Daily Gadgets, Computer, and Electronics News » search_engine

SEO Suggestions from Randy

cosa — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 01:14:17 +0000

A week ago I asked Randy Charles Morin of KBCafe to take a look at my site and give me some suggestions how to improve my search engine ranking. I know that my site is not yet well-indexed in any search engine. Here’s my original message to Randy:

I need suggestion especially on the SEO side. It sucks on Google Search Blog, Yahoo (no inbound links) and MSN (low pages indexed). I’m fairly new with SEO, so I guess I’d need lot of advices from you

Yesterday, he gave his valuable advices about my site. Here’s the summary:

To get more links on Google Search Blog, he advices me to be more active in blogosphere.

Your getting some linking action in the blogosohere. If you want to improve these numbers, then it’s simply a matter of being a better blogger. That doesn’t mean blog more. Often bloggers don’t realize that writing blog entries is only one part of being a blogger. Fully participate in the blogosphere by linking to a lot of other bloggers, linking to source blogs and leaving comments on other blogs (with your sig leading back to your blog).
For Yahoo!, he suggests to make a list of URL to each page on this site (like SiteMap), and then submit it to Yahoo!

Yahoo! has a great way for blogs to submit all their blog entries. You simply create a text file that list all the URLs, one URL per line. Here’s the URL list [http://www.kbcafe.com/adwords/urllist.aspx] I created to submit all the Besting Adwords blog entries to Yahoo! Then submit the URL here [http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request].

Well, I guess now I have some works to do :d

Anyway, thanks Randy!

Search Engine Friendly Table Structure

cosa — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 01:00:08 +0000

Paul Madden, from Learn-From-The-Experts.Info, emailed me yesterday and told me about his new article, “Search Engine Friendly Table Structure“. The article talks about the search engine’s crawler behaviour, the effect to your site (and search engine’s ranking), and how you can make your site more search engine friendly by changing your website structure/layout. Overall, it’s a good SEO reading.

Paul is kind enough to give me the permission to publish the article here. So, enjoy the article!

Search Engine Friendly Table Structure

Looking at your pages code the way the search engine spiders do.

Go and find the homepage of one of your websites, one that you worked hard on and got it looking exactly how you wanted. Great work! Now use your mouse and right click and view the page source, still happy? This is the view that you’re most important visitor gets, the search engine spider.

The spider only sees the code so look carefully again and look where that carefully crafted text on the page is. I bet is somewhere down the code and more often than not its even after all the navigation links to the rest of your site.

If you were the spider what would you think of the page now? Odds are if you were that spider you would be slightly confused about what was important on the page.

Now don’t be too disheartened this common problem is very easily solved for most site owners by implementing a quick fix, one that id like to share with you now. In these days of complete acceptance of CSS we could have created the site and positioned the code layout how we wanted but for many sites the traditional table based layout will have been used.

The traditional webpage table layout looks something like this: –

Cell1 â€“ Main Graphic Banner

Cell2 â€“ Navigation links
Cell3 â€“ Main Content

The problem comes because the search engine spider reads the code from the top of the page down and the way this table is coded means that the navigation links will come higher in the code than the main content. So to fix this the simple trick I use is to add an extra table cell at the top of the navigation section and to make the cell in the main section span two rows. This makes the table layout look like this: –

Cell1 â€“ Main Graphic
Cell2 â€“ Main Content
Cell3 â€“ Navigation Links

See the way the table cells are read now?

The spider skips past our new added cell and moves straight onto the main course of our vital content before finishing off with those navigation links.

That was easy eh?

This technique can even be implemented on existing websites without causing any disruption to the look and feel. You will have to take a little care if you have a complicated layout but if you have a traditional simple table based layout then you should be able to add this technique to your page without too many headaches.

What’s that?

You just want a simple template you can use?

Heres your free template (copy and paste it)

And for those who cust want the code here it is for a simple page, copy and paste and above all get those spiders in!

Keyword Phrase

Insert Main Graphic Here

Keyword1

Keyword2 in phrase

Main content goes here

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Good Luck!

[ Original Source ]

Google Search Count Tool

cosa — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 17:29:41 +0000

Found this useful AdSense tool via Adsenseology. Google Search Count Tool will give you an estimate number of how often a keyword (or keyword phrase) is searched for on Google each month. That information would be really useful on your AdSense keyword research.

Here’s the information you can retrieve from the free Google Search Count Tool:

Searches per month
Maximum bid amount
Estimated CTR
Market Value
Adsense Effective CPM

[ Try Google Search Count Tool ] [ Via AdSenseology ]

Work-Hours is a Good Time for Blogging

cosa — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 03:24:03 +0000

One of the key of bringing traffic to our blog is finding the right time to post our blog entry. We’re not talking about our loyal or regular visitors, since (mostly) they always come to our site anyway, no matter when we post a new entry. But we’re talking about dragging new visitors, those who use RSS feed search engine or aggreator, such as Technorati, Feedster, etc.

I guess you already know that listing on such RSS search engine usually ordered by the time of the post. So searching for specific keyword / tags, will return the most recent entry first. What if we post on the wrong time? Of course, you’d get no advantage of those search engine since your post will be burried under many other posts. Note that this is also depend on the popularity of your subject/keyword/tags.

The benefit of it is, you’ll get more visitors. But more visitors always follow by other good effects, such as more AdSense revenue, more product sales, etc.

So when is the right time to blog in order to drive traffic to your blog?

A new study by Atlas shows that â€œWeb users who view display ads during the workday and early evening are more likely to make a purchase, fill out registrations, or otherwise convert than consumers who see ads between midnight and dawn“.

Conversion rates peaked at around noon Eastern Standard Time, when conversion rates were around 36 percent higher than average for the day. The daily low occurred shortly after 4:00 a.m., when conversion rates were around 53 percent lower than conversion rates for the day.

The number of impressions and conversions rose and fell together throughout the day, but the different ratio of impressions to conversions at different hours of the day showed that people were most likely to respond to ads during lunch and in the early evening.

â€œIt shows that people are reacting to advertising at lunchtime, while they’re at work, and when they go home, around dinner time,” says Young-Bean Song, Atlas’s director of analytics.

According to the result of the study, the recommended time to blog is within the work hours, not during late hours (10 PM – 5 AM). Randy, from KBCafe, confirms this:

“My CTR tails off in the evening and night. About 1/3 of my PageView occur before noon PST, but about 1/2 of my clicks occur before noon PST. I get next to nothing between 6PM PST and midnight.”

So, the conclusion is, find out your target visitors’ demographic location, check their time zone, and blog during their work hour. Not hard, isn’t it?

[ Via Macalua ]

Yahoo! Instant Search

cosa — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 04:23:35 +0000

Yahoo! launched their new service, Yahoo! Instant Search. This new feature gives a real-time analysis, upon typing your keyword, of what you’re (probably) looking for. The preditected search result, if any, will be displayed right away underneath the search box. If the result is correct, you can hit the link to go there or simply press Ctrl-Enter.

According to their FAQ, Yahoo! predicts the result by analyzing your typing speed and spaces between search words. Those two information are used to figure out when to ask Yahoo! Search for a result. After that, they’ll try to find and return the most relevant result based on what you have typed.

Why feel lucky when you can be right? With Instant Search, results instantly appear for Yahoo! Shortcuts and common searches.

[ Via Benny Chandra ]

Searching for AdWords Advertisers

cosa — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 07:13:03 +0000

I just knew that we can use Google search engine to search something and return only link from AdWords advertisers (Sponsored Links). Use this link to search for Sponsored Links on Google.

So what is it good for? Well, if you’re an AdSense publishers, and currently looking for profitable niche, this could be one of your weapon. The more advertisers you get from specific niche, the better. It’d be useless if you build a page for something that doesn’t have any advertisers at all.

Let’s take for an example: mesothelioma. Every AdSense publishers know that this is one of the hottest AdWords keyword outthere. How many advertisers we have for Mesothelioma? Only 17. Compare with affiliate keywords (and its combination). It has lower CPC than mesothelioma, but more than 100 advertisers are available. So which one do you think would be more profitable? :p

[ Via Google Lady ]

Google Blog Search Launched

cosa — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 09:15:17 +0000

Google has launched their own blog search engine. Not just one, but two. The first is special for Blogger sites, and the second goes worldwide. The end for Technorati, Feedster, or IceRocket?

Quoted from Google Blog Search official page:

What is Blog Search?

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice.

Blogger user now could take advantage of their special Google Blog Search. Very nice strategy from Google to eliminate their competitor on free blog hosting market. With this new feature from Google, I’d probably make one or two blogs on Blogger.

Google Blog Search works by indexing blog feeds. Google said that the feeds will be checked frequently for new content. It means, using Blog Search will return fresher or newest result than their standard search engine. Also, according to Google, because of the structured data within site feeds, it is possible to find precise posts and date ranges with much greater accuracy.

You can also subribe to the top 10 or top 100 search results as either Atom or RSS feeds. Just take a look at the bottom of each page for the feed link.

[ Google Blog Search Official Page ]

Make Your Own Yahoo! Logo

cosa — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 02:30:33 +0000

Remember my old post when I post a link to a site where you can create your own custom Google logo? This site offers similar service, but it’s for Google’s rival, Yahoo!.

Yahoo!-style logo maker use the Yahoo! font provided by Gaut Fonts. Sampe output below.

[ Create Your Own Yahoo! Logo ]

Drawing Attention To Your Site Through Search Engine Optimization

cosa — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 16:58:01 +0000

Scott Koegler, from Small Business Pipeline, wrote a wonderful tutorial for beginner about Search Engine Optimization. On his “Drawing Attention To Your Site Through Search Engine Optimization” article, he explains several basic tehniques that we should do to optimize our site for Google search engine and achive a better position on Google’s search result.

Basic SEO techniques covered in the article are:

Know your terms
Place your phrases
Build your pages to encourage crawlers
Get Linked: Crawlers link from other sites.
Use Google’s facilities to increase your exposure.
Review your site

[ Read Article]

Tags Search Engine

cosa — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 17:27:08 +0000

Many web services now support tags feature, such as: del.icio.us, flickr, and technorati. Tags itself is more ‘independent’ way, compare to category, to labeled stuff. For example, if you have a mouse category, you can have the following tags: wheel-mouse, optical mouse, usb mouse, etc.

KBCafe is a search engine which support searching through tags. It will search on del.icio.us, flickr, technorati, and yahoo through their RSS feed. As further described on their site, KBCafe tag search is a meta RSS search engine, that is, it queries many other search engines by using their RSS interface and presents the results from these search engines in one common interface. This allows the user to quickly view all the results of various search engines. You can also use KBCafe tag search to easily subscribe to results of the searches, so you can stay on top of your favorite subjects without having to remember to come back to KBCafe tag search.

[ Visit KBCafe Tags Search ]