and =
A: Sears indeed has search engine unfriendly URLs – a major failing for that site. One consequence is that Google is indexing duplicate pages from Sears.com, which dilutes PageRank scores.
Q: A site I use is Tripod based. Tripod carries Google Advertising. I can’t find my site in Google but they have clearly gone over the site because the ads they serve up are dead on. Why?
A: Googlebot and the Google AdSense advertising program operate independently. I’d need to see your site to ascertain why you are not getting indexed, but if I had to guess I’d say that your site’s PageRank is too low.
Q: Can the use of style sheets, because they replace bolding, H1, H2 etc,, with style sheet references, reduce ranking?
A: Theoretically, if you’re trying to game the search engines. If you’re not doing anything spammy, then you have nothing to worry about.
Q: I’ve optimized my Website for Google, got picked up and ranked #1 for my keywords in Yahoo, but completely ignored (left-out) of Google, Why?
A: I’d need to see your site to ascertain this. Perhaps you linked to a bad neighborhood but Yahoo doesn’t care? Perhaps your dynamic URLs are overly complex but Yahoo didn’t mind as much? Could be any number of things.
Q: Why do drop down menus pose a problem for Google, if you have the code within the html as opposed to calling out to the code.
A: Because Googlebot doesn’t execute the Javascript/Java/etc. programming code in your page that is required to operate the drop down menus.
Q: When using text nav, where do I place the keyword(s) within the hyperlink text? Before/after a “?”â?¦?
A: Ummâ?¦ There is no ?” in hyperlink text. For example: Ford cars and trucks doesn’t have a ? character anywhere. Your keywords can go anywhere in the hyperlink text.