Pleasanton Web Design

Myth #2: Search engine optimization alone will result in good ranking in competitive searches.

Doing well in competitive searches primarily depends on off-page factors – factors not directly modifiable by the Webmaster. Why? Because we webmasters are all trying to tweak our pages so they will appear at the top of the SERPs. The “customer” of the search engine is the person performing the search, not the webmaster trying to promote his or her site. Not the business owner looking for leads. Not the spammer trying to make a quick buck. So the search engine engineers look at other factors to determine the quality, importance and authority of the websites they list in their results. What are some of these factors?

Domain Age: How long the domain has been registered by the same entity. Search engines, especially Google, look at this as a trust factor and will give a significant boost to sites that have been around for a while.

Domain Registration Length: Registering your domain for only one year will penalize you as a possible spammer. Domain registration is inexpensive, so register all domains you plan on promoting for at least two years.

Incoming Links: Link juice, link authority, PageRank and backlinks all refer to this important measure. Links pointing to your site are a vote of confidence in your content. The more reputable the site that links to you, the more weight that links carries in the search engine algorithm. Links must be relevent to the context of your site.

Hilltop Authority: In a nutshell, hilltop authority is comparative a measure of how many times a web page is referenced in the initial search engine result set by other web pages in that result set. The rank of the initial result set is based on various factors such as keyword relevance and the other off-page factors previously mentioned. The search engine then reorders the result set giving a boost to the web pages that are linked to by other pages in that result set.

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admin google, search engine optimization, seo

Want to set up a 5 second delay in sending your Gmail messages? 5 seconds is not a lot of time, but it’s better than nothing, especially if you’ve ever hit send and immediately thought of a revision or had a twinge of regret (or good judgement).

The Gmail undo feature is in testing now, so you’ll need to log in to Gmail, and go to “Settings” and then the “Labs” tab. There you’ll see a long list of features you can try out. It’s so long that you’ll want to ctrl f “Undo” to find the Undo feature. Enable the feature. I had to log out of Gmail and back on to get it to work.

Now when you send an email, you’ll see an “Undo” link at the top, where it notifies you that the email has been sent. Click on that link fast, because it will disappear in 5 seconds!

admin gmail, google

Microsoft’s update of LiveSearch launched this weekend. I haven’t read much of the hype, because I expect it is just that – hype. What I have absorbed is that Bing is supposed to be a “Google Killer” and a substantially new way of performing search, with the searcher being kept on the Bing site longer (because it gives them everything they need) so they can be exposed to more advertising.

The first thing I noticed when visiting Bing.com is the nice big graphic on the homepage. There was a little arrow indicating I could change the picture (hot air balloons, how original), but when I clicked on it, I was prompted to install Microsoft SilverLight, with no explanation of what it is.  I happen to be aware that it’s supposed to be a Flash type program that allows rich media experience, but I don’t know that the typical visitor would be. Anyway, I learned my lesson from Windows Vista and my daughter’s X-Box to thouroughly research performance of Microsoft products before exposing my life to them, so, no thanks.

The searches returned results identical to LiveSearch. Focused on keyword relevance rather than link authority. On-page trump off-page factors, so very easy to get good ranking, even for competitive terms. Good news, I guess, if anyone actually starts using Bing.

On Bing.com you are automatically shown local listings, including a little map for certain searches. Not a huge difference from Google, which does that already. Also included are categorized links below the top result, kind of like Google Sitelinks.

A search for Pleasanton Restaurants in Bing resulted in a list of the worst  restaurants in the area. I have a stomach ache just looking at it. The same search on Google results in a list of some very good, and some so-so restaurants. This is probably due to the review feature of Google Local. Bing has reviews listed too, but they are all pulled from Yelp. Bottom line is, as my son would say “FAIL.”

In conclusion, my first reaction to Bing.com is that it is a mediocre attempt to copy Google, so I have a hard time seeing how it is going to be a Google Killer.

admin google, joomla, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo, web promotion

Matt Cutts addressed the Google algorithm update that recently gave a boost to brands that I commented on in my post Big Company Google Boosts Other Big Brands in Search Results. He basically downplays the change and apparently ignores the question posed “What does Google consider a ‘Brand’” by saying his team doesn’t consider brands. Right. What is Vince based on then? Guess it’s a secret.

admin google, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo, web promotion

Let’s face it. Maybe Google started off as a egalitarian, nice, fair, “do no evil” type of company, but they have officially hit the big time. Big companies aren’t nice or fair. There is too much money involved. If you still buy into the nicey-nice Google culture, read the New York Times article on Google’s Marissa Mayer and the reaction/comments from Silicon Valley Web Guild and ValleyWag. That, along with comments from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, paints a pretty good picture of corporate executives drunk on their own elitist Koolaid (ok, crappy metaphor, but it’s early).  He calls the internet a cesspool. And the solution? Good ole Big Brands. Trusted by millions.

So what does that mean to you, trying to make information about your products and services available to the general public ? It’s going to be harder, at least in the short term. What does it mean to you, the searcher trying to find specific information that’s a little bit off the beaten path. It may be more difficult.

Here’s a possible side-effect of the brand bump in the Google SERPS, that I haven’t see much discussion about. In a couple of different verticals I work with, I’ve noticed page one being filled with directory results from large paid directories, rather than websites of individual businesses, when doing a local search for a specific product or service. Are these big directories considered a brand?  How does adding an extra step of displaying a directory results page in the search engine results page help anyone?

So Big Brand=Higher Quality, More Accurate Content=Better Search Results? No. Google has the ability, resonsibilty, or authority to determine what information is “TRUE” and what is not? NO. My personal opinion is that such an idea, forced into the algorithm by the almighty dollar rather than a concern for helping the searcher find what they are looking for, will result in people switching to another search engine to find what they are looking for. Then, when the traffic decrease results in a loss in revenue, Google will move the other way. I hope.

admin google, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo, silicon valley web guild, spam, web marketing, web promotion

If you use Google Webmaster tools, or otherwise monitor the state of it’s indexing in Google and other search engines, you’ve undoubtedly run into the problem of duplicate content. The most basic manifestation of this problem could be the indexing of both the www and non-www versions of your website. If your website is dynamic, there is a good chance that the complex URLs produced lead to duplicate content being indexed by the search engines.

The canonical link tag, which is supported by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft is placed in the head of your web page document. It tells the search engine the preferred URL that should be used to index the content. Here is an example:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yoursite.com/product.php?item=blue-widget” />

Obviously, if your web pages are being produced dynamically (I don’t really see a use for this tag for simple sites where they are not) you are going to need to add some kind of functionality that produces the new tag. There are already plugins available for Wordpress, Drupal and Magento packages.

THe canonical link tag certainly seems like a good idea, but we’ll have to see how smoothly the implementation on websites plays out, and if it lives up to it’s potential in improving search engine performance and ease of maintenance for those sites that use it.

admin google, search engine optimization

It seems like my life is all Google, all the time lately. They do seem to be coming up with a lot of cool stuff for us Webmasters. Yesterday I wrote about the new “Links” tab in Webmaster Tools that displays backlinks. Today I somehow discovered Google Co-op.

Google Co-op lets allows you to do 3 things:

1. Create your own search engine
2. Deliver specialized search results
3. Help users refine their searches

Create you own search engine

Name your search engine, enter some keywords in order to “tune” it to the data you want your searchers to see, and specify the URLS you want searched. I created a search engine called “All Troy Search” that just searches my Websites and blogs. You can customize the look and feel as well as have Google host the results, or host them on one of your pages.

The results page will have “Sponsored Results” which you can link to your AdSense acccount.

See my custom “All Troy Search” on my portfolio site.

You can make our own personal Google SERPS look as hideous as you dare.

Deliver Specialized Search Results

Your ever-loyal and trusting visitors can subscribe to results or feeds that you supply with Subscribed Links, and they will show up in their Google SERPS.

And finally…

Help users refine their searches

To do this you have to sign up to contribue to Google Topics. But enough for now. I’m all Googled out.

admin custom search engine, google, google co-op