Search Engine Optimization

Is Google news crawler stealing content? May 29, 2007

Category : SEO News , add a comment

In an interesting article over at CNET news, they discuss whether Google is actually benefiting the traditional news organizationsâ€™ when it crawls and aggregates news websites or is it simply stealing content

“If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?” Sam Zell, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.said during a speech at Stanford university.

My view: if I look over the shoulder of someone reading the new Harry Potter book, and read the first paragraphs, am I stealing it?

See the full article here:.

How to pick your keywords

Category : Traffic Building , add a comment

This is one of the single most important decisions your going to make for your website, you must decide what keywords (words) best describe your website, remember this is SEO which basically means your marketing to the search crawlers not to people so while being overly verbose and descriptive may go down well with people, for SEO you start by choosing 2 or 3 keywords that you think best describe your website.

Ask yourself this question, if you were searching for your website product of content what words would you use when searching in Google, then ask your friends, very soon you should have a short list of 3 or so keywords.

So you now know what keywords your woud use to find your website and you know what words your friends would use, what about everyone else?, you need to find out.

How to check popular search keywords?
Yahoo overture has a great little tool called Yahoo keyword assistant, located here; http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

So in our example we search for DVDs, we can see that more people searched for DVD rentals then DVDs, this means you might try focusing more on renting online rather then selling and emphasize general DVDs rather then Chanâ€™s because less then 100 people searched specifically for these. Regardless its clear how useful this information is.

From this moment forward these words control how you market your website, if your keywords are â€œJacky Chan DVDsâ€, then your aim in life is to increase your search ranking when someone types in Jacky Chan or Jacky chan DVDs or Chinese DVD etc, any new products or new content must be relevant to these keywords

It sounds obvious to say â€œyour website content should only be relevant to the central idea or product sect of the website or businessâ€ but you would be amazed how difficult it is to discipline yourself to keep your website content focused.

Tags: Google, Search, Keywords

US Search volume increases 11 percent over last year May 28, 2007

Category : SEO News , 29259 comments

Americans conducted 7.3 billion searches online in April, virtually unchanged when compared to the prior month, but up 11 percent over the same period last year.

Search breakdown

Google Sites 3.6 billion
Yahoo Sites 2.0 billion,
Microsoft Sites 757 million,
Ask Network 376 million
Time Warner Network 364 million)

Google market share up in April 2007

Category : SEO News , 337 comments

Google market share has increased to almost 50%, they are now at 49.7%, according to research firm comScore Inc, the gain can be attributed to Google taking business from its closest search rivals, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask.U.S. Web users performed 7.3 billion searches in April, over 10 percent more than a year earlier. Google sites attracted 3.6 billion searches by

U.S. users during April, comScore said. In

Europe and the rest of the world Google’s share of the Web search market is more in the region of 60 percent

Shares of Google jumped 1.7% on the news

Tags: Google, market share

How to add a del.icio.us link to your website May 27, 2007

Category : Traffic Building , 42505 comments

You mught have seen the save to del.icio.us’ on various websites on your travels.

What is del.icio.us?

Its a social bookmarking website similar to digg, where you store your bookmarks publicly, all the bookmarks are tagged into categories and then the top most popular are displayed on the homepage and in various categories

How do you add it to your website?

You add the following code to the bottom of your website;

<a href=”http://del.icio.us/post” onclick=”window.open(’http://del.icio.us/post?v=4&noui&jump=close&url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’&title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title), ‘delicious’,'toolbar=no,width=700,height=400′); return false;”>Save This Page</a>

This is another method to promote your website

Google’s Data Retention Challenged by Europe

Category : SEO News , 36 comments

Google’s Data Retention Challenged by EU

The European Union investigates whether saving search data violates privacy laws.

European data protection officials have written to Google warning that the search giant may be in breach of E.U. privacy because of the way it retains data on individual searches.

Google is sitting on a gold mine of data on its customers - compiled by keeping records of searches, emails and other user data - and this has the European Union worried. So worried that the EUâ€™s data protection advisory group sent a letter to Google suggesting the company was keeping was keeping information on usersâ€™ searches for too long, reports Reuters.