This topic has been discussed way too many times by way too many people yet it is a bit discouraging how many website owners still do not really care to give emphasis on the development of their website’s actual content. For the most part I believe that it is because many wish to get as much money out of their sites while spending as little money and effort as they can. I guess this is true for many things, not just websites. If you look at the truly successful websites though you’ll see that the success really hinged on the content. SEO as I’ved said time and time again can only get you so far. It will help bring in traffic but it won’t guarantee success. So next time you take a look at your site or a client’s site be honest in your assessment of the content. Remember the […]
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Written by on December 15th, 2008 with no comments.
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Here’s another search engine optimization Q/A on on the topic of web site marketing via directories compared to search engines plus a bonus on the value of meta search engines.
These are real questions from a web site owner and due to the vintage nature of the topics, reflect the need for ongoing education and updates necessary for anyone involved in marketing through search.
What is the audience of the directories compared to the search engines? What is the benefit of being included in directories ? What if I only submit my website to algorithmic search engines and not directories: Does it really matter ?
Directories like Yahoo’s Directory and DMOZ.org have been cited by several search engines as logical places for inclusion as part of an effort to acquire inbound links. However, as of October 2nd, 2008 Google no longer includes this recommendation in their Webmaster Guidelines.
The audience for directories as far […]
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Written by on October 9th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on search-engine-optimization and directory-submissions and meta search engines and SEO Basics and Link Building and SEO and SEO Tips and Online Marketing.
Online Marketing Blog has always been about more than search engine optimization, covering digital public relations, social media marketing and plenty of other internet marketing topics. And yet, SEO is a core component of nearly every thing we do in our consulting practice.
For the web site owners and marketers fairly new to the site optimization game, we like to offer tips based on common questions overheard in the course of providing SEO and internet marketing services.
Question: “Ensure your site is crawlable” What would be, in your opinion, the basic conditions that need to be reunited for a website to be crawled?”
“Crawlable” means the links to and within your web site can be discovered and followed by search engine spiders. Spiders or bots are programs that search engines send out to find and re-visit content (web pages, images, video, pdf files, etc). If a search engine spider cannot follow a link, […]
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Written by on October 7th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on indexing and crawler and spider and search-engine-optimization and SEO Basics and SEO and SEO Tips and Online Marketing.
If you are worried about the consequences of having your site hacked here are some useful info that should put your mind at ease, knowing that you know what to do in case it happens.
Google will delete you from their index but they will restore your URL in their index as soon as they confirm that your site is clean.
Google will contact you to inform that your site has been removed from the index and will also give you the reason for removal (i.e. the fact that you’ve been hacked and they don’t want your site to appear in Google’s SERPs till it’s cleaned up).
They’ll be nice about it. There’s no doubt about it Matt Cutts is really nice even to poor stressed out webmasters/website owners with hacked sites.
If being removed from the list worries you too much remember to focus on the positive part. Since Google will be contacting […]
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Written by on May 30th, 2008 with no comments.
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Been trying out Aaron Wall’s new Firefox extension, Rank Checker, and it works really well. If you want to have no problems making it work though let me remind you of the difference between a URL and a domain.
We all know that the URL of a website is its HTTP address. For us that would be http://www.phoenixrealm.com/. We also know that the domain is also used to locate the the address of a website. However, they are different in that the domain of a website is just a subset of the site’s URL. So for this site the domain would be phoenixrealm.com.
So why did I give that short review on the difference between URLs and domains? Because I have to admit that I use the two terms very loosely and often interchange in my mind. In my defence this is because it usually doesn’t matter if you type in the […]
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Written by on April 16th, 2008 with no comments.
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Why should you ask about the difference between search engine algorithms? As I have mentioned in previous posts, though Google is the big daddy of search, it is important to know the difference between the algorithms used by different search engines. The truth though is that when it comes to Google, Yahoo!, and MSN there isn’t much difference, at least in terms of the basic principle. Ask uses a different approach though.
If you look at the Ask Algorithm (read the short answer if you want a less amusing but easier to understand answer) you will see that Ask places emphasis not only in the number of inbound links but also previous user click streams to help determine a site’s actual popularity. This is a good thing in the sense that the search engine actually gets to determine (with each click) which sites are really relevant to the search terms since […]
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Written by on February 18th, 2008 with no comments.
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Some SEO folks, when talking about keyword stuffing, pertain to the page as being over optimised. But is there really such a thing as over optimisation? I was mulling this over and realised that the term is contradictory. After all anything that is less or more than it should be simply isn’t optimised. Just for the heck of it I looked up the meaning of the word optimized. According to Dictionary.com to optimise anything means…
to make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible.
to make the best of.
Computers. to write or rewrite (the instructions in a program) so as to maximize efficiency and speed in retrieval, storage, or execution.
In short you really can’t over optimise anything because then it simply won’t be perfect nor effective. In SEO when you make mistakes and go overboard (i.e. keyword stuffing) then it isn’t called optimisation any more - it’s called spamming. So out with […]
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Written by on January 30th, 2008 with no comments.
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I don’t know how I missed Matt Cutts’ video on Webmaster Central Blog on removing your content from Google. Anyway it’s not too late to give a summary of the talk especially since it is very useful.
There are several options for removing your content from Google although not all options are very good. Dan, at Doublespark-SEO blog, recently discussed two options, robots.txt file and the nofollow attribute. To learn more about both options please read the posts there. The great thing about Matt Cutts’ talk is that I preferred the robots.txt method before, but now after listening to the talk, it simply makes sense to use the two methods he favored.
Best Options:
.htaccess - Use this to password protect a directory. This method is really good for preventing a page/directory from being indexed since Google bot won’t even attempt to guess the password and so won’t even be able to […]
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Written by on January 25th, 2008 with no comments.
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Google and other search engines can penalise you for having duplicate content on your website. This may be intentional or unintentional on your part. If it is intentional then either you have your reasons or you can get rid of the problem. On the other hand if duplicate content is being generated on your website […]
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Written by on September 26th, 2007 with no comments.
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