Global Google Search Results

Many people don’t realize that when they search Google, they’re receiving different data than people who live in other places around the country. Different data centers are updated at different times, meaning search results can change depending on where queries are pointing to.

To check results in the various data centers, use Google Datacenter Search.

32 Search Engine Optimization Tips

1. Repeat information throughout your page. Make sure your title tag, meta content, headers, and content all match up.
2. Have a strong text to code ratio. If 95% of your page is made up of code the search engines are going to have a harder time reading the content.
3. Add keywords to your page names. A page with the name of purina_dog_treats.html is more likely to boost search results than treats.html.
4. Bold keywords in your content. Many search engines give more relevance to bolded terms.
5. Don’t create a Flash website. Maybe someday in the future search engines will be able to make sense of Flash, but for now, you won’t get ranked under more than one page if you build your entire site in Flash.
6. Promote your website on blogs, forums, and other websites you webmaster. Backlinks are important for seo, but traffic can be too. If your link is in a relevant place and it draws a steady stream of traffic, search engines will give it more relevance.
7. Make sure you use your keywords in your alt tags. But avoid keyword stuffing.
8. Practice only ethical seo. Unethical seo practices could get your site banned from Google.
9. Use <h1>, <h2> etc. in your headers. Search engines place more relevance on header tags.
10. More content is typically better. A page with more content will have a better text to code ratio meaning the search engines won’t have to wade through as much code. This also allows for more opportunities to use your relevant keywords.
11. Make sure to research your keywords. Choosing keywords that merely represent the company or services your website offers isn’t always the best route to take. Instead, look for relevant search strings and alter your content to reflect what is actually being searched. For example, if your company sells all sorts of posters and frames, but gold framed posters are getting a high search volume, target those keywords instead of being general.
12. Put some thought into your description meta. This is the text that people will typically see on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). If the description is not enticing or relevant, users will not click.
13. Track which pages get hits and find out what is working. Using software like Visitorville lets you see very detailed statistics about which pages are getting hit and what site directed them there. If you are getting a lot of traffic from a certain keyword, considering writing more content for that term.
14. Avoid using text colors that are similar to their background colors. Google may interpret your text as being cloaked- meaning a possibility that you will be taken off of their list. Contrasting text is not only search engine friendly, you will be doing a service to your readers.
15. Move away from tables in your designs. Tables create code bloat which makes it more difficult for search engines to find the relevant content on your page. Use css positioning whenever possible.
16. Install Firefox developer toolbar and poke around competitor sites that have high ranking. If you want to compete with the big companies, find out what they’re doing right and try to emulate them. Seo techniques aren’t copyrighted.
17. Pay a blogger to review your website.Not only will you get backlinked, you may also generate some decent traffic.
18. Target appropriate backlinks. Quality backlinks are great for your site’s organic relevance and will also drive traffic.
19. Create a facebook, myspace or moli page for your site. All of these are indexed by Google.
20. Add keywords to your image names. Sometimes people will find your site on a Google images search. Image names will also be read by search engines and give the page more relevance.
21. Create a text document called robots.txt in the site root.
22. A frequently updated sitemap is vital. Whether you use an xml or html sitemap, it’s important that search engines can easily find every page that you want indexed. Make sure to update the sitemap every time you add a new page.
23. Create a 404 page. In some cases you will have to fight against Internet Explorer which likes to hijack your 404 functionality, so Google a tutorial if you’re having trouble. 404 pages are an excellent way to capture any misspelled links or broken anchors that would anger your users and throw off search engines.
24. Use external styles and javascript.Don’t clutter your page with in-line styles or heavy handed javascript statements. This is more code that search engines have to wade through to get to your content.
25. Don’t add too many conditions to dynamic urls. A url of only one or two conditions will do much better on the SERPs than a url with 5 conditions (all other things being equal).
26. Rewrite dynamic urls if possible. It’s an advanced technique- but if you have access to a knowledgeable developer it is advantageous to rewrite dynamic urls to contain keywords from the page content.
27. Submit your site to DMOZ. But don’t hold your breath. DMOZ chooses which sites they want to add to their directory- and the waiting list is typically very long. It’s worth it to submit to their list- but definitely not essential.
28. Clean up your code. Programs like Visual Studio and Dreamweaver allow you to automatically clean up your code for readability. This will help you trim the fat and eliminate as much code as possible.
29. Don’t duplicate content in your site. Search engines are looking for unique content that can only be found on any given page. If you duplicate large portions of content from one page to another you will be creating competition within your own site for top ranking on the SERPs.
30. Write a blog. Many webmasters, seo specialists, etc. have created blogs that they update 2-3 times a week. The more popular the blog gets, the more value the backlinks you’ve created will be to the search engines.
31. Create a Youtube channel. If you don’t have video content relating to your website, buy a webcam and start filming some. Even if your videos are only moderately successful, they can provide a fair amount of regular traffic to your site- as well as provide backlinks.
32. Create microsites.Many companies have created microsites that have gimmicks in them such as flash games- and backlinked to their main website. This not only produced more interest in the company services and products, but improved seo results.

Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly?

Ross Dunn, CEO of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc., recently wrote a great article on strategies to make your website more search engine friendly. Here is the meat of that article -

When I sit down with new clients and discuss the status of their new or existing site they are often shocked when I am forced to inform them that their site is not search engine friendly. Encountered with a blank but slightly shaken look I then explain that this means their site has a particular problem that is hindering search engine rankings. Often this is represented by an inflexible design, overuse of advanced web technologies, or simply a weak navigation scheme. As a result, if they were to continue with the site as it stands they are unlikely to attain competitive search engine rankings.

The following is checklist designed to help you gauge the search engine friendliness of your website and, if you are in the midst of planning a website this checklist will help you avoid the common pitfalls of unfriendly designs.

Technologies

First consider what technologies your website is using. There are certain technologies that require a little more hand holding than others to ensure search engine compatibility.

1. FRAMES
Lets start with this oldie. Luckily, frames are becoming a way of the past what with the use of DIV layers and the slow onset of incredibly flexible AJAX coding. The long and the short of it is that if you have Frames on your website then you are starting off at a disadvantaged position that cannot be truly search engine friendly no matter what you do. There are, however, some remedial fixes that will tie you over until you can redesign your site; yes I said redesign. The fix that I recommend is to use a noframes tag whereby you place another version of your web page inside of your framed page. This ‘backup’ page is what the search engines will view; here you can place relevant content and navigational elements so that the search engines can at least navigate portions of your site that are (hopefully) not framed.

More info on the no frames tags.

2. FLASH
There was a big brouhaha that Flash had become search engine indexable and you no longer had to worry about its search engine issues. Frankly, I have not seen the fruits of this ‘improvement’ to a respectable degree yet so I still consider it a kiss of death for websites designed solely in Flash. If you have a Flash-only website then I recommend one of these two options; one is to design an html version of your website and make the home page of your website html rather than Flash where you can then allow users to choose between html or Flash. The second option is to redesign the site so that it mixes both html and flash together. For example, this might mean implementing Flash amidst content on an HTML page as you would an image. I realize there are certain limitations to this option but if you can create a slick site in this manner then you will have the best of both worlds; clean search engine friendly content along with an interactive, multimedia feel. Just remember that the majority of relevant text should be in HTML format for the search engines to index.

3. Search Engine ‘Unfriendly’ Dynamic URL’s
Unfriendly dynamic URL’s are a common side effect of using a Content Management System that is not designed with search engine rankings kept in mind. Here are some examples of some unfriendly URL’s:

Sample 1:
http://www.mydomain.com/myproducts.php&354=prod333&subproduct

Sample 2:
http://www.surfboardsforyou.com/boards/
filename.php?id=F98ZF4&productId=39222&section=wicked&brand=582&template=532

These URLs are problematic because a search engine may consider these addresses too complex to spider. Why too complex? Suffice it to say that the more complex the URL, the higher the chance that a search engine robot will consider the content too dynamic to read; it changes too often to be valuable to a search engine.

The way around these types of URLs is actually not so difficult; it may only require a small investment of time and money. The ‘time’ will be required when researching which URL fix is right for your system. The money may be required to pay a programmer to implement and test the new URLs. Here are how the URLs might look once they are fixed to be search engine friendly:

Sample 1 Fixed:
http://www.mydomain.com/myproducts/354/prod333/subproduct/

Sample 2 Fixed:
http://www.surfboardsforyou.com/boards/wickedboards/39222/board532/

These URLs are better because they do not include the extraneous characters that are so telltale on dynamic websites. In addition, the URLs are designed to appear like normal website directories when in fact they are dynamic URLs.

Important: it is vital that you minimize the length of the URLs that you use. Search engines may stop crawling a website if there appear to be too many subdirectories. The samples above show fixed URLs that have about as many subdirectories as I would allow (4).

Design

This section focuses on the overall layout and usability of your designs from the perspective of a search engine robot. Search engine friendly design is occasionally quite complex so I have provided a list of the most common issues to consider.

1. Menus
Are the menus on your website spiderable? If not you may be hiding major areas of your website from search engine spiders and missing out on additional search engine rankings.

The fact is there are very few menus out there that a search engine will have a problem following, but there are definitely some worth avoiding. For instance do not use a JavaScript Jump Menu as the core mode of navigation of your website; search engines cannot index this type of menu. Also be careful of Flash menus, they look slick but they will impede the progress of a search engine spider especially if they are the only means of navigation within your site.

General Menu Rules
The ideal menu would be text based and each text link would include the keywords you are targeting on the destination page. Setting up a menu with this much forethought requires that you determine the layout and content for your site before web design begins. Once you have a clear picture of the content for each page you can then research the keywords that are best to target per webpage. This essential keyword research can be done in house easily enough using systems-like keyword research tools that provide you with a glimpse into how your customers think by showing how many searches there are per month (or year) for a particular term.

Remember, almost every page within your site has a very real opportunity to gain a top ranking; all you need to do is ensure that the design, content and site structure is optimized. Ensuring that the menu is carefully thought out and designed is a crucial step for top rankings.

Finally, if you are at all uncertain whether your menu is search engine friendly then be certain to back it up with a text menu in the footer of your page using the same keyword targeting principles noted above.

Tech Advice: a simple text menu may be less than desirable for you; in this case I recommend DHTML menus. These menus use text but in a manner that is quite appealing and very search engine friendly.

2. Sitemaps
Sitemaps can dramatically help the visibility of your website by allowing search engine spiders easy access to all of the pages in your site. Place a link to the sitemap on every page within your site to ensure easy access no matter where a search engine or user enters your site.

Sitemap Tips
Just having a sitemap will help but how you build your sitemap will also play a role in how well the search engines catalogue it. For example, if you have a twenty-page website it would be ideal to create a sitemap where each page is represented by a title along with a short description. Ultimately, the page may be a bit long but it will have content that the search engines like to index and it will boost the relevance of the linked pages because the titles will accurately represent the content. So in effect, you will now have more than just a sitemap; you will have a table of contents for your site that has the potential of getting a ranking and provides an extra boost to the ranking worthiness of each page.

Google Sitemap
Google Sitemap is an additional design element that you should consider adding.

3. Layout
How you layout your page can make a significant difference in how well your site ranks and ultimately how search engine friendly it is.

Tips for Layout
Search engine robots read a webpage from the top of the source code (the programming that made your page – see “view source” in your browser) all the way to the bottom. As a result, it is important to ensure that both of the following elements are found as close to the beginning of code as possible:

A) A short sentence introducing the topic using the keyword targets you have chosen for the page.
B) Your text menu and other navigational aids, or if this is not possible it would be even more beneficial to start with a paragraph or two of relevant content followed by the navigation.

By placing this information near to the top of the page, you will promptly present the search engine robot with relevant text that backs up the page title and backlinks. You will also provide an immediate sitemap of sorts for the search engine to spider, which includes keywords relevant to each page.

4. Splash Pages – ACK!
With the odd exception Splash Pages are a kiss of death for a website because the home page (the first page seen when someone visits your domain), your most important page, is often converted into nothing but an excess entry point with little or no relevant content on it. Aside from reducing your chances for ranking, you are also making your visitors take another step to get to content or sales material in your site. Any additional steps you add will lessen the likelihood of a successful sale.

Please Let Me Change Your Mind
If you think you need to use a splash page then you need to talk to someone who will change your mind. No, honestly, give me a call if you want because there is nothing more painful to a SEO or search engine friendly web designer to see a Splash Page in use. If, in the unlikely scenario your splash page is required, there are ways to make it slightly more search engine friendly.

1) Add a highly relevant and well-worded paragraph to the page so that the search engines have something to index that shows them they are in the right place.
2) Either provide a link to your sitemap or implement a text menu in the footer of the page so the search engines can access the internal workings of your website without having to take an extra step.

Most Popular Keywords – What are people looking for

What are all of the millions and millions of people in the world searching for? Some of the major search engines provide a way to glimpse into the web’s query stream to discover the most popular search keywords or topics. Use these links to research what keywords are most popular.

• AOL Hot Searches – Top current queries, or see those in the last hour, last day and within particular categories.
• Ask IQ – See top searches at Ask.
• Dogpile SearchSpy – Choose to see either a filtered or non-filtered sample of top, real-time search terms from this popular meta search service. Sister site MetaCrawler offers a similar MetaCrawler MetaSpy service.
• Google Trends – Allows you to tap into Google’s database of searches, to determine what’s popular. View the volume of queries over time, by city, regions, languages and so on. Compare multiple terms, as well. See our review: Google Trends: Peer Into Google’s Database Of Searches.
• Google Zeitgeist – What people are searching for at Google and its associated specialty services in a variety of categories. There are versions for various countries, as well.
• Lycos 50 – Long-standing service showing top searches at Lycos each week.
• Yahoo Buzz Index – Shows you what’s hot and what’s not in terms of search topics at Yahoo.
• dWoz Search Phrase Lists – Great directory of services like those above, for search engines large and small, across the web
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool – Enter a term or terms, the use the drop-down box to see the popularity of terms and popularity over time.
• Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool – Formerly called the Overture Keyword Selector Tool and the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool before that, this free service is primarily designed to help advertisers who wish to select terms to target with ads on the Yahoo network. But you can use it to see how popular particular terms are.
• Researching Keywords – For Search Engine Watch members, this provides an annotated rundown on key tools useful for search marketers needing to perform search research for their campaigns.
• Search Term Research and Search Behavior – These categories of Search Engine Watch’s Search Topics area compile articles on the subject of how people search from across the web and stretching back to 1997. Available only to Search Engine Watch members.

Make URLs your friend not your foe

One thing that I can’t stress enough is try to stay away from Dynamic URLs, these are URL addresses with variables, and values following the “?” character. Google used to state that it had troubles indexing sites with dynamic URLs, and to a degree this still holds true. If you are going to use Dynamic URLs always try to have less than 2 variables in your URL. I have seen sites with excessive products, and URLs where Google / Live / Yahoo all have a different number of pages cached.

A better approach is to URL Rewrite your URLs. For the Linux side Apache has Mod Rewrite, and for Windows you can use ISAPI Rewrite. When you implement a URL Rewriting system you are essentially creating a hash URL lookup table for your site, than when a server query comes in it checks the hash table to see if it finds a match then feeds it the corresponding entry.

To put it into simple terms what we strive to accomplish with URL Rewrites is to mask our dynamic content by having it appear as a static URL. A URL like Article?Id=52&Page=5 could be rewritten to /Article/ID/52/Page/5/, which to a search engine appears to be a directory with an index.htm (or whatever default / index page your particular web server uses).

Most good website engines (WordPress, Joomla, etc.) all have pre-built modules that make this very easy. So do your homework – it will pay off BIG!

Baby got back links?

Building quality backlinks is a great way to ensure search engine success. With an emphasis on “quality”, a tool called the Backlink Builder can help you get backlinks in all the right places.

Backlink Builder asks you to supply a keyword or theme, and then returns relevant websites that contain phrases like “add link” or “add site.” Make acquaintances with as many out as your heart desires, and know that you’ve given a huge boost to your online campaign.

SEO design guidlines even your mom will understand

Whenever someone finds out that I am have a background in Internet marketing, it never fails that I am asked the exact same question over and over again – “What can I do to get my website more visible to search engines?” I usually ask for their website address so I can take a look at what they have done so far. 99% of all of the websites I see do NOT follow the simple guidelines for design and content development that search engines provide.

In an effort to make this as easy as possible for you, here are some of the more relevant design and content guidelines provided by Google, Yahoo or MSN that you should follow -

• 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.
• Don’t overdo the use of graphics. Visitors can read the text on an image, but search engines can’t.
• 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.
• Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• Use only well-formed HTML code in your pages. Ensure that all tags are closed, and that all links function properly. If your site contains broken links, search engines may not be able to index your site effectively, and people may not be able to reach all of your pages.
• If you move a page, set up the page’s original URL to direct people to the new page, and tell them whether the move is permanent or temporary.
• Keep your URLs simple and static. Complicated or frequently changed URLs are difficult to use as link destinations. For example, the URL www.example.com/mypage is easier for spiders to crawl and for people to type than a long URL with multiple extensions. Also, a URL that doesn’t change is easier for people to remember, which makes it a more likely link destination from other sites.
• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Limit all pages to a reasonable size. We recommend one topic per page. An HTML page with no pictures should be under 150 KB.

This is a small list of the things you can do to improve your website design. To see a comprehensive list of guidelines provided by the big 3, click on their logo below to read their specific guidelines.

No-Cost SEO Tools to Help You Increase Your Website Traffic

The right SEO tools can work wonders for your search strategy. You can save time, effort and investment, not to mention improve your rankings. A big thank you to Marketing Sherpa for providing the background for each of these.

Google Advanced Search

Cost: Free

http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

Description: This tool can be found by going to Google, clicking “Advanced Search” and then clicking the “+” symbol next to “Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more.” Now you should see a field titled “Where your keywords show up.”

This lets you limit a search to:
o Anywhere in the page
o Title of the page
o Text of the page
o URL of the page
o Links to the page

The big one is “links to the page.” By selecting this option and searching for your competitors, you can find which sites are linking to them. You can also limit the search by date to uncover the links that have been created most recently.

Google Trends

http://google.com/trends
Cost: Free
Description: Google Trends reveals keywords’ historic search volume on Google (but not the exact figures). Say you’re torn between two keywords. Type them into the text box, separate them with commas and click to see which has received the most search traffic over time. The data dates back years and is illustrated with graphs.

Use the tool to:
Decide on a keyword, i.e., should you go with singular or plural?
Search engines return different results for singular and plural forms of a noun. So, a tractor manufacturer might rank well for the term “tractor” but not for “tractors.”

Rank Checker

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/
Cost: Free
Description: Rank Checker is a Firefox plug-in that takes keywords and reports your rankings on:
o Google
o Yahoo!
o MSN
o Google in other countries

If you check your rankings by typing in search engines and sift through results, stop now. This tool automates that process.

SeoQuake

http://www.seoquake.com/
Cost: Free
Description: SeoQuake is a Firefox plug-in that’s great for researching your search competition. It can resort search results based on a range of factors, including:
o Number of Web pages
o Number of links from Yahoo!
o Number of links from MSN
o Alexa rank
o Domain age
o Links from del.icio.us

Today’s Hot Trends

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X
Cost: Free
Description: Another Google Trends feature is Today’s Hot Trends. You can access it by clicking “More Hot Trends” on the Google Trends homepage. “It’s been talked about for a while, but I don’t think a lot of people are using it,” Reynolds says.

Today’s Hot Trends is updated every hour and shows the top 100 fastest-rising search terms on Google.

Yahoo! Search Assist

http://www.yahoo.com/
Cost: Free
Description: When you’re using the search box in Yahoo!, you might notice a gray textbox of terms that appears when you start typing a phrase. The words in the box are Yahoo!’s suggestions for related keywords, loosely based on word content and search volume.

The difference between this tool and many others is the fact that Yahoo!’s suggestions are not based on character order alone. For example, typing “bug” into some tools will only return keywords that begin with “b-u-g” like “buggy” or “bugs.” Yahoo!, on the other hand, returns “fashion bug,” “bugs bunny” and “bed bugs.”

Link Popularity

What is link Popularity? Link popularity is a general representation of the total number of web pages which link to a website (or individual web page). Most of the major search engines support the “link:” operator. Type in “link:” (without the quotation marks) in front of the URL about which you want to learn.

What does this tool do? This tool will query all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) when you enter the “link:” operator with your chosen URL. It will return the total link count for each URL.

Why is link popularity important? Link popularity is important because it is a major factor used by search engines in determining a site’s position in search results. Generally, a site with more inbound links will be positioned higher than a similar site with fewer links. Other factors that are considered include anchor text.

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