You often realize that Google accessed to folders you didn’t want to be accessible when you happen to see them on search engine results. It can sometimes be very annoying, for example if you uploaded a private document for your customer and gave him a link to it, but forgot to disallow the folder it was in with the robots.txt file. The same kind of problem happened to Dell, who published a confidential spreadsheet containing information about their new computers in a folder of their site, but without linking it from nowhere. Google crawled the site and indexed the page, which made it available online.

An article at ZDnet explains the situation:

Apparent specifications for Dell’s future notebooks were briefly exposed by Google’s search engine Tuesday, before the spreadsheet was removed from a Dell FTP site and from Google’s cache

The basic configurations for the Dell Inspiron e1405, Inspiron e1505, Inspiron 640m and Inspiron 6400 were available, along with several other unannounced Dell products, via a Dell FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site. A poster at technology review site NotebookReview.com noticed the spreadsheet and posted the link in one of the site’s discussion forums.

Dell, however, didn’t want to give any comments on their future laptops:

“We do not comment on unannounced products,” a Dell representative told CNET News.com.

In the spreadsheet, prices and specifications for older Dell products appear alongside recently introduced products and unannounced PCs with Intel’s Core Duo processors, which were expected to ship in February.

This is how the author of this article at Zdnet explained what happened

The search engine keeps a cache of pages from the last time it crawled the Web, but Webmasters can use an automated system on Google’s Web site to remove links that were not meant to be shared with the public.

Well, I guess the automated system he was talking about is nothing more than just the robots.txt file, which allows anyone to tell Google or any other search engines which files have to be disallowed. Google asks us to put condoms on paid links but they don’t mind hooking up with any files they find.

P.J. Fusco has published an excellent and very comprehensive article today on Clickz about how to organize your pages to optimize the importance of your keywords, but also on how to keep a site easy to maintain and have accessible urls.

A few quotes from this article that I found very interesting:

Using the right structure for your pages and directories:

Some Web sites contain only a few files and require a relatively simple architecture. Others are large and require a more sophisticated structure. Large or small, well-optimized sites adhere to specific naming conventions to ensure all information is readily accessible to search bots and spiders.The deeper you bury keyword rich content, the less likely search engines will find it. Some search engine spiders won’t go deeper than a certain number of subdirectories.

When building or optimizing your website, it’s important to keep a clear organization of your pages. You would prefer to organize your pages in directories rather than putting all of them under the root folder of your site. That will first allow you to keep your files well organized and easy to find when you’ll need to make changes and also, having files put in directories that contain keywords will increase the relevance of your urls. However it’s not recommended to have deep subdirectories, it will make your files hard to find and crawled less often if not linked properly.

On page optimization:

“Keywords at the beginning of the title tag are given the most weight. By leading with keywords carefully chosen for specific Web pages, you can make each site page more relevant for keywords and keyword phrases used in popular Web searches.”

I agree, the more targeted, the better. For less-competitive keywords, the use of a short and targeted title tag can make a huge difference.

Then, about H1 tags often ignored by webmasters who think that they are “too big”:

“Some Web developers believe H1 tags are unsightly on the page — large, bold text that distracts from the overall site design. This needn’t be the case. The H1 tag’s font, size, color, and surrounding white space can all be defined using style sheets to complete the site design.”

With CSS, it’s indeed very easy to resize your H1 if you think it looks too big. Personally, I always resize them with a size of about 20px. You shouldn’t bypass the use of H1 just because you think it’s tedious to use CSS.

Next, you must ensure each optimized page’s body copy is adequately long and keyword rich. If at all possible, incorporate at least 250 to 300 words on each page so the search engines have enough content to determine the page’s theme.

Include relevant keywords, particularly near the top of the page, as search engines weigh these words more heavily. Optimal keyword density is a highly debated topic. Generally speaking, 5 to 8 percent keyword density in body copy is ideal. But be careful not to go overboard, or your copy won’t read well. Body copy must be useful to visitors if it’s to be relevant to search engines.”

The reason why you should include your keywords on the top is that search engines give more importance to them but also from the users’ point of view, you want them to read relevant content as soon as they land your page and don’t want them to scroll down your page to know what your site is about.

“It’s also important hypertext links pointing to various site pages include your targeted keywords and keyword phrases as assigned to specific Web pages. Most major search engines still weigh link anchor text as highly relevant to the page being linked to. It’s best to keep text links relatively succinct; the longer the link text, the more diluted the theme.”

Try to link to your most important pages from the home page using relevant and short anchor texts, and try to use the same anchor text as link titles on these pages.

Keyword research is, for me, the most important part of any SEO campaign. They are the base of your strategy. They help you adopt the right on-page optimization, they allow you to know the links you need to get and the anchor texts you will have to use etc. Then, after all your efforts, you see improvements in your traffic and on your sales.

Basically, SEO is about optimizing your pages for the keywords that people are looking for based on tools like Wordtracker, Overture, or Google adWords Keyword tool etc.
You build your content around those keywords mainly. But most of the time, people focus too much on keywords data, that they forget one thing. Keywords tools do not predict what search terms people are going to use in the future!They also don’t give you the less popular keywords which can be very important.

That’s why you need to be creative and anticipate what your audience is going to look for in the search engines. You need to create pages that are going to be the anwsers to the questions that people are going to ask before purchasing the products or services that you sell.

Just like in the real life, if you’re a sales rep and have a meeting with a prospect, you have to make sure you are going to be ready for all the questions he might ask you.
For example, let’s say someone is interested in buying some extra memory for his laptop. Good thing for you, you sell laptop memory and your site is well optimized for general keywords such as “laptop memory” , “cheap laptop memory”, “notebook memory” “toshiba laptop memory” etc…

So let’s say that this potential client is willing to know how to install laptop memory before buying, he just wants to make sure it’s easy to do. So he goes to google and types in “laptop memory installation“. Let’s see: 2,760,000 results but I only see 3 results that look very relevant to me, the first 3 ones. That person is very likely to click on one of these, look at the title tags used: they are very attractive, aren’t they? So he clicks on one of those, let’s say the second link: http://www.directron.com/howtoupmem.html

The article is very educative and perfectly explains how to install memory on a laptop. Fine, the visitor is reassured, he feels good now and he decides to buy from this web site.

Also, look at the competition on Google for that term: it doesn’t seem too hard for me to rank well for that keyword. A good link title with the words “laptop memory installation” and a good content should help you a lot.

You should always try to build content according to the keyword data you obtained from different tools, but also according to what people are likely to type in when doing a search, that is less competitive keywords, or ‘non-ecommerce related keywords’. By doing so, you are just going to have more advantages compared to your competitors who just optimize for the exact same keywords as everyone in your industry.

When you write your title tags, do you have the users in mind or just the robots?

While it’s important to write relevant title tags for SEO reasons, we should make sure our title tags are going to catch the users’ eyes and incite them to click on your site. Just like using call-to-actions text ads in Pay-Per-Click advertising, we can use this technique in the organic results. Because users are not robots, they should be treated differently, a robot won’t buy your products, a user can and you should make sure you write titles that can motivate their behavior.

Link titles on search engine listings are your most important element: because they are underlined and use a different color than the rest of the result, they are the main draw to get people to click on your link.

For example, if you are an electronics store and your advantage comparing to your competitors is your low prices, instead of writing something like:

Electronics: MP3 players, computers, cameras, home theaters and more!

You could write something like:

Consumer Electronics: Lowest Prices on All Electronics Since 1998

If you want to be more “aggressive”, you can even write words such as “click here” like WeBuildPages does:

If you want to rank higher, click here. Internet marketing …
We Build Pages is an Internet Marketing Company providing SEO Services. About Us – Home Page – Site Map – Contact We Build Pages …
www.webuildpages.com/ – 30k

In the mean time, you could also optimize your description and include call-to-action words and maybe promotional words.

One of the most respected SEOs, Aaron Wall, the famous author of SEO Book, has been interviewed recently by Lee Odden, President of TopRank Online Marketing.

He comments about the recent purchase of Threadwatch , the famous Internet Marketing discussion site/blog. The guy really impresses me, he really seems to be both a good SEO and a very skilled business man.

The most interesting question in the interview is :

“What do you think has been the biggest change this year affecting SEO or SEM?
”

when Aaron replies:

“Duplicate content filters and the reemergence of natural links. Seems to me all the blogs and whatnot make it to where a good viral marketer will typically be able to outperform most strictly search marketers. Search marketing is becoming more about traditional marketing. “

We can’t argue on this point. After the big chaos that Google created with Jagger, it’s obvious that most of the SEOs have to calm down a little bit on PageRank, reciprocal links and all kind of obsolete techniques and focus more on “traditional marketing”.

To set you apart from the crowd, you now need to create interesting content for your visitors, which will make it linkable. It’s quite easy to retain the attention of your visitors by writing articles that really touch to them.

For example, if you are in the debt market, you can write dozens of articles to help people make better choice regarding their debt problems, and also explain them how the solutions that you offer can relieve them. If you really create that kind of trust with your visitors, you can be sure that you will convert more of them and also have more people who will link to your site.

Aaron also speaks about “the trouble spots” he sees for search marketers:

“MarketingSherpa recently reported that affiliate marketing commissions this year will be greater than the amount spent on search marketing, and about 89% of what is spent on search marketing goes to the paid (non organic) side. To me that means that if you have an SEO service business model you really need to focus on keeping costs uber low or build a hell of a brand so you can charge out the nose. Otherwise your better off creating content for contextual ads and affiliate programs. “

That’s what most of the people have been talking about recently, it seems that you can make a living with affiliate programs with the increasing number of companies spending money on that kind of marketing.

V7N officially launched their SEO contest today, where the goal is to rank number 1 on Google for the term “v7ndotcom elursrebmem”

Pretty unique term, right? The winner will receive $4,000 and an iPod. The second prize is $500, and third through fifth places will receive $100 each.

I think it’s a pretty exciting contest, not only to know who is going to win, but more to see and analyze the techniques used, for example H1 tags, anchor texts, location of the keywords in the url or not, and also links. I’ll keep an eye on it and give some feedback on the things that I think make them rank well.
There is already 10 results for the keywords. The number 1 is a girl who chose to register the domain http://www.v7ndotcomelursrebmem2.com , good luck to all!