Web Design Ireland

posted by Robert on Sep 14

How many of you in the audience have taken the Google AdWords Professional exam? If not (or even if you want to offer some tips), a High Rankings Forums thread discusses the pros of getting certified.

Study Tips: It’s no different than a regular exam. Study it as you would any test.

Achieving Pro Status can mean two things. You can be either a Google AdWords Qualified Individual or a Google AdWords Qualified Company. As Alan Perkins puts it, “Google works with my agency … not specifically with me as an individual Google Advertising Professional. Our individual qualifications allow us to qualify as a company.”

Benefits: The Google AdWords Learning Center has a lot of good information. Additionally, once you achieve your certification, you can use it in promotional materials for your company.

Source: http://www.seroundtable.com

posted by Robert on Sep 14

Yesterday, Yahoo announced that it’s now easier to submit your site to Yahoo Site Explorer: all you have to do is have a valid sitemap.xml file on your site.

With this feature, new stores as well as existing stores with ’sitemap.xml’ enabled will have access to the toolkit inside Site Explorer. Within a few hours of enabling, you’ll be able to locate your indexed pages and the links to your sites, as well as delete pages in the index or rewrite dynamic URLs. To double check if your site was auto-authenticated, take a look in the ‘Source’ column in the ‘My Sites’ page in Site Explorer.

At first glance, it seems like this may make it easier for others to “steal” your site in Site Explorer. However, you still have to authenticate your site ownership using an authentication key or a meta tag.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com

posted by Robert on Sep 10

Justin Sanger, CEO LocalLaunch gave a six-step guide to the local search market.

1.Content control and dispersion

2.Empowering ratings and review channels

3.Riding the coattails of authorities

4. Understanding Google references

5. Simple and structured optimized pages

6. Local link building and strategix IYP purchases

He went on to say that business content drives the marketplace and that people should think beyond their Web site.

Think about business content online in its various forms and mobilize to cleanse, enrich and optimize content.

He added that it has become increasingly difficult for local advertisers to rank their own Web pages in the SERPs.

Source: http://www.webdesign.org

posted by Robert on Aug 21

Web analytics company Compete has launched Compete Search Analytics, a Web based resource that brings search analytics to users on a pay-as-you-go basis. The new service will be available September 12,2007.

 “The tool is essential for people looking to do competitive research into what, where and how consumers are searching online, and I’m impressed by it,” said Aaron Wall, search engine optimization expert, blogger and author of the SEO Book. “When I log in I feel like a kid in a candy store.”

Compete Search Analytics offers users new keywords they should be bidding on, displays gaps in their competitor’s search strategies that can be exploited, finds search terms that drive the most engaged visitors and tracks performance with keywords against competitors.

Compete Search Analytics provides data from the monthly searches on the top six search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Windows Live, Ask and AOL). It shows keyword referrals, what sites are benefiting most from popular keyword phrases. It also offers site referrals, which keywords are bringing traffic to specific Web sites and site comparisons, how your search referrals match up against other sites.

“Compete Search Analytics is professional-strength for pros like Aaron Wall, but easy and cost-effective enough for novices as well,” said Jeremy Crane, director of search and online media at Compete.

“Whatever your level of experience, in a few short clicks our service will make you more successful with your search marketing programs; it’s that intuitive.”

Source: http://www.webpronews.com

posted by Robert on Aug 17

Everybody is talking about this study from Oneupweb that says that internet retailers are not optimizing their sites for SEO. At the risk of rehashing, here are my two cents.

I hate to say “I told you so”, but this report demonstrates something I have been saying for the last few days–SEO experts are still placing way too much value on things that are mattering less and less. According to the report, the definition of optimized websites are sites with appropriate titles, keywords, site architecture and other items related to spiderability.

Give me a break…

Should companies have appropriate titles and meta tags? Of course they should–that is a given. But can you expect to see huge leaps in search engines because of those factors if your site has not built authority in the search engines? The answer is no unless you are in an industry without any competition. If you don’t believe me, just try it.

Completely missing from the executive summary but addressed later in the report was the subject of links. Oneupweb points out that lots of inbound links can help overcome a lack optimization in on-site factors. That is good information. In fact, it is the most important bit of information in the report. What matters far more than on-site optimization is how well a site has built its authority, and whether it has an offer that is likely to generate inbound links naturally.

You see, this last item is the dirty secret of how SEO relates to internet retail. Generating inbound links to a commerce site is many times harder than generating links to an informational site. Unless you are selling a unique product that has a lot of appeal, you have will have to work very hard and creatively to find ways to obtain inbound links without paying for them or bartering for them. While either of these things may be OK, depending on your industry, you simply may not be able to afford to pay for enough links to get where you need to be.

If you are selling products that everyone else is selling and you have no competitive advantage such as being in a position to lowball everyone else, you are in big trouble in 2007. Why? Because other sites are not going to give away links to commercial e-tail sites without a very good reason. In my opinion, internet retailers are struggling in SEO mostly because of their inability to build their sites’ authority through natural inbound links. Fixing meta tags is not going to overcome this problem.

As an internet retailer, our SEO strategy is this simple–do the obvious stuff like on-site optimization and then find a way to create a competitive advantage. This strategy will work well in 2007, but more importantly, will still be working in 2010.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com

posted by Robert on Aug 10

Rand Fishkin followed up his original ten questions (plus bonus) on SEO knowledge with the answers, and some new questions from Danny Sullivan for everyone’s perusal.

Seven More Questions About SEO

If you knew about the big four search engines, the concept of the ‘long tail’, and Alexa’s fatal flaw, you got through the easy questions without a problem.

Rand provided a follow-up as promised to his original SEO quiz. He answered the original questions, like listing the three most important elements in the <head> section of a typical HTML document (and listing one that really isn’t that important):

Title, Meta Description and Meta Robots are the big 3. Although Meta Robots isn’t essential to have, it’s certainly able to control spider and search activity. Meta keywords is another common answer, but it would rank as a distant 4th, as our experiments show that none of the major engines will rank a page for a keyword that is listed only in the meta keywords tag.

Danny offered some suggestions for another quiz. His seven questions proved taxing enough to drive Rand to the Internet to find a couple of answers. Here’s the seven questions Danny posed to the audience:

1. How do you seize control of a local listing on Google? On Yahoo? What fields can you change? How do you add a picture?
2. What elements are important to ranking well in Google Video and YouTube?
3. How do you get into Google News? In particular, what unique structure do your URLs need to reflect to even be considered?
4. Google Blog Search — full text or indexing off whatever you put out in feeds?
5. How do you submit to Google Product Search? Yahoo Product Search?
6. Do you have to have a mobile web site to be in Google Mobile? Yahoo Mobile?
7. How do you know if Google is personalizing your web results?

Think of it as a warmup to SES San Jose coming up this month.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com

posted by Robert on Aug 8

Today at the Google Blog, product manager Dan Crow formally introduced the “unavailable_after” meta tag, which can be used to identify a temporary page with a set shelf life.

In “Robots Exclusion Protocol: now with even more flexibility,” Crow explains:

For example, to specify that an HTML page should be removed from the search results after 3pm Eastern Standard Time on 25th August 2007, simply add the following tag to the first section of the page: <META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”unavailable_after: 25-Aug-2007 15:00:00 EST”>

Use of this tag will be treated by Google as a removal request, which should take effect the day after the removal date passes.

Crow first spoke publicly about the new tag earlier this month at an Getting Into Google — Best Turnout So Far!“>SEMNE event, which SEMNE co-founder Jill Whalen wrote about in the High Rankings Advisor.

Source: searchenginewatch.com

posted by Robert on Aug 3

Thursday, August 02, 2007 at 10:46 AM

Written by Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur, Search Quality Team

Held on June 27th, Searchnomics 2007 gave us (Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur) a chance to meet webmasters and answer some of their questions. As we’re both engineers focused on improving search quality, the feedback was extremely valuable. Here’s our take on the conference and a recap of some of what we talked about there.

Shashi: While I’ve worked at Google for over a year, this was my first time speaking at a conference. I spoke on the “Search Engine Friendly Design” panel. The exchanges were hugely valuable, helping me grasp some of the concerns of webmasters. Greg and I thought it would be valuable to share our responses to a few questions:

Does location of server matter? I use a .com domain but my content is for customers in the UK.

In our understanding of web content, Google considers both the IP address and the top-level domain (e.g. .com, .co.uk). Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance. For example, “.co.uk ” domains are likely very relevant for user queries originating from the UK. In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web server’s IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.
I have many different sites. Can I cross-link between them?

Before you begin cross-linking sites, consider the user’s perspective and whether the crosslinks provide value. If the sites are related in business — e.g., an auto manual site linking to an auto parts retail site, then it could make sense — the links are organic and useful. Cross-linking between dozens or hundreds of sites, however, probably doesn’t provide value, and I would not recommend it.
Greg: Like Shashi, this was also my first opportunity to speak at a conference as a Googler. It was refreshing to hear feedback from the people who use the software we work every day to perfect. The session also underscored the argument that we’re just at the beginning of search and have a long way to go. I spoke on the subject of Web 2.0 technologies. It was clear that many people are intimidated by the challenges of building a Web 2.0 site with respect to search engines. We understand these concerns. You should expect see more feedback from us on this subject, both at conferences and through our blog.

Any special guidance for DHTML/AJAX/Flash documents?

It’s important to make sure that content and navigation can be rendered/negotiated using only HTML. So long as the content and navigation are the same for search crawlers and end users, you’re more than welcome to use advanced technologies such as Flash and/or Javascript to improve the user experience using a richer presentation. In “Best uses of Flash,” we wrote in more detail about this, and are working on a post about AJAX technology.

Posted by Adam Lasnik

posted by Robert on Aug 3

Forty percent of all search queries are repeat queries from users trying to find information they have found before, according to a new study. But if there has been a change in search result rankings since the last time the query was entered, it significantly hinders the searcher from re-finding the information they seek.

Almost Half of Search Queries Are Repeats

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, according to the study’s authors, hailing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Washington, and Yahoo. It really depends on how much time has elapsed since their first search.

If users repeat a query very soon after the initial search, they are most likely looking for new information, rather than trying to re-find. However, if they don’t search again for a span of days, they either don’t remember exactly what they saw before, or are more motivated to find that exact website.

Sometimes it just depends on how exact they are at remembering what query string they used before, but most of them (around 70 percent) are pretty decent at remembering.

The study seems to affirm that the higher the rank, the higher the likelihood a result will be clicked. This is demonstrated on re-finding missions when a previously clicked result shows up farther down the SERP. It is less likely to be clicked than a previously un-clicked result that now appears closer to the top.

This is in contrast to when the SERP is exactly the same as before. The previously clicked result is more likely to be clicked again.

The authors write:

We found that it was much more likely for a repeat result to be clicked if there was no change in rank: 88% percent of the clicks for overlapping-click queries were repeat clicks if there was no change in rank, while only 53% of the clicks were repeat clicks if there was a change in rank.If the rank of the result had not changed, the second click occurred relatively quickly, while if the rank had changed, it took significantly (p<0.01) longer. Changes to result ordering appear to slow re-finding.

The researchers advise that search engines should be more mindful of repeat queries in the future by tailoring results that are predictive of what searchers are trying to re-find. They suggest that the best way to do this may be by providing software to the end-user that keeps of record of their individual search queries and reproduces either queries or direct links to websites previously visited.

They downplay, however, the practice of using popular results, generated from users on the whole, to influence search results, as search spam could unduly influence them.

“In contrast, personalizing search results based on search history can help avoid potential problems caused by spam.

posted by Robert on Jul 31

Best uses of Flash

Thursday, July 05, 2007 at 3:15 PM

Written by Mark Berghausen, Search Quality Team

We occasionally get questions on the Webmaster Help Group about how webmasters should work with Adobe Flash. I thought it would be worthwhile to write a few words about the search considerations designers should think about when building a Flash-heavy site.

As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn’t have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.

So what’s an honest web designer to do? The only hard and fast rule is to show Googlebot the exact same thing as your users. If you don’t, your site risks appearing suspicious to our search algorithms. This simple rule covers a lot of cases including cloaking, JavaScript redirects, hidden text, and doorway pages. And our engineers have gathered a few more practical suggestions:

1. Try to use Flash only where it is needed. Many rich media sites such as Google’s YouTube use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation. You can too, by limiting Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation. In addition to making your site Googlebot-friendly, this makes you site accessible to a larger audience, including, for example, blind people using screen readers, users of old or non-standard browsers, and those on limited low-bandwidth connections such as on a cell phone or PDA. As a bonus, your visitors can use bookmarks effectively, and can email links to your pages to their friends.
2. sIFR: Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that the user may not have installed on their computer. A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML — it’s just displayed by an embedded Flash object.
3. Non-Flash Versions: A common way that we see Flash used is as a front page “splash screen” where the root URL of a website has a Flash intro that links to HTML content deeper into the site. In this case, make sure there is a regular HTML link on that front page to a non-Flash page where a user can navigate throughout your site without the need for Flash.

If you have other ideas that don’t violate these guidelines that you’d like to ask about, feel free to ask them in the Webmaster Help Group under Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking. The many knowledgeable webmasters there, along with myself and a cadre of other Googlers, will do our best to clear up any confusion.