Basics of Search Engine Optimization

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization

The fundamental concepts behind Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are understood by most search engine marketers, but those new to the subject should find this article to be very useful. Informative articles on various aspects of SEO have been published here on MarketPosition.com over the years, and in this post I will summarize these concepts and provide links to relevant articles.

Keyword Research
The first step in SEO is to identify the search terms for which you would like your web site to rank well on search engines. We might believe that we know these terms already, but our intuition is often incorrect about how popular or competitive search keywords actually are in reality. People use all kinds of variations of phrases as they are searching for information on the internet. It's important to identify these terms and use them in your site content exactly as people type them into search engines. To discover what these search terms are, a keyword research tool should be used. There are several free tools available, but most of the robust keyword research tools are subscription based.

Web Site Optimization
You now have your well researched keyword list in hand, and are ready to use the keywords in your web site content. How should these search terms be integrated into your web pages? How often should the phrases be used, and in what sections of the pages? Those are excellent questions and the answers are not known exactly because they depend on the algorithms used by search engines. However, it is generally agreed upon that search engines look at several different sections of a page when evaluating its content:

Title tag
Heading tag
Meta Keyword and Meta Description tags
Text within the Body area
Link text and Link URL
ALT attribute for Image tags (the ALT tag may be less significant than other areas of the page)

Search engines look at the various sections of the document for repeating patterns of keywords or phrases. For this reason, it's important to have a keyword density within a specific range.

Web Site Design
Aesthetics and user friendliness are important elements of web site design, but there are a number of other things to consider to ensure a web site will be as friendly to search engines as possible.

HTML Validation
It's important to ensure that the HTML code that makes up a web page is correctly formatted. If there are errors in the code, then search engine spiders may have difficulty indexing the page's content. Use a HTML Validator to check the formatting of HTML code,

Site Map
It's always a good idea to create a site map to make it easy for search engine spiders to index the site's content. Link to every page on the web site that has relevant content, and place a link to the site map on the site's home page. It may also help to sign up for the Google Sitemaps program to help ensure your content is indexed by Google.

Develop a Site Theme
One aspect of web site design that is often overlooked is theme development. If possible, organize your content so that particular themes are reinforced. Read Reinforcing Ideas and Improving Relevance to Gain Better Rankings for ideas to consider when organizing your site content.

Avoid Duplicate Content
It's important to avoid duplicating content on the web site.

Comply with Search Engines' Terms of Service
There are several practices to avoid to stay on good terms with search engines. Techniques like cloaking, hidden text, or spamming, for example, violate search engines' terms of service. If a site is found to be using these types of blackhat techniques, it will typically be removed from the search engine's index.

Build Link Popularity
The Link Popularity of a page is a term that refers to the number of other web sites that link to that page. Search engines typically consider how many other sites link to a page as a factor in determining that page's ranking. The idea behind this is that if others link to a page, then they must consider that page's content to be valuable in some way. However, all links are not weighted equally and it's therefore important to try to encourage high quality web sites within your own theme area to link to your site.

Monitor Performance
Once your optimized web site is online, you'll want to monitor its performance on the search engines. If the site is brand new, it should of course be submitted to the search engines, or perhaps resubmitted if necessary. Monitor the site's positions on search engines for keywords of interest to identify areas where the site is performing well and areas that can be improved.

A web site that is positioned well in search engines should start receiving a significant number of visitors. To monitor traffic and other useful web site statistics, a web analytics solution such as WebTrends is recommended.

Conclusion
The art of SEO is a set of skills that can be learned and implemented by anybody who manages a web site. However, proper optimization and maintenance of the site requires time and effort, and the fundamental elements of SEO discussed above must be put into practice. Those who find they do not have the time or desire to implement their own SEO program, then hire an SEO Expert who incorporates all of the steps above.

SEO Tip: Jump-Start Methods For Linking Building

SEO Tip: Jump-Start Methods For Linking Building

In the world of SEO and gaining top rankings, you MUST have related links on
other top and trusted web sites. Because the engines don't want "artificially created" (or useless) links, so there are no easy ways to build link popularity. The days of link farms and huge link exchange programs are over. Try those strategies now and you can easily find yourself booted out of an engine. Rather, the engines want links from authoritative sites, or links from sites that share the same focus as your site. But besides the link popularity you gain by getting an authoritative site to link to you, you also gain additional visibility for your Web site. So, when working on building link popularity, don't forget those two basic reasons for requesting links....Bonnie

For a lot of people, link building is a drag. It's like going to the dentist or writing that tax check every quarter... you don't really want to do it but you know you have to. It's that drag factor that makes a lot of people look for short cuts and easy methods to hurry the process along and get maximum bang for the shortest buck. Unfortunately, if this is how you feel about linking, it will be difficult to communicate the kind of enthusiasm you need to entice customers and industry experts to link to you.

Some people think marketing means being cute or creating sizzle to attract attention and links. It might for the short term but long-term relationships aren't built on short-term tactics. Being clever and controversial will attract attention but it doesn't build trust, respect or increase the value of your service which is what you need to get links and business coming to you.

People often ask me, "what's the best way to build links?" Most are looking for fast turn-key methods because they consider link building a necessary SEO evil instead of a long-term marketing opportunity. Heck, I look for easy solutions as well, but I also try not to get sucked into the swap-fast-blog-rich schemes out there because I know their effectiveness won't last.

Here are a handful of the more foundational yet highly effective tactics anyone can use to jump-start linking efforts:

Refer & Recommend. Getting recommendations and endorsements from highly visible industry experts almost eliminates the necessity of selling yourself and is the epitome of getting business in general to link to you. When you look at it from this point of view it makes sense to focus your efforts on getting links from the power players in your niche rather than chasing down reciprocal links or buying site-wide ads. Consider creating a company advisory board and invite the movers and shakers of your industry to be part of it. Tap into the collective business knowledge and link power these people hold.

Show and Tell. Whether you offer a service or product, dangle a carrot and give away something of value in exchange for the link. Step away from the mindset that you have to swap a link for a link and offer a free or lite version of your product as the incentive instead.

Expose Yourself. Now, now, not that kind of exposure! I mean the type of editorial exposure you get when you work the media. Explore alternative angles in addition to doing the standard press release submission. Write a letter to the editor of a newspaper, podcast, blog, periodical or trade publication in your niche about an issue that's relevant to your business. Editors who are presented with well written cogent pieces will most likely reprint the piece and/or link to you in response. After all, everyone wants good content these days so make sure it's yours their getting!

Link building is like anything else worth having— if you want the good stuff, you have to work for it. No matter what marketing tactic you use, it's the passion and drive you have for your products and business that will be the single greatest element in attracting links to your website.

Source: Debra Mastaler is President of Alliance-Link, an interactive marketing agency focused on providing link building campaigns and link training. The Link Week column appears on Mondays at Search Engine Land.

www.ontheavenues.com

SEO Tip: Does Google read your CSS files?

SEO Tip: Does Google read your CSS files?

Many webmasters reported that Google's spider started to index their external CSS files. What are CSS files, why does Google index them and how can this affect your rankings on Google and other search engines?

What are CSS files?

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) files allow webmasters to specify the layout of a web site without touching the HTML code. A good example is the CSS Zen Garden site.

On that web site, you can change the complete look of the site by selecting different style sheets. The HTML code of the page is always the same, only the CSS file that is used to display the HTML code changes.

What's the problem with CSS files?

CSS allow webmasters to design their web pages without touching the HTML code. That also means that webmasters can use that technique to hide content from their web site visitors.

Webmasters can put keyword rich content in the HTML code of their web pages that search engines can index. The same text can be hidden from human web surfers by using CSS.

That means that search engines see something totally different than human web surfers. Unfortunately, some webmasters try to fool search engines with that technique.

What do search engines do about this problem?

Search engines don't want to be fooled by webmasters. For that reason, they started to index CSS files. If search engines find anything that looks like spamming in a CSS file, they might penalize the corresponding site.

What can you do to avoid problems with your CSS files?

Unfortunately, it's not clear yet what search engines consider spamming and what not. There are many legitimate uses for hiding text on a web site so it's hard to tell what search engines will penalize.

As a rule of thumb, don't try to cheat search engines. If you do something explicitly to cheat search engines then chances are that search engines will detect this and penalize your site sooner or later.

Ask yourself if it is really necessary to hide text on your web site. If it might be misinterpreted as spamming by human web surfers, don't hide text on your site. Don't use shady techniques to promote your web site.

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Better badware notifications for webmasters

Better badware notifications for webmasters

In the fight against badware, protecting Google users by showing warnings before they visit dangerous sites is only a small piece of the puzzle. It's even more important to help webmasters protect their own users, and we've been working on this with StopBadware.org. A few months ago we took the first step and integrated malware notifications into webmaster tools. I'm pleased to announce that we are now including more detailed information in these notifications, and are also sending them to webmasters via email.

Webmaster tools notifications
Now instead of simply informing webmasters that their sites have been flagged and suggesting next steps, we're also showing example URLs that we've determined to be dangerous. This can be helpful when the malicious content is hard to find. For example, a common occurrence with compromised sites is the insertion of a 1-pixel iframe causing the automatic download of badware from another site. By providing example URLs, webmasters are one step closer to diagnosing the problem and ultimately re-securing their sites.

Email notifications
In addition to notifying webmaster tools users, we've also begun sending email notifications to some of the webmasters of sites that we flag for badware. We don't have a perfect process for determining a webmaster's email address, so for now we're sending the notifications to likely webmaster aliases for the domain in question (e.g., webmaster@, admin@, etc). We considered using whois records, but these often contain contact information for the hosting provider or registrar, and you can guess what might happen if a web host learned that one of its client sites was distributing badware. We're planning to allow webmasters to provide a preferred email address for notifications through webmaster tools, so look for this change in the future.

Source: Google Offical Blog
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MSN SEO Tips

MSN Search - SEO Facts

The SEOBook , a wonderful source has a great overview of Yahoo and SEO needs that all of us SEO experts agree with...well, at least this SEO expert does :-)

MSN Search had many incarnations, being powered by the likes of Inktomi and Looksmart for a number of years. After Yahoo! bought Inktomi and Overture it was obvious to Microsoft that they needed to develop their own search product. They launched their technology preview of their search engine around July 1st of 2004. They formally switched from Yahoo! organic search results to their own in house technology on January 31st, 2005. MSN announced they dumped Yahoo!'s search ad program on May 4th, 2006.

On Page Content
Using descriptive page titles and page content goes a long way to help you rank in MSN. I have seen examples of many domains that ranked for things like

state name+ insurance type + insurance

on sites that were not very authoritative which only had a few instances of state name and insurance as the anchor text. Adding the word health, life, etc. to the page title made the site relevant for those types of insurance, in spite of the site having few authoritative links and no relevant anchor text for those specific niches.

Additionally, internal pages on sites like those can rank well for many relevant queries just by being hyper focused, but MSN currently drives little traffic when compared with the likes of Google.

Crawling
MSN has got better at crawling, but I still think Yahoo! and Google are much better at crawling. It is best to avoid session IDs, sending bots cookies, or using many variables in the URL strings. MSN is nowhere near as comprehensive as Yahoo! or Google at crawling deeply through large sites like eBay.com or Amazon.com.

Query Processing
I believe MSN might be a bit better than Yahoo! at processing queries for meaning instead of taking them quite so literally, but I do not believe they are as good as Google is at it.

While MSN offers a tool that estimates how commercial a page or query is I think their lack of ability to distinguish quality links from low quality links makes their results exceptionally biased toward commercial results.

Link Reputation
By the time Microsoft got in the search game the web graph was polluted with spammy and bought links. Because of this, and Microsoft's limited crawling history, they are not as good as the other major search engines at telling the difference between real organic citations and low quality links.

MSN search reacts much more quickly than the other engines at ranking new sites due to link bursts. Sites with relatively few quality links that gain enough descriptive links are able to quickly rank in MSN. I have seen sites rank for one of the top few dozen most expensive phrases on the net in about a week.

Page vs Site
I think all major search engines consider site authority when evaluating individual pages, but with MSN it seems as though you do not need to build as much site authority as you would to rank well in the other engines.

Site Age
Due to MSN's limited crawling history and the web graph being highly polluted before they got into search they are not as good as the other engines at determining age related trust scores. New sites doing general textbook SEO and acquiring a few descriptive inbound links (perhaps even low quality links) can rank well in MSN within a month.

Paid Search
Microsoft's paid search product, AdCenter, is the most advanced search ad platform on the web. Like Google, MSN ranks ads based on both max bid price and ad clickthrough rate. In addition to those relevancy factors MSN also allows you to place adjustable bids based on demographic details. For example, a mortgage lead from a wealthy older person might be worth more than an equivalent search from a younger and poorer person.

Editorial
All major search engines have internal relevancy measurement teams. MSN seems to be highly lacking in this department, or they are trying to use the fact that their search results are spammy as a marketing angle.

MSN is running many promotional campaigns to try to get people to try out MSN Search, and in many cases some of the searches they are sending people to have bogus spam or pornography type results in them. A good example of this is when they used Stacey Kiebler to market their Celebrity Maps product. As of writing this, their top search result for Stacey Kiebler is still pure spam.

Based on MSN's lack of feedback or concern toward the obvious search spam noted above on a popular search marketing community site I think MSN is trying to automate much of their spam detection, but it is not a topic you see people talk about very often. Here are MSN's Guidelines for Successful Indexing, but they still have a lot of spam in their search results. ;)

Social Aspects
Microsoft continues to lag in understanding what the web is about. Executives there should read The Cluetrain Manifesto. Twice.Or maybe three times.

They don't get the web. They are a software company posing as a web company.

They launch many products as though they have the market stranglehold monopolies they once enjoyed, and as though they are not rapidly losing them. Many of Microsoft's most innovative moves get little coverage because when they launch key products they often launch them without supporting other browsers and trying to lock you into logging in to Microsoft.

MSN SEO Tools
MSN has a wide array of new and interesting search marketing tools. Their biggest limiting factor with them is that they have limited search market share.

Some of the more interesting tools are
Keyword Search Funnel Tool - shows terms that people search for before or after they search for a particular keyword
Demographic Prediction Tool - predicts the demographics of searchers by keyword or site visitors by website
Online Commercial Intention Detection Tool - estimates the probability of a search query or web page being commercial, informational-transactional, or
Search Result Clustering Tool - clusters search results based on related topics
You can view more of their tools under the demo section at Microsoft's Adlab.

MSN Business Perspectives
Microsoft has too many search brands for building their own technology in house.

They have MSN Search, Microsoft AdCenter, and Windows Live Search. All these things are pretty much the same thing and are meshed together, the only difference between them is that Microsoft does not know what brand they want to push.

Microsoft also heavily undermines their own credibility by recommending doorway page generator software and fake Alexa traffic generator software.

It seems as though Microsoft is big, slow moving, and late to the game.

Search Marketing Perspective
I believe if you do standard textbook SEO practices and actively build links it is reasonable to expect to be able to rank well in MSN within about a month. If you are trying to rank for highly spammed keyword phrases keep in mind that many of the top results will have thousands and thousands of spammy links. The biggest benefit to new webmasters trying to rank in Microsoft is how quickly they rank new sites which have shown inbound link bursts.

One note of caution with Microsoft Search is that they are so new to the market that they are rapidly changing their relevancy algorithms as they try to play catch up with Yahoo! and Google, both of which had many years of a head start on them. Having said that, expect that sometimes you will rank where your site does not belong, and over time some of those rankings may go away. Additionally sometimes they may not rank you where you do belong, and the rankings will continue to shift to and fro as they keep testing new technologies.

Microsoft has a small market share, but the biggest things a search marketer have to consider with Microsoft are their vast vats of cash and the dominance on the operating system front.

So far they have lost many distribution battles to Google, but they picked up Amazon.com as a partner, and they can use their operating system software pricing to gain influence over computer manufacturer related distribution partnerships.

The next version of Internet Explorer will integrate search into the browser. This may increase the overall size of the search market by making search more convenient, and boost Microsoft's share of the search pie. This will also require search engines to bid for placement as the default search provider, and nobody is sitting on as much cash as Microsoft is.

Microsoft has one of the largest email user bases. They have been testing integrating search and showing contextually relevant ads in desktop email software. Microsoft also purchased Massive, Inc., a firm which places ads in video games.

Microsoft users tend to be default users who are less advertisement adverse than a typical Google user. Even though Microsoft has a small marketshare they should not be overlooked due to their primitive search algorithms (and thus ease of relevancy manipulation), defaultish users, and potential market growth opportunity associated with the launch of their next web browser.

Learn More
MSN Guidelines for Successful Indexing
MSN Site Owner Help
MSN Search Blog
MSN AdCenter Blog
Microsoft AdLab
Microsoft Research

Source: SEOBook
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Yahoo SEO Facts

Yahoo! Search

The SEOBook , a wonderful source has a great overview of Yahoo and SEO needs that all of us SEO experts agree with...well, at least this SEO expert does :-)

1. Yahoo!been in the search game for many years.
2. is better than MSN but nowhere near as good as Google at determining if a link is a natural citation or not.
3. has a ton of internal content and a paid inclusion program.
both of which give them incentive to bias search results toward commercial results
4. things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in Yahoo!

Yahoo! was founded in 1994 by David Filo and Jerry Yang as a directory of websites. For many years they outsourced their search service to other providers, but by the end of 2002 they realized the importance and value of search and started aggressively acquiring search companies.

Overture purchased AllTheWeb and AltaVista. Yahoo! purchased Inktomi (in December 2002) and then consumed Overture (in July of 2003), and combined the technologies from the various search companies they bought to make a new search engine. Yahoo! dumped Google in favor of their own in house technology on February 17th, 2004.

Yahoo! has a cool Netrospective of their first 10 years, and Bill Slawski posted a list of many of the companies Yahoo! consumed since Overture.

On Page Content
Yahoo! offers a paid inclusion program, so when Yahoo! Search users click on high ranked paid inclusion results in the organic search results Yahoo! profits. In part to make it easy for paid inclusion participants to rank, I believe Yahoo! places greater weight on on-the-page content than a search engine like Google does.

Being the #1 content destination site on the web, Yahoo! has a boatload of their own content which they frequently reference in the search results. Since they have so much of their own content and make money from some commercial organic search results it might make sense for them to bias their search results a bit toward commercial websites.

Using descriptive page titles and page content goes a long way in Yahoo!

In my opinion their results seem to be biased more toward commerce than informational sites, when compared with Google.

Crawling
Yahoo! is pretty good at crawling sites deeply so long as they have sufficient link popularity to get all their pages indexed. One note of caution is that Yahoo! may not want to deeply index sites with many variables in the URL string, especially since

Yahoo! already has a boatload of their own content they would like to promote (including verticals like Yahoo! Shopping)

Yahoo! offers paid inclusion, which can help Yahoo! increase revenue by charging merchants to index some of their deep database contents.
You can use Yahoo! Site Explorer to see how well they are indexing your site and which sites link at your site.

Query Processing
Certain words in a search query are better at defining the goals of the searcher. If you search Yahoo! for something like "how to SEO " many of the top ranked results will have "how to" and "SEO" in the page titles, which might indicate that Yahoo! puts quite a bit of weight even on common words that occur in the search query.

Yahoo! seems to be more about text matching when compared to Google, which seems to be more about concept matching.

Link Reputation
Yahoo! is still fairly easy to manipulate using low to mid quality links and somewhat to aggressively focused anchor text. Rand Fishken recently posted about many Technorati pages ranking well for their core terms in Yahoo!. Those pages primarily have the exact same anchor text in almost all of the links pointing at them.

Sites with the trust score of Technorati may be able to get away with more unnatural patterns than most webmasters can, but I have seen sites flamethrown with poorly mixed anchor text on low quality links, only to see the sites rank pretty well in Yahoo! quickly.

Page vs Site
A few years ago at a Search Engine Strategies conference Jon Glick stated that Yahoo! looked at both links to a page and links to a site when determining the relevancy of a page. Pages on newer sites can still rank well even if their associated domain does not have much trust built up yet so long as they have some descriptive inbound links.

Site Age
Yahoo! may place some weight on older sites, but the effect is nowhere near as pronounced as the effect in Google's SERPs.

It is not unreasonable for new sites to rank in Yahoo! in as little as 2 or 3 months.

Paid Search
Yahoo! prices their ads in an open auction, with the highest bidder ranking the highest. By early 2007 they aim to make Yahoo! Search Marketing more of a closed system which factors in clickthrough rate (and other algorithmic factors) into their ad ranking algorithm.

Yahoo! also offers a paid inclusion program which charges a flat rate per click to list your site in Yahoo!'s organic search results.

Yahoo! also offers a contextual ad network. The Yahoo! Publisher program does not have the depth that Google's ad system has, and they seem to be trying to make up for that by biasing their targeting to more expensive ads, which generally causes their syndicated ads to have a higher click cost but lower average clickthrough rate.

Editorial
Yahoo! has many editorial elements to their search product. When a person pays for Yahoo! Search Submit that content is reviewed to ensure it matches Yahoo!'s quality guidelines. Sites submitted to the Yahoo! Directory are reviewed for quality as well.

In addition to those two forms of paid reviews, Yahoo! also frequently reviews their search results in many industries. For competitive search queries some of the top search results may be hand coded. If you search for Viagra, for example, the top 5 listings looked useful, and then I had to scroll down to #82 before I found another result that wasn't spammy.

Yahoo! also manually reviews some of the spammy categories somewhat frequently and then reviews other samples of their index. Sometimes you will see a referral like http://corp.yahoo-inc.com/project/health-blogs/keepers if they reviewed your site and rated it well.

Sites which have been editorially reviewed and were of decent quality may be given a small boost in relevancy score. Sites which were reviewed and are of poor quality may be demoted in relevancy or removed from the search index.

Yahoo! has published their content quality guidelines. Some sites that are filtered out of search results by automated algorithms may return if the site cleans up the associated problems, but typically if any engine manually reviews your site and removes it for spamming you have to clean it up and then plead your case. You can request to have your domain evaluated for re-inclusion using this form.

Social Aspects
Yahoo! firmly believes in the human aspect of search. They paid many millions of dollars to buy Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site. They also have a similar product native to Yahoo! called My Yahoo!

Yahoo! has also pushed a question answering service called Yahoo! Answers which they heavily promote in their search results and throughout their network. Yahoo! Answers allows anyone to ask or answer questions. Yahoo! is also trying to mix amateur content from Yahoo! Answers with professionally sourced content in verticals such as Yahoo! Tech.

Yahoo! SEO Tools
Yahoo! has a number of useful SEO tools.

Overture Keyword Selector Tool - shows prior month search volumes across Yahoo! and their search network.
Overture View Bids Tool - displays the top ads and bid prices by keyword in the Yahoo! Search Marketing ad network.
Yahoo! Site Explorer - shows which pages Yahoo! has indexed from a site and which pages they know of that link at pages on your site.
Yahoo! Mindset - shows you how Yahoo! can bias search results more toward informational or commercial search results.
Yahoo! Advanced Search Page - makes it easy to look for .edu and .gov backlinks
while doing link:http://www.site.com/page.html searches (links to an individual page)
while doing linkdomain:www.site.com/ searches (links to any page on a particular domain)
Yahoo! Buzz - shows current popular searches Yahoo! Business Perspectives
Being the largest content site on the web makes Yahoo! run into some inefficiency issues due to being a large internal customer. For example, Yahoo! Shopping was a large link buyer for a period of time while Yahoo! Search pushed that they didn't agree with link buying. Offering paid inclusion and having so much internal content makes it make sense for Yahoo! to have a somewhat commercial bias to their search results.

They believe strongly in the human and social aspects of search, pushing products like Yahoo! Answers and My Yahoo!.

I think Yahoo!'s biggest weakness is the diverse set of things that they do. In many fields they not only have internal customers, but in some fields they have product duplication, like with Yahoo! My Web and Del.icio.us.

Search Marketing Perspective
I believe if you do standard textbook SEO practices and actively build quality links it is reasonable to expect to be able to rank well in Yahoo! within 2 or 3 months. If you are trying to rank for highly spammed keyword phrases keep in mind that the top 5 or so results may be editorially selected, but if you use longer tail search queries or look beyond the top 5 for highly profitable terms you can see that many people are indeed still spamming them to bits.

As Yahoo! pushes more of their vertical offerings it may make sense to give your site and brand additional exposure to Yahoo!'s traffic by doing things like providing a few authoritative answers to topically relevant questions on Yahoo! Answers.

Learn More
Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines
Yahoo! Search Help
Yahoo! Search Blog
Yahoo! Search Submit - paid inclusion
Yahoo! Publisher Search Blog - blog discussing Yahoo!'s contextual ad product
Yahoo! Research - Yahoo!'s research lab

Source: SEOBOOK

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Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google

Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google

Wikipedia calls itself ‘The biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. Over two million articles and still growing ‘ the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Amazon.com is linked with project
Launch scheduled for early next year

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo!

Mr Wales has begun working on a search engine that exploits the same user-based technology as his open-access encyclopaedia, which was launched in 2003.
The project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”.

Mr Wales told The Times that he was planning to develop a commercial version of the search engine through Wikia Inc, his for-profit company, with a provisional launch date in the first quarter of next year.

Earlier this year he secured multimillion-dollar funding from amazon.com and a separate cash injection from a group of Silicon Valley financiers to finance projects at Wikia.

However, it is understood that amazon has also collaborated with Mr Wales on the search engine project and is expected to lend its support to the venture in the future.

Mr Wales, a 40-year-old former options trader, believes that, as the popularity of Google has grown, obvious flaws in its search engine technology have become apparent.

“Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results,” he said.

Spammers and commercial ventures are also learning how to manipulate Google’s computer-based search, he added.

Mr Wales believes that Google’s computer-based algorithmic search program is no match for the editorial judgment of humans.

Google searches are conducted using an algorithm that calculates how many other websites are linked to a certain site, which in turn gives the material found by the search a ranking. Therefore, the first result in any Google search is the website that has the most links pointing to it.

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia written by thousands of contributors from around the world, known as “Wikipedians”, using free open-source software.

Mr Wales aims to exploit the same network of followers and the same type of free software to create his search engine.

“Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,” Mr Wales said. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.

“But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” he added. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

Mr Wales believes that the reputation already fostered by his Wikipedia community and the transparency of his technology will build sufficient trust in his search engine to bring in advertising revenue and make the Wikiasari venture profitable.

“The revenue model of search is advertising. Transparency in search, therefore, is like transparency in news. If the quality is there people will come.”

Catching up with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft’s MSN or even smaller operators such as Ask.com will be a difficult challenge, Mr Wales conceded.

Source. Timesonline: James Doran, Tampa, Florida
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Can My Site Rank Well on all Four Major Engines?

Can My Site Rank Well on all Four Major Engines?

One of the most frequently asked questions readers and clients email StepForth Placement's SEO staff, revolves around how websites can be best optimized to meet the algorithmic needs of each of the major 4 search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Though there have been wide sweeping changes in the organic search engine landscape over the past six months, the fundamental ways search engines operate remains the same.

This question, or variants on it, reflects a shared notion among some webmasters that SEO driven placements at one search engine might come at the expense of high rankings across the other search engines. As the thinking goes, the techniques used to make a well optimized website rank well at Google might somehow prevent that same site from achieving high rankings at Yahoo, MSN and/or Ask. Alternately, webmasters and advertisers who already have great placements at Google but not at the others appear wary of sacrificing their Google rankings in pursuit of higher placements on Yahoo, MSN or Ask.

The differences between how each engine works appears to be causing a bit of confusion among webmasters and search marketers, especially regarding how to optimize well for all four at the same time.

Techniques that work on one engine might not work as well on another. In some extreme cases, techniques that work brilliantly with old school engines like MSN and Ask, and even with the invigorated Yahoo, are a kin to a kiss of death on Google.

There is one search engine friendly site design and optimization philosophy that works, almost every time, without fail. Good content, smart networking, and persistence over time. A well constructed website, or one that has been treated by a good search engine optimizer, should be able to rank well on all major search engines, provided that site has useful, relevant information to express.

Questions about ranking well on all four engines brings up some of the basic differences between the major search engines and, in light of so much change in the sector over the past few months, a look at what search engines look at, and how they do it seems in order.

There are a lot of differences between the major search engines but, by and large, they all gather information the same way. Each major search engine uses unique spider agents known as Googlebot, Slurp (Yahoo/Inktomi), Ask.com/Teoma, and MSNbot, (updated list @ Wikipedia), that find information by following links from document to document across the web. Spiders are designed to revisit sites on a semi-regular basis as well, though they often hit the index (or home) page more often than other pages. Spiders do tend to dig deeper looking for changes to internal documents based on changes to the index (or home) page. This allows the engines to maintain rapidly updating versions of the web, or parts of the web, in separate proprietary databases.

Each search database has its own characteristics and most importantly, each engine has its own algorithms for sorting and ranking web documents.

Getting information into those databases is the first stage of SEO. The site needs to be constructed (or reconstructed) in such a way as to allow search spiders to easily read and absorb the information and content contained on them.

Assuming realistic expectations and goal setting are already part of the equation, the success or failure of any multi-engine optimization campaign is dependent on the type of site being marketed, as much as it depends on methods and techniques used to market it. If the ultimate goal is strong search engine placements across all major search engines, a few compromises in style might be a temporary necessity in order to expose the great content and reap the rewards of multiple rankings.

Before beginning the building or construction of a site, having a working knowledge of the major on and off-site elements each search engine looks at when examining and evaluating a site and its contents is a key starting point.

There are two overarching areas all search engines examines when ranking a web document or site known as "on-page” and "off-page". As their names indicate, search engines examine factors and elements that occur on the document or site in question as well as factors and elements occurring on other documents and sites related by links or by topical theme.

While the search algorithms of each engine might differ in the number of factors found on or off page and the overall importance of those factors, they all examine generally similar sets of data when deciding which should rank where in relation to whatever search-queries are entered.

For example, Google loves links, as does Yahoo, MSN and to a lesser degree, Ask. MSN and Ask are considered to be old school search engines, allowing simpler SEO techniques to work quite well, as they still do with Yahoo.

On-page factors are generally found in one of four areas, Titles, Tags, Text and Structure, while off-page elements tend to involve links, locality, search-user behaviours and the performance of competing sites.

Here is a thumbnail breakdown the most important factors each search engine considers, roughly laid-out in order of importance.

Google: Incoming Links, On-page SEO, Site Design Spiderability, User analytics, Outgoing links, Inclusion in other Google indexes, Document Histories

Yahoo: On-page SEO, Links and Link Patterns, Site Design, User analytics, Inclusion in other Yahoo indexes, Document Footprints

MSN: On-page SEO, Site Design and Structure and Sipderability

Ask: On-page SEO, Site Design, Site Structure and Spiderability

Because Google drives approximately 50% of all organic search traffic, SEOs, webmasters, and search advertisers tend to be most concerned with Google placements. When planning a search optimization campaign, whether for a new site or in the redevelopment of an existing site, building around Google's needs is obviously the most logical path. It is also a smart way to find your way into the other search engines. Though each of the rival engines want to present the best possible results, Google's algorithms account for quality scoring to a deeper degree than the others do. In other words, if your site meets Google's various tests, it will likely meet those of the other engines.

Google puts an enormous weight on its evaluation of the network of links leading to and out from every web document in its index. Most, if not all, documents found in Google's index got there because Google's spider Googlebot found it by following an inbound link. Because its ranking algorithm is so heavily link dependent, Google is frequently forced to tinker with how it evaluates links, a process that generates a score known as PageRank. The basic wisdom on links says that incoming links from topically relevant sites are beneficial while those placed in order to get a better ranking at Google are not. Google also examines links on a document or site that are directed towards other sites in order to gauge if a webmaster is trying to game it or not by participating in link-networking schemes. To one degree or another, the three other major search engines do this as well, though MSN and Ask are not known for using link analysis as a weighty measure of site or document relevancy. Yahoo most certainly does. Link analysis is used to determine the seriousness and credibility of a web document by comparing it with other documents it is associated with.

Once a document exists in a search engine database, several on-page factors are examined. The engines tend to examine several elements of any particular document and the sites they are associated with including title, meta tags (in some cases), body text and other content, and internal site structure.

The key to providing search spiders with a strong on-page experience lies in presenting search spiders with a well designed, topically focused site. Again, remember the four basic on-page areas; titles, tags, text and site structure, creating documents that are friendly to all four search engines is not terribly difficult.

There are a few easy tips that should be kept in mind though. New websites should always introduce themselves to the search engines with very focused content expressed on a very basic site structure. Adding content as time goes forward is a much better way to feed search spiders than giving them a site that is already full of information. Search engines, especially Yahoo and Google, appreciate fresh content and can be “invited” back to a site again and again when new material is added.

Webmasters with pre-existing websites enjoying great rankings in one place but seeing sub-standard rankings in others should take a step back and re-evaluate the overall theme presented by the documents that make up their sites. In a technically perfect world, the most relevant and topical documents would reach the top of the rankings. As the search engines really are striving for a measure of technical perfection, ensuring your documents are tightly and topically focused is essential.

For those who have lost position at Google but not at the other search engines recently, check your link networks for undesirable connections. Good placement at MSN, Ask and Yahoo but sub-standard placement at Google is almost always a signal that some links going to or coming from your site have raised questions at Google. You should also check the content your site carries to be sure it is (as much as possible), original and not simply a copy of content found on other sites.

In the end, the best practices tend to win with the major search engines. A good website or document should be able to place well across all four engines at the same time, provided the webmaster or SEO specialist takes time to follow SEO best practices.

Source: Stepforth
SEO Expert OnTheAvenues

SEO Mistakes

SEO Mistakes

Search engine optimization is as much as an art as it is a science. Since none of us know the exact “secret sauce” search engines use to rank websites, we are left to use our experience of evaluating top ranking websites.

The question is how can we quickly evaluate websites and determine what made them rise to the top? Watching and learning from the top ranking websites can lead us to the right answers, but we have to go beyond what the naked eye can see in the search results and web pages. The bottom line is, you need to train your eyes to look for what search engines look for.

Of course we can never be a 100% sure we had found the answers to every single question, but in most case we can apply what we have learned and replicate it on our own websites with success.
In search engine optimization for every single positive ranking factor, there is an equivalent negative ranking penalty. For example, increasing the keyword count on a web page is a great way to increase keyword focus and relevance. However when a keyword is repeated too often, it quickly becomes keyword spam and can negatively affect ranking.

The Top 10 SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid

Don’t rely on images or flash for navigation or text display.
The search engines can’t read text inside images, and not all search engines can read text embedded in flash. You could have a whole page of images, but your readable word count will be zero. Therefore the search engines will have no clue what your web page is about. If you insist on keeping your image or flash based navigation, you should ensure there are text links on every page containing the target keywords. An alternative description for images or ALT tags should be used on most of your images that require an explanation.

Don’t use frames.
Search engines can’t read text in frames and the only alternative is using the NOFRAMES tag to give the search engines some content to crawl. In general frames should be completely avoided if possible.

Don’t stuff the metatags with keywords.
META keywords will not help your search engine ranking in any way. Nonetheless META keywords and META descriptions are still important to use. The keywords used in the keyword META tag must also appear on the web page. You must create a unique META description for every web page, describing the content in one or two sentences. The META description is often used in the search engine result pages under the website link and can greatly increase the click through rate if it’s worded correctly.

Don’t focus on irrelevant or too many keywords in your

Cool Site: Animal Vegetable Video

Animal Vegetable Video

What does a flock of sheep do when it's alone? In 1988, Sam Easterson strapped a video camera to a sheep's head to find out. (The answer: a lot of starting and stopping and checking in with each other). Sam has since outfitted a wide range of wild animals with his custom-designed "helmet-mounted" cameras.

And, with the sample footage available here, he allows us to glimpse his astonishing work. A wolf snuffles and digs in the undergrowth; a baby chick squeakily trails another hatchling; a tarantula pads across the rocks. There's a lot of nosing around: A wheezy pig pokes in the mud with its wide snout; an alligator nudges through the swamp, occasionally flaring its nostrils. We're even offered a tumbleweed's point of view as it plunges onward. The videos are choppy and brief, but they're unfettered by human presence -- and that's enormously satisfying

Bonnie Burns SEO Expert www.ontheavenues.com

Cool Site: Skeletal Systems of Cartoon Characters

Skeletal Systems of Cartoon Characters

Like so many Americans, Michael Paulus grew up watching cartoons. But unlike most children who become adults and shed interest in their animated friends, Michael matured into an artist who applies grown-up analysis to the animated characters of his youth—and their bone structure, in particular.

That pondering led to detailed illustrations of the skeletal systems of such preeminent cartoon actors as Barney Rubble, Shmoo, and Baby Huey. If you accept the maxim that a large cranium indicates great intelligence, then Michael has revealed that Charlie Brown might just be a genius (footballs notwithstanding). Hello Kitty is a whiz. And Pigpen is a veritable Stephen Hawking. As for Betty Boop, it's a wonder she can even hold her mastermind-sized head up above those dainty little feet.

Bonnie Burns SEO Expert www.ontheavenues.com

Cool Site: Pimp That Snack

Pimp That Snack

It's hard out here for a snack. Just as the KitKat, the Toblerone, or the M&M thinks it's making it, along comes Pimp That Snack, flashing "The Mother of all KitKats," "The Everest Toblerone," and an M&M 1,000 times the size of those puny things you find at the corner store. Each entry in this catalog of fabulousness boasts meticulous recipes, detailed photographs, and from-the-stove accounts of how each confection was cooked up—and came out so colossally huge. The gallery displays lavish color portraits of tricked-out sweets, and the most popular list may lead you down the path of no return.

Our story? Once we caught sight of the Monster Jammie Dodger and the King of Rolos, we were intrigued. But it was the Pop-tart the size of a cookie sheet that hooked us for good.

Bonnie Burns. SEO Expert www.ontheavenues.com

Cool Site - The Envelope Collective

The Envelope Collective

It doesn't take much to enlist in The Envelope Collective. Three simple steps will land you in their warm embrace:

Turn an envelope into a piece of art.
Stamp it.
Mail it to one of the Collective's three thoroughly disclosed locations.

Assuming neither snow nor rain nor dark of night interfere, you should soon see your handiwork displayed in the group's online gallery. This "collaborative experiment in art" welcomes graphic squares and squiggles, goblin renderings, rock star tributes, and penguin portraits of all kinds. Whether you fancy collage or illustration or 55-word tales, you will find a hearty welcome here. And if you feel like contributing multiple times, go right ahead. Some mail-art activists are nearing 100 deliveries. Long live the Collective

Bonnie Burns SEO Expert: www.ontheavenues.com

Internet Users In Search of a Home

Internet Users In Search of a Home

If you are a Realtor and your web site cannot be found…you are losing out on potential business!!! According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the number of Americans who have looked online for information about a place to live has doubled since 2000. Now, nearly two in five adult internet users in the U.S. (39%) have done this, up from 34% in 2004 and 27%

The number of Americans who have looked online for information about a place to live has doubled since 2000

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project

The number of internet users who go online to look for information about a place to live has grown steadily over the past six years. Now, nearly two in five adult internet users in the U.S. (39%) have done this, up from 34% in 2004 and 27% in 2000.

This means that overall, more than a quarter of all adults in the U.S. (27%) have looked online for information about housing, double the overall number of Americans who had done so in 2000 (13%).

Also, more than half (51%) of the youngest adult internet users, 18 to 29 years old, have searched online for housing information. This compares with 43% of internet users 30-to-49 years old; 27% of internet users ages 50 to 64; and 15% of internet users ages 65 and older.
Perhaps reflecting their transient stage of life as well as their remarkably intensive use of the internet, 9% of online Americans ages 18 to 29 reported in August that they looked for housing information on a typical day, more than double the percentage (4%) in this age group who said the same thing two years earlier.

Two other characteristics of internet users are associated with the likelihood of looking online for information about places to live: the number of years they have been internet users and the type of internet connection they have at home. Those who have been online six years or more are significantly more likely than shorter-time users to have done this: 45% of these veteran users have looked online for housing information; compared with 30% of those who have been online 4-5 years; 24% of those online for 2-3 years; and 22% of those online one year or less. In addition, 45% of those with broadband connections at home have looked online for housing information, compared with 30% of those with home dial-up connections.

Among the factors related to the likelihood of looking online for a place to live, youth is a stronger predictor than connection speed or years of online experience.

Source: Deborah FallowsPew Internet & American Life Project
Bonnie Burns http://www.ontheavenues.com/real-estate-websites-seo.html

The Most Common Reason for Dropped Rankings: Duplication

The Most Common Reason for Dropped Rankings: Duplication

This article found on http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1593/ does a great job of explaining why duplicate content can cause your site to lose rankings

Duplicate Websites
Definition: a duplicate website is a website that has many if not all of the same pages as another live website.Note: the following questions are based on a person who owns two websites that are duplicates.

Q: “Why is a duplicate website such a bad idea?”
A: The major search engines are constantly trying to improve the quality of their search engine results in an effort to provide the best quality content for users. When duplicate content is indexed by search engine spiders, valuable time and processing power is wasted. As a result, search engines have blocked sites that used duplicate content from their database, ultimately favouring the site that either had the content first, or I believe, the one site that has the greater online history. In addition, the major search engines have a bad taste after dealing with so much duplicate content created by spammers over the past several years. As a result, posting a duplicate website is an offense that can quite literally blacklist a domain; there are few things the search engine properties dislike more than being gamed by spammers.

Q: “What should I do with my duplicate website then? Just delete it?”
A: Deleting the site is the only option unless you want to create an entire new website with unique content and a unique purpose. That said, by deleting the website you can still ensure the effort you put into promoting the old site does not go to waste by pointing the domain to your new website’s domain using a 301 redirect. A 301 is a term used to describe a server protocol which Google and other search engines will ’see’ when they visit the old site. The protocol essentially says that your content from the old site can be found on the new site and that this is a permanent forwarding of all traffic. 301 redirects are by far the best way to minimize your losses from shutting down a website that just might have traffic or inbound links.

Q: “Which website should I shut down? Is there anything I should consider first?”
A: Yes, it is very important that you choose the website that has the most backlinks and has been online the longest. The reason I say this is that Google tends to favour entrenched websites; they have been around a while, are well backlinked and overall appear to have a positive history.

Whatever your decision is, it is vital you understand switching a website to a new domain is a dangerous step. This is because of Google’s famed ’sandbox’. The ’sandbox’ is really only an overused turn of phrase that represents a portion of the Google algorithm which considers the age of the domain as a signifier of trust. Generally, new websites will require 6 months to a year before substantial rankings are evident; this is kind of a right of passage that Google appears to be enforcing on the average website. Sites that are obviously popular and quickly gain a load of legitimate link popularity will easily avoid the sandbox (because Google can not afford to miss a ‘great’ website) but this is not the common scenario.

Q: “Will using a 301 redirect pass on the benefit of the deleted site’s link popularity?”
A: Link popularity is passed onto the other website when a 301 is used but how much this pass-over will benefit the website seems to fluctuate on a case-by-case basis. Usually the fluctuation is only present when popularity from one domain is passed to another with differing content/topic. In this case, since the link popularity is being redirected to an identical website I expect the benefit to be virtually lossless.

Duplicate ContentDefinition: content appearing within a website that is duplicated elsewhere on the same website or elsewhere on the Internet.

Q: “I need content for my website; can I just copy content from industry journals and benefit from that quality content?”
A: No, aside from the copyright concerns of using content that is not yours, your rankings (if they exist) would suffer because it is highly likely the major search engines would detect the duplicate content. As a result, the page that you create may get flagged as duplicated and it would be ignored at the very least. The page could even devalue your site’s overall credibility. Credibility is a critical component of Google’s algorithm so sites with less credibility tend to have a harder time staying (’sticking’ if you will) in a particular ranking.

Q: “I use a content management system to manage my site and it uses a particular set of templates. These templates have some duplicate content within them and they are spread all throughout my website. Should I be worried?”
A: No, in most cases the amount of duplicate content used within a template in a content management system (CMS) is negligible. If, however, you have a large number of pages created using a page where 90% of the text