I'm working on increasing my organic search results. I recently had my site reviewed by a programmer and he told me the following:

As for your site - it has a lot of good keyword content however there is one big red flag.
If you look at the code - towards the top (around or about line 15) is a tag called "__VIEWSTATE".
This is an encrypted proprietary dot net tracking code and it is NOTORIOUS for stopping search engines right there - before they even get to your content.

Can anyone tell me more about this code? Why it is there. Does this come with the E-Pro Store automatically or did I do something (unknowingly) to generate it? Does it really stop the search engines? If yes...how do I get it removed? Thank you.

MJ

PS...I do have sitemaps listed on Google and Yahoo. I also run PPC campaigns on MSN and Google.

Pardon me for putting in my two cents, I took the liberty of reviewing your site. I am a golfer so I was very interested!

What I checked was the keywords in your source code. The very first keyword you list is "golf accessories" this is a Very popular keyword! This tells the search engines that it is your most important keyword. On your home page you only list "golf accessories" twice! That is not enough. Put it everywhere if this is really the keyword you want to get high organic rankings for. Use it in your descriptions, use it in your alt text for images. Use it in your links.

We launched our site in Oct. of 2007, it took about 2 months to start showing up in the search engines. After about 3 months we started showing up on the first 3 pages for many of our keywords. ( we do not use the most popular keywords because we support our site with google adwords, the most popular words can exceed $5/hit)

Our site has been well received by the search engines and we use the same software that you use! I would recommend that you check your pages for the most popular words and build your keyword list around that. Try to choose words or phrases that aren't already very popular.

Good Luck

Thank you for your reply and sharing your knowledge. I will go back through the site and take a look at the things you mentioned! Thanks again!

MJ

Hi MD,

That is great advise. I just thought I would point something out that I noticed...your page width is extremely large. It therefore seems like people would have to use the horizontal scroll bar to see the entire homepage. I have a 17" widescreen and it barely fit. I tried shrinking my window to see if you had a % property, but it looked like it was a fixed width. Is this correct?

If so, I have always been told to stay away from the horizontal scroll at all costs! I personally use CNN.com as a reference, and when they increase their page width, I do as well (as that is a pretty safe bet as to when the industry makes a certain size the "official" size.

Anyways, just thought I would give you my .02 cents as that is what these forums are for.

I would love any critiques you might have on my site as well (IMG:http://forums.networksolutions.com/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) www.christianbooksbibles.com

CBBs,

Thank you for this info.!! I have a large monitor and I forget that most people do not. I will definitely reduce the width in order to avoid using the scroll bar.

I have been to your site and I am amazed at how many items you offer! I have been tempted (no pun intended) to contact you to ask some questions. I may soon.

I think that many of us using this forum on a regular basis can provide a lot of help and advice to each other, once the kinks are out of the system....

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitestatus

I checked your site and it was last indexed by Google on Feb. 23, 2008. Also, if you put into a Google search box: index: www."yoursite".com you will see where your site shows up in Google. Your site has a lot of external links on other sites, appx. 240 instances.

I'm glad it was something that could be fixed...I had the same problem and just realized it when I logged into the site with another computer.

Yeah, we have just under 100,000 products (pushing the limits of the ASP) and it definately took some brainstorming and work getting everything on there with images and descriptions, etc....we haven't quite figured out how to apply weekly updates in an efficient manner...but I have a great programmer that will solve the problem.

NS is a great piece of software...just a little premature of an upgrade in my opinion. I spent about $5000 trying to create an e-commerce site from scratch, and just came back to network solutions despite its downfalls.

Anyways, yeah, I think these forums will be very helpful for sellers once there are more customizable options to work with, as we can share our areas of knowledge with eachother.

Onto some SEO tips I have found to work...

Determine several keywords or keyphrases that you want to enhance. However, like you mentioned MD, make sure there aren't too many (to test, just type it in Google and look how many results are shown...I stick with under 1,000,000 for my SEO efforts...

For each of these keywords, I created a "guide" where I followed several rules (like using <h1> <h2> and <h3> for titles, putting the keyword in every title, and creating the page with a subfolder root (i.e. http://mysite.com/keywordfolder/index.html) and calling it index. Search engines see this and like it.

Next, you want to use a keyword density of about 10%. i.e. for every 10 words you write, one should be the keyword.

I can go into more detail if anyone is interested, but the point of these pages is to grab organic results and them have them redirected to a place where they can buy what your keyword is targeting. An example of this can be found at www.christianbooksbibles.com/nooma/index.htm. The page isn't very friendly, but it shows up in listings due to the structure and keyword density, and then people will click on the "Shop for NOOMA DVDs" link and be directed to where they can buy.

This was all very effective for me. I was in the top 5 for Google, MSN, and Yahoo within one year (however I recently changed the structure of the site and the URL and now have to start from scratch, so I have absolutely no visibility at this point)

Anyways, I needed a break from work so I thought I would type that up for you to help with your organic listings.

Forgive me for this because I don't know what it all means but to answer your question...

Question: What is being passed back and forth in the _ViewState form control?
Answer: The __VIEWSTATE hidden field is used to transfer the differences in controls from what is declared in the page -- and the values they contain at the end of a request immediately prior to rendering. We can then use this information to re-construct the server controls to match that last rendered state during "postbacks" to a page.

The information within the __VIEWSTATE field is not really encrypted -- although the values are definitely "cyptic" to read (mainly because server controls try to store information in as compact a format as possible -- and because our serializer performs some limited compression).

You can see how much viewstate each control is saving by enabling tracing for the page. For example, by adding a trace attribute to the page directive:

<%@ Page Language="VB" Trace="True" %>

This will cause a table to be output at the bottom of the page. This won't show the exact values stored in viewstate -- but will give you a rough estimate of the size of each server control value.

Note that you can disable the viewstate feature -- either for the entire page or on specific server controls. This is done at the page level by setting the following page directive:

<%@ Page Language="VB" MaintainState="False" %>

or on an individual server control by setting a "maintainstate" attribute:

<asp:datagrid id="MyGrid1" maintainstate="false" runat=server/>

I found this at: www.aspnetfaq.com/default.aspx?FaqId=203&CategoryId=51

Thank you for all the helpful information. I'm reviewing my top queries list from Google analytics and Google webmaster tools and will look at adjusting my keywords and phrases. I'm very basic in my programming knowledge so I'd prefer to stay away from disabling the _viewstate. It sounds like the site will come up fine in the search engines with it being there. Because I am so basic in my knowledge I'm very hesitant to make behind the scenes changes to the site. I try to keep things the original way NS set them up.

Is the horizontal scroll bar showing up on my site when you view it? www.golfx.com? This is the first time I've heard the comment about my site filling up the page and to be aware of the scroll bar. Thank you for mentioning that!

Yes, I am showing up in the search engines. I think I am doing OK. My PPC and organic search results are even in their results. Example: 20 PPC hits and 20 Organic search hits. I believe my organic search results has room for improvement. The tips listed here are very helpful to me. They are things I was unclear on before. Thank you both very much!

Golfx1,

To address your original question, I would be curious to find out why a programmer feels that attribute, which is a necessary part of the HTML for a form on the page, would be a problem with the search engines.

It sounds to me that if you are finding yourself ranking for your important search phrases, the theory that the code is somehow going to stop a search engine from proceeding through your page has already been proven wrong. Just a thought.

Personally, I have my doubts that the code in question would stop (or even slow down) a spider. There are many things that could be placed into someone's HTML that could present problems for spiders but that is not one of them. I can say with reasonable confidence that you are safe and have no reason for alarm.

As far as your question about the horizontal scroll bar, there is not a horizontal scroll bar unless I am viewing your page in 800x600 resolution and I doubt that could be avoided. Most internet users no longer have there monitor set to 800x600 these days.