The Axandra newsletter archive

7 January 2003

This week you might find out that you're unintentionally deluting the effectiveness of your important keywords. We're also telling you that some words on your Web pages might get you banned on search engines.

Google and other big search engines ignore common words such as 'the', 'of', 'where', as well as certain single digits and single letters. These words are called "filter words". They are ignored because they tend to slow down a search without improving the results.

Of course, every search engine has its own list of filter words. We've found out that the following words seem to be ignored by most search engines:

a, about, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, from, how, i, in, is, it, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, was, we, what, when, where, which, with

* What does this mean to your site?

Search engines consider keywords in the title, in the body text and in link texts of a Web page as an important ranking criteria.

Be careful when you choose your keywords for the title and the rest of your Web page. If your Web page title contains a list of filter words you won't get any results. You might also dilute the effectiveness of your other keywords if you include too many filter words in the title.

Many search engines recommend limiting the number of letters in the title and in the meta tags. If your Web page title or the meta tags contain too many filter words, you might reach the character limit before your important keywords begin.

* Some words can get you banned on search engines

While filter words might dilute the effectiveness of your other keywords, some words might get your Web page banned on search engines. These words are called stop words.

Adult words and phrases that contain sexual content are the most common stop words. However, some search engines build custom stop word lists to penalize Web sites that use "keyword stuffing". Some sites use the same keyword over and over on their pages to get a high rank for that keyword on search engines, even if it is not related to their content.

Of course, search engines try to find those sites and they penalize Web pages that use keyword stuffing. Unfortunately, some sites are penalized although their webmasters didn't try to spam the search engines just because they use a keyword too many times.

That's why keyword analysis and the right keyword density is very important for a successful Web site. If the keyword density is too low, you won't get a good ranking, if it's too high, your site might get accused of keyword stuffing.

* Summary

1. Use your most important keywords at the beginning of the title, meta tags, link texts and body text.
   
   
2. Avoid using filter words to increase the effectiveness of your keywords.
   
   
3. Make sure that your Web pages have the right keyword density and don't contain stop words.
   
   

The right keyword mix on your Web pages will help you to improve your ranking on all important search engines.

To find out the keyword density of your Web site, you might want to try the freeware edition of Internet Business Promoter.

* New Google Dance

Google is indexing new Web sites every day. It permanently sends out robot programs to crawl the Web and to remember every Web page it can find.

Once in a month, a new database is built of all found Web pages that an Internet user can search on Google's homepage. Some webmasters call the process of updating Google's database "Google Dance".

Webmasters all over the world highly anticipate the exact date of the next Google Dance to see if the ranking of their Web pages has changed.

According to some webmaster forums, Google started its latest update process on January, the 1st.

Meanwhile, there are two new online tools that can tell you when the next Google Dance starts:

http://www.google-dance.com/

http://www.google-dance-tool.1hut.com/

* Google's ready for IPO, says Forbes

The business magazine Forbes wrote : "One bright spot will be Internet growth. The search site Google is queued up for a first-quarter IPO off of surprisingly virile numbers--some $300 million in 2002 sales, $100 million in profit. Profit?... For an IPO?... An Internet IPO? Yep."

* Google employee said Google would let penalties expire

In a webmaster forum , a Google employee said that Google had penalized Web sites participating in certain link exchange programs. Those link exchange programs had used hidden texts and hidden links.

Now Google would let those penalties expire and most of those Web sites would come back.

If you don't want to have your Web site removed from Google's index, stay away from hidden text, hidden links and bogus link exchange programs (better use a serious tool like ARELIS ).

* AllTheWeb adds new syntax to its search

You can now use the "filetype" command when you perform a search on AllTheWeb.com. This command lets you limit your search to specic file types:

• filetype:flash searches Flash/Shockwave files
• filetype:msword searches Microsoft Word documents
• filetype:pdf searches Acrobat Reader documents

You can combine these commands by placing them inside brackets, for example "(filetype:pdf filetype:msword)".

By the way, Google uses the filetype command, too . However, Google uses typical Windows file extensions so for example, if you want to search for Microsoft Word documents, use "filetype:doc" on Google.

* Measure the link popularity for your site

The freeware tool " Link Popularity Check " is able to measure the link popularity of your Web site. It also compares your Web site with other sites, for example your competitor sites. It's freeware, no nags, no popups and no reminders.

* Internet marketing Web sites we recommend

• Happy New Year
  
  
• Yahoo to acquire Inktomi
  
  
• Google Froogle - Froogle Google
  
  
• How to write keyword rich Web pages
  
  
• The Google resource page

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