It has long been the case when considering SEO to target Google but with recent statistics show that its maybe time to consider more effort towards its newest rival Bing

Bing, according to Microsoft , recorded an 8% rise in unique traffic for June, a survey carried out also saw recommendations doubled.
StatCounter figures also show that Bing’s share of search engine traffic rose 1% from 7.41% in May up to 8.45% in June. Though this does still leave Google as a run away steam train with 89.8% of the market.
My view is, and has always been dont ignore other Search engines, start working out what numbers 8.45% or even just 1%, means in terms of users!

Popularity: 2% [?]

We all know the importance of Optimising our site for Search Engines, typically ensuring we use the right keyword density, number of keywords, content etc…
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML or AJAX as it is more commanly know as is a great way to make a more dynamic and interactive site.
When a search engine send out its robots because of the interactive nature of Ajax and the fact it relies on using as few pages as possible but to interact with the web server, the robot does not get the same content a human user would, in fact Ajax itself is not visable to Search Engines. So reporting back it takes with it little if any information about your site.

Yahoo’s Amit Kumar added that while technology is awesome, simplicity is also crucial so engines can understand content of page. Google’s Dan Crow explained that using CSS, Ajax and Web 2.0 technologies with workarounds will accommodate for search engines in their current state of understanding, but at the same time be prepared for the future when search engines are able to better comprehend these technologies

One way around this is to create a normal page for each Ajax page, though this is not an ideal solution due to the amount of extra work required to create these.
Presenting the search engines with your optimised content is a better way to approach this especially if your site is a large one. Make sure that they can get to a unique page with valid, quality content. You can still have dynamic pages, but you may want to consider using URL rewrites to create Search Engine Friendly URL’s.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Many times, website owners will spend so much time focusing on what they want their visitors to see, they forget about optimizing what they don’t expect their visitors to see.

In recent weeks, I’ve seen several mishandled 404s, but one theme seems to return “200 OK” codes to search engine crawlers for 404 pages. The sites doing this are pretty significant sites we’ve looked to engage from an SEO perspective.

In a couple cases through our monitoring of Webmaster Tools, we’ve even discovered client sites with this issue. The last thing you need in the Google index is an error page. But even worse are multiple URLs that were mistyped being returned as “OK.”

Another interesting trend I’ve seen is dynamically generated 301 or 302 redirects that send users to either the home page or a custom error page when someone mistypes the URL from a domain into the browser. For example, if I typed www.searchenginewatch.com/doesnotexist, I’m led to a nice custom 404 error page that offers users a number of choices to find the right page. The key is to understand exactly what kind of response code it returned to the server.

In order to check response codes, I like to use the SEOconsultants.com tool. If I place the mistyped URL above into the box at this page, I get a detailed list of how the page is seen from a crawler’s perspective. The call to the server generates a 301 redirect to the custom 404 page described above, but most important, it returns a “Server Response” of 404 not found.

Because the user is led to a page with more information, they will likely be happy and continue to navigate in order to find what they want. The key is that by the server response code being a 404, the URL won’t be indexed in the search engines and will simply “disappear.”

Now if the response code was “200 OK,” which is a mistake developers sometimes make, a new URL could be indexed (/doesnotexist) with possible duplicate content. The home page is often used to redirect people in the event of a dead or non-existent page.

From a user experience standpoint, it’s arguable if that’s the right choice or if the user should be sent to an error page. I’m sure you can find many people on both sides of that fence. From an SEO perspective, you can end up with duplicate versions of your home page in the search engine indexes, but with bogus URLs.

Without a custom 404 error page, the visitor — human or robot — is left with only two courses of action: to abandon their search or click the back button. Search engines can reduce rankings due to server errors and broken pages. Simple errors such as “404 page not found” in large quantities can make the search engines believe that a site isn’t complete or is under construction and, as a result, they may determine that the site isn’t worthy of strong search engine rankings.

When a nonexistent page is requested from the server, the server should respond with a special “HTTP Status” header value of “404 Not Found,” which may also be followed by custom error-page body content. Incorrectly configured Web-servers that respond with a status header value of “200″ (or any other erroneous value) are exposed to significant risk with respect to search engines’ “duplicate content penalties.” This is because the identical content (in this case, the error page content) would be available under a potentially infinite number of URLs.

Custom 404 pages serve several important purposes. First, they return the correct code to the users and to search engine spiders, informing the visitors that the page they were seeking wasn’t found. Second, custom 404 pages present visitors with options about what to do next. Without a custom 404 error page, the visitor — human or robot — is left with only two courses of action: to abandon their search or click the back button. Neither of these are a satisfactory response to an error.

Geis provides specific recommendations to several clients on this issue. So, if you have this problem with your sites, don’t feel like you’re alone. Take care of it because it could potentially be damaging in the long term from a user experience and SEO perspective.

Popularity: unranked [?]

What are Authority Backlinks?

Authority backlinks are links pointing to your site from websites considered to have high authority. Usually, these are websites which have a high page rank, huge traffic (and hence high Alexa Rank) and consist of user-generated content. Some people say that leaving your link on an inner page of a high authority site (and high page rank) won’t help.  Well…they are wrong. These websites do pass link juice to your site and will help your website climb up the search engine rankings (especially Google). The most popular of these websites are:

• Blogger (PageRank 8 )
• WikiHow (PageRank6)
• 43Things (PageRank 7)
• Hubpages (PageRank 6)
  
• Squidoo (PageRank 7)
• eHow (PageRank 7)

How to get the links?

1. Go to each one of these websites and sign up for a free account.
2. Create your page using where possible they keywords you are targeting. For example if your main keyword is “Educational Toys” then your Blogger blog name should contain those two keywords. Same applies for the other authority sites: create pages and name them your with your main keyword. Obviously many times this won’t be possible because they will be taken but be creative!
3. Make sure your page is not spammy and make it as legitimate as possible. Write a small 300 word article on your subject and place 1-2 links to your site with your preferred anchor text
4. in eHow you can add your links in the Resources section

There you go – 6 high PR links pointing to your website. Of course it takes time to create the accounts, and add the articles. Then you have to make them look legitimate. It’s even more time consuming if you want to create 15-20 of these with unique articles pointing to your site.

If you want to do some quality SEO and linkbuilding feel free to contact me and I’ll get back to you to consult you and discuss the appropriate actions to propote your website through SEO

Popularity: 5% [?]

With hundreds of thousands of new web pages going live on the Internet each and every single day, you may find yourself struggling in order to achieve high search engine rankings. With all the competition, ranking well for highly competitive and sought after keywords could take many months if not years, and could potentially cost a lot of money as well.

The SEO trend over the past two years or so has been steering more toward “long tail” keywords. Long tail keywords are highly targeted, narrowed down, niche keywords with less competition which allows you to rank well for a less competitive keyword or phrase. The benefit is not only less competition, but also the fact that you will be attracting higher targeted visitors.

For example, if you are a car dealership trying to achieve high organic search engine rankings, we can narrow down a long tail keyword as follows:

New car
New Honda
New Honda Accord
New Honda Accord 4 door
New silver Honda Accord 4 door

Notice that each keyword is narrowed down more and more until we reach the long tail keyword of “new silver Honda Accord 4 door”.

You could only imagine how difficult it would be to rank well for the term “new car” or “new Honda”, and any traffic coming from those keywords is not very targeted. However, the competition for the term “new silver Honda Accord 4 door” would be much less and at the same time the traffic you would receive from that keyword would be much more targeted to the content on your page.

Therefore, when Continue Reading

Popularity: 5% [?]

Although Google has billions upon billions of websites and pages listed in their index, there are a few things you need to know about how Google works.

First off, Google only knows of a fraction of the websites on the Internet. It would literally be impossible to search through and properly index every single public page that exists on the Internet today. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of new pages of content are added to the Internet every single day.

Therefore, we know that Google’s spiders only crawl through a fraction of the websites online. Of them, only a fraction get indexed in their search results. It is important to know that every page that’s indexed gets spidered but not every page that gets spidered is indexed. If your website is not spidered, it is impossible for it to be indexed.

Once Google’s spiders crawl a page, a series of calculations and steps are performed, much of which are secret and proprietary to Google. Of these steps, a Pagerank is assigned to each page in which Google calculates its importance on a scale from N/A-10. Once this is done, Google takes a large series of information and factors how it will rank your site in its search engine results. This information includes:

• The content on the page
• The page URL
• Your website’s Pagerank
• Other information found on your domain
• The age and expiration date of your domain
• The IP address your domain resides on
• Which sites link to the page
• Which sites are linked from your page

As an expert in the search engine optimization field, this information is clearly used to determine how your pages are ranked. All of the factors that go into play are unknown, as I have already mentioned, and they are changing regularly. This is one of the tricks that make SEO and search engine marketing a continual learning process.

Every page on your website may not be indexed. For example, if you have a low Google Pagerank and 1,000 pages on your site, chances are that Google will choose not to list some of those pages. If, on the other hand, you have a high Pagerank with 30 pages on your site, more than likely all of your pages will be indexed.

This does not mean that your website should not encompass many pages. Making your website as search engine friendly as possible will help more pages of your site to be indexed and will thus improve your ranking in the search engines. There are a plethora of onsite and offsite techniques that are involved in improving your site’s search engine friendliness. Some of these include:

• Including an XHTML valid sitemap
• Including a robots.txt file
• Having a custom 404 error page
• Fixing any broken or dead links
• Choose a fast host
• Use a dedicated IP address
• Have a 301 redirect in place
• Ensure your site is W3C valid
• Optimize your site to load as fast as possible
• Increase the number of quality backlinks to your site

These are but a few of the steps you should keep in mind. There are, of course, many others and each one of the above steps can be analyzed and broken down themselves.

You want to be as search engine friendly as possible so that the search engine spiders revisit your website often and index more of your pages. By optimizing your images to load faster, writing clean and valid code and utilizing all of the steps outlined above, search engine spiders will not run into any trouble as they scan through your site. Believe it or not, Google also strives to save as much bandwidth as it can. Therefore, the less bandwidth it takes to load the pages of your site, the longer Google’s spiders will stick around.

On the flipside from what Google likes is what it hates. Any effective search engine marketer needs to know not only what helps but also what hurts. Duplicate content, fake Pagerank, cookie stuffing and similar actions will severely hurt your search engine rankings if not get you de-indexed altogether.

Google also hates paid links. As their algorithms change, they are paying more and more attention to how important other people feel your site is. This is done in efforts for Google to show the highest quality results that they can when a user performs a search. The more people that link to and talk about your site, the more important Google feels it is, therefore the spiders will feel that the content on your website is worthwhile to others and will most likely rank it well.

If Google feels that you are paying other website owners to link to your site, they will either not use that link to help your site’s rank or it can even penalize your existing rank. Let’s face it- paid links have always existed and they always will. But, there are preventive measures Continue Reading

Popularity: 15% [?]

I have seen hundreds of blog and website owners giving advice on how to get your blog off the ground and build a reader base from the ground up. One of the most common tips I see given out is to submit your site to as many web directories as possible. Submitting your site to web directories can be somewhat risky as it can do some good, but it can also do a lot of damage.

Blindly submitting your website to hundreds or even thousands of web directories can significantly hurt your website in both Pagerank as well as in search engine rankings, and the effect could last for months.

Instead of mass-submitting your site to heaps of web directories, you should do so with great care. Listing your site in web directories is one of the few opportunities you have to control which sites link to yours. With that said, it would only make sense for you to choose quality websites.

Remember: Quality trumps quantity

When you mass-submit your website to directories, whether it’s through some sort of online service or otherwise, many of the directories will have a Google Pagerank of N/A or 0. If your website has any sort of Pagerank, having tons of lower ranked sites linking to yours can ultimately cause your Pagerank to drop. In addition, mass submitting directory services will many times list your site in the wrong categories within the directory itself.

It is a commonly known fact that Google frowns upon “unnatural” links to your website. When you have 1,000 websites linking to yours practically overnight, this can set off a red flag with not only Google but with other search engines as well. This can and most likely will cause your site to be penalized in its organic search engine rankings.

The truth about web directories is that they don’t have nearly the same influence over your site as they did five years ago. To take advantage of what they can do for your site, it would be wiser for you to manually submit your website to carefully chosen directories individually. Space out the frequency of your directory submissions so as not to have dozens or hundreds of links to your website suddenly appear overnight. Choose only high-quality directories with a valid Pagerank equal or higher than that of your own site.

When it comes to backlinks, Continue Reading

Popularity: 2% [?]