All About Google
June 15, 2008
If you read The Search Engine Showdown, you know Google is my favourite search engine. Why? Google always offers the most results for any given search (they currently have over 8 billion pages indexed), it’s faster than the Audi Quattro we test drove this morning, and 9 times out of ten, in my experience, all the front page results are relevant to my search. In fact, I usually find what I’m looking for within the first few sites listed. I also really respect the fact that two college kids started it (kinda like Abalone Designs!) and that those two college kids seem not to have forgotten where they came from. If you check out the images at Google’s press center (http:// www.google.com/press/images.html) and scroll down to the Everyday Life Inside Google section, you’ll get a feeling that life at Google is fun.
Google is the most used search engine on the web. In May, 2004, 36.8% of all searches on the web were done using Google. Also during that month, Google powered 54% of all searches done on the web (Read more about these figures here).
The Search Engine Showdown
June 8, 2008
If you’re anything like me, you have a favourite search engine and you’re loyal to it. You never use any others (which made this research difficult for yours truly), insist yours is the be-all and end-all and you even go so far as to deny any shortcomings it may have. But is your search engine truly the best? Inspired by a great article at the BBC News (BBC News: Search Wars), we decided to compare the major search engines. Here’s what we found.
We chose the search term “real estate fiji” because it’s a competitive industry and geographically specific. We also searched with the same phrase, misspelled to see if the search engine would suggest the correct spelling.
Initially loading the search page for Google is lightning fast.
The look is clean and easy to understand.
Search time was 0.15 seconds.
The search yielded 1,190,000 results.
All results on the first page were relevant.
Spellcheck was available.
Yahoo!
Initially loading the search page for Yahoo! is a little bit slower than Google, but still fast.
Search time was 0.18 seconds.
The search yielded 711,000 results.
Your Online Home-Based Business Can Lead To Search Engine Stress
June 3, 2008
As a member of several search engine optimization forums, I have recently noticed (especially since Yahoo recently decided to try their hand at competing with Google) that the stress level of many webmasters has gone way up. This applies not only to webmasters involved in Internet-based home businesses, but to webmasters in general.
Additionally, it seems that many people that are in the business of search engine optimization (SEO) are, with good reason, going completely bonkers. As Google came on the scene in 1998 and quickly dominated the search business, website optimization became largely a game of shooting at a single target, namely, pleasing Google…for all intents and purposes, Google became the “800 pound gorilla” of the search engine business.
Since the advent of search engines (particularly Google) spawned the whole SEO business, I guess its only fair that the search engine industry can once again turn the SEO business on its ear, and it seems now to be sort of a cat and mouse (not desktop) relationship that can get really interesting as we move forward.
Not only are there now several viable players (most notably Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask Jeeves) in the search engine business, but they are all adopting different and frequently changing algorithms for determining the ranking positions for websites.
The Life Blood of Internet-Based Home Businesses…Search Engines
May 29, 2008
Anyone involved in an Internet-based home business will soon come to recognize the importance of search engines as a vehicle to attract potential customers.
Since the inception of Google in 1998, the popularity of using search engines has increased dramatically. Nielsen NetRatings reports that about 114.5 million Americans, or a whopping 39 percent of the US population, currently use search engines.
Through February of 2004, Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN ranked as the two favorite spots on the Internet with 87.3 million and 86.2 million unique monthly visitors, respectively, according to figures produced by Nielsen NetRatings.
Microsoft.com, ranked third, with 64.2 million visitors, but this figure is somewhat misleading because this site attracts much of its traffic by repairing flaws in the Windows operating system. Google was the fourth most popular site with 60.8 million visitors.
The market shares of MSN and Yahoo haven’t changed much in the past three years while Google has emerged as a powerhouse without spending much of anything on advertising. Google’s audience is now approximately six times larger than it was in early 2001, when it was the 26th most popular destination on the Internet.
Using Blogs for SEO
May 20, 2008
Why Start A Blog?
I knew about blogging and blogs for years before I actually started my first blog… So this begs the question… “Why did it take me over 4 years to start my 1st blog?”
Well, why would I want a blog? After all, blogs are just for geeks, self opinionated left or right wing zealots pushing some obscure political agenda, teenage school kids waffling on about their zits and boyfriends or technical journals full of terms and jargon only a rocket scientist could understand.
And I never bothered with blogs or the development of the “blogosphere” again.
Then something changed the way I viewed blogging about July 2004. I was introduced to using a blog as a tool for SEO - Search Engine Optimization. In the crudest form it was almost spamming, but done properly, it will get your website pages spidered almost immediately and indexed in less than a week.
Blog and Ping
The crude method involved first setting up both a blogger (.blogspot) blog and a free myYahoo page. You add the RSS or Atom link from your blog to your myYahoo page, so that your blog feeds into your myYahoo website.
The First Search Engine Marketing Method: Content That Meets Customers Needs
May 15, 2008
For your business web site, good search engine rankings and high user traffic depend on relevant content. More user traffic will mean more sales leads and then more sales. Beyond any technical tricks, content that meets the users’ need for three types of information is the best guarantee that search engines and users will find your site. The Google and Yahoo page rankings favor sites that have articles of about 1000 words and that use keywords relevant to the user’s search.
Once they find your site with a search engine, web users spend more time on sites where their needs are met. To understand why users come back to content rich sites, lets look at the ways that a successful website, like DVInfo, fills the three most important information needs of the website user.
The DVInfo.net online community boasts over thirteen thousand members and a quarter million posts. What makes users of DVInfo Community come back to the site on a regular basis? The users come back for relevant content that meets their needs.
Search Engine Optimization With Sitemaps
May 9, 2008
I just wanted to share a little Search Engine Optimization experiment I ran to confirm the theory that Google likes content rich sitemap pages rather than just a bunch of links pointing to different pages on your site. I also wanted to look at a way of funnelling Google page rank to all the internal pages on my site as quickly as possible I have heard from a few search engine optimization companies that sitemaps are good ways of helping search engine spiders find all the pages on your site but have you every thought that using good quality sitemaps can also help your internal pages attain a very high Google page rank very quickly I was reading a Search Engine Optimization article about how Google likes pages with good quality relevant content and how they wanted to serve this quality content to their surfers. I decided to run a little experiment with sitemaps. I build two types of sitemap, one with just links to my article pages and the other with the same links but these links were also surrounded with relevant search engine optimized content. Sitemap without search engine optimized content http://search.freefind.com/find.html?id=85113844&m=0&p=0
How To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking
May 3, 2008
With search engines like Google currently indexing over 8 billion pages, it is becoming more and more difficult to get a top search engine ranking. Type in a popular search phrase such as “Internet Marketing” into Yahoo or Google and you will be returned over 8 million results!
Unless your website is in the first two or three pages, it is unlikely that you will receive many visitors from search engines.
So what should a webmaster do to give their website the best chance of ranking high in the search engines?
All search engines work slightly differently and have ever changing algorithms for ranking web pages, but these tips can be applied when planning, developing or marketing a website to help you reach that top page of search engine results.
(1) Choose your keywords carefully
It’s extremely important to set aside time to research your keywords. It’s best to do this in the planning stages, before developing your website, but many of us start a website without knowing a thing about how the search engines work, so you may find yourself doing this weeks or months later.
Have You Been Dropped By Yahoo?
April 27, 2008
Yahoo has fairly recently updated its guidelines. You can read the full list at:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html
I thought that a few points were of great interest to you because we have discussed these issue in the past when describing the best way to future-proof your site against search engine algorithm changes.
Here are some of the new guidelines:
Pages Yahoo! Wants Included in Its Index ________________________________________
1. Original and unique content of genuine value
2. Pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine considerations secondary
3. Hyperlinks intended to help people find interesting, related content, when applicable
4. Metadata (including title and description) that accurately describes the contents of a web page
5. Good web design in general
It seems content is now King for Yahoo, and unique content at that. As I have always told you, develop webpages with unique content and your sites will do well.
Here is a summary of some of the guidelines Yahoo makes on what not to do. I have added my own comments in brackets afterwards:
1. redirects (targeting smart pages and similar cloaking techniques).
Google - PR & Backlinks
April 21, 2008
Here are some observations that I have made recently:
1. On several of my own sites, I have some pages with zero page rank despite having links pointing to them PR 5 pages on the same site. These pages are now 2-3 months old. Shouldn’t they have PR by now?
2. Most of these pages rank well despite the apparent PR 0.
3. Doing searches on Google show up a lot of anomalies. Many top ranking pages have PR 0.
For example, go to http://www.prsearch.net/
This is that great search tool I mentioned last week which gives you the PR and backlinks of the search results. Do a search for Bratz dolls..
Here are the top 10 sites when I search:
#1 PR 6 Backlinks - 151
#2 PR 7 Backlinks - 5
#3 PR 0 Backlinks - 18
#4 PR 4 Backlinks - 2
#5 PR 0 Backlinks - 0
#6 PR 0 Backlinks - 0
#7 PR 0 Backlinks - 0
#8 PR 0 Backlinks - 0
#9 PR 6 Backlinks - 46
#10 PR 0 Backlinks - 11
