SEO - Website Construction - advice needed [Archive]

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1weekSEO

1st July 2010, 18:27

Hi all

I know the basics of HTML I've just used Submit Express to check on a potential client's meta tags and relevance, the souce code show meta info, but SE shows nothing at all.

Is there something blocking the crawling?

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"><html><head><meta name="verify-v1" content="0I68FZypD5xGHO4DXd1e7Z2LIQ65R+NQWkUpfDGqkKI=" /><Actinic:BASEHREF VALUE="http://www.clientsdotcodoturl/" FORCED=1 /><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /><meta http-equiv="MSThemeCompatible" content="yes" /><title> here is the start of the meta title, descrip, keywords etc

Or am I blonde?

Thanks, Nina

OldWelshGuy

1st July 2010, 18:34

Actinic:BASEHREF VALUE="http://www.clientsdotcodoturl/

shouldn't that be your actual web address?

1weekSEO

1st July 2010, 18:37

Yes OWG I took that out on purpose so not to divulge client.

OldWelshGuy

1st July 2010, 18:42

Would need to see the whole of the head, as there could be no cache no index or other robots blocking stuff in there.

1weekSEO

1st July 2010, 18:53

Found no meta tags. Meta tags analysis. Title: Found no title.
The title is used by most of the search engines. Consider adding a title. Description: Found no description meta tag.
The description meta tag is used by most of the search engines. Consider adding a description meta tag. Keywords: Found no keywords meta tag.
The keyword meta tag is still used by many search engines. Consider adding a keyword meta tag. Robots: Found no robots meta tag.
This tag is not really required but helps spiders to index the web page. Author: Found no author meta tag.
This tag is not really required but helps for your (company) name recognition.

Thanks OWG, also Analytics code is directly underneath meta info and getclicky at bottom of source, but I believe this is correct for 2 tracking systems am I right on this?

Umm I'm arguing with myself I don't want to paste the code on here, is it against regs to DM you?

OldWelshGuy

1st July 2010, 18:56

No what I meant was we would need to see the head content of the page, not the response from the crawler. They might well ahve blocked that spider from crawling. so it might be worth placing domain.com/robots.txt into a browser and see exactly what they are blocking (never really understand why people do that rather than use HTACCESS as using robots.txt is actually telling hackers where all your good stuff is :D

1weekSEO

1st July 2010, 19:05

I wasn't aware of that command thanks OWG - However the results are irrelevant to my untrained eye, I searched with and without www and also http:// in G

Done a CTRL+F can't see any robot.txt in the source code, even a search for 'robot' brings up nothing.

Have you got time to explain what HTACCESS is or shall I googlit?

wdltd

1st July 2010, 21:02

Hi Nina,

I think OWG is suggesting you type http://www.clientsdotcodoturl/robots.txt into your browser to see if there's a robots file - which is one place where spiders could be being blocked.

The .htaccess file is used to send instructions to the web server (Apache). You will need FTP access to look at it. Generally it would be in the root directory of the site. This is a second place where spiders could be being blocked.

awebapart.com

2nd July 2010, 08:24

I've just used Submit Express to check on a potential client's meta tags and relevance, the souce code show meta info, but SE shows nothing at all.
Therein lies the problem. You are using some SEO tool which tries to mimic what a search engine does, but only in a rough way. The Submit Express parser (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing) (the program which analyses the html page) is not as good as the google parser. It's a totally different piece of software, so it cannot truly mimic exactly what a search engine would do.

<Actinic:BASEHREF VALUE="http://www.clientsdotcodoturl/" FORCED=1 />
It is actually this tag which is messing up the Submit Express parser. HTML should allow for custom tags, like <Actinic ... > and most parsers should ignore them. The w3 validator might take issue, but browsers and search engines should ignore them (browsers and search engines are designed to cope more gracefully with the unexpected).

I checked this by using a page which parses OK with the Submit Express parser. I then added the tag, and the parser wasn't able to pick up the title, keywords, description any more.

Moral of the story? Don't trust SEO tools completely when they are trying to mimic search engines, because they wont be able to mimic search engines completely.

Even I have set up an extremely rough search engine parser (http://www.howtoprogram.it/home/advanced-programs/search-engine-web-page-text-extractor) on my 'how to progam' website, but I actually make it quite clear that it is a very rough and simple approximation of what search engines really do.

Trust what you see in the code, what your browsers see, what the search engines see. In this particular case, if the title of the page is being displayed at the top of the browser, and being displayed by the search engines in search engine results, and you can see the title tag in the code and it looks alright, then the Submit Express parser is wrong.

1weekSEO

2nd July 2010, 08:29

1weekSEO

2nd July 2010, 08:35

Therein lies the problem. You are using some SEO tool which tries to mimic what a search engine does, but only in a rough way. The submit express parser (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing) (the program which analyses the html page) is not as good as the google parser. It's a totally different piece of software, so it cannot truly mimic exactly what a search engine would do.

It is atually this tag which is messing up the Submit Express parser. HTML should allow for custom tags, like <Actinic ... > and most parsers should ignore them. The w3 validator might take issue, but browsers and search engines should ignore them (browsers and search engines are designed to cope more gracefully with the unexpected).

I checked this by using a page which parses OK with the Submit Express parser. I then added the tag, and the parser wasn't able to pick up the title, keywords, description any more.

Moral of the story? Don't trust SEO tools completely when they are trying to mimic search engines, because they wont be able to mimic search engines completely.

Even I have set up an extremely rough search engine parser (http://www.howtoprogram.it/home/advanced-programs/search-engine-web-page-text-extractor) on my 'how to progam' website, but I actually make it quite clear that it is a very rough and simple approximation of what search engines really do.

Trust what you see in the code, what your browsers see, what the search engines see. In this particular case, if the title of the page is being displayed at the top of the browser, and being displayed by the search engines in search engine results, and you can see the title tag in the code and it looks alright, then the Submit Express parser is wrong.

Thank you very much for taking the time to reply in such detail. I understand a lot better now.

I can see the title of the page at the top of my browser
The site in in SERPs
The title tag does look fine.

The site is indexed by Google, and has 9 backlinks (in Google)

But surely there are negatives to the site being constructed like this?

The company has been trading for decades, is not verified in any of the search engines and is 1.6mill in Alexa, I really want to help this guy but I don't want to get out of my depth.

Do you have any further advice?

awebapart.com

2nd July 2010, 10:40

But surely there are negatives to the site being constructed like this?
Like what? Like in a way that causes some unimportant buggy SEO tool to go wrong?

Some people might argue that the code should at least w3 validate, but since I'm not an Actinic specialist I do not know whether this is possible or what other side effects there would be with the Actinic system if this is attempted.

The code you have provided is pretty much standard Actinic code used on a lot of websites, some quite successful websites (e.g. google for archery and have a look at bowsports)

The company has been trading for decades, is not verified in any of the search engines and is 1.6mill in Alexa, I really want to help this guy but I don't want to get out of my depth.

Do you have any further advice?
I do not know anything about the business or the website or its goals or what success it is having either on the search engines or once visitors reach the site. A 1.6 million alexa traffic rank measurement might seem low but it should still mean that it gets a fair bit of traffic and what is good depends upon what its market is (I would also pay more attention to the website's own stats like unique visits, where the traffic is coming from, what search terms from the search engines). Verified by search engines, I'm not sure exactly what you mean there, but if it means registering as the owner via each search engine's webmaster tools, then this isn't vital.

If you want to help this guy then a good starting point is to realise that there are things you don't know too. In this particular case if the website requires advanced SEO and the site is an Actinic site, then consider looking for an Actinic SEO specialist.

What I can say is that I'm not a fan of providing SEO advice merely by going the automated SEO tool report way. This can often lead to wrongly focusing on what is easy to report on in an automated way - meta keywords, alexa traffic rank, etc - rather than focusing on the real important issues.

1weekSEO

2nd July 2010, 11:36

What I can say is that I'm not a fan of providing SEO advice merely by going the automated SEO tool report way. This can often lead to wrongly focusing on what is easy to report on in an automated way - meta keywords, alexa traffic rank, etc - rather than focusing on the real important issues.

I need to find out and understand the important issues, and continue to learn by them.

Once again, thank you for your honest reply and taking the time to explain, it is appreciated.

Chunkford

2nd July 2010, 14:36

Some people might argue that the code should at least w3 validate, but since I'm not an Actinic specialist I do not know whether this is possible or what other side effects there would be with the Actinic system if this is attempted.

You wont get an Actinic site to w3 validate as the system uses its own tags needed for the system to work. Besides IMO it's not a necessity, and is only a guide.

OldWelshGuy

2nd July 2010, 16:30

Actinic is OK, but it is FAR from perfect. many moons ago, I was very active on the actinic forum, made loads of suggestions, passed lots back to the Actinic team also. THEN they created their own in house SEO team.

I think it is called biting the hand that feeds you, as at that point, myself and a few others immediately stopped feeding back anything to Actinic via the forums.

The same happened with a company called (nah not going to name them :D) they have analytics software wich is very good, BUT I introduced about a dozen clients to them, and within days their sales team were calling them up telling them their current SEO was rubbish, their current PPC was rubbish, their current (anything this company group did) was rubbish, I called them up, told them that they were out of order as I had referred these clients to them so they should respect the referral, Their reply was "all's fairt in business buddy, live with it" so no more referrals for this lot either, which is a shame as their system is superb, BUT they simply can't be trusted, as if they behave like this, WHAT are they doing with all the data they are collecting from your site?

if any SEO's would like to know the name fo this company to avoid like the plague as they are scummy in their approach, then shoot me a PM.