Archive for the ‘Chapter of the Week’ Category
Internet Marketing & SEO
Having high rankings on search engines is a great thing. However, it’s also important that your web pages are displayed with an attractive description in the search results. If the description is not appealing to web surfers then they might not click the link.
How do Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live create the descriptions and snippets that are used in the search results?
How Google creates descriptions and snippets
Google seems to use the description from the meta description tag if you search for a page by its URL, or if the searched keywords do not appear within the found page.
If the found web page doesn’t have a meta description tag then Google seems to use the sentence that contains the searched keyword as the description.
If a web page is listed in the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org) then Google might also use the description that is used in the DMOZ directory.
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Google is by far the most important search engine on the net. To rise to the top of their search engine, you need to improve your link popularity and you need to understand how they measure your link popularity (over 50% of all search engine traffic comes from Google, and if you can rise to the top, you will likely rise to the top of all the other search engines as well).
Link popularity is defined as the number of sites that are linking to your site. Some websites have thousands or even millions of sites linking to them, while others might have only a few. The search engines use the number of inbound links your site has as a measure of how important your site is, which translates into your search engine ranking.
The actual number of links to your site is not the only variable used to calculate your link popularity. The search engines also examine the relevance of the links to the subject matter of your site. For example, if a website that sells vitamins has 4,000 inbound links, but the source of most of the links are websites that have nothing to do with vitamins, then the algorithm that search engines use to determine link popularity will take that into account, and the link popularity score will not be very good.
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Google’s share of Oct. U.S. searches 64 percent - up 6 percent
Google accounted for 64.49 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ended October 27, 2007, while Yahoo Search, MSN Search and Ask.com accounted for 21.65 percent, 7.42 percent and 4.76 percent of searches.
Google seems to allow hidden content in some cases
If the hidden content is a more-accessible-but-less-pretty version of the content that hides it–e.g. text behind an image containing those words–our quality measures should not mind. Of course, we suggest using the ALT and TITLE attributes of the IMG tag, which were designed for this very purpose (providing alternative text to replace images), but you are, of course, free to design your site as you see fit.
Microsoft’s Live.com releases webmaster tools
We want the center and the blog to be a place for two way communication between Live Search and the webmaster community because we understand that SEO’s and webmasters need this kind of information and the tools we are building to keep their sites performing well.
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The top 1% of searchers performs a full 13% of all searches
If you extend this to the top 20% the number of queries increase to roughly 70%. So in contrast to the standard 80-20 pareto it appears that in web search there is roughly a 70-20 distribution. […]
Are these high volume searchers the same every month or is there some churn amongst these top searchers?
Tips for optimizing Ajax pages
Many webmasters have discovered the advantages of using Ajax to improve the user experience on their sites, creating dynamic pages that act as powerful web applications. But, like Flash, Ajax can make a site difficult for search engines to index if the technology is not implemented carefully.
Google has $10m in prize
Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular Internet search engine, plans to offer $10 million in prizes to developers who create applications for its mobile phone operating system, known as Android.
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