seo blog

SEO For Flash - Webmaster central blog

2007-07-06T05:43:00.000-07:00

"As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn't have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn't currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.

Try to use Flash only where it is needed. Many rich media sites such as Google's YouTube use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation. You can too, by limiting Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation. In addition to making your site Googlebot-friendly, this makes you site accessible to a larger audience, including, for example, blind people using screen readers, users of old or non-standard browsers, and those on limited low-bandwidth connections such as on a cell phone or PDA. As a bonus, your visitors can use bookmarks effectively, and can email links to your pages to their friends.
sIFR: Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that the user may not have installed on their computer. A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML -- it's just displayed by an embedded Flash object.
Non-Flash Versions: A common way that we see Flash used is as a front page "splash screen" where the root URL of a website has a Flash intro that links to HTML content deeper into the site. In this case, make sure there is a regular HTML link on that front page to a non-Flash page where a user can navigate throughout your site without the need for Flash."

Original post

Advanced use of Google Analytics and the new interface

2007-06-11T14:45:00.001-07:00

This guide should help you find your way around the new system.

read more | digg story

How Search Engines Treat No Follow : No Follow Doesn't Mean No Index

2007-04-28T10:05:00.001-07:00

Google, Yahoo and Ask.com sound off on their treatment of the No Follow attribute and clear webmaster confusion that links from sites such as Wikipedia using this attribute have no value.

read more | digg story

The best keyword suggestion tools

2007-03-25T10:01:00.000-07:00

Google adwords Keyword Tool

Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool

Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Keyworddiscovery Free Search Term Suggestion Tool

MSN adCenter Labs Keyword Group Detection

Fix your websites URL's to increase traffic study shows

2007-03-24T14:57:00.001-07:00

The case study showed that this simple change alone had a significant impact on the sites search engine visibility. Nothing else was changed or optimized during the study. The number of indexed pages in Google almost doubled, tripled in Yahoo! and almost quadrupled in MSN.

read more | digg story

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Get a more complete picture about how other sites link to you

2007-03-17T08:34:00.000-07:00

"For quite a while, you've been able to see a list of the most common words used in anchor text to your site. This information is useful, because it helps you know what others think your site is about. How sites link to you has an impact on your traffic from those links, because it describes your site to potential visitors. In addition, anchor text influences the queries your site ranks for in the search results.

Now we've enhanced the information we provide and will show you the complete phrases sites use to link to you, not just individual words. And we've expanded the number we show to 100. To make this information as useful as possible, we're aggregating the phrases by eliminating capitalization and punctuation."

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The importance of a semantic URL - Robert’s talk

2007-03-16T07:04:00.000-07:00

What is a semantic URL?

Semantic URLs, also known as Friendly URLs, are made up of logical parts, therefore showing the actual name of the specific web page you’re watching, while at the same time displaying where it belongs in the web site hierarchy. Let me give you some examples:

Bad URLs

http://www.example.com/?id=547
http://www.example.com/aspx?id=547&product=785
http://www.travel-example.com/?continent=3&country=15&city=54

Good URLs, made from the samples above

The bad examples above can actually mean something like this in reality:

http://www.example.com/contact
http://www.example.com/products/screwdriver
http://www.travel-example.com/europe/sweden/stockholm

See just how much better it gets? Another thing I dislike is when file extensions, like .php or .aspx, are part of the URL. What’s ridiculous about that, too, is that isn’t the content of the PHP or ASP.NET file that is presented, its the content that it generated that is shown to the end user. I’m all against the usage of any file extension in the URL, but the only one that would make sense at least some sense is .html, because that is what is served to the web browser.

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Interview with Google's Matt Cutts about Next-Generation Search

2007-03-14T07:38:00.000-07:00

Readwriteweb.com interview with Matt Cutts.

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Better badware notifications for webmasters

2007-02-27T09:21:00.000-08:00

"In the fight against badware, protecting Google users by showing warnings before they visit dangerous sites is only a small piece of the puzzle. It's even more important to help webmasters protect their own users, and we've been working on this with StopBadware.org. A few months ago we took the first step and integrated malware notifications into webmaster tools. I'm pleased to announce that we are now including more detailed information in these notifications, and are also sending them to webmasters via email.

Webmaster tools notifications
Now instead of simply informing webmasters that their sites have been flagged and suggesting next steps, we're also showing example URLs that we've determined to be dangerous. This can be helpful when the malicious content is hard to find. For example, a common occurrence with compromised sites is the insertion of a 1-pixel iframe causing the automatic download of badware from another site. By providing example URLs, webmasters are one step closer to diagnosing the problem and ultimately re-securing their sites.

Email notifications
In addition to notifying webmaster tools users, we've also begun sending email notifications to some of the webmasters of sites that we flag for badware. We don't have a perfect process for determining a webmaster's email address, so for now we're sending the notifications to likely webmaster aliases for the domain in question (e.g., webmaster@, admin@, etc). We considered using whois records, but these often contain contact information for the hosting provider or registrar, and you can guess what might happen if a web host learned that one of its client sites was distributing badware. We're planning to allow webmasters to provide a preferred email address for notifications through webmaster tools, so look for this change in the future."

Original post

24 On-site SEO Checkups For Clueless Developers / Marketers

2007-02-21T12:38:00.000-08:00

"Although this will seem, to many of you, a very generic list of SEO on-site tips, you may be surprised to see how many SEO consultants and web developers overlook or forget these basic steps when launching a new site. These twenty- four On-site search engine optimisation checkups/tips can assure that any link building / link baiting efforts that will be made will give great results."

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The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines

2007-01-30T03:52:00.000-08:00

We all know and use Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask. But here's a list of 100 more that add their own unique slants to organizing the Web for you. You might find one or a few that improve your search life.

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Official Google Blog: Controlling how search engines access and index your website

2007-01-27T07:39:00.000-08:00

"Search engines like Google read through all this information and create an index of it. The index allows a search engine to take a query from users and show all the pages on the web that match it.

In order to do this Google has a set of computers that continually crawl the web. They have a list of all the websites that Google knows about and read all the pages on each of those sites. Together these machines are known as the Googlebot. In general you want Googlebot to access your site so your web pages can be found by people searching on Google.

However, you may have a few pages on your site you don't want in Google's index. For example, you might have a directory that contains internal logs, or you may have news articles that require payment to access. You can exclude pages from Google's crawler by creating a text file called robots.txt and placing it in the root directory. The robots.txt file contains a list of the pages that search engines shouldn't access. Creating a robots.txt is straightforward and it allows you a sophisticated level of control over how search engines can access your web site.
"
read more >>

New Google feature - Plus Box

2006-12-09T19:37:00.000-08:00

"If someone searches for your business and we have good confidence that we know your business address, we’ll include an expandable “Plus Box” in your search result listing. "

It’s free!!
You can upload multiple listings, thanks to Google Base.

link>>

direct link>>

Google Yahoo MSN join forces - Sitemaps

2006-11-17T16:19:00.000-08:00

"Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site."

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Google - Virtual hosts vs. Dedicated ip addresses

2006-11-15T15:47:00.000-08:00

Finally. The answer! Google makes no difference.

"Links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses." - Matt Cutts

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Google Custom Search Engines Open Worlds of Potential

2006-11-08T15:42:00.000-08:00

The development of the Internet, and later search engines, has put a wider (and sometimes deeper) range of information at more users’ fingertips than ever before. What’s more, it has empowered users to find exactly what they’re looking for – the ultimate in “personal media,” if you will. But large general search engines have their faults. What if you could build a search engine that focused specifically on your own interests?"

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The ultimate webdesign usability checklist

2006-11-01T09:59:00.000-08:00

Nice usability tips!
"I noticed that I, and fellow webdesigners, keep making the same usability mistakes over and over. This checklist with 88 questions is a must read for every webdesigner who cares about usability."

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Your own search engine with Google

2006-10-24T17:32:00.000-07:00

"Wouldn't it be cool if you could easily build a search engine on your blog or website tailored to the topics and areas you know and love the most? You're not alone if you'd like that -- we've heard from partners large and small, and users across the web who want access to the Google search platform, and want to customize and make it their own. "
You will be able to select the websites that you like and include them into your web search. Any searches will then return results just the results from yours selected web sites.

Also:

You easily add hundreds of urls
You can also choose to exclude results from different sites
The look and feel is also customizable
The Google Marker allows you to add and label sites in your Custom Search Engine (CSE) or in a Google topic
Upload OPML, TSV, XML formats

more info >>

Google Webmaster Central Adds New Tools

2006-10-19T16:30:00.000-07:00

Googlebot activity reports

The number of pages Googlebot's crawled from your site per day, the number of kilobytes of data Googlebot's downloaded per day, and the average time it took Googlebot to download pages. Webmaster tools show each of these for the last 90 days.

Crawl rate control

"If you'd like Googlebot to slow down the crawl of your site, simply choose the Slower option. If we feel your server could handle the additional bandwidth, and we can crawl your site more, we'll let you know and offer the option for a faster crawl."

Enhanced image search

You can now opt into enhanced image search for the images on your site, which enables our tools such as Google Image Labeler to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images. After you've opted in, you can opt out at any time.

Number of URLs submitted

Lets webmasters view the number of URL’s which are could in the Sitemaps submitted to Google.

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20 Ways Search Engines May Rerank Search Results » SEO by the SEA

2006-10-18T19:17:00.000-07:00

Search engines try to match words used in queries with words found on pages or in links pointing to those pages when providing search results.

Often, the order that pages are returned to a searcher are based upon an indexing of text on those pages, text in links pointing to those pages, and some measure of importance based upon link popularity.

original post more >>

Yahoo Search Marketing’s New Platform Goes Live

2006-10-18T07:58:00.000-07:00

This afternoon Yahoo announced that it is finally going live with the rollout and transition to its new Yahoo Search Marketing platform, dubbed ‘Panama’.

Yahoo is converting over its first group of advertisers to the Yahoo ‘Panama’ system today, and expects the majority of Yahoo advertisers to be transitioned into the system by the end of the year, with the option for advertisers to make the switch after the busy Christmas season."

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Biggest list of Google Adsense alternatives on the Net?

2006-10-17T03:38:00.000-07:00

If you want to make money from your website or blog, then check out this huge list of alternatives to Google Adsense. Everything from CPM, CPA and CPC, to price comparison, affiliate marketing and pay per post...

read more | digg story

Yahoo Optimization Help, Yahoo Optimization Tips

2006-10-13T17:44:00.000-07:00

For a long time, Yahoo seemed to be the only real player in the search engine market. Somewhere along the way, they became a hybrid search engine and web directory, allowing more than one way for users to find websites they are looking for. Being yanked highly in Yahoo allows you to have the best of both worlds. Find out more about how to optimize your website to make the best use of the Yahoo experience.

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Increasing Your Traffic with Web Directories

2006-10-12T18:17:00.000-07:00

Are web directories worth the effort anymore? Why spend the time (and in some cases money) submitting your website to a directory if it seems like nobody uses them anymore? Well, web directories are more useful to attract visitors to your site than you might think. This article gives you the surprising reason why, describes a couple of the biggest web directories, and helps you make the most of this resource."

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Google To Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion in Stock

2006-10-10T15:14:00.000-07:00

Combination Will Create New Opportunities for Users and Content Owners Everywhere

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., October 9, 2006 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it has agreed to acquire YouTube, the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community."

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5 Basic Tips For DMOZ Listings

2006-10-09T06:14:00.000-07:00

With all of the recent buzz about linkbaiting, social media optimization, and the wealth of new vertical search engines launching on the market, sometimes it’s easy to glance over the basic do’s and don’ts in the world of search engine optimization. We’ve discussed link building and directory submittals before in the past, and it’s time to revisit some of this discussion.

Hands down, the top three directories where a site should be submitted are Yahoo.com, Microsoft bCentral Small Business Directory and the Open Directory Project (DMOZ).

Quality sites can be added instantly into bCentral and Yahoo via payment, but a link in the DMOZ can be a little difficult, especially if you don’t know any editors.

Akash Kumar, CEO of Search Engine Optimization Company Vista Divine Inc., was awesome enough to lend the world his 5 tips for getting listed in DMOZ:

1. Submit your site to a proper category. Most of the sites submitted to Dmoz are rejected due to having submitted to improper or wrong categories, so you must find out the most relevant category for your site before submitting it to Dmoz. If you are unsure about which category you should submit to then just do a search in Dmoz for the sites similar to yours and note down the category to which they have been submitted to. If"

Original post >>

Choosing Keywords - How to Conduct Competitive Research

2006-10-06T16:05:00.000-07:00

So what’s involved in competitive research? The first step in competitive research is to figure out where you are in the SERPs for certain core keywords. This sounds difficult, and if approached manually, it is almost impossible to track. So you need the right kinds of tools to help you here. One tool that’s available commercially is Internet Business Pro, or IBP for short, from Alexa. You simply enter your keywords and website, and it can find your site within the top 500 for particular keywords, if there.

Link

SEO SALARY

2006-10-04T13:45:00.000-07:00

seo $59,000

View Larger Salary Graph

Tools for SEO: Search Engine Friendly URLs

2006-10-04T13:38:00.000-07:00

Search engines prefer static URLs to dynamic URLs. This article explains the difference tells why search engines don t like dynamic URLs and shows you some ways to make your dynamic URLs look like static ones....

link

Hello!

2006-10-04T12:56:00.000-07:00

My first post on this blog!