Curacao SEO Project - m-a.an
June 18th, 2007 by Joost SchrierMuller & Associates is a tax law firm on Curacao. They offer many services in the tax law arena like fiscal advice, help with audits and assistance if the tax collector has a beef with your company. An extra service they offer is a fiscal subscription where they take care of all your tax matters at a fixed monthly rate. We don’t know anything about taxes and such, but this sounds good.
The website looks very clean. The design is corporate, but not boring, and the color scheme is very appealing. It is available in three languages (Dutch, English and Spanish) and has a very flat structure. This makes it easily digestible without treating visitors like idiots. We like.
The numbers
| URL | www.m-a.an |
| Google PageRank Homepage | 2/10 |
| Frames | No |
| Incoming links | |
| Google Yahoo MSN |
1 5 n/a * |
| Indexed pages | |
| Google Supplemental Yahoo MSN |
18 10 11 12 |
| Open directory listings | |
| ODP Yahoo |
No No No |
| Age domain | ?? (.an domain names don’t have whois) |
| Meta tag “Description” homepage | None |
| Meta tag “Description” internal pages | None |
| Meta tag “Keywords” homepage | None |
| Meta tag “Keywords” in internal pages | None |
| Title tag homepage | ..: Muller & Associates - Belastingadviseurs / Tax Lawyers :.. |
| Title tag internal pages | Yes, identical |
| Use of header tags | No |
*: MSN’s interface to see the incoming links has been off-line for a while so we can’t see this number.
Explanation
The Top Level Domain (TLD) for the Netherlands Antilles is .an and is managed by Mr. Pengel of the local university (www.una.an). In reality he’s not the only one that takes care of it of course, but he is the figurehead for this aspect of the University just like Matt Cutts, for instance, is the figurehead for Google’s webspam team.
One of the problems with the .an domain names is the lack of transparency. There is no whois-server where you can check which domain names are taken or who owns a specific domain. Hopefully this will be fixed when Curacao gets its own TLD in the future. Mr. Pengel, if you are reading this: online purchase and management of domain names would be nice as well. ;)
Anyway, back to Muller & Associates. The company was formed in 2001 and we assume that they registered their domain name sometime during those years. So, the domain name is probably 4 to 6 years old and there probably was some sort of presence on that domain name as well, but the homepage has a PageRank (PR) of only 2. This is very low for a website that’s older than 2 years…
The PR that Google assigns to pages is said to be determined by the amount and quality of incoming links, as well as the age of a domain. You can deduce the ‘problem’ easily from the table above; there are hardly any links to the website. An added problem is that the pages that do link to the website hardly have any PR of their own.
Why is Google PR important? PR can be seen as a measurement by Google of how ‘important’ your website is. It is a relatively democratic measurement because the premise is that people link to either their source for information or to websites that have something interesting to say about a subject. From this follows the idea that the more links a website has the more interesting and noteworthy it is.
When Google has to decide on which website to put on the number one position in their results and they need to choose between two websites that seem equally relevant to the query they will go for the website with PR5 over the website with PR2. So, it pays off to get more links to your website, not just for the direct traffic from those links, but also to increase your clickthroughs from Google’s results pages.
Google has indexed all pages of the website (and has put 10 out of 18 in the supplemental index), but Yahoo and MSN have respectively indexed only 11 and 12 pages. If a search engine hasn’t indexed your webstite’s pages, they can’t show them when someone is looking for the information.
One bottleneck in the ‘indexability’ of the website is the way in which the spider has to move from one language to the other. The link to the other languages is down with so-called imagemaps which are no favorite of spiders. When you look at how much search engines like different kinds of links the consensus is that they like normal text links, they like image links (buttons) less and imagemaps even less.
The way to improve ‘indexability’ of your website would be to add normal text links to your pages. You could do this by adding a footer in the bottom of every page with text links to the important pages (all pages within the language in the case of m-a.an).
Another very useful way of being friendly to search spiders (and your visitors at the same time) would be to add links on the pages to the same page in the different languages. Right now, every page has a link to the homepage in the other languages. This only adds to the importance of those homepages, but the individual pages are important as well.
An added benefit of adding a footer and these ’same-page-different-language’ links would be that the added internal link love will pull pages out of Google’s supplemental index and into the main index.
All pages in m-a.an have a title, but it is the same title for every page. The title of a page is one of the most important factors in SEO. It is supposed to summarize the contents of the page and incorporate the keywords that you want that page to rank for. It is also the first thing people see when scanning the search results in a search engine so it has to look good as well. If you use the same title for every page in your website you’re missing opportunities.
There is a lot of discussion about whether or not the description- and keywords meta-tags are important or not. Many people say they add hardly any benefit and are just a waste of time. Others say that you should sweat the small stuff and benefits are benefits, even if they are only small benefits.
We think you should take the time to add page-specific description- and keywords meta-tags. If you don’t go overboard with keyword stuffing and such they will only help your website and can mean the difference between first page and second page on the search engines.
