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…

… 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.

You’ve probably seen the news about Viacoms lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infingement. Well,  everyone new that was coming and it will be a test case that will  be very interesting.

But I really do have some doubts about Google… If you know anything about the internet and search engines, you know that Google is the major player and has been for a while. However, whereas just a couple of short years ago Google was a free service, just like YouTube, Google has now morpehd into a multi, multi billion dollar advertising system with a front-end that still appears to be free search engine results.

The truth is far different from that though, as far as I can see…

Monsters Spawned

Adwords; Pay Per Click is the first child, Son Of Google. It generates billions of dollars in advertising revenue for G by allowing people to bid on keywords.

Adsense; the Ugly Sister. Allows me or you to show advertisers Adwords adds contextually on our web pages and share in the profits with G.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think these are great ideas. But both have become monsters in their own right. It seems that G is unable stop spamming and its attempts to do so invariably hurt real businesses when they get dropped from the SERPS or are forced to bid high on keywords because of low quality scores.

Google is all about relevence, at least that’s what they claim. Yet they will be the first to admit that their SERPS quality is pretty bad a lot of the time. And, of course its a SPAM issue. Well, now SPAM comes in 3 flavours. SEO, PPC and Adsense. What’s your favorite?

So Google is in a constant mode of trying to control all its spam flavors, while making billions of dollars. There’s a saying that goes something like ‘If you need to control something then its out of control’…

I wonder if we could get some sort of recompense from Google whenever spam shows up in their SERPS or Adwords or Adsense related to our keywords. You know what its like when you see your website listed amongst a load of crud and spammy pages… Well, if Viacoms lawsuit is successful that’s going to be just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure some clever lawyer out in California will come up with a class action lawsuit.

And getting back to that lawsuit. I think its very strange that holier than though G can decide its OK for people to share copyrighted material online, but you can’t put up a web page that requires someones email address without paying, in some cases, outrageous financial penalties to G.

You can make money without doing evil… Hmmmm

On the subject of website linking and optimization, a really important element of your internal linking strategy will be your ‘standard’ html sitemap.

Not to be confused with your Google sitemap! If you checked out Revenge Of The Mininet you will know what I mean.

So here is a link to a very nice Java sitemap generator that you can download free and use to create a nice html sitemap for your website. Click on the picture/ box that says Site Mapping Tool and get started today!

Oh and Happy Independence Day!

I’ve been working on a project to increase Google page rank. While a neccessary part of this is to get relevant, inbound links to the website there is also another strategy that should be employed.

This is to contain the page rank within certain areas of the site at pass it, where necessary, to ther pages. While this sounds like a good plan, implementation can be tricky. Most websites have a pretty simple structure of internal links that are often not controlled much at all.

Most web savvy people know that you should only link out to other websites from certain pages so that you don’t ‘leak’ PR out of your site. But with a bit of thought, some javascript and a good old site map, you can control the flow of page rank internally too. Whats more, you can increase the page rank of your best keyword pages by directing it from pages of less importance fro within your site.

For a lot more info on this see Revenge Of The Mininet

Off page search engine optimization refers to links coming from other web pages and how those links are created. Not all links are created equal!

There are two types of incoming link;

Reciprocal Links This is where you put a link on your web page that links to another site and the other site puts a link on their site that links to you!

One Way Links These are links that only link either too you, which is very good and what you want. Or from you, which is not so good (for you).

On-page search engine optimization refers to all of the things that webmasters do to their pages to get the best possible search engine rankings. This would include, for example, ensuring that the best keyword or keyword phrases are used in the page title.

There are many on-page optimization factors that can be tweaked or adjusted to get your page ranked better and I’ll cover the main ones as we complete them in a real project.

When we talk about search engine optimization (SEO) we are talking about what is generally referred to as organic search results. This means the natural results from the search engines index (as opposed to paid for results).

So search engine optimization is the process of getting the best possible natural search engine ranking for your chosen keyword or keyprhrase.

This is probably one of the hottest topics on the web. Everybody wants to get good search engine rankings. Well, there are two areas that need to be addressed and I will cover both of them as they come up in projects. Anyway, they are;

1. Search Engine Optimization – SEO
2. Search Engine Marketing – SEM