By far the biggest story regarding Google's latest update is that several pages which previously enjoyed first page ranking in Google took a big hit this past month. If this is news to you, then consider yourself one of the lucky ones. You've been spared – many were not so fortunate. You see, this was not just any ole update. This update ushered in a significant modification of Google's ranking algorithm.

- We've also seen a new issue arise in which Google seems to be dropping some sites that have not been updated or acquired any new inbound links for a year or more. Update your sites!
- Google has gotten better at recognizing artificial link structures. For reference, here are the guidelines we published (Nov '04) on how to build a natural looking link structure:

The scam is based around exploiting the feature in AdWords that rewards high click-through rates. Fraudsters (aka, cybercriminals) have been programming software bots that will repeatedly search Google for a targeted keyword thereby generating huge numbers of impressions for that keyword but without any click-throughs. This causes the click-through rate of keyword targeted ads to rapidly decline and, as a result of the low click through rate, be disabled by Google.

Anyone who's run an AdWords campaign knows what a pain it can be to get your disabled keywords back up and running. In the meantime, while you're working to get your disabled keywords back online, fraudsters can run their own ads relatively free of competition. Ah, the disgustingly-enterprising criminal mind!

Impression fraud has been around for a long time but has always kind of flown below the radar. That's largely because it affects only AdWords PPC campaigns (due to the way AdWords ranks PPC ads based on click-through rate). Other than keeping a watchful eye out, there's not much else advertisers can do about it at this point. We do believe, however, that Google could probably track and discount those impressions coming from suspicious IP addresses without too much difficulty. And, we think they should do so if for no other reason than it would help keep impression fraud from skewing their AdWords ranking system.

Of course, Google is going to take meaningful action only after the complaints become too uncomfortable and the public relations nightmare becomes too awkward to handle. After all, AdWords is the reason that Google is profitable. Without it, their bottom line is underwater. Be sure that you track your AdWords campaign vigorously. And if you feel you're getting ripped off, let Google know about it immediately and aggressively. Remember, they have a vested interest in keeping you happy.

By learning to identify natural human language, search engines are able to greatly reduce the amount of search engine sp@m. Search engine advances continue, especially on the heels of Google's suspected algorithm change which will enable Google to weigh the relevance of links against the content of their pages. Search engines will continue to look at the entire content of websites and continue to attempt to identify the real subjects and themes of any given site.

As search engines learn to better identify the natural language structure of websites, sites that are well formed will have a natural advantage. Although good search engine rankings will always depend on more than just the structure and content of a website, the content of a website will always be the heart of a page's rankings.

Make a Search Engine's Job Easy - Search engine spiders have a lot of work to do. Not only do they spider billions of pages every month attempting to discover new web pages and update already discovered web pages, these spiders need to parse through hundreds or even thousands of lines of code trying to distinguish between titles, content, structural code, and even the occasional keyword stuffing by search engine spammers. By simplifying your website, you make the job easier for the spider and allow the spider to index more pages on your site in a shorter amount of time.

Avoid Bloated Code - Unfortunately for the sake of design, many website owners have paid absolutely no attention to how efficient their code is. As a result, they may have a lot of extraneous, unnecessary code. The result of bloated code is a page that may be difficult and confusing for a search engine to decipher, or the spider may misinterpret the code.

Fortunately, HTML and CSS is quickly catching up to the design standards of website professionals. Using proper HTML and CSS, you can design extremely appealing websites that do not rely on tables for their layout. If you would like to see just how versatile and effective HTML and CSS is, look at the examples laid out at CSS Zen Garden. CSS Zen Garden is a website that displays the power of CSS and properly formed HTML. There are several different designs all using the exact same HTML, but through CSS they are able to build sites that look completely different from each other.

If you want to see something very amazing about what CSS Zen Garden is doing, follow these steps. View the HTML of their page. It does not matter what style you are viewing, the HTML is the same for every style. Then copy that code and paste it into your HTML editor and view the output. The page that you will see is an extremely basic looking page. More importantly, though, the page that you will see is a very well organized page which would be easy for any spider to understand.

Learn More About HTML - If you are like most website owners, you know very little about HTML. You may know a little bit of code, but it really does not seem worth your time to learn the inner workings of HTML. If you feel this way, then you are really missing out on great SEO opportunities.

HTML is built to naturally identify parts of your web page that are more important than others. It was built to be extremely organized. Using the organization that HTML provides, you can help a search engine spider identify the parts of your website that are more important. Below are some uncommon tags that HTML provides that you can use to help organize your content:

Alt Tag – Most website owners know about this, but including an Alt Tag on your images is actually required if you want to have a properly formed website.

<acronym> - The acronym tag allows for a website to explain what an acronym stands for. For example, the acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. However, when the spider comes to your website, all it will see is SEO which may mean various things. The acronym tag will allow you to add this keyword to your text. The use of this tag should look like this: <acronym title="search engine optimization">seo</acronym>

<caption>- Although using tables to determine the layout of your website is becoming a practice that will soon be extinct, tables will still be necessary. The caption tag allows you to identify what a specific table is about. An example: <caption>Table 3.2. Raw Sales Data</caption>

<code> - If you ever want to display programming code on your site, you should use the code tag which will set that text off as being programming code. Example: <caption>Table 3.2. Raw Sales Data</caption>

The H Tags – H1 tags became popular in SEO circles once website owners learned that Google did pay attention to this tag. However, there are actually 6 different heading tags. The H1 tag is the most important while the H6 tag is the least important. If a search engine were to try to create a table of contents from a website, it should be able to do so from the H tags.

These are just a few examples, but HTML provides several tags for your content to help you organize your material, and help search engines know what to emphasize in your content.

Article Tip: We have started a thread of these HTML tags. If you know of any tags that we have not mentioned, please add to the list. You can find the post at: http://forums.site-reference.com/t378/s.html.

The lesson from this should be that learning HTML is not an endeavor that has few benefits. There is a lot of HTML that can help you both simplify your code and add more content to help your rankings.

Consider Moving to a Table-less Layout - The demands of web surfers unfortunately increased faster than website technology could keep up. As a few website owners were able to present visually appealing websites through tabled layouts, web surfers quickly became used to the graphic rich and well organized content. Unfortunately with tabled layouts, HTML code became sloppy and full of information that dealt only with the layout of the site, not with the content.

Fortunately, web technology is catching up. It appears as if Internet Explorer 7, which was announced to be released this summer, will finally adhere to the CSS2 standards. If you are not familiar with CSS, just read that previous sentence as being a very good thing. As was demonstrated by the example of CSSZenGarden.com, CSS can be used to create a page that is as appealing, if not more appealing, than standard tables.

Most website owners know CSS to be a tool that they can use to edit the appearance of text and the colors of their site, but CSS is also a tool that can be used for the layout of your site. As CSS comes out with newer versions (CSS3 is in the works), layout will become a more important development.

So how do you move to a table-less layout? The answer is simple: learn HTML and CSS.

The Side Benefit: Accessibility - Did you know that blind people surf the Internet? That may not seem shocking initially, but consider that the Internet is a highly visual medium of transferring information. Blind people are able to use web readers and Braille machines that interpret HTML code.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of websites are not accessible for blind people because they are not well formed sites. By moving to a well formed website, you will be adding access for an audience who marketers really do not focus on.

Article Tip: Search engines love websites that adhere to W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Bringing it Back to SEO - Many website owners are reluctant to take the time, energy, and monëy to really learn HTML and CSS, or to learn how they can make their websites truly accessible. However, in the end, they could be hurting their search engine rankings once search engines move closer to identifying natural human language.

The creators of HTML have done a magnificent job in creating a structure that can be used to organize your content in ways that make search engine optimization extremely easy. As the owner of your website, you should take care to make sure that it is running the way it was intended to. You wouldn't purchase a car that fails to meet basic standards of quality, so why would you trust your company's income to a website that is based on code that does not meet the quality standards of the Internet?

Designing your site properly does take time and effort, but the rewards are numerous. Not only will you have the satisfaction of having a website that is both light in its code and efficient, but search engines will be able to identify the key points of your content much easier, thus giving you more control of your rankings.

1. Register a good domain name which reflects what your site is about. Even if you are an established business, don't register www.FredJones.com if you make widgets. Rather, you want to register something like www.BestWidgets.com because that would inspire confidence in people looking for quality widgets who would not necessarily have heard of Fred Jones the widget-maker.

2. Name your page URLs based on reasons similar to the above, except now you can be more specific. Search engines like to know what your page is about. Name a page after a product (BigYellowWidgets.htm) or a service or action (Buy-Widgets-by-Post.htm) on one of the sales pages.

3. The text in the title tag is crucial in letting search engines know what each page is about. Put your important keywords in your title tags, using both the singular and plural versions (people will search for both) and make these tags different and specific for each page. For example, "Widgets and After Sales Widget Services". Whatever you do, don't call the home page "Index", but treat it almost as a mini-description.

4. The other tags (at the top of the html page) between the two "head" tags are not as important as the title tag, but the description tag is still used by some search engines in displaying what you would like web users to see when they scroll down a page of search results. Some search engines don't use the description tag at all; others, like Google, sometimes use part of it together with part of the main body text surrounding prominent keywords on your page. So you may as well treat the description tag seriously; make it brief (about 25 to 30 words) and as comprehensive as possible in the short space allowed. Make sure you have your popular keywords included within your description tag.

The Alt tag is used for a very short description of an image or graphic file, and is what is displayed if you allow your mouse pointer to hover above a graphic. These days it is not considered important for search engines.

The Comment tag is never displayed on the body page, and is used by coders and designers as an instruction or reminder to themselves about what that section of html coding should be doing; in the past, some webmasters in their quest for website promotion and search engine ranking used to stuff keywords in the comments tags, but now it is generally acknowledged that the main search engines pay little or no attention to these.

5. Keyword density. Each search engine has its own preference as to how many times a keyword phrase appears on the page in order to signify the relevance of that keyword phrase (in other words, in order to help the search engine understand what the page is about). Around 5 to 8 per cent is a rough guide as to the optimal level. Don't overdo it, otherwise it will be seen as spam or keyword-stuffing. Also use your keywords in the heading tags H1 and H2. There is an H3 tag as well, but it is doubtful whether search engines bother with that, as it is perceived as less prominent on the page, therefore less relevant to what the page is about.

6. Don't forget good linking in your website marketing. Search engines will judge the importance of your web pages to some extent on the number and quality of incoming links from other sites. Ask other webmasters with sites on similar themes to yours for a link, in exchange for a link back. These sites should not be in competition with yours, but should be similarly themed. You may occasionally be asked by other webmasters if they can link to your site. If this is so then have a look at their site; make sure that their site is relevant, that it has at least some PageRank, and that it just "feels" good, and has no nasty surprises like redirects or unexpected popups. You don't want to be associated with a "bad neighborhood"!

7. Make sure that important keywords are included in the anchor text within inbound links from other sites. This is crucial to search engines when they try to figure out the relevance and importance of your pages. The inbound link from the other site should take the form of something like this (I'm using normal brackets instead of angle brackets so as not to use compromising html): (A HREF="http://www.Yourwebname.com")your important keywords included here(/A). You should definitely avoid something like (A HREF="http://www.Yourwebname.com")click here(/A), which tells search engines nothing except that your site is about "click here". Be careful!

Regardless of the excessive spam, the way our human mind picks through emails which are important, is by looking at the headline. If the headline does not appeal to our normal judgement of being a legitiment reason for contact, the email should either be trashed or saved for further reading. This is not to suggest using spam messages for all email contacts. It does, however restricts the use of commercial emails who did not optin and simply directs attention for those who have opted in to receive advertisements.

The problem with today's email messages are the bogus and hyped up headlines and the content does not match the headline, therefore is miss leading the purpose behind the product or service trying to be advertised. Now, all email messages are not presented in this fashion, but overwhelmingly 80% of what we receive daily in our inbox continues to never change.

The unidentified rule of the headline, is that it must sell the email message. Without a main theme mentioned in the headline itself telling of the product or service, then the purpose of the headline has now been shot down and eventually ends up in the trash. This means for those who are trying to sell by email, Must let the reader know what it is they are trying to sell in order to "Get The Click" and gain their interest to open the email to start with. A fashionable trick luring the reader to open the message will only make things worse and the credibility of the sender is now in jeopardy.

The unidentified rule of the email message relates directly from the headline in presenting the product or service without false pretenses. The number one reason of failure for email ads with bogus content, is the email was written to sell the product or service straight from the content instead of directing the reader to a website which in turn should sell the wares.

There are three main unidentified rules:

Another down side towards reading messages which seem to scroll into the distance, the average attention grabbing moment is only going to last within 60 seconds. Anything longer in reading a message which does not focus the readers attention on, will get trashed immediately. This email packet we all have seen that never ends, most likely has good intentions and worth the time spent reading it, although research has carved a path stating that the time we spend going through emails daily, our productivity is decreased by 38% due to overly tricked email messages.

1200 email recipients were surveyed determining whether they would read short or long emails with advertisements in them, 64% confirmed the deletion of long email messages for only those which did not interest them.

Any email of greater length can be extremely effective when stressing the key points and most importantly the benefits keeping the readers attention throughout the entire message. This also applies to short emails using key points, but tells us the advantages of reading an email in shorter length and having straight forward facts, will be more effective than longer ones.

The most attractive way to present HTML email messages without "screaming or yelling" is to use limited amount of graphics. This will minimize size and loading, plus it is easy on the eyes when reading the content and not trying to focus on heavy bright or conglomerate images. Seeing a great looking picture in our email with very little text, 94% of the time will be deleted, especially when it comes from anonymous senders. If the message should involve a graphic, so should the text to go with it. Period.

The unidentified rule of using advertisements in an HTML environment are to point out specific types of promotions, specials or events using Bold Titles, Headlines and Links. Use Italicizing for sub headlines and use bold and Italicizing for sub titles. This will present the email message so the reader can visually see key points or sections of the message and not be thrown off subject.

Keeping a positive attitude is a must when writing a selling email message, and also requires the email to be focused on the reader at all times and not hyping up the next special offer.

I can change the coding of your address link so that it looks the same, and still opens up a blank email already pre-addressed to you. There are a few programs that convert your email address into an encrypted JavaScript code. I then replace this code on your site. The only draw back - If someone has JavaScripting turned "off" on their browser, the link will not work. Over time, I truly believe that your amount of nasty, unsolicited email that wastes valuable time will be reduced!

Let me know by clicking on my address here - or here or here .... See how it works? Just like normal!
Automaticlabs.com
Article here - javascriptkit.com & Bronze-age.com