Five mistakes in SEO

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

MyHome in Difficulty

Major online Australian property portal MyHome is about to shut down its website after burning cash for past 15 months. MyHome.com.au owners are Microsoft and PBL which shows that having money is just not enough to succeed or should I say to survive in business. They have spent around 20 millions dollars in an attempt to capture a share of the $140 million online property advertising market. However MyHome found that it could not attract nearly enough online property searchers to at least break even. Unique visitors have reached half a million per month, while Domain.com.au has two million and Realestate.com.au more than four million unique browsers. The costs were too high and hence the decision to pull the plug. From SEO perspective the website has been only at around # 18 on Google while searching for "property for sale". Failure to get to top 5 listings as well as usabilty issues had a negative impact on the whole business model.

Search Events in 2008

If you are looking to learn more about SEO I have a list of upcoming SEO events and search marketing conferences. This year Search Engine Strategies will be held on March 17-20, 2008 in New York City. WebmasterWorld's PubCon will be in Las Vegas Nevada in later months of 2008. Ad Tech online marketing conference is now hosting in 10 cities around the world with the first in Sydney on March 12, 2008. SXSW Interactive Festival will take place from March 7 to March 11 in Austin, Texas. Those are the most important shows, but please leave a comment if there are any other SEO events which could be included on this short list.

Christmas SEO

Things seems to be winding down before holidays so I thought I will do some Googling for Christmas and SEO. It is a very far fetched and unrelated search but few interesting results could be worthwhile to mention. First there is a Christian Web Masters Forum which expresses concern that "Christians should try and get a good explanation of the nativity and what Christianity is all about as the top search result for "Christmas" at Google." Yes I can see that, since Google shows as first result Wikipedia entry for Christmas and just below we can find North Pole Santa Claus website as a second result. But I think it will be hard to dismiss Santa Claus which has become very strong tradition. The other news is that we will be able to track Santa in Google Earth on Christmas Eve in real time.

Harmful Web Content

In order to combat browser malware installations and make Internet safer, Google is displaying a brief message in the search results next to offending website as follows: This site may harm your computer. You may succeed to get your website to top 10 results but if you get this kind of message next to it, you would want to quickly redesign the website in order to avoid further negative publicity. However not everyone is getting the message. This morning when I run a search for "seo consulting" the current # 4 result showed as follows:
SEO Consultant - Shimon Sandler Blog SEO Consultant ...
This site may harm your computer.
The SEO Consultant must start with understanding the clients’ business and marketing goals to develop the strategy and approach for a winning SEO campaign. ...
www.shimonsandler.com/?p=200 - Similar pages
The question is that - if Google is a search engine, should it have a role to pass judgement on the websites?

Kitchens and SEO

Article "How to scale Mt. Google" in Business 2.0 magazine described a story on kitchen cabinetry online store - Kitchen Cabinet Mart based in Northern California. From humble beginnings when a website ranked low on Google, the owner Giovanna Villanueva has managed to get to number one listing. By methodical application of many SEO techniques when searching for "kitchen cabinets" (very popular phrase in this category) her website pops up at the top of Google's very important first page, even ahead of one of the country's largest cabinetmakers, Merillat Industries. The small business website KitchenCabinetMart.com went up from few orders to $10,000 in sales per month and Villanueva says that she can hardly keep up with all the inquiries and orders.

Politics and Search Engines

Looking at important title tags of two major political parities in Australia it seems that Labour Party has updated their meta tags recently trying to present a subtle political message for anyone using search engines. Liberal Party has done nothing so far and we are presented with very boring and unappealing message. Liberals are not getting good advice on optimising their website for search engines, but at the same time they prefer to spend hundreds of millions of dollars mostly for TV ads. According to Labour Party website, by election day later this year, John Howard will spent at least $850 million on taxpayer funded government advertising.
The Liberal Party of Australia
Official site of the Liberal Party of Australia. Features news, events, current topics, contact information and links ... www.liberal.org.au
Australian Labor Party
HOWARD'S ADVERTISING BLITZ. John Howard is wasting taxpayers' money at record speed. By election day later this year, he will have spent at least $850 ... www.alp.org.au

SEO Consolidation

Recent article in Media section of The Australian has revealed that one of the top SEO companies in Australia - Found Agency is due to complete the sale of its business to specialist marketing services Photon Group Limited for estimated $3 million. Siimon Reynolds is one of the executive directors in Photon Group Limited so it is a definite sign that SEO is taken more seriously and becomes a major strategy for big marketing agencies. It is the second acquisition of SEO business in last few months. In December 2006 Chris Dimmock has sold his search engine marketing company - Cogentis to BlueFreeway Limited. SEO companies consolidation is a new trend in Australia but it should not come as a surprise since in United States, big Madison Avenue marketing agencies have been buying SEO companies for last few years. For more details see the article:
Link kings net rich pickings in The Australian.

Chief SEO Speaks

On a recent SES London conference Matt Cutts who is a software engineer and the head of the Google's webspam team has shared his vision for Google in a keynote interview. According to Matt the main theme for Google in years to come will be personalization and localization. The ambition is to organize the world information and store data at Google with Gmail and other tools. Matt was also asked about the spam issue: "Matt answers: There was this guy who claimed there is no way his cloaking could be detected because he used “super duper” cloaking. His “super duper” cloaking had pages name “Doorway-Page-Alta-Vista”, my mom could detect that." And more about the definition of spam: Matt: That can be tough. Litmus test: what was the intent and how was it done. Spammy techniques – sneaky java scripts, techniques that are use help to determine the intent. Measuring how happy users are is important. Spam can be defined as noise, noise from your signal. Off topic spam – you type in your name and get porn. That is not in anybody’s interest. Cookie cutter sites that don’t add any value – 50 sites that there’s no diversity. No value add for the customer. There are definitely shades – some are more serious and some less." Matt was also asked about his favorite Non-Google tool. Yahoo site explorer was the answer.

SEO and Public Relations

John Andrews and Todd Malicoat in their recent posts have attempted to describe 16 reasons why people hate SEOs. I think it is very funny insight about what SEOs struggle with on a daily basis. Expert SEO not only makes you feel really stupid but is a Scary Thing too. "Your Expert SEO comes in and immediately everyone can see she knows her stuff. And your stuff. And his stuff. And that guy's stuff. Nobody is safe. This SEO person seems to hold a very broad yet very, very advanced expertise *and* is one of the most creative people you have ever met. This is scary." And about sacred cows "In fact, SEO Experts know that Sacred Cows make the best hamburger. Your SEO Expert says sell the cows and buy a few plastic cows to put out on the lawn at Christmas." Find out more about 16 Reasons People Hate SEOs.

Thoughtful Comments

Thoughtful comments on a subject of the post may benefit your blog in more ways than one. If your comment is well-written the blog owner will follow it keenly. Adding questions in comments may enhance the post and start a longer discussion which will lead to clarification of the main subject. Your comments will also add quality back links to your blog which in turn will make your blog more visible on search engines. By adding comments bloggers feel encouraged to continue with their writing. On the other hand authors of nuisance comments know what they are doing. And their strategy never goes a long way, since they will be ignored at best or simply deleted and forgotten.

Practical SEO Workshop

We will be presenting an interactive SEO workshop on how to design and update the websites for search engine visibility. During the practical search engine optimisation session we identify opportunities for immediate improvement based on the websites submitted by workshop participants. The date for Sydney workshop is scheduled for December 11. Starting from evaluation of actual websites we will analyse the search term selection, meta tags strategies and linking options. With plenty of personal attention from our SEO tutor you will learn how to increase your branding and competitive advantage on the search engines. At the conclusion the clear SEO strategy will be presented on case by case basis.

Government Web Usability

In a recent October issue of Government News magazine I have found an article about usability issues with respect to government organizations websites in Australia. Document dumping seems to be quite a common way of adding and building web pages. The end result is that things are hard to find and there is a lack of website functionally. On a bright side more government departments are conducting usability studies and improving their websites. One of the good examples is Australia.gov.au website. However in my opinion they should capitalize the link to business.gov.au on the left side. It is not a capital letter at the moment, possibly they refer to small business? Also search for Australian government on Google shows as a second result: " Not Found - australia.gov.au Australian Government Australian Government ... We're sorry, but there is no australia.gov.au web page that matches your request." That gives very unprofessional look. Also the third website on the list www.gov.au shows very poor title tag: Home - www.gov.au. There is still a big area for improvement here.