Tuesday, May 1st, 2007
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More news that Google will soon be taking over the world.
Call 800-GOOG-411
Use the new Google Voice Local Search experiment to connect to local businesses anywhere in the U.S. from your phone, for free. Just dial the toll-free number 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) and speak the name of a business (”Giovanni’s Pizzeria”) or its category (”pizza”).
You can choose to connect to the business directly over phone or, if you are calling from your mobile phone, you can also say “text message” and we’ll send you the business’s details by SMS. Google won’t charge you for a thing, but note that regular phone charges may apply based on your phone service provider.
http://labs.google.com/goog411
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007
Not really an SEO post, but cool nontheless. Here is a new feature from the “mouth” of Google:
A new Google Maps feature lets you easily create maps with placemarks that incorporate your text comments, photos, and videos from YouTube and Google Video. It’s a great way of sharing your stories on a map, whether it’s stops you enjoyed on a recent vacation or the best places to grab a quick bite to eat in your city. To get started, just click the “My Maps” tab on the left-hand side of the Google Maps homepage.
You can take a look at the maps other people have created (there’s even one of the Googleplex), and then get started making your own by clicking “Create new map.” If you make your map public, we will make it searchable for other folks who use Google Maps.
http://maps.google.com
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 25th, 2007
As of April 11th there is no longer a need to manually submit your sitemap to search engines. Last fall, the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) agreed on a sitemaps format. You can now add a simple line to your robots.txt file and let the engines know where your sitemap file resides.
Include the following line in your robots.txt file:
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Robots.txt has been used to instruct the search engines how to crawl your site - where not to go on your site. This latest sitemaps implementation of robots.txt will now tell the spiders where to go when indexing your site..
Sitemaps are important, especially for new sites, will help improve your website visibility in search results.
What is a xml sitemap?
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted in Google, Live Search (MSN), SEO Strategies, SEO Tools, Yahoo Search | 3 Comments »
Friday, April 13th, 2007
I have an easy SEO Tip this week. Make sure you register you domain name for more than one year. Register it for a minimum of three years and more if you can. This is especially important for new sites. The search engines, particularly Google, want to see that you believe your site is going to be successful. They also want to be sure that your site will be meaningful. A good indicator can be fort the length of time you register your domain. And the first place they check is with your domain register company (e.g. Godaddy.com).
Google has also filed United States Patent Application 20050071741 stating this very fact.
“Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.”
Another good reason to increase your domain registration period is it will prevent you from accidentally losing the domain name because you overlooked or didn’t receive the reminder email to renew.
While this tip is not going to rocket you to #1 in the search results, it can provide a quicker exit from the Google Sandbox and may provide some boost in your rankings. With so many contributing factors why overlook one of the easiest things to do. Go ahead and renew, it’ll do a website good!
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, SEO Strategies | 3 Comments »
Friday, March 16th, 2007
Get to know Google. What would an SEO Consultant’s life be like without Google? An interesting question but one we are likely never to have to answer. Google is the new Microsoft and will affect our lives forever more in ways we don’t even realize yet. Don’t believe me? Do you think Google just does web search? Think again.
I’ve listed many services that Google offers and I’m sure you may be a bit surprised at how many different pies the search giant’s thumb is actuall in. The list is growing so please contribute if you know of any I may have missed. I have bolded the Google services I view important for SEO purposes. (more…)
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Google, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007
Google can seem like a entity which can’t be pinned down, much like the Internet itself. But, believe it or not it has many locations and a headquarters. I found two phone numbers so I’m not sure which one you call to ask for a #1 listing for your site’s search term. Better call them both when to ask. 
Google Company Information
Contact Address
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Contact Phone
1-650-318-0200
1-650-253-0000
Contact Fax
1-650-253-0001
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
Google has posted about a new webmaster tool. It will allow webmasters to view backlink information which will show who links to your site, which pages are getting the links as well as both internal and external. This will certainly be helpful for webmasters and I applaud Google for allowing us insight, but I’m still bothered by this statement made by Google: “(Note that this may not be 100% of the external links to this page.)”
Oh, well. Better than nothing and a step in the right direction.
I believe Google wants cooperative partnerships with webmasters and ethical SEO companies and this is at least a nice gesture toward that goal. Time will tell, but the future looks a little brighter.
As of Feb. 6, 2007 the Link tab was not yet showing in my Webmaster Tools, we’ll assume it will show up soon.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Posted in Google, Link Building, SEO Tools | 1 Comment »
Friday, February 2nd, 2007
Since Google and the other search engines are a big part of my life, my wife would say too big of a part, I try weird searches every now and then. Today I did a search for the term “search” (without quotes) and then clicked the I’m Feeling Lucky button.
Very interesting what site that Google takes you to. Care to take a guess before giving it a try? It ain’t Google.
I wonder if Google is trying to tell us something? I guess this proves that the search results are truly not manipulated.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in Google, Live Search (MSN), Out on a Limb | 1 Comment »
Thursday, February 1st, 2007
Catching up on my Google reading and found this tidbit on Google’s Webmaster Blog. It refers to the strategy of buying text links to give you a better rank in Google.
This confusion lies in the common belief that there are two ways for optimizing the link-based popularity of your website: Either the meritocratic and long-term option of developing natural links or the risky and short-term option of non-earned backlinks via link spamming tactics such as buying links. We’ve always taken a clear stance with respect to manipulating the PageRank algorithm in our Quality Guidelines. Despite these policies, the strategy of participating in link schemes might have previously paid off. But more recently, Google has tremendously refined its link-weighting algorithms. We have more people working on Google’s link-weighting for quality control and to correct issues we find. So nowadays, undermining the PageRank algorithm is likely to result in the loss of the ability of link-selling sites to pass on reputation via links to other sites.
We don’t buy advertising links on sites for fear of this very reason. If the site is a good marketing investment for passing on visitors then a link may be worth purchasing, but if you are buying a link for the purpose of getting better search engine ranking, you might be better off investing the time to find a free link from another site.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Posted in Link Building, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Friday, January 19th, 2007
All web sites should use the META description tag. If you have too many pages to add it to, at least put it on your home page and any core pages that bring in search result traffic. Google will use the META description you place on your site if the user searched for a keyword that exists in the META description. Google is giving us some measure of control.
How best to use this you may ask? You need to think like a radio advertising writer. What can you say in one brief sentence that will entice a user to click your link rather than the one above or below. A little sensationalism never hurt.
A brand message can help or you can put your phone number in the META description. Think out of the box; how about a offer a discount or advertise a sale. Be careful though, if you put a sale message and when the sale ends your message might still display until Google updates your site listing. You don’t want your text in the search results still announcing a sale that is over. Ultimately you should tell searchers your unique selling proposition.
Remember that your META description will only show if the search term is in the META description. While this can be tricky, it can be done with some forethought. You can do this for all of your targeted pages and have dozens of marketing messages.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Google, SEO Strategies, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Friday, November 10th, 2006
Nice article about the misunderstood supplemental results Google supplies. Also good advice on how to help your pages escape supplemental hades and find the Google promiseland. Better yet you can also read how to avoid being placed in the supplemental results altogether.
According to Google’s FAQ page, supplemental results are part of Google’s auxiliary index (main results are drawn from the main index) and pages, which appear on the supplemental listing, have "fewer restrictions" than those that appear on the main results page. They further say that the inclusion of sites on the main or supplemental index is purely automated and does not affect page rank at all.
In truth however, pages that appear on the main index will almost always show up first in a search. Supplemental search results will only show up if there are very few or no results at all in the main index. Plenty of older web sites also tend to populate the supplemental results page. Needless to say the supplemental results page is not where you want your site to end up. Ironically several people have emailed Google asking that their sites be included in the supplemental index!
So how does a site end up in the supplemental results page? And more importantly how does one get out or even avoid inclusion in the first place?
Several factors may affect your inclusion in supplemental results but keep in mind it is best to avoid these factors at the outset, as it is easier to stay out of supplemental results than to get out.
One of the most crucial factors to consider is the text content of your web page; whether it is in the title tag, description tag or actual web page content. (more…)
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in Google, SEO Strategies, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines | 1 Comment »
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