Desert Web Designs Blog

This is the first of many book reviews coming from me. I feel that in the industry I’m in, the learning never stops. The web is a constantly changing place and in order to stay competitive, one must stay current (or as current as possible) in all facets of the web and wear as many hat’s as possible. I have a large, and ever-growing, library of what my wife affectionately calls my “nerd books” So be it. I’m fine with that designation. Many of these books I’ve read, and obviously the ones I havn’t, I plan to. Keep in touch to read more of my book reviews and recommendations ranging from SEO to PHP, CSS to Ajax, and more.

Book Review for:

Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO

by Jaimie Sirovich & Christian Darie

A quick note about this review. This review was written approximately a year ago when I was still new to, and learning, PHP and SEO. I am posting it here now as I am starting a new Book Reviews category for this blog.

I am still somewhat new to PHP and this was my first book I’ve read on SEO. However, this book was packed full of great information for programmers. I never realized that there’s so much that can be done from a architectural standpoint for SEO. I will definitely be referring back to this book on a regular basis in my future web developments.

One thing to keep in mind, this book is not for search engine marketer’s. Although the authors do explain the reason behind the methods they provide, about half of this book is PHP code. This book is designed for improving ranking during development and design of the website, and not after publication. I learned that there are two facets to SEO; the architecture and design of the site and the marketing of the site. This book addresses the former.

The only thing that kept me from giving this book 5 stars is that the book was primarily geared towards an e-commerce site with a majority of the examples directed as such. Now, most e-commerce sites do implement PHP, there are plenty of other sites that implement it as well that do are not e-commerce. I understand that SEO is relatively easier on these sites, but there are plenty of methods and examples that can be implemented on any site, not just e-commerce such as; URL Rewriting via mod_rewrite, 301 redirects, duplicate content, sitemaps, link bait, and more.

Overall, still a great book and well worth the price and the read. I will definitely looking for more titles from these authors.

P.S. Author Jaimie Sirovich has a tremendous SEO Blog site that while reading this book quickly became one of my favorite sites.

Paperback: 350 pages
Publisher: Wrox (April 16, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0470100923
ISBN-13: 978-0470100929

Here’s a situation I seem to come across on a pretty regular basis:

“I’ve gone through and optimized my website for the keywords that I want, and I’m still not getting the traffic I think I should be getting (or the traffic that I expected, or wanted, etc). How come?”

Read through that quote again closely, and see if you can figure out the problem. Did you find it? Ok, I’ll help. The customer/client is using “the keywords that I want.” The problem here is that the customer is optimizing for the keywords that he wants to get listed under. What he should be targeting is the keywords that his potential clients are searching for. It doesn’t matter how well you’ve optimized your site, if you’re not targeting the keywords your customers are searching for.

I recently came across an excellent article about this topic from Terri Wells of Developer Shed* titled Think Like a Searcher to Increase Your Traffic. Terri has written a number of great articles for SEO Chat which I would highly recommend checking out. In that article, Teri mentions “SEOs and site owners fight hard to get a top position on the search engine results pages for their chosen keywords. But that’s only half the battle at best……if we’re building and optimizing our sites for Google’s eyes alone, we’re only doing half the job.” So, it doesn’t matter if you rank #1 for every term you’re targeting if no one is searching for that particular keyword. Remember, our ultimate goal is making our site as visible as possible to searchers. I would rather take a lower ranking for a keyword that is searched more often, than a higher ranking for a keyword that is searched less often. Teri makes an excellent argument about this point specifically in her article. #1 isn’t always the best.

This obviously begs the question “How do I know what Mr. Customer is searching for?” There are tons of free keyword suggestion tools out there including Word Tracker that can assist with finding that out. We also offer a tool called Traffic Blazer starting at $29.99/year which not only contains a keyword suggestion tool powered by Yahoo! Search Marketing, but it also has a keyword analysis which will assist you in making sure that you are targeting the keywords you have selected correctly, search engine submission links, reporting features, and more.

In closing, the main point to take from this is: Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. You have to put your wants/needs aside. You will serve yourself and your website better by optimizing for the keywords your customer is searching for as opposed to the keywords that you would like to see yourself listed under and ultimately see better traffic results.

*For those of you unfamiliar with Developer Shed, they manage “20 high-technology websites collectively known as the Developer Shed Network.” There are many fabulous websites, many of which I frequent myself including Dev Articles, SEO Chat, Tutorialized, and Codewalkers. These are all sites I highly recommend and are worth checking out and worthy of being included in your bookmarks.

A question I’m often asked at work (tech support/sales for a major internet software company) by other tech support reps is, “Does having a shared hosting IP affect Search Engine Ranking?” Often times they are asking, because our customers are asking them, and for whatever reason, I’m considered the resident SEO expert for my team. I’ll admit I do know SEO, but not sure if I’m quite at the point where I would consider myself an “expert” per se. Anyways, it’s nice to get the compliment.

The long and short of this answer is “No! Having a shared IP address will not adversely affect your search engine ranking.”

The flip side to this question is “Will having a dedicated/unique IP address help my search engine ranking?” Again, the answer to this question is a resounding “No! Having a dedicated IP address will not give you a boost in the search engine rankings.”

Now are their benefits to having dedicated IP addresses? Yes. Are their SEO benefits to having a dedicated IP address? Minimal at best. Will it hurt you by not having one? No.

In a 2003 interview with Slashdot, Google Director of Technology Craig Silverstein answered this specific question accordingly:

Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception.

Now I know some of you skeptics out there may be thinking “Well that was 5 years ago, that’s a long time ago in a rapidly changing environment such as the internet.” And you’d be right. It’s very likely that in 5 years Google has changed their ranking algorithm. However, at the end of 2006, Google software engineer and head of their Webspam team, Matt Cutts answered that question in his blog post “Myth busting: virtual hosts vs. dedicated IP addresses”

There is no PageRank difference whatsoever between these two cases (virtual hosting vs. a dedicated IP)…I’m happy to affirm that this statement which was true in 2003 is still true now. Links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses.

While searching for these articles, I came across another blog post from SEO/SEM specialist Jim Boykin who takes the exact opposite approach in his blog post “SEO Tip - Get Your Own IP Address.” Jim recommends getting your own dedicated IP address for every website you own. Now obviously I’m in no position to argue with someone who has been doing this much longer than me, but the fellows at Google are. I’m not saying that Jim is wrong, all I’m saying is his advice contradicts the information from Craig and Matt.

Looking at the PageRank of Jim’s site versus mine, Jim’s site reports a PageRank of 5 while mine shows a PageRank of 3. Now there are some other contributing factors here. Primarily the fact that Jim’s site has been around 2 years longer than mine which gives more time to link build and gain PageRank. I’m not saying that it’s impossible for me to have a higher PageRank than Jim, I just don’t put much time into the marketing of my site because of the workload I have. It would not be beneficial to myself or my clients (current or future) to actively advertise and gain more work at this time. I’m not trying to make excuses for my lower PageRank, just stating the facts. But I don’t think that the dedicated IP address accounts for the difference.

In closing:
Are there web site benefits to having a dedicated IP address: Yes.
Are there SEO benefits to having a dedicated IP address: No.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) what most people don’t realize is that poor title bars can be a severe detriment to your ranking. Believe it or not, keywords in the title tag are extremely important when it comes to your search engine ranking. When searching through any search engine, results in the search engine results pages (SERPs) are listed under the page title located within the <title></title> tag. These are the bold faced headers that you see on the SERPs. In addition, the higher an item or text appears on the page, the more weight it is generally given as far as keyword relevance. Therefore, the keywords present in the page title are one of the first things the search engine spider sees so it is important space that is not worth wasting.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is putting your site or company name in the title bar. This is almost as useless as having the phrase Welcome to in the title bar of your pages. If you clicked the link, you would notice that 54 million pages returned with the phrase “Welcome To” in the title? How are you supposed to compete with that? Why would you want to compete for the phrase “Welcome To”? Does it have anything to do with your business? My guess is probably not.

As I said before, putting your domain or business name in the title tag is one of the biggest mistakes many people make…At least to a point (I’ll explain this in a minute). Why? Consider this: If someone knows your business/domain name, are they going to be searching for it in Yahoo! or Google? No, they’ll go directly to it. So why would you want to use that in the title tag and waste the keyword space? According to the W3C, a good title tag should be 64 characters, spaces included, so don’t waste it. If someone is running a search for your business or business type you want to be optimized for the phrase that they may be searching for, not for your business name. Of course you’ll come up ranked very high for a search containing your specific business name. But where you really want to show up is under the phrase that people would find you were they searching for businesses of your type. The reason I say “to a point” is that I’m not saying you should exclude your title altogether. Having it in the title bar is fine, but I would recommend putting it after your keyword words/phrase.

When it comes to search engines, content is king, and a good title bar should mirror the page’s content. Not only should a title bar contain quality keywords for search engine optimization, but should still be easily readable to a search engine visitor. A title bar should, in essence, be similar to a newspaper headline. If someone is browsing through the SERPs, your title bar needs to grab their attention that it piques their interest to the point they want to click the link to your page.

Look at it from a user standpoint. If you were searching for a website for classes say on “Underwater Basket Weaving” and came across two websites, one said “Home Page” in the title bar and was ranked a couple places higher than one that says “Underwater Basket Weaving Classes and Instructional Material”, which one would you be more apt to click on? I’m gonna put my money on the one that is ranked a little lower but is more descriptive. I’m also going to bet that the second would be ranked higher than the first, but there could be other factors at play that would cause otherwise. But that’s another blog.