Stop Yahoo! tracking your every move

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

If you have a Yahoo! account, whether to be a member of a Yahoo! group or to use their webmail, you may be surprised to hear that you are now being tracked via 'web beacons'.

If you go to the Yahoo! privacy page and scroll down to the 'cookies' section, you'll see 'web beacons' mentioned.

Now, when you are logged in to Google accounts, you know that Google is tracking your search history, and you can safely assume the same with Yahoo! However outside of Yahoo! services;

"Yahoo! uses web beacons to conduct research on behalf of certain partners on their web sites and also for auditing purposes."

Hmmm...sounds like they're logging more than search history...

"Information recorded through these web beacons is used to report anonymous individual and/or aggregate information about Yahoo! users to our partners."

Ahh...so patterns of our web use can be sold to enable advertisers to use ever increasing ways to get our attention...They do say no personally identifiable information isn't used. What's to stop them saying 'a female aged 23* living in Leeds is most likely to use these sites at this time of day'? It's anonymised data, but still quite frightening when you think about it.

There is an opt-out available - just click the opt-out option on the web beacons page and it's done. Don't press the big 'cancel opt-out' button that appears on the next page - it's not a confirmation button!

* it's just an example!

Labels: searchengines, security

How to change your web design

Monday, October 01, 2007

If you have an existing website and want to change the design, or perhaps hire a different web designer, it's not quite as straightforward a process as you might think.

If you are just changing the content of each page, then it is a simple job and you don't need to take this post as seriously as someone who is having a complete site overhaul.

This isn't an exhaustive list, but just a few ideas that spring to mind:

1) Your new site should comply with both W3C and Disability guidelines (Disability Discrimination Act in the UK).

2) If the domain and hosting are moving, ensure that they are registered in your name (see
Importance of renewing your domain name) and their costs are still reasonable...you can get domain names for less than £5/$10 and hosting for less than £25/$50 per year. Don't be fooled into thinking that paying more will get you 100% uptime on your website - this doesn't exist unless you've got a massive IT infrastructure in your large company.

3) If you are moving from one designer to another, have you got a copy of all passwords and access details?

4) If your page is going to use Flash animation, will it still be indexable by the search engines? You don't want to lose your hard-earned rankings because the search engines can no longer see what your site is about?

5) If you create new pages, will you map the old pages to the new ones if they have different names? If you use Linux hosting, you will need to do a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file - scary sounding but not that difficult if you search for .htaccess tutorials.

Labels: searchengines, webdesign

Can your paid links be detected?

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

According to the 'Ramblings About SEO website;

"Many major SEO firms make it a standard practice to recommend the purchasing of links to their clients. The search engines actively discourage this practice, and do their level best to detect those paid links. Here are 15 things they can use as signals that a link is possibly a paid link..."

Read the full post 15 Methods for Paid Link Detection for more information

Labels: linking, searchengines

New links directory with a twist

Friday, March 30, 2007

The Million Dollar Pixel Homepage opened new doors for advertising on the Internet in new ways. Big Web Links Bid Directory is a website that has taken the paid aspect of pixel websites, the auction element of sites such as eBay and the search engine friendliness aspect of the best web directories.

As they rightly point out, with many web directories, you submit your site and end up on an obscure page that no-one ever sees (how many pages of search results do you look at...1...3?). With a search engine friendly directory, at least the link to your site will be acknowledged by the search engines and that it will be on a page of similar-themed links.

With Big Web Links Directory, you can bid on the amount you want to pay for your listing, with the highest bids are listed first. The top 10 listings are shown on the homepage and top 20 listings on the top links page as an additional benefit.

The site itself is well designed and easy to navigate - much nicer looking than many directories and with some of the now-ubiquitous Web 2.0 design ideas implemented.

Labels: pp, searchengines

Linking Strategies - straight from the experts

Friday, March 16, 2007

I came across a blog post today that poses questions to five link development experts and shows their answers. Some of the information is slightly contradictory but is a fascinating insight into how the experts go about gathering links to their own and their clients' sites.

The experts are:

I've come across all of these people at some time or other, and they're all well respected in the SEO (search engine optimisation) / Internet industry for using ethical, honest approaches to website promotion.

And the questions asked?

What are the factors you would take into account before buying a link from a directly contacted site (not a link broker or seller)?
In sectors where links are particularly tough to come by (retail, B2B in boring industries, etc.), what are content tactics you?ve taken to appeal to relevant sites in those industries (specific examples would rock)?
What is the current climate with paid links, and how can I navigate the paid links landscape so that I come out smelling like a rose on the other side?
Automating the link acquisition process: How far do you recommend going with it? What are the benefits and pitfalls of automation?
Name 5 specific techniques (queries, tools, process, or starting points) you would use to get links for a statewide real estate agent.
What are the top 3 over-rated and under-rated criteria for determining how valuable an individual link will potentially be to your site?s search engine rankings?
If you were in control of the search engine algorithm at Google, what are the top three changes you would make specific to how Google values/counts links?
What?s the most common mistake you see people making in their link building activities?
How do you think that nofollow links and redirected links are treated by the various search engines and do you see any value in obtaining these types of links?
So many people complain about competitors who are ranking solely on reciprocal links. Do you believe reciprocal links still works as a complete strategy or do you believe age, trust and grandfathering (for lack of a better word) are taken into account? How important do you feel age is to a link?

As you can see, real relevant examples are given by the experts and there are a few simple strategies in their for checking out potential link partners. For 10 minutes of your time, "Five Link Development Experts: A Group Interview" could be an invaluable investment for your site.

Labels: internet, searchengines, seo

Consolidate your pagerank with .htaccess

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

If you look in the search engines, you may notice that some of the links to your site start with 'www' and others don't. The problem with this canonicalisation issue (despite the situation improving as the search engines become more sophisticated) is that some search engines will view this as two different domains and firstly, will split pagerank between the two and secondly, could push your pages into the supplemental results so your site won't be as easily found.

There is a simple solution to this if you use linux-based hosting and involves editing your .htaccess file. If you don't already have one of these files in the root directory of your hosting server, you'll have to create one. Note that whether you see this file may depend on your FTP program - set it to show all files including hidden ones. I use FileZilla which is an excellent open source FTP program and very simple to use.

The dot (period) in front of the htaccess means that it is a hidden system file. To create an htaccess file, open notepad and save a new file. Ignore the extension which is set to text file (*.txt) and in the filename box type ".htaccess", including the quote marks. You should now have a correctly named file.

Now type in:

Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.co\.uk$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
At the end of the last line, press the enter key to add a newline to the file. This is really important or your htaccess won't work. Now save this and upload it to the root of your website. Some hosts take a short amount of time to update htaccess (GoDaddy for example) but it should work instantaneously on most hosts. This can be adapted for any domain:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301] etc...

Just remember to change 'yourdomain' to your actual domain name!

Labels: hosting, searchengines, webdesign

Don't get your site thrown out the Search Engines

Altering your website to increase its rankings in the search engine results is known as SEO or search engine optimisation. By doing this, you will increase the number of visitors to your site, which in turn will hopefully increase your website's revenue. The major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) all publish do's and don'ts for websites - failing to acknowledge these on your site could easily result in it being banned.

Whether you pay someone to do your SEO, or do it youself, ensure that your site adheres to the webmaster guidelines and doesn't engage in any black hat practices. These will get your site banned from the search engines, and once thrown out, it's difficult to get back in. Adhering to white hat practices and providing quality content is the best advice for getting high rankings.

Quick ways to get banned include keyword stuffing (using the same phrases or words repeatedly) or hiding text by having lots of keywords in the same colour as the background. The former renders your page unreadable, which defeats the purpose of having visitors to your site whilst the latter has been used by webmasters to get visitors there on false pretences - they think they're viewing a page on one topic and arrive to see something completely different.

Links from high quality or high ranking sites are much more important in helping your site rankings than just trying to get hundreds of links. Although this may take time, acquiring higher quality links really will help your site in the long run. To find higher authority sites, use Google's pagerank as a guide. The higher the pagerank out of 10, the harder it will be to get a link, but the more value it will pass to your site.

Don't be tempted into buying hundreds of links at a time - it's better to get a few links a week at a constant pace than getting a lot sporadically. And when you do link, ensure that you get links to both your homepage and other pages on your site. Link exchanges can be a good thing, but ensure that you are listed with similar sites rather than just a random selection.

Don't be tempted to fool Google or the other search engines - they will find you out. Practices they may not like and not mentioned above include meta tag stuffing, cloaking, duplicate content and multiple submissions. Meta tags can be useful to your site despite not all search engines using them, but don't be tempted to stuff them full of more keywords and phrases.

Cloaking is where you show one page to the search engines and another to your site's visitors - again it gets them there through false pretences. Having the same website on several different domains sounds like a good idea, but the search engines do penalise duplicate content, whether by dropping you from the results or putting you on the 350th page of results which amounts to the same thing. Finally, if your site is linked to properly, the search engines will find your site without you having to submit your site to them. Submit only once then exercise patience until your site appears.

Google Webmaster Guidelines - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines - http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html
MSN Guidelines for successful indexing - http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm

Also see Google webmaster guidelines in plain English

Labels: searchengines, seo, webdesign

Google webmaster guidelines in plain English

Monday, February 05, 2007

If you are confused as to what the Google Webmaster Guidelines mean, you could do a lot worse than going to feedthebot.com. This is a very clearly laid out website, which uses CSS and keeps images to a minimum which results in fast-loading effective site.

Each of the guidelines has its own page - first the guideline is laid out, followed by definitions of any terms used and followed by further explanation and examples. Diagrams are used where necessary.

Definitely one to add to your bookmarks!

Labels: searchengines, seo, webdesign

Search eBay more effectively

Friday, December 29, 2006

If you use eBay regularly you may not be aware of how to increase the effectiveness of your searches. Here's a few tips below that may help:

1) Be specific
If you are looking for a particular item, put in more details e.g. if you want blue shoes type in 'blue shoes' rather than 'shoes'. If you are looking for a poster for your favourite band, type in 'bandname poster' rather than 'bandname'. Try also years or brands for specific results.

2) Search both titles and descriptions
The length of titles in eBay can be quite limiting - so if your search returns no results, try searching descriptions too.

3) eBay and Google search differently - use singular and plural versions
When searching in Google, your results will come back with both singular and plural variations. eBay doesn't do this so try both versions e.g. 'fish' and 'fishes'

4) eBay and Google search differently - and / or
Search engines do not use 'and' and 'or' literally - they allow you to use them to help target the results of your search e.g. 'fish and chips' will only find pages containing the words 'fish' and 'chips'. eBay on the other hand will only return results with exactly 'fish and chips' in the title / description.

5) Don't use punctuation unless it is standard
Again, eBay treats punctuation literally, so unless the item title or description uses it, you won't find any results e.g. if you want a t-shirt, search for 'tshirt', 't-shirt' and 't shirt'.

6) Searching for phrases
Typing in 'little fish' will find any results containing the words 'little' and 'fish'. Typing "little fish" (double quote marks) in the search box will find results containing words in that order only.

7) Removing a word from results
Typing in 'fish' may return results that also include sharks. What if you don't want sharks? Enter your search query as 'fish -sharks'

8) Removing multiple words from results
Typing in 'fish' may return results that also include sharks and whales. What if you don't want sharks and whales? Enter your search query as 'fish -sharks -whales'

9) Variations on words
From example 5 above, it would be time consuming to enter three different search terms, so instead enter (tshirt, t-shirt, t shirt) as your search term.

10) Wildcard searches
From example 3 above, it would be time consuming to enter different variations, so instead enter 'fis*' and any results containing 'fis' followed by anything else will be returned e.g. fish, fishing, fishes, fission etc...

11) Specific searches
If you know that you only want 'fish', type in "fish" (double quotes) to ensure that you only get results containing 'fish'. With some searches eBay automatically changes your search term to match more items. Searches using double quote marks will prevent this from happening.

Find eBay items in the UK or in the US.

Labels: ebay, searchengines

Internet Search Engine Safety

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

McAfee - famous for their antivirus software - compared the safety of five leading search engines earlier this year using their SiteAdvisor to generate website ratings:

"We again find that most leading search engines are similar in the safety of the sites they link to, though AOL replaces MSN as the safest engine and Yahoo! replaces Ask as the engine with the most risky results. Across search engines, we find sponsored results significantly less safe than search engines' organic results. Unsavory e-mail conduct is the dominant security risk although search engine users are also heavily exposed to risky downloads, browser exploits, and scams."

They recently revisited these results to see what had changed - the updated report states that search results from Google, AOL, and Ask.com are less likely to lead to dangerous sites than they did six months ago whilst MSN's and Yahoo's results however, send users to more risky sites than in May.

So should we worry? I don't think so, it's more about being aware - overall less than 5% of sites were considered unsafe and most of these were from sponsored results. It also depends on how well protected your computer is as to how much notice you feel you can take of the results.

See the report summary for more details.

Labels: browsers, searchengines, security

Why you should listen to Matt Cutts

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Anyone that owns a website and is responsible for the content should check Matt Cutt's blog occasionally.

He's also known as 'Google Guy' and regularly posts really useful information on how to stay on the right side of Google.

As someone who works within the GooglePlex, he really knows what he's talking about so you are wise to take note.

A good summary on some of his earlier posts can be found at SEO EggHead.

Pearls of wisdom include:

- Use dashes rather than underscores in URLs
- Don't use hidden, or nearly-hidden text
- Use user-friendly URLs
- Use the nofollow tag

More google info can also be found at their webmaster central blog.

Labels: blogging, searchengines, seo

Sitemaps: Google, MSN and Yahoo unite

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Sitemaps are the easiest way for webmasters to tell search engines about the content of their website. A sitemap can either be for site visitors' benefit, in which case an HTML or similar file is created or for the search engines in which case an XML needs to be made. This XML file contains information about each page on the site - the URL, how important the page is relative to the other site pages, when the page was last updated and how often it usually changes.

By providing this information, search engines are able to crawl your site more effectively. There are still no guarantees that your pages will be included though!

A new protocol "Sitemap 0.90" standardises the way that sitemap information is presented, so rather than having sitemap.xml for Google, URLlist.txt for Yahoo! etc... search engines will support the one format. Google, Yahoo! and MSN have all agreed to support this protocol.

I still recommend GSiteCrawler for creating your sitemap - it's simple to use and even automates uploading your newly created sitemap to your website and pinging Google Sitemaps!

Labels: linking, searchengines, seo

Another Google Page Rank update

Monday, October 09, 2006

So, it looks like there's recently been another Google PageRank update. And fewer people seem to care, which I see as a positive sign. PageRank is only one aspect of how well your website can be found or ranked, and I feel that having a well-designed site, that meets with coding and legal requirements, and appeals to site visitors by providing content written for them is more important than scrabbling for PageRank.

However, PageRank can be a useful indicator of a site's authority - the higher the number out of 10, the more important Google views it. To see your live pagerank, see http://livepr.raketforskning.com/ which shows your current pagerank at 199 Google Datacentres.

Labels: searchengines, seo

Free search engine optimisation tools

Sunday, August 13, 2006

SEO Chat has an amazing range of tools to help you optimise and analyse your website. What's more - they're free to use and tools are constantly being added. Explanations of each tool can be found on its page:

...is there any other tool you could possibly want?

Labels: resources, searchengines, seo, webdesign

eKstreme Domain Geographical Locator Review

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

I've just discovered a new toy!

The Domain Geographical Locator at eKstreme.com is an easy and brilliant way to find out where your backlinks come from.

As well as showing the TLD (top level domain e.g. COM or UK) of a backlink, the country where the site is hosted is also shown.

According to eKstreme, Google puts emphasis on the TLD in search results whereas MSN and Yahoo (probably) use the hosting country as their geographical guide.

To use this, just enter your URL into the search box and hit 'Localize domain'. You then get a list grouped by TLD of your backlinks. Clicking on the 'more' button will list all the backlinks with that TLD and where the site is hosted whilst clicking on the excel icon will download the list in, unsurprisingly, excel format.

You can click through on each sitename but you are only taken to the front page rather than where your link is. To find that out, just click on the Yahoo icon on the previous page.

I think the only thing missing is a visualisation of the data - for a quick overview this would be much easier than trying to absorb all the text data.

Oh, and it's free to use.

Labels: domains, searchengines

Search Engine Use is Becoming More Sophisticated

Friday, July 28, 2006

Fewer people use 1 word phrase in search engines according to OneStat.com.

Amsterdam - July 24 2006 - OneStat.com ( www.onestat.com ), the number one provider of real-time intelligence web analytics, today reported that most people use 2 word phrases in search engines. Of all the search phrases world wide, 28.91 percent of the people use 2 word phrases, 27.85 percent use 3 word phrases and 17.11 percent use 4 word phrases. Less and less people use now 1 keywordsince the last measurement in July 2005.

'Search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo can drive a lot of traffic to a web site. It is important that a webmaster or SEO expert knows what kind of search phrases they have to use to drive more traffic to a site. Our software is the ultimate solution to measure search phrases and search phrases by search engine. Each webmaster or SEO expert can analyse what kind of search engines the visitors use to find a web site,' said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat.com.

Labels: searchengines

How To Get Indexed In Google Search Fast Without Submitting To Google

Monday, July 03, 2006

Most new websites think that the only way to get indexed into Google search or any search engine is to submit their website.

Once a webmaster goes and submits there website into search engines their site normally will be placed on hold. Google calls this the Sand Box affect. This can take months before your website shows in search index.

Do you have months to wait and see if your website shows in Search Engines?

If your answer is no than I have a 4 step easy process that will get your website into Google Search index in some times less than a week and you never submit it to Google.

Read on to find out how.

1) The first thing you want to do is forget about submitting your site directly to the big engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo. This is the old, slow way.

2) Now the next thing you want to do is look online for free online directories and websites to submit your site to. Just type Free Search Engine Friendly Directory List into your favorite search engine. This should give you a good number of websites to start with.

3) Once you have found a list of free directories you can start submitting or suggesting your website. Be sure to place your website into the proper related categories. Try to look for directories that have a page rank of at least 2 to 3 to submit to first. They hold a bit more weight with Google Search than a 0 to 1 page rank sites.

4) Be sure to use a text link with your keyword phrases when submitting rather than just your URL. This will help search engines determine what keywords to index your website under.

That's it. It is that simple. Google Search and other search engines will find your website link while crawling websites and directories already indexed. Search engines look at this a vote for your site. Because most directories are human edited and if your link has been approved, engines like Google Search realize that your website must have some value.

Note: Not all directories will approve your site submission so you want to continue to find new link possibilities as this is also an excellent way to build link popularity.

Search Engines are always looking to supply new, fresh valued content websites to their update index, increasing the quality of their query results.

There are other things you can do to create links to your website like forum marketing, article submission and press releases but submitting your website to directories works just as well and free directories are all over the net.

About the author
This article was written by Wayne Hagerty certified Search Engine Internet Marketing professional with years of SEO experience. Discover how to increase traffic to your website. FREE Internet marketing news, and more. Succeed online, visit us today at: http://www.pixseo.com

Labels: linking, searchengines

How can RSS improve my Search Engine Rankings?

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

There are three powerful reasons why content from RSS Feeds is irresistible bait for search engine spiders.

1. RSS Feeds Provide Instant Themed Content?

There are several publishers of RSS feeds that are specific to a particular theme. Since the feed is highly targeted, it could contain several keywords that you want to rank highly for. Adding these keywords to your pages helps Google tag your site as one with relevant content.

2. RSS Feeds Provide Fresh, Updated Content

RSS feeds from large publishers are updated at specific intervals. When the publisher adds a new article to the feed, the oldest article is dropped.These changes are immediately effected on your pages with the RSS feed as well. So you have fresh relevant content for your visitors every hour or day.

3. RSS Feeds Result in More Frequent Spidering

One thing I never anticipated would happen as a result of adding an RSS feed to my site was that the Googlebot visited my site almost daily. To the Googlebot, my page that had the RSS feed incorporated into it was as good as a page that was being updated daily, and in its judgement, was a page that was worth visiting daily. What this means to you, is that you will have your site being indexed more frequently by the Googlebot and so any new pages that you add to your site will be picked up much faster than your competitors.

4. Better Search Engine Rankings with RSS

RSS is the latest craze in online publishing. But what exactly is RSS? RSS or Rich Site Syndication is a file format similar to XML, and is used by publishers to make their content available to others in a format that can be universally understood. RSS allows publishers to "Syndicate" their content through the distribution of lists of hyperlinks.

It has actually been around for a while, but with the advent of spam filters and online blogging, it is fast becoming the choice of ezine publishers who want to get their message across to their subscribers. However, not much attention has been given to the advantages RSS provides for search engine optimization.

5. Why Search Engines Love RSS?

Many SEO experts believe that sites optimized around themes, or niches, where all pages correspond to a particular subject or set of keywords, rank better in the search engines. For example, if your website is designed to sell tennis rackets, your entire site content would be focused around tennis and tennis rackets.

6. Search engines like Google seem to prefer tightly-themed pages.

But where does RSS figure in all this? RSS feeds, usually sourced from newsfeeds or blogs, often correspond to a particular theme or niche. By using highly targeted RSS feeds, you can enhance your site's content without having to write a single line on your own. It's like having your own content writer - writing theme-based articles for you - for free!

by Devendra Jaiswal
The author is a regular contributor to halfvalue.com where more information and other more accessories is available. Visit us:
halfvalue.com
halfvalue.co.uk
lookbookstores.com

Labels: rss, searchengines

Your Actual Number of Google Backlinks

Thursday, May 18, 2006

I've just discovered how to find out a more accurate number of backlinks* to your site that Google holds. If you just type your domain name into the Google search box, you'll only be shown a few backlinks but if you type the following code, you'll see a much higher, and more likely, number.

@:http //"yourdomain com"

or

@:http //"www yourdomain com"

* backlink = inbound link to your site. The more backlinks, the more popular your site is.

Labels: linking, searchengines, webdesign

Website analysis using Google advanced search

Thursday, March 30, 2006

As well as finding stuff, Google can be a useful website analysis tool:

Indexed pages in your site - site:www.yourdomain.com
Pages that refer to your site's URL - allinurl:www.yourdomain.com
Pages that link to your site - link:www.yourdomain.com
The current cache of your site - cache:www.yourdomain.com
Information Google has about your site - info:www.yourdomain.com
Pages that are similar to your site - related:www.yourdomain.com

Labels: searchengines

Where to submit your website to

Friday, March 24, 2006

Following up my post about how to generate and submit sitemaps to Google and Yahoo!, I was asked where to submit your sites in general. I wholeheartedly recommend the list below, and of course, there are many more places - just don't fall for the "Submit Your Site to 80,000 Search Engines". Firstly ask whether there really are that many search engines and secondly, if so, what sort of quality are they and finally, do you want to be associated with them?

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

Yahoo! (Registration required)
http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

MSN
http://search.msn.co.uk/docs/submit.aspx
http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

ExactSeek Family (E-mail address required)
http://www.exactseek.com/add.html

About.com
See http://a-zlist.about.com/ and contact the guide directly. Tends to be non-commercial sites only.

Labels: linking, searchengines, seo

Internet Marketing and the Small Business

Thursday, March 16, 2006

The internet marketing landscape has changed quite a bit in the past 3 years and has further defined itself further in the past 12 months. With Google raising $4 Billion from new stock offerings in 2005 we will see more changes underway over the next 3 years. Unfortunately, I fear the small business is going to be left out in the cold in this process. Perhaps a better statement would be that the small business has already been left out in the cold.

This writing is certainly not designed to provide a solution to the growing problem. More so, it has been written to raise the awareness and acknowledge the difficulty small business has on the web. Certainly the small business does not receive any sympathy from the major search engines in their quest to provide quality information for those that are searching the web.

Let's review how the situation has been created. We have to make the assumption a small business does not have the financial resources for a proper advertising campaign on the web (even though it is less costly than offline advertising) and they do not have the man-power to devote time for the non-costly methods of marketing. Yes, I have distinguished between advertising and marketing.

Marketing is the process or technique of promotion, selling and distributing a product or service. Advertising is to make your product or service publicly known an announcement to call public attention by emphasizing qualities to arouse a desire to purchase.

Can the small business market at no cost? Yes, absolutely, however, the issue at hand is not expenditure but time. Time they are already spending on their business and do not have more time to spend on non-costly marketing methods on the web. What are these non-costly but time-consuming marketing methods? This would include but not limited to writing articles, maintaining newsletters, maintaining email addresses with auto-responders, submitting their articles through a variety of methods and resources over the web. Let's not forget standard search engine optimization issues and HTML coding. Oh, the best one of all is 'natural' link exchanging as defined by Google. If you have not already been there, manual link exchanging is a time consuming process even if you do decide to spend money on lost cost services that can assist. You cannot use 'link farms' as that is against search engine policies and will cause your listing to be down graded.

In order to reach top ranking on the search engines it all boils down to links (or link exchanges, link popularity) and content. Inbound only links better than reciprocal inks. Writing content for your site, articles, news, newsletter is time consuming to properly write a 500 word article and the submission process is not easy either. Some services and software exists to help you in your submission of articles, but just like link exchange services they can only do so much. Could you create a blog and place your articles, certainly. However, you can see the 'things to do' list only keeps growing for the small business owner.

Could they engage in pay-per-click campaigns? Sure, however, you now are entering in a financial issue and one that does not necessarily provide a great return on investment. Pay-Per-Click campaigns are good as an overall marketing strategy and if you use it in combination with a variety of other internet and search engine marketing methods. On its own it cannot provide the returns the small business is seeking. Searching the key phrases (no longer key words) and understanding which ones to select is equally not an easy task. It requires due diligence, research and analysis to understand the information and make an informed decision. Assuming they can get past this part of the pay-per-click process, the next phase is writing the pay-per-click ad headline and content. Unfortunately we see many small businesses flocking to pay-per-click advertising in hopes of a quick return. They might as well go to a casino!

There is indeed another problem associated with Pay-Per-Click campaigns. The ratio of exposures to hits is equally a problem when you are supposed to keep a certain percentage ratio between the two. When search engines like Google are allowing your ad to be placed on other websites with their Google Adsense, your exposures are indeed going up, however, how many people actually click on the links? From Google's perspective probably a lot, but from the individual advertiser's perspective this is not necessarily a good situation. Google is now dictating what key phrases you 'should' bid on and ultimately consolidating the bidding war into small key phrase groups and larger number of advertisers.

Lastly, at least for this writing, but not necessarily on the subject, is time to see revenues. There is no doubt that it takes months for a website to propagate through the Internet. This is by no means a short-term situation and expectations need to be set accordingly. Just because you have a website does not mean that you will see rewards anytime soon. Once again we get into the dilemma of time resources to do the necessary internet marketing work in order to see benefits 6 - 9 months later.

Requirements set by the search engines as they seek to provide quality responses to those that are searching are making it increasingly difficult for small businesses to compete on the web. So, who will end up on the first page or in the top position of searches for key phrases? Unless something changes and the small business is given a chance, it will be the larger corporations that have the man power time and the money.

About the Author

Melih Oztalay is the CEO of SmartFinds Internet Marketing. A internet marketing firm specializing in turn key marketing solutions for businesses including research, analysis, planning an strategy. Please visit SmartFinds at http://www.hsfideas.com

Labels: biz, internet, ppc, searchengines

Will Duplicate Content Filters Destroy Article Marketing?

Monday, March 06, 2006

Rumors are circulating that recent search engine updates are threatening to penalize web sites carrying articles by niche industry experts due to wide distribution and use of those articles on multiple sites. Not so.

Duplicate content filtering confuses everyone. It is absolutely not new and has been in effect for years, but is constantly refined in search engine algorithms to filter out abuses. Any suggestion that article marketing is targeted by the search engines as duplicate content is an understandable misunderstanding. Duplicate content filters look for abuses, not legitimate multiple uses in appropriate forums.

What Are "Duplicate Content Filters"?
Duplicate content filters were first employed when people began setting up precisely mirrored domains without variation on multiple domain names to increase visibility. That ridiculous method worked to increase ranking until the search engines began de-listing one of the duplicate sites of those employing this technique. Usually it was the older domain that stayed in the index and the newer mirrored site was de-listed.

About the same time, unethical thieves began outright stealing entire sites and placing them on new domains to rank equally as well as the original owner for competitive phrases. Once the traffic was there, they sent them to their own product or affiliate pages. That worked for awhile, but the duplicate content filters nixed that as well and protected the orginal site in rankings.

Then sites began putting up "landing pages" and "doorway pages" for SEO purposes with minor keyword variations in headlines and body text on multiple pages on one site with very closely related text with minor keyword swaps to rank well for blue widgets, red widgets, purple widgets. No text varied but the color or brand or, in the case of travel sites, city and resort names. So search engines extended the duplicate content filter to include that ruse and filter it out.

Continually refining these duplicate content filters is an ongoing effort meant only to beat search engine spammers. Search engines don't set about penalizing legitimate uses of duplicate content - such as press releases distribution and reproduced articles by experts on specialized topics used widely on niche sites and blogs.

Legitimate Duplicate Content
There are dozens of legitimate reasons to have the same article on multiple specialty sites and even some good reasons within a single domain. Blogging software actually creates a duplicate page for every post which is deposited in an archive. That blog contains duplicate content until each post rolls off the bottom of the main page. AP and Reuters news stories run on hundreds of news sites. Experts, pundits and commentators within niche industries legitimately syndicate their content to appear widely across dozens of niche sites within their industry.

Many sites now put up duplicate "printer friendly" versions of pages without penalty, but it's always a good idea on the same domain name to post robots metatags telling them not to index duplicate pages. Printing pages or variations on landing pages used for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising should each be tagged by < name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> so you needn't worry about being penalized.

Will Article Marketing Still Work?
Articles distributed for use by other sites appear on many sites with surrounding themed content, varied site navigation and differing internal links. Articles rank well if they match the theme of the site they are used on. The best ranked sites usually rank better for that article. There is currently no penalty for using articles which appear on several sites. If this were the case, hundreds of major industry portals would be severely penalized.

If you search for article titles in quotes, you'll see them repeated everywhere across the web. Try a search for "Blogging Chocolate Purses" and see the extensive use of that article. I first posted it on my blog and my blog post ranks just below a major search engine portal for that article title. No penalty there, Pandia.com is just better ranked overall than my blog and they are legitimately using that article with my permission.

Why Article Marketing Is So Powerful
Article marketing is something I recommend to ALL SEO clients to gain valuable one-way inbound links. How much better is an article - with 700 to 1200 words displaying your expertise than a so-called "reciprocal link" gained by begging for it by spamming, er I mean, sending mass unsolicited emails to unrelated sites? (I'm stunned that anyone still uses that technique as it seems to me to be the equivalent of begging for links on street corners.)

It is inconceivable that experts writing on specialized topics will ever be penalized by search engines because many niche sites reproduce their expert advice & commentary in newsletters, web sites and blogs. Search engines would face an insurmountable problem in flitering legitimate expertise and commentary simply because it is popular and made available for use on multiple industry blogs and niche sites.

Your articles are no less valuable to the web community because they are syndicated and that appreciation is displayed clearly when they are used extensively across multiple web sites. "Write on", article marketers!

About the Author:Mike Banks Valentine blogs on Search Engine developments from http://RealitySEO.com and can be contacted for ethical SEO work at http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm He runs web content distribution site at: http://Publish101.com.

Labels: searchengines, webdesign

How to get your site indexed in Google and Yahoo

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

When you've got a wonderful website, you want the world to see it! Submitting to Google, Yahoo and MSN means that your site will show up in the listings at some point, but how do you tell the search engines which pages to list?

Firstly, use robots.txt - this states which parts of your website you DO NOT want to share. You can also use the robots meta tag in your web pages, but not all engines use this yet. For more information, see www.robotstxt.org/ and www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm.

Secondly, create a sitemap, which links to all of your pages and link to this from your index page. You don't have to just list all the links - it is for your visitors benefit too. For an example, see our sitemap at www.littlefishwebdesign.com/sitemap.htm.

Finally, create a Google and Yahoo sitemap, for the search engines benefit. You will need to create a Google Sitemap account (http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/) and Yahoo account (http://edit.europe.yahoo.com/config/eval_register?.intl=uk&new=1) to be able to submit your sitemaps. To create a Google Sitemap, I thoroughly recommend SOFTplus GSiteCrawler found at http://johannesmueller.com/gs/. There is a settings wizard, which walks you through the whole process and you can even choose for your completed sitemap to be uploaded to your website, and Google to be alerted.

The "URL list for export" function of GSiteCrawler means that you can then generate a text-only list of all your site's pages, ready to upload to Yahoo. This is a slightly more manual task than the Google Sitemap, but still a fantastic time-saving tool, as you don't have to type out each of your pages into a list. To submit your sitemap to Yahoo, upload the file to your website and then go to http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request and fill in the location of your sitemap file.

Of course, there are no guarantees that Google and Yahoo will index all your pages, or rank your site as highly as you would like, but at least using the sitemap method, you are giving your hard work a fighting chance to get noticed.

Labels: linking, resources, searchengines, webdesign

Check your website popularity with us!

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Link popularity checking is a quick and easy way to see how "visible" your website is on the Internet. It is a measure of the total number of links that a search engine has found for your website. Obviously this will change between search engines, so the top engines are queried for a collective result.

To use the link popularity tool, go to our resources page and complete your URL in the form of www.yourdomain.co.uk, and if there is a competitor you want to compare yourself with, enter their domain as well. Next, complete the access code given to you and finally press the 'generate' button.

Marketleap provide the data for this tool, and will give you a comparison table for where you stand on the internet, from a limited presence to the "900 lb gorilla" category! It will also collect your data over time, so you can see how well your web promotion is going!

Labels: linking, resources, searchengines

ROR Your Website - Help Search Engines Get Smarter

Friday, December 30, 2005

What is ROR?

ROR (Resources of a Resource) is an exciting new website content description tool and format. It makes it very easy to describe the content, objects, and structure of your website so search engines and other web applications can better find and understand your information.

For example if you are selling products, ROR enables you to document your product names, descriptions, prices, images, availability, affiliate programs, etc. Or if your site or blog provides information on a given topic, it allows you to describe how this information is organized (sitemap, topics, categories, new information, archive, blogroll, etc). ROR also provides terms for documenting objects such as contacts, articles, newsletter, feeds, images, audio, links, reviews, privacy policy, copyrights, and more.

ROR information can be easily added to your website by adding a ROR File called ror.xml. To create the file ROR provides templates and examples. It also provide a ROR File Editor, which will extract information from your website and allow you to describe it further. Larger websites can also generate ROR files from their databases.

Why Describe?

But why is it important to describe your website? Well, consider this phrase: "We offer a 10% discount on all our products until Mother's Day". While these words mean a lot to your visitors, they unfortunately won't mean much to a search engine or shopping search engine. Language is extremely complex and it will take time even for Google to elevate search to such levels of sophistication. And that's just one language, English.

So for now, to communicate your product information to shopping search engines you typically need to provide a feed (a machine-readable description of your products), and re-submit that feed to each engine each time the information changes. And to make matters worse, none of these feeds have the same format, so you also have to learn each format.

Another Approach

ROR suggests a better approach. Since search engines already come to your site to read text information about your products, it makes sense to also read additional information like prices, image URLs, discounts, etc. This way, you only change the information once, in your ROR file, and that's it. Product information is just one example but it illustrates this issue rather well.

ROR information can also be displayed on your website in a generic fashion so visitors can quickly and easily find information, without the need to re-learn or remember the structure and navigation of each website they visit. For that purpose, ROR provides an Info Button. The button reads the information directly from your ROR file.

ROR simply makes a lot of sense! It's powerful, easy, and very flexible.

ROR your Website, Spread the Word
You can get your ROR file at http://www.rorweb.com/, it only takes a few minutes for a basic file. You can always add more information later. You can also help spread the word by adding this article on your website, or a link to it.
Happy RORing!

The ROR Team
http://www.rorweb.com/

Labels: searchengines

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How to get your site indexed in Google and Yahoo

Check your website popularity with us!

ROR Your Website - Help Search Engines Get Smarter

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