Entries Tagged 'Search Engines' ↓
March 13th, 2010 — HTML, Search Engines
Author: RKD Unger
10 Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tips for HTML designers Article by Rkd Unger: www.internet-marketing-australia.com
Web design and SEO component
Search engine optimisation has been a hot topic for a while. Many owners understand that without professional SEO service their investments in websites are likely to fail.
It is typical though to see a professionally designed pages that miss or ignore the SEO component.
Web designers have plenty of things to take care of or worry about.
Static or dynamic, ASP or PHP, HTML or XHTML, browser compatibility – this is just a very short list of problems they face.
Being busy with their primary tasks web designers often miss search engine issues.
That can be a primary reason for many websites and web pages not to appear in search results at all.
Although SEO should be performed by specialists, some initial efforts can be applied during the web design stage.
10 Tips for Web Designers
1.Do not miss the Title tag. Although it is optional, it has a maximum weight for search engines. SEO specialists spend hours researching and creating good titles. Do your client a favor – if SEO is not budgeted for make sure that every page you work on has a meaningful title. 2.Do not miss DESCRIPTION meta tag. All meta tags are optional. Be aware that description is second important SEO issue. Try to match it to title.
3.Make sure that title and description are located within HEAD.
4.Do not use dynamic pages if you can. The project architecture may dictate usage of PHP, ASP etc. However search engines are reluctant to index them.
5.JScript is fun to use but it makes it harder for search engines to understand the content of the page. If you need just a menu highlight try to use style instead of script.
6.Pages with Flash are difficult to optimise for search engines. How about web sites that are built on Flash? They impress visitors. However how do visitors find such websites?
7.Utilise style sheets. Most of modern pages use style sheets. Very few utilise them effectively. That is why web pages are overloaded with HTML attributes. That makes them heavier and slower in load.
8.Search engine look for text – not images. If possible use text rather than image.
9.Text of the page should be at least 250 words. Search engines do not score pages with just a few sentences.
10.Text of the page shouldn’t be very lengthy. To make search engines happy stick with the page size of 15KB – including images.
About the author: RKD is the founder of http://www.internet-marketing-australia.com. He is the author of IMOR/SEOR methodology for search engine analysis of web sites.
Originally posted 2005-03-22 19:42:59. Republished by Old Post Promoter
March 4th, 2010 — Search Engines
So you heard about someone stressing the importance of the robots.txt file, or noticed in your website’s logs that the robots.txt file is causing an error, or somehow it is on the very top of the top visited pages, or, you read some article about the death of the robots.txt file and about how you should not bother with it ever again. Or maybe you never heard of the robots.txt file but are intrigued by all that talk about spiders, robots and crawlers. In this article, I will hopefully make some sense out of all of the above.
There are many folks out there who vehemently insist on the uselessness of the robots.txt file, proclaiming it obsolete, a thing of the past, plain dead. I disagree. The robots.txt file is probably not in the top ten methods to promote your get-rich-fast affiliate website in 24 hours or less, but still plays a major role in the long run.
First of all, the robots.txt file is still a very important factor in promoting and maintaining a site, and I will show you why. Second, the robots.txt file is one of the simple means by which you can protect your privacy and/or intellectual property. I will show you how.
Let’s try to figure out some of the lingo.
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Originally posted 2005-11-17 13:29:39. Republished by Old Post Promoter
March 3rd, 2010 — Search Engines
When Yahoo dropped Google I started paying more attention to the visits from Slurp. Fewer than 200 hits were reported during the nightly visits. Slurp has steadily increasing, last night it was much closer to Googlebot in pages touched if not amount text.
Googlebot (Google) 2793 85.73 MB
Inktomi Slurp 2153 33.50 MB
Oddly the two searchbots seem to arrive within minutes of each other be it 2:00 a.m. or 6:00 a.m.
Originally posted 2004-03-07 03:33:26. Republished by Old Post Promoter
March 2nd, 2010 — Search Engines
Posting a link to a John Dvorak article on search engines is an exercise in nostalgia as much as anything. Back when I read the computer press he was usually entertaining. Wrongheaded sometimes but that was better than the deadly dull columnists, shills really, who had to pretend this or that tedious thing was important. Mostly because the producers of those things were major advertisers.
Not all is lost: A recent issue of MIT’s Technology Review details some of the new approaches to searching, including the unique clustering methodology employed by Mooter (www.mooter.com). Instead of a list of search results, you get clusters not dissimilar from those found at the quirky Kartoo (www.kartoo.com).
The search engine mentioned in the article—and one I’ve been toying with—is Teoma (www.teoma.com), ironically now owned by Ask Jeeves. It often outperforms Google in accuracy and in putting exactly what you want at the top of the results list. Some of this may have to do with Google’s abandonment of its ranking methodology because of the emergence of redundant cross-linking, which is something many outsiders blame on nearly 5 million slaphappy bloggers and their so-called blogrolls.
Search Engine Mania
Originally posted 2004-03-31 15:46:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter
February 28th, 2010 — Search Engines, Spam, Scams, Weblogging, Website
This $75 program is one the reasons I no longer use any stats program that can be seen by search engines on my websites.
[Program name omitted] is a … mass referrer spammer, which means that it will make a connection to a buttload of sites of your choosing with any referrer URL and User-Agent that you specify. This accomplishes several things. Firstly, it generates webmaster traffic from webmasters checking their referral statistics.
Yep, you might get a visit from me. If your traffic is really low another visitor might inspire a moment’s false optimism. That certainly won’t make me turn to you for mortgage information, buy the secret of untold wealth from you, use your dating service or get you an extra click on a banner ad. Seeing you aren’t a friend I’ll just close that Firefox tab and move on.
Secondly, it boosts your link popularity and thereby your Google PR, because a lot of sites have public referral stats with linked entries. [Program name omitted] operates on textfiles with URL-lists, and a textfile of 3047 active blog websites which you can use to start getting free traffic and PR right away is included!
I’m sure at least one of my sites is on that list. I used to run Refer there and like many webmasters made the stats available to anyone who wanted to look. That was how I learned about referrer spamming. It took less than a month to get all trace of those bogus referrals out of Google.
Even now “thehostingnet.com” sends a bunch of referral spam to that site. They aren’t getting an iota of Google PR from doing that. But it no more harms me than it does them a lick of good.
If you run a web statistics package ideally you keep it out of your server’s web accessible areas. If you can’t block the subdirectory in your robots.txt. You might want to password protect it as well.
Once you are listed as a site to be sent referrer spam I don’t think you’ll ever fall out of the lists. But you can keep the spamming from having any effect.
Originally posted 2004-09-03 11:53:21. Republished by Old Post Promoter
February 24th, 2010 — Search Engines
Author: Michael Rock
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to leave some code in your web site to tell the search engine spider crawlers to make your site number one? Unfortunately a robots.txt file or robots meta tag won’t do that, but they can help the crawlers to index your site better and block out the unwanted ones.
First a little definition explaining:
Search Engine Spiders or Crawlers – A web crawler (also known as web spider) is a program which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine, that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches.
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Originally posted 2005-05-14 18:42:51. Republished by Old Post Promoter
February 22nd, 2010 — Search Engines
This morning I saw a search engine referral that I couldn’t quite decode. It was from Yahoo and had something to do with sexuality. So I clicked on the link. I found myself at Yahoo’s. Edifying Spectacle’s sexuality page of contents was at the top of the unpaid for URLs. No amount of self-flattery would convince me that I’d be the first site listed on Yahoo for sexuality. Then I noticed that it was the 241st site. Yahoo displays “feminine men, gay sex life, problem of bisexuality, transgendered people” for the page. Don’t know what the searcher was looking for but he was really willing to dig down deep. Which is what many of the referrals to my site suggest.
Originally posted 2002-11-30 19:36:50. Republished by Old Post Promoter
February 21st, 2010 — Search Engines
There are many articles out there claiming to explain the Google sandbox. At least one is relevant and worth reading.
Google’s infamously and arguably mis-titled”Sandbox Effect” has been an observed phenomenon since early 2004. Although many continue to argue and debate the causes and effects of this unusual algorithmic element, there is virtually no debate on its existence. At one time, the best explanation of the sandbox was:
Read 2005 Analysis of Google’s Sandbox
Originally posted 2005-09-14 15:16:21. Republished by Old Post Promoter
February 21st, 2010 — Search Engines
A couple of days ago I wondered how having Zempt add a “listening to” line to my weblog entries would skew my search engine results. Since Google gulps in a whole page at a time whenever you add recently commented on lists or just other entries titles to the sideboards Google (or any search engine other that an RSS engine like Feedster) will mix it altogether in a maddeningly random stew.
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Originally posted 2003-09-20 19:12:54. Republished by Old Post Promoter
February 19th, 2010 — Search Engines
Author: Mel Strocen
By now, virtually every webmaster has heard or read that the major search engines are responsible for 80% or more of the traffic received by most web sites and that most searchers never look beyond the first 20 – 50 search results. Not surprisingly, an entire industry devoted to search engine ranking and search engine optimization (SEO) has sprung up to capitalize on these well known facts.
Tens of thousands of web sites compete to achieve top ranking for their chosen keywords and keyword phrases. We’ve published numerous articles by various SEO experts on linking strategies, optimizing meta tags and page content, and relevant page content. And, undoubtedly, we’ll publish many more. Achieving a top ranking for a particular keyword or phrase is a major accomplishment, but the sad fact is that most web sites will never come close to reaching a top 10, a top 30, or even a top 100, listing in any major search engine.
Is it possible to be listed in the top 10 – 30 search results of a major search engine? Yes, possible, just not very likely for the average web site. It’s a lot like playing the lottery and with the same appeal. Get your site in the top 10 search results and the payoffs are big – you just need to knock out a few million competitors.
THE RISE OF PAY-PER-CLICK
The difficulty in achieving a top ranking for a free site listing has in recent years given rise to the pay-per-click search engine phenomena. Overture’s singular success with this model has resulted in hundreds of search engines jumping on the pay-per-click bandwagon. Pay-per-click is a great idea and taps right into the frustrated webmaster/site owner market. Many site owners simply do not want to be bothered with checking keyword density, tweaking their page content, fiddling with their meta tags and undertaking linking campaigns.
With pay-per-click, you get the site ranking you can afford. A simple, understandable concept. If money isn’t a problem, the PPC system is hard to beat.
Most experts would probably recommend combining search engine optimization with PPC for maximizing traffic. And, there you have it – the two dominant methods for driving targeted visitors to your web site. Dominant, but probably irrelevant to the vast majority of site owners and webmasters who don’t have the time to learn the ever-changing art of SEO or the budget for PPC’s and SEO firms.
What should be relevant is how to get traffic to your site without breaking the bank or having to earn a degree in SEO techniques. Where it comes from should be secondary. Don’t limit your traffic building efforts to just a few of the majors like Google, Yahoo, Inktomi and Overture. The top 8 or 10 search engines may be popular but that doesn’t mean that your site will reap the benefits.
Here are several reasons why:
1. Sometimes the numbers work against you. Another billion pages added to Google or AlltheWeb are NOT going to help the average site owner – they are just going to bury the needle – your website – deeper in the haystack. And search traffic is only important, if your website can be found.
2. The major search engines cater primarily to searchers not webmasters. Why? Because more search traffic means more revenue and there are far more searchers than webmasters.
3. Even PPC engines deliver more than top 50 search results. That means unless you’re a high bidder, your website may still not be seen by many.
>From a webmaster’s perspective what you should be looking for in a search engine is the right balance of search traffic and understandable site listing/ranking options. Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask Jeeves have massive traffic, but you need to evaluate your chances for having your web site added and then ranked well. You also need to determine if a search engine is more focused on revenue generation through ads, paid inclusion and Sponsored listings than they are in catering to your concerns about where your web site appears.
More specifically, when evaluating any engine regardless of size or traffic, you should consider the following factors:
1. Free Site Listings A few years ago, you could submit your site to almost any search engine, small or large, for free. But times have changed. Today, even many second tier engines have PPC or paid inclusion programs, and free submissions, where offered, are often given little attention. This ties right into the second feature you should be looking for in a search engine. 2. Indexing Speed The usual pitch is that free listings can take a month or more to be added (with some SE’s, never is more likely), but a paid listing will be added within 48 hours to a week. Does this make sense? Most search engines don’t manually review site submissions so whether a submission is free or paid shouldn’t affect indexing speed. Slow indexing for free site submissions is most often nothing more than a deliberate ploy to get your money.
3. Ranking Options Look for a search engine that offers some clues on how to improve your site ranking, short of emptying your wallet. Few engines reveal all the factors they use in ranking sites but knowing where the emphasis is (content, link popularity, meta tags, etc.) can be enough to point you in the right direction. There are also a handful of engines and directories that offer innovative listing options that give your website a much better chance of being seen.
4. Quality Searches Important to site owners and searchers alike. When quality sites are buried in a sea of second rate listings, no one benefits.
5. Traffic If you want your website seen, the traffic a search engine attracts is important, but don’t be too quick to write off smaller, up and coming engines. Not too long ago both Google and Overture were considered long shots in the search engine wars. Also, keep in mind that top ranking in an engine that receives a few million searches per month may be more important to you than no ranking in an engine that receives millions of searches per day.
6. Paid Listing Options: Look for paid listing options that offer more than fast inclusion in a database. With PPC, you get what you pay for, but with paid inclusion, you should receive more than you would with a free listing.
If you’re not familiar with any search engines other than the big players, check out FreeWebSubmission.com (http://www.freewebsubmission.com) where you can find a list of the 50 top search engines that still offer free site listings. Engines are ranked by their Alexa rating which indicates their user popularity. Here’s a list of the top 10 from FWS with current Alexa rankings:
1. Google – 5 2. Lycos – 44 3. AltaVista – 64 4. About – 86 5. Open Directory – 157 6. AlltheWeb – 215 7. ExactSeek – 1,999 8. ScrubTheWeb – 2,483 9. What U Seek – 2,868 10. SearchHippo – 2,905
Some other engines and directories worth considering in your promotion efforts are Gimpsy (http://www.gimpsy.com/), RoList (http://www.rolist.com), SitesOnDisplay (http://www.sitesondisplay.com) and National Directory (http://www.nationaldirectory.com).
About the author: Mel Strocen is CEO of the Jayde Online Network of websites. The Jayde network currently consists of 12 websites, including ExactSeek.com (http://www.exactseek.com) and SiteProNews.com (http://www.sitepronews.com).
Originally posted 2004-08-30 16:21:35. Republished by Old Post Promoter