This is my week to rant about Google so just let me be for a second. I have been doing random searches everyday in areas and verticals that I don’t typically search on just to find some funny search results that don’t make sense or where the SEO pro’s have worked the “Google Algorithm” also referred to my me as “Google Love’s How Popular I Am” tool. We already know Google doesn’t care about your inbound links or your PR link backs or your PageRank score. They get their data from Analytics, Feedburner, links from trusted sources which are usually news publications (Authority links), Registrar info on the age of your site, how active the content is and the list goes on. So what happens when all of your competitors are employing the same tactics to Google? Check the “Nordstrom Coupons” search example below:
Isn’t this reminiscent of how Altavista.com search results used to look back in 1999 before they went under?
Now let’s look at how the search results used to look back in January, 2001 now that Google has published their own ‘way back index machine’ for us to view the Google 2001 results for Nordstrom Coupons:
What has changed in 10 years? Looks like the consumer is getting a pretty shitty experience and where are the ads? Oh, Google doesn’t think that advertisers should be able to buy this keyword I guess because it isn’t relevant even though tons of those same advertisers are now SEOing the hell out of it. This results are starting to look a little homogeneous.
I wish our friends at Mahalo.com would hurry up and get all of their index filled up and start spending some money to get some mind share in search.
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Have you been wondering how you can get your site included in Cuil.com but can’t find anything anywhere on their site? I am always looking for alternative SEO and natural search traffic options and did a little digging around and found the Cuil.com webmaster info page at:
http://www.cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/
From that page, there is a link that says “Please let us know” - nice SEO anchor link huh? Well, that link takes you to this page:
http://www.cuil.com/info/contact_us/feedback.php?to=crawl%20me
To: Crawl Me
From: put your email address here
Site URL: http://www.mysite.com <-- be sure to include the http://
or you can send them an email directly to: crawlme@cuil.com
Something tells me that the form will work more efficiently. Now cross your fingers that they start gaining some momentum before Google takes over the Earth.
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And finally the moment that we have all been so anxiously awaiting, a new search engine to battle the Google giant. I have always been an advocate for the small guys. Cuil.com was created by Ex-Google workers, Anna Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers - Russell Power and Louis Monier. They have kept a low profile, raised $33 million in venture capital and in the end launched Cuil, pronounced “cool” today.
The first thing I did was look for a Submit URL page. I found a webmaster info page that had an email address for now on site submissions. If you would like Cuil to crawl your site and have it included in our index, just let them know:
crawler@cuil.com
Twiceler is the name of their robot Web crawler. The user-agent is “twiceler.” They understand that many small sites are bandwidth-limited, so support the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
More info can be found at:
http://www.cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/
Costello’s Irish heritage inspired Cuil’s odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore. Let’s see if these guys can pull it out and make some noise in the search space. If I was Microsoft I would be trying to get some investment going on this project as it seems like a small dream team at work.
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I recently did a SEO presentation at BizJam and got a few questions about SEO and flash websites and came across this posting in Google’s Blog by Software Engineers at Google, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins.
Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.
In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.
Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.
Now even though Google is one of the only engines that can now effectively crawl flash files there are a few other techniques that you might want to explore that include inserting primary content into the Javascript function called SWFObject 2.0. The primary content can contain links, headers, styled text, and images— basically anything you can add to an regular HTML page. With SEO copy writing applied to the primary content, Flash then becomes a non-issue for SEO.
-Brian
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There was a great deal of buzz around getting your site listed on relevant news sites via press releases. Is there any merit to this? Hells yeah. Once you send your press release out o the wire there is a good chance that Yahoo news, Google news, Reuters and other aggregators will pick it up if it is press worthy material. If this happens then the blogosphere usually repurposes the release and takes out excerpts or references. Hopefully some of those references will be your website URL. The most common mistake that I see is companies forgetting to use an anchored link to their own website in their releases. Duh?? Many writers, especially bloggers are too lazy to strip this out of the releases and if they copy and paste the news then you get another inbound link hopefully from a blogger that has relevant content to your business or vertical. If you happen to have something press worthy enough to get to the home page of Digg or other social news media sites then it becomes a home run for your link strategy. Here are a few good press release distribution services and some of these guys even have SEO upgrades for releases. Money!
PRWeb
PR News Wire
PR Log
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MSN has recently launched its own Webmaster Tools (Beta) center which is similar to the Google Webmaster and Yahoo Site Explorer webmaster areas. You can register you website and sitemaps with them now at:
MSN Webmaster Tools
Use the Webmaster Tools to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your website, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your websites. Once you have your site authenticated with a HTML tag then you can view a site summary, your rank on MSN, top keywords, top outbound links and top backlinks.
You can submit your XML sitemap for better results. Sitemaps help the Live Search robot find all of the files to be indexed. You’ll get the best indexing results by using robots.txt autodiscovery.
On the website status page you’ll see the date from the last crawl or your site along with the total number of pages that were indexed.
If you haven’t submitted your site and it doesn’t already appear in the MSN Live index then you can submit to MSN below:
MSN Search Submit
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Google is constantly experimenting with new features aimed at improving your search experience. They have recently created the Google Experimental Search page which allows you to try out some of the new features. You can experience search results in exciting new ways. Here are a few of the features they recently added:
• Alternate views for search results (See results on a timeline, map, or in context of other information types.)
• Keyword Suggestions
• Keyboard Shortcuts
• Left-hand Search Navigation
• Right-hand Contextual Search Navigation
Join any of the listed experiments and you’ll be able to see that feature whenever you do a Google search. I have been wondering why they haven’t just included some of the Google suggests features that the Google toolbar has on the main Google search. I like when it completes the searches with keywords that I am most likely to use and pulls from my search history as well.
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I got this information from our Google Agency Services weekly update newsletter. It has some helpful tips if you use YouTube.com for viral traffic. Be sure to also watermark your videos and/or have a URL slide at the end so users can type-in your website address if they want to visit your site.
Tips to Improve Your Video’s Ranking on YouTube
YouTube video search uses a variety of signals to determine the placement of a video in our rankings, including the video file name, title, and any associated metadata. The more information provided about a video, the better it can be searched. In general, we strive to give the best possible objective video result. However, there are some best practices that clients can use that will help their rankings:
* Add a Descriptive Title to Your Video - When users search for a video on YouTube, they will find your content easier if you include an accurate and descriptive title for your video. An engaging title can also help your video stand apart from the rest of the crowd.
* Make Your Descriptive Content Clear and Specific - Try to determine what content your video contains that will help users find it and distinguish it from other videos. Providing content that is descriptive, accurate, and unique is an important factor. Using complete sentences in your description is also a good idea. For more information, you can reference What should I put in my video description?
* Provide Accurate Tags - Including tags that users may use when they search or browse videos also helps. However, avoid using techniques such as keyword stuffing which will ultimately hurt your videos rankings.
* Community Opinion - Our vast and highly engaging YouTube community is an important factor that can affect the ranking result of your videos. Signals from users who share, comment, rate, watch, subscribe to and embed your videos are also taken into consideration when ranking videos.
* YouTube Embeds and Links - YouTube also takes into account links from reputable websites that point to your video. Web sites that are “important” and point to your video may improve your videos ranking. Similarly, YouTube also takes into the consideration reputable websites that embed your video. For information on how to embed videos, please refer to How do I embed videos on my website or blog? Google has also published webmasters guidelines that apply to all sites that embed or point to video content. This document also provides important quality guidelines that webmasters should take into consideration when linking to or pointing at videos.
Using these and other factors, YouTube strives to provide the most accurate and relative video search results. YouTube also continues to modify and improve its algorithms to ensure accurate results and create a better user experience.
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We all know how much the engines are loving blogs and bloggers these days. If you can’t beat them then join them…sort of.
How can you make your site that isn’t a blog more SEO-bloggish-friendly?
It is pretty simple my friend. Here are 3 tiny steps that you can implement, introduce or tweak to your existing pages to show the relevance of the content on your page or website.
#1 - Title Tags. Keep them short and to the point. Example: The title tag we use for one of our sites Hip-Hop.net is “Hip-Hop.net - Hip Hop Network”
4 keywords, not spammy and to the point including the keyword that we are trying to rank high in the SERPs for: “Hip Hop”
#2 - URL Re-Writes. I believe this is what gives the bloggers the one up on the competition because the URL usually matches the title of the blog post and the H1 header title on the page. 1+1+1 = top listing in most cases if your site is relevant to the topic being searched. Example: You knew I would have one for you to see. Do a search in Google for “implementing flash click tags“.
This page should appear as the top result (fingers crossed):
http://internetadpulse.com/design-advice/implementing-flash-click-tags/ <-- Look at the URL, it matches the keyword search string and when you click on the page the header also matches. Wordpress is like Magic huh?
#3 - H1 Tag. The old school header tag makes a comeback to the scene. Headers in old HTML mark-up are very important. Think about newspapers for a second. If they didn't have headers for the articles then you probably would just glance right over them. The Header tag lets the engines know the topic of the page content. I usually recommend using either a breadcrumb trail and having the page title at the end of the breadcrumb.
Example: Home > Design-Advice > Implementing Flash Click Tags (make this your H1 in CSS).
Check out an old client, Bag Borrow or Steal, that I did some SEO consulting for and how they do the breadcrumb trail, the title tag header on the page and the same text from the header in the URL string. Perfect execution! See this example handbag detail page: Betsy Johnson ‘Guns & Rosettes’ Hobo handbag page then do a search in Google for the keyword phrase: Betsey Johnson ‘Guns & Rosettes’ Hobo
Doesn’t it just look to easy to be true? Remember to keep your content relevant, be picky on your link trades and include your site URL in your press. Google will love you sooner or later.
-Brian Rauschenbach
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According to the latest data from Hitwise, a company which uses data directly from ISP’s to track overall internet usage trends, Google has continued to gain market share over the last three months.
In October Google’s share of searches reached 64.49% based on a sample of 10 million US web surfers. They seem to have largely taken market share from all the major other engines (msn and yahoo) which both saw modest declines in their percentage of the search market share.
The one odd finding was that while both msn and yahoo declined in share against Google the little engine that could (ask.com) actually rose a small amount to 4.76%.
This is most likely largely due to their aggressive television and internet marketing campaigns in which they take direct aim at the lackluster Google search results interface. This however may not be enough to keep them competitive as Google is also heading in a similar direction with their slow introduction of their own version of universal search.
See all the results here
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