Google introduces Event Rich Snippets to Search Results

Link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/...

Google Pulls Pirate Bay From Search Results

The homepage of Pirate Bay disappeared from Google’s search results Friday, after Google allegedly received a DMCA takedown notice targeting the site.

The move is unexpected because, while the Pirate Bay is rife with pirated material, the site’s spare landing page contains no content to speak of — just links, a logo and a search box. By law, DMCA notices are targeted to specific infringing content.

Link:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/...

Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in our web search ranking

At least for Google's web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in our web search ranking.

Do you need more proof that this?

Link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/...

30 Free SEO Tools You Must Know

Using 101 tools for whatever purpose is not productive. At the end of the day you got to find your set of say 10 or 12 tools you’ll use. Everything else is just playing around and wasting your precious time. Thus this list will be the size of the usual SEOptimise list, approx. 30 items. I’ll concentrate on free SEO tools here as everybody can test them this way. Some of them are freemium that is they offer basic functionality for free and make you pay for the full fledged product.

Link:
http://www.seoptimise.com/...

Video: What You Need to Know about SEO (Straight from Google)

Link:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-for-bloggers/

4 Essential SEO Infographics

See all 4:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/4-essential-seo-infographics

Optimize your crawling & indexing

Link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/...

Google Gives Presentation On Search Engine Optimization

Video: Google’s Matt Cutts On “Over Optimization”

Easily add ratings to your website

You can easily add a rating system to your website with JS-Kit. This is a great way to get immediate feedback on your website products, listings or posts from your visitors. Also, if you haven't heard Google will be displaying Rich Snippets which may include ratings. So, get your ratings now and possibly enhance your listings in a Google Search Result snippet.

From JS-Kit:

The best content on most web sites and blogs gets buried as new content is added. JS-Kit's Ratings service solves this problem by uncovering and displaying your top content. It lets your visitors rate your merchandise items, services, pictures, blog entries, or any other objects on your site.

The service can be used in two modes, either as a 5-star rating widget or a thumb-up/-down widget and is incredibly easy to install on any static or dynamic web page.

Link:
http://js-kit.com/ratings/

Whats new for Google searching?

Google Search Options:

Wonder Wheel:

Rich Snippets:
Read more:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/...


SkyMap: Google Sky Map turns your Android-powered mobile phone into a dynamic window on the night sky. When you point your phone upwards you will see a map of the brightest stars, constellations and planets in that part of the sky. The next time you see a bright star and want to know what it's called, Sky Map can help you identify it.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/


Codenames Spellmeleon and Chameleon: A new way of displaying results for misspelled words that should help in those clicks on sites that prey on misspellings
http://www.dullest.com/blog/searchology-spellmeleon-chameleon/

Comments in Google search results?

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

Find out where you ranked in Google when someone clicked your link

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.

Link:
http://searchengineland.com/...

Specify your canonical at the site level

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.

Link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...

Cheap SEO will get you nowhere

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.

Link:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/35218

Video: Free SEO tips from Matt Cutts

Yahoo web analytics, who knew?

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.

Link:
http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/

7 ways to track your web traffic for free

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.

Two important SEO videos

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."

Link:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/...

Google Analytics Gets a Major Upgrade

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.

Link:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/22/...

Crawling through HTML forms

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.

Link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/...

Special styling for NoFollow links

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.

Link:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seeing-nofollow-links/

Google's Cutts: Good directions drive traffic to your website

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.

Link:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/...

See what the world is searching for with Google Insights

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/#

Added to the big list of Google

Video: Google's Matt Cutts on Spam, Ranking, and Your Search Future

Google gets improved Flash indexing

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.

Link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/...

Matt Cutts Translated: 8 SEO Tips I Heard Him Tell Eric Enge

Eric managed to get Matt Cutts to tell us some juicy info and he did it all so nonchalantly. ;-)

Link:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/...

Duplicate content due to scrapers

Since duplicate content is a hot topic among webmasters, we thought it might be a good time to address common questions we get asked regularly at conferences

Link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/...

SEO Tip roundup

Five Takeaways from SMX Advanced: How the Engines Handle rel=”nofollow” Links, Interesting Matt Cutts comment #1, Interesting Matt Cutts comment #2, Speaking of PageRank…., Too Much Analytics is Never Enough

Seven Short SEO Scribbles: Is NoFollow Really NoFollow?, Domain-Level PageRank, Are SEO Flags a Bad Thing?, When Will Knols Rule the Index?, Internationalizing on Domains Back in Vogue, Yes, Matt Cutts Said All Links to a Domain Help Every Page on That Domain Rank Better, Is There Still a Debate on Nofollow?

Understand how visitors view your website with Eyetrack

How much do we really know about how people read news websites? We can track their behavior clicking through a site visit. We can collect personal information. We can ask them questions. But that presents a small part of the full picture. To get the rest, we need to climb inside their heads and look through their eyes as they view online news sites -- to peer into their minds and see patterns that even they don't consciously see.

Might be old but interesting none-the-less

Link:
http://www.poynterextra.org/...

How important is #1 in Google?

Pretty telling isn't it?

Read all about it:
http://www.seoresearcher.com/...

Best practices when moving your site

Your aim is to make the transition invisible and seamless to the user, and to make sure that Google knows that your new pages should get the same quality signals as the pages on your own site. When you're moving your site, pesky 404 (File Not Found) errors can harm the user experience and negatively impact your site's performance in Google search results.

Link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/...

Yahoo! Slurp 3.0

Over the past few weeks, we've [Yahoo!] been preparing for the latest version of the Yahoo! Search crawler with some infrastructure updates, which recently caused a variance in our crawl behavior.

As the new software undergoes a phased rollout to our production crawlers over the next several weeks, you'll see the following changes:

a) The crawlers will start crawling from a different and much smaller set of IP addresses, but it'll still be from the crawl.yahoo.net domain.

b) The crawlers will also publish a new user-agent, 'Yahoo! Slurp/3.0.'

Link:
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000531.html

Secrets of Google News exposed!

Often publishers ask us why Google News didn't include one of their articles, or skipped the image associated with an article. In the search for answers, we've noticed that there's a lot of confusion about how we include and rank articles. We'd like to share some of the facts, and debunk the myths.

Quick Points:

• Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH
• Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE
• Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking MYTH
• Articles that are just images or video won't be included TRUE
• There's no way to see why my articles weren't included in Google News MYTH
• Publishing a sitemap helps my rankings MYTH
• Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News TRUE
• If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings will improve MYTH

Read about each point above:
http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/...

Leaked Google Document will change the game for SEO?

Do you believe that this internal document to Google is real? A lot of SEO experts seem to think so. Whether you do or your don't is does give some pretty good information and is worth a glance.

What is interesting is, if this document is true, how much more humans have an affect on the SERPs.

Link:
http://.../quality-rater-guidelines-2007.pdf

(download it while you can as it may not last long)

How Search Engines Work

How GoogleBot interacts with your website

If I'm [googlebot] indexing for regular web search, and I see links to MP3s and videos, I probably won't download those. Similarly, if I see a JPG, I will treat it differently than an HTML or PDF link. For instance, JPG is much less likely to change frequently than HTML, so I will check the JPG for changes less often to save bandwidth. Meanwhile, if I'm looking for links as Google Scholar, I'm going to be far more interested in the PDF article than the JPG file. Downloading doodles (like JPGs) and videos of skateboarding dogs is distracting for a scholar—do you agree?
---
After actually downloading a file, I use the Content-Type header to check whether it really is HTML, an image, text, or something else. If it's a special data type like a PDF file, Word document, or Excel spreadsheet, I'll make sure it's in the valid format and extract the text content. Maybe it has a virus; you never know. If the document or data type is really garbled, there's usually not much to do besides discard the content.

Very interesting read on how and what GoogleBot will do when accessing your website.

Link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/...

Webmaster tools from search engines gives valuable information

If you've never signed up for the various webmaster accounts at the major search engines (Google, Live Search, Yahoo!) then you're missing out on a lot of very valuable information on your website. These are great tools to help increase your position within the various search engines.

Where to find:

• Google Webmaster - Help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.
• Yahoo! Site Explorer - Allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page
• Live Search Webmaster - Use the Webmaster Tools to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your website, submit sitemaps and view

What Should SEO's Focus in 2008 - Matt Cutts Answers

Google Local (as discussed in the video):
http://.../is-your-business-on-google.html

7 must-read Webmaster Central blog posts

Our search quality and Webmaster Central teams love helping webmasters solve problems. But since we can't be in all places at all times answering all questions, we also try hard to show you how to help yourself. We put a lot of work into providing documentation and blog posts to answer your questions and guide you through the data and tools we provide, and we're constantly looking for ways to improve the visibility of that information.

Topics:

• Googlebot can't access my website
• URL blocked by robots.txt
• Why was my URL removal request denied?
• Flash best practices
• The supplemental index
• Duplicate content
• Sitemaps FAQs

Link:
http://.../7-must-read-webmaster-central-blog.html

Google answers questions about duplicate content

I asked Matt Cutts (Google Engineer):

Yahoo provides a robots-nocontent class tag that can be used to remove content from the page flow from being indexed (or used in determining a pages weight). Does Google support this tag? If not, are there are plans to support such a tag?.

He answered:

"We don’t current [sic] support that tag, for a couple reason. We think we do pretty well on detecting boilerplate (e.g. you’re not likely to run into any issues of duplicate content for header/footer type stuff). The other reason is that we haven’t seen a lot of sites using the tag after Yahoo mentioned it. Given the choice on where to put engineering resources, not a ton of people have asked for this feature."

Good to know

Google Sitemaps FAQ

A great collection of common questions you may have when it comes to the use and need for a Sitemap on your website.

Link:
http://.../sitemaps-faqs.html

Excellent Analytics Tip #11: Measure Effectiveness Of Your Web Pages

A Five Step Program to Measure Effectiveness of Your Web Pages:

• 1: Don’t Obsess About Your Home Page.
• 2: Compute Your Cliff - Only Then Jump.
• 3: Bouncy, Bouncy, Bounce - Its Good For You.
• 4: Site Overlay - Something To Love.
• 5: Think Holistically - Multiple Metrics, Key Context.

Read the full story:
http://...analytics-tip-11-measure-effectiveness-of-your-web-pages

The Ultimate Fate of Supplemental Results

Now we're coming to the next major milestone in the elimination of the artificial difference between indices: rather than searching some part of our index in more depth for obscure queries, we're now searching the whole index for every query.

Link:
http://.../ultimate-fate-of-supplemental-results.html

New code for Google Analytics

The new Google Analytics tracking code (ga.js) has been launched and is now available for you to use when you set up a profile. Installing the lighter ga.js code snippet instead of the old tracking code (urchin.js, "legacy") lets you take advantage of upcoming advanced features and sophisticated reporting while keeping the reliable tracking capabilities of urchin.js. For these reasons, we recommend installing ga.js instead of urchin.js. For more information on the new ga.js code, including information on migrating over from "urchin.js,"

Link:
https://www.google.com/.../answer.py?answer=55488

Migration Guide:
http://www.google.com/analytics/GATCmigrationguide.pdf

Matt Cutts on using ALT tags

Breakdown of a Google search result

Page Title: Usually pulled from the TITLE tag set on the page. Can also be pulled from the Open Directory Project's (DMOZ) title. Setting the META tag NOODP prevents the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) information being used and will default back to onpage information. Limit of 63 characters.

Snippet: Pulled from the page content or meta description. If the search keyword is located further down in a page Google may pull the snippet from within the page, around the keyword. If for some reason the page was not accessible then Google may pull the information from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Limit of approximately 156 characters.

Plus Box: Used to expand the information shown for a company. Examples of why a plus box is shown would be: Stock Information, Map of company address

Url: Url of where you will be taken when clicking the search result

Filesize: Size of the page you will be taken to.

Cached: A snapshot of the last time the page was crawled. Sometimes next to the Cached link will be an indicator of the time of last crawl (like 1 hour which means it was crawled one hour ago)

Similiar pages: Pages that are similiar to the page displayed in the search result

Note this: Saves the result in Google Notebook. Displayed when you are logged into Google.

Site links: A helpful list of links within a domain that a user may want to go to beyond the presented result from a keyword search. This is a completely algorithmic result (not done by hand or evaulated by a human).

More results: Provides a search result for your keyword that limits the search to within the domain of the search result.

- Digg it -

(as extracted from the video from Matt Cutts)

How PageRank Works & Why the Original PR Formula May be Flawed

Great article discussing how Google's PageRank works. If you're doing any SEO then you really should read and understand this article. Could help.

Link:
http://.../how-pagerank-works-original-pr-formula-may-be-flawed

The 10 Most Common SEO Mistakes

6. Poor titles and headers - Keyword tools are wonderful weapons. These are valuable for far more than SEO. Keyword tools tell you what language people use when referring to your products and services. Even in a world without web sites, this is something you would want to know. Then you need to make sure you have pages and content that addresses the major topic areas that relate to your business.

Read the entire list and learn a little which can go a long way.

Link:
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/071116-103407

Gatineau is Microsoft's answer to Google Analytics

Microsoft will be releasing an analytics program similiar to Google Analyitcs at some time in the future. Right now its in an invite only beta called Gatineau.

Read all about it:
http://www.liesdamnedlies.com/2007/10/its-here.html

Link to beta invite:
http://advertising.microsoft.com/microsoft-adcenter-gatineau

Google releases Code Search sitemaps

Google's Code Search helps users find function definitions and sample code by enabling them to search publicly accessible source code hosted on the Internet. You can tell Google about source code on your site by creating and submitting a Code Search Sitemap. A Code Search Sitemap is just like a regular Sitemap, and is submitted in the same way, but it does include some additional, Code Search-specific information.

Link:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/...

How to Fake a Google Page Rank 10

1. Buy a domain.
2. 301 Redirect the domain either in you .htaccess, PHP header (anything server side) to a page with the desired page rank. It’s better to redirect to something relevant. For example, if you are doing a mortgage site, redirect to a mortgage site.
3. Link to the page with the redirect from another of your sites that gets regularly spidered by Google. Since you use the Alexa Toolbar, you should have several sites that are spidered daily by google.
4.....

Full story:
http://.../how-to-fake-a-google-page-rank-10-or-any-pr-you-want/

Robots.txt file for an SMF forum

To reduce the duplicate content issue with your SMF forum and the Google index (or any search engine) you should include the lines below (between the dashes) into your Robots.txt file. This will block all pages which can be considered duplicate from getting into a search engine index and/or get removed if already added.

--------------------------------
User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=activate
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=admin
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=arcade
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=calendar
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=collapse
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=deletemsg
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=editpoll
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=help
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=helpadmin
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=lock
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=login
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=logout
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=markasread
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=mergetopics
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=mlist
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=modifykarma
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=movetopic
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=notify
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=notifyboard
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=pm
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=post
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=profile
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=register
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=removetopic2
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=reporttm
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=search
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=sendtopic
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=splittopics
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=stats
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=sticky
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=trackip
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=unread
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=unreadreplies
Disallow: /forum/index.php?action=who
Disallow: /forum/Themes/

Disallow: /forum/*.msg
--------------------------------

/forum/ should be replaced with the path to your forum

What is a robots.txt file:
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

Search Analytics

Compete's Search Analytics are the starting point to build search marketing campaigns that create brand awareness, drive site traffic and increase sales.

Features:

• Discover new keywords you should be bidding on
• Find the gaps in competitors' search strategies
• Invest in terms that drive the most engaged visitors
• Track your performance against competitors and peers

Link:
http://searchanalytics.compete.com/

More tools for SEO

• Page Strength Checker: Gives information about any URL that let you determine the strength of a page. Age of the domain, number of backlinks and PageRank are displayed.
• PageRank: Check the PageRank of any page at 37 Google data centers. Gives a great overview of how Google's data centers see your PageRank.
• SEOMoz Tools: A great collection of some very useful tools like: Back Anchor Text Analysis, Crawl text and many more.
• Xinu: An all in one page information tool. Enter a URL and get everything you can imagine about the web page.

More tools:
http://.../the-top-15-free-seo-tools.html

Webmaster Tools gets an update

• No more tabs! Navigate through the new sidebar.
• Breadcrumbs in the page title for easier product navigation.
• A sidebar that expands and contracts to show and hide options based on your current goal.
• New sidebar topics: Overview, Diagnostics, Statistics, Links, Sitemaps, and Tools.

Link:
http://.../2007/09/subscriber-stats-and-more.html

An Exhaustive List of Search Engine Based Keyword Research Data

A solid list of every which way you can look at a keyword to get an idea of metrics, value and potential from the engines themselves (rather than services like AdWords, YSM, Wortracker or KW Discovery). This is more of an "expert" level post, as you'll need to use these searches/tools yourself to figure out exactly how they apply to your business, but it's stil valuable to have all of this collected in one place.

Link:
http://.../exhaustive-list-search-engine-based-keyword-research-data

Eleven steps to buying a domain name that doesn't suck

Eleven steps to buying a domain name that doesn't suck: "Whether you're a multinational Internet retailer or a lone human just entering the Web world, there are many things to consider when purchasing a new domain name, not the least of which are core SEO (search engine optimization) parameters. Following is a list of considerations I'd supply to either entity mentioned above or anyone in between. Some may seem ridiculously obvious, but a friendly reminder won't hurt."

Link:
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9759544-7.html?part=rss

Google improves its Robots.txt tools

We've improved Webmaster Central's robots.txt analysis tool to recognize sitemap declarations and relative urls. Earlier versions weren't aware of sitemaps at all, and understood only absolute URLs; anything else was reported as Syntax not understood. The improved version now tells you whether your sitemap's URL and scope are valid. You can also test against relative URLs with a lot less typing.

Link:
http://.../new-robotstxt-feature-and-rep-meta-tags.html

Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology thoughts

Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology thoughts: "Before you begin cross-linking sites, consider the user's perspective and whether the crosslinks provide value. If the sites are related in business -- e.g., an auto manual site linking to an auto parts retail site, then it could make sense -- the links are organic and useful. Cross-linking between dozens or hundreds of sites, however, probably doesn't provide value, and I would not recommend it."

Link:
http://.../server-location-cross-linking-and-web.html

What is the Google Supplemental index?

When Google originally introduced Supplemental Results in 2003, our main web index had billions of web pages. The supplemental index made it possible to index even more web pages and, just like our main web index, make this content available when generating relevant search results for user queries. This was especially useful for queries that did not return many results from the main web index, and for these the supplemental index allowed us to query even more web pages. The fewer constraints we're able to place on sites we crawl for the supplemental index means that web pages that are not in the main web index could be included in the supplemental.

Link:
http://.../supplemental-goes-mainstream.html

Top 12 SEO tips for 2007

Some good, some OK but the entire article is worth reading for someone who has never thought about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) before. You can also read my blog post on what I know about SEO - been meaning to come out with a v2.0 of this post as I have learned so much more since that post first appeared.

If you could do one thing now its #3 in the SEO Tips article.

Article:
http://.../top-12-seo-tips-for-2007.htm

How to Determine if a Link Passes Reputation / Authority / Equity / Juice / etc.

How to Determine if a Link Passes Reputation / Authority / Equity / Juice / etc... : "I have been buying many links but it is hard to know which ones count and which ones do not. Is there any way to test if a link is clean and passes link authority?"

Link:
http://www.seobook.com/archives/002347.shtml

Create Google sitemaps online

Xml-Sitemaps.com lets you create Google sitemaps online through their very easy to use interface. Should be noted that the free service does limit to 500 URLs so going beyond that would require the pro service.

Google Sitemaps helps Google know of all the pages in your website and gives them a single file that adds or updates the URLs in the Google index. All you have to do is sign up for a Webmaster account with Google and then add a website profile and sitemap. This is a must for a site with any kind of depth as you don't want to rely on the Google Crawler finding all your pages.


Link:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Google PageRank, the long version

Everything you ever wanted to know about Google PageRank and were afraid to ask:
http://.../google-pagerank-what-do-we-really-know-about-it/

My PageRank and BackLink Checker

Better Google Analytics through URL tagging

Google Analytics is probably one of the best free web statistics applications around. This is one of those things that every webmaster (man I hate that word) should have installed in a website. With Google Analytics you get an in depth view of the traffic coming to your site and, with goal conversions, you can track whether they reached the page you wish they would. Powerful, easy to install and a great interface (as of the second release) makes this my favorite places to visit and poke around.

Not only can you track the traffic as they move around your site but you can track how they get to your website. This is especially important if you want to setup and run an email campaign or you're running ads on another website. No need to write code or do anything fancy, all you need to do is use URL Tagging.

URL Tagging is what it sounds like, a method of tagging a URL to provide better stats through Google Analytics. You can have a group created for an email newsletter or a banner ad running on another website. Google has made it so easy to create tags, through their online URL Builder tool, that you can start tagging all your newsletters separately to see how each one performs. This is just the tip of iceberg of the power of Google Analytics.

Go forth and start tagging!

What is tagging:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/...

Online URL Builder:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/...

Google PageRank and Backlinks Checker

I wasn't sure I was going to post about this but what the heck, I post about everything else. Another tool from Veign that can give you a compact report of Google Pagerank and backlinks from various search engines in a single report. The reason I wasn't going to post about it is because its more of a tool for my needs and not sure if anyone else would even care to know about it. For now its limited to a mazimum of 10 URLs but may expand if my needs exceed 10 or I hear enough comments that request more.

Link:
http://www.veign.com/tools/pagerank/

2007 Web Analytics Shootout - Interim Report

Every web analytics tool measures clickthroughs and page views a little differently. They're all using slightly different yardsticks and getting slightly different results. The disparity is driving us to distraction.

Full report will be delivered sometime in July of 2007

Link:
http://.../analytics-report-may-2007.shtml

Yahoo! hits the mark for SEO with its robots-nocontent attribute

Web pages often include headers, footers, navigational sections, repeated boilerplate text, copyright notices, ad sections, or dynamic content that is useful to users — but not to search engines. Webmasters can apply the "robots-nocontent" attribute to indicate to search engines any content that is extraneous to the main unique content of the page. Yahoo! Search observes the class="robots-nocontent" present on XHTML elements, such as div, span, and all others.

This is a great idea from Yahoo! as it means that web designers (and SEO companies) can better identify to the crawlers what are the actual content of the page and not just supporting content (like navigation menus). I think this could have a huge impact on the results displayed in Yahoo!, especially for those who implement the new attribute. Veign has, have you?

Link:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp/slurp-14.html

Blog post from Yahoo!:
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000444.html

How to submit your website to the major search engines

Lets just get to it.

Yahoo!
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

MSN
http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

Google
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

DMOZ (Open Directory Project)
http://dmoz.org/add.html

Altavista
http://www.altavista.com/addurl/default

Alexa
http://www.alexa.com/site/help/webmasters

Is your business on Google?

Make sure by going to the Google Local Business Center and make sure you're listed.

Link:
http://www.google.com/local/add/lookup?hl=en-US&gl=US

Cool: Google Maps Listings get Coupons

Google Local Business Center now allows a business to add coupons to their listings. This is cool for people like me who are always using Google Maps for locating local business'.

Let Google users print your coupons and bring them to your business.Coupons will appear alongside your business listing on Google Maps.

Link:
http://www.google.com/local/add/coupons

Quick SEO Links

Just because a client asked I thought I would also share.

SEO Links:
http://www.seomoz.org/
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/
http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html

SEO and META Tags:
http://www.seomoz.org/articles/search-ranking-factors.php
The meta description tag is almost completely outdated in markup, but is still useful for describing your page accurately to the search engines. In some cases, the engines may even use this tag as the description of your site in the results page listings, giving you greater control over your content and message. It is questionable, however, that keyword use in this tag has any influence, whatsoever, in affecting the rankings.

SEO revisited

I stumbled across a a couple of new SEO websites. One is a great list of tools and the other is probably one of the best articles I have come across. Just in case you forgot my post on the subject check out the 'SEO and What I know' post.

151 SEO Tools:
http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html

Rules to Better Google Rankings:
http://www.ssw.com.au/.../RulestoBetterGoogleRankings.aspx

Web QA Test Tool Links:
http://www.aptest.com/webresources.html

Google and SEO

SEO Mistakes: Not checking your site:
http://www.mattcutts.com/.../seo-mistakes-not-checking-your-site/

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), what little I know

I have learned a little about SEO over the years and have had some good results with some of my clients websites and my own. I wanted to share a quick run down of some various things I have learned.

Random thoughts:

• Make sure pages are well structured and the code is as clean as possible (XHTML compliant helps with this). Google only reads the data of the page and well structure helps it identify what's important on a page.
• Don't use Flash and expect it to help in anyway. No spider can read the contents of a Flash file and therefore all is ignored.
• Make use of H tags as H1 tags will be read as the most important information on a page in the body (this is below page name, URL, and title).
• The higher up in a page the information the more important / relevant it will appear.
• Don't rely on images to convey important information - Images can't be interpreted by Google. If images are used make sure you have well worded ALT tags and don't make them too long, short and sweet.
• Don’t use links that say Click here or other verb type actions. Use links that are descriptive to where its going and what will be accomplished by clicking the link.
• Try and get yourself into the DMOZ (www.dmoz.org) - this helps you get into lots of other search engines which in turn helps in Google. DMOZ is a open database of websites used by lots of search engines including Google. This also will help you get listed in Google's regional directories.
• Don't over do meta tags. Tags with more than 255 characters or abouts will be ignored. Plus Google does not use these for relevance - they look at content.
• Come up with a list of keywords you want to be found on when search and make sure you page content uses these words. Make sure these words are used in the Title, ALT tags, and H tags (with H1 being important). This is referred to as keyword density, too much will get you penalized, too little and you will not be found - find the balance.
• Get yourself onto any site you can - except links farms where you could end up getting de-listed from Google. Post answers in newsgroups, answers on forums, write articles, start a blog on your website, include a signature with your website where ever you post. Basically get your name and site out there.
• Be consistent in your websites URL. Either use http://YourDomain.com or http://www.YourDomain.com and stick with it. Google sees these as different and you want one to get as much credit as possible for each page.
• Make page names as relevant as possible.
• Don’t make too many changes. It takes time for a change to affect your rankings or search results. Wait a couple months on a main change to take affect and don't be discouraged, it takes time.
• DO NOT use under-handed methods for getting ranked higher like link farms, cloaking or lots of 1pt or text that matches the background color. This is a sure way to get de-listed.

Tools:

Search Engine Placement:
http://www.pagerank.net/search-engine-position-tool/

SEO Resource:
http://www.seomoz.org/

How to rank high at Google:
http://www.apromotionguide.com/google.html

PageRank and Position Search:
http://www.prsearch.net/

(post a comment with your best thoughts on this)