|
June Search Engine News From
www.searchengine-news.com
Google
Google's gearing up to crawl AdWords landing pages in an effort
to assess them for quality control. The purpose is to determine
how informative your landing pages are as well, as to verify relevancy
to your ad. Google has used landing page quality as a determiner of your ads overall Quality Score for some time now; but never before have they dedicated a spider exclusively to the job.
Google Press Day 2006: Google's Media Event Announces a Ton
of New Product Releases. Google held their annual Press Day this
month, in which they released a raft of interesting new features.
Google Co-op,
the most exciting product launch Google has had in the past year,
harnesses the power of Google's users to structure Google's data
and search results—all without Google having to do anything.
First, as refined results for regular searches, something Google refers to as Topics. For instance, if you search on a health related term such as sprain, you'll see several links to search additional search results. These links read Treatment, Symptoms, Tests/diagnosis, and so on.
The second way Co-op shows up in the search results is as labels beneath the listings—in this case for those search results that have been selected by people or organizations participating in Google Co-op. For example, when searching for sprain, beneath most results you'll see the labels that the search result was tagged with; as well as who did the tagging.
The third way Google Co-op appears in the search results comes after you've set your account up and created your subscribed links. Then whenever someone who's subscribed to you searches on a query that matches one of your subscribed links, your page will be displayed at the top of Google's search results.
In theory, it has the potential to be huge, but only time will tell
if it becomes a winner or if it gets relegated to the dustbin of
ideas that were simply too clever for people to fully grasp and
use.
Considerably easier to grasp than Google Co-op, Google
Trends is simply a fun way to compare the popularity of
various search terms over the course of the year. Google
Trends is an easy way to check the relative popularity of all sorts
of terms, and can be a useful way to gauge how the demand for various
products you offer fluctuates throughout the year.
No surprise, searches for sunscreen routinely peak during the middle of the year (summer time in the northern hemisphere), while searches for snow tires are highest near the end of the year (winter months 'up over').
Google
Notebook is a way to bookmark web pages (or even pieces
of content from pages) directly in Google. Users who are logged
into their Google Accounts will see a small Note this link near
the bottom of each search listing.
What's really interesting about Google Notebook is that now Google can see what you (and everyone else who uses their program) find interesting. They'll be able to see what pages you bookmark, what content you decide to copy, and how you organize that information.
Google
Gadgets are little software programs which you can easily
install within Google desktop.
MSN - The Microsoft
PPC program, previously known as MSN adCenter, has officially launched.
It's now called Microsoft adCenter.
AOL - nothing's been happening
at AOL.
YAHOO! - Yahoo's Analyst Day
was a chance for Yahoo to present their business strategy to market
analysts and lay out a vision of what's to come. Much of the focus
was on taking Yahoo's vast stores of content—Yahoo
Finance, YAHOO
Music, YAHOO
Video, photo and text.
"Comparing PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Campaigns" From
As webmasters, we are all chasing customers. We are looking for human visitors to come to our websites and to buy what we are selling.
To serve our needs for targeted traffic --- potential customers --- the search companies have begun to offer us a share of their significant traffic through many paid advertising methods.
The most common advertising offer at the search engines is the PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising model. There are also other search advertising models such as CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) and Featured Listings.
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising Model - The top two PPC-providers are:
 adwords.google.com
 http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/
By far, PPC is currently the most popular advertising model. From the buyer's perspective, it is usually the most expensive type of advertising and the one that generates the most fear of fraud. In fact, many experts suggest that click-fraud might be as high as 20 to 25% of all click-traffic.
Pay-Per-Click is exactly what it sounds like. The advertiser bids on keywords and tells the advertising company that they will pay X number of cents or dollars for every clíck that they receive to their website through the PPC-provider's website.
Advertisers compete for position within the search results with the highest bidder getting the best advertising spot at the top of the results. The second highest bidder gets the #2 spot, etc.
Generally, Pay-Per-Click providers serve three listings on the first page of search results. Only when there is strong competition for a particular keyword term and a number of advertisers vying for placement, will the PPC-provider show results with more than three advertisers.
If you bid the minimum 15 cents per clíck (the standard for most PPC systems), then it is possible that you might not see your listing on page one or page two of the search results. Let's face it; PPC providers are interested in making the most money they can from the traffic they send to people. So, if one advertiser is paying a dollar per clíck and you are only bidding five cents a clíck, who do you think will receive the best placement? Yep, the one-dollar per clíck advertiser will get the most attention and the best placement, even if it requires pushing your placement back to page three of the search results.
The biggest advantage to these systems is that they serve large pools of consumers online, and they let you target specific search keywords.
The disadvantages are numerous. Those most often cited include: the high cost of bids for certain keywords, poor conversion rates on purchased clicks, and clíck fraud (generally regarded as people clicking your link just so they can get paid for it).
Personally, I have paid as high as a dollar per-click for a service that sells for $35, and $20 in volume. I have spoken to others who operate for-profit websites and have paid as much as $2.50 per clíck on an average keyword. In some really competitive markets, people pay as much as $30 per clíck.
Which Advertising Model Is Right For You? - It really depends on your business model. More so, it depends on your absolute click-through averages and your website conversion rates.
Your advertising needs to cost you no more than what it earns for you. Ideally, your advertising will cost less than it earns for you.
Some businesses trade on the lifetime value of customers and are willing to pay more to get customers than what they earn on their first sale, but not all of us can afford to build a customer base in the same way that Amazon built theirs.
If your advertising budget is small, your goal should be to make every advertising dollar count. Grow your business to the point where you might be able to afford some of the more expensive advertising solutions. But then, if the lower-cost solutions generate sales for you, why would you want to pay more?
"Best Blogging Software" From
The blogging platform wars are getting really interesting and much of the discussion I find myself in lately revolves around what is happening with various CMS systems. The market can essentially be defined into 3 major camps: remotely hosted, self hosted, and community based systems. I have used pretty much every blogging platform available and each of them has its ups and downs. In this article I will cover the best options for each area taking into account price, usability, market share and of course SEO potential.
All of these products are either open source, completely free or have a functional free version.
Remotely Hosted Blogging Software - (Note: From an SEO stand point optimizing a domain you do not own or control is not the best marketing plan.)
 Blogger - Blogger is completely free and currently owns the majority of the remotely hosted user base, but not by a landslide. Bought out by Google in 1999, Blogger essentially fired up the blogging trend we see today. It is by far the easiest overall solution to use and, if you are a novice user looking to throw up some recipes or poetry, this is for you. Blogger is completely free and includes some great features like comments, photo blogging, and a basic community feel with user profiles. Because it is so dumbed down there are some features you may not find with Blogger that are only available through 3rd party add-ons. As a side note Blogger weblogs do quite well in the search engines and this was recently exploited with it being the first choice for sp@m blogs or splogs. A splog is a weblog used for the sole purpose of gaining inbound links or generating thousands of keyword stuffed pages with Adsense and the like. The recent Google Jagger update cleared a large portion of this up. Free.
 Typepad - Released in 2003, Typepad is a product of Sixapart, the makers of Movable Type. It is largely based on MT but there are some major enhancements and differences. Your blog can accomodate one or more photo albums with auto thumbnail generation. You can easily add music, books, and other media to Typelists, which grab a thumbnail from Amazon and other retailers for easy displaying in your sidebar. Typepad is also a great deal more technical than Blogger so a bit of HTML know-how is recommended. On that note, editing your blog to look the way you want is also quite easy and Typepad blogs are known for being very eye-pleasing, intuitive and easy to navigate. In Sixapart's business model, Typepad is aimed at regular home and small business users while Movable Type is targeted at larger businesses or for internal intranets. Price: Basic, $4.95 a month; Premium, $8.95 to $14.95 a month.
 Xanga - These guys originated back in 1999 as a site for sharing book, music and movie reviews. Although it quickly morphed into a full blown blogging tool, Xanga still maintains the ability to run a powerful review site. Xanga pulls data from several retailers like Amazon.com including thumbnails, pricing and a cover. The software also is very usable by novices with a powerful WYSIWYG editor allowing for easy HTML editing, adding smilies, links, and other symbols. By using Blog rings it is also easy to interface with Xanga's other 3 million users to share interests, ideas, and of course traffic. Xanga comes in a free and $25 flavor.
Mentions: Blogsome, Blogster, MindSay, Multiply
Self Hosted Blogging Software -
 WordPress - WordPress originally began as a mod of an older open source package known as B2. WP is MT's biggest competition and is often the bain of endless Wordpress vs Movabletype style threads around the internet. Although launched just over a year or so ago WP has really taken the blogosphere by storm. And with good reason - Wordpress is completely free under GNU licensing and is packed with many features you will not find anywhere else. It is also much easier to install and get blogging for novice users and has a very large and helpful community. WP runs on PHP/mySQL and is quite scalable judging from some of the very large and trafficked sites I see using it. It also sports utilities to import files from Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and B2. Wordpress recently upped the ante when Yahoo recently included them on their hostíng packages, in addition to MT. I have to admit I am finding myself more and more digging WP and will likely convert Profitpapers to WP as I get time (it can be a biznitch). Wordpress is free.
Movable Type - Aside from maybe Greymatter (the original open source blogging tool), Movabletype dominated the blogging market share in 2002-2004. Released in late 2001, Perl based Movable Type by Sixapart has maintained a large portion of the blogging market share, due mainly to the fact that there is a free version (supporting up to 3 weblogs) and that it is incredibly powerful, intuitive and easy to customize. Template driven Movable Type also sports one of the largest communities of developers and blogging enthusiasts around, meaning lots of support, idea sharing, and of course plugins. Movable Type can be configured to dynamically generate HTML, PHP or any other kind of pages you like, meaning it is incredibly scalable, fast, and loved by spiders. It is perhaps the most well known blogging software for SEO purposes and it is what currently powers Profitpapers and several of my other projects. Moveabletype is either Free with 3 authors, 1 weblog, and no support or $69.95 with unlimited weblogs, authors and full support.
Textpattern - Textpattern is the brainchild of Dean Allen and was written to ease publishing of content for those not inclined to learn HTML. Like WP and MT, Textpattern runs on PHP and mySQL for easy administration, backups, and power. What really sets textpattern apart from the others is the integration of Textile. Textile is a tool for easily formatting content for those who do not know HTML. WP & MT have modules for textile as well but it is native to the Textpattern system. Another bonus of the app is its superior handling of comment sp@m due to its smaller market share. On the blogs I maintain running WP and MT, I often find myself clearing out sp@m every day, whereas on some very busy textpattern sites I receive only manual comment sp@m (not bot driven). TP is open source.
Mentions: Blosxom, LifeType, Serendipity
Here is a handy blog software comparison chart courtesy of Online Journalism Review. Here is another from Weblog Industry Report which is much more thorough and nostalgic yet a tad dated.
If you are into following the devlopment of open source CMS, portal, blog and related systems you should check out opensourcecms.
"Protect Your Site From A Google PageRank Drop" From
For the uninitiated, Google ranks all pages on the web with a scale of PR0 to PR10 - higher is better. High PR sites or pages receive most of the traffic for competitive keywords or phrases. Keywords are what surfers type into search engines to find what they're looking for on the web.
Ranking high in Google for popular keywords can prove very lucrative. It can make the difference whether your website is in the black and producing hourly profits, or a total worthless waste of pixel space. Having a high Google PR is equivalent to having money in the bank, it is that important.
Google is still the undisputed king of traffic and, regardless of what's on the horizon, Google is the major deliverer of the web's traffic. That's why losing your high Google PR ranking, sometimes overnight, can be so devastating for the struggling webmaster or marketer.
Read this article to discover how you as a webmaster can protect yourself from lost profits and traffic, even if Google pulls the plug on your site or PR, while putting another one of their endless algorithms into place.
10 Ways to Outsmart Google's PageRank System - Here's a list of things you can do to lessen the impact of a sudden drop of the almighty Google PageRank:
• Diversify your traffic - make sure you cultivate other sources of traffic other than the search engines. Form partnerships and strategic links with other webmasters. Interact in forums and online communities.
• Provide quality information and free products or services that get 'good word of mouth' recommendations from your visitors. Content will always be king - make sure it reigns supreme on your site.
• Pick the right domain name. If you can, choose a short catchy keyword for your domain, one people will remember and would naturally type into a search engine or browser to find what they're looking for on the web. For example: www.hotels.com.
• If you're having success with your site, (or/and especially if you're not) venture into off-line advertising and promotion. Use traditional promotional products, t-shirts, caps, bumper stickers, etc. to promote your URL. You can also try PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising to provide you with targeted traffic and sidestep the search engines. Well sort of!
• Try viral products like ebooks, reports and free software programs to get your links out into the marketplace. You can also try product or site testimonials which are another great source of targeted traffic.
• Be extremely careful of any out-going links from your site. Don't link to bad neighborhoods (link farms, banned sites, etc.) Google will penalize you for bad links so always check the PageRank of the sites you're linking to from your site. If you don't have the Google Bar - you can check any site's PageRank at: www.iwebtool.com.
• Onsite SEO factors do have an influence on rankings - make sure your site is dressed to kill. Pay attention to keyword density, title descriptions, meta tags, alt tags and interior linking structure. If you can, optimize your site for all three major search engines: MSN, Yahoo and Google. But don't stop there, also submit your site to the countless other smaller search engines on the web. It's the old adage, don't put all your eggs into the ever-changing Google basket or you'll probably turn your site and yourself into one desperate basket case. Other search engines listed at: www.isedn.org.
• Along those same lines, have a large spread of keyword phrases that you're targeting with the content on your site. Don't go after extremely competitive keywords which have countless major players with deep pockets buying links, left right and center. Instead, pick a whole range of keyword phrases that have less or little competition. All these keyword phrases will add up to a flood of traffic for your site. Phrases that for the most part won't be affected by a sudden drop in PageRank. One good site for finding these keywords is www.nichebot.com - it will give both the number of hits and the amount of competition for each keyword.
• There is one more strategy you must explore if you want to lessen the power and importance of your own site's PR. One strategy that will bring in tons of Google traffic even if your PR is ZERO. You must utilize the PageRank of other sites on the web. Use off-page optimization for your major keywords. Build countless anchor text links through keyword rich articles, content related blogs and products that benefit from the high PR of other sites on the web.
• Keyword rich articles are some of the best examples of this method, placing them on high PR sites will filter Google traffic through these articles onto your site. It will also warm up these visitors before they reach your site and they will be more receptive to any of your site's offerings - never underestimate the power of the Pre-sell. Build enough of these links and a sudden drop in your own Google PR ranking won't drastically affect your bottom line or the amount of quality traffic you are receiving.
What's even more satisfying, if you build these links, partnerships, and off-site optimization - your Google PageRank will probably go up. If it doesn't, who cares, for you will have Google-Proofed your site against any sudden drop in your site's PR rankings and broadened the reach of your site by using the high PR of other sites on the Web. In the process, you will have protected your site and yourself from the big bad Google PR wolf.
You don't have to conquer Google, you just have to outsmart it!
"Four Simple Strategies to Increase Rankings Today" From
www.searchengine-news.com
Search engine optimization is an entrepreneur's dream. Who doesn't love getting vast numbers of customers at no cost? Achieving those top rankings can be like turning on a veritable firehose of eager customer traffic.
Many aspects of search engine optimization do take time. You've got to collect incoming links and create unique content before you can really reap the rewards search engines have to offer. There's really no shortcut for quality SEO.
The good news is that once your site is established as a credible resource by the search engines, there are several killer strategies you can employ... that will literally boost your rankings overnight!
1. Fix Your Title Tag - Your title tag is the single most important ranking component on your web page. A good title tag accomplishes three objectives...1. Features the exact phrase you want the page to rank for.
2. Makes that phrase the very first that appears in the title.
3. Repeats that phrase in some variation.
2. Increase Your Keyword Density - There's no magic formula for the number of times you should use a keyword on your page. However, it is very true that increasing the number of times that keyword appears will often increase your page's rankings.
Again, don't get carried away. Adding a keyword phrase hundreds of times to a page will get you penalized. However, if your keyword phrase currently appears on your page five or six times, and you work that phrase (or some slight variation) into your page an additional three or four times, you'll almost always see an improvement in your search rank.
3. Use Keywords in Your Internal Links. - Internal links are the links you use to link your site's pages together. You don't always have control over the way other people to link to you, but you have complete control over the way you structure your own internal links.
This is something you should take advantage of. When linking to your own pages, always use the link anchor text you want those pages to be found for.
4. Get a Listing in Each Search Engine's Preferred Directory - Up 'till now, we've only discussed changes to your own site (the so-called on-page factors), and avoided mention of building incoming links.
That's because, even though incoming links are probably the most important thing you can do to boost search rank, the effect of a good link can often take several weeks to manifest itself, while on-page changes can show results in a few days or less.
However, there is one type of link that seems to kick in fairly quickly, and that's a link from a search engine's favorite directory.
Each search engine has a preferred directory, as follows...
1.Google places a lot of weight on the DMOZ Directory, and sites listed in DMOZ are used to populate the Google Directory (not to mention getting you listed in over 400 other directories that use DMOZ data).
2. Yahoo has a preference for the Yahoo Directory, obviously.
3. MSN prefers Microsoft's bCentral Directory, and getting a site listed here will often lead to immediately improved results in MSN search.
How to Become an Overnight Success - We've laid out four killer strategies that will give most any site a quick boost in the search rankings. Some of this might be old-hat if you're a pro SEO, but it's even easy for the pros to get so caught up in the advanced techniques and forget that simple things like tweaking your title tag or beefing up your keyword density can often give you a nice boost in the search engines. Of course, you've still got to focus on the essentials, like building quality incoming links and creating great content.
But once you have those other factors in place, the strategies mentioned here are the ones that make that all-important difference between showing up on page one instead of page two, and can significantly increase the amount of search traffic that comes to your site.
And perhaps best of all, they take effect really quickly, often as soon as the next time the search engine crawls your page.
May Search Engine News From
www.searchengine-news.com
Google - As you may know, Google has more than one search spider crawling the Internet to provide their search results. If you check your site logs, you'll be able to identify them by their specific User Agent strings. For example, Google's main search results are crawled by the Googlebot: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html). That could take several days or even weeks, and is largely dependent on the number and quality of incoming links your site has. The better your site's incoming links, and the higher your PageRank, the more frequently and more thoroughly Google will crawl your site. (So go get some links!)
Now, what does this mean for your site? First of all, if you watch your logs, you're likely to observe some slightly erratic spidering activity. If so, don't be alarmed if you see a drop in visits from Googlebot. It most likely means Google is crawling your site with one of its other spiders.
MSN - MSN Rolls Out Windows Live Academic Search. Currently, the content is focused on three fields: Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Physics; and has over 6 million records from about 4300 journals and 2000 conferences.
AOL - Adds New Mobile Search Features - AOL's Mobile Search has a new Surf the Web feature that makes it easier to view web pages through a mobile device, such as your cell phone. Surf the Web is designed to intelligently resize and reformat web pages for easy viewing on a small screen. Images are scrunched down, and the site's navigation menus are identified and moved into a single Quick Nav link, rather than having tons of links crowding your screen.
Yahoo! - Yahoo Launches Web-for-TV Service
336-408-9075
Rich@RichsWebDesign.com
|
|
