Search Engine Optimization Strategies

20 New Students' Questions & My Answers

Q: If I have more than one domain name, say 10-20 or more, for the same company name. Is it illegal with search engines?

A: There is nothing illegal about it. In fact it could work to your advantage. Check out the top listings in Google for “Coke” to see what I mean:

http://www.google.com/search?q=coke

However, it doesn't necessarily work with all search engines. Some will only index one domain and ignore the rest.

Q: What is the best search engine cloaker you would recommend that works really well?

A: I've never used a search engine cloaker, so I don't have a recommendation. Sorry. By the way, I wouldn't recommend using a search engine cloaker.

Q: I have created a search engine optimized hallway page. This is linked from the logo image on the homepage. The links on this page then drill down to further optimized doorway pages. My question regards submitting these pages. Do I submit each and every page to the search engines, or should I just submit the hallway page, or just the main homepage? Please let me what is the best way to submit.

A: I do not recommend submitting hallway pages that only contain links and no text. Some search engines, such as AltaVista, ignore/reject links only pages, as they see it as SEO spam. A better way would be to add a short description beside each link. Why not turn it into a site map or something like that. Then link to the page, via a text (not image) link, from all the main pages of your site. The important thing is to use the exact keywords in your text links that you want to target. When you've done that, submit your homepage and all your important pages, such as the "site map" (hallway) page as suggested above.

Q: I was ready to purchase WebPosition Gold. However, they don't support my Macintosh. Your other suggestions also don't support Macs. Do you have any suggestions that would be similar to WebPosition Gold for a Mac?

A: Try SubmitWolf Mac; a search engine submission software program for the Apple Macintosh that automates the process of submitting web pages to hundreds of search engines.

You can find more info at:

http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/directory/search-enginesubmission-software.html (no longer available)

Q: Can I apply your search engine strategies to Chinese search engines?

A: Yes, you should be able to apply the SEO strategies to Chinese search engines. There may be some differences, but the basic principles should apply.

Q: At the moment, we have a campaign with a well known newspaper website, where we are on all article pages, but not the front page. We are also in the featured links on the bottom right, for one month. This gave us about 300 links in Google, but they all have a page rank of 0-2. We were offered the opportunity to be on the front page, which has a page rank of 9. Would it be of much help to our PageRank and traffic in Google by having this one link on the front page as opposed to the many pages that have low PageRank?

A: I would recommend getting a PageRank 9 link as opposed to hundreds of PageRank 0-2 links, which is basically doing nothing for the PageRank on your webpages. Having said that, there's no guarantee that a single PageRank 9 link will be picked up by Google or the PageRank will be passed onto your landing page. A number of factors come into play including how they link to you and the number of links out of the page.

The major benefit of having hundreds of PageRank 0-2 links compared to the one PageRank 9 link is that there are hundreds of "doorways" for the website's visitors to click through to your site, whereas the PR9 link only offers one.

What I would suggest is test the homepage PageRank 9 link for 4-6 weeks to see if it affects your website's PageRank. I'm pretty sure the newspaper site is crawled and indexed by Google on a regular basis (if not daily), so you should be able to measure any benefits within 4-6 weeks.