Is sitemap necessary for a site? Search engine optimization seo tip wednesday February 16 2005,

Site map is a term coined and used for a site to show a list of important pages of a site, To avoid the homepage or any other page look cluttered sitemaps are created and connected to an important page of the site, Mostly it is connected to the homepage of a site,

There has been various debates across various forums whether a sitemap is essential for a site, As an opinion of search engine genie we suggest adding a site map to your site, Site maps help in various ways both for visiting search engines and regular visitors,

Some benefits of sitemaps on a site,

1. Users wont get lost of your site if you run a big site, If you connect your important pages in your site map users can navigate easily to any page listed in the sitemap and return to the main page without loosing their path,

2. For large sites it is difficult to navigate deeper and deeper, A good sitemap prevents this and users can navigate to any page without getting lost, Also most of the inner pages will come more closer to the homepage and this helps effectively in good navigation,

3. Not all search engine crawlers crawl a site deeper and deeper, Some crawlers like yahoo slurp tend to go into a site only to a certain extent, For crawlers like slurp pages shouldnt be buried deeper, A sitemap will combat this problem, When a site map is used pages will come closer to top level and this help yahoo’s crawler slurp to reach inner pages too,

4. Also suppose if a site has javascript menus, DHTM menus and other menus that are not search engine friendly a sitemap will definitely help in better crawling of a site, A sitemap with text only links to inner pages is very much useful,

5. Sitemaps also help in better spreading of a pagerank, Pagerank google’s trademark algorithm

Site maps are good for large sites as well as small sites, Hope our tips on sitemaps will give your site a better exposure to search engines,

SEO Blog team,

Keyword research an important step towards effective search engine optimization – Seo tip tuesday feb 15 2005

keyword research is a vital part of search engine optimization, Targeting wrong keywords for a site will put all efforts in vain,

An effective keyword research and finding the right keywords will bring in targeted traffic to a site, Targeted traffic means good business,

Points to keep in mind when doing keyword research,

1. Compare the keyword suggestions of overture, wordtracker and adwords and see which are most searched and most popular,

2. Try running an adwords or Overture PPC campaign and check which keywords convert best,

3. Don’t try optimizing for all keywords, eliminate keywords which are too low competitive and which are bound to bring very less business,

4. Always research for both singular and plural keyword phrases/keywords,

5. Don’t go for spelling errors for a legitimate business site, it makes the site look bad,

6. Apart from the suggestion tools suggestion on the popularity of a keyword phrase we can analyze the competitiveness of a keyword/keyword phrase by checking the number of pages having that term in google/yahoo/msn, checking the number of pages added in title using allintitle: command, checking the targeted keyword distribution by using allintext: command in google, this command will reveal all pages having that keyword phrase on the page,

7. Short list keywords which are good for optimization, Separate words that are useless, words that are too authoritative and too competitive, Optimize for lower competitive keywords first and then move towards competitive keywords,

Hope the above tips are useful for your search engine optimization keyword research process,

Some tools for effective keyword research,

https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
http://www.wordtracker.com/

SEO Blog Team,

Yahoo’s Toolbar features – Yahoo firefox toolbar and internet explorer toolbar

yahoo recently launched their toolbar for firefox browser, Firefox is an increasingly popular browser next to internet explorer of microsoft, you can down load firefox toolbar here,

toolbar.yahoo.com/firefox

Also their internet explorer toolbar version has various features some of them are,

• Easy access to Yahoo! Search
• Bookmarks and custom buttons that follow you anywhere
• Search This Site to find results just for the current web site
• Search History to remember your previous searches
• Translate This Page based on the popular Babelfish tools
• Mail notification when new Yahoo! Mail arrives
• One click access to Yahoo! Games, Finance, News, Sports and any web site you choose
  New Feature: One click “Add to My Yahoo” on sites that provide RSS/Atom feeds

Google offers Google hosting for wikemedia / wikepedia network of sites,

Google Inc the ultimate search engine company has offered to host wikepedia one of the largest human edited encyclopedia on the internet, It seems the board of directors of wikemedia are discussing this offer,

wikemedia says,

Google Inc. have made a proposal to host some of the content of the Wikimedia projects.
The terms of the offer are currently being discussed by the board. The developer committee have been informed of some of the details via email. A private IRC meeting with Google is planned for March, 2005.

An interesting replies well to this offer from google in slashdot.org,

“I fear that authors/editors would withdraw from Wikipedia if it were
under the arm (or in the iron-fist) of a for-profit company. If these people
felt like Google was profiting on the backs of their freely-contributed content,
these content creators would leave and the Wiki would whither for lack of
fresh/updated content. Donating time so that other may profit does not seem
likely.
What is interesting is that Amazon makes this work. The company is
clearly a for-profit entity. Yet its crown jewels are the volunteer-created book
reviews. I’m not sure what makes this work. It might be that friends-of-authors
are motivated to post glowing reviews, it might be that people who disliked the
book are motivated to post scathing reviews, it might be that some reviewers
simply like to publish, or all of the above. Perhaps Wiki/Google-pedia could
borrow this model to mix free-labor with for-profit.
Looking further into
the future on an alternate path, I wonder if Googlepedia could become a fully
for-profit (or at least self-sufficient) professionally run and staffed
encyclopedia. With micro-royalties to authors/editors (and moderation-based
revocation of payments for “bad” content), the organization would attract
content creators on a for-pay basis. This aligns the motivational underpinnings
of the organization with those of the content creators. The current Wikipedia is
for-free people creating for-free content. A future Googlepedia could by for-pay
people creating for-pay content.
One overriding lesson from Wikipedia (and
Slashdot for that matter) is the ultimate necessity of sources of hard currency
for online sites. As long as something is small (and below a certain scale of
popularity) it can survive on donated hardware, bandwidth, or the benevolence of
a monied patron (someone who pays the hosting bills out-of-pocket). But once it
reaches a certain scale, the cost of serious server power, bandwidth, and
professional administrators pushes the budget far beyond the hobby scale.
Although pleas for donations can help, I suspect large-scale sites must,
ultimately, turn to ads, tie-in product sales, and subscriptions.
What is
fascinating, in a long-term trend sense, is that the cost of scale are steadily
declining. Cheaper hardware, declining bandwidth costs, and improvements in
systems management tools mean that sites can reach ever-larger scales before
generating prohibitive burn rates on costs. The number of visitors that a
hobbyist/free-site can support continues to rise. Perhaps Wike need only wait
for the singularity point when the cost to reach (and serve packets to) the
entire world is within the reach of a home-grown, volunteer-run
organization.”

Meta Description tags – Meta keywords tag Do they help in search engine rankings Search engine optimization tip Monday 14th february 2005

Meta description and meta keywords tags are used in olden days when the search engines didnt have crawler capabilities and cannot crawl a whole site, They used to read only those tags and evaluate a sites ranking based on that, Later search engine spammers got aware of this tactic and started abusing these tags a lot, they just stuffed keywords in these tags,

Then crawler based search engines came into existence and they started seeing much more on a site than just just meta tags, they say onpage factors including alt tags, visible text on the page etc, Slowly the use of meta tags by search engines have become lesser,

But not all top search engines completely dropped using these days, Various top search engines use various meta tags for different reasons,

Yahoo uses meta description tag as part of their ranking algorithm, they see the keywords in that and use it with all the other factors of a site, similarly MSN uses meta description tag in their ranking algorithm, We have proved the above in our tests across these search engines, Also we have proved yahoo and MSN doesn’t use the meta keywords tag,

When it comes to google, NO they don’t use meta description tags,

How we tested for google??

We made up some bizarre phrases and added them to the meta description tag, only our site has those phrases, so when we search for those phrases in search engines we don’t see the result coming up so mostly google don’t use the meta description tags in their algorithm, But google uses snippets of meta description, google indexes the tag and during query time if the relevant words are present in the meta tags they just fetch it and display it, So it never hurts to add the relevant phrases to the page in the description tag, Keywords tag is completely ignored so we can just forget it,

SEO Blog Team,

Froogle an important shoppnig search engine – Search engine optimization tip Sunday 13th february 2005

Some tips on froogle can be found on our froogle section of the site,

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/froogle-feeds.htm

What google says about froogle:-)

Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google’s search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase.

To use Froogle, look for the Froogle Product Search box on the advanced search page or go directly to the Froogle home page. Type in the name of the item you want to find and click on “Froogle Search.” Almost instantly, you’ll see photos of relevant products and links to the stores that sell them. Or you may choose to browse through the merchandise categories listed on Froogle’s home page until you find exactly the item you want to buy.

As with all other Google search results, Froogle ranks store sites based only on their relevance to the search terms you’ve entered. Google does not accept payment for placement within our actual search results, and advertising that appears to the right of Froogle search results is always clearly identified with the label “Sponsored Links.”

new pagerank 10 site found in google SERPs

As regular visitors to this blog has noticed we have a comprehensive list of pagerank 10 sites, these page rank 10 sites / pages were found digging down deep into search engine results using lots of pagerank software including seochat’s pagerank search tool,

Now we found a PR 1o site which enter’s the pagerank 10 sites list for the first time, its http://toolbar.a9.com

Do search engines penalize link exchanges? – Search engine optimization tip saturday 12th february 2005

Search engines dont penalize a site based on link exchanges alone, link exchange itself is nothing wrong, reciprocal linking has been around long before the origin of pagerank a google’s technology based on links, and it often makes sense organically,

links are the building block of the web,

though search engines dont penalize sites which exchanges links with legitimate sites they are known to frown upon sites using link exchange softwares, link exchange softwares highly disturbing to website owners and webmasters,

Also if we link to bad neighbourhoods too much there might be some sort of hidden filter that will play on the site and possible penalize them, So it is save to say link exchanges are not bad but doing them in too much aggressive way does cause some problems,

SEO Blog team,

Pfizer and Microsoft Sue Viagra Spammers

spammers are getting their share, Microsoft and pfizer are after some companies who spam selling bogus and fake drugs, news here,

According to some industry estimates, one out of every four pieces of
e-mail spam are advertisements for fake Viagra or similar drugs.
The lawsuits
specifically target what Microsoft and Pfizer characterize as “international
spam rings,” run by the companies or individuals behind the Web sites
cndpharmacy.com and myepharmacydirect.com, Ezydrugstore.com and
others.
Additionally, Viagra maker Pfizer took legal action alleging
trademark violations against companies or individuals operating 10 Web sites
with names such as www.viagrastories.com, www.cheapviagrastore.com and
www.viagra.com.ua.
A reporter’s e-mails seeking comment sent to some of the
companies involved in the suits went unanswered yesterday. One of them,
cndpharmacy.com of Canada, apparently shut down within hours of the announcement
of the lawsuits.
technewsworld.com/story/news/40524.html

Do you need a Robots.txt file for search engines?? Search Engine Optimization Tip 11 February 11th Friday 2005

Robots.txt is a text file placed on the root of the server to tell the search engine crawlers that there are restrictions for the crawlers in crawling the targeted site,

We can perform various tasks with robots.txt, some of them are prevent search engine crawlers from crawling the site, stop crawlers from specific pages/directories etc,

Robots.txt is not necessary for better search engine crawling, it will be good if an empty robots.txt text file is uploaded to the root, that way you can prevent 404 errors when crawlers request fetching the robots file,

Robots.txt file is not for users, it is only for search engines so nothing will be affected if there is no file, But adding one wont make any harm, An empty robots file will be nothing wrong in that,

keep visiting for new tips,