Now we don’t want to launch into a crash course about html or meta tags — the thing is, the power and force of search engine optimization can absolutely bring in power and force to your website, and eventually to your sales as well. We can say that SEO effort is successful through the sales and dollars — that’s why many will agree that SEO programs are the driving force that makes a website a website. By making changes every once in a while to your SEO (words, phrases, meta tags, html) the better results you will going to get. This simply shows that yes, SEO is magical. Literally.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo have come into terms of getting rid of spam and will probably get rid of your site when they see it as just trash or a scheme to lure people to check it out — that means your online business should have the meat and spice to make you reach the top ranks into their list — and then everything else will just follow. You’ll feel its power and force in no time.

Goojje is a play on words, sounding like sister while  ‘Google’ in maderin sounds very much like big brother. The creators of Goojje even left a message on their front page roughly translated as “Sister was very happy when brother gave up the thought of leaving and stayed for sister”. Many are interpiting this as a mockery of Google potentially pulling out of China while others believe it is a plea for Google to stay.

Goojje Home- page suspiciously similar to Google

It is very clear that the site has modeled itself off the searching giant from the style of layout to the Google font and colours. There is even a small nod to Baidu with the paw print in its logo.  The search engine returns many of the same results of Google but only ‘clean’ government approved websites. It is well known that the Chinese government has implemented filters on the country’s internet access dubbed as The Great Firewall of China, with any content that is deemed ‘undesirable’ blocked out. This includes many foreign sites such as the BBC news site.

The Google owned Youtube was also reproducted with a Chinese makeover. A variation of Youtube called Youtubecn popped up not long after Goojje showing videos that are usually blocked on the Youtube’s site. Although its slow and often described as glichy, Youtbecn is gaining alot of momentum.

Google refused to make any comment on Goojje or other copycat sites.

Google is still the strongest owning 66% of all the online search market. Although Google still is the most predominantly used search engine, competition is now emerging from Chinese search site Baidu ranking third, while Microsoft is showing amazing growth being up 70%. This could be suggesting that many users are wanting to optimise their search results by going to alternatives.

With internet searches diversifying over the course of 2009, any number of new searching sites could find their way onto comScore’s list for 2010.

*images sourced from www.comscore.com

Search engine optimisation is a way of getting your site to rank highly on search engines by choosing words and phrases that best relate to your website. As users search these terms it is a sure fire way to display your website at the top. By making changes to your meta tags and HTML, the quality of searches can be improved greatly. Its widely known that the top search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves like to keep their search algorithms and strategies a secret to stop spam sites from clogging up their searches and still claim credit for the highest search results.

SEO algorithms are very complex, meaning, for example that a website could be ranked 600th on Google and 1st on AOL. There’s often no need to submit a new site to a search engine as a cleverly placed link to an existing site will do the trick, connecting all the content together on the search engine. From then it takes a few days for all the new sites to be indexed. Now it is imperative that research is carried out to find the best search phrases and keywords to improve your search engine ranking. This is usually time consuming for business’, who are now choosing to seek additional help for this kind of promotion and marketing. A kind of a consultation service to help improve the design and traffic of their site

123 Ranking is one of those that business’ are turning to guarantee their top ten position in search engines. SEO with a difference they are defiantly one to be looked up.

www.123ranking.co.uk

Well, Hakia has come up with nobrandsearch.com – a blind test of search engines. It takes results from Google, Yahoo, Bing and it’s own Hakia and delivers them unbranded to see which results people prefer. Search Engine Watch goes into more detail on this and is well worth a read and even a test.

What did you find on nobrandsearch.com? Did you click Google every time?

What Are Testimonials?

In the online world, testimonials are positive comments posted on a website to demonstrate how happy previous/existing customers are. Testimonials are from people who are willing to recommend the service and put their name, even their face or company name, against their comment to vouch for what they’ve said. It is a known fact that they can increase conversion for many sites.

How Can You Use Them to Build Links?

Well, when a testimonial is displayed on the website is often links to the site of the person commenting. This is a valid link and, if you have an exact match domain, can be a great link to have – particularly if the comments are displayed on a websites home page and they are an established website with some level authority and trust.

If you are happy to submit positive comments to a company or website they should be more than happy to publish them – particularly if you are also an authoritative source or well known name or brand.

Have you tried this method of link building? Did you find it effective or difficult to implement? Would you include this as part of your link building campaign? Comment below.

Here are 6 SEO site redesign tips to keep your new site search engine friendly:-

1. Creating Your SEO’d Site Architecture

Search engine spiders pay a lot of attention to how your pages are linked together, pages that have inbound links from every other page on your site will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a couple of others.

Don’t bury content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic too deep within the new sites structure. Ensure that content focused around the more competitive key terms are placed fairly high in your sites hierarchy.

2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content

People seeking information from a search engine tend to have a question,  problem, or a need for specific information. The search terms they type into the search engines reflect this. The more ways you can categorize your content for different target markets you serve, the better.

Try to make sure that all of your top-level pages answer the visitors potential questions, and make it clear that your products and services can solve their problem. To avoid any duplicate content issues you should also ensure that regardless of how someone found any piece of content on your site, they always end up at the same URL.  For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it might be listed under both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, regardless of which category they started in, should always be the same.

3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS

Search engines take time to index new URL’s  and give them any kind of weight. During your redesign if URL’s have to be updated for any reason, whether it be due to a new content management system or back-end coding, it’s vital to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relevant counterparts on the redesigned site. This will ensure that the link popularity of the old URL’s are swiftly passed onto the new ones, this will also ensure site visitors don’t receive 404-not-found errors if trying to access old URL’s.

4. Coding of Navigation Menus

Any links that are contained within the navigation menu of your site should be coded in a search engine– friendly manner. Some DHTML and flash menus are invisible to search engines, so can’t be crawled which consequently causes the pages linked within them to not receive the link popularity they should and possibly even not get indexed at all.

Ensure all navigational menus are coded with CSS, this will make them visible and therefore crawlable to the search engine spiders. It’s also best to make sure your content can be reached by hard-coded links, –don’t force visitors to go through any kind of search box menu as they are generally not very search engine friendly.

5. Custom HTML Elements

Some level of automation for metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images can be helpful but it’s vital for an effective optimisation that your new websites content management system (CMS) allows you to manually input custom descriptions for these as well.

Make sure your CMS has fields available to enter data for meta tags, heading tags, etc. Some systems only allow one set of global tags but it is far more effective to optimise individual pages so try to use a system which has this function.

6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links

Generally it’s best not to use session IDs to track your sites visitors,  however if your system has to use them you’ll only need to feed the “clean” URLs to the search engine spiders ,– otherwise they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same content under multiple URLs which will result in duplicate content issues.

There will probably always be a few unexpected bugs to work out when your new site goes live but by following the above at least you won’t have to be afraid of losing your search engine visitors.  There’s nothing like the feeling of having your beautiful new website launched, but even better is knowing that the people looking for what you offer will continue to be able to easily find you in the search engines.

The snippet performs a couple of functions – it gives you a summary of what the page is about, and it shows you the context within which your query terms might appear on a page. Sometimes the search engine will decide to display the meta description tag if it feels it is most relevant to the search query you have entered. Other times it displays different information from various different places.

Sometimes it will display a snippet of text from your page’s content if it feels something you have written is more related to the search query. But sometimes it will display text not even found on your website. In this case, where is the information coming from?

If the search engine decides that the page is relevant to your search query but the content doesn’t give a good enough summary in relation to the search query it can pull information from various other places that has a better description, including the Yahoo Directory or DMOZ.

If snippets aren’t very informative, in relation to the search query, it may deter people from clicking onto particular websites or they may not click onto the most helpful or relevant websites. Poor quality snippets can lead to a poor searching experience so the search engines are fine-tuned to deliver quality and relevant information for as many websites and searchers as possible.

Nowadays search engines are finely tuned to deliver the most relevant results to its users in the quickest possible time, taking in many factors to make split-second decisions on which results you need to be shown. Back then, search engines were a lot more simple and their approaches were somewhat different to what we are used to today.

Bill Slawski thought it would be fun to look at how the search engines looked a decade ago.

Google’s approach isn’t to simply offer a new service to further their goliath brand. They explicitly state that they “may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.” This means that your information, although anonymous, will be tracked, monitored and potentially published and used for better targeting of their adverts or otherwise.

Even though we’ve seen similar services such as the tr.im closedown recently, it looks like URL shortening services are here to stay. And why not? They are perfect for posting long URLs on Twitter and Facebook, but it’s a service that is borne out of other leaders imposing limits on their service. Twitter for example with their 140 character limit on all tweets.

At the moment, Google’s URL shortening service can only be used for shortening Google’s own products and services and “not for broader consumer use.”

What are your thoughts on Google’s new venture? Are there enough URL shortening services? Do they simply disguise where you are linking to, shrouding your link destination in a cloud of fog? Should long URLs be there to let you know exactly what you’ll be seeing when you click on a link? Post your comments below.