Internet Marketing

Stephan Spencer, from CNET’s News Blog, posted an informative entry about a few updates that are taking place with Google’s search algorithm. Of particular interest was the news from Matt Cutts regarding underscores in URLs. Traditionally, underscores were treated differently from hyphens.

Hyphens have long been the preferred method for dividing keywords up in a link. Whereas, URLs with keywords separated by underscores have been ignored by Google — they would only view it as a phrase. Matt Cutts, software engineer on Google’s Webspam team, has stated that keywords separated with underscores are now treated the same as keywords separated with hyphens. This is big news for SEO firms and businesses that have been using underscores and didn’t want to re-write URLs just to adapt to Google’s preferences.

Matt also claims that Google now treats URLs with a query string the same as static URLs. (As long as there are no more than two or three parameters in the URL) In other words, you shouldn’t take a hit in your Google position ranks if you have a question mark in your URL; just try not to have more than two or three equals signs in the URL.

Cutts stated that the number of slashes in your URL (i.e. the number of directories deep your page is) isn’t a factor in your Google rankings. He went on to say that although it doesn’t matter for Google, it is rumored to matter for Yahoo and MSN (Live Search). Matt addressed this because Spencer specifically asked the question from the audience.

According to Matt, the file extension in your URL won’t affect your rankings. So it’s inconsequential whether you use .php, .html, .htm, .asp, .aspx, .jsp etc. The one extension you should avoid for your Web documents? .exe.

Matt stated it was “myth” that Google uses its status as a domain registrar to access domain registration data to use it as a ranking signal. According to Matt, being a registrar doesn’t grant one special access to other registrars’ customer data. Note that Matt didn’t state whether Google is or isn’t using WHOIS data as a signal. I think they are still giving rank preference for older websites.

When asked about how to get one’s blog into Google News, Matt shared one of Google’s requirements for inclusion: The blog must have multiple authors. (Darnit!)

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Not only does Google have the largest search engine today it has started to amass a bunch of businesses and technologies that provide them vital user data and what you search for, what websites you go to, how long you stay there and they even record if actions are taken on those sites. If you are logged into any one of their services like Gmail or personalized search then they even know that it was you that creates certain transactions. When you signed up for Google you probably provided them with your date of birth information, gender and location info. Starting to sound a bit creepy? The truth is that Google has recently stopped public records companies from buying “proper name” search terms. I believe this was to make it seem that they were helping to protect your personal information. Why then is it a acceptable understanding that if you are looking for “dirt” or information on someone that you just “Google” them. How important is your privacy to you? Do you mind that LinkedIn, Wis.dm, Myspace and other social networking sites have opened up your personal profiles for Google and other search engines to crawl and include in their search index?

Google Buys Peakstream - PeakStream develops tools that boost the performance of single-threaded applications on multi-core chips.

Google Buys YouTube for $1.65B - YouTube.com had approximately 19.1 million visitors in August 2006 (Comscore)

Google Acquires Feedburner for $100M - Feedburner.com is a RSS feed management company.

Google Acquires DoubleClick -
DoubleClick, the online advertising company, was purchased for $3.1 billion in cash. Read an article on why privacy advocates are concerned with the DoubleClick purchase: Google-DoubleClick deal

Google Acquisition of Urchin - Urchin developed software to help companies analyze the traffic at their Web sites.

How often are web users using Google for search? According to the latest published stats on SearchEngineWatch, Google generates about 90-100 Million searches a day and has 500,000,000 users worldwide (June, 2007).

Google has collected information from their Feedburner RSS aggregator on what sites are the most popular and what topics are most talked about. I heard that Google can basically analyze their search stream data and tell Hollywood whether a movie is going to flop or not before it even hits the theaters. Google has their own toolbar that I use everyday that collects search and click stream data, they have thousands of websites that are part of the Googe AdSense publisher network that have Google content matched ads. If you use Gmail then you’ll see sometimes that the context of your email messages get matched up with advertisers. If you are talking about an upcoming trip to Barcelona, Spain then you might see an ad that has “Cheap Hotels in Barcelona”

Free Wifi Access Data - Google is beta testing free wifi coverage areas in Mountain View right now. I am pretty sure this will allow them to get ISP-type data on users surfing behaviors.

Google Checkout - Google even wants to know what I am buying and to help me streamline my logins and passwords.

Google Even Owns Domains - A lot of people don’t actually know that Google is also a Domain Registrar and they know when you register a domain name and make any changes to it.

Google Maps Street View - They have now started photographing streets in major cities with cars that drive around and take photos in all directions. Here is a photo that one of the Google’s Toyota Prius camera cars took in SF:

So watch your back because Google surely is. How does that saying go? “Keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer.” It is always nice to know how big businesses are growing and who owns what and for what reasons. You all didn’t think that Google was still a garage operation? Google also is in the process of building their own power plant on the banks of the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon.

Now get back to searching and blogging so they can collect some more data from you today.

-Brian

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Here is a top 20 list of SEO Tips and Tricks that I use when doing search engine optimization work for our websites and our clients websites. Some of them are the obvious ones and a few are more creative and gorilla style marketing techniques.

I have them listed in no particular order of importance just so you try them all out at one point or another:

1. Create accounts on social sites like Myspace, Linkedin and Face Book and link to your website. Myspace re-writes outbound links so you don’t get credit for the link back but you can get traffic to your site. Linkedin in has an area where you can edit your profile and specify websites. Choose the other drop down so you can custom name the link. You can put up to 3 websites in your Linkedin profile. (see Brian’s LinkedIn Profile). Make sure you then build your contacts as a dead profile doesn’t do anything for you. Face Book also lets you list a website in your profile. There are a ton of other social sites that have these features. It is important before you go and invest a bunch of time with this to make sure they don’t have “no follow” tags on the outbound links.

2. Create accounts on all of the “Linkerati” websites like Digg, Reddit, Technorati and Del.icio.us and claim or submit your site. Be very clever with your titles and descriptions so you don’t appear to be just spamming their communities. Start engaging with the communities by commenting on articles, posting new topics and voting on stories. Invite all of your office buddies to join your networks as friends too. Add a Del.icio.us button on your home page so people can easily bookmark you in their del.icio.us accounts.

3. Submit your site to the top search engines free submission pages. duh. A list of those can be found here: Search Engine Submission

4. Syndicate your site’s content by using an RSS feeds. Submit your RSS feeds to agregator sites like FeedBurner, Squidoo, FeedDirectory, FeedFury, Feedboy, Jordomedia, FeedBomb, FeedCat, and RSSmad.

5. Write an article related to your sites content, publish it on your site and then submit it to article sites.

6. Get an account on StumbleUpon and get your friends to Stumble your site. Again, you need to connect to your friends to get some traction with Stumbleupon.

7. Create a custom 404 page so that even if someone lands on your site by error they are re-directed to a nicer page with maybe some Google AdSense ads. This is more important for older sites that might have had tons of pages that are now broken or have been removed.

8. Add a link to your site in the signature of any forums or bulletin board communities that you post on. This is also called “Sig-Whoring”. It will also help establish yourself as a trusted source if you are a good contributor to the forums.

9. Don’t worry about Google’s PageRank - worrying about PageRank is as effective as using Alexa to determine your sites popularity online. Google has their own internal PageRank that they use for weighting. The visible PR is mostly to drive SEO people crazy when dealing with their clients. Google PR in the toolbar is all about vanity. We have sites with zero PR that still show up in top organic results.

10. Search Engine friendly design - I said that I wasn’t going to order these by importance but I have to emphasize how important this one is. If your site has a bunch of embedded forms, headers with your address and 800-numbers, javascript drop down navigation links, flash movies, frames, or pages with large images and no text then how the hell do you expect the search engine spiders to crawl the content of your site and determine what relevancy it has to certain keywords and categories.

11. Stay away from 2 and 3-way link trading schemes. Build your link backs organically through a few stragegic link trades with sites that have similiar or relevant content as yours. One way links are the best way to go. Get the technorati’s talking about your site.

12. Get a press release written and sent out on the wire about your site and some special feature or offering you have. Be sure to place a nice anchor link in your press releases back to your site. Anchor links still have a lot of weight in scoring if done properly.

13. Title Tags are KING. Make sure your title tags and H1 header tags are matching or close in context of what your pages content is about. The engines are spidering and indexing meta tags but little to no weight is being assigned to them. (I know this one hurts and is hard to swallow but is very true.) Write your description tags so that they are effective in communicating when a person is reading the abstracts in the SERPs. Make sure your URLs are easy to read too and that they correspond to the title or content of the page. (example: look at the title of this page, the URL and the Header of the article)

14. The Algorithm that Google uses is “Markov Chaining” to help calculate scoring & rankings. Do some research on it online and you’ll understand why they are using an algorithm like this.

15. Do NOT use frames. Funny how people still have sites in frames. Their should be some sort of W3 consortium against frame websites.

16. Do I submit my site to DMOZ.org? I personally think it is a big waste of time and an empty community of about 10 editors that actively approve sites. Who has used a directory in the last year anyways?

17. Create an XML sitemap of your site and submit it to Google, MSN and Yahoo. They are all using the same sitemap protocol. You can submit to Google through their Google Webmasters central and Yahoo through Yahoo Site Explorer. It is a good practice to also have a sitemap linked on your site from the home page to allow users to be able to navigate easily and for the crawlers to pick up your content for indexing.

18. Do your site in CSS and submit your site to CSS communities. CSS goes back to the search friendly design and the engines love how nice CSS renders.

19. Ask the Blog-o-sphere and other websites to review your site and/or products for you on their site.

20. Validate your HTML and CSS. It’ll help ensure your site displays well in all browsers.

What engine should I optimize my site for? Well, that is an easy one since Google receives about 50% of all search queries, Yahoo 25%, MSN and Ask about 10% each.

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Stop words are quite simply words that Search Engines generally do not index to save space in their database and increase the speed at which it can retreive data for search queries. These words are usually extremely common and don’t add anything substantive to the context of your content.

Common stop words are “a”, “of”, “the”, “I”, “it”, “you”, and “and” however it is believed the many search engines will actually include a much more comprehensive list.

So what does this mean to those of us involved in the SEO game. In a nutshell while stop words can’t be eliminated entirely from your title and Hx tags they should be minimized as much as possible. The name of the game in keyword density is to include only enough information thats needed to increase the weight of your targeted keywords or phrases. A stop word is simply diluting your efforts and as you can see won’t provide an ounce of help as the search engines simply ignore them anyway.

Lets take a look at a specific example - imaging the following as a title tag:

Mary had a little lamb who’s fleece was white as snow.

We can identify “had”, “a”, “who’s”, “was” and “as” as stop words in this title. “little” is a suspected stop word as well. A more effective title would be the following:

Mary’s lambs white fleece is like snow.

We have eliminated all but two stop words and as a result have increased our target key word density.

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For years we have known about using robots.txt and the rel=”no-follow” tag to guide spiders through our websites to index what we want and to ignore the rest.

Yahoo has now introduced a new twist on this concept with the introduction of support for a new class that can be used to block indexing of specific content WITHIN THE CONTENT ITSELF. Let me repeat that, you can now block indexing of content not only on whole pages or directories but within the content itself.

Let’s take a look at this tag. The syntax is simple. class=”robots-nocontent”. It can be used just like any other CSS class. For example you could use it in a standard div tag as follows:

I am content I want Yahoo to index.

That’s a pretty powerfull tool if you wanted to increase Key Word density by removing duplicate content such and UI elements and common includes such as footers and headers.

Now if only Google would adopt this we would be getting somewhere.

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In the hoopla over Google’s purchase of DoubleClick many people didn’t take notice of another company purchased in the sale, Performics

What is the big deal? At first glance Performics simply appears to be the performance-based marketing division of DoubleClick. However after digging a little deeper you also realize that they offer Search Engine Optimization services to their clients.

That’s right - Google now owns one of the largest Search Engine Optimization firms. To me this is a conflict of interest. Only Google knows how its algorithm works, will this knowledge be used to give clients of Performics an unfair advantage over other SEO providers?

A vibrant industry has blossomed in the SEO services sector, from small mom and pop shops to larger full featured agencies. Could the be another area Google is interested in dominating. Clearly with the purchase of Perfomics they are moving in that direction.

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What are Site Maps?

Site maps are simply a list of all the pages that comprise your website, usually in a hierarchical format. You can think of it as analogous to a Table of Contents page in a book. There are two different types of site maps. HTML which is meant to be browsed by humans (search engines can read them too) and XML which is meant to be read by other computers.

Why would I want a Site Map?

In addition to assisting your visitors find content or information they are seeking there is another important reason to use site maps and thats for another type of visitor, spiders! Spiders are small programs used by search engines that continually scour the web looking for content to include in their listings.

A site map basically provides a nice tidy listing of your entire website that allows and ensures the spider will crawl all of your content. Note that this will not improve your rankings but it will ensure that all of your content is spidered and reduces the likely hood that your “orphan” pages are overlooked. Orphan pages are pages without any other pages linking to them making them hard for the search engines to find.

How do I make a site map?

Thankfully the days of having to manually generate a site map are long gone. Today there are great free tools that will do the task for you. My two favorites are below.

XML Sitemaps This site provides an excellent tool for generating both HTML and XML sitemaps.

Wordpress Site Map Generator - an excellent plug-in for wordpress that automatically generates a site map for your blog.

What do I do with my site new map?

Now that you have a site map you should submit it to the search engines. This ensures that the engines properly and fully index all the content listed on your site map. The two major search engines I recommend submitting your site map too is Google and Yahoo. You can follow the links below to find the submission forms. You will need a free account from their sites to use the services. Once you are logged in simply add your site and follow the directions.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Google Webmaster Tools

If you get lost post a comment and I will help you out.

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