Searching Websites

Google can be used to search for specified phrase within a website. In order to do that you need to specify a command: site:URL "keyphrase" For example: site:advanet.blogspot.com "search engine".
With other useful command you may discover websites that offer similar content to the ones you already know. You can use this Google search command to find similar sites as well: related:advanet.blogspot.com.

Twitter SEO Value

Twitter has gained huge popularity in last few years. And many ask the question about its SEO value. From Google perceptive Twitter links have nofollow attribute, which blocks the flow of PageRank, and carry little link value to help with organic rankings. But even nofollow links bring extra visitors to the target website which is the main goal of SEO. The other benefit is that Twitter is a social media tool which creates community and relationships. And implementing social media tools can go a long way in building Internet brand awareness and raising company profile.

Is SEO overrated

Some of the customers are getting frustrated and asking: Is SEO overrated? It is probably like asking is recession overrated? It all depends where you live, and how good or bad your finances are. Global economic downturn has caused many companies losing their sales. And many of them are cutting down marketing budgets to increase cash flow. However without their current spending for search engine marketing, the sales numbers could have been even worse. Also search engine optimisation is still one of the best strategy to bring traffic to the website and it deos not requite big marketing budget. SEO is not overrated but in some cases it is misunderstood and poorly executed marketing strategy.

Simple SEO Tips

Some may say - there is nothing simple about search engine optimisation. However, whether SEO is easy or not really depends on the particular website. In most cases SEO is not difficult as long as sufficient time and effort is invested into the project.
1. Create webpage titles related to targeted keywords.
2. Make your meta description unique for each webpage.
3. Use most important keywords in webpage name or URL.
4. Use cascading style sheets (CSS) rather then tables.
5. Add H1 tags preferably towards the top of each webpage.
6. Implement breadcrumbs functionality on your website.
7. Analyze your targeted keywords using Google suggest.
8. Implement the sitemap as text links.
9. Put CSS and JavaScript into external file.
10. Describe your images with the use of the alt tags.
11. Make sure your site logo alt tag contains your keywords.
12. Avoid automatic directory submission.
13. Find quality links to your website. Not easy.
14. Don't use same anchor text in all your inbound links.
15. Use deep linking to many webpages on your website.

Subdomains and SEO

Are there any benefits in using subdomains for the purpose of website search optimisation? The answer is yes, but with a few reservations. Subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain. For example "serivces.seo.com" is a subdomain of the "seo.com". At present, maximum two results can appear for a domain in the top 10. There is one exception that applies only to major portals such as Amazon, Ebay, About.com etc. Search Engine Land advice is to use subdomains when you have very disparate content that you feel searchers would feel relevant. For instance, if you have a travel site, it may make sense to use subdomains to categorize cities. Recommending further that for each search query that you want to list, make sure that you have one or two pages that you most want to rank for those terms and focus on optimizing those with keywords, anchor text, and links. Know that every page on your site won’t rank for each query, so decide which are the most relevant.

Search Engine Bias

The question of search engine bias can be easily verified by examining search results for popular words and phrases. I have performed search for very competitive and frequently searched word finance on Google and Yahoo.
As I expected Google lists as number one:
Google Finance
Google Finance offers a broad range of information about stocks, mutual funds, public and private companies. In addition, Google Finance offers interactive ... finance.google.com
And Yahoo shows in top position... no surpise here:
Yahoo! Finance
Free sharemarket information, financial news, glossaries and guides to help you learn about Australian and international markets.
au.finance.yahoo.com
See if you can find other examples of search engine bias.

Two Words Phrases

One of the leading web ranking provider RankStat.com reported that most people use two word phrases in search engines. There is also a tendency developing that single word phrases searches are in decline and multi word phrase searches are becoming most common. Of all search engines world wide, 28.38 percent use 2 word phrases, 27.15 percent use 3 word phrases and 16.42 percent 4 word phrases.
The 10 most used word phrases in search engines on the web are:
1. Two word phrases 28.38 percent
2. Three word phrases 27.15 percent
3. Four word phrases 16.42 percent
4. One word phrase 13.48 percent
5. Five word phrases 8.03 percent
6. Six word phrases 3.67 percent
7. Seven word phrases 1.63 percent
8. Eight word phrases 0.73 percent
9. Nine word phrases 0.34 percent
10. Ten word phrases 0.16 percent