May 12
I sure hope not. What a mistake it would be to allow public comments in Google search results. All I can see is the blackhat SEO guys hammering the comments to help bring down the competition’s websites. Why? Because the amount of clicks a search results gets can affect its overall rankings. Bad comments means less clicks, means it position could drop.
Read more here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/weblife/?p=630
Apr 15
Your analytics software can already tell you a lot about the traffic you’re getting from natural search: which search engines are sending traffic, what keywords are sending traffic, which pages are getting the most search engine traffic. But wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly where in the search results your page appeared when the user clicked?Google has confirmed speculation originally published by Patrick Altoft that their new referrer string does include ranking data.
Mar 13
development, google, seo No Comments
Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: we now support 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.
This is great. Google is giving web developers much more control over sites that they push out. No longer do you have to go into Webmaster Tools to fix canonical issues with your website.
Actually, this method gives you much more control. In summary, you can have duplicate content on your website and specify, through a special tag, which is the page that Google should be indexing. This means you can easily filter out Print version of pages or pages with additional query parameters.
Nov 17
The State of Washington has filed suit (.pdf) against a Redmond-based search engine optimization and Web services outfit that has done business under the names Visible.net, Captures.com and WebMarketingSource.com. In essence, the state attorney general contends that these entities have ripped off their mostly mom-and-pop clientele through a pattern of unfulfilled performance promises and financial shenanigans. While the clients may be on the smaller end of the spectrum, they have been forking over real money, with initial startup charges ranging from $3,750 to $9,750, plus a monthly fee of $40 to $100.
This is what I tell clients when it comes to SEO. It costs money and trying to find the cheapest company will get you nowhere.
Nov 07
google, seo, yahoo No Comments
Yahoo! Web Analytics is an enterprise site analytics tool that provides real-time insight into visitor behavior on your website. With powerful and flexible tools and dashboards, Yahoo! Web Analytics helps online marketers and website designers enhance the visitor experience, increase sales and reduce marketing costs.
Google Analytics needs to step up and start offering a more real-time stats. Yahoo is now doing it (see below)…
Get detailed reporting within minutes after an action occurs on your website. Quickly identify dips in key site metrics or monitor the performance of new content. Seeing the impact of website and marketing changes immediately makes it much easier to optimize them. Yahoo! Web Analytics also maintains historical data so you can go back at any time to review old data for new insight, or compare the present to the past without any changes to your page tags.
Nov 05
design, development, seo, web server, website No Comments
Awstats
Awstats is a log file analyzer type of web statitics reporting tool. This means the data displayed will be the most accurate and complete than some of the other methods listed. Awstats can provide all the expected information (page views, visitors, hits) plus it can give you bandwidth used, and filesizes of downloads.
CrazyEgg
One of the first to offer Heat Maps which shows where your user are clicking on your website. This alone makes Crazy Egg worth checking out.
FuseStats
Another website offering Heat Maps, which is a color overlay so you can see where your users click, on top of the standard web stat information. They offer a free account, which is why I added it to the list, which can be used for very low traffic websites.
Google Analytics
This, in my opinion, is the gold standard for client side web tracking (not a server log analyzer). Google Analytics provides some of the most powerful tool for tracking your visitors, analyzing your websites traffic flow, checking on goals for your visitors and general overall information provided. Plus they are constantly pushing out new features and I’m sure real-time tracking isn’t far behind.
HiStats
Another great option which provides a very user friendly interface (and quite appealing) and provides a hit counter which can be added to your website so your visitors can see how many visits you get. Oh, did I mention they provide real time tracking? Very nice option.
StatCounter
A very popular web stats choice where a small piece of code is embedded in your web pages that handles all the tracking for your visitors. Not as reliable as Awstats but easy to setup, not tied to a server (so you maintain your history) and you can access your stats at anytime from any computer.
The Hit Counter
Looking for a simple, simple to install (2 steps) hit counter for your website? Then The Hit Counter what you need. They have made the creation of a custom hit counter as simple as it can be.
Oct 29
Whiteboard Friday – Has Pagerank Changed?
“This week, Rand discusses good ol’ Pagerank. How has it evolved, and is it still the same fickle curmudgeon we all know and loathe love? PR has certainly seen its share of tweaks and updates over the years, but how much does it even resemble what we saw in the patent apps of yore? Let’s explore, shall we? Feel free to chime in with your thoughts and concerns about the topic and how you feel it could impact SEO in the future.”
Link:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/…
Whiteboard Friday-Solving Indexation Problems
“So what’s the topic? Indexation issues. What do you do when you have a large (or ginormous) site and thousands of your pages simply aren’t getting indexed? Well, a lot of times it means you lose clicks and lose business, but there are ways to solve this problem…watch and learn.”
Oct 22
Google Analytics just got better. Google will begin rolling out a set of major upgrades today to the free Website measuring tool. The new features include the ability to create custom reports, better ways to look at audience segments, the ability to track and measure AdSense inside Google Analytics, an API (on it’s way), the introduction of cool bubble “motion charts,” and some user interface improvements. Let’s take these new features one at a time.
Sep 23
In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.
Aug 25
This is a great way to look at a website and see what links are tagged as NoFollow, meaning the link will not count as a vote in Google. This is a must on your website if you don’t want to be penalized for linking to know spammer sites or what Google calls a ‘Bad neighborhood’. With this little Firefox hack you can quickly see what links have been tagged – for reviewing your website or any other.
Aug 07
You have a website and can’t figure out why it’s not showing up at the top of Google’s search rankings. You go to Google.com for some guidance but get lost trying to find answers.Certainly, achieving visibility in Google’s search rankings can be a mystery. To help solve the riddle, USA TODAY sat down with Google’s Matt Cutts, an engineer and active blogger, who has five easy tips on how to “optimize” your site so Google (GOOG) and the rest of the world can find it.
Aug 07
With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.
Great tool for SEO as it gives you not only the search term you requested but also breakout search terms relating to yours.
Link:
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#
Jul 01
Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.
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