LIVE SEO NEWS

Google News is now creeping with Googlebot

2011-09-19T02:06:00.000-07:00

Google News recently upgraded their infrastructure to crawl with Googlebot which is main user agent. What does this mean? Not for most publishers. Any new organizations that wish to retire from Google News can continue to do so: Google News will always respect the robots.txt entry Googlebot-News, Google old user agent, if it is more restrictive than the robots.txt entry for Googlebot.

Google Help Center provides detailed guidance on using the robots exclusion protocol for Google News, and publishers can contact the Google News Support Team if they have any questions, but we wanted to first clarify the following:

Although you’ll now only see the Googlebot user-agent in your site’s logs, no need to worry: the appearance of Googlebot instead of Googlebot-News is independent of our inclusion policies. (You can always check whether your site is included in Google News by searching with the “site:” operator. For instance, enter “site:yournewssite.com” in the search field for Google News, and if you see results then we are currently indexing your news site.)
Your analytics tool will still be able to differentiate user traffic coming to your website from Google Search and traffic coming from Google News, so you should see no changes there. The main difference is that you will no longer see occasional automated visits to your site from the Googlebot-news crawler.
If you’re currently respecting webmaster guidelines for Googlebot, you will not need to make any code changes to your site. Sites that have implemented subscriptions using a metered model or who have implemented First Click Free will not experience any changes. For sites which require registration, payment or login prior to reading any full article, Google News will only be able to crawl and index the title and snippet that you show all users who visit your page. Our Webmaster Guidelines provide additional information about “cloaking” (i.e., showing a bot a different version than what users experience). Learn more about Google News and subscription publishers in this Help Center article.
Rest assured, your Sitemap will still be crawled. This change does not affect how we crawl News Sitemaps. If you are a News publisher who hasn’t yet set up a News Sitemap and are interested in getting started, please follow this link.
For any publishers that wish to opt out of Google News and stay in Google Search, you can simply disallow Googlebot-news and allow Googlebot. For more information on how to do this, consult our Help Center.

As with any website, from time to time we need to make updates to our infrastructure. At the same time, we want to continue to provide as much control as possible to news web sites. We hope we have answered any questions you might have about this update. If you have additional questions, please check out our Help Center.

Source: Google Blog

10 Steps To Increase Your Google Pr

2011-01-21T03:46:00.000-08:00

There is no secret behind the success you can have by increasing your Google pr, but the true secret is how you can do so. There is an array of different ways you can increase your Google pr, but persistence and using a combination of several methods will help you climb up the search engine and increase your pr faster. So, here’s how to increase your Google pr.

1. Link exchange
If you link to other sites that are similar to yours, your Google pr will rise because of the multiple links you have pointing back at your site. If you link to sites unrelated to yours, Google will penalize you.

2. Content
The kind of content you produce goes a long way. If you can offer fresh and enticing content to your readers, more than likely you will get a frequent return base to see what else you have to offer, which Google loves.

3. Forums
Posting in forums is a great way to spread your knowledge across the Web and advertise your products and business at the same time. A lot of forums allow signatures where you can link your site and refer people to it, which in turn will generate more traffic and increase your Google pr.

4. Blogs
Having a blog associated with your website is almost essential today. How to increase your Google pr from blogs is by consistently posting new ideas and thoughts every day, offering advice and answering questions, and obviously promoting your business.

5. Article writing
Article writing is one of the best ways out there to increase your Google pr. You have the ability to spread your knowledge, use keyword optimization, submit the article to thousands of article directories, and spread your website link through the resource box.

6. Write reviews
As crazy as it may sound, your Google pr can and will go up if you write reviews on anything. Whether it is on movies, books or sports games, the key is subtly placing the link to your website in it.

7. Affiliate programs
Affiliate programs can increase your Google pr, but it can also hurt it as well. It is vital that you join a successful affiliate program that correlates with your website; otherwise you will see your Google pr drop.

8. Free
All you have to do is put up the word free and people are immediately interested. By sending a free e-book out through an auto-responder or free articles for a week, you will generate a high volume of traffic just to receive the FREE item.

9. Newsletter
A newsletter is a great way to increase your Google pr because it keeps visitors involved and continuously keeps them up to date with what is going on in your business.

10. Keyword optimization
Keyword optimization is about the most difficult way to increase your Google pr, but it can potentially raise it the most. By targeting specific keywords throughout your entire website and in all of your content and articles, you will slowly rise to the top of the search engines.

Seven Things to Avoid When Looking For Link Partners

2011-01-21T03:44:00.000-08:00

Designing a Reciprocal Link Campaign can be a tricky endeavor. As a webmaster, you must choose your linking partners wisely. Generally, a good rule of thumb is to ask yourself one question: "Will this be a valuable resource to my readers?" If you view it as a legitimate, valuable website, chances are Google will too.

Below you will find 7 tips for avoiding the major pitfalls new web developers often encounter.

1.) Do not link to sites that are irrelevant to yours. Search engines only view relevant reciprocal links as a means of improving your Page Ranking.

2.) Avoid sites that have a "Links Page" that is hard to find. Some sites don't even connect their home page to the links page. If this is the case, you probably will not benefit from the exchange.

3.) Avoid sites that contain more than 25 to 50 links per page. Your link will be hard to find, plus the site has the potential to be viewed as an FFA site. Better safe than sorry.

4.) Do not link to sites with directories that are haphazardly arranged with no categorization. Again, it could be a "Link Farm;" plus your site's address will be hard to find.

5.) Make sure you only link to sites that you deem worthy of your readers' time. Avoid sites that don't contain valuable information. The best way to gain readership is by offering a valuable resource!

6.) Avoid sites that have poor linking strategies and/or are connected to "Link Farms." You don't want to be lumped into a category with sites like these.

7.) Avoid linking to a lot of sites with a low PR. A few are ok, but generally aim for sites with a higher PR than yours.

Once you have found websites that you want to exchange links with, start networking! Email other webmasters and tell them all of the reasons their readers will benefit from reading your site. Show them that their site will be prominently displayed in a small organized directory on your page as well.

Send a pre-made html link to your site so that it's a simple cut-and-paste job for them. If the exchange appears to be too time consuming, most webmasters will overlook your request. Most importantly, show politeness and courtesy in your emails. You will be surprised at how many people respond to your inquiry when asked appropriately.

If you still have trouble finding reciprocal links, try creating contests on your own site. Offer a small prize, or simply a prominently displayed link on your homepage. If your site distributes a newsletter, offer free advertising for participating link partners.

If you find a site you really like, write a short review about it and display the site's link. It will be hard for a webmaster to pass up the opportunity to brag about a good review. Get creative! The more web developers you talk to, the more possibilities there are for increasing your link popularity. The key is, be patient, and be persistent. Even if you only acquire one third of the links you pursue, your efforts will be well-rewarded.

Doodle 4 Google - tell us what you’d like to do someday

2011-01-21T02:43:00.000-08:00

Today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of the fourth annual Doodle 4 Google contest. Open to K-12 students in the U.S., Doodle 4 Google is an opportunity of a lifetime: design the Google.com homepage doodle for millions to see, and while you’re at it, take home a $15,000 scholarship and a $25,000 technology grant for your school.

In the spirit of thinking big, our theme this year is “What I’d like to do someday...”—giving all of the talented young dreamers an opportunity to flex their creative muscles. We know this crop of students will be the generation of tomorrow’s leaders and inventors, and we can’t wait to see what they come up with.

While most of this year's contest remains the same, we’ve made some exciting changes based on your feedback. Now, parents or guardians can register their students directly, and if a school registers, there’s no limit on the number of doodles they can submit. But remember, we only allow one entry per student. We’re also pleased to partner with Boys & Girls Clubs of America and Girl Scouts of the USA, two organizations that truly bring this year’s theme to life.

Once you’ve registered your students and they submit their artwork, Google employees and our panel of guest judges, including Whoopi Goldberg, gold medal ice skater Evan Lysacekand “Garfield” creator Jim Davis, will narrow down the submissions. The top 40 regional finalists will not only receive a trip to New York City and a visit from Google in their hometown, but their artwork will be featured in a special exhibition in partnership with the Whitney Museum of American Art.

For more details, check out google.com/doodle4google, including full contest rules. To get started, whether you’re a teacher or a parent, register your student(s) by March 2, 2011. Then get out the crayons, paints and markers—you can even throw your own doodle party. Please note that all entries must be postmarked by March 16, 2011.

Source: Google blog

2011 SEO Tips To Rank Better in Search Engines

2011-01-07T00:25:00.000-08:00

1. Canonical Issues - check canonical issues to make sure there is a preferred default page or domain preference (http:// or www).

* No reason to have 3 variations of a home page .html, .php and default.htm, depending on your programming platform, server settings (Unix or Windows) as well as if you are using static pages or a content management system you will need to consolidate your website to either http:// or http://www to avoid splitting your site into less potent slivers.

2. Indexation and Crawl Frequency – See how many pages are crawled in a site to determine crawl frequency.

* If you have a home page that is crawled regularly and your internal pages are ignored, then this is often a result of lack of internal or external links.

* You can implement sitemaps on a folder by folder basis, then link from the footer in a site template to a maser sitemap page (where all the mini sitemaps are linked to) to increase indexation. This way the link from the footer consolidates the ranking factor to one page and THAT page feeds the various site maps equivocally (through a tiered drip-down site architecture effect).

3. Orphaned Pages and Dead Ends – check for orphaned pages to determine if pages are linked sufficiently to ensure crawling.

* If you have a page or sub folder in a website that is only linked to from a few pages, then you cannot possibly expect that page to rank well in search engines. If you yourself will not “endorse” a page by linking to it properly (contextually from keywords in the body copy) or from the primary or secondary navigation, then you cannot possibly expect search engines to pay that page with any more credence than yourself.

* Also be weary of PDF files (which can rank on their own and sponge link flow from your website). Make sure PDF files have absolute links (use the complete URL) back to your site, so they do not pool ranking factor and trap it where the rest of your site cannot benefit.

4. Dynamic URL’s – If pages are dynamically created, try to remove or rewrite as many parameters in the URL as possible or use URL / Mod rewrite.

* Any time you have session data or query string parameters in a URL, you are decreasing the possibility of indexation. Particularly if there are conventions such as ?PID=23D-55.aspx trailing along, when a SEO friendly naming convention could have taken its place with a bit of programming. You can rewrite entire segments, sub folders, categories, etc. without losing functionality or compromising SEO value.

5. Naming Conventions – Use proper naming conventions (subject or keyword first, then plural variation, modifier, then tag line).

* Here is a more useful post about how to use meta titles, descriptions and naming conventions, but the gist is simple. Create a hierarchy based on a relevant platform of topically reinforcing semantics using keyword clusters and related synonyms to toggle relevance from what search engines deem as the co-occurrence matrix.

6. Manage Outbound Links – Try to cap outbound links per page to fewer than 50 links for larger pages (10 for top level pages that need more ranking factor).

* The more links that leave a page, the less ranking factor the elements on that page have as equity. The only instance when this is not a concern is if the page itself is augmented from other strong internal pages or have strong inbound links from other sites to offset the hemorrhaging effects of excessive links leaving a page.

7. Footer / Site wide Links – Use footer links sparingly by tactfully to tie site segments together.

* Footer links still work (using 5-10 keyword-rich text links at the bottom of a page), but that can also diffuse the intent of pages that do not have enough content to distinguish themselves from other pages. If a page in a site does not have more than 300 unique words on that page, it can lose relevance as the navigation and other code structures collapse and all interject their shingles to offset or diffuse the pages unique purpose and optimal continuity.

* For example if you have a page that is only a paragraph or two and you expect that page to rank for specific keywords, your navigation alone may trump the relevance for that page. Check your cached pages in text view to see how search engines view your code and your content without style sheets or java script.

* Footer links can help bring balance to pages with less content, but use them on pages with enough content to weather their contribution.

8. Broken Links – Check for broken links which could be hemorrhaging link flow and weakening a site from within.

* Broken links irritate search engine spiders, and when they cannot connect the dots, your sites rankings suffer. If you are using WordPress our plugin SEO Ultimate features a 404 monitor that sweeps the site for broken links which you can find and eliminate.

9. Alt Attributes in Images – Use alt attributes on images to preserve content integrity while providing internal links for ranking factor.

* Using the alt attribute in images allows you to reinforce topical relevance with the on page text based content to improve a pages relevance score.

10. Anchor Text Optimization – Use pertinent anchor text and do not waste link equity from excessively linking to non reciprocating pages within a site.

* Employing anchor text optimization means using relevant keywords to link to relevant pages within a site. Do this enough and before you know it you are virtual theming (which means creating a secondary navigation contextually through keyword co-occurrence).

* This alone can distinguish your site from competitors as each granular layer consolidates ranking factor for a website. This alone is one reason why Wikipedia dominates search results, due to virtual theming.

Using a robots.txt File

2010-12-26T20:59:00.000-08:00

What is a robots.txt file?

A robots.txt file provides restrictions to search engine robots (known as "bots") that crawl the web. These bots are automated, and before they access pages of a site, they check to see if a robots.txt file exists that prevents them from accessing certain pages.

Does my site need a robots.txt file?

Only if your site includes content that you don't want search engines to index. If you want search engines to index everything in your site, you don't need a robots.txt file (not even an empty one).

Where should the robots.txt file be located?

The robots.txt file must reside in the root of the domain. A robots.txt file located in a subdirectory isn't valid, as bots only check for this file in the root of the domain. For instance, http://www.example.com/robots.txt is a valid location. But, http://www.example.com/mysite/robots.txt is not. If you
don't have access to the root of a domain, you can restrict access using the Robots META tag.

How do I create a robots.txt file?

You can create this file in any text editor. It should be an ASCII-encoded text file, not an HTML file. The filename should be lowercase.

What should the syntax of my robots.txt file be?

The simplest robots.txt file uses two rules:

User-Agent: the robot the following rule applies to

Disallow: the pages you want to block

These two lines are considered a single entry in the file. You can include as many entries as you want. You can include multiple Disallow lines in one entry.>

User-Agent

A user-agent is a specific search engine robot. The Web Robots Database lists many common bots. You can set an entry to apply to a specific bot (by listing the name) or you can set it to apply to all bots (by listing an asterisk). An entry that applies to all bots looks like this:

User-Agent: *

Disallow

The Disallow line lists the pages you want to block. You can list a specific URL or a pattern. The entry should begin with a forward slash (/).

To block the entire site, use a forward slash.
```
Disallow: /
```

To block a directory, follow the directory name with a forward slash.
```
Disallow: /private_directory/
```

To block a page, list the page.
```
Disallow: /private_file.html
```

URLs are case-sensitive. For instance, Disallow: /private_file.html would block http://www.example.com/private_file.html, but would allow http://www.example.com/Private_File.html.

How do I block Googlebot?

Google uses several user-agents. You can block access to any of them by including the bot name on the User-Agent line of an entry.

Googlebot: crawl pages from our web index

Googlebot-Mobile: crawls pages for our mobile index

Googlebot-Image: crawls pages for our image index

Mediapartners-Google: crawls pages to determine AdSense content (used only if you show AdSense ads on your site).

Can I allow pages?

Yes, Googlebot recognizes an extension to the robots.txt standard called Allow. This extension may not be recognized by all other search engine bots, so check with other search engines you're interested in to find out. The Allow line works exactly like the Disallow line. Simply list a directory or page you want to allow.

You may want to use Disallow and Allow together. For instance, to block access to all pages in a subdirectory except one, you could use the following entries:

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /folder1/

User-Agent: Googlebot
Allow: /folder1/myfile.html

Those entries would block all pages inside the folder1 directory except for myfile.html.

I don't want certain pages of my site to be indexed, but I want to show AdSense ads on those pages. Can I do that?

Yes, you can Disallow all bots other than Mediapartners-Google from those pages. This keeps the pages from being indexed, but lets Googlebot-MediaPartners bot analyze the pages to determine the ads to show. Googlebot-MediaPartners bot doesn't share pages
with the other Google user-agents. For instance, you could use the following entries:a

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /folder1/

User-Agent: MediaPartners-Google
Allow: /folder1/

I don't want to list every file that I want to block. Can I use pattern matching?

Yes, Googlebot interprets some pattern matching. This is an extension of the standard, so not all bots may follow it.

Matching a sequence of characters

You can use an asterisk (*) to match a sequence of characters. For instance, to block access to all subdirectories that begin with private, you could use the following entry:

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /private*/

How can I make sure that my file blocks and allows what I want it to?

You can use our robots.txt analysis tool to:

Check specific URLs to see if your robots.txt file allows or blocks them.

See if Googlebot had trouble parsing any lines in your robots.txt file.

Test changes to your robots.txt file.

Also, if you don't currently use a robots.txt file, you can create one and then test it with the tool before you upload it to your site.

If I change my robots.txt file or upload a new one, how soon will it take affect?

We generally download robots.txt files about once a day. You can see the last time we downloaded your file by accessing the robots.txt tab in your Sitemaps account and checking the Last downloaded date and time.

Getting Out of Google Supplemental Results

2010-12-26T20:46:00.000-08:00

Getting out of the Google Supplemental Results may be possible by improving your website navigation system. To get more pages fully Google indexed, the prominence of important website pages can often be boosted by linking to them from pages within your domain having the highest Page Rank, such as your homepage. The reason for this being that Page Rank is passed from one page to another by links and the most common cause of Supplemental results is lack of Page Rank.

Start by determining your most important web pages which have been made supplemental - for example those promoting lucrative products and services, and then improve your website internal linking by adding links to these pages from more prominent fully Google indexed pages of your site including your homepage. At the same time, ensure that your website navigation system is search engine friendly using a website link analyser.

By improving website navigation and getting more inbound links from other Worldwide Web sites, you may be able to get more website pages fully Google indexed, solving the problem of partial Google indexing and Supplemental pages.

Where the Google Page Rank of your website homepage is PR4 or PR3, improving your website navigation system and in particular the prominence of internal pages may help to get out of supplemental results. This can be done by including static hyperlinks from the homepage to your 'problem supplemental result pages'.

However, where your homepage is PR3 or lower and you have a large website, internal navigation improvements alone may still not be enough when it comes to getting out of the Google Supplemental Results. At PR3 or lower, your homepage Page Rank is probably too low to pass on enough Page Rank to your internal pages to completely get out of Supplemental Results.

To fully solve the problem of partial Google indexing, get more one way links to your site from quality web directories and sites of a similar theme and wait patiently to become fully Google indexed. In addition, getting more quality one way links pointing to internal pages of your website (rather than just targeting your homepage) is another powerful way of boosting the ranking of those pages against specific keyword terms, and it will also assist in getting them out of supplemental results. This is often referred to as "deep linking".

Important Information about Google Buzz Class Action Settlement

2010-11-02T20:58:00.000-07:00

Google rarely contacts Gmail users via email, but we are making an exception to let you know that we've reached a settlement in a lawsuit regarding Google Buzz (http://buzz.google.com), a service we launched within Gmail in February of this year.

Shortly after its launch, we heard from a number of people who were concerned about privacy. In addition, we were sued by a group of Buzz users and recently reached a settlement in this case.

The settlement acknowledges that we quickly changed the service to address users' concerns. In addition, Google has committed $8.5 million to an independent fund, most of which will support organizations promoting privacy education and policy on the web. We will also do more to educate people about privacy controls specific to Buzz. The more people know about privacy online, the better their online experience will be.

Just to be clear, this is not a settlement in which people who use Gmail can file to receive compensation. Everyone in the U.S. who uses Gmail is included in the settlement, unless you personally decide to opt out before December 6, 2010. The Court will consider final approval of the agreement on January 31, 2011. This email is a summary of the settlement, and more detailed information and instructions approved by the court, including instructions about how to opt out, object, or comment, are available at http://www.BuzzClassAction.com.

Google Algorithm Updated

2010-10-18T23:01:00.000-07:00

Everyone wants top rankings for their website and most people use search engines to find what they are looking for. We all know that if your website is not in the top of a search engine that you will miss out on prospective clients, however as you also know getting these top ranks are not easy. We almost all know in some form what SEO (search Engine Optimisation) is, even if we have not got a clue how to do it. But whether we have done it ourselves or got someone to do it for us you will know that a one of hit will not fit the bill especially when search engines make changes make changes to their algorithms (this is the special formula that SE’s used to rank your site in the search engine results pages [SERPs]). Sometimes these tweaks are minor while other times they are huge and the impact is far reaching for all online users.

Google has made an algorithmic change, which, looks for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. Apparently this is not a flyby night minor change either as Google have stated it is a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change, which suggests that sites getting less traffic will still be indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly this change impacts “long tail” traffic, which generally is from longer queries that few people search for individually, but in aggregate can provide a large percentage of traffic. Google have said they will not be rolling it back.

So where does this leave your average small to medium sized business owner? Well if you have an ecommerce site using a structure that has longtail keywords for pages less viewed, you need to check your stats and see if you were in fact impacted by the update (did you lose traffic from some long tail phrases), also check out your linking practices ensure all links have been obtained using whitehat techniques. Another very important thing to do to help yourself now is check your link strategy out and ensure you are passing link juice to your internal pages.

Make sure all pages have unique good quality information (if you do ecommerce, this is definitely for you do not just use the manufacturers materials) and if you do not use them currently or have not used your social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for a while now is the time as this will help you to build links to internal pages and get traffic throughput to them. Most savvy Business owners realise they can not rely purely on Google or any search engine for that matter for traffic and that social media sites can help boost their business’ exposure. Finally do not go mad do not change everything in the hopes of fixing something that may not even affect you, use your stats and above all common sense.

This is not the end of Long Tail Keywords however good optimisation is really important to your continued online success now, forget how to change, manipulate or find a way around the algorithm changes instead work with it and fix your SEO efforts accordingly by making consistent updates to your content, posting high quality articles that have been optimised on to a well designed site that has also be optimised is the winning game plan here. This does not mean that your rank will be the same indefinitely it does mean that you do work a bit harder and a bit differently to consistently keep you business in front of potential customers.

Google Latest Update Provides Best Results

2010-10-14T23:16:00.000-07:00

At the end of May, Google released an update to their search algorithm-dubbed “Mayday” by most-that affects natural search engine rankings, especially for what are known as “long-tail keywords”. In looking at this Mayday update, we will ask the question: Are these Google updates “fair and balanced”?

The “Mayday” moniker for this Google algorithm seems altogether appropriate. We picture people on a sinking ship yelling “Mayday”. And there are many people on this proverbial sinking ship. People from around the Internet are saying that they lost about 80% of their traffic since this update and many of these people are referring to pages that focused on long-tail keywords.

As you know, Google frequently updates their algorithm to improve search results. The Mayday update carries with a significant change for how Google returns search results for “long tail keywords”.

An example of a long-tail keyword would be something like this: “Apple iPod Touch 32gb 3rd generation review.”

In the past, a page that was optimized for this long tail term might win the battle. Here is how this would be accomplished: The SEO optimizer would create a page with that exact name and he or she would sprinkle the long-tail keyword liberally throughout the article (which would probably be filled with non-original content). They would then create several inbound links using this exact long-tail keyword as the anchor text.

The goal with a page like this would be to attract visitors looking for iPod reviews and then have an affiliate link through which the visitor would then buy an iPod. Ideal Result: This page would rank above a site with better, more original content and, most importantly, earn money!

The Google Mayday update is designed to prevent someone from easily leveraging a long-tail keyword like this.

Matt Cutts, the man who presides over the Google algorithm updates, spoke frankly about the Mayday changes affecting long-tail keywords saying, “this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.”

If you search for this iPod term now, you will see that all “above the fold” results (what you see without having to scroll down) are authority websites such as Amazon.com and Cnet.com.

As many people are found on the edge of the sinking ship yelling “Mayday”, let’s ask the question: Is this Google Mayday update fair to the SEO practitioner? Is Google putting SEO specialists in an untenable position?

Though the Google Mayday update disconcerts many in the SEO circles, it is certainly fair. In the example above, would you rather see a suspect site with duplicate content about iPods or a great, legitimate site such as Cnet.com?

As an SEO practitioner, you do not want to abandon the idea of long-tail search terms. You simply want to make sure that the resulting pages are a great match for the searcher with highly relevant and quality information. And no, your Amazon rip-off product page, no matter how much you “reword it”, is not a worthy of high results.

Google must provide the best results and is doing everything that they can to accomplish this.

The fact is that Google still makes 80% of their revenue from search engine results. All of the other cool Google stuff-can you say Google Earth?– is funded through the monies generated by their search engine. If Google ever loses the search engine battle, they will be the ones yelling Mayday!

Source: pc-blog.lt

Deal between Facebook and Microsoft

2010-10-13T23:00:00.000-07:00

Today's deal between Facebook and Microsoft, which allows Microsoft's Bing search engine to incorporate your Facebook "like" data into its relevance rankings, illustrates how the balance of power on the Internet is shifting from search to social networking.

Microsoft got interested in search in 2003 for a lot of reasons, not least because it saw how Google was shaping the behavior of Internet users.

In user testing and from various data collection systems like the MSN toolbar, Microsoft noticed that a lot of users started each Web surfing session by entering a search term into Google, and returned to the site throughout the day. Google's blank white page was becoming the de facto start page for the Internet.

For a lot of people, that's changed.

For instance, a reporter at a major daily paper recently told me that her company no longer spends a lot of time on search engine optimization – that is, trying to get stories to show up high in Google's search results. Instead, they've found that a ton of traffic is now coming from Facebook (and to a lesser degree, Twitter).

So now they're focused on trying to write the kinds of stories that will get lots of people to post them on their Facebook pages. (Which is what they should have been doing anyway – writing interesting stories that appeal to lots of people. Imagine that.)

Today's deal brings the power of that anecdote home. Google's algorithm will continue to be great when searching for pure information with no particular agenda. But what about figuring out what movie to see this weekend? Or finding out when Neil Young has a cool new video and accompanying album? Or getting instant recommendations on a plumber to fix your suddenly broken water heater? In each of those cases, I got the answer from my Facebook friends.

These are the kinds of commerce-related questions that power Google's revenue today, as they're most likely to get users to click on related advertisements. But as more users turn to Facebook to answer these kinds of questions, advertisers will follow. Microsoft gets this transition, and is more than happy to speed it along.

Google Analytics via New Status Dashboard

2010-09-27T03:49:00.000-07:00

"Google Analytics processes huge volumes of data for websites around the world everyday, thanks to Google’s globally renowned infrastructure," Yi Wang from the Google Analytics Product Team, wrote.

"While we never stop focusing on system reliability and scalability, we also want to make sure our users have an easy way to get the latest updates from us should there be a problem," he added.

"Today, we’re pleased to announce that we have launched the Google Analytics Status Dashboard. Now anyone can visit this Status Dashboard to check on the current status of components of the Google Analytics system," he announced.

The new Dashboard should give an overview of the main components of Google Analytics, Data Collection, Web Report and the GData API.

Data Collection indicates whether the analytics data is being gathered correctly from the websites. The Web Report indicator shows if the users can log into their Analytics account and view the data being gathered. Finally, the GData API indicator shows whether the Analytics APIs are working.

Like with the similar Google Dashboards, there are some caveats. The data is not real-time, and is likely updated just a few times a day. What's more, it only shows global availability so it's only of use in the event of a major failure.

"The Status Dashboard is the best place to check for service availability of Google Analytics anywhere in the world," Google says, indicating that the data may be localized in some way, though.

Still, while the global Dashboard may show that everything is working properly, there may be issues locally preventing Analytics from either gathering or displaying the data at any one given time.

source: softpedia

About Google Instant Search

2010-09-13T03:06:00.001-07:00

Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search.” Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way.

Benefits

Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.
Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.
Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way.

Top 25 Free High Rank Backlinks and Profile Sites

2010-09-08T01:55:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of 25 high page rank web sites where you can post your content, create profiles, and link-up your site’s URL without any reciprocal link from your site. Once you create these high page rank backlinks, profiles, and accounts, they will be a source of web traffic for you. These sites are also great for reputation management campaigns. The sites will normally create a good ranking profile for your company name that in most cases willl appear witin Google’s search results pretty fast.

1. eHOW.com Write how to articles or videos. Post your link in your profile. Also a good source of information if you want to know how to do something.

2. WikiHow.com Same as eHow but you can edit existing wiki pages or create your own. Cleverly put your link in “Sources and Citations” section

3. 43Things.com You have to sign up for participation. Post your own goals or reply to posted “to do” list. Occasionally, insert your own link as a resource.

4. Squidoo.com This is one of my favorite. Build your lenses and you can add links to your site, embed your YouTube videos and flickr photos.

5. AssociatedContent.com You can add your link in your profile. Not a favorite of mine.

6. HubPages.com Another site like Squidoo and AssociatedContent. You can put links to your sites in the content you create here.

7. Digg.com The most popular news ranking site. If you have good blog posts you can post them here. If your article goes to the home page, you will attract thousands of high page rank backlinks and tens of thousands of visitors for a short period. Be prepared for handle the load otherwise you will bring down your server.

8. Reddit.com Another news popularity site. Same as Digg. Post your blog articles here but don’t submit your entire site.

9. Answers.yahoo.com Ask questions and post answers to others questions. You can post links to your site in your answers.

10. Xanga.com A community blog. Crete keyword rich contents and links to your sites in the posts.

11. Kiva.org A microfinance site. You lend to and borrow from individual entrepreneurs. Create a profile page and link to your site from your profile page.

12. Geocities.com One of the oldest site. Create a few mini websites and links to your web sites from the geocities pages.

13. Twitter.com Create an account using a keyword and post your link in your profile.

14. Propeller.com Another news popularity site. Put you site’s link in your profile page.

15. Tradebit.com A site where you can buy and sell digital contents. If you ebooks, your own recorded music, etc., put your keywords in listing pointing to your site’s URL.

16. Angelfire.com Another old site like Geocities. Create your mini sites and put links to your site on the mini site pages.

17. Weebly.com A web 2.0 site where you can create your own mini sites like Geocites. Use the same technique you use for Geocites and Angelfire for back links to your sites.

18. Blogowogo.com A blog aggregation site. If you are running a blog, add your RSS feed to their site and any time you post new articles in your blog, your page at Blogowogo will be updated.

19. Tumblr.com Post and share your photos, articles, links, music, and videos. Use you site’s link in the profile page.

20. StumbleUpon.com Discover great web pages and share with your friends. You can submit your site and individual pages to StumbleUpon.

21. eZineArticles.com The most popular article directory. Submit your articles with author’s box under each article. You can use up to two links to your site in each article.

22. Flickr.com The most popular photo sharing site. You can drop your site’s link on the profile page.

23. MyBlogLog.com Share your online activity on a single page. Link to your sites from the profile page.

24. FastCompany.com If you are passionate about business idea, you should sign up with this very respected site. You can use anchor text in your profile page to link to your web site.

25. YouTube.com The most popular video sharing site. If you don’t have an account with YouTube, you should sign up immediately. Upload interesting and funny videos. Create your profile and link to your site

Link Building SEO: Correct way to use links to your site

2010-09-07T21:34:00.000-07:00

Link building is the gasoline that powers Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Its job is to build a site's value in the eyes of a search engine.

There is a lot of misunderstanding around the subject of link building. As a result, most people build links that don't help improve their search engine ranking.

SEO Link Basics

A link is a connection between one web page and another. A person who clicks a link on one web page will be taken to the page being linked to.

Search engines regard a link from one web page to another as a vote in favour of that page. As a general rule of thumb, the more links a web page gets the higher it will rank in search engines.

In a search engine's 'mind' links are not created equal. The value of a web page that links to your site is taken into account. If your site has nothing but low value links, it won't necessarily help you rank higher in search engines. Of course, it won't hurt either.

Link Tips

A link will normally only convey SEO value to your site if it's a one-way link (from them to you). If you're merely swapping links with friends, the two links will essentially cancel each other out.

To gain SEO value, you'll need to find ways to generate one-way links to your site. Click on my author profile below for 66 different link building ideas.

It's also worth noting that links between different pages on your site also count. In fact, I recommend you examine your site structure and look for ways to increase the links you send to key pages.

2 Ways to Convey SEO Value through Links

There are 2 ways to convey SEO value through links. They are...

1. Link juice
2. Contextual links

Link juice is a term that imagines SEO value to be a liquid, and describes its flow from one web site to another. For example, imagine that the BBC linked to you from its homepage (we all live in hope).

Link juice is said to flow through the link and land on your site. The more valuable a site is in the eyes of a search engine, the more link juice it has to send to your site. This directly impacts on your own search engine ranking.

A contextual link is one that contains a keyword phrase. That is, the clickable text in the link is a search term. For example, the following is a contextual link: Dental Root Canal Treatment.

A search engine creates an association between the keyword phrase in the link and the web page its linking to. This association helps the web page being linked to by improving its ranking for that particular keyword phrase.

The best kind of link is a contextual link from a high value site because it sends plenty of link juice (i.e. SEO value), and it creates a keyword association for the page being linked to.

Think Deep

Most non-professionals think about link building in terms of a site's homepage. But search engines are interested in the entire site, and assess its overall value. If you only get links to your site's homepage you'll struggle to fully realize the potential of SEO to send visitors to your site.

Each key pages on your site should have its own keyword focus. This then provides the keyword phrases required to create contextual links.

When generating links to sub-pages on your site helps improve the SEO value of the entire site. This is partly due to the principle that 'all ships rise on a rising tide', and is also the result of the way link juice flows throughout your site.

If you do happen to secure a link from a high value site such as the BBC, the resulting SEO value arrives at the page on your site being linked to. If that page links to other pages on your site (as it should do), link juice will spread to those pages and benefit your entire site as a result.

Where to click next on Google Wonder Wheel

2010-05-10T03:28:00.000-07:00

I have found the new Google wonder wheel as a useful tool to use. The application which shows you the related searches to your term and navigates you all the way to the right term is easy to use and different. Sometimes small change to display the same things on another way is everything that is needed.

This is why when I’m using the Google wonder wheel I’m facing some problems, to understand where to click next. As a new user to this Google option and from Emails I’m getting from other users, the main issue to face is “where to click next”?

When you are using this application and searching via the terms Google offers, you don’t really know where to click next on Google Wonder Wheel or on the side results. Maybe you need to click back to the origin Google page? How to go on and navigate via the other Google options? All these questions came to the table when people tried the Google Wonder Wheel for the first times.

After a while, anyone can learn Where to click next on Google Wonder Wheel since the real results are on the right hand side of the page. Navigating on the Wonder wheel is addictive, but it will not take you to where you want to go. After every new wheel you open, search for the right result for you on the right hand side.

This example shows that even after few clicks on the Google wonder wheel, its still hard to know Where to click next on Google Wonder Wheel next, because the true results are on the right hand side.

Optimization for Google

2010-03-18T02:20:00.000-07:00

Search engine optimization is not just to rank in search engines but mainly to achieve a good click through rate from the targeted visitors. This means that your web site should come up in the search results of the search-engines with targeted keywords that are related to your content or theme of your site.

Not surprisingly, Google optimization is becoming increasingly competitive as more and more companies realize the importance of getting a high ranking here, but it is also one of the most ‘user-friendly’ search engines to work with! Google updates frequently, deep indexes many pages from a website, and is also good at ignoring sites that try to ’spam’ the listings through the use of unscrupulous techniques.

Points to achieve Higher Google Rank:

Place keywords in URL:

The most important elements to insert keywords into are the URL (domain name + path + filename) and title of your web page. Also, a low-level URL is considered more important than a higher level URL.

Page Titles:

Pay a lot of attention to the titles of the pages you are trying to get ranked. Don’t target more than two or three keyword phrases. Worry about the proximity and prominence of the main keywords. By that, I mean put your more important words closer to the beginning of the title, in the right order, next to each other and make sure the target keywords are a high percentage (but not 100%) of all the words in the title.

Google Site Submission:

Great, you’re all set. Now you should submit your site to Google, right? Not necessarily. Let Google find you. HOW Google finds you can affect your page rank. I don’t mean that there is a standard penalty for submitting to Google. There’s been speculation on that for a while but I have yet to prove it matters.

Increase Quality Back Links:

Back link helps our site to be indexed by Search engine faster. That is the first thing for you to know. No matter how good your site is, without any back link from other site, it’s like your site is a great mall in the deep jungle. So hard for people to find and visit your site.

Google Analytics:

Using Google Analytics as the only information of the campaigns effect can create a distorted and incorrect picture of what really is taking place. The Urchin software, that is used by Google for their Analytics program, is stripped of many features, the output is delayed and as in forums of webmasters widely discussed full of flaws. Most well known draw-back is the slowing down of the web site, because the JavaScript offered by Google is connecting each time to the Google Server. Well, it is for free, so no claims can be made. So when you have performance problems check also this fact.

Beating the Recession With Affiliate Marketing

2010-02-19T02:12:00.001-08:00

A recession is now inevitable. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently predicted that the current recession in the United States will last for at least the whole of 2009. It is of global proportions and it will not discriminate and thus will affect each and every single market. Moody's stated that China is in for its most serious economic downturn in two decades and trade figures have been described as just awfully dreadful. All is far from well in the Euro region, already said to be plunging headlong into recession, with the UK economy being the fastest to contract. Developing countries will also feel the crunch with growth predicted to slow to an abysmal 4.5% for the pre-developed. Shades of the Great Depression seem to be colouring the present global economic crisis so the big question of how to safeguard our financial well-being is springing into everyone's mind.

For this I offer a simple straight-forward answer. Start one or many low investment, high return businesses! Cynical readers will be tossing around expletives at this statement as it is common knowledge to everybody that doing this will ensure profitability, even in the worst of downturns. It is the method of what businesses we should be starting that is this article's concern. My advice is, start an affiliate business! It possesses low initial investment and at the same time maintains high yield characteristics that I believe we should all take note of.

The cost inherent in setting up an affiliate program is fairly paltry. Simple things like hosting, domain name registration, and pay-per-click advertising, are all fairly inexpensive. Compared to traditional physical commerce, affiliate marketing offers a host of benefits with the most useful characteristic being never having to ever stock up on the wares that you are marketing! It also does not require having any physical office, storage or operations space. This translates into never having to pay rent or a mortgage installment! Estimates put US spending on affiliate marketing channels at $2.1 billion dollars for 2008. In terms of your audience however, you are not just marketing to the US. You are marketing to the entire world!

If you have diligently marketed your affiliate products, you stand to make ludicrous sums of money. Since low operating costs are coupled with opportunities to generate extremely high returns, affiliate marketing is the ideal way to generate more income during economic slumps!

Google AdSense by Considering Content as King

2010-02-14T22:21:00.000-08:00

Google AdSense provides you the possibility to produce earnings with no making whatever thing different than maintaining a fine site. The major essential aspect in determining the victory with Google AdSense is the quality and amount. Note that web sites that are content-affluent have been quite victorious with the Google AdSense marketing program. The advertisements should not be random; it should be directed in the direction of the content of the web site. That typically enhances the click via ratio and additionally the earnings of the web site.

Some may feel that fine content has not anything to do with, in developing their site. However, what we consider cannot be right every time. Google this moment utilize students as human being reviewers, and in case they come crosswise sites with poor contents, they will simply ban that from the programmed and one time banned it will not be that quite simple to get that account back.

Boring, old, musty and fusty contents will produce fewer guests just. Interesting and enlightening content attracts more guests to the site and thereby it enhances the earnings to your site.

Therefore, the content in AdSense plays an extremely essential function in the quality of your web site. Major care should be given at the same time as preparing the content for your AdSense. It is not needed that your content should be massive, usually little and trouble-free content is found to magnetize many viewers. Your content should be enlightening, factual, appropriate, and genuine and focused. You have to make your advertisements look as if you have placed them there deliberately as though they were something essential relating to your production, matter in addition to your service. There are sites accessible on the net to aid you produce more traffic by improving the nature of your content in the AdSense. They just supply you the vital hints in developing a content affluent AdSense. Another perfect way to advance a fine content is to put you in the guest’s shoes. That might aid you to realize the weaker side of your content and assists you to enhance much.

The keys utilized in the content of an AdSense additionally boost the quality of the content. These keys put the advertisements in the peak place and that in turn will produce more clicks for you. This way having content with the right keys will make your AdSense site a gainful one.

From all that, it is quite clear that the content has a remarkable function in making of a fine Advertisement site. In addition, it could be rightly stated that the Content is the King in Google AdSense.

Google Chrome PageRank Checker

2010-02-07T01:37:00.000-08:00

I was just trying to find out the PageRank of a couple of sites using Internet Explorer’s Google Toolbar, but something was broken. Google Chrome has a nice PageRank extension, though.

As you can see in the screenshot, it’s helpful by immediately showing the actual value instead of just a green bar. A couple of times it reverted to zero after loading, but otherwise the values it was showing looked like they were the correct ones. (Considering it doesn’t look like it’s an offical extension, I’m not sure though how accurate the values are now, or will be in the future.)

What Is Bounce...

2010-02-02T05:29:00.000-08:00

Do you hear that?

That is the sound of your website rejecting potential customers.

Bounce… There goes another one.

You've probably seen the term 'bounce rate' before in your analytics reports, or heard someone mention it in conversation.

But do you really know what a bounce is?

Do you really understand the importance of this metric?

More importantly, do you know how to fix a high bounce rate?

Bounce Rate Defined

The Google Analytics Help Centre sums it up best with "Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page)".

Or, to put it more plainly, "Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors."

I have highlighted the key phrase in bold and if you only remember one thing, this is it.

What is a "high" bounce rate?

Everybody will have a different opinion on this, and of course there are variables such as seasonality and industry that come into play, but in general I feel that any page with a bounce rate higher than 25% needs attention.

25% still means one out of every four people who arrive at your website leave without looking further.

A retail store owner sure wouldn't be happy if one out of every four people who set foot in their store left without investigating different isles – it should be no different online.

How to Reduce a High Bounce Rate

There are a couple of things you can do to pages with high bounce rates, and in fact should be applied to all landing pages.

These two things should be simple to apply and believe me, if you do them well, you will notice a difference.

Relevancy

If I had to bet on one thing that was the cause of a page's high bounce rate, it would be a lack of relevancy.

Ensure your landing pages are relevant to your sites visitors. Landing pages are usually found via a search engine, so ensure your landing page talks specifically about the keyword the visitor used to find your website.

Call to Action

Any landing page must generate or maintain the visitors buying momentum through to a conversion goal such as a sale or an enquiry.

You must make it obvious to the visitor what you want them to do next by ensuring one primary call to action is prominently placed in the active window and above the fold.

Don't ask your visitors to make decisions. It is your job to guide them, you are in control.

Measure

After making changes to your landing pages, it is essential that you measure the effect those changes have.

Depending on your traffic volume, you may start seeing results in as little as a few days.

If you want to get really clever with your analysis, segment a page's bounce rate by traffic source to see how different sources of traffic react to landing on particular pages.

Bing Adds Recipes to Search Results

2010-01-27T21:15:00.000-08:00

Bing is now giving special placement to recipes in response to some food-related searches:

Bing pulls from a number of popular recipe websites (delish.com, MyRecipes.com, epicurious.com.com, etc.) to bring you correlating recipes that you can sift through by holiday, meals, ratings, and my personal favorite, convenience (with a 10 month old at home, quick is key) and much more.

Plug in a potential ingredient, such as sausage, or a food item such as chocolate chip cookies, and you’ll see links to recipes embedded within the regular search results, within a special section:

Clicking on any particular recipe or the “recipes” link above the section takes you to a new “recipes task page,” where Bing provides nutritional information and calculates the relative calories and fat content of recipes. You can see an example of this deep dive here:

The page also allows you to narrow recipes by star rating, by main ingredient and other options including for some, if they are “kid friendly.”

Want to access the recipe search feature directly? That’s not possible, at the moment. You have to hope it appears in response to an ordinary search. However, to increase the odds, add the word “recipe” to your search. For example, searching for macaroni and cheese doesn’t trigger the box — but macaroni and cheese recipes does.

Even though this seems like a minor thing, it’s an appealing and useful feature that may attract loyalty, frequency or some new usage.

Here’s a video from Bing that explains the feature more:

Bing Maps Steals The Cool Crown From Google

2010-01-22T05:32:00.000-08:00

Microsoft has had a collection of mapping tools and assets that haven't been fully utilized or received the play (or usage) of Google Maps. But in an announcement today Bing Maps breaks new ground in online mapping even as it plays a bit of catch up with Google.

First, Bing Maps is introducing "Street Side" in 56 US metro areas, with the ambition to go global eventually. This is the Microsoft answer to Google Street View: immersive street-level photography that, like Street View, allows users to "walk down the street" and explore neighborhoods in cities. Microsoft began Street Side at roughly the same time as Street View but hadn't released anything (to date) other than this limited demo site.

The environment that Microsoft has created is richer than Street View and brings "augmented reality" into Maps in a compelling way. Microsoft has also utilized its 3D mapping assets in creating the new experience. Here's how the Microsoft press material describes the technology behind the new Maps experience:

Photosynth and Silverlight are the underlying technologies in Bing Maps that connect everything and help provide the more seamless experience. Based on Seadragon and Photo Tourism concepts, Photosynth lets us literally "stitch" together photographs to provide more realistic view of locations as they appear in real life. Photosynth-enabled Streetside imagery is built on geometric models that are reconstructed underneath the imagery to provide a truly 3D experience that shows locations as they are in real life.

The one "catch" is that you need to install Microsoft Silverlight to make it all work. But once installed the new Bing Maps beta site enables a wide range of experiences, search and discovery tools that haven't been available (or maybe possible) previously.

In addition there's an "apps gallery" that enable data overlays directly on the map. All of the current modules are Microsoft created but the company will enable third parties to integrate their content into Bing Maps (e.g., Yelp reviews) in the near term.

Google Gained Market Share in China in Last Six Months

2010-01-19T22:58:00.001-08:00

Google has been closing the gap on Chinese search engine leader Baidu over the last six months according to web analytics company StatCounter. The firm's research arm StatCounter Global Stats reports that at the end of 2009 Baidu held 56% of the Chinese market compared to Google's 43%.

"Google has made impressive gains in China since July last when it was at 30% compared to Baidu's 68%," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "Our analysis suggests that given Google's recent strong performance, market share is certainly not the reason behind its threat to leave China at this time."

At the end of 2009 Yahoo! and Bing's combined share of the Chinese search market stood at just 1.18%.

Despite significant gains in China in the last six months, Google's market share there still lags its global penetration where it has over 90% of the market.

The analysis is based on 24 million search engine referring clicks from China which were collected between July and December 2009.

SEO Tip – Optimize Your Images for Better Rankings

2010-01-04T02:00:00.000-08:00

You have all been told for years that you must add lots and lots of images to your sites. You’ve learned that visitors enjoy looking at pictures of houses, that blog readers are pulled in by having large images at the top of a post.

But is it possible to bring more traffic in from the search engines because of how you use images on your sites? The answer is yes. Today we’ll cover a few ways to help your site rank better using images.

Before we continue, take six minutes and watch these three Google Webmaster videos:

That pretty well sums up this post…oh, you want more? Fine, keep reading.

Use Descriptive File Names for Images

In video 1, Matt flat out tells us – YES OPTIMIZING IMAGES WILL INCREASE TRAFFIC. What else do I need to say to convince you?

Matt suggests using descriptive file names for your images. Don’t keep the bland,boring name your camera created, what good is a name like “dsc00234.jpg”? You should use a carefully thought out descriptive name. You shouldn’t get too carried away with long file names, but I do suggest using multiple words. Of course, keep in mind our tip from last week and use dashes to separate the words in your file name. Possibly use something like: “3576-lakeview-street-homerville-tennessee-kitchen-1.jpg”.

Use ALT Tags for Images

In Video 2, Matt reinforces something I and others have already told you – ALT tags for your images are important. However, he does tell us something new; it’s OK to use slightly longer, more descriptive text instead of just “cat”, “house” or “motorcycle.” So what does that mean for you? It means that when you take pictures of a house you are listing, you have an opportunity to really do a good job of describing the property through photos, in a way the search engines not only understand, they want. Consider putting something like this in your ALT tags: “123 brookehaven road, Jasper, Wyoming – master bedroom – MLS 123456″. Be creative in your description, use words people will be using when they search the web.

Image File URLs

In video 3, Matt reminds us that the URLs of files help the search engines figure out what is in the picture. Depending on how your site is constructed, this might take a little bit of planning. Rather than just drop all you images in a generic folder named “images”, or named for the date you uploaded them (like WordPress does by default), perhaps you should consider creating a special structure to store them in. You could get pretty detailed if you wanted to take the time. You may want to create a folder structure like what’s shown here, based on your state, county & city names. Of course, YOU should know your web traffic better than I do, use names you KNOW people use in searches, based on your keyword research.

BONUS Information

How well did you listen to video 3? Go back and listen to it again, starting from about the 25 second mark, ending at about the 40 second mark. OCR and Meta-data for the images? Now we’re talking.

OCR?

OCR, if you don’t know, stands for Optical Character Recognition. Matt’s comment implies that Google is able to READ and understand the text with in your images. How can you use this? Start adding a crisp, clear title to all of your images. Make it easy for them, place the text on a plain background and use a simple, non-swirly font.

Meta-data?

OMG! Not more meta tags! Take a deep breath, relax. It’s not more geeky tags. Image meta-data is often added automatically by digital cameras and it can be edited by many image editing tools to add all sorts of information. The image to the right is a screen shot taken from within Adobe Photoshop, but the software that came with your camera may also allow you to edit your files like this. Place your descriptive text within these fields before you upload them.

I know this was a lot of information, but I’m confidant you can manage it.

When working with images, keep the fortune cookie in mind; how it looks on the outside is important, but sometimes it’s what you can’t see that is more important.

Iframes, Please Make Way for SEO Poisoning

2009-12-20T22:21:00.000-08:00

If a hacker managed to hack into your blog or website, what could they possibly do? They could insert malicious iframes or JavaScript code into your Web pages. Probably even attempt to steal some data. But most likely they would "search engine optimize" your website. Can this be true? Well, let me explain more.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a collection of techniques used to achieve higher search rankings for a given website. "Black hat SEO" is the method of using unethical SEO techniques in order to obtain a higher search ranking. These techniques include things like keyword stuffing, cloaking, and link farming, which are used to "game" the search engine algorithms.

So what does a hacker gain from all this? Why would a hacker help you achieve a higher search engine ranking? Quite the contrary; he is helping himself.

What the hacker actually does is add numerous additional Web pages to your website. Let’s call each of these additional pages "fake" Web pages. Each fake page is based on a popular search topic and has content related to that topic. Most often the content is stolen from legitimate sites and feeds. The hacker also uses topic-related keywords in the URLs of these fake pages. Each of these fake Web pages is added without the website owner’s knowledge or consent. For example, if you own the site example.com, the hacker might add virtual pages such as:

• example.com/?ohio-voting-results
• example.com/?atlanta-mayoral-race-results
• example.com/?dancing-with-the-stars
• example.com/?nicole-narain

All of these fake pages would then redirect to content stolen from some reputable site related to the keyword.

Now, if a legitimate user was to search for one of these keywords, he or she would encounter a reference to this fake Web page in the search engine results. The keywords in the URL, the keywords in the title, and the relevant content would all cause some search engine algorithms to place this Web page high in the search engine results. In other words, this fake Web page has "gamed" the search engine algorithm into believing that that it has relevant content, with respect to what is being searched for.

But what does the hacker gain from getting a legitimate user to visit this fake Web page? After all, the visitor would simply be reading relevant information based on what was searched for. Well, not really. The Web server’s configuration file is changed by the hacker to recognize that the user is visiting this fake page after following a link from a search engine result page, and is then redirected to a fake antivirus or misleading application Web page, which is different from what the search engine spider actually sees. This is known as cloaking.

Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user’s browser. Search-engine crawlers spider through links in order to find and index Web pages. So when the search engine spider visits this page, it is presented with relevant information that is related to the search topic theme. In fact, most often the relevant keywords in the URL, title, and the content gives this fake Web page a higher ranking in the search engine results. However, when the user visits this fake page from the search engine result page he or she will be redirected to a fake scan Web page.

There are many different ways to achieve cloaking. One popular method is to look at the User-Agent string in the HTTP request. Search engine crawlers use specific strings in the user-agent field of the HTTP header. Using this, the Web server can serve a different page to the crawler. The referrer field can be used to ascertain if the user is coming from a search engine result page, and in that case redirect them to a fake scan website serving misleading applications.

So how do these websites get picked up by the search engine crawlers? There are several ways to do this. One can manually submit a website to search engine crawlers. Also, crawlers can spider through links, so a reference link on one website can get your website crawled and indexed. Additionally, many crawlers use sitemaps provided by the website owners in order to find all the pages on the website. Search engine advertising programs can also be used for getting indexed.

Search engines attribute importance to links to a website that exist on other websites. These links are called "backlinks" and indicate the popularity of a website. Backlinks will also get a website crawled and indexed as well as increase the page rank.

A "link farm" is a group of websites that have links to other websites in that group. Apart from other factors that contribute to a website gaining a good ranking, backlinks play a vital role—and a link farm provides a website with many back links. In fact, there are services such as Link Farm Evolution and SENuke available online, which allow for the creation of thousands of backlinks for a website.

Recently we came across a link farm for a group of fake pages that were serving up misleading applications. The link farm allows these fake pages to be indexed and therefore increases their page rankings.

Shown above is a snapshot of the link farm in question. You can see that each link is related to a recent real-world event, and each link ends with a keyword related to that event. All of these pages were created on legitimate websites that were hacked to serve these virtual pages.

Although the

So, you have now read how black hat SEO techniques are effectively employed to redirect victims to fake antivirus websites from search engine results. The following diagram gives a good visual summary of the typical actions that occur:

1. The hacker hacks a site to serve legitimate content to a search spider and malicious content to users.
2. The hacker creates a link farm to the hacked site to be picked up by a search spider.
3. A search spider crawls the link farm.
4. The hacked site appears in the search results.
5. A user clicks on the search result link leading to the hacked site, which redirects to the malicious page.

Canonical URL Tag

2009-12-20T20:33:00.000-08:00

The announcement from Yahoo!, Live & Google that they will be supporting a new "canonical url tag" to help webmasters and site owners eliminate self-created duplicate content in the index is, in my opinion, the biggest change to SEO best practices since the emergence of Sitemaps. It's rare that we cover search engine announcements or "news items" here on SEOmoz, as this blog is devoted more towards tactics than breaking headlines, but this certainly demands attention and requires quick education.

To help new and experienced SEOs better understand this tag, I've created the following Q+A (please feel free to print, email & share with developers, webmasters and others who need to quickly ramp up on this issue):

How Does it Operate?

The tag is part of the HTML header on a web page, the same section you'd find the Title attribute and Meta Description tag. In fact, this tag isn't new, but like nofollow, simply uses a new rel parameter. For example:

link rel="canonical" href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog"

This would tell Yahoo!, Live & Google that the page in question should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL www.seomoz.org/blog and that all of the link & content metrics the engines apply should technically flow back to that URL.

The Canonical URL tag attribute is similar in many ways to a 301 redirect from an SEO perspective. In essence, you're telling the engines that multiple pages should be considered as one (which a 301 does), without actually redirecting visitors to the new URL (often saving your dev staff considerable heartache). There are some differences, though:

Whereas a 301 redirect re-points all traffic (bots and human visitors), the Canonical URL tag is just for engines, meaning you can still separately track visitors to the unique URL versions.
A 301 is a much stronger signal that multiple pages have a single, canonical source. While the engines are certainly planning to support this new tag and trust the intent of site owners, there will be limitations. Content analysis and other algorithmic metrics will be applied to ensure that a site owner hasn't mistakenly or manipulatively applied the tag, and we certainly expect to see mistaken use of the tag, resulting in the engines maintaining those separate URLs in their indices (meaning site owners would experience the same problems noted below).
301s carry cross-domain functionality, meaning you can redirect a page at domain1.com to domain2.com and carry over those search engine metrics. This is NOT THE CASE with the Canonical URL tag, which operates exclusively on a single root domain (it will carry over across subfolders and subdomains).

Over time, I expect we'll see more differences, but since this tag is so new, it will be several months before SEOs have amassed good evidence about how this tag's application operates. Previous rollouts like nofollow, sitemaps and webmaster tools platforms have all had modifications in their implementation after launch, and there's no reason to doubt that this will, too.

How, When & Where Should SEOs Use This Tag?

In the past, many sites have encountered issues with multiple versions of the same content on different URLs. This creates three big problems:

Search engines don't know which version(s) to include/exclude from their indices
Search engines don't know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, authority, anchor text, link juice, etc.) to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions
Search engines don't know which version(s) to rank for query results

When this happens, site owners suffer rankings and traffic losses and engines suffer lowered relevancy. Thus, in order to fix these problems, we, as SEOs and webmasters, can start applying the new Canonical URL tag whenever any of the following scenarios arise:

While these examples above represent some common applications, there are certainly others, and in many cases, they'll be very unique to each site. Talk with your internal SEOs or SEO consultants to help determine whether, how & where to apply this tag.

What Information Have the Engines Provided About the Canonical URL Tag?

Quite a bit, actually. Check out a few important quotes from Google:

Is rel="canonical" a hint or a directive?
It's a hint that we honor strongly. We'll take your preference into account, in conjunction with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to display in search results.

Can I use a relative path to specify the canonical, such as ?
Yes, relative paths are recognized as expected with the tag. Also, if you include a link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL.

Is it okay if the canonical is not an exact duplicate of the content?
We allow slight differences, e.g., in the sort order of a table of products. We also recognize that we may crawl the canonical and the duplicate pages at different points in time, so we may occasionally see different versions of your content. All of that is okay with us.

What if the rel="canonical" returns a 404?
We'll continue to index your content and use a heuristic to find a canonical, but we recommend that you specify existent URLs as canonicals.

What if the rel="canonical" hasn't yet been indexed?
Like all public content on the web, we strive to discover and crawl a designated canonical URL quickly. As soon as we index it, we'll immediately reconsider the rel="canonical" hint.

Can rel="canonical" be a redirect?
Yes, you can specify a URL that redirects as a canonical URL. Google will then process the redirect as usual and try to index it.

What if I have contradictory rel="canonical" designations?
Our algorithm is lenient: We can follow canonical chains, but we strongly recommend that you update links to point to a single canonical page to ensure optimal canonicalization results.

from Yahoo!:

• The URL paths in the tag can be absolute or relative, though we recommend using absolute paths to avoid any chance of errors.

• A tag can only point to a canonical URL form within the same domain and not across domains. For example, a tag on http://test.example.com can point to a URL on http://www.example.com but not on http://yahoo.com or any other domain.

• The tag will be treated similarly to a 301 redirect, in terms of transferring link references and other effects to the canonical form of the page.

• We will use the tag information as provided, but we’ll also use algorithmic mechanisms to avoid situations where we think the tag was not used as intended. For example, if the canonical form is non-existent, returns an error or a 404, or if the content on the source and target was substantially distinct and unique, the canonical link may be considered erroneous and deferred.

• The tag is transitive. That is, if URL A marks B as canonical, and B marks C as canonical, we’ll treat C as canonical for both A and B, though we will break infinite chains and other issues.

and from Live/MSN:

This tag will be interpreted as a hint by Live Search, not as a command. We'll evaluate this in the context of all the other information we know about the website and try and make the best determination of the canonical URL. This will help us handle any potential implementation errors or abuse of this tag.

You can use relative or absolute URLs in the “href” attribute of the link tag.

The page and the URL in the “href” attribute must be on the same domain. For example, if the page is found on “http://mysite.com/default.aspx”, and the ”href” attribute in the link tag points to “http://mysite2.com”, the tag will be invalid and ignored.

However, the “href” attribute can point to a different subdomain. For example, if the page is found on “http://mysite.com/default.aspx” and the “href” attribute in the link tag points to “http://www.mysite.com”, the tag will be considered valid.

Live Search expects to implement support for this feature sometime in the near future.

What Questions Still Linger?

A few things remain somewhat murky around the Canonical URL tag's features and results. These include:

The degree to which the tag will be trusted by the various engines - will it only work if the content is 100% duplicate 100% of the time? Is there some flexibility on the content differences? How much?
Will this pass 100% of the link juice from a given page to another? More or less than a 301 redirect does now? Note that Google's official representative from the web spam team, Matt Cutts, said today that it passes link juice akin to a 301 redirect but also noted (when SEOmoz's own Gillian Muessig asked specifically) that "it loses no more juice than a 301," which suggests that there is some fractional loss when either of these are applied.
The extent of the tag's application on non-English language versions of the engines. Will different levels of content/duplicate analysis and country/language-specific issues apply?
Will the engines all treat this in precisely the same fashion? This seems unlikely, as they'd need to share content/link analysis algorithms to do that. Expect anecdotal (and possibly statistical) data in the future suggesting that there are disparities in interpretation between the engines.
Yahoo! strongly recommends using absolute paths for this (and, although we've yet to implement it, SEOmoz does as well, based on potential pitfalls with relative URLs), but the other engines are more agnostic - we'll see what the standard recommendations become.
Yahoo! also mentions the properties are transitive (which is great news for anyone who's had to do multiple URL re-architectures over time), but it's not clear if the other engines support this?
Live/MSN appears to have not yet implemented support for the tag, so we'll see when they formally begin adoption.
Are the engines OK with SEOs applying this for affiliate links to help re-route link juice? We'd heard at SMX East from a panel of engineers that using 301s for this was OK, so I'm assuming it is, but many SEOs are still skeptical as to whether the engines consider affiliate links as natural or not.

Traffic Generation Techniques

2009-09-23T01:36:00.000-07:00

Everyone wants to know how to generate more web site traffic unless you know them you can’t run a successful business. There are many techniques with which you can easily generate/drive traffic to your website. I want to explain some high-impact traffic generating techniques so that you can use implement them to minimize time and to maximize the results.

1- Social Bookmarking

2- Social Networking

-MySpace

-FaceBook

3- Web 2.0 Pages

4- Article Submission

5- Press Release

6- Forum Posting

7- Blog Commenting

8- Directory Submission

9- Classified Ads Posting

10- Regional Traffic

More….

The main goal of this traffic generation is nothing but maximizing your Search Engine Rankings so that your website would get displayed in the Top of SE’s for your main targetted keyword.

Implement all the strategies that I have mentioned above once you are done with the On-Page Optimization which I have been discussing so far..these are the minimum things which you have to make sure that you followed all factors that I have mentioned.

How to avoid duplicacy of pages and content in websites

2009-07-06T21:13:00.000-07:00

Duplicacy of pages add no real content to the web and do nothing to improve the quality of the search engines output. By offering the same document over and over search engines would offer a horrible product with no variety. For this reason, duplicate pages are often filtered out. This is the exact reason Yahoo! dislikes many affiliate websites.

Duplicacy of content and pages are major cause for search engine optimization.Even if search engines like Google will not always penalizes you for duplicate content, they will still have to choose one of the URLs / pages to show in search results and ignore all other duplicates.

If problem is related with WWW-pages and non WWW-pages URLs in the generated XML sitemap will then either be with or without www which may differ from the paths search engines such as Google.

To avoid duplicate content use canonical URL in wordpress.This is the definition given in Google’s Webmaster Central Blog a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

It is very easy to specify the canonical URL of a page – all you have to do is add this line in the head section…

The purpose of this tag is to prevent the problem of duplicate content.

The best thing about this tag is that all three major search engines(Google, Yahoo and MS Live) support this initiative.
header.php

Go to the theme folder in wordpress(wp-content/themes/
) and open the file header.php in your favorite editor. Now find the line…

and add the following code before that line…



" />

Now, it should look something like this…

" />

That’s it - you are done! Save the file and upload it to your server.

This fix will add the canonical URL tag to all the posts and pages of your blog. If you want to see a blog that have implemented this fix, take a look at the source of this page.

What is a canonical URL?

If you already know you would be surprised at how few webmasters have ever heard of a canonical URL. If you also spend time in Google Groups you will find people scratching their heads and not getting a clear answer as to how to troubleshoot and resolve this troublesome issue in Google.

PR Update and SEO Updates

2009-07-02T05:49:00.000-07:00

Search engines are changing their techniques day by day. So every coming day brings some SEO updates for webmasters. Search engine like Google use to change its algorithms after couple of weeks that’s why some time PR update brings some unexpected and shocking results.

As every body use to search the desired information through some search engine, most probably Google. Obviously, every one wants to touch relevant date instead of wandering around the different sites. Search engine help us by sorting out the sites in such a way that the most relevant site comes up in top results. So in order to bring their sites among the top results webmasters use different techniques and the process of bringing these sites at the top of the list by using SEO updates in legalized way is called white hat SEO.

Search engines use different algorithms in order to sort out the data in better and faster way. However, the most successful and popular of all algorithms was developed in Stanford University by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This algorithm was named Page ranking.　 The prototype of this algorithm was launched in the market in 1998 with the name of “Google”.

Page rank algorithm was based on votes. For example, a link from site X to site Y is counted as a vote from site X for site Y. The site which has the more votes means have more back links will be considered more important and will get a higher “page rank”. One interesting fact is that Google assess the importance of a site through the sites from where it is getting back links. No doubt every back link is considered as a vote but different votes have different values. That means if your site get a back link from a site which has a good page rank and healthy back links that will ultimately affect the ranking of your site in next PR update.

So we can say that more and more back links is not the only way of optimizing your site for high search engine ranking. Rather then that if you want to see your site with good page rank after next PR update then don’t go for back links only, instead of this try to go for quality back links. Rather then back links, search engine also consider many other factors while allocating page rank, so webmasters should keep an eye on SEO updates, in order to get the idea about the working of search engine algorithms. Some times sites having healthy back links fail to get good page rank during PR update rather then that Google penalizes those sites which use to get back link by using black hat techniques. While if you will upload sites of same nich on the same ip of the hosting it may effect the google page rank of your sites.

In short we can say that search engines optimization is not a rocket science rather then it is the name of continuously changing field, in which you can get guidance through SEO updates or you can also try your ways by following search engine guidelines. It really needs some thing beyond expertise. People who are working in this widespread field of search engine optimization love to get useful SEO updates.

Microsoft's Bing goes live in preview (Update 2)

2009-06-05T01:42:00.000-07:00

The buzz last week and building overnight (on Twitter) was that Microsoft's new search product, Bing, was going live early.

This morning, users of Live.com as well as MSN search got a little surprise ... two days early.

Prior to an upcoming multi media advertising blitz valued at 80-100 million dollars, Bing is now live in most time zones in 'preview mode'.

Bing Travel, born out of Microsoft's Farecast acquisition, is also now live as well as other new members of the 'Bing family', not exclusive of Bing Cashback.

The Bing preview video (using Silverlight) had been up for the past three days. Search experts and those just wondering how Bing will effect the search landscape can now test the product without invitation and, no doubt, we'll see a few thousand articles posted throughout the day.

Bing is being promoted not as a 'Internet Search Engine' but as a decision making product. Users with specific questions will be able, if all goes well for Microsoft, to type in a question or phrase and receive some relevant links in return.

With a few memories of 'Ask Jeeves' or maybe Yahoo Answers ... Bing is here.

Update 1: The Bing Community is also now active and getting busy along with a forum for feedback and questions. A few blogs within the community: Bing Maps, Bing Travel, Bing Developer, and the new Webmaster Community in Bing.

Sender Time Zone : New in Gmail Labs

2009-05-29T02:37:00.000-07:00

Gmail grows day by day and adding more features in Labs and make those features live that which are gaining the hearts of users. On April 8th 2009 night Gmail has released a new product in labs called "Sender Time Zone". This is a nice feature. Using this feature you can find what time in your contacts country.

Don't get confused. For example you have friends or clients world wide. For example you have received an important mail from client or friend. You would like to discuss about that issue immediately to him or her and wants get it resolved. If it is early morning to your client or friend, then it's so bad to disturb them in a deep sleep. So using this feature just simply have a look on time zone (as shown in the image) and then call him if it's the right time or else wait for few hours. (click on the Image to enlarge)

If you have all local friends then it won't much use for you, because yours and their time zone is same. For professionals and Global consultants have found this feature very useful who have global network and also interacting with them often.

But here is a problem again. If you are in India and your system has set to US timings then it may show your time wrong. So it would be better to set your system according to your time zone. Of course most of the people will set their pc time zone as per their time zone only, however i just want to make you aware of this.

Google Flash SEO

2009-05-28T02:23:00.000-07:00

In case you missed their recent announcement about Flash, Google and Adobe have teamed up on a new algorithm to index text content in Flash. As a result of the new algorithm for Flash, Googlebot now indexes “textual content in SWF files of all kinds” and extracts URLs embeded in Flash.” On July 1, 2008, Google rolled out another update designed to assist Googlebot in its ability to traverse simple JavaScript, like SWFObject. While the full impact is not yet known, these technologies will redefine how Flash sites are created, constructed, designed and, as a result, optimized.

Before discussing the results of my case studies and how to optimize an actual scenario Flash site, it’s important to understand some crucial background information.

Prior to the introduction of Google’s Flash algorithm, Googlebot crawled only (X)HTML architectures without executing JavaScript to access text content and/or URLs in Flash. These new capabilities raise a number of questions about how Google handles, crawls and indexes content in Flash. Does Google index all text content in Flash? Does Google associate text content in Flash with the correct parent URL? Does Googlebot crawl links containing “pound signs” in URLs? Can Flash files have PageRank? How does Google treat underlying interlinked (X)HTML structures of corresponding text content pages? What about “Progressive Enhancement” techniques? To answer these and other questions, I’ve been testing the effectiveness of “Google’s Flash algorithm” since its inception to find out what it means for current design practices.

Googlebot Flash Update Case Studies

Before looking at how to optimize an actual scenario site, it’s important to establish the new “laws of the land,” so to speak. For that reason, I’ve conducted a number of experiments with various sites but have included only a few case studies below. These case studies lay a foundation in terms of understanding how Googlebot now interacts with Flash since Google’s new algorithm for Flash was introduced. For demonstration purposes, I’ve used Google’s example from Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Google Flash Update Case Study #1:

Google Flash Content Association with Parent URLs

Experiment: To determine if Google associates text content embedded in Flash inside an (X)HTML page with the correct “parent” URL as a single entity.

Hypothesis: Google currently still does not associate text content in Flash with the correct parent URL or as a single entity.

Background: According to Google’s Official Webmaster Blog, “If the Flash file is embedded in HTML (as many of the Flash files we find are), its content is associated with the parent URL and indexed as single entity.” To support their claim, Google posted the following image:

Procedure: To test their claim, I used Google’s example query [nasa deep impact animation].

Result:

Conclusion:

Since the introduction of support for SWFObject in July, Google hasn’t associated text content in Flash with the correct parent URL or as a single entity. More often than not, either the Flash URL or both the Flash and parent URL are indexed.

*For test validity, I’ve monitored Google SERPs (search engine results pages) for the above query daily over a period of 60 days. I’ve also monitored Google’s SERPs for the following queries over the same period of time: [deep impact amy walsh] and [deep impact impact with comet Tempel 1].

Google Flash Update Case Study #2:

Google Flash File PageRank

Experiment: To determine if Flash files can accrue PageRank.

Hypothesis: Flash files can accrue PageRank.

Background: In a recent interview with Eric Enge, Maile Ohye mentioned that links in Flash function as a regular links and, therefore, can pass PageRank. If links in Flash can pass PageRank, it seems they could also accrue PageRank.

Procedure: Again using Google’s example, I visited both the parent and child URLs and recorded their “Toolbar” PageRank.

Results:

The (X)HTML parent URL page has a “Toolbar PageRank” of 7 while the Flash file URL (.swf) page has a “Toolbar PageRank” of 6.

Conclusion:

Flash files can accrue PageRank independent of their own parent URLs.

*Note: The illustration in this case study shows both the parent and child URLs indexed as unique individual entities in Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages). This further supports the findings in Case Study #1.

Google Flash Update Case Study #3:

Googlebot #anchor (fragment identifier) URL Extraction

Experiment: To determine how Googlebot handles URLs containing #anchors (fragment identifiers).

Hypothesis: Googlebot ignores #anchors (fragment identifiers) in URLs and, as a result, extracts only URLs preceding #anchors (fragment identifiers) in Flash embedded links.

Background: According to Google’s own JohnMu, “When we find URLs with an anchor attached like that (http://domain.com/page#anchor) we generally ignore the anchor part, since it is not relevant when fetching the contents of a URL.” While this is a convention commonly used for playhead control in Flash sites, it refers to the same page as defined by W3C.

Procedure: To test the experiment, I used Google’s “inurl:” operator to search for instances where Google had indexed a URL containing a pound sign. The queries I used are [inurl:#] and [inurl:& # 35;].

Result: No results found.

Conclusion:

Google doesn’t index URLs containing #anchors (fragment identifiers) in Flash per W3C Guidelines.

Google Flash Update Case Study #4:

Google Flash Text Translation

Experiment: To determine if Google can translate text content in Flash.

Hypothesis: Google can not translate text content in Flash.

Background: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” To some, “universal accessibility” would imply translation.

Procedure: To test the experiment, I used Google’s translation tool to translate the case study example into French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Russian.

Result: No results found.

Conclusion:

Currently, Google doesn’t seem to support translations of text content in Flash.

Googlebot Flash Interaction Scenario

Avenues for optimizing Flash differ, but the final destination remains the same in terms of organic search engine optimization. The scenario below reveals the basics of how Flash sites are typically optimized. In addition to the description, I included images to help further illustrate the dynamics involved.

“SEO for Flash” is simple in theory; embed an entire “site” within a Flash file and layer that Flash file over an interlinked (X)HTML structure of corresponding content pages via JavaScript. Thanks to the JavaScript (SWFObject), users with Flash enabled see Flash, while users without Flash enabled (previously Googlebot) receive the underlying interlinked (X)HTML version of content pages. In order to control the Flash presentation for users with Flash, URLs with #anchors are embedded to create the illusion of “seamless transitions” between “virtual pages” within the Flash file.

(A second iteration of this same technique draws text content seen both in the Flash presentation as well as the underlying (X)HTML from the server. However, Google does not attach external content resources loaded in Flash files. “If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered a part of the content in your Flash file.”)

While the scenario above seems fairly simple, understanding how each element is “digested” by Googlebot is a bit more complex. Here are a few issues to be aware of when optimizing Flash sites in light of the new Flash algorithm.

“Progressive Enhancement”

As illustrated by Case Study #1, Googlebot traverses simple JavaScript, like SWFObject and, as a result, it completely circumnavigates text content provided via “Progressive Enhancement” in most cases.

Flash in SERPs

As Case Study #1 and #2 illustrate, Google may not associate text content in Flash with the appropriate parent URL and/or as a single entity. This makes it possible for users without Flash-enabled browsers and/or devices (iPhone) to access Flash files directly from Google’s SERPs. This issue can result in a bad user experience.

Links

As illustrated by Case Study #3, Googlebot ignores pound signs (#anchors / fragment identifiers) in URLs. As a result, Googlebot interprets URLs containing pound signs as different URLs with different content than intended. (After pointing this issue out to the creators of SWFAddress, Asual added the “Copy link to clipboard” option to footer of pages in their SEO example.) This issue is further complicated by the introduction of Google’s new algorithm for Flash, the support for simple JavaScript and the possibility of Flash files being indexed in Google search engine results pages.

If a user posts a link to domain.com/photos.html#/contact.html, Googlebot will only see and index the content at domain.com/photos.html.

PageRank / Keyword Thinning

As illustrated by Case Study #2, Flash files can now accrue PageRank independent of their own parent URLs. As a result of this issue, PageRank thinning is likely to occur, because PageRank is divided between the parent URLs and actual URL. The percentage of thinning is likely to increase in proportion to the quantity of underlying (X)HTML pages containing “the flash file.”

Similar to PageRank, keyword relevancy may not be allocated to the intended URL. When keyword relevancy that is intended for one URL is instead allocated to another URL, thinning occurs.

Translation

As Case Study #4 illustrates, Google doesn’t seem to translate text content in Flash files, especially when text is supplied by a server or some other third party source.

Google SEO for Flash

Before talking about SEO for Flash, it’s important to define what that really means. Ask a Flash guy what SEO for Flash means and he might say something like “indexed content” or “indexation.” Ask an SEO guy what SEO for Flash means and he might say something like “ranking top 10 or text content in Flash.” As you can see, there are two different definitions and, therefore, two totally different expectations at work here. To an SEO, indexed content is the starting point where SEO for Flash begins. Simply “being indexed” is better defined as “Search Engine Friendly” (SEF). The introduction of Google’s Flash algorithm means most Flash sites are, by default, search engine friendly assuming text content resides within the Flash files and isn’t in a vector format.

Organic search engine optimization (SEO), unlike search engine friendliness (SEF), depends heavily on “meta data,” not just “meta tags.” Lots of information can be gleaned from (X)HTML by search engines via, TITLE elements, ALT attributes, images, headers (H1, H2, H3, H4…), internal link structure, fonts, link popularity, relationships, site categories, subdivisions and sections. Engines rely on these elements for meta data as well as other informational “signals” used for rankings. “More data is good data” but only when that data is available in a digital format that’s digestible by search engines and can be translated to determine relevancy for textual queries. As Vanessa Fox recently pointed out, the lack of structural meta data in Flash is a real disadvantage.

With Google’s introduction of “Universal search” in May 2007, Flash sites were dealt a new obstacle. Universal blends results from verticals like news, images and YouTube, in Google’s search results. The advent of “Universal search” is somewhat problematic for Flash sites, because Googlebot can’t extract images and/or video embedded in Flash for inclusion in Google’s “Universal” search results. To illustrate, currently Adobe.com doesn’t rank top ten in Google Images for [Adobe] or [Adobe logo].

Google Flash SEO Tips for 2009

Since “optimizing Flash” is difficult, it’s better to understand the fundamental limitations of the medium in terms of search, and to then concentrate on optimizing site design and architecture.

When it comes to text, “Don’t use it for something when there’s already a standard whose output can be easily parsed, easily processed, and whose openness makes its processing easier for browsers and searchbots.” - “Bergy,” Google Webmaster Central
Avoid text content and links in Flash
Don’t use text content in Flash supplied via third party file
If you must use text content in Flash, use sIFR
If you must use text content in Flash and sIFR isn’t an option, create individual Flash files laid over each corresponding (X)HTML page via SWFObject
“Instead of including everything in one flash file it may make sense to break the content into different flash files so you can create different HTML pages around the different ideas contained in it.” - Aaron Wall, SEOBook.com
When using SWFObject, consider using absolute URLs in underlying (X)HTML and Flash files
When using SWFObject, be sure to include “alternative” images for users without Flash
Avoid using text content in Flash for pages employing “seamless transitions” where URLs don’t change, or, instead, include “pound signs”
Provide links to important pages within Flash files using absolute URLs for users who arrive at the Flash file via Google search engine results pages
Consider how translation issues may impact content in Flash and investigate ways of working around these issues

Free Tips To Generate Traffic and Link Popularity

2009-05-20T05:28:00.000-07:00

The main objective of any Search Engine Optimization campaign is to generate traffic and attract more and more visitors by using different ethical strategies. Building link popularity is one of the most effective ways to make popular your website on the web and also getting traffic to your website. In this article you can find some important tips to generate traffic and obtain inbound links for your website:

1. Article Submission: Submitting article to various article submission directories is a better and effective way to obtain inbound link and generate traffic to your website. If you are an expert of your field and can write good content then write articles related to your business and submit them to article submission directories. Always remember to include a resource box having a link back to your website. If your article is impressive and informative to users then it will be published and increase your traffic as well as link popularity.

2. Directory Submission: Submitting your website to related web directories is an easy way to increase link popularity and generate traffic to your website.

By submitting your website to a directory you will get an inbound link that increases your link popularity. Often webmasters and many other people go to visit various web website directories for specific information so it also helps to generate traffic to your website.

3. Blogging: Business blogs are also an effective way to generate traffic as well as obtain inbound links to your website. Create a blog related to your business and make regular posts on that. Blogs are easily accessible and you can easily add or modify content in your blog. Always include a link back to your website in each and every post of your blog that will help to divert traffic to your website. If your blog posts are unique and informative then visitors may return back to your blog time to time for more information and it will increase traffic to your blog as well as your website and help to increase your link popularity.

4. Online discussion forums: Online discussion forums are also an excellent way to generate targeted traffic and building link popularity to your website.

There are three ways to participate in online forums. You can post any useful information related to general topic of that forum by starting a new thread, you can post your queries and also respond to requests for help. It is beneficial to take part in discussions in these forums, as they often provide you a signature box where you add a link to your website. These signatures appear in your each and every post. In this way it increase link popularity and targeted traffic to your website at no cost.

5. Press Releases: Press releases considered not only generating traffic and building link popularity to your site but also effective way to get noticed your business in media. You can write a well crafted content for press release or attempt to write something unique that will be useful to its users, write as shorter as feasible to maximize your efficiency and speed and submit it to popular press release sites to publish. Do not forget to include a link back to your website in press release.

6. Link Exchange request: Sending Link exchange request to other relevant websites is one of the most effective ways to generate traffic and building link popularity to your website. Only focus on sites relevant to your website but not the direct competitors and send them request to exchange links with your site. Make sure to have something unique to attract other webmaster to link to your site.

It results in long term so it requires a little patience. Avoid link farms and try to get links from authority websites, edu and gov sites and also focus on getting links from older websites.

Above tips will be useful to you, follow them and sure link popularity and traffic to your site will increase day by day. If you have any suggestions or comments feel free to share with me….

Top SEO Tips To get higher Search engine Rankings

2009-05-20T05:26:00.000-07:00

Getting listed in search engines is not a difficult task but what matters how have your site been listed in a search engine. Your site can get higher ranking in all search engines if you follow ethical SEO strategies. In this article you can find some important SEO tips which can help you to get higher Search engine rankings:

1.Do Research on Keywords: Keyword being the weapon of your success in SEO as search engines work as per your keywords hence be careful while selecting right keywords. It is widely advisable to use Overture or Wordtracker tools to select right Keyword.

2.Work On Content: It is widely said that for websites ‘Content is King’. So concentrate on your web content and make sure that the content provides some unique information to your visitor and not duplicated from elsewhere. While writing content for your web pages, insert vital keywords which relate to the products and services that your company offers.

3.Proper Design: Design your site that clearly represent your business and make an easy navigation based on your keyword research. Your overall webdesign should be simple, nice and user friendly. Make web pages that are easy to load. Don’t make pages with large images, if images are necessary; make a thumbnail and must add a description of the image.

Be Search Engine Spider Friendly: Search Engines read the websites content through its spiders or crawler. These spiders go through the site and categorized them as per the need of searchers. Always make sure that you have HTML link in your main navigation on each page. Avoid javascript link and menus, flash, graphics as search engine spider’s can not read them.

5. Build incoming links to your site: Incoming links are very, very important for SEO and also possibly the hardest part of SEO to implement. One way Incoming Links always have more importance than reciprocal links. Avoid link farms and try to get links from authority websites, edu and gov sites as they have more weightage than others and also preferable by search engines. Writing articles and submitting them to various article directories is also a better way to get free one-way incoming links and it also build a good reputation at the same time.

6. Don’t try to fool the search engines: Search Engine spiders are now more clever than you think and Search Engines update their algorithm time to time so don’t try to make them fool otherwise your site will be banned from search engines. So avoid cloaking, link farms, keyword stuffing, alt text spamming or other and unethical methods.

Have a little patience and follow the Ethical methods of SEO. It will surely give you your desired results

What Is the Next Step After Optimizing Your Online Traffic?

2009-05-04T21:21:00.000-07:00

As most webmasters already know, making money online is essentially about optimizing traffic and monetizing that traffic. Optimizing traffic refers to two things:

getting targeted visitors to come to your site (meaning that if you sell an anti-virus software, you want people that come to your site to be looking for those) [QUALITY]; and
getting as many of those visitors as possible [QUANTITY].

Once you have optimized your site in terms of attracting good traffic, what should you do to make money out of it? It depends on the purpose of your presence online (by the way, if you're not clear as to what is your purpose in making a website, you better stop and reflect on it before going on... otherwise it's like walking in the dark with no sense of direction). People looking to make money online normally fall under three categories:

Webmasters looking to build good resources sites and make money out of the traffic that comes. For instance, if you are passionate about chess, you may want to build a website discussing chess strategies. Your main purpose is therefore to have an informational site and you will probably make money by "selling" your traffic to advertisers through various means such as pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, or pay-per-action.
If you are really passionate about chess, you can go a step further and build a blog that will discuss your perspective on chess. This undertaking will involve more work since you will need to write entries on a regular basis if you want to build your readership. Overall, however, the concept is the same as above in terms of monetizing your traffic. You will probably make money by selling your traffic to advertisers.
Jumping from informational sites to sites that sell products/ services now... If you are a manufacturer of board games, your main purpose is not to sell information per se, but to sell your product online. If that is the case, you will monetize your traffic by selling your products and not by "selling" your traffic as is the case for informational sites.

All that being said, most webmasters learn through trials and errors. As you will probably learn if you are serious about making money online, good webmasters and those that succeed all have at least two qualities in common. They have lots of patience and perseverance! So next time you feel like giving up, remember that!

3 Key tools of a web designer or web marketer

2009-03-24T22:27:00.001-07:00

In order to design a successful website, you need to ensure that it is appealing to the eye of those who will be using it. The appeal of a website is critical due to the fact that you are not going to be able to make face to face contact with your actual website visitors; and the first impression they get from your website should be a memorable one. Since you cannot convince your ‘customer’ in buying your product or visiting your web page by the means of one-to-one conversation, you should aim to use your website in order to encourage sales through an impressive design. A web page or its design becomes utterly useless when web designers or web marketers do not think about their website in this fashion. Being focused on the appeal of your web page will ensure that it becomes as successful as you want it to be.

This article will list the 3 important key tools in creating an impressive website:

Tool # 1 – E-Mail

An analysis pertaining to the ways and reasons that people use the internet has revealed some startling facts. Several research and studies were carried out, and the results have demonstrated that most people make use of the internet primarily to send and keep up to date with their emails. The people who use the internet for this purpose often refer to surfing the World Wide Web as their secondary objective. From this discovery, you can imagine the importance of having an email id that contains the name or nature of your company or even your web page’s domain name. Moreover, having possession of an email account like this, gives you customers or consumers the impression that your company is thorough and professional. If you are using your website as your email id, it conveys that you see your website as an important extension to your business.

Tool # 2 – Online Payment options

Nowadays most people prefer paying for products and services online rather than issuing a check or paying by cash. Hence, irrespective of whether you are a web page designer or a web marketer it is highly important that you have a fair amount of knowledge on this subject. For those who are actual web designers, you should be aware of incorporating online payment features within the web sites that you design. For those who are web marketers, you should aim to have the online payment features enabled on your web site so that customers who make use of your services, have the ability to pay you online.

Tool # 3 – Web page design

You need to be aware of how well and in what ways you can present your website, in terms of design. Whether you are a web page designer or a web marketer, this aspect is actually the most important. Not all professionals need to be aware about all aspects of design and it is not necessary for you to be the best web designer in the world, you just need to be able to understanding what type of design will appeal to your target customers. They key is to design a website that represent what you are trying to sell.

Although there are quite a number of tools available for a web designer and marketer, the above three are the most important and effective.

How to achieve keyword optimization?

2009-03-24T22:23:00.000-07:00

Keyword optimization is very critical and important when it comes to ensuring that you have a competitive web site that generates a lot of traffic. Online businesses heavily thrive in search engine listings if the website representing the business has good keyword optimization.

Keyword optimization is very important because of the following factors:

• The right keywords attract a higher number of potential customers; and the majority will actually end up buying your products or utilize your services
• Websites that are built with good keywords, earn the highest of ranks among popular search engines
• By including good keywords into your web site scripts, you have the potential to save huge amounts of money that will be required to spend on other forms of advertising

It is a fact that web pages designed with specific keywords describing the product or services that you host, have the ability to rank higher in search engines. However, care must be taken when using key words as web pages designed with a higher number of keywords tend to lose focus and hence, earn very low ranks in search engine searches.

The following points are just a few tips on finding the right keywords in order to attract your target audience:

• Try and imagine yourself in the shoes of your potential customer and think like them - Think about what you would like to find within your web site and what features or information would tempt you into purchasing your product or service.
• Try and include descriptive phrases as your keywords rather than simple ones. For instance if you are selling candles online, try and use ‘aromatic incense candles’ or ‘painted gel candles’, etc. Choose phrases that contain words that best describe your product or service.
• Make use of keyword selector tools such as the one provided by Overture at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/.
• Take help from your friends, relatives and colleagues in order to find out what words they will type in search engines to find the product or service that you sell.
• Use the Webster’s dictionary or thesaurus to find similar words or synonyms that describe your product or service and consider all three forms of that particular word.
• In case you already own a web site, try and incorporate a search box/form for visitors to make use of. This search box/form should find items or information within your own web site and will also give you a great insight as to the different words that people use while searching for items, products or services online.

You can also incorporate your websites’ server log to preview what potential customers are looking for, when it comes to keyword searches. Once you have collected a sufficient list of keywords and key word phrases, you can then go about selecting and choosing the best among them and use those particular keywords for your web site.

Link Analysis Tools

2009-03-04T01:38:00.001-08:00

Link Analysis Tools

Link analysis is a field which has lost a bit of its importance over the past couple years. Google has clamped down on paid links, web directories, and article directories. At the same time more people are blogging online, and more webmasters have become aware to the field of public relations and the value of links. These combine to make it is much harder to catch up with a competitor if you are trying to duplicate their link building strategy.

To some degree link analysis has moved away from PageRank and anchor text toward analyzing news in the marketplace and understanding why stories are spreading (link analysis is evolving into media analysis and public relations). Here are 6 of my favorite link analysis tools

Yahoo! Site Explorer
Google Blog Search
Google Webmaster Central
SEO Link Analysis
Xenu Link Sleuth
Advanced Link Manager

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Google and Microsoft generally show rather limited link data to the public. Yahoo! Site Explorer shows a much deeper and more representative sampling of inbound link data.

SEO Link Analysis

SEO Link Analysis is a free Firefox extension that adds link anchor text, PageRank score, and if a link is nofollowed to Yahoo! Site Explorer results.

Google Blogsearch

While Google tends to show a small sample of backlinks their Blogsearch is much better at detecting new links from blogs.

Google Webmaster Central

If you verify you own a website inside Google Webmaster Central, they will allow you to download a list of links pointing at your site. If you notice your rankings for a keyword are decent (but could be better) you could look through some of the people linking at your page and ask them to link at your page using more specific anchor text.

Xenu Link Sleuth

Xenu Link Sleuth crawls websites looking for broken links. This helps you keep your website maximally clean and functional by finding any broken internal links and any references to documents that are no longer online.

Advanced Link Manager

Advanced Link Manager is a paid software package starting at $199 which allows you to automatically track new backlinks obtained by competitors. It also crawls pages to find anchor text, if the link is using nofollow, and the PageRank score of the linking page.

We also created a free tool somewhat similar to Advanced Link Manager, named Backlink Analyzer. We have not updated our tool in a while though, and it is sorely in need of an update.

PPC Tools

2009-03-04T01:35:00.000-08:00

PPC Tools

As search ad networks have become less transparent many PPC tools that did things like bid gap management have been rendered useless, while Google has built out a powerful AdWords API, an ad platform that allows you to bid per click or per conversion, and the Google AdWords Editor.

Google AdWords Editor
Google Website Optimizer
Speed PPC
PPC Tools suite
PPC Analytics Tools

Google AdWords Editor

Google AdWords Editor is a free desktop tool advertisers can use to quickly edit their AdWords campaigns in bulk.

Google Website Optimizer

Google Website Optimizer is a free tool that makes it easy to test and improve your landing page and conversion process. Conversion Rate Experts offers a great overview article about how to take advantage of Website Optimizer and other conversion boosting tools.

Speed PPC

Speed PPC is a paid desktop software program which makes it easy to generate many cross referenced ad campaigns and landing pages for geo-targeted keyword combinations. At $497 Speed PPC is not cheap, but if it is beyond your means and you are a good programmer then Zipcode Guy offers a free database of U.S. cities and zip codes.

PPC Tool suite

My wife has build a free collection of useful web based PPC tools including a keyword list generator, a keyword list cleaner, a typo generator, a keyword wrapper, an ad group generator, and a ROI calculator.

The keyword list generator can be good for creating a quick list of keywords to plug into a PPC account to see what variations get the most search volume, then trim back the fat after you collect some account feedback data.
The keyword list cleaner is good for taking a dirty keyword list and making it useful. For example, lets say you have a list of MP3 player related keywords. This tool allows you to quickly filter out any keywords related to car and automotive MP3 players.
The ad group generator makes it easy to create ad groups for Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter at the same time.

PPC Analytics Tools

Many big affiliate marketers create their own bid management software, but newer affiliates may find tracking tools like Optimize My Site and Tracking 202 useful.
Many enterprise level websites create custom bid management software for their company, but for enterprise level merchants who do not manage paid search in house, firms like Efficient Frontier can help with management.

Keyword Research Tools

2009-01-27T01:28:00.001-08:00

There are plenty of keyword tools available on the web, free and paid, to help in your research for developing the best keywords. I do recommend doing some homework on your words before any link building campaign. Your findings will dictate where to focus your link building efforts and your on page changes should be coordinated with this.

Keyword Discovery offers a paid search tool that is quite robust. They offer a free version which is limited in features but still quite usable and helpful. The paid version I have not used, but the features look like you can really get down and dirty with your research, looking at keyword by niche, showing the most popular searches in a particular industry.

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

Wordtracker is the other popular paid keyword suggestion tool, and their free version is quite useful. you can only enter one word instead of comparing multiple words. Wordtracker offers a free trial for their more robust product for 7 days.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

SubmitExpress has a free tool called Keytracker that gauges the traffic of words, comparing those two popular keyword tools. You can enter more than one keyword, and It makes suggestions and shows the traffic for suggested or similar words as well.

http://keywords.submitexpress.com/keytracker.php

For keyword suggestions, Google offers its keyword tool for free, which will suggest keyword combinations based on either phrases you enter, or will analyze an existing web page. Then it does show the search traffic for those words. Another helpful free tool, recommended.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Microsoft’s Adcenter offers the Keyword Forecast tool. It will compare traffic for a few keywords in graph form, and does not require you to type in letters verifying you are a human, saving time for a quick look. The data seems to be about a year old though:

http://adlab.msn.com/Keyword-Forecast/Default.aspx

SEO Book offers a keyword research tool that compares data from many sources in one view. You can get lost in this one. You can only enter one word at a time, and it does not make the best suggestions compared to the others, but the info correlated is very robust, linking to the different keyword tools and search engines that it used to populate the info, showing the other suggestions and traffic from search engines. Fun toy.

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

World Top Sites Comming Togather Soon

2009-01-23T00:35:00.000-08:00

World top sites like Google, Yahoo, Live, MSN, My Space, Face Book, Tagged, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Digg, Del.icio.us, Propeller, Ebay, Amazon, Apple, Wal-Mart, Target, Dell and mpore sites Going to Comming togather at one place.

Yes, We are all going to browse world Top sites at one place with out going to each and every site one by one, and we can browse top social bookmarking as well as social networking sites on your own profile. In seconds of time we can move from one site another.

All this is going to be possible with the one site "TEMPTOS"

In Temptos we can browse the top sites and we can browse all the sites at a single window, with out opening multiple windows or tabs, and we can stay active in each and every site for long time.

So start browsing at temptos.com and make your browsing more easy and faster.

Temptos.com

“CPA Networks”: Defining the Terms

2009-01-21T01:34:00.000-08:00

Contrary to how it may appear on the façade of things, CPA networks are not affiliate networks. The “CPA” part in their name is what is misleading many. Generally meaning cost-per-action, a widely-spread affiliate payment model, the abbreviation “CPA” is actually not the best way to describe “CPA networks”. The more appropriate name for them is sub-affiliate networks. Whereas a traditional affiliate network (e.g. CommissionJunction or LinkShare) is functioning as a mediator between merchants/advertisers and affiliates/publishers, CPA networks are working as yet another link in the chain between the merchant and the affiliate. I have put together the following diagram to illustrate the difference between a traditional network and a CPA network:

If a merchant were running an in-house affiliate program, the sub-affiliate network will be a link between the merchant and the affiliate, receiving commissions from every sale that the affiliate sends. Be it with an in-house, or with an on-an-affiliate-network affiliate program, the affiliate becomes a sub-affiliate, while the “CPA network” is the affiliate that is paid a “preferred” or “private offer” (read: higher) commission (or per lead bounty, which is the preferred payment model for sub-affiliate networks), and can afford to pay their sub-affiliates a higher commission/bounty than the default commission/bounty that the affiliates would get if they went directly to the merchant. Why “preferred” commission? Because being an affiliate with a large volume of sub-affiliate traffic and sales, they are essentially perceived as power affiliates or “super affiliates”.

This raises several problems. I would like to touch upon the two main ones.

Conflict of Interest

Being an affiliate themselves, the “CPA network” is in direct competition with their sub-affiliates. The conflict of interest is there and no serious affiliate will disclose their techniques and methods to a competitor by working under them as a sub-affiliate. Hence, if a merchant decides to run their affiliate program on a “CPA network”, they should not expect any super-affiliates to join their program. Furthermore, they should be aware of the lower quality of leads they will receive through the CPA network, as opposed to a managed affiliate program on a traditional network.

Shady “Marketing” Practices

History testifies to the fact that it is not uncommon for “CPA networks” to tolerate (or even partake in) e-mail spam, adware, fraudulent “leads”, incentive websites (not the affiliate type you want to have in a program if you’re paying for leads), recruiting other sub-affiliate networks.

Much more can be written on the topic, and a simple search of online discussions on “CPA networks” will yield a plethora of enlightening blog posts and forum threads. To work, or not to work with sub-affiliate networks will ultimately be the affiliate’s and the merchant’s decision. One thing I hope they do is make an educated and well-weighted decision.

10 Tips for Better Email Marketing in 2009

2009-01-15T00:33:00.000-08:00

If you’re an email marketer, Stefan Pollard at Clickz posted YOUR New Years resolutions in his post, Ten Resolutions to Make 2009 a Better Email Year.

Here’s a quick overview of his 10 tips, but check out the original article if you want full details.

1. I Will Listen to Feedback - Feedback helps build better programs. When you understand what your audience wants, and what they don’t, you can deliver on those items.

Sign up for all ISP feedback-loop sources.
Monitor replies to inboxes, even those you tell readers not to e-mail.
Solicit and read reader comments.
Send surveys for direct comments on specific topics.

2. I Will Give My Subscribers More Control Over What They Receive

Provide meaningful choices during the subscription process (avoid all conjunctions).
Use a preference center to make personalization or customization easier.
Collect only data you need to complete the process at opt-in.

3. I Will Monitor More Than Open/Click-Through Rates/Revenue - Track unsubscribes, bounces, and spam complaints as well as open and click rates.

4. I Will Practice More Segmentation for Increased Relevance- Set aside one day a month as “segmentation day,” where your goal is to “do incrementally better e-mail.” For example, identify a subset of your list and tell an incrementally better story to it. You shouldn’t need complex data integrations.

5. I Will Practice Good List Hygiene and Trim Inactives - Optimize your sign-up process to collect more accurate data.

6. I Will Pay Attention to the ISPs - Visit ISP postmaster sites regularly to learn about changes that affect delivery and get information to make you a better e-mail marketer.

7. I Will Work to Send Great Content - Not “great” as in “exciting,” although that would be nice. Instead, write content that works: no broken links, correct spelling, punctuation, and word use and images used properly.

8. I Will Make it Easy for Recipients to Know Who I Am - You want recipients to recognize you immediately in the inbox.

9. I Will Be More Careful About Whose E-mail Efforts I Emulate We assume that companies with top brands, or brands we admire, also do e-mail marketing right. So, we copy what they do, but Hhnestly, most of them aren’t doing great e-mail, either.

10. I Will Banish the Word “Blast” From my Vocabulary

Why Social Media Marketing is Effective

2009-01-15T00:28:00.000-08:00

Last month Brand Central Station posted a great article on why social media and word-of-mouth marketing are more effective than traditional medias, and while I highly recommend you read the original post, I want to share a few key nuggets with you:

via The Buzz on Word-of-Mouth Marketing | Brand Central Station

“Social science researches have provided some interesting insights into how we remember information that may give us some insights. Alan See, writing this post in the Customer Think blog explains it this way…”

Research shows that we tend to remember:

• 10% of what we read

• 20% of what we hear

• 30% of what we see

• 50% of what we hear and see

• 70% of what we say

• 90% of what we both say and do

So what does this have to do with social media and word-of-mouth marketing?

“Traditional medias like newspaper, outdoor and radio - medias that primarily depend on just one sensory experience, impart 10-30% of the content of the message on the recipient.

A personal referral not only creates an impact on the recipient consumer, it reinforces the decision in the person making the endorsement.

Buzz marketing - the process of getting people to talk about your brand and to act on those endorsements - is highly effective because it requires and reinforces a deeper knowledge and understanding of a brand’s attributes and values. According to this research, we tend to remember 90% of what we say and do. In other words, face-to-face interaction between consumer and brand leaves an impression (and knowledge)nine times as rich as a newspaper ad or magazine article.

If you think about it for a minute, you already know this. When a customer has a bad experience, they are much more likely to tell people (and in the age of social media, that could be a lot of people) than those who have a good experience.”

SEO Steps

2009-01-05T00:29:00.001-08:00

SEO STEPS

SEO Information Systems Team will following SEO activities on your
website , If you choose our SEO Services.

1. Initial Report Analysis
2. Competitive Analysis
3. On Page details (Metatags).
4. Preparing Content Analysis
5. Building Back lings (Inbound/Outbound)
6. Key Word Submission
7. Final Report

Initial Report Analysis:
* Keyword/Phrase analysis
* Keyword research using word tracker, Overture and Googlesets
* Competitive analysis
* Extensive Competitive Analysis for better search engine ranking
performance
* Initial position analysis report
* Website Usability Analysis by Usability and copyediting expert
* Extensive Log file analysis
* Personalized Report Analysis and Monitoring
Let we pick up the present information of given website means Meta
tags details and back links checking and checking for how many Key
word in the site and their strength. As well as Site Page rank and
Compaction of the given site which position in different search
engines.

Title Description Keyword Backlines Page rank

Basically this process depends on the Company or Clients if Clients
want to require this process we must do the basic step of this other
wise we must starts the Competitive Analysis.

Competitive Analysis:
Competitive Analysis means Observation of different sites which sites
theme related to our site. Let we consider competitive key point of
Meta tags checking and Back lings observation. Each and every point to
be noted on excel sheet it should be very useful to us.
Title Description Keywords Backlines Content Url of site

Back links checking in search engine: link: www.sitename.com
Saturation checking in search engine: Site: www.sitename.com
Caches by searching: Cache: www.sitename.com

On Page Optimization
* Homepage Optimization
* Meta tags placement
* Content fixing
* Monthly Manual Update to Optimized Content
* Fixing the text links
* Optimized Navigational Structure
* Site map for better crawling of your site
* Descriptive site map creation
* Link resource page creation
* Link exchange page creation
* Image Optimization
* SEO Copywriting
* Spell Checking
* HTML Validation Checking
* Browser Compatibility checking
* Website Load time checking
* Creation of robots file
* MOD_Rewrite / URL rewrite for Dynamic sites for better search engine
crawling
Keyword Analysis: Single word definition. Keyword should be 3 types
1. Low level: Competition should be less then 4 digits it will take 3
moths.
2. Medium level: Competition should be less then 7digits it will take
6 moths.
3. High level: Competition should be less then 8 digits or more it
will take 1 yr.

First read the web site after that we are going to choose perfect
keywords. The Home page contains minimum two keyword and internal
pages contain single or more keyword.

After selecting keyword we are going to check the competition and
number of clicks on that keyword and keyword strength.
Keyword Tools: Sandbox of Google, Word Tracker, Keyword tool, web
counts, adwords, more free tools.

Keyword Tools (hits) Google Yahoo Msn Recommended
Keyword Hits/clicks competition competition competition Hits/clicks
>comp

Meta tag Analysis:
1. Title: Most imp keyword and try to repeat. It should be less then
65 chars in Google 75 in Yahoo 80 in Msn. Over all it suggested in 60
chars.
2. Description: Starts with same keyword and try to repeat to it.
Description should be less then 150 chars in Google, 170 in yahoo, 185
in msn over all better suggestion 150.
3. Keywords: After selection keywords the most recommended keywords
placed in this section.
Meta tag Tools: Meta tag tool,

Content Analysis:
We have to increase our keyword density it means our imp keywords
should be repeat in middle of our content and starting with main
keyword and try to end with that keyword. Every 100 words Keyword
should be repeat Low Level Keyword 3-4 times. Medium Level Keywords
5-8 times High Level Keywords 9-10 times.
   Content OptimizationÞ
   Image OptimizationÞ
   Using Alt tagsÞ
   using Heading tagsÞ
   Using Text LinksÞ
   Hipper links.Þ
Home Page:500-800 words. Home page size 30kb, internal page size 40kb
min
Keyword Density Tools: Live-keyword analysis.com,
Keyword % of Keyword % of Required

OFF Page Optimization
* Manual submission to all major search engines
* Semi-automatic submission to more than 200 Search Engines
* Resubmission of sites to certain search engines if necessary
* Submission to important paid inclusion directories
* Yahoo Directory Inclusion
* Submission to Dmoz directory
* Submission to more than 5000 free inclusion quality directories
* Re-optimization of site
* Reciprocal link building - 2way and 3way links
* Link Popularity through one way links
* Buying text link advertisements from relevant sites to increase the
link popularity
* Article Submission
* Newsletter Submission
* Forum Posting
* Blog submission

Link Building (Inbound)
Getting back links from other websites mean we have to submit our
website in Directories, Forums, Blogs, Social Book Merchant, Social
Networks,

Page Rank depends on No of back links.
Checking for back links in search engines : links: www.sitename.com
Site checking : www.Alexa.com

Link Exchange (Outbound)
The process of exchange link between two websites.

Site Maps:
Html Site Map: All Pages Links placed here it should be text links.
XML site Map: Its for Search engine purpose it should be created in
xml
www.xml-sitemaps.com. File name: sitemap.xml placed in root folder

RSS ( Really Simple Syndication/Rich site Summary) :
Channels: Modified Pages
Items: Other Pages

File Name: RSS. XML

Create Rss Feeds follow this link

filename: Robots.txtèRobots/Algorithm/Spider:
Hides some confide ional maters in web pages.

User Agent: *
* Disallow:

means all search engines (Google, yahoo, Msn )è*
means Not indexing of out siteè/
means not reading particular page.è/public/text.html
Reports
* Monthly management plan
* Detailed Ranking Report
* Weekly updates & comprehensive Monthly Ranking Reports
* Submission Management with Reports
* Site Visibility Statistics Report
* Server Check and Link Check
Support
* Search Engine Algorithm Updates
* 100% Guaranteed Uptime during site Modifications
* Multiple CD Burned backups of Optimized pages and site
* Technical Support
* 24/7 Phone support and online support

pay per sale

2008-12-23T20:20:00.002-08:00

Definition

Online advertising payment model in which payment is based solely based on qualifying sales.

Information

In a pay per sale agreement, the advertiser only pays for sales generated by the destination site based on an agreed upon commission rate.

Paying per sale is often seen as the payment model most favorable to advertisers and least favorable to publishers. In such an agreement, the publisher must not only be concerned with the quality and quantity of his or her audience, but also the quality of the advertiser's creative units and destination site.

If possible, many publishers avoid sales-based agreements, preferring to stick to the CPM model. However, some publishers, facing weak ad sales, have little choice but to accept sales-based agreements to utilize remnant space.

For advertisers, pay per sale has some unique advantages compared to pay per click and pay per lead. There are fewer concerns about whether conversions are legitimate, and whether traffic is incentivized or of low quality.

pay per lead

2008-12-23T20:20:00.001-08:00

Definition

Online advertising payment model in which payment is based solely based on qualifying leads.

Information

In a pay per lead agreement, the advertiser only pays for leads generated at their destination site. No payment is made for visitors who don't sign up.

A lead is generally a signup involving contact information and perhaps some demographic information; it is typically a non-cash conversion event. A lead may consist of as little as an email address, or it may involve a detailed form covering multiple pages.

One risk to the advertiser is the potential for fraudulent activity by incentivized 3rd-parties or marketing partners. Some false leads are easy to spot. Nonetheless, it is advisable to make a regular audit of the results.

Things to Consider When Creating Your Social Media Strategy

2008-12-17T22:06:00.000-08:00

Taking advantage of the many different ways to promote an Internet business is not something you just sit down and dream up. It actually involves skills and taking the time to learn the many different advancements being made almost daily.

Social media is one of these new technologies that the average person is not going to know about until they do some research. It also requires that you create a strategy for how to use these new forms of marketing to benefit your business the most. You may actually need to have a business meeting with yourself and create a social media strategy.

There are a couple of things you must address when you determine how to properly use social media.

First of all what is the goal that you’re trying to achieve with them? Are you trying to educate your readers and at same time brand yourself as an expert with credibility?
Are you trying to make sales for products you represent?
Maybe you are just trying to build a list for future follow up!

Social media tools are really only as good as the way you use them. For example blogging is a fantastic way to put your thoughts online very quickly. It is something that doesn’t require a special skill and anybody can do it

Adding video to your website or blog is a little harder. This will require that you not only learn how to record a video, but that you also learn how to get it online where people can view it.

Video is very appealing and is interactive with your reader. However, so is blogging when you allow your visitors to post comments, add content, take surveys, and so on. You may even want to do both of these but again, your strategy will determine whether you’re going to learn new skills or not.

One thing that is fantastic about social media is how it allows you to create a community within your business. You could set up your own discussion forum if you wanted.

You could join existing social networks such as Facebook or eEntrepreneur. These are excellent places to meet potential business partners and build your business using social media this way.

You may not even know exactly the social media strategy that you are looking for right now. Try different things and see what appeals to you. The key is determining exactly what you want to get from the social media that you are involved in and then be consistent in how you do it.

SEO Tips

2008-12-14T22:52:00.000-08:00

Every html document must have a Title Element in the head section. Some refer to the

(head) (title)Title Element - Page Titles(/title) (/head)

The above title element example will produce something that looks like this in your browser title window…

Authors should use the title element to identify the contents of a document. Since users often consult documents out of context, authors should provide context rich page titles. The title element should ideally be less than 64 characters in length. While there is no limit on the length of a title, developers should be aware that the title element may be truncated if too long.

Page titles or title elements, are one of the most important factors when developing a search engine friendly web page. The primary keyword phrase for that page and any secondary keyword phrases that you may be targeting. For example…

(title) - Search Engine Marketing Companies in California - (/title)

Notice that our main keyword phrase Search Engine Marketing Companies is at the beginning of the title. We then added in California at the end since we are targeting a regionally specific group of search engine marketing companies in California.

View the source code of this page to see the !-- This is the Title Element or Page Title --) showing you where the title element is placed within the (head) (/head) section of your document.

The title element is one of the primary tags that must appear in the (head) (/head) section of your web pages.

Million Dollars worth Photographs!---Rare Collection

2008-12-10T22:10:00.000-08:00

1) Tim Berners Lee -- Founder of the World Wide Web

2) Picture taken when microsoft was started

3) Steve Woznaik(sitting) and Steve Jobs of APPLE Computers.
He was three months late in filing a name for the business because he didn't get any better name for his new company.
So one day he told to the staff: "If I'll not get better name by 5 o'clcok today, our company's name will be anything he likes...."
so at 5 o'clcok nobody comeup with better name, and he was eating APPLE that time...
so he keep the name of the company 'Apple Computers'

4) Bill Hewlett(L) and Dave Packard(R) of HP.
Behind them in the picture is the famous HP Garage.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
And the winner was NOT Bill... the winner was Dave.

5) Ken Thompson (L)and Dennis Ritchie(R) ,creators of UNIX.
Dennis Ritchie improved on the B programming language and called it 'New B'.
B was created by Ken Thompson as a revision of the Bon programming language (named after his wife Bonnie)
He later called it C.

6) Larry Page(L) and Sergey Brin(R), founders of Google.
Google was originally named 'Googol'.
After founders (Stanford graduates) Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor...
they received a cheque made out to 'Google' !...
So they kept name as GOOGLE

7) Gordon Moore(L) and Bob Noyce(R) ,founders of Intel.
Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce'.
But that was already trademarked by a hotel chain...
So they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics. .. INTEL

8) Andreas Bechtolsheim , Bill Joy, Scott Mc Nealy and Vinod Khosla of SUN(StanfordUnivers ity Network) MicroSystems.
Founded by four StanfordUniversity buddies.
Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer;
Vinod Khosla recruited him;
Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it;
and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer...
SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network

9) Linus Torvalds of Linux Operating System Linus Torvalds originally used the Minix OS on his system which he replaced by his OS.
Hence the working name was Linux (Linus' Minix).
He thought the name to be too egotistical and planned to name it Freax (free + freak + x).
His friend Ari Lemmk encouraged Linus to upload it to a network so it could be easily downloaded.
Ari gave Linus a directory called linux on his FTP server, as he did not like the name Freax.
Linus like that directory name and he kept the name of his new OS to LINUX...

Track Your Visitors, Using PHP in LOG File

2008-12-08T22:59:00.000-08:00

There are many different traffic analysis tools, ranging from simple counters to complete traffic analyzers. Although there are some free ones, most of them come with a price tag. Why not do it yourself? With PHP, you can easily create a log file within minutes. In this article I will show you how!

Getting the information

The most important part is getting the information from your visitor. Thankfully, this is extremely easy to do in PHP (or any other scripting language for that matter). PHP has a special global variable called $_SERVER which contains several environment variables, including information about your visitor. To get all the information you want, simply use the following code:

// Getting the information $ipaddress = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; $page = "http://{$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']}{$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']}";  $page .= iif(!empty($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']), "?{$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']}", ""); $referrer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; $datetime = mktime(); $useragent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']; $remotehost = @getHostByAddr($ipaddress);

As you can see the majority of information comes from the $_SERVER variable. The mktime() (http://nl2.php.net/mktime) and getHostByAddr() (http://nl2.php.net/manual/en/function.gethostbyaddr.php) functions are used to get additional information about the visitor.

Note: I used a function in the above example called iif(). You can get this function at http://www.phpit.net/code/iif-function.

Logging the information

Now that you have all the information you need, it must be written to a log file so you can later look at it, and create useful graphs and charts. To do this you need a few simple PHP function, like fopen (http://www.php.net/fopen) and fwrite (http://www.php.net/fwrite).

The below code will first create a complete line out of all the information. Then it will open the log file in "Append" mode, and if it doesn't exist yet, create it.

If no errors have occurred, it will write the new logline to the log file, at the bottom, and finally close the log file again.

// Create log line $logline = $ipaddress . '|' . $referrer . '|' . $datetime . '|' . $useragent . '|' . $remotehost . '|' . $page . "\n";

// Write to log file: $logfile = '/some/path/to/your/logfile.txt';

// Open the log file in "Append" mode if (!$handle = fopen($logfile, 'a+')) { die("Failed to open log file"); }

// Write $logline to our logfile. if (fwrite($handle, $logline) === FALSE) { die("Failed to write to log file"); } fclose($handle);

Now you've got a fully function logging module. To start tracking visitors on your website simply include the logging module into your pages with the include() function (http://www.php.net/include):

include ('log.php');

Okay, now I want to view my log file

After a while you'll probably want to view your log file. You can easily do so by simply using a standard text editor (like Notepad on Windows) to open the log file, but this is far from desired, because it's in a hard-to-read format.

Let's use PHP to generate useful overviews for is. The first thing that needs to be done is get the contents from the log file in a variable, like so:

// Open log file $logfile = "/some/path/to/your/logfile.txt";  if (file_exists($logfile)) {    $handle = fopen($logfile, "r");  $log = fread($handle, filesize($logfile));  fclose($handle); } else {  die ("The log file doesn't exist!"); }

Now that the log file is in a variable, it's best if each logline is in a separate variable. We can do this using the explode() function (http://www.php.net/explode), like so:

// Seperate each logline $log = explode("\n", trim($log));

After that it may be useful to get each part of each logline in a separate variable. This can be done by looping through each logline, and using explode again:

// Seperate each part in each logline for ($i = 0; $i

Now the complete log file has been parsed, and we're ready to start generating some interesting stuff.

The first thing that is very easy to do is getting the number of pageviews. Simply use count() (http://www.phpit.net/count) on the $log array, and there you have it;

echo count($log) . " people have visited this website.";

You can also generate a complete overview of your log file, using a simple foreach loop and tables. For example:

// Show a table of the logfile echo ''; echo ''; echo ''; echo ''; echo ''; echo '';  foreach ($log as $logline) {  echo '';   echo '';  echo '';  echo '';  echo '';  echo '';   echo '';  }  echo 'IP Address Referrer Date Useragent Remote Host
' . $logline['0'] . ' ' . urldecode($logline['1']) . ' ' . date('d/m/Y', $logline['2']) . ' ' . $logline['3'] . ' ' . $logline['4'] . '
';

IP Address	Referrer	Date	Useragent	Remote Host
' . $logline['0'] . '	' . urldecode($logline['1']) . '	' . date('d/m/Y', $logline['2']) . '	' . $logline['3'] . '	' . $logline['4'] . '

You can also use custom functions to filter out search engines and crawlers. Or create graphs using PHP/SWF Charts (http://www.maani.us/charts/index.php). The possibilities are endless, and you can do all kinds of things!

In Conclusion...

In this article I have shown you have to create a logging module for your own PHP website, using nothing more than PHP and its built-in functions. To view the log file you need to parse it using PHP, and then display it in whatever way you like. It is up to you to create a kick-ass traffic analyzer.

Content VS Backlinks

2008-12-01T03:59:00.000-08:00

Content

is a key factor to rank well. Content is important in your website that readable by spiders, and readers or viewers. You can still gain backlinks if you put the unique content of your blog or web site. Proving unique content related to your web site is a good, we can say content is king. No need to promote much your web site, you can get high page rank in a couple of months. Good Unique Content is the target from the visitors to read the latest updates or press releases. More related sites are likely to promote your site in their site. Webmaster out there asking you to be added in one way or 2 way link exchange. No need to promote your website and finding related sites to exchange link.

Backlinks is also important but we consider this another option to be popular in search engines. Building Links is important for the web site to gain PR or page rank but not all links are valued equally by search engines.

Other SEO Tools Sites

2008-11-26T21:05:00.002-08:00

210 Resources - on Online Tools, Generators, Checkers - Excellent collection..

Keyword density analyser - Find Keyword Density in the content.

SEO Tools (136 SEO Tools) - This SEO Tools page has links to the best SEO Tools on the internet and these tools will help you to optimise your website and move your search engine position higher.

Online SEO Tools - the Ultimate Collection - Great Collection of SEO Tools.

SEOChat - Great Collection of SEO Tools.

Webmaster Toolkit - Nice Collection of Search Engine Optimisation Tools.

WebConfs - SEO Tool Set - Large collection.

Useful Free Web Tools - SEO, Webmaster, Validation, Blog and RSS Tools.

WeBuildPages - Free Internet Marketing and SEO Tools.

Go4Outsourcing.com - Useful Online Tools.

Multiple Site Checker - Saves you pain and time by offering an URL specific list of links to the most popular and useful web-based tools. Includes validators, accessibility checkers, link and load time check, WHOIS, HTTP response, and more.

Best SEO / SEM Forums / Newsletters

2008-11-26T21:05:00.001-08:00

WebMasterWorld - Possibly the best forum on SEO out there. Keep up to date with the issues - register and mailing list opt in here.

Search Engine Land - New kid on the block but possibly the best mailer round-up of SEO news on the net. Subscribe to the daily SEO news summary on the submit form (top right).

HighRankings - The 'White' Queen of SEO. Some good quality stuff here - mailer opt in here.

Digital Point Forums - Great Forum and very open - Say Hi to Shaun.

BackLink Tools

2008-11-26T21:02:00.000-08:00

NB: Google Don't show all of your backlinks with the "link:url" command but they will show you all of your backlinks, (well most of them), if you sign up your site for their Google Webmaster Tools.

(Google and Yahoo Sitemaps can be created easily with this Free download Sitemap Tool).

Digital Point - Back link, PR Checker, Search Engine Keyword Tracker & Keyword Ranking Tools. Track your keywords for free. SUPERB!

Xinu - Gives page rank, backlinks, social bookmarks, index pages and whole lot more.

100+ Untapped Link Building Strategies - Superb resource for finding unusual link building strategies for your web site.

BackLinkWatch - Excellent Back link checker - Gives PR, number of OBL (out bound links) and whether nofollow is used.!

Domain-Pop.com - Link Popularity, Domain Popularity & IP Popularity.

Google PageRank, Indexed Page, Back link Checker - Checks PR, No. of pages indexed and no. of backlinks across all Google (DC's) data centres. Some other really good tools on here.

Xenu's Link Sleuth (program) - Free Download - Not exactly a back link checker but great tool for checking your site for broken links. Displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. Customized reporting can be produced at any time (broken links by page, broken links by link, sitemap, etc.) - Networking, Web and HTML tools. Other online version here.

SEOmoz Page Strength Tool - Excellent tool giving you; The Relative Importance and Visibility of a Web page - The Potential Strength and Ability of a Page to Rank in the Search Engines and Data on Popularity, Links & Mentions of the Page Across the Web.

MarketLeap - Link Popularity Check - Excellent tool giving link popularity check with up to 3 other sites for comparison. Also has a industry categories with benchmarks to see the kind of back link strength other sites have. Also has a history graph for each time you use it.
MarketLeap - Search Engine Saturation - Search Engine Saturation simply refers to the number of pages a given search engine has in its index for your website domain. Not all search engines report this information but enough of them do to create some meaningful benchmarks for your search engine marketing campaigns. Also has a history graph for each time you use it.

WebMasterEyes - Page Rank Displayer - This excellent tool shows the Google Page Rank of all outbound links from any webpage. Try using it on a google search.

Indexa 2.0 (program) (115 KB) is a free java website popularity program that reports Google Pagerank, the number of backlinks recorded on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista and AlltheWeb and the number of pages indexed. Limitations: Analyses 4 urls and 2 search engines. For Windows 98/ME/XP/2000/2003/Unix/Linux/MacOS X.

Link Popularity Check 3.0.3 (program) (941 KB) checks how many sites link to yours and your competitors in 5 major search engines. For Windows XP/Me/NT4/2000/98/95.

BackLinks Master 1.5 (program) (1.3 MB) helps you find who is linking to you, whether links are direct and what keywords are in the anchor text. For Windows 98/ME/XP/2000.

Keyword Crawler 1.1 (program) (424 KB) is a keyword tool that can analyze your website and provide web page reports for the top keywords used, word density, Google pagerank, internal and external backlinks and broken links. In addition, the program can also generate a sitemap file in XML format. For Windows 98/ME/NT4/2Kx/XP.

Webmaster Tools

2008-11-26T20:49:00.000-08:00

Website SEO Health Check Tool - NEW (Nov 07) - Aaron Wall has released a new tool named the Website Health Check Tool. The tool reviews a site's title tags, descriptions, URLs, and page status codes. It then returns problems the site may have with missing title tags and descriptions, any duplicate title tags or descriptions, www versus non-www issues, index page health, and error handling issues. Aaron plans on adding more features to the tool.

Fagan Finder's URL Info - Superb tool for handling web pages: finding information about it, translating it, finding related pages, links, whois, etc. Allows multiple windows so you don't have to type in url for different data.

CodeFlux - Internet Tools - Some really neat tools here - finger, nslookup, whois, ssl, traceroute, ping, dig, validate www pages, w3c and ietf standards, tidy www pages, encoder, etc.

Duplicate Content Checker - Really neat tool from Webconfs, that checks two given pages and reports the similarity percentage of the two pages. Ideal for checking if your pages are going to be marked as duplicate content.

SEOmoz Page Strength Tool - Excellent tool giving you; The Relative Importance and Visibility of a Web page - The Potential Strength and Ability of a Page to Rank in the Search Engines and Data on Popularity, Links & Mentions of the Page Across the Web.

ITools - Internet Tools - Networking, Web and HTML tools.

TrafficEstimator.com - Use the Traffic Estimate tool to find out approximately how much traffic a website gets.

Domain Dossier - Investigate domains and IP addresses.

WebConfs: URL Rewriting Tool - .htaccess code generator for re-directing dynamic web pages into static web pages. Another version here :- mod rewrite generator .

Redirect Checker - This tool provides a simple and precise answer to a question, often asked by SEO's, directory owners and webmasters. It immediately identifies the three main types of redirections : 301 redirect, 302 redirect or HTML redirect (meta refresh). It also detects frames (FRAME tag) within the page pointed to by the tested link. The tool only analyses HTML links. It should not be used with JavaScript links.

DynamicDrive - Free, Original DHTML & Javascripts to enhance your web site.

Email Riddler - Email Riddler is an online tool that encrypts and transform your email address into a series of numbers when displaying it, making it virtually impossible for spam harvesters to crawl and add your email to their list.

Simple Email Encoder - This form will allow you to encode your e-mail address through the use of Character Entities, transforming your ascii email address into its equivalent decimal entity.

WatchThatPage - Free web service allowing you to monitor any web pages for changes, either on your site or a competitors.

IPS Tag Checker - Useful tool for those wanting to move .co.uk domains from one IPS tag to another. After the tag change has been requested, enter the domain name in question, the IPS tag of the provider you are moving the domain to, and your email address. The tool will check on the status of the IPS tag every hour, and will email you if it finds the tag has moved.

Xenu's Link Sleuth - Free Download - Great tool for checking your site for broken links. Displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. Customized reporting can be produced at any time (broken links by page, broken links by link, site map, etc.) - Networking, Web and HTML tools.

Extreme Tracking - One of the best website counters out there with tons of visitor information. (hint - don't want to show the extreme counter image on your site - img=1x1)

StatCounter - A free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats.

Keyword Crawler 1.1 (program) (424 KB) is a keyword tool that can analyze your website and provide web page reports for the top keywords used, word density, Google pagerank, internal and external backlinks and broken links. In addition, the program can also generate a sitemap file in XML format. For Windows 98/ME/NT4/2Kx/XP.

Free Website Templates - Really good selection of free website templates.

Free PDF Converter - Convert commonly used files (Microsoft Office, Open Office, graphic images, vector graphic and other formats) to PDF. It can also convert back PDF to DOC - Here's Another Free PDF Converter

Dynamic MySpace Flash Images - Over 75 fun Flash ecards that you can customize the text message right into the Flash image! You will be given the HTML source code to add to your site so the created image will show up (we host it, hot linking allowed), great MySpace.com (forums/blogs) image add-ons. Also See Make Your Own Sign Generators - Import your images so you can place custom text on them.

File Difference Tool - Free tool - Enter two files to see their differences. The tool is intended to compare nearly identical ascii files (such as cgi scripts, html or txt), or comparing html pages the have changed search engine rank to a previous version of the document.

iWeb - HTML Colour Chart - Gives Hexadecimal values for all colours. Also has CSS style sheet generator .

1000's of Free Online Fonts - Enormous collection of free downloadable online fonts - presented in categories - best I've seen on the net so far.

Online Font Tester - View how fonts look with certain parameters - nice tool.

Malevole's Text Generator - Tired of using Lorem Ipsum for dummy text in your latest masterpiece? This text generator has been developed based on years of careful research and is guaranteed to improve even the most lacklustre of designs.

5,000 Online Resources - Huge list of really useful online tools - a must see for any webmaster.

StockXhnge - Browse through the categories of their huge gallery containing over 250.000 quality stock photos by more than 25.000 photographers! Need a wallpaper for your desktop? Need a pic for your commercial website design? Looking for inspiration? Have a look around.

Online CSS Optimiser - Excellent tool for optimising your site css files.

CSS Creator - CSS Layout Generator - The generator requires a DOM capable browser with JavaScript enabled.

CSS Rounded/Beveled Box Generator - Great tool for getting that professional looking table.

Pixenate - Online Image Editor - great if your not on your own pc or for those with no image editing s/w.

Image Size Optimizer - Lets you easily optimize your gifs, animated gifs, jpgs, and pngs, so they load as fast as possible on your site. Furthermore, you can easily convert from one image type to another.

List-o-Matic - Online CSS Navigation Menu creator - inspired by Listamatic, a collection of examples of CSS styled list items used for navigation.

List-u-Like CSS Generator - Create cross-browser list-based navigation bars with ease.

Color Scheme Generator - Website colour scheme generator.

Web 2.0 Website Generator - This site will automatically generate the XHTML/CSS layout for your new Web 2.0 site. Just set your preferences and click Generate and you are ready to begin your new life as a Web 2.0 Gazillionaire!. <grin> - Seriously though, it is a rther cool - has nearly everything: Rounded corners, gradients, XHTML and CSS, a color scheme to make your eyes vomit, a trendy 'badge', Google Ads, whitespace galore and a big-ass dorky font. Pop in some AJAX and watch squillions of dollars roll in.

Contact Form Designer - Enables you to create form-to-email scripts for your ASP, PHP or Perl web site with no programming skills needed. Use this nifty little online form designer to finish it off.

Encyclopedia of Free Software Downloads - Superb site for free software downloads - for Mac, Linux and Windows.

ZARA 3D - Headline Maker (Free) - Nuff said ...

Keyword Tools

2008-11-26T20:42:00.000-08:00

NB: If you sign up your site for their Google Webmaster Tools - it will give you a run down of what keywords your site is appearing in Google for and the average position of that term in Google.

Also - Please see this comprehensive list of keyword resources at SearchEngineLand -> Search Marketing: Search Term Research.

SheerSEO Keyword - Page Analysis Online Tool - NEW - Superb Tool, currently FREE featuring ; SERPs tracking tool for Google and Yahoo - Page rank monitoring - Word density - Number of referrers - Number of indexed pages - Site auto discovery for relevant search terms & pages - Main referrals analysis, showing the website's main referral links, the referring page PageRank and link text.

SEO Book Free Keyword Suggestion Tool - A really neat free keyword tool on SEO book that gives something approaching KEI analysis (well as good as it gets for Free ;0). I personally use a paid Wordtracker account, which you should subscribe to if you're really serious about SEO. Nevertheless, this free keyword tool has some awesome features.

SeoDigger.com Find keywords by URL - Superb little tool which gives you the keywords and their positions for a given website on Google and MSN - not 100% but gives you a good idea of the keywords you have coming in up in Google and MSN really quickly - Check is accessible only to separate pages of a site - you have to register to see the results but it's free.
Digital Point - Search Engine Keyword Tracker, Keyword Ranking Tool and Back link, PR Checker. Track your keywords for free. Requires Google API which are no longer issued.

MyLongTail - Excellent Free tool - reveals in real time which keywords people use to find your website. When acted on, they can increase the natural search traffic to your website.

MSN Keyword Forecast (NEW) - Not bad this - Enter your keywords/phrases, separated by a semi-colon and it will give you graph or text output of no. of searches / impresssions. (from MS: 'Learn about the impression count forecast and demographic predictions of your search terms. The search forecast results can be shown as Flash, pictures, or text.'

Google Keyword Tool - (9/7/08 - added search volume numbers to the external keyword tool. The volume numbers are approximations). Generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends.

GKW - Good Keywords - Download Program - Free Windows software tool from Softnik Technologies for finding the ideal set of keywords for targeting your web pages. Use Good Keywords to find suitable keywords sets, create your meta tags, brainstorm product ideas, etc. Uses Data from Yahoo and Ask.

Yahoo - Formerly Overture - UK Keyword Selector Tool. Rather better version on nichebot here. (Stop Press - June 08- the new Yahoo keyword tool Has been pulled.)

Miva Keyword Tool - Apart from Overture and Google Ads tool above - this is the only other UK based keyword tool I have come across.

IBP Internet Business Promoter - Download Program - The very best free keyword research tool Although you wont be able to use most of the promotion stuff in the program unless you buy it - there is a kick ass keyword research tool that's free to use - the program uses Overture / Yahoo for most countries, Google Sandbox, Miva and a host of others plus a keyword permutation program and a ton of other stuff.

Yahoo and Wordtracker Keyword Tool - From 123promotion - Gives a different take on these tools by country.

Check Keyword Traffic - From BruceClay.com - This tool will produce an estimate of daily search activity for a specific keyword phrase on the internet across the major search engines. This is only an estimate, and on a daily basis your mileage may vary.

Keyword Typo Generator - From SEOtools - Generate a list of suggestions for likely human misspellings and typos for given keyword.

SearchGuild Keyword Difficulty Checker - how hard it would be to rank for the keyword or phrase.

Keyword Lexicon - Derive related keywords - thesaurus type tool.

Ontology Finder - Related Keywords Lookup Tool - The goRank ontology lookup tool checks the top 1000 Google results for your keywords by running a related word query.

SEO Sleuth - AOL Search Data - SEO Sleuth was created out of the recently released AOL search data. This tool allows you to view what keywords people searched for. How much organic traffic each site gets from a search engine. How many clicks individual SERPs get.

Google Multiple Datacenter Keyword Rank Checker - This tool will perform a search across multiple datacenters, and check where your site may be ranking in each of them. This tool differs from others of it's kind in that instead of searching by IP address, it uses the actual domain name associated with that IP, simulating what someone would actually see when going to google.com and hitting that datacenter. Hovering your mouse over the datacenter name will reveal what IP address that name resolves to. This will give you a much more accurate view of what others are seeing when they search.

Wordtracker Keyword Tool - Find the top 100 related keywords - U.S. Slant.

Yahoo Multiple Keyword Rank Checker - Check a sites ranking in Yahoo! for up to 5 different phrases at once. Searches are cached, and a new search for a given keyword will only be performed once every 24 hours. Otherwise the rank will be checked against the cached results.

Advanced Google Searches - Use this tool to search google in many special ways. A useful resource for search engine optimisation (especially keyword research) among other things.

Keyword Generator for Google AdWords (and Overture) - This Excellent tool generates a list of possible keyword combinations based on lists of keywords that you provide.

Acronym Finder - With more than 550,000 human-edited entries, Acronym Finder is the world's largest and most comprehensive dictionary of acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms.

Itools Language - Excellent language resource with dictionaries, terminology finder, thesauruses and even a crossword and scrabble solver. Can also find Research Tools - Search Tools - Language Tools and People Search Tools

Google Trends - Find out the time time of year your keywords perform. Searchable by year and country.

MarketLeap - Search engine keyword placement check. Also has a history graph for each time you use it.

Keyword Suggestion Tool (AOL leaked data) - Based on a set of user data accidentally released by AOL from a 3 month period, collected from March 2006 through May 2006, Enter in a keyphrase to see an estimate of how much traffic that phrase would have generated in that time frame for a one month period across the 3 big search engines. Clicking on the number under the Google column opens up Google Trends for that phrase for the month of May 2006, and clicking on the result under the Yahoo column will bring up the Overture Keyword suggestion tool for the most recent month that data is available.

Keyword Crawler 1.1 (program) (424 KB) is a keyword tool that can analyze your website and provide web page reports for the top keywords used, word density, Google pagerank, internal and external backlinks and broken links. In addition, the program can also generate a sitemap file in XML format. For Windows 98/ME/NT4/2Kx/XP.

SpyFu - Formerly a program called GoogSpy - this free web-based tool you can use to do competitor research. Powered by Velocityscape's data extraction tool, Web Scraper Plus+, which extracts 500,000 search results a day from Google and loads them into SpyFu's database. The most obvious use for GoogSpy is to discover all the keywords your competitors are bidding for on Google's AdWords.

SEO Process

2008-11-26T02:37:00.000-08:00

1	Keyword in URL	First word is best, second is second best, etc.
2	Keyword in Domain name	Same as in page-name-with-hyphens
3	Keyword in Title tag	Keyword in Title tag - close to beginning Title tag 10 - 60 characters, no special characters.
4	Keyword in Description meta tag	Shows theme - less than 200 chars. Google no longer "relies" upon this tag, but will often use it.
5	Keyword in Keyword metatag	Shows theme - less than 10 words. Every word in this tag MUST appear somewhere in the body text. If not, it can be penalized for irrelevance. No single word should appear more than twice. If not, it may be considered spam. Google purportedly no longer uses this tag, but others do.
6	Keyword density in body text	5 - 20% - (all keywords/ total words) Some report topic sensitivity - the keyword spamming threshold % varies with the topic.
7	Individual keyword density	1 - 6% - (each keyword/ total words)
8	Keyword in H1, H2 and H3	Use Hx font style tags appropriately
9	Keyword font size	"Strong is treated the same as bold, italic is treated the same as emphasis" . . . Matt Cutts July 2006
10	Keyword proximity (for 2+ keywords)	Directly adjacent is best
11	Keyword phrase order	Does word order in the page match word order in the query? Try to anticipate query, and match word order.
12	Keyword prominence (how early in page/tag)	Can be important at top of page, in bold, in large font
13	Keyword in alt text	Should describe graphic - Do NOT fill with spam (Was part of Google Florida OOP - tripped a threshold - may still be in effect to some degree as a red flag, when summed with all other on-page optimization - total page optimization score - TPOS).
14	Keyword in links to site pages (anchor text)	Links out anchor text use keyword?

NAVIGATION - INTERNAL LINKS
15	To internal pages- keywords?	Link should contain keywords. The filename "linked to" should contain the keywords. Use hyphenated filenames, but not long ones - two or three hyphens only.
16	All Internal links valid?	Validate all links to all pages on site. Use a free link checker. I like this one.
17	Efficient - tree-like structure	TRY FOR two clicks to any page - no page deeper than 4 clicks
18	Intra-site linking	Appropriate links between lower-level pages
NAVIGATION - OUTGOING LINKS
19	To external pages- keywords?	Google patent - Link only to good sites. Do not link to link farms. CAREFUL - Links can and do go bad, resulting in site demotion. Unfortunately, you must devote the time necessary to police your outgoing links - they are your responsibility.
20	Outgoing link Anchor Text	Google patent - Should be on topic, descriptive
21	Link stability over time	Google patent - Avoid "Link Churn"
22	All External links valid?	Validate all links periodically.
23	Less than 100 links out total	Google says limit to 100, but readily accepts 2-3 times that number. ref 2k
OTHER ON-Page Factors
24	Domain Name Extension Top Level Domain - TLD	.gov sites seem to be the highest status .edu sites seem to be given a high status .org sites seem to be given a high status .com sites excel in encompassing all the spam/ crud sites, resulting in the need for the highest scrutiny/ action by Google. Perhaps one would do well with the new .info domain class. Not so much, now - .info sites can rank highly.
25	File Size	Try not to exceed 100K page size (however, some subject matter, such as this page, requires larger file sizes). Smaller files are preferred <40k>
26	Hyphens in URL	Preferred method for indicating a space, where there can be no actual space One or two= excellent for separating keywords (i.e., pet-smart, pets-mart) Four or more= BAD, starts to look spammy Ten = Spammer for sure, demotion probable?
27	Freshness of Pages	Google patent - Changes over time Newer the better - if news, retail or auction! Google likes fresh pages. So do I.
28	Freshness - Amount of Content Change	New pages - Ratio of old pages to new pages
29	Freshness of Links	Google patent - May be good or bad Excellent for high-trust sites May not be so good for newer, low-trust sites
30	Frequency of Updates	Frequent updates = frequent spidering = newer cache
31	Page Theming	Page exhibit theme? General consistency?
32	Keyword stemming	Stem, stems, stemmed, stemmer, stemming, stemmist, stemification
33	Applied Semantics	Synonyms, CIRCA white paper
34	LSI	Latent Semantic Indexing - Speculation, no proof
35	URL length	Keep it minimized - use somewhat less than the 2,000 characters allowed by IE - less than 100 is good, less is even better
OTHER ON-SITE Factors
36	Site Size - Google likes big sites	Google has caught on and dumped millions of pages, or made them supplemental.
37	Site Age	Google patent - Old is best. Old is Golden.
38	Age of page vs. age of site	Age of page vs. age of other pages on site Newer pages on an older site will get faster recognition.

Google Web Search Features

2008-07-25T03:51:00.000-07:00

Google Web Search Features

In addition to providing easy access to billions of web pages, Google has many special features to help you to find exactly what you're looking for. Click the title of a specific feature to learn more about it.

	• Book Search	Use Google to search the full text of books.
	• Cached Links	View a snapshot of each page as it looked when we indexed it.
	• Calculator	Use Google to evaluate mathematical expressions.
	• Currency Conversion	Easily perform any currency conversion.
	• Definitions	Use Google to get glossary definitions gathered from various online sources.
	• File Types	Search for non-HTML file formats including PDF documents and others.
	• Groups	See relevant postings from Google Groups in your regular web search results.
	• I'm Feeling Lucky	Bypass our results and go to the first web page returned for your query.
	• Images	See relevant images in your regular web search results.
	• Local Search	Search for local businesses and services in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada.
	• Movies	Use Google to find reviews and showtimes for movies playing near you.
	• Music Search	Use Google to get quick access to a wide range of music information.
	• News Headlines	Enhances your search results with the latest related news stories.
	• PhoneBook	Look up U.S. street address and phone number information.
	• Product Search	To find a product for sale online, use Google Product Search.
	• Q&A	Use Google to get quick answers to straightforward questions.
	• Refine Your Search - New!	Add instant info and topic-specific links to your search in order to focus and improve your results.
	• Results Prefetching	Makes searching in Firefox faster.
	• Search By Number	Use Google to access package tracking information, US patents, and a variety of online databases.
	• Similar Pages	Display pages that are related to a particular result.
	• Site Search	Restrict your search to a specific site.
	• Spell Checker	Offers alternative spelling for queries.
	• Stock and Fund Quotes	Use Google to get up-to-date stock and mutual fund quotes and information.
	• Street Maps	Use Google to find U.S. street maps.
	• Travel Information	Check the status of an airline flight in the U.S. or view airport delays and weather conditions.
	• Weather	Check the current weather conditions and forecast for any location in the U.S.
	• Web Page Translation	Provides you access to web pages in other languages.
	• Who Links To You?	Find pages that point to a specific URL.