What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?, What are the benefits of SEO? and How to do SEO? are some of the common questions of any novice doing SEO. Shari Thurow puts it nicely in a nutshell.

to get the greatest impact from organic SEO, optimizers should have a basic understanding of how search engines work. Part of this understanding is to monitor how SERP design evolves to improve the searcher experience. By optimizing a Web site for people who search, everybody wins: searchers, search engines, SEOs, and Web site owners

Read Term Highlighting and Search Engine Optimization for more information.

DSarathy.

SEO Tags: Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Land

When Google bot crawls your site, your site should not be down if not Google bot might think that all your pages are removed and no such site exists. When I went through a thread in Google groups, the query from bigmamaslings was

I’ve been having problems with downtime from my hosting company (am moving tomorrow as this is the final straw) and I’ve now practically disappeated from Google. I was in 3rd position for 5 of the more popular searches for my business and now - nothing.

and VanessaFox from google has replied that

If the host is down when Googlebot tries to access your pages, then those pages may disappear from the index until Googlebot can crawl them again. In webmaster tools, do the pages you want indexed appear in the crawl errors section? If so, then Googlebot was unable to access them.
If you are moving the site to a new host and the pages are available the next time Googlebot tries to access them, then you should see them in the index again soon after that.

So down time can make differences in your business. Always be aware.

Mark

Tags : Google, Down time, Google Bot, Crawler

In my previous blog Rank better with RSS feed , to make many know about your blogs, use your RSS feed effectively. Tips on using feeds which was the topic in Google’s official blog yesterday.

The feeds can be used to know the count of your subscribers, this is possible by using Feedburner feeds. Feedfetcher from Google crawls your data, so the same information can be taken from the crawling data of google from your logs. A unique feed id is given so that the confusions due to multiple URL facing the same feed can be cleared.

You can also use feeds to submit for sitemaps. Add a Link tag which will be easier for Google to crawl your feeds.

Using these feeds will make us notified and crawled by seach engines often.

Mark

SEO Tags : Feeds, Tips on using feeds, Feedfetcher, Sitemaps

Google states that Ads provide valuable information when they are highly relevant and targeted to a user’s query. In order to serve high quality ads to users, Google use the Quality Score to set minimum bids for keywords based on keyword clickthrough rate (CTR), ad text relevance, the historical performance of the keyword on Google, and the user experience on the ad’s landing page.

Higher Quality Score Keywords are rewarded with a lower minimum bid and Low quality keywords receive higher minimum bids so it costs less for higher Quality score ads to be displayed in Google searches. High quality ads are not only more relevant , but can also improve the ROI by lowering advertising costs.

Quality Score column will be added to Google Adwords that shows the minimum bid for all of the keywords within an ad group as well as a Great, OK, or Poor quality label for your keyword. The quality label can be used to get a quick overview of the quality of the keywords, or look at the minimum bid for a granular understanding of Quality Score. Google Ads Quality team says,

First, we’re improving the way that we set minimum bids for keywords where we have limited data.Second, we’re improving the Quality Score algorithm to make it more accurate in predicting the quality of all ads.

Lowering minimum bids for high quality ads and raising minimum bids for low quality ads will improve the quality of ads served by Google. Choosing a keyword that is more specific to the product or service that you offer or editing your ad text to make it more relevant to the keyword is what Google recommends before you simply raise your minimum bid. Related Information from Google’s official post regarding updates.

Mark

Tags : Quality Score, Quality Score Algorithm

Blogging is considered to be one of the powerful tools for online marketing. Blog helps the user to generate large volume of content with minimal efforts both in creation as well as maintainence. Now there are two modes of having a Blog. Having an account in an online Hosted Services like WordPress, Blogger etc., is one type and the other type is to Host the Blog by you. Though both has it’s own advantages and disadvantages, let’s analyze which is best.
When it comes to Blog in Hosted Service, it is much easier. One need not worry about the installation and maintenance of the database, security patches. Overall it is very easy and convenient to use. When it comes to Self Hosted Blogs, the user has got to have more responsibilities and has a complete control over the setup. When Blog is used for business or used as business, Self Hosted Blogs are the best.
DSarathy.
SEO Tags : Blogging, WordPress, BlogSpot, Blogger, Blog in Hosted Service, Self Hosted Blog

Sarah’s explanation of how to improve your Yahoo Quality Score

Remember that more than click-through rate influences the quality of an ad: The quality of an ad is determined relative to other ads displayed at the same time by both its expected performance going forward and its historical performance. Historical performance data was not purged on February 5, but as time passes, the data generated after the launch of the new ranking model will have the strongest influence on ad quality calculations.

The time it takes to take both expected and historical performance into account to measure ad quality depends on the volume of searches related to a keyword. Keywords with lots of daily searches often generate enough data in a relatively short period of time until historical performance is a stronger factor for ad quality within that marketplace.

And no, the data used to determine ad quality is not “purged” at the beginning of a new month.

So these tips will be helping you in improving Yahoo’s Quality Score.

Mark

Tags : Yahoo Quality Score

Concept of Yahoo for advertisers lately was higher bidding gives the higher position for the ads. Many variable terms like “Quality ” has now been added to the Yahoo search after Feb.5th. This move gathered many praises and criticisms from many advertisers and searchers. It has become a big deal for advertisers now calculate their position in Yahoo search but searchers get more relevant results and was highly benifited with this change.

Yahoo will also have the same relevance as that of Google and will be more helpful for users to search through.

One more news from Yahoo to include today, Yahoo Search Builder back in August released Yaoo search Builder. Many issues came with the search box provided. Now Yahoo has introduced “super-narrow” search box option, with 192 pixels, and will be more helpful for users those provide Yahoo search in their websites.
Mark

Tags : Panama, Yahoo Search Builder, Relavance

Most of the webmasters were waiting for Google to show most or all of the backlinks for their site. Google now has provided the backlinks of a site in the Webmater tools. The internal links and external links of a site can be known from this tool.

Check your backlinks Google’s Webmaster Console and know what’s up. Try to move on increasing your backlinks which also carries some weightage in site’s ranking. Think that most of the webmasters will be highly benifited by this tool.

Check out Webmaster Central Blog for more information.
Mark

SEO Tags : Backlinks, Google, Webmaster tools

Google Bombs are really a problem to Google search engines. The number and type of links that points to a website is highly accountable in Google for search engine rankings. So if many websites with the particular search term links to a website so that it attains a high ranking in Google in a short period of time is kown to be Google Bombs.

Google on 25th january decided to minimize the Google Bombs. Google has modified its algorithm against Google Bombs and minimize its impact on search engine rankings.

Inbound links for a website is highly important for a website but the link must be a high quality link. With the very same link text if a site gets more link will be counted as a Google Bombing attempt.
Know more about Google Bombs in webmaster central blog.

Mark

SEO Tags : Google Bombs, Search Engine Rankings, Google Algorithm

A few days ago; there was a discussion in Search Engine Land regarding the Google Custom Search Engine. Barry Schwartz made a mention about the CSE which he had made to search SEO / SEM forums. MarkZZ of ZZMarketing commented that he had created a similar CSE for the same purpose. I replied MarkZZ saying that we at RankQuest had launched a service called SEOLens on Nov 17th 2006, more than 3.5 months before.

To me it is not the question of who invents? Or who’s idea it is? It is only an answer of who had executed well to win the hearts of the users / customers.

DSarathy.

SEO Tag : SEOLens, Google CSE, Custom Search Engine, SEO, SEM