Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category

After you’ve had your website up for a while or maybe if you want to do some competitor research there is a really useful function in the Google external keyword tool that you can use to look at the footprint of your website and see what Google thinks it’s about.

To find the Google external keyword tool just go to Google and search for ‘Google external keyword tool’ and it will be the first organic link at the top of the page. Click on that link and you get to the tool. The first thing to do is select the website content option, which is on the left side of the page.

Then enter the website domain name in the ‘enter a web page URL’ box. Check the box that says ‘include other pages’. Then click on get keyword ideas. The tool will run and it may take a few seconds before you see any results. When it’s finished scroll down a little bit and you’ll see a section that says ‘showing keywords grouped by these terms’.
Read the rest of this entry »

It seems a recent post at TechCrunch has created somewhat of a poo-storm in the search engine optimization space.

I have to agree that the thought of government trying to regulate search seems pretty darn ridiculous to me.

The anonymous author states ‘It’s now conventional wisdom that search engine optimization, representing the organic result sets on any search query, is more voodoo than science’. Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter is exploding at the moment and everyone is climbing on the bandwagon, blogging about its benefits etc, and you could be forgiven for thinking that this was the new easy way to online success.

In the real world, clients want to talk about search engines, search engine optimization or search engine marketing (Google Adwords / Pay-Per-Click).

Why? The current economic downturn is having an impact on businesses and with the majority of people now using Google (mainly) to find information on an all subjects across the board, many organizations are re-evaluating their online marketing and website strategy. It’s an area that clients in every market are asking for advice on.

Many are now concerned by their visibility to prospective customers. Businesses that previously saw a website as an online brochure are waking up to the fact that online they’re completely invisible to those searching online for the products and services that they offer. Not a good place to be at the best of times, but a business killer in a recession. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reading recently about some major newspapers requesting, and getting, tax breaks because they are failing in the current economy.

A tax cut has been approved in Washington state; I quote “Newspapers across the country have resorted to layoffs and other cost-cutting moves to deal with a wounded business model and a recession-fueled drop in advertising”

Read about tax breaks here

I really don’t get it. They are even blaming Google for their problems? I’ve been recently checking into advertizing rates for display and other types of ads in local papers and magazine here in Sarasota. They have got to be kidding! Sky high prices, with no way of really tracking results. And yet they are still failing?

I think most people see printed news as largely outdated and cumbersome.

This video post from Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand. I’m off to apply for a bail out too!

Well its been too long since I last posted but I’ve had so much going on and I had to put some things on the back burner. I recently had a problem with a malicious script on my WordPress blog and had to write a software utility to help me clean up the mess. I’m going to realease  the software as a FREE tool to help other webmasters  who need to do a cleanup job, bt before I do I need to fix a few minor bugs and finish the installer program. But here’s a brief demo video of the tool in action, so you can see what it does…

Some time ago I was lucky enough to get hold of an ebook called Revenge Of The Mininet by Michael Campbell. In that book and associated tools and utilities provided by search engine optimization guru Leslie Rhode was detailed ideas and strategies about how to control the flow of PageRank through your website.

I did some modifications to my Content Management System to do just that, specifically control the flow of PageRank exactly where I wanted it in my site and my customers sites and boy, it worked like a charm.

The option I chose back then was to modify the content management system to use javascript to redirect menu links. So I changed all the regular <a href links to javascript window.location. This has worked fine and served me well.

However, at the beginning of 2005 Google, Yahoo, MSN and some of the other major players introduced a new <a tag called rel=nofollow. This tag allows you to explicitly tell the search engine spider to either follow the link or not, which is what I had done with javascript code.

Now it’s all the rage to be ‘going natural’ with SEO and I’m thinking that it might be a better option to change the content management system back to regular <a links rather than javascript. I forgot to mention that the only way the search engine spiders currently crawl any of my sites modified in this way is via a site map, either a regular html site map or now xml site maps too.

So I’m going to try and find out if this is the way to go now before making any changes. Maybe I should stick to the old adage “if it aint broke, don’t fix it”?…

You may have noticed that your search engine results placement have moved around a bit recently. I know mine have and so have some of my customers.

Do we have to expect a larger ranking algorithm update? Will this change the ranking of your web pages in Google’s search results?

Here’s an overview of what I’ve noticed and what has been reported by webmasters in forums recently:

1. Some established websites that did not spam dropped out of Google’s index early March.
2. It seems to take much longer now until new websites get indexed by Google.
3. Rather less relevant results have received higher rankings because some relevant pages either dropped out of the index or lost some of their inbound links.
4. The Cache data doesn’t seem to be updated.

The site: and inurl: queries on Google that normally fluctuate for large websites now report the same numbers every day.

Changes like these are usually a clear indicator of an upcoming ranking algorithm update.

Is this really a ranking algorithm update?

Google engineer Matt Cutts denied that there are any major changes in the search results and that there was a ranking algorithm update on the way.

However, he wanted to investigate if and why the results change so much.

The observations of the webmasters in the forum might be normal changes that happen all the time. But the webmasters who discovered the changes are very web-savvy and they should be able to distinguish an anomaly from usual fluctuations.

I’ve heard on some of the paid search forums that it has to do with Google implementing more of it’s Latent Semantic Indexing algorithm. This makes sense of what I’ve seen recently and I’m in the process of updating some of my pages to see if that’s the case. If it is I’ll make another post.

Another alterantive is that Google is relying more and more on human reviewers to police the content of it’s index and make adjustments. This then brings a human element to the placement of your web page in the index. Here’s a link to a couple of excerpts of the reviewers guide.

This article states (near the bottom) that G has something like 10,000 human reviewers The plot thickens…

Now seeing as I’ve been on a bit of a rant against Google recently I’m going to end it by telling you about a couple of different kind of search engines that are known as Answer Engines.

Brainboost is a ‘Question answering engine that accepts natural language queries’ and it is the spawn of Answers.com, the ultimate answer engine, with quick accurate dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, bios, tech terms, news, sports, weather, and much more…

I’ve been using both and have been pretty impressed with the results. Of course, the content is provided by publishers that are affilited with Answers.com, so you ain’t gonna get loads of SPAM! I really like the Answers toolbar and popup. Try it and see what you think…

 maybe this will become the search engine of the future? Look out Google!

Rant over, finished no more…

If you’ve ever done any keyword research online you’ll know how tedious it can be. But we live in a competitive world and due diligence requires that we perform at least a basic analysis before we spend money right? And where do we go to do that? Well, a very large percentage of the population go to BIG G!

 Now, if I have a legitimate need to perform keyword analysis for either myself or a client either by hand or using decent automated tools, I expect to have access to the same system will take my money and yours. But alas, more irritants along the way because of, ahem, computer viruses or spyware… and of course the need to ‘protect our users’… Here’s one for your viewing pleasure…

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

You only have to type the captcha phrase into the box, but it’s bloody annoying! Particularly because it’s often almost impossible to read the captcha text!

Ah well…

I remember reading several articles last year about the death of SEO. The main point of these was that eventually Google will perfect its algorithms and search engine results will be accurate based solely on the content, which will be the most relevant.

Well, I expect that G would be the first to admit that we are a long way, years and years probably, away from that scenario. However, G has come a long way in its fight against search engine spam, making in less easy to force your web page to the top of the rankings without a lot of inbound one way links (it is still possible to do a Google bomb, but they usually disappear pretty quickly).

The most recent buzz is about Latent Semantic Indexing which is a new algorithm that has been developed and for which Google has a patent. The summary of the invention states;

‘An information retrieval system and methodology uses phrases to index, search, rank, and describe documents in the document collection. The system is adapted to identify phrases that have sufficiently frequent and/or distinguished usage in the document collection to indicate that they are “valid” or “good” phrases. In this manner multiple word phrases, for example phrases of four, five, or more terms, can be identified. This avoids the problem of having to identify and index every possible phrases resulting from the all of the possible sequences of a given number of words.’

I don’t know too much about the algorithm and how it works but its main focus is ensuring that the content of your pages, paragraph by paragraph are relevant and on topic. So it appears that G is fighting back against machine generated content and the duplicate content created private label rights articles.

You’ll be hearing a lot of buzz about this over the coming months and people will be devising new strategies to get sites with weak content to rank well. I will be maintaining the same search engine practices as always, for the time being at least. I will however be encouraging the deployment of a new model for web development and structure that incorporates blog pages within my standard web content management framework.