SEO Blog

There are many ways in which you can improve your Google listing, and some work better than others depending on the type of website you have or on your niche. Here are ways in which you can get a higher Google ranking, or even a better search engine ranking in general.

Author : Peter Nisbet

According to Webmasters World Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) are returning fewer results for specific queries, pointing to possible Google SERPs update. The speculations for such changes are that, it may be due to the quality control practices employed by Google, or it can also be a human-error.

Another concern is cache related, where the cache date is current but the cache pages are about one to three months old. In some cases, cache pages aren’t being displayed at all. Such as in case of google.co.uk, users are experiencing ranking changes (increased ranks), that is being attributed to the quantity of links rather than quality of links. Some reports suggest that a lot of irrelevant information is being displayed in the first page of Google SERP, information that is in no way related to search query.

Let us see what the Webmasters at the ‘Webmaster World’ have to say about this possible update:

I’ve wondered too as to why some search terms are affected more than others and some result pages are changing around while other barely move.

Has anyone seen any relationship between how popular a search the term is and how much movement is going on?

As to when it will end I don’t think we can predict as not
hing quite like this has gone on before

I dont know if anybody has reported this or they could be doing some major testing in my areas.

Im seeing some dramatic across the board cuts for returned results for many keywords in my areas. Many keywords that once returned 850-950 results are now showing only 600-725 returned results. First page though is showing about the same amount of returned results as before which is somewhat deceptive. I had a feeling this was right around the corner. Theyre applying more and more of the quality control features of Adwords to the natural results.

I see this pattern too. It might be the result of the “human editorial army” as well as the automated quality measures.

Has anybody seen where cache dates may be 1-3 months old but the page showing in the cache is current? This is taking into account that the new cache date could show up shortly but doesn’t.

I’m noticing the rapid rise of a few sites in the google.co.uk serps. On investigation using Yahoo site-explorer it looks like shear volume of backlinks of any quality trumps a lower number of quality links. Whoever has been playing with the UK geo filter recently seems to have turned off the “high quality” bit of the algorithm. Thus creating a field day for webmasters who exploit the low pay rates of 3rd World SEOs.

Since it is generally agreed that being linked to (except in certain extreme situations) cannot harm your site should we all be paying someone $200 to get 400 links from dodgy directories?

Well, these unexpected changes definitely have unmistakable similarities with SERP updates. However, as of now, it would be wise to just wait for Google’s response.

Author : Navneet Kaushal

UK and European marketers, corporate decision makers, webmasters and search engine marketing (SEM) specialists and rookies, including pay per click (PPC) advertisers and search engine optimization (SEO) consultants, attend SES London each year to network with their peers and learn the SEM tips, tactics and strategies that aren’t covered online. Approximately 1,500 search and digital enthusiasts are expected once again at SES London. Your customers, colleagues and competition will be in attendance — will you?

Event Overview:

• Organized and Hosted by world-renowned search authorities
• Real-time actionable information you need to grow your business through search engine marketing
• Ins-and-outs of search engine marketing from top search experts and the search engines themselves
• A unique setting to network with fellow marketers and search engine industry professionals to discuss the trends in search engine marketing
• Access to the world’s most comprehensive gathering of search engine marketing & optimization-related solutions providers and potential partners & affiliates.

What You Will Learn:

• How search engines list web sites for free and through paid placements
• How to get free “organic” traffic by building a site that pleases search engines and your visitors
• How to efficiently purchase listings guaranteed to rank your company at the top of search engine results
• How to calculate the ROI of your search marketing efforts by tracking your visitors from the time they hit your site until they buy-and get tips on improving conversion if they don’t
• How to build links that generate traffic to your web site, and how to avoid the penalties of “spamming” the search engines
• What’s coming next in the constantly evolving world of web search, and how you can profit from those changes.

Article by : http://www.searchenginestrategies.com

There is none out there who can describe the sophesticated page rank technology owns by Google than Google itself . the below is inormation by Google regarding the page rank .

Technology Overview

We stand alone in our focus on developing the “perfect search engine,” defined by co-founder Larry Page as something that, “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” To that end, we have persistently pursued innovation and refused to accept the limitations of existing models. As a result, we developed our serving infrastructure and breakthrough PageRank™ technology that changed the way searches are conducted.

From the beginning, our developers recognized that providing the fastest, most accurate results required a new kind of server setup. Whereas most search engines ran off a handful of large servers that often slowed under peak loads, ours employed linked PCs to quickly find each query’s answer. The innovation paid off in faster response times, greater scalability and lower costs. It’s an idea that others have since copied, while we have continued to refine our back-end technology to make it even more efficient.

The software behind our search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we’re able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.

• PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
• Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Our search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.



 resultsPageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

Our innovations don’t stop at the desktop. To give people access to the information they need, whenever and wherever they need it, we continue to develop new mobile applications and services that are more accessible and customizable. And we’re partnering with industry-leading carriers and device manufacturers to deliver these innovative services globally. We’re working with many of these industry leaders through the Open Handset Alliance to develop Android, the first complete, open, and free mobile platform, which will offer people a less expensive and better mobile experience.

Over at Yahoo’s Search Marketing blog, Marketing Communications Manager Roger Park is offering up tips on converting your search ads. He breaks down a bunch of best practices principles to three main steps: Optimize, Navigate and Track.

Optimize

Optimizing your landing pages is crucial to a profitable search marketing campaign. Park advises:

Have a “deep link” to a product on your site
Offer several contact methods
Online shopping carts should be secure and easily visible
Remove broken links
Have good server availability
Navigate

Park encourages site owners and developers to put themselves in the shoes of their web site visitors. I personally have found that many of my clients have a difficult time being able to do this. They’re just too close to their business. So, it was nice that Park also served up some tangible tips:

Create an obvious pathway to the product that the visitor searched for
Don’t have too many layers between the landing page and the end goal - no more than 2 clicks
If the end goal is sale, move non-commercial content below the fold
Track

Successful marketing campaigns are built on solid data. Consistently evaluate your data and tweak your paid search campaigns accordingly. Yahoo’s conversion-only analytics tool can help you do that. The tool can help you analyze keywords, tweak landing pages, and improve under-performing ads.

What do you think of Park’s advice? Anything else you would add to the mix? Share your ideas in the comments!

Posted by Nathania Johnson

The effects of Web 2.0 are far-reaching. Like all paradigm shifts, it affects the people who use it socially, culturally, and even politically. One of the most affected groups is the designers and developers who will be building it—not just because their technical skills will change, but also because they’ll need to treat content as part of a unified whole, an ecosystem if you will, and not just an island.

To summarize, these are what we see as the six main themes covering design in the Web 2.0 world:

1. Writing semantic markup (transition to XML)
2. Providing Web services (moving away from place)
3. Remixing content (about when and what, not who or why)
4. Emergent navigation and relevance (users are in control)
5. Adding metadata over time (communities building social information)
6. Shift to programming (separation of structure and style)

Our purpose in this column is to analyze those themes and figure out what Web 2.0 means for designers. We’ll explore the new technologies that are making it happen, take a closer look at the new interfaces that demonstrate its power, and ponder the social effects it has on the people who use it.

As we move along, we hope that designers who may be wary of the promises of new technology help us focus on the practical aspects of this one, the subtle but real changes that Web 2.0 is having (and will have) on design.

UsabilityAccessibility and Usability issues

Since Googlebot is actually designed to simulate the behavior of an average Internet user, it will check web pages for accessibility and usability issues as well. In general, the algorithms identifying major problems of a web site are highly refined, thus errors, misused code or hard to comprehend layouts are all playing a role in deciding the ranking of the pages. While a few errors will most likely be ignored, major problems, site-wide navigational inconsistencies, and especially intentional misuse or even overuse of certain elements may very well lead to a decline in rankings.

Known issues

Accessibility and usability checks are heavily relying on browser compatibility, which in fact is an ever changing factor. Some practices may now be more widespread than they were about a year ago, yet still be viewed as a hindrance, because of a minority of web browsing software still can not display them correctly. Google is updating its algorithms and Googlebot constantly, thus is expanding the methods a web site may utilize in its design to get its content properly indexed. The results try to be on par with the majority and technical advancements. Shockwave Flash content is analyzed for its textual content, javascript based links are followed the same as anchor text links ( although they don’t pass any parameters ), image maps, information in the <NOFRAMES> tag, and other advancements in standards are evaluated in the same manner for relevance and trust. However the broader range of browsers a web site can serve, the more importance it will be given to. There is still a hierarchy in judging usability issues, rendering the most accessible sites above the specialized designs. For example, text link references will weigh more than image based links, references buried in heavy code will likely to be followed at a slower rate than easy to access navigation.

+ Resolution: The W3C standard for web pages is a good hint on whether web sites are ready to be evaluated by Googlebot, based on the simulated user experience. While a page does not need to comply with all standards, major errors, and problems that are not only browser specific differences will less likely be ignored. Asking yourself the question whether your web site is easy to use, and whether it is accessible with most common web browsers is also a hint. A simple checklist might be to watch out for broken links, orphaned pages, loading time, number of links within the navigation, and the overall navigation communicating a consistent and coherent page hierarchy, images being labeled with ALT tags, the use of unique TITLE and META description tags, proper page encoding settings, language settings, text of readable size and color, no hidden text, no overuse of anchor text in links, no cloaking or off-screen content, no invisible layers, no redirect chains, no overuse of keywords to an extent where the content becomes meaningless, use of all necessary but also closing of all HTML tags, use of proper layout emphasizing the parts unique to a page, and the code not relying on yet to become standard practices. While the list of things to keep an eye out for could seem long, once thought over, the knowledge of web page coding and some common sense applied will save most pages from becoming a burden to your web site, or the visitor trying to decipher them. The most common errors are still the most obvious ones, with misused or vital but forgotten HTML code leading the list of problems, and cause many of the instances of a drop in rankings.

I have been reading the Bruce Clay’s websites since 2003 , while there are hundreds or i better say thousands of seo guys out there but i say with confidence that he is the one of the top seo and internet marketing experts who knows well about his job inorder to understand the relation between each search engine and how each one of the engine feeds others there is a below chart is being taken directly from his site .

In the boldly headlined blog entry, “Search quality, continued,” Googler Ben Gomes explaines in greater depth what search quality means to Google.

It’s too bad Google didn’t publish the post before the Un-Search Engine, Un-Cuil, Cuil, launched.

Gomes has written a clear overview of factors that Google considers to improve search user experience. Those are some of the same factors SEOs take into consideration when consulting on site design:

1. A small page. A small page is quick to download and generally faster for your browser to display. This results in a minimalist design aesthetic; extra fanciness in the interface slows down the page without giving you much benefit.

2. Complex algorithms with a simple presentation. Many search features require a great deal of algorithmic complexity and a vast amount of data analysis to make them work well. The trick is to hide all that complexity behind a clean, intuitive user interface. Spelling correction, snippets, sitelinks and query refinements are examples of features that require sophisticated algorithms and are constantly improving. From the user’s point of view search, almost invisibly, just works better.

3. Features that work everywhere. Features must be designed such that the algorithms and presentation can be adapted to work in all languages and countries.

4. Data driven decisions - experiment, experiment, experiment.

We’re looking forward to the next installment when Google discusses some of the specific experiments they’ve done to improve search quality.

Author:  Kevin Heisler

Many web designers view search-engine optimization (SEO) as a “dirty trick,” and with good reason: search engine optimizers often pollute search engine results with spam, making it harder to find relevant information when searching. But in fact, there is more than one type of search-engine optimization. In common usage, “black-hat” SEO seeks to achieve high rankings in search engines by any means possible, whereas “white-hat” SEO seeks to code web pages in a way that is friendly to search engines.

In Using XHTML/CSS for an Effective SEO Campaign, Brandon Olejniczak explains that many web design best practices overlap with those of white-hat SEO. The reason is simple: such practices as separating style from content, minimizing obtrusive JavaScript, and streamlining code allow search engines to more easily spider, index, and rank web pages.

Two years later, I am going to take Brandon’s conclusions a step further. I have been a search engine optimizer for several years, but only recently have become infatuated with web accessibility. After reading for weeks and painstakingly editing my personal website to comply with most W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, I have come to a startling revelation: high accessibility overlaps heavily with effective white hat SEO.
Accessibility for all users, even search engines
On further reflection, this overlap makes sense. The goal of accessibility is to make web content accessible to as many people as possible, including those who experience that content under technical, physical, or other constraints. It may be useful to think of search engines as users with substantial constraints: they can’t read text in images, can’t interpret JavaScript or applets, and can’t “view” many other kinds of multimedia content. These are the types of problems that accessibility is supposed to solve in the first place.

Walking through a few checkpoints
Now that I’ve discussed the theory of why high accessibility overlaps with effective SEO, I will show how it does so. To do this, I am going to touch upon each Priority 1 checkpoint in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which affects search-engine optimization.

1.1 Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g., via “alt”, “longdesc”, or in element content)…

Not only are search engines unable to understand image and movie files, they also cannot interpret any textual content that is based on vision (such as ASCII art). alt and longdesc attributes will, therefore, help them understand the subject of any such content.

Search engines are also “deaf” in reference to audio files. Again, providing textual descriptions to these files allows search engines to better interpret and rank the content that they cannot “hear.”

1.2 Provide redundant text links for each active region of a server-side image map.

Text links are very important to search engines, since anchor text often succinctly labels the content of a link’s target page. In fact, many search engine optimizers consider anchor text to be the single most important factor in modern search algorithms. If a website uses an image map rather than a text-based menu as the primary navigational method, a redundant text-only menu elsewhere on the page will give search engines additional information about the content of each target page.

4.1 Clearly identify changes in the natural language of a document’s text and any text equivalents (e.g., captions).

Major search engines maintain country and language-specific indexes. Specifying the language of a document (or of text within a document) helps search engines decide in which index(es) to place it.

6.3 Ensure that pages are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are turned off or not supported [...]

Some users choose to disable JavaScript and applets in their browser’s preferences, while other users’ browsers do not support these technologies at all. Likewise, search engines’ “browsers” do not read scripts; therefore a webpage’s usability should not be crippled when scripts are not supported. Otherwise, search engines may not even index the page, let alone rank it well.

14.1 Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site’s content.

It is a bit less obvious how this particular checkpoint aids SEO. But if a website contains the “clearest and simplest language appropriate for the site’s content,” it is probably using those keywords with which potential searchers will be most familiar. Searchers tend to use succinct queries containing familiar language. Thus, to receive maximum traffic from search engines, it is best that a website contain the same words which the site’s audience will use when searching.

The benefits do not end with Priority 1—many of the Priority 2 and 3 Checkpoints are important for SEO purposes, too. For instance, Checkpoints 6.2 and 6.5 refer to the accessibility of dynamic content. In fact, making dynamic content search engine-friendly is one of the most daunting tasks a search engine optimizer faces when working on an ecommerce or database-driven site. Following the W3C’s recommendations can help to avoid any indexing or ranking problems related to using dynamic content.

From the horse’s mouth
If you doubt any of the above, perhaps a visit to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines could convince you that Google rewards high accessibility. This page specifically mentions best practices which will help Google “find, index, and rank your site.”

Design and Content Guidelines:
Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
Make sure that your title and alt tags are descriptive and accurate. [...]
Technical Guidelines:
Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
Note that each of Google’s guidelines actually correlates with a W3C Web Content Accessibility Guideline. (Oddly enough, the word “accessibility” does not actually appear in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Perhaps they are afraid of scaring off some webmasters with technical jargon? In any case, it is clear that Google is lobbying for high accessibility.)

SEO: just another feather in accessibility’s cap
The checkpoints I highlighted above are just a few of the many ways that high accessibility will help optimize a website for search engines—many of the other checkpoints in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are helpful to SEO, as well. Of course, to most web designers, the goal of accessibility is (and should be) to make sites accessible to all people, independent of their platform or any disabilities they have. But if accessibility gets a website more traffic from Google, even better!

The good news is that a web designer who follows best practices for accessibility is already practicing solid white hat SEO. Search engines need not scare anyone. When in doubt, design your site to be accessible to blind and deaf users as well as those who view websites via text-only browsers, and SEO will fall into place.

Author :  Andy Hagans